and you come to me 

on a submarine ...

i always thought this was sus

it actually is

and you come to me 

on a summer breeze  ...

beegees rocks

 what you're good at is probably in your blind spot

cos you do it so easily that you don't think about it

derek sivers - obvious to you genius to others

 fifth day of solitude, i feel like i'm healing ; listening to van halen's balance; always needed it but never could ask for it consciously

plus i am talking on the blog , meaning the usual suppression circuits have relaxed

the suppression circuits..... 

Programs must be written for p̵e̵o̵p̵l̵e̵  me to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute

no. no. no. for ME to remember on sunday what i wrote on wednesday

i'm pretty sure NO ONE wants to read my code

Fire and drums

 

Teddy o' clock

 

we are legion

 

Save before erasing

 

 

monkey and potato

 

OOP The Easy Way

I purchased a digital book in three formats with the cash left over on my forex card.

It made me feel good, and gave the promise of a worthy pursuit to me who was wallowing in indulgence, guilt and post-operative invalidity.

Why OOP ? I used to read articles titled "OOP is a horrible disaster that must end " and nod my head all along and wait for civilisation to come crashing down due to OOP so that I could say "ah ! I told you so".

The hour is late and the time is nigh and the industry has consumed OOP with great delight and absolutely no sign of letting up and mostly, all the jobs paying my salary has been on this.
So maybe I am turning into the skid.
Or maybe I am digging my grave a foot deeper .
Time will tell.

Who is Tim Rentsch ?

https://www.academia.edu/34882629/We_need_to_Small_talk_object-oriented_programming_with_graphical_code_browsers

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/947955.947961

OOP was meant to be easy enough for children

Part 1 of the book is deconstruction of OOP

Objects receive messages and locate methods corresponding to those messages and invoke them.
Flip this and you get Objects decide what to do with messages.
The CMU Mach system . No tight coupling - send messages over a port.
Compare with opening para of the ZeroMQ book (written by the creator)

Micro-services sounds like OOP. A micro-service is an independent entity communication over stateless wire formats with other parts of the system. = object.

Brad Cox founded Objective C and built a company to exploit it .

"... so that OOP becomes an “alternative” to functional programming, in which the big problem is decomposed according to the operations used in its solution. "

More stuff to read ,this time on functions/functional

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3193776

Haskell is a functional language with facility for handling state (oh no , monads !!)

------------------

In his textbook “A Touch of Class” from 2009, in Section 2.3 “What is an object?”, Bertrand Meyer uses the following definition:

An object is a software machine allowing programs to access and modify a collection of data.

This is in exact opposition to the usual goals of "encapsulation" or "data hiding" that we have heard about, in which we try to forbid programs from accessing and modifying our data!
------------------


very much a huh ? moment there .. doesn't an object encapsulating data and providing methods for their manipulation satisfy both ?



ooh ooh ooh - a paper by the biggies ! also note, they refer to Tom DeMarco in the, well, references !!!


Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham published a paper on UI patterns before the GoF got theirs out.
http://c2.com/doc/oopsla87.html
The paper has 5 UI patterns


Kent Beck is one my favourite software heroes - the c2 wiki is apparently made from 4 or 5 lines of code.
Similar to the PHP founder's comments


Patterns failed, why should we care ?
https://www.deconstructconf.com/2017/brian-marick-patterns-failed-why-should-we-care


All GoF patterns are implementation patterns, unlike Christopher Alexander


Larry Wall's TimToady = TIMTOWTDI = there is more than one way to do it




---- building objects
smalltalk ideas of bytecode, live editor, image etc
- the image is both personal and universal !
is gnu smalltalk a smalltalk ?
no building step .
live objects !



" The worldview that lends us words like “toolchain” or “pipeline” is one of sequential activities, where a program may end up “in production” but certainly doesn’t start there. People using the programs happens at the end, when the fun is over. "

We feels deeply about this. And I agree. The fun is tinkering and seeing magic happen. In todays world they don't care about this, they care about you shipping magic regularly, in a horrible clanking setup and no fun.

