The Packbats' Weblog

A couple weeks ago, in a fit of frustration about not understanding object-oriented programming, we read several articles from the August 1981 issue of Byte Magazine explaining Smalltalk. One of those, "Is the Smalltalk-80 System for Children?" by Adele Goldberg and Joan Ross, contained this passage:

Contrary to the idea that a computer is exciting because the programmer can create something from seemingly nothing, our users were shown that a computer is exciting because it can be a vast storehouse of already existing ideas (models) that can be retrieved and modified for the user's personal needs. Programming could be viewed and enjoyed as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary act. The frustration of long hours of writing linear streams of code and then hoping to see some aspect of that code execute was replaced by incremental development. Emphasis was placed on learning how to make effective use of existing system components (objects in the Smalltalk sense). Much of the teaching we did was to show users how to search for and read the descriptions of the many useful components we and others (and even new users) continued to add to the system.

Using resources within an already-powerful system is a highly effective and rewarding form of programming, and understanding that it is programming allows users to program more effectively within these systems.

We bring this up because, when you create a formatted document using a modern word processor, this is what you are doing: you are simultaneously creating data and creating instructions for how that data should be processed. (That's why it's called a word processor: it is doing work to convert the words into a format where they can be comfortably accessed.) When the Accessibility Awareness disabled.social account talks about using paragraph styles, it is because you, by using these library functions, allow other document interpreters – like screen readers and keyboard shortcut tools – to execute their own versions of these library functions and therefore process the data more usefully.

Obviously, word processing programming languages are special-purpose, like the bespoke forks of Lua implemented in fantasy consoles and game engines, or the Personal Home Page tool that some folks use for managing websites. It is a vast storehouse of already-existing components, designed to support its specific purpose.

…and we are dwelling on this thought today because we know many users of word-processing tools who do not avail themselves of these existing functions. And because we think this is, in part, because using these functions comfortably requires a degree of philosophical understanding of computers – an ability to learn a computer's language and translate your intentions into it.

As sighted writers, we are well familiar with the idea of marking off sections by having some big text at the top … but the idea that you can directly communicate, below the level of visibility, that a specific block of text is a section heading? And that the bigness of the text should happen not because you chose it, but because you chose to invisibly designate a line of text as heading?

That's a programming mindset.

And you have to learn that.

(original thread.)

Simplicio: Computers are magic.

Sagredo: There's nothing magical about it; computers are simply sophisticated mathematical machines. Magic, by contrast, is supernatural - an independent force with its own logic that acts upon the world, and is merely channeled or controlled by those with magical power.

Simplicio: So, in your opinion, computers are not magic because they are not supernatural, not independent, not logical, and don't act upon the world. Shall we take these in reverse order?

Sagredo: Gladly. And yes, of course computers act on the world, and do so through logical calculation - that is the entire reason we created them. But they are not independent of it, they are part of it.

Simplicio: The logic of a computer is hardly the logic of a landslide or river or growing tree, however. All of these are straightforward and natural, whereas computers are constantly seized with their own caprices. You have a telephone, so surely you have seen it decide your text means something entirely different than your intentions.

Sagredo: You underestimate the sophistication of trees, but you are again merely describing the difference between nature and artifice. My telephone and your grandfather clock are alike unnatural, in your sense, and the errors of autocorrection in the one are much the same as the slipping minutes of the other: reflections of our limitations.

Simplicio: Do not try to distract me with the miracle of clockwork timekeeping - I can argue for the magic in that another day; your telephone is a much clearer example. Its errors of autocorrection happen within it, from its own memories and caprice, independent - independent! - of temperature or setting.

Sagredo: Only as independent as a book that remembers what is written on its pages. It acts because it was programmed to, because it stored this data and processed it in the way it was designed.

Simplicio: It acts because it was commanded to, by one with the power to channel its force in a direction - but even then, the magician wanted it to guess infallibly, did they not? Certainly an autocorrect without error would be quite a selling-point.

Sagredo: They did - but such a thing is impossible.

Simplicio: The computer acts on its own internal logic, independent of what its controller demands.

Sagredo: Independent of their intentions, but not their work - its actions spring from what it is told to do, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me what you had to say about DNS? I remember you spoke at some length the other day.

Sagredo: When many voices are speaking, the results can become confused, but it is still the result of how it was made and shaped, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me of what you had to say about free will?

Sagredo: I can - I said that we are also machines, defined by our history and origins, our nurture and nature, but able to shape ourselves, changing even our goals and desires. Are you about to claim that my telephone's autocorrection is as independent? Perhaps it should be granted citizenship.

Simplicio: As, no ... but independent, yes.

Sagredo: It is not supernatural.

Simplicio: Sagredo, you are a cunning arithmetician, but let me ask you: why should I care? We are surrounded by forces that we do not understand, that listen to sounds we can hear and sounds we cannot, that remember what they encounter, and that respond according to arcane and unpredicable intentions. They imbue us with tremendous power, if we can control them, but are terribly dangerous if we cannot. Lives are saved and lost because of what flows through these channels. You yourself wield this power, turning it to answer your astronomical queries and mine, to prove and to refute our theories. Do you not see what it does?

Sagredo: Your contention is that I am a wizard, unwitting.

Simplicio: It is.

Sagredo: I don't know how I can accept that.

Simplicio: Heavens help me. Sagredo, you know that you are capable, no matter how much you insist on downplaying it.

There are few tools as good as photography at documenting what is there. The camera almost inevitably captures an enormous wealth of detail in that span of time when it admits light into its lens - photography can record the visual element of history with incredible speed, accuracy, and fidelity. This is something to be celebrated.

