Diff for "DevilStack"

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.

• https://andrewsmithauthor.com/devil/notes/

• pXI Prologue, 2013 and Bitcoin , pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto

• pXI Adam Back cryptographer, cyberpunk, Hashcash

• pXIII Bitcoin uses C++

• pXIV Bitcoin exegesis: Satoshi not C++ native, learned to code in 1980s, mixed US/British spellings

• pXV Russian(s)? Vladislav Surkov? Putin’s Rasputinreflexive control

• pXVII demimonde derangingfebrile

• pXXVIII TV shows Silicon ValleyMr. RobotRussian Doll 10Xer 5% women 3% black

• pXXVIII Facebook Myanmar genocideIndiaSri Lanka

p001 Ch.01 Revenge of the SpaghettiOs

• p001 1700 to 9000 programming languages

• p002 freeCodeCamp 2014 Quincy Larson

• p002 trio of web languages: HTML CSS JavaScript

• p003 shift-devil: dash that should have been underscore

• p004 fCC freeCodeCamp W3Schools

• p005 Pascal case Camel case

• p005 lorem ipsum

• p007 programming is never easy ... accept that feeling -- of being constantly wrong and not knowing
• p008 ... exposes me as probably no smarter than an economist.

• p0011 Gerald Weinberg The Psychology of Computer Programming

p013 Ch.02 Holy Grail

• p014 Python Software Foundation Guido van Rossum

• p016 Bloomberg essay What is code?

• p018 Nicholas Tollervey Don't let anyone tell you code is not political

• p018 Zen of Python

• p019 There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

  • compare Larry Wall's TIMTOWTDI for Perl

p021 Ch.03 PyLadies and Code Freaks

• p021 Young travelmate Alex, maintains websites using the Django web framework (like MoinMoin, coded in Python)

• p022 Author's new home in Marin, where crimes are harshing a mellow without a license, and gluten smuggling

• p022 ecstatic dance group ... sensei

• Pycon in Cleveland

• p023 Hosho!Zulip! Tivix! Nexmo!

• p025 Naomi Ceder

• p027 Recurse center in Brooklyn, phrase "well actually" banned

• p027 San Quentin The Last Mile

• p028 Eric MatthesPython Crash Course

• p028 Bikeshedding

• p028 bike shedding yak shaving

• p030 PyLadies

• p036 Lynn Root painting charity-auctioned for $16, $32, $64 ... $512 ... $1410 !!

p038 Ch.04 Minutely Organized Particulars

• p038 Edsger Dijkstra Selected Writings on Computing

p046 Ch.05 The Real Moriarty

• p059 George Boole The Laws of Thought

• p059 Great Hunger 1845-1852

  • homeless in the streets while academics and church elders dined luxuriously

.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

• p085 Bletchley Park

  • "Auntie Flo is not so well" message summoned 200 code breakers, 10,000 by war's end, 75% women

• p086 Enigma Turing Bombe

• p087 Lorenz cipher, Tunny, Tunafish, intercepts called "fish"

• p087 Turingery

• p088 Turing machine "universal computing machine"

• p089 John von Neumann

  • OCD, drawers and light switches flips

• p093 "dissembling"?? movie The Imitation Game

• p093 not Turing's, but Max Newman's design, nicknamed Heath Robinson

• p093 Colossus Tommy Flowers 1500? 1800? vacuum tubes

• p094 paper tape input, 5000 characters per second, programmed with a switchboard in front and a plugboard in back

• p095 In 2009 Benjamin Wells hypothesized a cluster of 10 Mk II machines would have been Turing complete

• p095 Confirmed that Hitler expected D-Day landings at Calais rather than Normandy, so Eisenhower launched D-Day the next day. Colossus shortened the war by years and countless lives.