The point that the using and making of software should go hand in hand is a doctrine that lies unadopted ,but is probably the only way to have fun in creating software.

I am close to ending part -one - the antithesis
OOP is independent agents interacting through messages. There. What I do at work in Java is not OOP.

What I do with micro-services at work is, somewhat OOP.

Another telling line ( supporting  my stance in the first para of this post)

"....  OOP seems to have failed, but it may not even have been attempted. " 

one problem with random object structures coming over the wire is that JSON de-marshalling creates piles of doo-doo like lists and maps containing lists and maps , even for simple objects.

This causes nightmares


------

I might have mis-bought this book. I might have confused the book with a blog post which takes apart Uncle Bob's OOP vs FP  example. That was an interesting piece of code refactoring involving klingons and guns.

 there are two things all adults fight daily, every minute & every year

the needle, and ,  a line in the sand

the needle always moves faster than you want

and the line in the sand is always a bit closer than you want

the Twelmot formula

The __ _ ___. 

However, __ ___ ___. 

Octopuses __ ___ __. 

Tentacles __ _ ___ __. 

Alarmingly, __ _ ___ __. 

Thus, __ __ __.

The wall has writing 

However, who is there to read it  

Beasts pounce on the unwary  

Claws rending  meaning from medium 

Alarmingly, there is proliferation of impotent media

Thus, the market never clears 

 

The weekend had  come. 

However, Twelmot continued to be hunched over his console, muzak on. 

The Installation was  still  down. 

Repairbots trundled around,bobbing as they crossed over wires . 

Alarmingly, only one node reported green. 

Thus, when the Commandant arrived, everybody else had fled the scene.

The man in the suit and tie continued to dance on the roof. 

However, the girl with lights on her shoes had disappeared.

Piles of electronic equipment lay on the pavement .

Speakers stacked ,stood silently .

Alarmingly, Twelmot couldn't remember where he'd left his repairbot.

Thus, twilight found him wandering round the speakers ,mumbling.

 I thought we were living in a computer simulation. 

However, last night, I created some decryption software that would crack ANY encryption on the planet, called up my CIA contact and updated him, then burnt it into a usb drive disguised as a mid-10th century Mesopotamian dagger

What tripped my alarms was the fact that I never had a CIA contact, so who did I call ? And of course, at midnight, a figure all dressed in black, climbed over the balcony sill, sneaked into my study and tried to make away with the dagger.

We aren't living in a computer simulation.  We are living inside a spy movie !!

bits and pieces of Thief of time has been coming back to me in many many ways. 

God's debris too, is magical too !!

what if there are no particles, only a particle, and it expresses itself in multiple ways, and each pattern is a mind

Death is beyond time. he can go to any moment, as though it were a place

what is this was the reality of the universe , that it was a stretch of moments stretched across to infinity , a divine japa mala ?

what if it was just one mind ,divided among itself, traversing each bead of a mind, planting sensory input like how I assume a matrix process would run ...

the big bang would be the breakup of the single universe(al consciousness- both are one) into a free agent and the rest

what if the single particle manifests, and one after the other 

David Deida has come up again, only because the landscape he paints fits things as I see them

ba duan jin too

When two people meet, there are actually six people meeting.

This line is by William James. Didn't expect to be in such good company.

Are these the id, ego and super-ego ? or should I say, do these correspond to the id, ego and super-ego ?

In the annals of human psychology, no beast retains so much power or influence, as does the pink elephant.

All variations of human interaction and discourse start and end with one single aim - to install the right pink elephant.

revisiting The Matrix in 2021. When Elrond moonlights as an AI program

Nowadays they are just programs.

The movie is slow paced. this is pretty relevant for an era where you had to watch it in theatres, where you have to listen to the lines without the help of a convenient subtitles. You had to listen, or you lost what was said. The action scenes are crisp, yet they are slower than the ones today. Maybe it's just me but movies have gotten faster, with an urge to cram in more and more tropes within a bulging 11/2 - 2 hr window.
Comparing Columbo to Monk can help you see the speed, but also comparing Charlie Chan to Columbo .