...but the capturing of images with a camera does not cease to be photography when it is used to other ends.

( 550 words, including mention of food )

- 🐲

(Original post, 2016-04-19)

( Discussion of queerphobia and what-does-queer-even-mean )

"No" is the short answer. I don't believe that there is such a thing as fate or destiny - the world is far more chaotic than that.

Greta Christina recently posted something rather brilliant about atheism and self-definition that ... well, it inspires me to define my atheism, just so people know where I'm coming from.

I'd love to see people's reactions to this, by the way. I might be too busy to react properly, but I'll try to answer questions, comments, complains, and arguments, whatever reaction you have to what I say.

*clears throat*

I'm an atheist. What that means is that I don't believe that anything like a god is real. I'm not totally certain - I don't think any atheist is totally certain, however hyperbolic their rhetoric might become in the heat of debate - but I've thought about this quite a lot for quite a while, I've read a lot of arguments, and all told I simply don't believe it. I'm pretty sure that the people who do believe there are any gods, be it one, a few, or many, are simply mistaken.

I'm an atheist. I'm a strong atheist - I believe that no such thing as a god is real. Now, this distinction commonly causes semantic confusion: "I don't believe gods are real" doesn't mean "I believe gods are imaginary", never mind that I could state both truthfully; it's perfectly common for atheists to not believe that gods exist, while simultaneously not believing that gods don't exist. Such persons don't believe they have the evidence to commit either way on the question. I do.

I'm an atheist. I'm a metaphysical naturalist - I think the universe operates according to fundamentally non-mental principles. Richard Carrier defined supernaturalism well in an essay a couple years ago: supernatural things cannot be broken down into non-mental pieces. That makes no sense to me. Everything I have ever learned - my education in philosophy, in physics, in psychology, in mathematics, in computer science, in literature - has given me a strong instinct that somewhere at the base of it all are simple mathematical laws. I draw the comparison to Conway's Game of Life: the rules are basic and unbreakable, but through their implications on higher and higher levels of complexity in the world shaped as it is we find everything with which we are familiar.

I'm an atheist. I don't believe there's any overlord of the universe to dictate moral laws for us, nor any afterlife wherein our acts can be judged. Our morals are our own - earned in the struggles and victories of our ancestral species, forged on the anvil of a world which does not tell us what we should do, but merely referees. Our senses of beauty, of honor, of justice, of fairness, of charity, of love, of pride, of disgust ... every subjective experience we have is ours, proven on the steppes from which we came and coming together to create that which is us. To declare that this makes goodness into something meaningless is, if you'll forgive the rhyme, senseless - we're not stupid, and if we value goodness, that is meaning enough.

I'm an atheist. I am an atheist because I have the freedom to be thus - the freedom to learn, to decide, and to proclaim. I would not live where I was required to be thus by ignorance, deception, or coercion: to be an atheist freely is to be aware of the need for freedom. As Alfred Tarski is quoted to have said, "The sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" - and to be forced to believe that snow is white is to be coerced to believe, be that belief true or false. The only way to be free to believe truth is to be free to believe what one must on the strength of one's own judgement.

I'm an atheist. I care about being an atheist - I care about what I believe, and about being true to what I believe. I want to be treated decently and with respect. I want the people who disagree with me to listen to me - to trust my sincerity and my rationality - and when they argue with me, I want them to be sincere and rational in doing so. I want the arguments against me to stem from a fair and charitable reading of my sometimes-clumsy explanations - you can fight me, but fight the true implications of my world-view with the true implications of yours.

...in the form in which they are then in effect."

The above sentence is extracted from the first rule of Peter Suber's game of self-amendment, "Nomic". As some of you know, I am a fan of this game, to the point where I and a Livejournal friend of mine decided to set one up on Livejournal.¹

The reason why Rule 101 was placed in the ruleset is explained simply enough by the author:

Nomic even makes some rules explicit in order to make them amendable, when in most games they are implicit —rules to obey the rules, rules that players each start with zero points, and so on. No tacit understanding that one brings to most games simply qua games, let alone any explicit rule, is beyond the amendment power of Nomic. After Nomic was first published in Scientific American,² a German philosopher wrote to me insisting that Rule 101 (that players should obey the rules) should be omitted from the Initial Set and made part of a truly immutable shell. He missed an essential point of the game. Rule 101 is included precisely so that it can be amended; if players amend or repeal it, they deserve what they get.

This is, naturally, well and befitting Dr. Suber's purposes in analysing paradoxes of law. However, after playing the game, a second effect of this rule has occurred to me.

It makes it obvious that people can break the rules.

Thanks to bradhicks, I sit here knowing two more horrific tales of modern atrocities than I did when I awoke this morning. And no, that's not sarcasm - I am truly thankful to have heard these stories. One of them is the most eloquent condemnation of the U.S. health care system I have ever seen, but irrelevant to this post. The other regards a heartwarming tale of a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agent enjoying the perks of his position. And yes, that is sarcasm - I am truly appalled by what this man did. It's ugly. Terrifically ugly.

And illegal. But people can break the rules.

Let me reiterate. People break rules. And unless those rules are structured and enforced in such a way that people can't or won't do wrong - unless the systems are in place that will make it possible (nay, likely!) that abuses and the like will be caught and their perpetrators punished (and punished severely enough to be a deterrent) - and furthermore, unless the social structures are in place to remove the desire to commit the crime - the fact that such-and-such is illegal isn't worth a bum nickel.

1. The friend is active_apathy, the game is nomicide. It's not the first, but it's the longest-lived so far. Slash advertisment. ^
2. Editor's note: the <em> tag that appears to have been erroneously applied to the magazine title has been appropriately replaced with an <i> tag. ^