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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Darius Bacon's LiveJournal:
- Nonexecutable documentation tends to start out inaccurate and grow worse.
- Conversely, unless tests stay intimate with documentation, they degenerate: "To keep the tests running as the software is changed, the purpose of the test is often lost, and the test is gradually changed into one that always passes."
- Software can support experimental reading. In Emacs you can change tush examples and gauge the effect at the press of a key.
- This extends to interactive or adversarial writing to produce the document in the first place.
| Sunday, February 17th, 2008 | |
| 1:21 pm | Zen agora In the game Zendo, a master makes up an arbitrary, secret rule, and students compete with each other to be the first to guess it. The rule classifies configurations of pyramids into two types. We call a configuration of pyramids a 'koan'. An example rule: a koan 'has Buddha-nature' if it has a red pyramid pointing at a green one. Play starts with the master setting out two example koans, one of each type, labeled accordingly; then the master picks a student to move first. The student builds a new koan. Then, if that student wishes, all students separately and simultaneously guess the koan's type, and the master awards a green stone to each student who was correct. Whether there was a guessing round or not, the master labels the koan with its type. Also, if the student whose move it is has a green stone, they may give it back to the master and guess the rule. A correct guess wins the game. For a wrong guess, the master builds and labels a koan that the guess classifies incorrectly. The student may keep choosing to guess for as long as they have stones. Play passes to the next student on the left. So that's the game; there are a few more details of play and terminology in the official rules, e.g. the type labels are white and black stones, they use Zen terms instead of my boring English, etc. I've never played it -- I was just reading its very interesting design history last night, via Chris Okasaki. This morning I thought of a variant: instead of the master picking an initial student, and instead of play passing to the next student on the left, there's an auction on each move for the right to move. (With real money or play money, whichever. A second-price auction with sealed bids seems the right thing, although you'd want to avoid the auction machinery overwhelming the actual play.) The winner of the auction pays the auction-assigned value to the previous mover, then moves. At the end, the student who guessed the rule gets awarded some money; this money was collected from all the players at the beginning of the round when the master made up the rule. I guess for the very first auction, before there's any mover to pay the auction-value to, the payment should go into the prize pot. (Maybe in subsequent rounds the first payment goes to the winner of the previous round.) The rationale is to reward players for inventing insightful koans whose answer is likely to bring the solution closer. If you think of a 'good experiment', the value of the next move will be higher than you had to pay, and you'll make a profit. Also -- while it's not apparent from my description which deemphasized the "Mondo" and the "Buddha nature" and such -- I think it's hilarious to mix capitalism and Zen. (This was suggested by Eric Baum's reinforcement learning auction ideas. I suppose you could make a game this way out of any competitive machine-learning algorithm.) ETA: This has the obvious defect that the first mover can hold onto ownership for the rest of the game. There needs to be some cost to stop that, something like the ante in poker, I guess. Oops. If per-auction antes went to the master, that'd encourage the master to make overcomplicated rules and counterexamples, so that's not the answer. Hmm. Maybe just bite the bullet and say the house takes a cut? Vegas Zen Agora. But then it needs gambling! Argh! Zendo really does sound elegant, doesn't it? So, another attempt: We play with funny money managed by a neutral banker. At the start of a session each player gets a stash. Each move, the banker collects 'rent' from each player for the privilege of staying on the trading floor. There's an auction for the move; the price is paid to the previous mover. The new mover builds a koan, which the master labels. The mover then may guess the rule, once. A correct guess wins the set prize money, and ends the round. A wrong guess produces a counterexample from the master, and ends the move. This variant eliminates the green guessing stones and the all-students-guess option, since they seem sort of redundant with the auction. We could potentially take out the student-built koans, too, and have them just guess the rule every move, but that may be going too far. |
| Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 | |
| 1:54 am | Endorsement The ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} darius endorsement for U.S. president goes to Barack Obama. As pnh puts it:He’s not an insurgent; he’s the standardbearer for a faction of the country’s political elite. I believe that, on balance, this particular faction happens to comprise many of the the smartest and most conscientious individuals from within that elite. So I’m supporting Obama and his train, people like Samantha Power and Robert Malley and Lawrence Lessig, just as a peasant might cheer for an aristocratic faction made up of reasonably decent individuals against other factions made up of out-and-out thugs. Not because the peasant doesn’t know the game is rigged, or doesn’t have the wit to imagine a better world. But because incremental change matters, and because the right incremental changes can lead, like water flowing downhill, to bigger and more profound ones. (Though I disagree with the reason "because life is short". In genetic algorithms it's important for your fitness function to be reasonably discriminating even in the vast area of the space that's far from optimum. Recent elections brought home to me how much that principle applies to politics.) ETA: Peter Norvig posted another, quite different endorsement worth reading. |
| Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 | |
| 7:15 pm | Beethoven/Tolkien I met Beethoven's piano sonatas and The Lord of the Rings at about the same age, around 10, though they were never especially linked in my mind before. I've always loved the sound of the piano; in second grade after it was first announced that there'd be lessons after school, I skipped back home with the signup form, playing air keyboard. The class was taught by a sprightly old gent named Fekko von Ompteda, and I enjoyed it, unlike school in general: it was just hard enough to be interesting, and there we were making actual music with our hands on heavy hulking mysterious machines -- plus an old Moog once -- and learning bits of mathy theory and an esoteric visual code. I liked the teacher too: he was an immigrant and charmingly eccentric in his own right, though after mumbledy years I've quite forgotten why I thought so. It seems he was "a very gifted and amazingly progressive musician", and, sadly, is no more; I wish I'd come back to Toronto for a visit before he died. Moving to California ended all that. But my parents gave me for Christmas, at some point, a multi-record set of Beethoven played by Ivan Moravec, who as far as I'm concerned defines Beethoven -- see, I imprinted on it. The cycle of piano sonatas is my ultimate comfort music now. This time, as I happened to come back to The Fellowship of the Ring at the same time, I was struck by how much sonata #20 sounds like the Shire. It could be dance music at Bilbo's birthday party. You might plump for the 'Pastoral' sonata instead, but I say no, that one's too Elvish. :) But that wasn't the really striking discovery. I'd like you to play this clip, the theme of the last movement of sonata #4, and read the opening of Chapter 8, Fog on the Barrow-Downs: http://www.accesscom.com/~darius/tmp/fg That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind; a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise. I doubt the young Beethoven could have captured the feeling of the passage this foreshadows at the end of The Return of the King, though; that would be a job for late Beethoven, who, alas, never came back to LotR for inspiration. Sorry for the lousy fade to end the clip; it's the first time I've tried to use a sound editor. I'm afraid I didn't note down who performed this. |
| Monday, January 21st, 2008 | |
| 2:23 pm | Thanks, y'all, for your comments. They were helpful, and now I've gotten in touch with my gut feeling and made up some rationalizations for it. Any snark used in the production of this post was directed solely at the poster. |
| Sunday, January 20th, 2008 | |
| 11:52 pm | Dear lazyweb, I'm a California member of the Decline-To-State Party. I have till Tuesday to change my registration. While voting is one of the least influential things you can do politically, it's sort of bad to just skip it. Should I: 1. Register Democratic and vote for Obama? He seems like the least-bad leading candidate. (Some evidence. The linked post takes this as evidence of effectiveness; I'm more impressed by the choice of what to be effective about.) 2. Register Republican and vote for Ron Paul? There will be a Republican Party for the foreseeable future, that even wins some elections, so its future character matters a lot. Paul, for all his, ah, imperfections, is the only candidate to really repudiate the Bush administration (besides repudiations like it's too liberal or not warlike enough); a good enough showing might make some marginal difference. 3. Register Republican and strategically vote for Romney? I suppose keeping McCain out of the general election, which he might win with the press fluffing him, would make a bigger difference than influencing the Democratic choice. Downside: this is dishonest. |
| Saturday, January 19th, 2008 | |
| 12:05 am | QOTD Quoth papersky on reading a biography of George Eliot: In one section, she states that some well-regarded people think Middlemarch the best novel in the world, ever. I stopped and looked suspiciously at this, turned the idea around a few times, and cautiously considered that in fact perhaps Middlemarch did deserve to be considered in the same company as Lord of the Rings, Cyteen, A Fire Upon the Deep, The Disposessed and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. (That grinding sound you hear? F.R. Leavis turning in his grave?) But you know, not really. Because it's just an awful lot easier if you get the world ready made for you. That's my main objection to people who say mainstream and fanfic can be as good as original SF. People can juggle two balls awfully well, and Middlemarch and Dark Reflections both do that, in their different ways, about as well as it can be done. But that still can't really compare to people who are juggling four. Mostly I just wanted to share this because it made me smile, but it did trigger some thoughts: Seeing A Fire Upon the Deep on this list took me aback a bit because I'd give higher accolades to its prequel, A Deepness in the Sky. But this choice does make better sense here: aDitS is a story of superlatives, and