Differences between revisions 105 and 106
⇤ ← Revision 105 as of 2025-03-22 09:44:43 →
Size: 50911
Editor: KeithLofstrom
Comment:
← Revision 106 as of 2025-03-22 09:50:56 → ⇥
Size: 50945
Editor: KeithLofstrom
Comment:
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 399: Line 399:
 .''That statement may explain the author's obsession with the flaws of software personalities. Open source software creators are '''visible'''; bricklayers and chefs and farmers and power engineers and countless other essential providers are not. Biting the hand that feeds him all the way up to the elbow, rather than guiding and collaborating with the imperfect people that keep him alive''.  .''That statement may explain the author's obsession with the flaws of software personalities. Open source software creators are '''visible'''; bricklayers and chefs and farmers and power engineers and countless other essential providers are not, and can be MUCH crazier. Author biting the hands that feeds him, all the way up to the elbow, rather than guiding and collaborating with the imperfect people that keep him alive''.

The Devil in the Stack

Andrew Smith . August 2024 . Beaverton Lib. 005.1 SMI

British-born 1961 Andrew Smith website

My first glance at this book was off-putting - I somehow got the idea that the author thought perjoratively about programmers and technologists. The book is actually a journalist making a deep and sincere dive into software, the communities of people who create and maintain it, and how they think about it.

p001 Ch.01 Revenge of the SpaghettiOs

p013 Ch.02 Holy Grail

p021 Ch.03 PyLadies and Code Freaks

p038 Ch.04 Minutely Organized Particulars

p046 Ch.05 The Real Moriarty

.p066 Ch.06 The New Mind Readers

  • p067 Post-Brexit Überschwemmung (flooding, presumably of coders from England to the continent)

  • p068 Anti-immigration riots in Chemnitz 2018

  • p068 2018 Google data breach private data of 500,000 uw34w

  • p070 Dr. Janet Siegmund learning coder brain scans

  • p070 programming education high drop out rate (50% is "astronomical?" Higher for Medicine, Engineering, Architecture, Law, and Accounting)

  • p072 André Brechmann Combinatorial NeuroImaging, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg

  • p073 Java -> Python Norman Peitek

  • p073 artHOTEL Magdeburg

  • p075 axon transmission rate 50% ??
  • p078 computer code comprehension activates brain areas for working memory, problem-solving, and language processing, left hemisphere for most right-handers
    • same areas for natural language and general analytical processing
    • no left hemisphere for mathematical thinking
  • p078 Dijkstra "An exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset for a competent programmer."
  • p079 "...some computer science students are hardly able to talk, to form whole sentences when they come to us/"
  • p079 "... you can't train them. All you can do is find them and let them loose"

  • p080 Scott Portnoff https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3152433

  • p081 "Homework ... was to memorize the assigned program ... to write it out perfectly."
  • p081 "... this is how we acquire language"

  • p082 Gerald Weinberg The psychology of computer programming an approach that works for one person may not work for another

  • p082 Russell A. Poldrack The New Mind Readers Central 616.07548 P7629n 2018

p084 Ch.07 Theories of Memory

p126 Ch.08 Hilarity Ensues

p159 Ch.09 Catch 32

  • p184 Ch.10 A Kind of Gentleness

p213 Ch.11 The Gun on the Mantlepiece

  • p213 Guido van Rossum retires as BDFL age 63, 2019 ??b1956??

  • p222 Shakespeare Insult Kit

  • p226 Ee Durbin Ernest: Pac-Man rule, always leave room for another to join a hallway discussion

  • p226 PyCon t-shirt sheerer than usual, don't burn bra

  • p229 San Quentin The Last Mile

p236 Ch.12 Code Rush

  • p236 "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein

  • p237 Wolf nee. Scott Collins "programming in Python is like coming home to a puppy"

  • p239 Code Rush 2000 documentary

  • p239 book Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle

  • p240 Wolf age 14 fixing computers for local businesses $50/hr

  • p241 notes Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla 1999

  • p242 programmers expected to change jobs every two years

  • p244 https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/ DVD? no nearby libraries

  • p244 Andy Rubin founded Android Inc in 2003

  • p245 Steve Wozniak said 2013 Jobs movie was great but inaccurate,"debate" with director Aaron Sorkin

  • p246 General MagicAndy Hertzfeld title "Software Wizard"

  • p247 HarvardsHoward Gardner multiple intelligences book PSU BF431.G244 1983

  • p248 Hertzfeld: Zuckerberg insincere, not willing to trade profit for better user experience
  • p249 Hertzfeld favorite language Python
  • p250 Guido bio, p251 probably autism spectrum
  • p251 "master slave" language war, traces to electrical engineering 1904, some suggest controller/responder
    • (how about lead and follow for flipflops)

