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vishers · 5 years ago

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Friday-ish Links

An old friend figured out that you can make a grammatically correct sentence out of 3 repetitions of Poop. She seems to be absolutely killing it in the quarantine homeschooling unpleasantness. It made me think of one of my favorite examples of English ambiguity: the "buffalo" sentence by Dmitri Borgmann (best known for his work in recreational linguistics! 😂).

Miss Amy suggested that run books are actually just technical debt. While I agree on one hand I disagree on another. It's true that if you can write a sufficiently robust runbook to the point where an unskilled operator can simply follow the steps slavishly to solve the problem then you might as well take it one step further and write a program that does the slavish steps. Even so, I believe that run books are essentially extremely cheap first steps towards possible automation. If you look at a run book I write it does bear some similarity to a program. There are "if this, then that, else that" sections for sure and I do comment on them like I might in a program. But there are many more holes and explicit calls to say to the operator (often myself) "Last time I looked at this it was very ambiguous. Take a second to look around so you're sure you're doing the right thing. Add some notes right here if you see anything new." My intention is not that an unskilled operator can respond to things. My intention is that my learning and your learning can begin to merge until we think it's stable enough to write a program. The process of writing the program then is a heavier weight activity but should have been made as lightweight as it could be by virtue of having a body of discovery underpinning it in the form of the run book it replaces.

My buddy Joshua sent me this t00t because he knows how much I love D&D, Common Core, and Homeschooling. I'm constantly struggling with how to get my kids really into non-fiction texts which is one of my favorite insights from Common Core and it had never occurred to me that they way they devour the D&D Core books and duel with me on every minor detail the rules indicates quite a successful engagement with non-fiction text indeed.

Hidden Brain on NPR rebroadcast (AFAICT) Fake News: An Origin Story on 2020-04-30 on WHYY (my local NPR station) in How Failing Newspapers Cost Us All. It was an incredible listen all around but the quote that really caught me was

TUCHER: Yes. There was a real debate about the term faking in the 1880s and 1890s. But it was a debate in which many people argued, many journalists argued, faking is a good thing. By faking at that time, they didn't mean nefarious manipulation. They meant embellishment, adding some details, filling in gaps that they hadn't been able to see at the time, making an interviewee sound a little more articulate. It wasn't wholesale manipulation, but they argued that people would like that better because it gave them truth that was closer to what they expected, that it gave them stuff that wasn't boring, that - nobody wanted a newspaper said one handbook for journalists…

VEDANTAM: In other words, if the mere recitation of the facts doesn't do justice to the truth, the honest journalist actually goes beyond the facts to try and represent the truth.

TUCHER: Yes, yes. You can do a higher truth that way, and that's a term that we hear a lot, you know, somehow getting at a higher truth by glossing over inconvenient details. But this was a genuine movement. In the early years of the professionalization of the press, there were professional journals in which this argument was made… But in general, yes, there was a real sense that it was a good thing to do.

This of course immediately brought to mind a long standing debate my buddy Redmond and I have over the relationship between Truth and Fact. Elie Wiesel has said: "Some stories are true that never happened." While I agree that Truth reflects something greater than the sum of the facts that make it up, I still staunchly make the claim that Truth is separable from fact and can (sometimes) be gotten at more easily by lying about the facts in play.

Depression has been an enormous part of my life. My Mom suffered from it. My wife suffers from it. I think in some small ways I suffer from it. I had forgotten that Peter Sagal had opened up about his own depression on The Hilarious World of Depression with John Moe but was reminded of that fact on Fresh Air.

There's nothing more exquisitely pleasurable to me than spending a long evening locked in deep conversation with a small group of people. I am a great lover of good questions that flow freely in those times. Naturally I was intrigued by this post on Quartz and even more amazed that I had never even heard of Warren Berger and A More Beautiful Question. Boy do I want to read these books now.

eccentricj posed an interesting question on Clojureverse: "Are we the programming equivalent of “fake” martial arts?". I'm partly thankful just because I had never heard of the world of Fake Martial Arts that they reference and I think that just speaks for itself. But I also think that it's a good introspective attitude to have towards your tools. The idea that your language/ecosystem is the 10x language/ecosystem and everyone using anything else is brain dead and that you'll run circles around them is silly. It immediately called to mind this quote that I ran into recently.