• p096 Oswald Veblen nephew of Thorstein Veblen

• p096 Artillery range table computation on ENIAC at University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering

• p096 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer 17K vacuum tubes, thirty tons, Turing Complete

• p096 Adele Goldstine project administrator

  • p098 exemplar professional and mother, daughter Marina
• p098 Programming took weeks, plugboard cabling and 4000 ten-position switches
• p099 six programmers learned ENIAC using the schematics, and diagnosed troubles to individual vacuum tubes

• p100 John Mauchly, Grace Hopper Kay McNulty

• p100 subroutines. nesting, loops

• p101 Betty (Snyder) Holberton

• p101 ENIAC 1945 December modelling thermonuclear explosion, one month, one million punch cards

• p101 Stan Ulam

• p102 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC

• p104 Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation

• p105 UNIVAC for United States Census Bureau in 1951

• p110 author's 32 GB laptop

• p111 Charles Petzoldwebsite Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software Beaverton 004 PET 2023

• p112 Konrad Zuse

• p113 Jack Ganssle The Embedded Muse

• p113 Robert C. Martin born 1952 2016 The Future of Programming

  • two major hardware transformations since 1950s, no radical advances in software writing technology
  • p153 "What happened? ... first 1970 job 24 programmers 30-40yo half women, 1980 50 programmers 20-30yo, 3 women

• p114 Julian Bigelow Theories of Memory (essay? where?), history of the IAS project

• p115 von Neumann bottleneck, instructions and memory in time series are slower
• p116 von Neumann, we are "creating a monster"

• p117 German Navy Enigma 4th rotor in 1942, Dieppe raid (overseen by Ian Fleming) ... attempt to capture codebook?

• p118 Tony Sale model Colossus at National Museum of Computing

• p119 Polish bomba cryptologic bomb

p126 Ch.08 Hilarity Ensues

• p126 Lecture by Thomas Baldwin about Satre'sBeing and Nothingness

• p127 UK education minister Jo Johnson UK university lectures "highly variable"

• p127 daughter bored by PowerPoint lectures, enjoyed "just spoke" lecture

• p137 Diane Chen DjangoGirls

• p139 Android/Perl meeting unfriendly, Python nice . 1984 women 40% of CS degrees, 2015 5% of CS degrees
• p140 80's 90's men respected woman's ability and experience, in 2013 felt threatened, excluded and failed women

• p140 1969, Grace Hopper was Data Processing Management Association first "Man of the Year"

• p143 Dallis Perry William M. Cannon A vocational interest scale for computer programmers 1966

• coding competence, one striking characteristic:disinterest in people.
• p147 Carnegie Mellon: men loved to hack, women motivated by purpose, involvement collapsed to 5% in 2015

• p148 2017 Google memo from senior engineer James Damore women ...evolved ... inferior at ... programming

• p150 2017 !Github study: women's work accepted less often if gender revealed, more often if it isn't

• p152 Charlton D. McIlwain book Black Software CMill 302.23089 MCILWAIN

• p154 Stanford 17% undergraduates from top 1%, 52% from top 10% (34% from bottom 80%)

  • more interesting: later in life, avg. income of poor student 74th percentile, rich student 79th percentile, showing regression to the mean.

• p155 UC Berkeley 3.8% from top 1%, 38% from top 10% (46% from bottom 80%)

  • later in life, avg income of poor student 70th percentile, rich student 75th percentile, similar regression to the mean
  • book quotes "bottom 60% of students" ... not

• p156 Prof. Sarah Jane Blakemore Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain Bvtn 155.5 BLA

• p157 Racist Soap Dispenser

• p159 "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." Pablo Picasso - - "Oh yeah? Try debugging one.' Me

p159 Ch.09 Catch 32

• p165 "if you can understand the tutorial ..." ??? GitHub isn't a tutorial, it is fragments of projects

• p165 https://you.women2.com/

• p165 Linux Code of Conflict

• p166 "The German government trusts GitHub with the text of its federal laws"

  • No, a hobby project from one member of the Bundestag (Stefan Wehrmeyer) which then got abandoned.

  • here's the ''actual'' repository

• p166 ... almost never got hacked? No ... a "gigantic Asian country" makes unauthorized changes, others revert them

• p166 Apollo 11 LEM assembly language source code

• p167 ESR activist of #MeToo-bashing libertarian right. reddit "libertarian" babble about !MeToo

  • This sentence is ad hominem "slander" (well, ignorant impoliteness). ESR is well known. He also has cerebral palsy (like my sister) and will (rarely) "compensate" with "power talk" (like my sister). ESR is very much worth listening to the other 99.9% of the time. Eric's wife Cathy is a lawyer, and he respects her opinions and feelings. Andrew Smith should read "I Used to Like You Until... : How Binary Thinking Divides Us" by Kat Timpf, and other recent books about seeing others without divisive partisan prejudice. I will suggest the same book to ESR, mostly because Timpf "does Libertarian" with panache.

