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Home » Open thread 5/29/21

Open thread 5/29/21

The New Neo Posted on by

The extraordinary creative literary world of the Bronte children began with a gift of tin soldiers, but it didn’t end there:

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Open thread 5/29/21 — 36 Comments

  2. C. S. Lewis and his brother also created an imaginary world as children and wrote stories placed in it. Very interesting.

  5. Welcome to the Japanese Rustbelt:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bdi3Bo5YqE

    Not.

    If this had been made by PBS or BBC they would have found some Ainu and spent half the episode cataloging his/her complaints and then devoted the other half to a transsexual crack addict or a Sudanese ‘refugee’ having trouble with chopsticks.

    Japan is far from perfect. In many ways it’s still slowly dying from 1945 Syndrome. But they don’t make it worse for themselves. Their government doesn’t hate their people, their corporations don’t just ship out entire factories to China so that Cloud People management can collect stock options, and their mass media doesn’t see its prime directive as being the gutting and humiliation of the national culture and people.

    The fact that Japanese media is owned by you know actual Japanese could have something to do with this last part 🙂

    On my one and only trip to Otaru 17 years ago, there were a lot of signs in Cyrillic telling Russian sailors how to behave. Nowadays they’d be in Chinese. Chinese tourists are good for the economy but plagues of locusts ain’t in it.

  7. Well. It’s taken two weeks for me to recover from the semester.

    The “Designing Large Programs” course turned out to be more of a trial by ordeal than a learning experience. I was back on startup time, sleeping four hours a night, half-panicked that I wouldn’t make the deadline and dealing with a team.

    We didn’t learn much about designing large programs beyond whatever we scrabbled together in not enough time. I’m half-convinced that it’s a washout course which provides CS students a preview of how grim life in the professional software lane often is.

    No letter grade yet, but we scored 193/200 points, so I guess that’s an A, but at what price, lord?

    The biggest difference I’ve noticed taking STEM courses as a senior is stamina. I don’t have the energy of a 20 year-old and I don’t have the will to force myself to.

  8. Great you’re back Huxley!

    “We didn’t learn much about designing large programs beyond whatever we scrabbled together in not enough time. I’m half-convinced that it’s a washout course which provides CS students a preview of how grim life in the professional software lane often is.”

    It was like that in Software Engineering classes back in the 80s. I think those Ivy Towered (more like Brutalist Concrete Bunkered in actual fact) Sadists had read Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine and gotten some Programming Death March ideas into their heads. And you’re not wrong about the stamina thing. Back then could claw back an all-nighter’s sleep debt in 24 hours. Now it’s more like half a week. Wrack and Ruin!

    By final year, they knew pretty well who did not get along with who and who was competent and who was a dead weight drag. So what did they do? Made a conscious effort to team together people who couldn’t stand each other and throw in a leavening of disruptors and hopeless cases with the stars for each project group — some kind of lesson about Being Professional was supposed to come out of that.

    Massive Kudos for doing it at your age!

  9. huxley,

    He lives!

    The thought of going back to college nauseates beyond belief for so many reasons. Been there done that.

  10. I think those Ivy Towered (more like Brutalist Concrete Bunkered in actual fact) Sadists had read Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine and gotten some Programming Death March ideas into their heads.

    Zaphod:

    Yes, I remember browsing the Yourdon book, “Death March: The Complete Software Developer’s Guide to Surviving ‘Mission Impossible’ Projects” and thinking, “This man is on to something…”

    I was in my late forties during the dotcom bubble when I had the thought, “I’m too old to be sleeping on the floor anymore.”

    My blood boiled at the end of the course when I discovered I had to fill out questionnaires for grade points ratting myself and my teammates out on how well we did and how well we got along in 20 questions rated from 1 to 5. (Is that part of the workplace these days?)

    I still love programming, but I’m not sure I’d want to make a career of it today. The pressure looks as horrible as ever and one is much more a cog in a big machine. Then throw in the diversity nonsense which works against men, whites and Asians.

  12. The thought of going back to college nauseates beyond belief for so many reasons. Been there done that.

    Griffin:

    I still love learning too, but college sure makes it unpleasant. My plan is to take only a course or two each semester so the time demand doesn’t become too onerous.

