nikhil.io

Back in the good old days – the “Golden Era” of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called “Real Men” and “Quiche Eaters” in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones that didn’t. A real computer programmer said things like “DO 10 I=1,10” and “ABEND” (they actually talked in capital letters, you understand), and the rest of the world said things like “computers are too complicated for me” and “I can’t relate to computers – they’re so impersonal”. (A previous work [1] points out that Real Men don’t “relate” to anything, and aren’t afraid of being impersonal.)

But, as usual, times change. We are faced today with a world in which little old ladies can get computerized microwave ovens, 12 year old kids can blow Real Men out of the water playing Asteroids and Pac-Man, and anyone can buy and even understand their very own Personal Computer. The Real Programmer is in danger of becoming extinct, of being replaced by high-school students with TRASH-80s!

There is a clear need to point out the differences between the typical high-school junior Pac-Man player and a Real Programmer. Understanding these differences will give these kids something to aspire to – a role model, a Father Figure. It will also help employers of Real Programmers to realize why it would be a mistake to replace the Real Programmers on their staff with 12 year old Pac-Man players (at a considerable salary savings).

LANGUAGES #

The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of PASCAL, was once asked, “How do you pronounce your name?”. He replied “You can either call me by name, pronouncing it ‘Veert’, or call me by value, ‘Worth’.” One can tell immediately from this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM/370 FORTRAN G and H compilers. Real programmers don’t need abstract concepts to get their jobs done: they are perfectly happy with a keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer.

• Real Programmers do List Processing in FORTRAN.
• Real Programmers do String Manipulation in FORTRAN.
• Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in FORTRAN.
• Real Programmers do Artificial Intelligence programs in FORTRAN.

If you can’t do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can’t do it in assembly language, it isn’t worth doing.

STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING #

Computer science academicians have gotten into the “structured programming” rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don’t all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the examples they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another – clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000 line programs that WORKED. (Really!) Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000 line FORTRAN program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world won’t help you solve a problem like that – it takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real Programmers and Structured Programming:

• Real Programmers aren’t afraid to use GOTOs.
• Real Programmers can write five page long DO loops without getting confused.
• Real Programmers enjoy Arithmetic IF statements because they make the code more interesting.
• Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if it saves them 20 nanoseconds in the middle of a tight loop.
• Programmers don’t need comments: the code is obvious.
• Since FORTRAN doesn’t have a structured IF, REPEAT … UNTIL, or CASE statement, Real Programmers don’t have to worry about not using them. Besides, they can be simulated when necessary using assigned GOTOs.

Data structures have also gotten a lot of press lately. Abstract Data Types, Structures, Pointers, Lists, and Strings have become popular in certain circles. Wirth (the above-mentioned Quiche Eater) actually wrote an entire book [2] contending that you could write a program based on data structures, instead of the other way around. As all Real Programmers know, the only useful data structure is the array. Strings, lists, structures, sets – these are all special cases of arrays and and can be treated that way just as easily without messing up your programing language with all sorts of complications. The worst thing about fancy data types is that you have to declare them, and Real Programming Languages, as we all know, have implicit typing based on the first letter of the (six character) variable name.

OPERATING SYSTEMS #

What kind of operating system is used by a Real Programmer? CP/M? God forbid – CP/M, after all, is basically a toy operating system. Even little old ladies and grade school students can understand and use CP/M.

Unix is a lot more complicated of course – the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week – but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don’t do Serious Work on Unix systems: they send jokes around the world on USENET and write adventure games and research papers.

No, your Real Programmer uses OS/370. A good programmer can find and understand the description of the IJK305I error he just got in his JCL manual. A great programmer can write JCL without referring to the manual at all. A truly outstanding programmer can find bugs buried in a 6 megabyte core dump without using a hex calculator. (I have actually seen this done.)

OS/370 is a truly remarkable operating system. It’s possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space, so alertness in the programming staff is encouraged. The best way to approach the system is through a keypunch. Some people claim there is a Time Sharing system that runs on OS/370, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.