Q: Is there a programming language that is the best choice for all (or nearly all) application development? If yes, which language is it, and what makes it best? If not, what would it take to create such a language?

Ritchie: No, this is silly.

Stroustrup: No. People differ too much for that and their applications differ too much. The notion of a perfect and almost perfect language is the dream of immature programmers and marketeers. Naturally, every language designer tries both to strengthen his language to better serve its core community and to broaden its appeal, but being everything to everybody is not a reasonable ideal. There are genuine design choices and tradeoffs that must be made.

Gosling: I think the one that has the best broad coverage is Java, but I'm a really biased sample. If you're doing things that are heavily into string pattern-matching, Perl can be pretty nice. I guess actually those are the ones I use much at all these days. Most of the older languages are completely subsumed; the reasons for using some of them are more historical than anything else.

---Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling

The uncomfortable truth is that because there's no silver bullet languages are more like productivity systems than any of us would like to admit.

This also brings to mind Brian Kernighan's talk on successful language design which is really good in its own right. Kernighan definitely seems to fall into the camp of pragmatic DSLs. Once you have a language that is purpose built to solve the problem at hand it should become quite simple to express the solution to your problem in that language.

Had on opportunity to link to BashFAQ/028 which is always fun. The vagaries of script location are quite surprising.

This Guardian article on an actual historical event that closely resembled Lord of the Flies was fascinating.

via Brian Marick

I don't understand Linux logging nearly well enough and I probably never will given that it's all being ditched for Docker anyway.

The issue of compliance testing against terraform is becoming more and more of an issue as we distribute control of our infrastructure around my company. I like the idea of using something like eerkunt/terraform-compliance (blog) to do static analysis rather than standing up actual infrastructure.

This post by Camille Fournier hits very close to home right now. This is my job and it's hard for all the same reasons she outlines.

This pair of posts sings my tune. Choose Boring Technology!

AWS Networking 101 is not particularly well named IMO and it has some very interesting insights regarding what you can and can't control in your AWS VPC. If you're looking for a higher level conceptual overview you should really head to AWS VPC Core Concepts in an Analogy and Guide.

via Corey Quinn

Love discovering new coreutils tools. In this instance it's numfmt because Steve Purcell had the gall to post something publicly positive about awk. xD

I try to take everything I read on the t00ts with a grain of salt but this t00t from a supposed education scholar fits my understanding of the world so it must be right. It's easy to think that because mass education was so recently introduced homeschooling/communityschooling must be easy or natural. Unfortunately most of us have no idea how homeschooling ever looked before and our expectation of education is entirely shaped by modern notions of what the goal of education is. The idea of teaching your modern renaissance style curriculum to your kids while doing full time work is, as the author suggestions, "batshit insane".

Peng Yu once again with a case of "why in the world are you using bash for this?" question.

Re: How to pipe just stderr to stdin in a pipeline?

Premature Optimization

I love Honest Trailers and they did one for Bladerunner 2049!

Whooooooooooooooa original broadway cast Hamilton is coming to Disney+ on July 3!

I've listened to a lot of Tom Lehrer over the years and despite nearly failing out of Chemistry I did love me The Elements set to the tune of The Major-General's Song. Helen Arney kills it with the addition of 4 new elements over a napping child!

via TARDISLittleFreeLibrary

Also Tom Lehrer: New Math (concert live) (1965)

Hello, my name is Mike, I'm a recovering True Believer - Mike Anderson

My wife recently watched through Wild, Wild Country on Netflix. It brought to mind this post by Mike Anderson about a community you may not have heard of that was very influential to me. I think about it often. The fallout is still happening.

I love automation. It's all about this statement from In Praise of AutoHotKey.

There’s something about the difference between “a single hotkey” and “four steps” that makes me more likely to bother.

When something is cheap and abundant why not do it all the time. Also I found out Hillel also has a 'Current Web Page' hot key!

