More rants of a dead man

My other kid is fascinated with numbers. So he asked me to make him a page that would convert numbers between any bases.

So I picked the reasonable base 2 to base 36 range.

http://deadpelican.com/calc.html

If you dig a big hole, and then you take all the dirt you displaced and put it back in the hole, you’ve done a lot of work.

But you have accomplished anything? Have you improved anything?

Now let’s say you dig a big hole in somebody’s flower garden. Something pretty with rows of cutesy little flowers.

Then you take all the dirt you displaced and put it back in the hole.

You’ve done a lot of work. You can even say you’ve accomplished something. You’ve taken things a step back.

This isn’t progress, and it isn’t helpful.

My kid liked this page so much I thought it would be easier to run it on my server so it would load more quickly.

http://deadpelican.com/randomletter.html

So it seems I’m not the only one who has this perspective on the software development industry and it is even more rare that he also calls it “progress” just like I do. Although I use the term sarcastically and he says we’re not really making progress, which is the same thing.

So as proof that there are other people who also see the constant churn of the same stuff over and over as a giant waste of time, I give you this guy, I guess his name is uncle bob.

The smackdown:

http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2016/07/27/TheChurn.html

The follow up:

http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2016/09/01/TheLurn.html

Unlike me however, he offers some good examples of ways to improve the lot.

I’m starting to think that we’ve reached peak-smart. Basically there’s some bar at which most programmers basically top out at, which is what makes them go redo everything over again in a similar but different shiny sort of way. And I think they do that, because that’s it. They’ve topped out. Getting into machine learning is HARD. Whereas learning yet another silly language syntax to regurgitate the same software is easy and comforting.

Obviously there are some above-the-bar guys because machine learning exists, but I expect these are the same guys who are working on the self driving cars and the voice recognition stuff.

So it makes sense that as problems get harder, fewer and fewer people are able to solve them, and the software developers who can’t, just fall back and find a new javascript library to draw neato webpages in.

Speaking of, I’m really out of date with the web world thank The Great CPU and I’ve been doing back end block device stuff which I love. So I was surprised to find out about AMP.

I think it stands for “we’ve finally made web rendering so bad it’s unusable, so we’re hacking in yet another layer of crap to try and make it perform tolerably well.”

Go ahead everybody, go learn your next javascript AMP compliant library. Have a good time.

The greeks too, now that I think about it. There’s a number of times in human history when people were on the brink of major technological progress. Maybe the timing was wrong, on the wrong people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe there were just too many stupid people.

But for whatever reason, the industrial revolution didn’t happen until fairly recently, and it’s a good thing.

If the romans had discovered electricity and figured out they could dig up oil for fuel for generators, and for running combustion engines, there wouldn’t have been any left for me now.

Except for the odd side-effect, in C, c++ is basically equivalent to ++c.

But in C++ the magnitude of those side-effects is far greater, so much so that in a bunch of stl cases where it matters, it is far more efficient to use ++c than c++. So it seems to me it would have made more sense to recognize this by calling the language ++C instead of C++.

I don’t get into politics much, but this election season isn’t really about politics so I thought I’d say something.
All the trash about hillary is pretty normal dirty-politician stuff. The difference is that hillary got caught.
At first I just thought she was more incompetent than the rest of the politicians who lie cheat and steal, and just don’t get caught.
Then I realized, she’s just unlucky.
It doesn’t matter who was running for president now, they would have suffered similar humiliations as hillary. With the internet solidifying its place in our society as the source of all dirt, every presidential election from now on will be made more open and public because no server is safe from hacking and computers aren’t going away any time soon.

I wrote this neat little program for my phone that uses bluetooth discovery to look for stationary devices. The idea is that when my phone detects one of these devices it can do something. I.E. it is location aware. When I go to my car, my phone can react to it, when I go home, my phone can react to that.

Works great. Or at least it used to.
See google is smarter than the rest of us, and they know better, so as a result, they improved their latest version of android (5.0) by changing the bluetooth settings so that it can no longer be set to broadcast its name all the time.

I have one moto-g that refuses to upgrade to 5.0 and works great, I go near it and my phone recognizes it. But alas I have another moto-g that updated itself and now it no longer works. I googled and googled, and that’s just how it is. I tried writing a program to just turn on bluetooth discovery all the time, but it causes a popup to display saying “xyz application wants to enable bluetooth visibility, ok?” which defeats the purpose, since I’m not going to be there to press OK.

It happens, however, that I have an old droid 1 lying around. These are really great machines. Actually the droid 3 is probably the best machine ever made, but the droid 1 isn’t too shabby either.
It requires little power, boots immediately when it detects power even from a dead battery (if say it’s been sitting in my car for a week). Some phones require the battery to charge for 5-10 minutes before it will boot, not this puppy.
It boots quickly, and best of all, it can be set to have the bluetooth discovery enabled all the time and never shut off.
And it will never get upgraded.

In short, the droid 1 can be had on ebay for about $10, and it makes a great bluetooth beacon.

Over the years I’ve had a number of silly ideas about how to solve the middle east problem, or various little bits of it. Surely none would work, but they were amusing to think about.

I was re-reading this article I wrote….

Transitioning to no money.

and I was reminded of one of them, speaking as I was of buying land.

For years and years lots of people have been upset with the idea of israel. They just don’t want it to exist or something. I’m not an expert in the field, I only remember dribbles of what I read and hear, but I know part of the problem is that lots of people believe that the land that israel inhabits is more special than other bits of land around it.