PROGRAMMING TOOLS #

What kind of tools does a Real Programmer use? In theory, a Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the front panel of the computer. Back in the days when computers had front panels, this was actually done occasionally. Your typical Real Programmer knew the entire bootstrap loader by memory in hex, and toggled it in whenever it got destroyed by his program. (Back then, memory was memory – it didn’t go away when the power went off. Today, memory either forgets things when you don’t want it to, or remembers things long after they’re better forgotten.) Legend has it that Seymour Cray, inventor of the Cray I supercomputer and most of Control Data’s computers, actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Seymour, needless to say, is a Real Programmer.

One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day, he got a long distance call from a user whose system had crashed in the middle of some important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the phone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading register contents back over the phone. The moral of this story: while a Real Programmer usually includes a keypunch and lineprinter in his toolkit, he can get along with just a front panel and a telephone in emergencies.

In some companies, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers standing in line to use an 029 keypunch. In fact, the building I work in doesn’t contain a single keypunch. The Real Programmer in this situation has to do his work with a text editor program. Most systems supply several text editors to select from, and the Real Programmer must be careful to pick one that reflects his personal style. Many people believe that the best text editors in the world were written at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for use on their Alto and Dorado computers [3]. Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would ever use a computer whose operating system is called SmallTalk, and would certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse.

Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems. EMACS and VI are probably the most well known of this class of editors. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider “what you see is what you get” to be just as bad a concept in text editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer wants a “you asked for it, you got it” text editor – complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.

It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse – introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.

For this reason, Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit a program that is close to working. They find it much easier to just patch the binary object code directly, using a wonderful program called SUPERZAP (or its equivalent on non-IBM machines). This works so well that many working programs on IBM systems bear no relation to the original FORTRAN code. In many cases, the original source code is no longer available. When it comes time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of sending anything less than a Real Programmer to do the job – no Quiche Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is called “job security”.

Some programming tools NOT used by Real Programmers:

• FORTRAN preprocessors like MORTRAN and RATFOR. The Cuisinarts of programming – great for making Quiche. See comments above on structured programming.
• Source language debuggers. Real Programmers can read core dumps.
• Compilers with array bounds checking. They stifle creativity, destroy most of the interesting uses for EQUIVALENCE, and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts. Worst of all, bounds checking is inefficient.
• Source code maintainance systems. A Real Programmer keeps his code locked up in a card file, because it implies that its owner cannot leave his important programs unguarded [5].

THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORK #

Where does the typical Real Programmer work? What kind of programs are worthy of the efforts of so talented an individual? You can be sure that no real Programmer would be caught dead writing accounts-receivable programs in COBOL, or sorting mailing lists for People magazine. A Real Programmer wants tasks of earth-shaking importance (literally!):

• Real Programmers work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing atomic bomb simulations to run on Cray I supercomputers.
• Real Programmers work for the National Security Agency, decoding Russian transmissions.
• It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the cosmonauts.
• The computers in the Space Shuttle were programmed by Real Programmers.
• Programmers are at work for Boeing designing the operating systems for cruise missiles.

Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they can to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation, such as hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, and repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.

One plan for the upcoming Galileo spacecraft mission is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/- 3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.

As you can tell, many of the world’s Real Programmers work for the U.S. Government, mainly the Defense Department. This is as it should be. Recently, however, a black cloud has formed on the Real Programmer horizon.

It seems that some highly placed Quiche Eaters at the Defense Department decided that all Defense programs should be written in some grand unified language called “ADA” (registered trademark, DoD). For a while, it seemed that ADA was destined to become a language that went against all the precepts of Real Programming – a language with structure, a language with data types, strong typing, and semicolons. In short, a language designed to cripple the creativity of the typical Real Programmer. Fortunately, the language adopted by DoD has enough interesting features to make it approachable: it’s incredibly complex, includes methods for messing with the operating system and rearranging memory, and Edsgar Dijkstra doesn’t like it [6]. (Dijkstra, as I’m sure you know, was the author of “GoTos Considered Harmful” – a landmark work in programming methodology, applauded by Pascal Programmers and Quiche Eaters alike.) Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.