• p169 British Library Patents

• p169 Airplane hijacking injector 1972

• p169 Sanitary appliance for birds 1956 US, not GB in book

• p175 Richard Stallman free software movement 1983

  • rabbit hole tunnel to Jeffrey Epstein and Marvin Minsky

• p176 Stephen Levy's 2010 Hackers 2010 RMS: "I'm the last survivor of a dead culture and I don't really belong in the world anymore ... and in some ways I feel I ought to be dead."

• p179 Jay Hanlon Stack Overflow

• p179 Facebook wind turbine for psychosis, Stack Overflow channels generosity

• p184 Ch.10 A Kind of Gentleness

• p185 Nicholas H. Tollervey Mu code editor

• p187 sealioning time wasting attacks on projects and coders

• p187 Walrus Operator := Python assignment operator as part of a larger expression ... inside if statement?

• p187 Patricia Torvalds Post-Meritocracy Manifesto

• p190 Hacker Newsmoderator Anna Wiener memoir Beaverton 338.476 WIE

  • author note : The classic Lisp text is Daniel Friedman's "The Little Schemer". MIT Press 1996
• p192 "If these kids are so smart, why are they poor?"

• p193 embarassing Zuckerberg messages They trust me, dumb fucks (in 2005, quoted 2010)

• p193 curiousity ... needs a kind of gentleness

• 194 Julian Dibbell My Tiny Life

• p197 author's neighbor Sagar builds stuff ... stop him and he turns back into a frog.
• p198 as small child, took apart grandmother's vacuum cleaner, put it back together

• p199 Twin Oaks Commune rural central Virginia

• p200 Rajneeshpuram 1981 - 1985 Osho

• p203 Test Driven Development Kent Beck

• p204 SUnit unit testing framework framework Ward C notes

• p205 no functional code written until a true/false test exists

• p205 PyTest unit testing framework

• p205 PyWeek

• p210 death and taxes and doubtful dependencies

• p210 FAANG Stocks Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google

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

• https://andrewsmithauthor.com/devil/notes/notes_13_devil/

• p265 2018 March 18, self-driving Volvo prototype (driver playing with phone) fails to recognize cyclist with shopping bags, Elaine Herzberg 49 yo struck and killed

• p266 2018 October 28, Lion Air Flight 610 737 Max 8stalls and crashes in Java Sea.

• New Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System added to kludge behavior of re-engined aircraft to mimic prior version so certification and pilot retraining could be avoided. Instead, software and pilots failed, killing 181 passengers and 8 crew.

• Boeing "teabagged" the bottom line

• "teabag" refers to a variation of fellatio, what the fuck (obscene phrase matching obscene verb) was author Smith thinking? In a library book sold to public libraries used by children, no less. Ah well, perhaps the kids already "teabag" and I'm behind the times.

• p268 Weapons of Math Destruction 2016 by Cathy O'Neil 1972 https://mathbabe.org WCCLS Tigard, not Beaverton

• p268 Virginia Eubanks Automating Inequality 2018 Cmill/Tigd 362.5 EUBANKS

• p268 Safiya Noble Algorithms of Oppression 2018 Bvtn 025.0425 NOB

  • from notes and sources: A slew of books on algorithmic bias: Add to these Kyle Chayka's estimable Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture (2024). In fact, this topic has continued to be lavishly explored: see also More Than a Glitch by the NYU algorithmic bias researcher Meredith Broussard, from 2023, or an excellent interview with her in MIT Technology Review, March 10, 2023, entitled "Meet the AI expert who says we should stop using AI so much: Meredith Broussard argues that the application of AI to deep-rooted social problems is already producing disastrous results."
• p269 Students . . . marked down for having the temerity not to go to a fee-paying school

  • These students figured out their tests were graded by AI — and the easy way to cheat

  • A-levels and GCSEs: How did the exam algorithm work?

