pandoricity

I'm a capitalist. Why? I believe that money is the best proxy we've found for getting things done based on need. But I hate that it encourages companies to produce new goods constantly, and that this is a much more successful business strategy than trying to sell second hand goods. One of the curses of rich countries is that the overhead to fix/recirculate goods easily becomes too high relative to people's wages, and many useful items sit around unused.

We recently went to our fourth carpet store today. This was four too many. But, now no-one can deny that I am qualified to rant about how their business model is broken and insane. Let me run you through how it works:

One of my favourite ideas is that of a Local optimum , a mathematical concept that can be applied more broadly. If you've never heard of the term, it's that starting somewhere you may incrementally improve but never discover that a better solution exists. For instance, imagine you're in the 10th century, trying to develop the fastest means of transportation. The current state of the art is the horse; you therefore decide to spend time breeding better horses. You make a small improvement, but with this approach you have no chance of discovering any of the many technologies that have now replaced the horse. (1) Pseudo-mathematically, this might look something like:

As a programming father you need to be concerned about your budget. This means resisting the temptation to buy the most amazing hardware, and not running power-hungry CPUs all day. Ok, I lie - I'm not really that concerned about our budget, and I could afford to buy a new computer. I must admit to reading a pamphlet for our upcoming council election... and part of the reason I can afford a new computer is that I enjoy cost optimisation (ok, stinginess). But what's even more fun is that the best way to be stingy is to use three different gadgets instead of just one.

Content warning: this is directed purely at programmers. At work we're deciding what configuration file format to use for a new piece of software, where the configuration will have to be produced or modified by non-expert users. Of course, as the developers of the project, it's always easy to forget about these, your most important users: those who won't have a deep engagement with your project and how amazing it can be, but to whom it is only a minor help or hindrance on their path to 'getting shit done'. Broadly, I think there are three choices you can make: the bad choice: design a system around the sum of the complexity involved the 'nice' choice: design a system that focuses on providing a straightforward view to the median user but is extensible enough that any kind of complexity can be represented the lazy choice: design a system that only really accounts for non-expert users, forcing others to either water-down their dreams or build elaborate...

A slightly amended version of this was subsequently published in the online version of the SMH    I have a confession to make. I was one of the 394 candidates on the NSW Upper House ballot paper. And I want to apologise for its ridiculous number of boxes, more than any sane person should need to consider. It doesn't serve democracy to offer so many choices that are ignored. Last time we had a 'tablecloth', the 1999 NSW election, it inspired reform of dubious utility. The bar was raised for party registration, which clearly hasn't been sufficient, and requiring 15 candidates on a group ticket only increases the amount of paper used. Even the system of optional preferential voting and above the line numbering, which makes it easier to vote as you would wish, adds to voter confusion due to the subtle differences from the federal system. If we accept that the minuscule number of people who vote for individuals below the line have no impact on the result, and that we ...

I'm happy that we're not all using COBOL and Fortran. Unfortunately, we're (almost) all still using some variant of the Bourne shell. There's no reason you have to... unless you want to worry about boring things like other people reading or running your code. So I've spent some time fiddling with es (it's a functional type shell with sane quoting rules; Jordan, you know you want it).