The real programmer might compromise his principles and work on something slightly more trivial than the destruction of life as we know it, providing there’s enough money in it. There are several Real Programmers building video games at Atari, for example. (But not playing them. A Real Programmer knows how to beat the machine every time: no challange in that.) Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of 50 million Star Wars fans.) The proportion of Real Programmers in Computer Graphics is somewhat lower than the norm, mostly because nobody has found a use for Computer Graphics yet. On the other hand, all Computer Graphics is done in FORTRAN, so there are a fair number people doing Graphics in order to avoid having to write COBOL programs.

THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT PLAY #

Generally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works – with computers. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway, although he is careful not to express this opinion out loud. Occasionally, the Real Programmer does step out of the office for a breath of fresh air and a beer or two. Some tips on recognizing real programmers away from the computer room:

• At a party, the Real Programmers are the ones in the corner talking about operating system security and how to get around it.
• At a football game, the Real Programmer is the one comparing the plays against his simulations printed on 11 by 14 fanfold paper.
• At the beach, the Real Programmer is the one drawing flowcharts in the sand.
• A Real Programmer goes to a disco to watch the light show.
• At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying “Poor George. And he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary.”
• In a grocery store, the Real Programmer is the one who insists on running the cans past the laser checkout scanner himself, because he never could trust keypunch operators to get it right the first time.

THE REAL PROGRAMMER’S NATURAL HABITAT #

What sort of environment does the Real Programmer function best in? This is an important question for the managers of Real Programmers. Considering the amount of money it costs to keep one on the staff, it’s best to put him (or her) in an environment where he can get his work done.

The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer terminal. Surrounding this terminal are:

• Listings of all programs the Real Programmer has ever worked on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface in the office.
• Some half-dozen or so partly filled cups of cold coffee. Occasionally, there will be cigarette butts floating in the coffee. In some cases, the cups will contain Orange Crush.
• Unless he is very good, there will be copies of the OS JCL manual and the Principles of Operation open to some particularly interesting pages.
• Taped to the wall is a line-printer Snoopy calender for the year 1969.
• Strewn about the floor are several wrappers for peanut butter filled cheese bars (the type that are made stale at the bakery so they can’t get any worse while waiting in the vending machine).
• Hiding in the top left-hand drawer of the desk is a stash of double stuff Oreos for special occasions.
• Underneath the Oreos is a flow-charting template, left there by the previous occupant of the office. (Real Programmers write programs, not documentation. Leave that to the maintainence people.)

The Real Programmer is capable of working 30, 40, even 50 hours at a stretch, under intense pressure. In fact, he prefers it that way. Bad response time doesn’t bother the Real Programmer – it gives him a chance to catch a little sleep between compiles. If there is not enough schedule pressure on the Real Programmer, he tends to make things more challenging by working on some small but interesting part of the problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in the last week, in two or three 50-hour marathons. This not only inpresses his manager, who was despairing of ever getting the project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation. In general:

• No Real Programmer works 9 to 5. (Unless it’s 9 in the evening to 5 in the morning.)
• Real Programmers don’t wear neckties.
• Real Programmers don’t wear high heeled shoes.
• Real Programmers arrive at work in time for lunch. [9]
• A Real Programmer might or might not know his wife’s name. He does, however, know the entire ASCII (or EBCDIC) code table.
• Real Programmers don’t know how to cook. Grocery stores aren’t often open at 3 a.m., so they survive on Twinkies and coffee.