• p269 AI Incident Database

• p269 MIT Technology Review 2021/02/11 Auditors are testing hiring algorithms for bias, but there’s no easy fix

  • Technology Review at Multco

• p271 "AI" means "machine learning, writing their own code to match a model, "autocomplete on steroids"

• p272 humans and animals use transfer learning, analogizing in physical world, machines don't come close.

• p273 2010 Flash Crash

• p273 Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human response time Neil Johnson 2013

• p274 Johnson's Facebook fact-finding experiments - "I've had my accounts blocked four times.

• p275 Emergence of Extreme Subpopulations from Common Information and Likely Enhancement from Future Bonding Algorithms Johnson et. al 2019

• p275 PNAS Stewardship of global collective behavior

• p275 Crazy pricing on Amazon, i.e. luxury yarn for $40,000

• p276 George Dyson multicellular digital algorithms, Ashby's Law, control system as complex as the system itself

run into a fire truck because we forgot to put it into the model.

• p277 2021, Tesla, Uber, Zoox "not in the time frame we anticipate"

• p278 Toby Walsh UNSW "no one knows how to write a piece of code to recognize a stop sign"

• p281 NYT Dec 2020 "Police Drones Are Starting to Think for Themselves"

• p282 Pentagon Project Maven Google employees protested and resigned, management did not renew contract, published a code of ethics. Amazon and Microsoft continued with Maven.

• p282 Lucy Suchman Lancaster University UK

• p283 Lilly Irani at UCSD, info at speed of light, no human oversight. Technical discussions avoid moral responsibility

• p285 Gene Spafford: tech companies should be responsible for product actions, not merely lines of code

• p286 What's the most extreme possible system behavior?

p287 Ch.14 Algorave?

• p288 Code For America Jennifer Pahlka Ted Talk Recoding America

• p288 Obama's deputy chief Technology Officer United States Digital Service

• p289 Open Oakland

• p296 TOPLAP Alex McLean

• p297 James J. McCartney SuperCollider

• p298 TidalCycle Haskell Sonic Pi based on Ruby

• p298 Shelly Knotts

p300 Ch.15 A Codemy of Errors

• p304 Michael PraetoriusCarlo Gesualdo d 1613Tenebrae Responsoria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__ydAZKJgk0

• p305 University of Leicester (not Leicester University) Ryan Kirkbride[ [ https://github.com/Qirky/FoxDot | FoxDot ]]

• p306 Python venv virtual environment , project plus specific python version and environment

• p307 [[ https://www.datacamp.com/blog/python-2-vs-3-everything-you-need-to-know | Python 2 vs Python 3 ]

• p308 PyPIPython Package Index "Cheese Shop"

• p314 Docker WP article free and premium tiers

• p317 SuperColliderQuark for Communicating with FoxDot

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

• p322
• p323
• p324
• p324
• p325
• p325
• p326

• p327
• p327
• p328
• p328
• p329
• p329

• p330
• p331
• p331
• p332
• p332
• p332

• p333
• p333
• p334
• p335
• p335
• p336
• p336

• p336
• p337
• p338
• p338
• p339
• p339
• p340

• p340
• p340
• p341
• p346
• p346
• p347

• p348
• p348
• p349
• p349
• p349

• p350
• p351
• p353
• p354
• p354
• p354
• p356

• p357
• p358
• p358
• p359
• p362
• p363

• p365
• p365
• p366
• p368
• p368
• p369

• p370
• p371
• p373
• p373
• p374

.p375 Ch.17 Apologies to Richard Feynman

• p375
• p377
• p377
• p377
• p378

• p379
• p380
• p381
• p381
• p382

• p385
• p386
• p386
• p387

• p388
• p389

p392 Ch.18 A Cloud Lifts

• p393
• p395
• p395

• p396
• p397
• p398
• p399
• p401

• p402
• p403
• p403
• p404

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

• p405
• p405
• p406
• p407

• p408
• p409
• p410
• p411
• p412

• p413

• p414
• p414
• p414

• p414

• p415
• p415

• p416

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