    I read on the web to expect to study 2-3 hours for every 1 hour of lecture. In these STEM classes I work 4-10 hours, depending, for every lecture hour.

  13. @Huxley:

    Re the Late Great Ed Yourdon and his eponymous press… There’s No Business Like Consulting.

    (Best approached much as one would sidle up to a Koan.)

    Now the Mythical Man Month is a Book.

  15. @Huxley:

    I am unlikely to darken the door of an institution of higher learning again, so have a non-political / cultural question you might be able to answer:

    Since this is your second time around, do you notice much difference in pace of teaching or broadness of material covered since one huge set of changes since my time back in the 80s is that everyone has access to Matlab, Computer Algebra Systems (super useful in doing all the drudgery of transforms), software which can graph anything without your having to sit down and write the damn code for it in HP-GL for a pen plotter, and so on. The tools available today are amazing.

    I had this moment of satori when I realised that the only reason that a market for scientific/graphing/CAS calculators exists today is that they *cannot* do certain things by design — and therefore can be certified for various levels of examinations and testing.

  16. Zaphod:

    “The Mythical Man-Month” was wonderful and remains as true as ever. I never read much Yourdon, but I did resonate with the “Death March” title.

    Have you noticed Bob Martin is punching it up on YouTube as “Uncle Bob”? He usually has an historical anecdote at the beginning about Alan Turing or astronomy or something to give the kids some larger grounding beyond the latest buzzphrase technology.

    Rich Hickey is currently my Guy for his videos on Clojure and general deep thoughts about programming.

    Should I learn Haskell?

  17. @Huxley:

    Thanks for the Bob Martin tip… wasn’t in my YouTube feed but algo will keep me updated henceforth.

    Should you learn Haskell? I think there’s something to be said for pure functional programming: it’s very humbling. Left me with zero illusions about my place in the IQ Hierarchy.

    Monads are a bit of a Mind@#$% and this mini Bridge of Asses gets rid of a lot of the poseurs, Gamer Girls and LARPers who you find infesting much ‘Web Development’ and more recently ‘Deep Learning’.

    But there’s a huge silver lining: when you ask for help, you’ll generally get really good help without the usual Substacky kind of noise which requires the reader ratings system to filter it. Sure the guy helping you might be a super genius who assumes you know what a Hylomorphism is, but I found that provided one is polite and makes an effort, everyone is very helpful.

    Real World Usefulness? Outside of some Hedge Funds and Startups where I suspect it’s more there for the Bridge of Asses Factor than the production side, maybe not. But as intellectual food, it’s crack for some.

    My dirty little secret a decade back when I was more actively interested in Haskell was that I could get some of my tricky algorithmic / heuristics for NP-hard stuff solved for free by asking in and around forums where the big brains congregated and displayed their big brain performance hoping to be hoovered up by Google et al. Haskell paid the rent for me a few times there.

    One thing I did notice though, was that if you solve a problem in a more neurotypical production environment using Haskell and it it smaller and more maintainable and more correct and faster than what the regular folk would have banged up in langue du jour, it’s not going to win friends and influence people. And that’s even after applying discount factor for my patented Zaphod Charm and Getting Along With Disparate Individuals Talent 😀

  21. Zaphod:

    I don’t have a good perspective to compare college in 2021 with college past.

    I first attended an experimental college in the early 70s. I was too confused and had too many family problems to handle the freedom. I downshifted to community college for an electronics degree, but that turned out to be a joke. I managed a 3.85 GPA on nearly no effort at all.

    So I was hoping for a happy medium this time around. Now that I’ve got the work-to-lecture-hour ratio calibrated, I think I’ll be in reasonable shape from here out.

    As to the influence of tech in education, I missed the transition. Back in 1971 we would go to the lab to use “Nixie” tube calculators and had to schedule time on the teletype to program the school’s solitary PDP-11 computer, then save our work on paper tape.

    Thanks for the info on Haskell. I’ve been doing Project Euler problems to learn Clojure. After I solve a problem I can look at the solutions others have written in other languages. The Haskell solutions are shockingly terse and run like a “bat out of hell” to use a phrase I’ve noticed in these parts lately.