THE FUTURE #

What of the future? It is a matter of some concern to Real Programmers that the latest generation of computer programmers are not being brought up with the same outlook on life as their elders. Many of them have never seen a computer with a front panel. Hardly anyone graduating from school these days can do hex arithmetic without a calculator. College graduates these days are soft – protected from the realities of programming by source level debuggers, text editors that count parentheses, and user friendly operating systems. Worst of all, some of these alleged computer scientists manage to get degrees without ever learning FORTRAN! Are we destined to become an industry of Unix hackers and Pascal programmers?

On the contrary. From my experience, I can only report that the future is bright for Real Programmers everywhere. Neither OS/370 nor FORTRAN show any signs of dying out, despite all the efforts of Pascal programmers the world over. Even more subtle tricks, like adding structured coding constructs to FORTRAN have failed. Oh sure, some computer vendors have come out with FORTRAN 77 compilers, but every one of them has a way of converting itself back into a FORTRAN 66 compiler at the drop of an option card – to compile DO loops like God meant them to be.

Even Unix might not be as bad on Real Programmers as it once was. The latest release of Unix has the potential of an operating system worthy of any Real Programmer. It has two different and subtly incompatible user interfaces, an arcane and complicated terminal driver, virtual memory. If you ignore the fact that it’s structured, even C programming can be appreciated by the Real Programmer: after all, there’s no type checking, variable names are seven (ten? eight?) characters long, and the added bonus of the Pointer data type is thrown in. It’s like having the best parts of FORTRAN and assembly language in one place. (Not to mention some of the more creative uses for #define.)

No, the future isn’t all that bad. Why, in the past few years, the popular press has even commented on the bright new crop of computer nerds and hackers ([7] and [8]) leaving places like Stanford and M.I.T. for the Real World. From all evidence, the spirit of Real Programming lives on in these young men and women. As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve The Problem, saving the documentation for later. Long live FORTRAN!

ACKNOWLEGEMENT #

I would like to thank Jan E., Dave S., Rich G., Rich E. for their help in characterizing the Real Programmer, Heather B. for the illustration, Kathy E. for putting up with it, and atd!avsdS:mark for the initial inspriration.

REFERENCES #

1. Feirstein, B., Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, New York, Pocket Books, 1982.
2. Wirth, N., Algorithms + Datastructures = Programs, Prentice Hall, 1976.
3. Xerox PARC editors . . .
4. Finseth, C., Theory and Practice of Text Editors - or - a Cookbook for an EMACS, B.S. Thesis, MIT/LCS/TM-165, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1980.
5. Weinberg, G., The Psychology of Computer Programming, New York, Van Nostrabd Reinhold, 1971, page 110.
6. Dijkstra, E., On the GREEN Language Submitted to the DoD, Sigplan notices, Volume 3, Number 10, October 1978.
7. Rose, Frank, Joy of Hacking, Science 82, Volume 3, Number 9, November 1982, pages 58 - 66.
8. The Hacker Papers, Psychology Today, August 1980.
9. Datamation, July, 1983, pp. 263-265.

Saw with LD. Eight-episode miniseries, with Season 2 in the works. Could’ve been at least two episodes shorter. Trippy, wonderful cinematography, just unbelievable production quality, and backed by (yet another) amazing score by Max Richter.

Especially great if you, like me, are a fan of Tom Hardy. His character growl-mumbles his way through Regency-era London as a traumatized 5-D Chess-playing badass with a vendetta who takes on the East India Company and the Crown, and who may or may not have supernatural powers that allow him to commune with the dead.

And when I say “growl-mumbles”…

My favorite character was Brace (😭😭😭), played to perfection by David Hayman.

I love this so much. Just look at this happy fuzzderp 🥰

By /u/noah9389

The argument here being that, since the ‘general form’ of the conjecture is undecidable, TypeScript’s type system is undecidable. How does one even think of doing these things?

I love Typescript, but it isn’t nearly ambitious enough. It would be vastly improved with an --extremelyStrict flag enforcing that your Typescript code is free of side-effects; that is – no Javascript code is generated at all. Real programmers do all of their computation within the type system. Otherwise, they can’t be sure their program will work in production and should be duly fired.