Monk has a lot more happening but only a little bit gets shown. With Columbo, and more with Charlie Chan , all thats shown is all that is happening and vice versa.

Each scene in the Matrix is as good as an album cover. Each line has a clean place in the story.

The story evolves nicely along the path of the Hero's Journey. Living a normal life, getting called into an adventure, being told you're the chosen one, discovering powers, finding help, day becomes night and right becomes wrong and up becomes down, a climactic battle, back to normal life , but not as the same person.

If I could've avoided watching the Matrix or the Pirate sequels, I'd have been an accomplished man by now, but my appetite for junk bordering on garbage is a fundamental component of the loser that I am

The oracle told Trinity that she'd fall in love with the one. Falling-in-love is not a quantified scientifically measurable thing - you're just become a spaced out junkie who smiles inside yourself all the time, or so I have been told. It's ludicrous to base a prophesy on 'the coming of the ONE' on such a. thing, and also very irresponsible too.

The Matrix follows the whims of probability nicely. Any system designed to do keep multitudes under delusion via electrical signals to the nervous body will have definite but small percentage of exceptions, and a smaller number aware of this themselves. Such characters form the 'potentials' littering the oracle's house. 
The oracle is a woman baking cookies in a kitchen, holding vast powers of wisdom and prophecy. A very interesting picture that.But we already knew , that our women in our kitchens knew more about the life and the purpose of the universe than we could even dream of.  Yeah, but they won't tell us. We men are pawns in their grand game. Again,  Alice in wonderland.

The call to adventure comes in the form of a "follow the white rabbit' message and a white rabbit tattooed on a random chad's ho.

The meeting with the oracle is amazingly well done. The breaking vase, the corny line about being the One is like being in love, you know it.  She tells him he's got the gift but he's not going all out on it. Isn't this the exact hero's journey pattern ?

The cars are just lovely, the cityscapes are deliciously depressingly  grey-blue. the kind of happy sad feeling I associate with Pink Floyd.

to heal you need space and time

Thinking about the science of the Matrix - the central thing  in the matrix is that humans are immobilised in pods , with simulated reality coming to them via electrodes going into them.

In this simulated reality, they just do what we do in this life of ours, going to work, paying taxes, raising families, getting a little entertainment (ref the Steve Jobs walls quote)

however. the real call to action comes when they have to unplug morpheus to save zion.that's when shit get's real, and Neo steps up

"you're empty, so are you" - truest of Mahayana buddhist revelations !! no they're talking about each others guns being out of bullets

the matrix is the story of a soul attaining nirvana, and the attempts of the entire known universe to destroy him

John Ousterhout - Philosophy of Design - talk at google - notes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY

Design is the most important. Yet it is not taught . Can it be taught ? 

Most important aspect of design = problem decomposition

Talent is overrated, practice is what matters

CS190 at Stanford - iterative - write, get feedback, write

1. Students build largest system they can think of in 3 weeks ~ 3k lines
2. Code reviews
3. Write some more code , repeat

Parnas - paper - on criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
|_ one of 2 most important papers

Classes should be deep 

- class is a rectangle, top edge is the interface, interface is the complexity cost. so needs to be simple
"classes and methods should be small " leads to 'classitis'. abstraction is important not length
unix file IO . the complete interface = 5 functions.


Define errors out of existence
Define semantics so that there are no errors there, limit places where exceptions are handled

three  examples -
a) Tk - unset a non existing variable - fail silently
b) Not allowing delete when writing going on - correct answer - unix - delete from directory entry, but keep contents so that working process finish, then when last fd is closed throw away file
Worst solution - remove the file when deleted, so now all other processes will have to handle an exception of what to in the middle of their write (what DO you do? how DO you code for such a possibility other than throw an error saying "i have no idea what to do, it's so wtf ,so exiting")

c) Substring index errors- 

 no out of index errors - just substring between my indices and string size. 
*) is it okay to crash - ans OOM errors - sure

Tactical vs Strategic programming

tactical programming is kludges to get system working - it turns to spaghetti very fast.

