Sunday, February 1, 2015

Study notes: Jan 25-31, 2015: "Technical debt," &C

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 
Homework for the future: 
"Technical debt and the making of payments on it" 
  • "Technical debt, as detailed in that Wikipedia article, is the collective IOU you-the-developer write to your future self. Let me just do this fast now, and do it right later, you think: let me do the quick but messy way now and do the correct way later. But of course, the minute you ship, you're moving on to the next big thing, and you never do go back to fill in those FIXMEs and TODOs in the doe, until the next time you have to touch that area and what would otherwise be a five-hour fix has turned into a twenty-hour fix because you have to 'pay back' the debt you incurred last time."
  • "More than that, you've got to pay the debt plus interest: it's a common truism that code you yourself wrote six months ago is as impenetrable as code written by a complete stranger, and you have to spend a great deal of time puzzling out what the heck you were thinking back then."
  • "Code that is brilliant, flawless, and crystal clear when you write it slowly morphs into idiotic, bug-ridden, and clear as mud over time. This is a well-known process. I suspect pixies in the source code repository, working their anti-magic while nobody's looking.
  • "Technical debt, like the responsible use of revolving lines of credit or obtaining a mortgage to buy a house in the real world, is an important part of the software lifecycle, and responsible use of technical debt is a tool that can enable a software project to succeed where they otherwise might have failed." 
  • "In another 10 years when historians write the history of the early 2000s on the internet, I fully believe they will point to LJ [Livejournal] as the technical pioneer that made a very great deal of Web 2.0 happen; the problems LJ solved back then are universal to any high-load system, and the solutions they/we came up with are still in use today..."
  • "When you see a code tour that's full of nothing but backend improvements, don't think of it as 'DW [Dreamwidth] isn't doing any feature development'. Think of it as 'Dreamwidth is doing the necessary background work to enable awesome feature development in the future'."


 "Friedrich Nietzsche on Why a Fulfilling Life Requires Embracing Rather Than Running from Difficulty"
  • Nietzsche: "It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being. I have a terrible fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy."
  • Nietzsche: "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities-- I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not-- that one endures." 
  • Willa Cather: "The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring." 
  • "Nietzsche also believed that hardship and joy operated in a kind of osmotic relationship-- diminishing one would diminish the other-- or, as Anais Nin put it, 'great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.'"
  • Alain de Bottom: "Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfillment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable."
"Nietzsche, the Overhuman and the Posthuman"

  • "Posthumans will allegedly lead happier, more fulfilling lives than we do now. This assumption is the main reason why transhumanists demand that we pave the way for posthumanity. In other words, there is a moral imperative at the heart of the transhumanist agenda."
  • "According to Nietzsche, the philosopher needs to position himself 'beyond good and evil,' because there are no moral facts and nothing that is truly better or worse than anything else. Happiness for instance is not to be considered better than suffering." 
  • "Transhumanists continue the logocentric tradition of Western philosophy. By and large they believe that what makes us human, and what is most valuable about our humanity, is the particularity of our minds. We are thinking beings, conscious of ourselves and the world, rational agents that use our environment including our own bodies to pursue our own freely chosen ends... Generally, the organic body is held to be replaceable." 
  • "[According to Nietzsche] promising immortality (or indefinite life extension) to everybody only boosts the widespread delusion that the world revolves around every single one of us, whereas in fact most of us should never have been born in the first place. Most people actually die too late, not too early, because they have never learnt to live... Instead of doing everything to escape death we ought to practice the art of going at the right time and celebrate our dying as something that we freely embrace, in order to plunge again into the great 'ocean of becoming', in which we belong. The overhuman understands how to live and how to die."
  • "There is a chance that his overhuman is merely an ironic device, never meant to be taken seriously as an ideal human. After all, we shouldn't forget that the overhuman was preached by Zarathustra, not Nietzsche himself, and may well be understood as a provisional concept in the ongoing movement of understanding, as one possible perspective on the way things are, but not necessarily a true one, let alone the true one."
  • "Nietzsche himself warned of misunderstanding the overhuman as some kind of higher human. Zarathustra, he reminds us, is the destroyer of all morality, not half saint, half genius, not an idealist type of higher human, not a Parsifal, but a Borgia. He is mainly characterized by contempt: of personal happiness and of reason."


 "Liberal from a Distance" (Part One)

  • "Fangs for the Fantasy noted recently that shows with post-apocalyptic settings predominantly, and seemingly nonsensically, go out of their way to position straight white men as the single voice of command and reason in their dislocated societies."
  • "To be a Liberal from a Distance your political engagement can go little further than having checking [sic] the box marked 'Democrat' each election, and perhaps purchasing an electric car. It means feeling nervous when people start talking about wildcat strikes. It means being glad that feminism and civil rights happened but feeling certain that we've solved those problems and can safely move on to more important things now. It means, in essence, position[ing] oneself on the left side of the aisle, but sticking close to the center lest someone mistake you for some kind of a radical. It means not wanting to get your hands dirty."
  • "There is a remarkable shared suspicion in The Dark Knight Rises and in Arrow of the Voice of the People. This manifests in suspicion of several different things: suspicion of the generalized archetype of speakers for masses of people, suspicions against a specific individual, and arguably even suspicions against the abstract idea of democratic will-- or, perhaps in their view, mob rule." 
  • "The stock character of the Corrupt or Hypocritical Revolutionary exists and is popular because it strokes and manipulates the egos of those who consider themselves nearly alone in political insight."
  • "Now, I'm just a simple supervillain from the country, not some city-slicking superhero, so I could be off base here, but when given the choice between constructing a doomsday device and NOT constructing a doomsday device, YOU DO NOT CONSTRUCT THE DOOMSDAY DEVICE. Whatever the other consequences, you do not facilitate someone's plan to wipe entire city blocks off the map!" 
  • "The crushingly frustrating thing about Slayer here is that he did not have to be a villain. He could have been an effective foil to Queen, used to demonstrate the fundamental contradictions of his identity as both billionaire scion of a family complicit in mass murder and a vigilante fighting for justice against the people he hob-nobs at cocktail parties with in his own life. He could have exposed how vigilantism cannot, on its own, lead to justice when uncoupled from a political consciousness and a demand from the people for political and economic reform." 