Mad Lad. Via HN. (Cached)

A guide to elegant post-dinner debauchery from Mr Wei Koh, watch aficionado, Style Council member and founder of The Rake Magazine, in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen.

The ‘guide’ in a nutshell: “Drink whatever you want, with whomever you like, talking about anything you’d want to, on any day of the week, until any time that works for you. I’m rich. Buy this watch.”

I’m mostly mad at myself for finishing it.

About as ‘essential’ as it gets if you want to appreciate a tool you work with every day. (Cached)

This is around Rovaniemi, Finland.

By Jani Ylinampa, whose Instagram account is just magical. Here’s another picture. Looks like a highly detailed miniature.

“Positive Affirmations don’t work when I question them, Jeremy.”

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

Here’s a fairly recent (Dec 2018) interview with the creators of chrome://dino. It was called Project Bolan (which I had to look up), had 270M games played every month¹, with most users coming “from markets with unreliable or expensive mobile data, like India, Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia” and took quite a bit of development to work on all platforms.

We built it to max out at approximately 17 million years, the same amount of time that the T-rex was alive on Earth… but we feel like your spacebar may not be the same afterwards.

Kiawak Ashoona, Musk Ox, 1963

No macOS love though 😔

Don’t know if these are shopped but this is amazing.

Some surrealism: Jan Švankmajer - Lunch (Food 1992).

The shortest film ever nominated for an Academy Award: Fresh Guacamole by PES.

Cooking utensil salad by Omozoc

And finally, an electronic hamburger via Clicker

Was discussing water quality in Des Moines with DL. Told her that our city couldn’t hold a candle to Ames, that their water was the “cleanest around.” Wanted to prove this but couldn’t find the 2014 viral hit “Hooray for Ames” video anywhere on the internet. GN, blessed datahoarder that he is, luckily had a copy ❤️🚰

Whatever. 🤘 Go Hawks 🤘

I remember the very first burrito I had in the Mission District in San Francisco. My friend warned me that it would be “around the size of your forearm” and that, if I tried to finish it in a single sitting, I would be an idiot. It was, I did, I am 🙏

i do not fuck with any burrito without heft. if your shit is convenient and portable, take it elsewhere. i want a burrito that is burdensome. unwieldy. when i raise it to my mouth, i should feel the weight of the mistake i am about to make. no child should be able to eat this.

if your burrito doesn’t make me hate myself both physically and spiritually, what’s the point? grow up. don’t waste my time.

Here’s another list of 36 styles with real examples. (Cached: styles, elements one and two.)

Everything you need to know about this waste of time without watching it, courtesy of SNL:

Vulture has a more charitable take and lists the “best bits”. And this is genuinely very funny:

Excellent stuff. Maybe two episodes longer than it should’ve been. The drug and alcohol abuse parts were heartbreaking.

Shit. Stallone wrote it. Background-watched because it looked revenge-y and Netflix listed it as a Top 10 movie in the US. Jason Statham is B+ as Jason Statham. This time, he growl-mumbles through this shit movie as an undercover DEA agent (with Special Forces training of course) who speaks with an English accent, presumably because he became a naturalized citizen beforehand.

Well, he was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, which is between Stoke-on-Trent and Sheffield so that would be a mix of accents but closer to Yorkshire, but he grew up in Norfolk… which would give him an East Anglian accent. He then moved to London I believe… which gave him his slightly unusual not quite Cockney accent or Mockney as we call it.

Kate Bosworth was excellent and looked like she subsisted purely off the aura of vegetables a few months before playing her role.

Also known as Pesquet’s parrot or the vulturine parrot.

The Dracula parrot is a large, heavy bird, stretching to almost half a metre from beak to tail and weighing in at almost a kilogram. It maintains all that bulk by feeding almost exclusively on figs, which researchers suspect is why it ended up with its strange semi-bald head.