{tactical = driving to the gate / strategic = driving to little tibet

getting to the gate is important but no point crashing your car to get there}

tactical tornado = usually heroes in companies. but no

working code is table stakes. but it is not enough

go slower initially, invest in zero-tolerance, and strategic programming will beat tactical programming soon

startups are tactical. is a problem

you can still have a great business with crappy code. eg, Facebook

make classes more generic, wham! you get deep classes

Q&A

Hire for slope, not intercept

 |_ people who you enjoyed best in interview

Some languages lend themselves to better design

** secrets, principles no recipes FULL LIST **
- working code isn't enough, must minimise complexity
- complexity comes from dependencies and obscurity
- strategic vs tactical programming
- classes should be deep
- general purpose classes are deeper
- new layer, new abstraction
- comments for things not obvious
- define errors out of existence
- pull complexity downwards

Links : 

https://sive.rs/book/TalentIsOverrated

https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/book.php

https://www.amazon.com/Software-Fundamentals-Collected-Papers-Parnas/dp/0201703696

when i first watched the matrix

 folks only had desktop computers, and that too only the rich

laptops were fiction

nobody had anything to do with cellphones

I used to call home occasionally over a land line

We used to read book for information, and the movers-and-shakers would read magazines to stay up to date, and we would hang out in places and talk and make fun of each other as a way to pass the time.

Space was infinite, and walking to the gate from the hostel took a long time.

the idea of an immersive digital world  replacing reality was extreme, far out fiction, and hence utterly delicious

Gibson said "we live in a mediated world, everything's mediated"

As Tofler said, space has shrunk 

today the matrix (Wachowski ,not Gibson) is a reality, except that it's not the internet or the technology, rather torrent of information pouring out of copper wires, optic fibre and over the ether rendering minuscule our direct experience of reality and the consequent meaning/context/structure-of-the-world formation. 

Hot technologies (McLuhan) have taken over and we are hollow shells .we obey, we consume, we go through the motions, most of us imbibing legal enhancer-drugs ( caffeine, nicotine ) and downers (alcohol) while others go 'beyond', imbibing the illegal ones - charlie, molly, ludes

the monks could drop out, but now meditation has made the list of legal enhancers, so it's impossible to know in a retreat if you're breaking through to the real, or just consuming more manufactured 'real'.

Notes : Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

Chapter 1

"In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message."

the evil  starts with Descartes. 

There is no such thing as a straight line in nature, nor are there paradoxes in nature.

a straight line is an abstraction, and an abstraction is a thought object. and the world of man from the time of Descartes has worked entirely in thought objects and thus have divided and conquered the world. 

idea here being a man working on abstractions can scale - imagine the factory floor

a man on a conveyor tightening a nut is not really building a car. the system is .

and thus systems were birthed

 man is not a beast nor the apex predator, though we often say so. he is but a cell

the apex predator today is America. the real America is formless and shapeless, yet it creates wealth for its followers, death and despair to its enemies , all by virtue of its factories ,people and the thought objects they hold. the true power of America lies in factories - not necessarily the ones within its shores. 

And nothing is a truer depiction of divide-to-control  as is a factory. 

the heart-beat of the world we live in today,  is the concept of division of labour. 

and while everybody follows division of labour, this particular avatar involves Labour and Capital as attributes. mankind has been following division of labour forever. the team has always prevailed over the single the lone wolf   from the age of  hunting teams . birth of agriculture started the ever-increasing cycle of cultivation vs population and as a side effect cities developed as intersection points for the different groups of people. 

a though object is not enough to result in action, it must be mapped to feelings and connected to the way of life of the human.  

a concept is a thought object. a thought object is something that you put in your head, and like the matrix, it load a world for you

to divide is to draw a straight line through a thing

to arrange ideas in a straight line also cuts through the clutter of the world