Giving Up is a Good Idea Sometimes

Just saw a post in Google+ today by Amanda Blain, where she shows a picture of a book saying this:

Never give up on anybody. Miracles happen every day.

—Someone

Of course, no, they don't happen every day. They hardly ever happen or never happen, depending on how you define miracle. Things that happen every day are not miracles, they are common. It's cheapening the word.

I did reply, though:

If god is almighty, pray for the convergence of the -1^n series, and see how it works. There is no god but math.

—Me

Which is quite a troll, even for my standards, but hard to argue with, I expect. This post is a more serious response to that original quote. And my response is, sometimes, you need to give up. Further, sometimes, not giving up is stupid, painful, dangerous and selfish.

Stupid

People don't really change all that much. They do it very slowly, when they do. And you are not (usually) the other person's guardian. There comes a point in people's lifes where helping them hurts them. Or worse, hurts the one helping.

Consider an abusive partner. Why should you not give up? Why allow him/her to hurt you further, in hope for a future change? That is just stupid and...

Painful

Because you are being hurt, either in body or in mind. And being hurt is, of course, bad. So why enable it? Why allow someone to cause you pain, just for his own sake? What are you telling that person? That you feel good about helping those who hurt you? That is...

Dangerous

Because he may believe you. You are teaching that person that you feel good helping those who hurt you, and that makes you a better person, so he may just try to help you be much better by hurting you further. And really, if that's how you feel, you are being ...

Selfish

Because helping someone just to feel self-righteous and pious and good is a scam. Help because you make the other feel good, not because it feels good for you. I see people trapped in abusive relationships, almost screaming "See how good I am! See the pain I take for love!" which is both selfish and insane.

So, give up. Because the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. But enough is enough. And stupid is bad.

Syndicated 2012-05-17 22:17:00 from Lateral Opinion

That Box

Everyone has that box, full of mistery USB cables, broken headphones, a mechanical mouse, printer cable and more USB cables. EVERYONE.

—Fede

I answered "I threw it away last friday". But that was a lie. I actually put everything in a bag, and had not thrown it away yet.

So here it is:

An now it's really gone. Including:

• Mini CDs with copies of the USB mass storage driver for windows (5)
• Parallel printer cable (2)
• Business cards of people I don't remember (12)
• Keys to a house that's not mine (1)
• Cigarette holder (1)
• Paper to do cigarettes (1 pack, "El Ombú" brand) (No, I don't smoke)
• Hard drives (3, total a bit below 4GB)
• CD reader (not writer) (1)
• RS-232 Serial cables (2)
• Mechanical keyboards (1, sticky)
• Artificial sweetener (4 packages)
• Mechanical mice (2)
• Leather case for Palm Pilot (1)
• Battery for a notebook I don't have anymore (1)
• AA batteries (3)
• IDE/PATA cables (2)
• Unrecognizable rubberstamp (1)
• Blockbuster credential (1)

And there was one thing I did not throw away. That's for some other day.

Syndicated 2012-05-17 17:48:00 from Lateral Opinion

Hack English Instead

Lots of noise recently about Jeff Atwood's post about why you should not learn to code. I am here now telling you you should learn to code. But only after you learn a few other things.

You should learn to speak. You should learn to write. You should learn to listen. You should learn to read. You should learn to express yourself.

Richard Feynman once described his problem solving algorithm as follows:

1. Write down the problem
2. Think real hard
3. Write down the solution

Most of us cannot do that because we are not Richard Feynman and thus, sadly, cannot keep all the solution in our head in step 2, so we need to iterate a few times, thinking (not as hard as he could) and writing down a bit of the solution on each loop.

And while we who code are unusually proud of our ability to write down solutions in such a clear and unforgiving way that even a computer can follow them, it's ten, maybe a hundred times more useful to know how to write it down, or say it, in such a way that a human being can understand it.

Explanations fit for computers are bad for humans and viceversa. Humans accept much more compact, ambiguous, and expressive code. You can transfer high level concepts or design to humans much easier than to computers, but algorithms to computers much easier than to humans.

I have a distrust of people who are able to communicate to computers easier than with fellow humans, a suspicion that they simply have a hole in their skillset, which they could easily fix if they saw it as essential.

And it is an essential skill. Programmers not only run on coffee and sugar and sushi and doritos, they run on happiness. They have a finite endowment of happiness and they spend it continuously, like drunken sailors. They perform an activity where jokingly they measure productivity on curses per hour, a lonely endeavour that isolates them (us) from other humans, from family and friends.

If a developer cannot communicate he isolates. When he isolates he can't cooperate, he cannot delegate. He can't give ideas to others, he can't receive them, he can't share.

And since lots of our communication is via email, and chat, and bug reports, and blogs, it's better if he can write. A developer who cannot write is at a serious disadvantage. A developer who cannot write to express an idea cannot explain, he doesn't make his fellows better. He's a knowledge black hole, where information goes to die behind the event horizon of his skull.

So, learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to read and listen. Then learn to code.

Syndicated 2012-05-16 17:23:00 from Lateral Opinion

Nikola Plans

English only!

I have not stopped working on Nikola, my static site generator. Here are the plans:

1. Finish the theme installer (so you can get a theme from the site easily)
2. Implement a theme gallery on the site (same purpose)
3. Fix a couple of bugs
4. Update manual
5. Polish a few theme bits
6. Release version 3.x (new major number because it requires manual migration)

After that, I will push on projects Shoreham (hosted sites) and Smiljan (planet generator) and make them more public. Shoreham will become a real web app for those who don't want to have their own server. For free, hopefully!

Once I have that, I have no further feature ideas, really. So I need more people to start using it, and that means I have to start announcing it more.

So, stay tuned for version 3.x sometime next week.

Post-Nikola, I will do a rst2pdf release, and then will get back to work on a book.

Syndicated 2012-05-15 22:05:00 from Lateral Opinion

One Meter

If I learned one important thing in college (and I like to think I do because otherwise I wasted a lot of time there) that important thing is how to measure things.

You may think that you don't need to go to college to learn that, and you are right, but the interesting bit, if I may sound like a social studies major for a few seconds, is how arbitrary measurements are. They are the one bit where all that "reality is a social construct" insanity is kinda true.

Consider the distance between two places. ¿How far is my house from my mother's?