Just as vultures lost the feathers on their head as an adaptation for feeding on bloody carcasses, it’s thought that the Dracula parrot did the same in response to its diet of sticky fruits – the lack of feathers around its beak and eyes mean it’s able to avoid turning its face into a matted mess.

It’s such a perfect solution to the parrot’s syrupy diet that Matt Cameron, an Australian parrot expert, asks, “If avoiding soiled and matted head feathers is a significant advantage to individuals, it is surprising that bald-headedness is not more widespread among the other fruit-eating parrots.”

via Deepu.

Nakamuro and his team looked at the videos Sakakibara had captured and were the first people ever to see tiny cuboid crystals made of tens of molecules of NaCl emerging from the chaotic mixture of separate sodium and chloride ions. Straight away, they noticed a statistical pattern in the frequency at which the crystals emerged; it followed what’s known as a normal distribution, which has long been theorized but only now experimentally verified.

Just amazing.

Nexe and pkg are two compilers that create self-contained executables out of your Node scripts.

Deno introduced this in a recent release, which got me looking for Node-based alternatives.

Dylan Beattie is my new favorite nerd on YouTube.

It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call ‘observation’ in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by electrons.

A devoted dog has spent days waiting outside a hospital in Turkey where her sick owner was being treated.

The pet, Boncuk, which means bead, followed the ambulance that transported her owner, Cemal Senturk, to hospital in the Black Sea city of Trabzon on 14 January. She then made daily visits to the facility, the private news agency DHA reported.

Senturk’s daughter, Aynur Egeli, said she would take Boncuk home but the dog would run back to the hospital.

A hospital security guard, Muhammet Akdeniz, told DHA: “She comes every day around 9am and waits until nightfall. She doesn’t go in.

“When the door opens she pokes her head inside.”

On Wednesday, Boncuk was finally reunited with Senturk when he was pushed outside in a wheelchair. “She’s very used to me. And I miss her too, constantly,” he told DHA.

Senturk was discharged from the hospital on Wednesday and returned home with Boncuk.

We do not deserve dogs.

[…] the simulation takes place on a replica of a starship bridge, with the test-taker as captain and other Starfleet members, officers or other cadets, in other key positions. […] the cadet receives a distress signal stating that the civilian freighter Kobayashi Maru has struck a gravitic mine in the Klingon Neutral Zone and is rapidly losing power, hull integrity and life support. Sensor readings are indeterminate and there is no way to verify the distress signal. There are no other vessels nearby. The cadet must quickly make a decision:

• Attempt to rescue the Kobayashi Maru’s crew and passengers, which involves violating the Neutral Zone and thereby provoking the Klingons into hostile action or possibly an all-out war; or
• Abandon the Kobayashi Maru, preventing war with the Klingons but leaving the crew and passengers of the freighter to probable death.

[…] The objective of the test is not for the cadet to outfight or outplan the opponent but rather to force the cadet into a no-win situation and simply observe how they react.

I wondered how this related to the Trolley Problem and came by this great post by Tom Ingram.

♥️♥️♥️ Via @uiowa

Saw with CK. Didn’t expect to like the movie as much as I did. Tilda Swinton and Ben Wishaw were brilliant. “Pure Christian pleasure.”

Dark Brown or Black: Nocturnal (helps with camouflage.) Orange: Dawn and Dusk. Yellow: Daytime. There are no Blue-Eyed Owls.

By Cameron Spires.

New Years resolutions for 2021 are gonna be like:

• travel to the other side of the room
• wear a different shirt
• cut screen time from 12 hours a day to 11
• eat a vegetable
• bathe

any history of COVID-19 in the US should really start off with an anecdote about how the chernobyl miniseries came out in 2019 and there was immediately a conclave of pundits smugly declaring that we would never respond to a disaster with such epic and malicious mismanagement

Here’s a short overview but I found it as easy as

brew install tesseract

# See output.txt
tesseract -l eng input.png output

That didn’t happen.