  22. Hi, huxley! *cheers*

    I’ve started taking a little small web class lately myself. It’ll be the start of a 4-course series totaling something like 8 months when done. I feel as if I won’t have suffered as you have, though.

    (There is, I suppose, still an option for me to take beginning Korean at the local language school, but I’d have to juggle both of those simultaneously and I don’t know if I’m up for that.)

  24. Philip Sells:

    I take it you aren’t taking an official college course!

    Excuse my naivete, but has college always been so much of a grind?

    My current experience is that classes are more like obstacle courses run at high speed to separate the students into grade levels. Whether students learn and retain anything is not really the point.

    I don’t blame the teachers. They look more stressed than the students.

    I didn’t realize how fortunate I’ve been that I’m mostly self-taught. I was able to dig into things until I got them and if I ran into an interesting side topic to pursue I could.

    All these years I imagined I was missing out on some fantasy education of the wise professor guiding students through a text, thoughtful discussions ensue and everyone is enriched.

  25. huxley, no, it’s a separate small private group. It is actually the first formal music instruction I’ve ever experienced as an adult.

    It’s a funny thing to me, in a way, that I never had to pull an all-nighter in college; 3 a.m. was the latest I ever had to go, and I forget what that was for – probably some big paper due in finals week. But in grad school, I had to go all night once to get ready for an organic-synthesis exam – Birch reductions and suchlike.

  26. @Huxley:

    “All these years I imagined I was missing out on some fantasy education of the wise professor guiding students through a text, thoughtful discussions ensue and everyone is enriched.”

    I guess this is what the marketing literature for very expensive liberal arts colleges still tries to insinuate. Reality is your professor shows up at the seminar with a newspaper-wrapped bundle and dumps a fresh giant still steaming quivering liver on the table and says ‘Roth Week, get ’em out!’

  27. huxley,

    For me college was a mixed bag. Going to a liberal arts college I had to take classes I had no interest in like biology, art history, sociology (that was a joke even 30 years ago) and those classes were a horrible struggle for me. The business, economics, history, political science stuff, on the other hand, I enjoyed a lot and even though some of them were very challenging I enjoyed them greatly.

    In fact a little episode that has stuck with me all these years was in a politics and government class I was taking with a curmudgeonly old prof that had literally written the text book spent an entire class one day ripping Joe Biden for plagiarizing the Neil Kinnock life story which had just happened. The thought of a prof saying a negative word about a D now is inconceivable.

    Michael Dukakis also came to our campus and spoke and it was met with yawns. Not that we didn’t care about the election it just wasn’t all consuming like it seems to be now.

    The idea of paying for what is now offered on college campuses is to me flat out crazy. Maybe STEM fields are still a little sane but any other subject is lost.

  28. @huxley:

    Don’t want to give you too many flashbacks to your all-nighters, but…

    https://www.takimag.com/article/a-history-of-failure/

    “The correct way to understand anarcho-tyranny is from a systems approach, looking at it and the managerial class as properties of the liberal democratic order. Like all systems, liberal democracy has properties, methods, interfaces, and implementations that define and control its actions. Encapsulated within the system are subsystems, which have properties, methods, interfaces of their own.

    For clarification, a property is an attribute of a system. In the case of liberal democracy, economic results would be a property. An example of a method is the process for selecting officeholders. An interface can be the various ways in which members in the system interact with properties, methods, and other members. Of course, the subsystems of liberal democracy can appear as properties of other subsystems.

    When viewed as a system, what appears to be coordination and sentience in liberal democracy is actually emergent behavior. This is behavior of a system that does not depend on its individual parts, but on their relationships to one another. Thus, modeling one aspect of liberal democracy, anarcho-tyranny, for example, tells us very little about liberal democracy itself. We only learn that anarcho-tyranny is one of its properties.”

  30. Like all systems, liberal democracy has properties, methods, interfaces, and implementations that define and control its actions. Encapsulated within the system are subsystems, which have properties, methods, interfaces of their own.