Sci-Hub seems cool if not, as Hillel says, striiiiictly legal.

Will the Supreme Court crown Trump king? /sigh The Christians elected Trump President hoping a lecherous, sexist, broken, egotistical, predatory, narcissistic man could be the champion that would end abortion and take back control of the Supreme Court. He took back control of the Supreme Court alright. With sycophants who would love to repay him the favor if they can of elevating him to monarchy.

I recently finished reading The Art of PostgreSQL. I heartily recommend it. Definitely taught me many things that I had no idea SQL could do. I'm especially a fan now of lateral joins, window functions, and lag. He linked to 3 different sites that I thought were especially good:

Rob Pike: Notes on Programming in C

Basics of the Unix Philosophy

Database Design: Normalization Basics - Techniques

My god. The idea of mocking out entire clouds is… Well it's something… localstack/localstack

News about my favorite parasite? Yes please!

via Brian Marick

QAnon Is More Important Than You Think. File this under things I wish I wasn't aware of. Like I was struck by during the Impeachment Inquiry I just don't know how we're going to survive the sundering of the realities we perceive we live in.

Rich Hickey praises the JVM as it turns 25.

Makes me think of java sucks

Java doesn't have free().

I have to admit right off that, after that, all else is gravy. That one point makes me able to forgive just about anything else, no matter how egregious. Given this one point, everything else in this document fades nearly to insignificance.

#friday-ish links

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woowinnie · 8 years ago

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Podcasts to listen to...

I listen to many (really good to listen on subway rides) podcasts. Many programs are pushing #TryPod to bring awareness to different audiences to multiple and diverse programs. For those who do not know, a podcast is an audio or video media program to entertain one’s imagination and to invoke conversation by informing the listeners.

😊 🎧📱💻 Therefore, go out try my list of podcasts to which I have listened for years or begun listening to (🤔 newest listens I have on my playlists includes Crooked Media’s “Pod Save America” and “With Friends Like These” – will not review 😑✌️):

1) How Stuff Works family: Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant in “Stuff You Should Know” are the best! Been listening to this podcast forever. (http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts). Go SYSK army!

Then, I have been catching up on Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Frey “Stuff You Missed In History Class” (http://www.missedinhistory.com). Older hosts of "Missed in History" included Sarah Dowdey & Deblina Chakraborty.

2) Continuing on the theme of history podcasts — I feel so much smarter with the three historians Nikki, Natalia, and Neil (the 3N’s or N^3) in the “Past Present Podcast” (http://www.pastpresentpodcast.com) put current news with critiques and arguments from scholars. Then, there are the insight from a crew of non-historian (with cruder language and laughter) in “Unbottoned History” (http://roxlabs.net/unbuttoned/). Listen to the podcast episode "138 - The New Deal": http://roxlabs.net/2016/05/08/138-the-new-deal/ And, one more history podcast is based on my interest to learn more about my cultural heritage by listening to the “The China History Podcast” (http://teacup.media/the-china-history-podcast/).

3) I love science! So, yes definitely listen and keep informed with science podcasts such as “Science Friday” (https://www.sciencefriday.com) and" Star Talk Radio" (https://www.startalkradio.net). Then, there are the serious peer reviewed research science podcasts from the journals of “Science” and “Nature.”

4) The opposite of science is the paranormal. The lore with Scott and Forrest in “Astonishing Legends” (http://www.astonishinglegends.com) brings stories like the Mothman, Count of Saint Germaine, and the Dyatlov Pass. They are doing a series on the Bermuda Triangle.

5) Last one I will share is the “Hilarious World of Depression.” The host John Moe interviews comedians (and other talented figures) about overcoming the stigma of depression (and other mental illnesses). The theme “Pagliacci” by Rhett Miller is so on point as “laughter is the best medicine.” Go listen to the last episode of the season was an interview with Paul F. Tompkins: https://www.apmpodcasts.org/thwod/2017/02/paul-f-tompkins-sees-dead-grass-and-has-screwed-up-relationships/?autoplay=true

#trypod

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