one of these is the blackest irony, that all the brilliance and hopeful plans are lost in the Slow Zone, with no character having the least hint of a clue of this. (Almost.) You need to have read aFutD to get that -- in that sense the book's worldbuilding doesn't stand alone like the books above. This difference of genre has an analog in the programming world with works written for the mainstream ecosystem, fitting into a gigantic tangle of shared assumptions, versus more self-contained systems like Smalltalk... growing their own tangles. Funny how I lean towards the latter in this world, too; I wonder how much the reasons are the same. I've wondered how we might take more advantage of allusion in programming -- in 'literate programming' can't the code itself be more literary? Today's new thought: maybe Vernor Vinge was thinking along the same lines with his 'analogical programming' in True Names. And I really should check out Middlemarch. |
| Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 | |
| 1:44 pm | 2007 books ( The list ) Reverse chronological order; more notable books that weren't rereads are bolded. It turns out my wishlist looks rather weightier than my actual reading habits, fancy that. I think I should be reading less and writing more. I considered starting by writing notes on each book, but that would take effort, and through lazy evaluation you can get the same result for books you're interested in, by forcing the thunk in the comments. The table was generated by an awk script. |
| Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 | |
| 1:12 am | It's often said that the U.S. can't go back to manually-counted paper ballots (like other countries use) because our ballots are so much more complicated. But couldn't we get most of the benefit of manual counting using spot checks? Like this: count with a black-box optical-scan machine at the precinct, as is done too often now, but in each precinct pick a random contest and also count it the old-fashioned way, preferably right then and there. If the discrepancy exceeds a threshold, hand-count everything and investigate what went wrong. Obviously, this guards against large-scale meddling better than local; but then large-scale hacks are the big new threat that these machines introduced. (There are details to flesh out, like the protocol to pick a random contest -- maybe each interested party has their representative roll their own N-sided die simultaneously, and they're all added like times on a clock -- and calculating how to get a low enough probability of undetected hacking to a degree that could change results regionally or nationally, with a safety margin, etc.) I've never volunteered at a polling place -- I'd like to learn whatever the reasons are why this is a dumb idea. Incidentally, it looks like there's some neat research on end-to-end voting verification. What's different about this is we could do it now, in the 2008 election, as far as I can see. Except of course where we're not using paper ballots at all, and have issued an engraved "Hack Me" invitation instead. (I mean technically we could -- legally, who knows. Shouldn't there be a legal argument for recounts a priori, from all the recent studies showing that electronic voting machines should never have been certified? The certification agencies themselves have a lot of explaining to do.) zestyping's Pvote design looks really good. I'm studying it in my spare time. |
| 12:30 am | I live within walking distance of a bunch of Hollywood studios, in Burbank. Sometimes this brings me a bemusing sight, like the giant crab atop an office building, or the barbed-wire camera-festooned hedges of Warner Bros. Ranch. Today, down the street from Legacy Media Tower -- that's what they called it. Legacy Media Tower. -- I was walking by the NBC building and saw the striking writers, who I'd managed to miss up till now. They were trudging around and around like a block-long treadmill, and I wished it were all about waving fists and singing "No Nos Moverán", impractical as that'd be to keep up. |
| Saturday, December 29th, 2007 | |
| 12:46 am | tush: literate testing for shell scripts I've just released tush, a program-testing tool. Yes, the day after I sang the praises of 18th-century gay hobbit porn, this package rejoices in commands like tush-check and tush-bless, but honestly, it's a coincidence. I didn't want 2007 to go by without a single software release outside of work, and this one had the least left to fix. (The documentation is still in need of a wit transplant it's not going to get.)Literate testing mixes executable tests into natural-language documents. The UpDoc page explains why: ( Dull prosaic README ) *wonders if anyone will flag this for adult content* |
| Thursday, December 27th, 2007 | |
| 3:26 am | On First Clicking Into Frodo Hill Much had I travell'd in this realm, Live-Journal, ere coming to its Province, teaselfiction,whose Hobbits practice in its Jurisdiction (the border Sign-Posts warn) the art nocturnal. I deem'd myself secure, for howsoever superb Exemplars of this Art there be, an art of trifling Interest to me (when Halflings hone it) hardly could endeavor to gaol me there. And yet 'tis this Domain, where Comedy, Lore, Sex, and Angst abut, that deep-brow'd Teasel drew forth from her Brain, that hardly can't but grab you by your Gut. (Or other Part.) Dear Teasel, I am slain: tied up upon a Heap of Hobbit-Smut. I hope I'm not too embarrassed by this in the morning. Teasel, you have your revenge for my Vinge rec. :-) N.B. This review was written after but starting on this one offering; I'm sure the others are as artful, but I haven't verified this yet, and eegh, like I have time. I meant to get some work done tonight. It looked like not all of the stories are slash; even if, like me, you're not especially into slash, do go over for the imagination and word-skill and the insight into Middle-Earth. |