And if it did
It wasn’t that bad.

And if it was
That’s not a big deal.

And if it is
That’s not my fault.

And if it was
I didn’t mean it.

And if I did
You deserved it.

It was found in 1982 in France. It’s 165M years old. Researchers reconstructed it in 3D using “synchrotron microtomography.” I was unable this reconstruction because the system of scientific journals is a money-grubbing bullshit system run by greedy people. Here she is though ♥️

Absolute garbage. Another self-indulgent snooze-fest. A total waste of Sienna Miller and Alec Baldwin’s talents. Makes you mad at yourself for finishing it.

ROSS: “And Sasha you’ve got… is it two girls and a boy?”

COHEN: “Too early to say, really.”

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Surprising in many ways!

A dinner at REDACTED is an unforgettable experience, not to be missed. It’s a beautiful restaurant, the food is fantastic, and you’ll be thinking about it long after the meal is over.

We started with the Date & Almond Naan, which was sweet and delicious.

The Butter Chicken, known in some places as Makhni, was tender, moist pieces of dark meat chicken, smothered in a delicious sauce with tomatoes, honey, cardamom, and what I’m assuming was a pound of laxatives.

The Three Greens Saag was wonderful, and not loaded with butter or cream – just fresh and delicious kale, spinach and mustard greens. Hearty, bold and certainly capable of demolishing even the stiffest of constipation.

White dude working the tandoors: you go, sir. The Tandoori Prawns were cooked beautifully, seasoned to perfection, and tore through me with the awesome fury of the horsemen of the apocalypse, Bravo.

The Duck Biryani, a special not on the menu, I would say, is not worth it. It’s two cups of rice and a duck thigh, and we were surprised to discover later that it cost $28. My wife thought it was going to be around $8. My sense of remorse doubled this morning as it ripped its way out of me in a raging fiery whirlwind of poopy terror.

This meal was delectable, exotic, and incinerated everything in my intestines. My morning was an unforgettable thrill ride.

The exotic flavors and aromas of India came flooding back to me as I literally peed out of my butt.

4 stars for the truly delicious food and unimpeachable service, minus one star for expensive biryani, and for turning me into a human flamethrower.

Via CO. Succinct, timeless.

I made a bet at work that involved me eating my Crocs (if I lost, of course), prompting my co-worker to send me this story about Eric Taylor, a “former Magic: The Gathering player and highly regarded Magic columnist, especially during the earlier days of the game” (MTG Wiki), who made a similarly hasty bet and honored its terms:

He went so far as to guarantee Kai couldn’t emerge victorious again, promising to eat his hat should he be proven wrong.

[…] By now a sizeable crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle. EDT began by biting into the rim, but couldn’t tear the material with his teeth. In a quick burst of speed, he reached into his bag, and pulled out a full bottle of Heinz Ketchup and a pair of scissors. Deftly slicing a swatch of material from the top of the hat, he masticated on the felt but found the taste to be offensive.

“This is terrible!”, he exclaimed, unleashing a destructive stream of ketchup all over the table and his headwear. He resumed devouring his hat, making chewing faces akin to Popeye the Sailor eating rotten spinach.

[…] Around the third mouthful, EDT began to wish he had a nacho hat. “This is terrible”, he screamed, banging his jaw against the table to force the hat down. This attracted the attention of Rob Dougherty, from the Boston. “You’re crazy!”, he admonished in the typical Your Move Games tone. Eric just shook his head, gritted his teeth, and said, “I have to do this.”

The focus of this project is to build a super reliable, durable, and stable network device from tried and tested tech. This is not a project for pushing the limits or testing out flashy new stacks. This affinity for ‘boring’ technology will reflect on most of the choices made here, from the hardware to the way we configure services and daemons.

Sounds lovely. (Cached)

By a single dev. At $42, an absolute steal for all the things you can do with it. Perpetual license, no bullshit subscription model. 😍