  • p254 Larry Wall

  • p255 TIMTOWTDINDVINBYE Tim Toady Bicarbonate: There Is More Than One Way To Do It But Sometimes Consistency Is Not A Bad Thing Either
  • p255 about American football "any sport requiring so much padding has yet to arrive at an appropriate set of rules"
  • p256 Wall studied music, chemistry, pre-med, joined NASA. evangelical Church of the Nazarene, accepts evolution
  • p257 modernism has simply replaced well-defined old rules with opaque new ones. Modernism is disruptive and inhumane
  • p258 Perl's priority ... individual freedom. Javascript same
  • p259 ramble about Modernism/Postmodernism
  • p260 after Programming Perl book, Perl 6 became an art project

  • p260 Henry Spencer likened Perl to a "Swiss Army chainsaw". Smith's note points to jargon file at catb.org

  • p261 Scuttlebutt decentralized social network

  • p263 Guido "... using computers for social interaction to the extend that we are now? It never occured to me."
  • p263 trio: gift for coding, also connected, empathetic, curious, fully rounded, exude gentleness
  • p264 code savant stereotype ... bad, potentially dangerous coder.

p265 Ch.13 Enter the Frankenalgorithm

p287 Ch.14 Algorave?

p300 Ch.15 A Codemy of Errors

p320 Ch.16 Do Algos Dream of Numeric Sheep?: An AI Suite

.p375 Ch.17 Apologies to Richard Feynman

p392 Ch.18 A Cloud Lifts

  • p393 ... the logic of classical computing ... Here would be a problem on the scale of the climate crisis, with no straightforward solution, the only considered response to which would be terror. Start looking for signs of such a phenomenon aid you'll think you see them everywhere.

  • That statement may explain the author's obsession with the flaws of software personalities. Open source software creators are visible; bricklayers and chefs and farmers and power engineers and countless other essential providers are not, and can be MUCH crazier. Author biting the hands that feeds him, all the way up to the elbow, rather than guiding and collaborating with the imperfect people that keep him alive.

  • p394-5 Coders have taught me better ways to approach difficulty ... This is a powerful feeling, for which I am inexpressively grateful.
    • try expressing more gratitude, and less personality analysis.

  • p395 SuperCollider

  • p395 SC3 SuperCollider Library for Python

  • p396 "psychocode" code that emulates the behavior of a psychopath (except crippled, blind, and often escapable). My pet peeve is code that fails to do what I tell it to do (like modern "push engines" that replaced responsive search ... and will soon be replaced by community/open-source alternatives)
  • p397 "this is a fight we must win" What you mean "we", white man?

  • p397 high salary: <- lack of competition, scarcity

  • p398 parents exhorted to teach their kids code

  • p399 Joe Morgan Slate I'm a Developer. I Won't Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You

  • p401 Alan Kay perspective is worth eighty IQ points

  • p402 Brett Cannon Python/Microsoft: "hire people who are good people"

  • p403 Uber's criminality

  • p403 Isness-D

p405 Ch.19 Strange Loops and Abstractions: The Devil in the Stack

  • p405 Douglas Hofstadter born 1945 Godel Escher Bach pub 1979

  • Young and fearless?
    • Early 30s is young?

    • Fearless? When Douglas was very young, he was very frightened of death. His physicist father reassured him with the likelihood of continued survival in a parallel universe. Later, Douglas learned that parallel universes weren't likely, and went catatonic with fear for a while. (I was told this by a close college friend).

    • Perhaps that brush with "meta-death" convinced him that life is short; if he hoped to create work as brilliant as his Nobel-Prize-winning father, he should start early and work hard at it.
  • p405 strange loops : compact recursive loops Hofstader
  • p406 "Content is inseparable from form" Hofstader

  • p407 John M. Culkin

  • p408 Russian oligarchs Hillsb/Tigard

  • p409 the message of code is abstraction
  • p410 python source to machine code process
  • p411 ordinary investors patsies
  • p412 abstraction is alienation (?)

  • p413 Neil Johnson new science of worst possible outcomes

  • p414 call it machine learning, not AI
  • p414 machine learning should be licensed (by who)
  • p414 racist law enforcement algorithms

  • p414 Facebook/Meta harming teenage girls, Instagram(Meta)

  • p415 Twitter village square

  • p415 Nir Eyal Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products 2014 Bvtn 658.575 EYA

  • p416 As intense as auto/oil industry war on climate change

p421 Select Bibliography

  • Copeland, Jack: Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers. 2006

  • McGilchrist, Ian: The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the Western World. 2021

  • p41

Notes and Sources

DevilStack (last edited 2025-03-22 09:50:56 by KeithLofstrom)