So there have been wars and terrorist attacks and other venting-of-anger activities.

What I don’t get is: Why, if so many people are so interested in owning the land israel occupies, they don’t just buy it.

Save up your money, don’t spend it on guns and military training, put it in a high yield investment of some kind, or start a crowdfunding venture called “Buy israel” and when you have enough money to buy some…. Buy it. Just like in the game monopoly.

Over enough time, if you buy more and more of it, you’ll eventually have the whole thing, and don’t worry, there is no plop of land so valuable that somebody isn’t willing to give it up for enough money.

In a barely related note, after the 1979 oil crisis (the fist one I remember) I had another idea how to solve another little part of the middle east problem.

Oil oil oil everybody wants oil. OPEC carries whims of the world on its finger based on what price they choose to sell oil at. Or at least they used to, to some degree.

For all the years I can remember, the effort was always ‘rely less on oil’ and ‘make cars more efficient’ and ‘do whatever you can to become less dependent on oil from the middle east’. As a long term solution that’s going to be a reality one way or another, but there’s a much more productive short term solution.

Use up all the oil as fast as you can. Buy that gas guzzler, keep the heat way up and turn on the air conditioning to compensate, get rid of those LED lights and get more manly incandescents.

The middle east countries that use oil as a bargaining chip can only bargain with it, if they have any left. If we use it all up, no more bargaining, no more chip, no more problem.

Of course it would get expensive near the end which would most certainly spur Mr. Science to come up with a solution to the lack of fuel for energy problem, but that’s going to happen anyway. With this simple technique we can rid the world of all those pesky people who fund themselves with oil money.

But the americans came along with their technology and fracked it all up. So that plan can’t work anymore. But maybe if we started doing it in the 70’s we’d have solved that problem by now, and could move on to new problems like self tying shoelaces.

Before the internet was anybody’s bad idea, I wrote this:

http://deadpelican.com/howthebrainworks.html

And I’ve had a lot of time to think about it more over the years, and I have a few thoughts to add…

You can’t live forever. ‘You’ being the important word here.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the science of getting older and how to put it off as long as possible.

There may be a magical point in time where life expectancy starts to increase at more than 1 year per year.

Anybody alive at that time (and able to afford whatever treatments are required) can conceivably live forever. I mean eventually you’ll get hit by a bus or taken out by some nasty disease, but the dying-of-old-age problem will have been solved.

Firstly if you think about it for a few minutes, you probably don’t want to live forever anyway, but I imagine you can come up with reasons besides the ones I’m about to offer.

Consider the idea of ‘you’. You are a unique individual person made up of your education and experiences and dna yada yada yada. I’m sure lots of philosophers have gone over this endlessly before me. The simple version of the problem is ‘what defines you’ changes. If you’ve ever looked back at your teenage years and thought “boy that time I did yada yada was really stupid” you might realize that given the same circumstances, you would decide differently. Because you’ve learned from your mistakes and you’ve realized a better decision making process given that scenario and you would do things differently.  Is that the same you? How many experiences do you have to have, and how many different decisions would you have to make before you started to think you were not the same person you were when you were 18.

But that’s a philosophical argument about not living forever, here’s a more concrete one.

Quite simply: your brain will run out.

When you are born you are a randomly firing set of neurons with just enough firmware to keep you breathing and eating. Watch any newborn, this is pretty obvious.

As you grow you learn to see and to hear and to do the most amazing of human skills: recognize patterns.

Then you learn to remember.

After that, it’s just a matter of gathering more and  more patterns and experiences until somebody hires you.

After that you can pretty much coast for a few decades.

But then what. The human brain is probably not a fixed size, but it does have to fit in your skull. Maybe some really smart people co-opt some space from their throat or something, but at some point the brain can only get so big.

Unless there’s some weird hyperspatial transference going on (and I have it on good authority there isn’t) there is a finite amount of information you can store. There are a finite number of neurons that can fire to enable you to think, absorb information, tie it to an existing pattern and impress it to long term memory. If you learn something new, at some point, something’s got to go.

I imagine if anybody could figure it out, we’d find that the human brain has evolved quite an impressive compression algorithm. One that, much like common picture compression, is lossy. It ties patterns together and makes a few distinctions between them, but  certainly does not store a perfect representation of all of your memories, each separate and complete.

You don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t even know what you did know but forgot. And you don’t know what you forgot, so you can’t even attempt to reproduce it. The error correction is limited.

People tend to misremember things, some worse than others, but nobody’s perfect and as it turns out, the laws of physics do not require people to have perfect memories. People make mistakes, not everything works out correctly all the time. And it’s okay, the world keeps spinning. But I digress, because I like to.

So here it is, you can’t live forever simply because on some level, your brain will stop working well. I have this vague idea that as you get older, some of the thinking neurons are sacrificed for memory neurons, but I don’t have any good evidence of that. But even without that at some point, your brain will fill up and you either won’t remember things as you would have before, or you’ll start losing old memories, or most likely, both.

Somebody once explained to me that a great way to tease out the possible solutions to a problem, is to make the numbers in your problem really large, and then it becomes obvious where the solution to the problem lies.

Given the decrepit state that your brain will be in after a few thousand years of live-forever treatment, it’s hard to imagine that you will still be you, or even able to think correctly.

No, you can’t live forever.