 "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" (Part Two)

  • "The morality of the show is Arrow-centric, meaning that what is good or bad is determined entirely by how Oliver Queen relates to it in a given moment (which in turn is often driven by drama rather than any kind of coherent sense of theme or continuity). This means that the aims of other characters politically are ultimately subverted and must be bent around the massive gravity well that is Oliver Queen's moral center. As a result, the show's sympathies are pulled toward the side of the rich and powerful-- and, by implication, the straight, white, and male-- and against the downtrodden and disadvantaged."
  • "Arrow, like comics, like video games, like cartoons, is Art as long as the academics praise it, and Just A Show as soon as the academics start ripping apart its sexism, its regressive politics, its failures of imagination."
  • "Anti-death transhumanism simply takes these individual battles against death from injustice, pointless war, need, senseless vengeance, &c., and extends that logic to the vagueries of biology and random chance. You are just as dead, after all, if you are struck by a drone or by lightning. If you are against one, why not be against the other?"
  • "Doctor Ivo rages his way through the narrative of Arrow with no hint of internal logic or consistent drive. I'm actually somewhat stuck at this point in my essay because the more I consider Ivo the less sense he makes." 
  • "It's a point of continuous outrage with me that so many people, the writers included, think that this is a sign of maturity. That throwing in love triangles everywhere they can is a sign of emotional development rather than an adolescent preoccupation with soap opera histrionics. They cannot possibly conceive of a world without jealousy, without spite, and, barring Black Canary's ex girlfriend, sex without penises going in vaginas."
  • "Critics, paid critics, seem largely to be fans of television with no understanding of the deeper level mechanic of message and theme... or even an understanding of relationships and decisions not driven by a need to own a particular lover!"
  • "If you can find a belief that leftists hold, this show is there on the sidelines calling, 'Hey, let's not be too hasty here! Let's not go too far!'"
  • "The fact of the matter is that we leftists are already villains in the context of this show. By embracing that status, we perform a radical act of reversal, drawing perverse strength from the reinterpretation of the master narrative so comfortable to lily-livered centrists. In the end, we are destined to be turned in to the authorities, both in fiction and in real life. There is no sense, then, in trying to please the authors of the narrative. Rather, it is far better to take on the mantle of the villain and use it as a source of strength. And that is what I ask now: that you join us in supervillainy. Do not wait to be put here by the rear guard who cheers from the back while taking down your name as insurance against the counterrevolution. Rather, choose of your own free will. Choose the dark side. And in choosing, choose the side that truly does want to save the human race." 


 "Fluttershyness is Nice"

  • "I don't think there's any particular contradiction between aiming a particular narrative at a younger audience and still imparting a slightly more complex, nuanced message, or in transcending the rote lessons that so many children's shows fixate upon."
  • "There's an implicit character judgment in this message, a sense that someone's admission of discomfort or fear is this 'hiding from your true self,' a deliberate self-hindrance. Taken to extremes it implies that those suffering from more extreme anxieties generating [sic] their feelings all on their own, and they can just get over it if they really wanted to." 
  • "That tendency to joke about things and solve problems through joking when paired with a certain level of social obliviousness can result in disaster, in the form of deeply upsetting someone. Because anxiety is not necessarily something you can just laugh off. It's a particular brokenness in the mind that lead you to distort your perception of reality into something threatening and fearful."
  • "The narrative thus, by positioning Pinkie as an external antagonist, makes visible the invisible illness of anxiety. It transforms anxiety into a tangible thing, and by doing so it allows Rarity to dismiss not FLUTTERSHY as ridiculous but THE ANXIETY. It's not that Fluttershy is being ridiculous, the particular broken parts of her brain are being ridiculous." 
  •  "Triggering someone's panic reflex is not making them stronger, it's not helping them, it's not doing anything other than basically being a really lousy friend. That's important to remember, too."
  • "You can't fix anxiety through magic. But maybe you can fix it through friendship."


 "The Mormon Myth of Evil Evolution"
  • "Therefore, Adam can be the 'primal parent of our race'-- or cultural group-- without discarding the evolutionary model." This seems like a potentially dangerous interpretation to take, not least because of the potential for bigotry. If we interpret Adam as being the father of our cultural group in the manner that Abraham is, then we remove this problem, but the wording does not seem to support this idea. Among other things, I do not believe that anyone has been referred to as having been adopted into the race of Adam. 
  • James. E. Talmage: "Belief in a loving God perfectly accords with my reverence for science, and I can see no reason why the evolution of animal bodies cannot be true-- as indeed the facts of observation make it difficult to deny-- and still the soul of man is of divine origin." 
  • Talmage: "Discrepancies that trouble us now will diminish as our knowledge of pertinent facts is extended. The creator has made record in the rocks for man to decipher; but He has also spoken directly regarding the main stages of progress by which the earth has been brought to be what it is. The accounts cannot be fundamentally opposed; one can not contradict the other; though man's interpretation of either may be seriously at fault." 
  • John A. Widtsoe to Sterling Talmage: "It would not hurt my feelings at all if in the wisdom of the Almighty the body of man was prepared in just the way you outline in your article, and then that the spirit of man, the eternal ego, was placed within the body so prepared."
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