    Zaphod:

    Are you telling me The Z Man is a Java software architect who is now hacking liberal democracy?

  31. The idea of paying for what is now offered on college campuses is to me flat out crazy. Maybe STEM fields are still a little sane but any other subject is lost.

    Griffin:

    I’ve despaired when walking the corridors of the Engineering building and seeing “Diversity is Great!” (or words to that effect) posters on the faculty office doors. Perhaps they are placating the woke mob, but I Have A Bad Feeling they mean it.

    As a senior, I’m only paying $5 per credit for classes. But the catch is I can only register for classes the first day of classes. Which means if there are more paying students than seats, I’m SOL. Unless … I can get a prof to waive me in.

    Meanwhile, it seems something has happened at what I’ll call the HR level. My advisor has become rather adversarial about keeping me to the straight and narrow, not always explained, rules. For instance, although I’ve taken and passed Calc III, she is suddenly keen that I take Calc I and II, then reprimands me if I say that doesn’t make sense.

    I’m the only senior in STEM that I can see. Perhaps my degree path, should I choose to pursue it to completion, is about to hit some brick walls.

  32. @huxley:

    I could be wrong, but I suspect the Z Man is more inclined toward degaussing the hard drive of Lib Dem, dropping the platters in a sulfuric acid bath, and then launching them into the sun.

    He doesn’t talk much about his professional life because obviously would be dangerous in this Cancel Culture. I think he’s got some kind of consulting business going around cleaning up other companies’ messes when it dawns on them that they can’t fix it up with their own people since their own people effed it up in the first place.

    My broader point is that the Big Brains opining on what ails our culture tend to all come from the Liberal Arts / Ivies — and whilst the best amongst them have gotten their heads around stuff like Peloponnesian War Bad. Alcibiades Bad, Melos Very Bad, Treaty of Westphalia Good. *wave credentials*, *drop more signifier tags*, yadda yadda… they tend not to have any background in systems thinking… and very poor grasp of how complex systems work, let alone fail.

    Whereas the Yeomanry and Peasantry tend to have a good understanding of failure modes since get to observe their ‘Betters’ effing things up and them over all the live long day… but the Y’s and P’s also have blind spot about complexity and emergent behaviour –> belief in QAnon, Protocols of… , etc.

  33. I get a bit bored by the whole Two Cultures debate because I’m naturally a contrarian (who woulda thunk?) and think that on the whole that the present Techno Lords of the Universe are some of the worst and most dangerously ignorant Barbarians ever to have lived. They literally don’t know what they don’t know.

    BUT, the failure of the products of a the best classical liberal education in the Hillsdale College last ditch remnant vein to grok systems thinking and complex systems behaviour — even just how plain *weird* and counterintuitive some of it is — is a huge blind spot affecting their ability to have a rounded grasp of where we are and why we are and how to go about beginning to think about what can be done about it.

    As for Think Tank Land, it’s déclassé to know how stuff fits together — that’s for mere Rude Mechanicals. Can’t help thinking again of recent comical photo of Ben Shapiro uncomfortably grasping an unfamiliar plank of sawn up tree outside Home Depot.

  34. Zaphod:

    All true .. and it’s not just “the products of a the best classical liberal education.” Most big-dog compsci guys I’ve known — who do know a thing or two about systems thinking — are drunk on the bad kool-aid.

    Climate change is another huge example of scientists breaking bad in their own territory. Now that I’ve reacquainted myself with the feudal nature of academia this is less surprising.

    Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble with Physics,” outlines the triumph of string theory based on groupthink. No national or global politics involved, just intramural academic muscle.

  36. “All these years I imagined I was missing out on some fantasy education of the wise professor guiding students through a text, thoughtful discussions ensue and everyone is enriched.” – huxley

    I went to college in the fall of 1970 thinking that very thing, and it was indeed a fantasy education.
    By spring, I knew that very little of that occurred in the ivied halls of our academe, although occasionally in my total 5 years in “higher ed” I encountered a rare specimen or two.
    Usually, “1 out of 3” was the best that happened.
    However, I had some good times, learned enough to get a job (programming computers, then teaching), and met some fine people.

    Enjoy the summer!

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