| Friday, December 21st, 2007 | |
| 3:19 pm | Nothing special to report, except that I'm posting this with my cute new XO laptop. Wheee! |
| Friday, December 14th, 2007 | |
| 11:52 pm | Bookworm  I think it needs a little bit extra, like a pet cat or a party hat or something. But my stuffed moggie wouldn't fit on the hoard. Do you have any books for dragons? |
| Thursday, November 29th, 2007 | |
| 8:02 pm | administrivia I just noticed that my journal's public posts had become a cesspool of comment spam. I thought this was set to screen anonymous comments and mail me notifications; I'd glance at each note and ignore the spam. This journal is still, supposedly, set that way, so I don't know what's broken, LJ or my understanding of it. I may end up disabling anonymous comments completely. |
| Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 | |
| 3:48 pm | What's up I quit my job at Yahoo last month. It was a privilege to work with such smart and friendly people. Now it's a privilege to get some time on my own -- I'm living in Burbank writing some hobby-hacks -- all part of my grand vision to Change the World of Programming, of course, but the link is pretty tenuous right now.  |
| Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 | |
| 12:53 am | Walking home this evening, remembering pameladean's Sunday-night astronomy post, I kept an eye out for the moon. To my surprise it wasn't just near a couple of bright planets as she'd reported, it was right spang in between them in a straight line. If you've seen Jupiter in a telescope attended by its moons, you know how this looked, only spread out, tilted, over the western horizon: as if our moon had moons. |
| Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 | |
| 12:49 pm | almost forgot Today is my 5-year LJ anniversary. |
| Sunday, January 30th, 2005 | |
| 3:41 am | random() Out walking today, a bike brushed by on the sidewalk, its rider giving me an odd look and asking some question I missed. I shrugged apologetically, though I hadn't thought I'd been blocking the way, and thought no more of it. Later at the library, leafing through The Joy of Music in the stacks, I was accosted by someone wanting to know if I'd accepted Jesus as my savior. It turned out this was the same guy as on the bike, and that I bore a powerful resemblance to Jesus -- not the first time I've been told so, but certainly the oddest. If we hadn't been at the library I'd have liked to preach on computational eschatology just to see what would happen. He went back for some pamphlets that I had to turn down. When my hair was shorter nobody ever said I looked like Iain Banks, hmph. Unrelatedly, I visited a big dotcom this week and they had everyone working in a giant open-plan office without even cubicles. How can anyone code in a place like that? Don't they need to concentrate? Maybe I'm more distractable than most? (For me even a blinking cursor is like a little man jumping up and down yelling "Look! Look!") Anyway they're hiring Erlang hackers -- if anyone's interested I can hook you up. Since I asked for a rant from lunza it's my memetic duty to offer rants now on subjects of your choice. Expect a lecture or an essay or something instead, though, even if rants have higher fitness. |
| Sunday, January 9th, 2005 | |
| 2:28 am | an unusual use for literature For years I've been threatening to build a user-programmable website someday, vaguely like a wiki but for code instead of text. I came up with a piece of the design tonight that I'm afraid might annoy lovers of literature. It takes some explaining: say this website were named foo.org. People come in and make new pages on it; the site assigns each page an ID, random enough to be unguessable, like https://foo.org/1e6cc1499953b4052d7 So we've got something like a phone number, https://foo.org/1e6cc1499953b4052d7 https://foo.org/toxon-basal-Pinal-uphel https://foo.org/screw-herdic-ridgil-Ogl https://foo.org/josser-kazoo-cause-cens https://foo.org/weal-androl-culgee-I https://foo.org/surtax-flot-pussy-epura and what does that remind you of? That's right! Spam. Trying again with a different word supply: https://foo.org/awful-heave-host-lo https://foo.org/deed-body-keels-fold-te https://foo.org/both-speed-nay-blow-awf https://foo.org/dared-tore-spy-twain-sp https://foo.org/robed-weave-thy-third-s Now this manages to not look like spam, I think, but I wonder: if you saw much more like this, could you ever read Beowulf without remembering that damned foo.org website? Because that was my source. I can even imagine this tainting Tolkien. ( more techie notes ) |
| Friday, December 31st, 2004 | |
| 4:16 pm | Friday pieblogging with Neal Stephenson This page from The System of the World almost made me wonder if the same author writes Fafblog. I can't see him doing that, but it's not like he's incapable of the same level of lunacy: "...and so we have made an arrangement with Mr. Party--but not disbursed any money to him, of course--nor do we expect to, until the end of this month," Daniel said. He'd given Isaac an account of the Clubb's late doings, mercilessly abbreviated because of the aroma of the mutton pies, which were waiting on a platter in his lap. The platter was a twenty-pound slab of silver done up in full Barock style and engraved with miles of tangled script: a paean to the sexual powers of Newton's niece. Here she was referred to as Aphrodite, a code that Isaac was not likely to penetrate. Happy new year! |