In Econ, Mr. Bosanko was talking about adults wanting to live high school again because they screwed up the first time. Then, I got it. Go back a couple hours and I was at home (~9:20AM) reading this: it’s long, but definitely worth the time

PC Gamer: About that lecture you gave recently. I wanted to ask you about social games. And I know you don’t like that as a title.

Jonathan Blow: Did I say that in my speech actually?

PC Gamer: Well, you called them evil.

Jonathan Blow: No, I mean the name “social games.”

PC Gamer: I think you said you don’t like it being attributed to some of those games?

Jonathan Blow: Well, they’re not very social. A game like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike or whatever is way more social. Because you actually meet new people in clans or guilds. You go do activities together and help each other out, right?

[With certain social games] it’s about the game exploiting your friends list that you already made, so it’s not really about meeting people. And it’s not really about doing things with them because you’re never playing at the same time. It’s about using your friends as resources to progress in the game, which is the opposite of actual sociality or friendship. Maybe not exactly, but it’s not the same thing, right? They’re really just called social games because they run on social networks but they’re way less [social] – like sitting down and playing a board game with friends at a party is a way more social game. That’s an intensely social experience, right? So, like whatever. I hate that name.

PC Gamer: Do you still think social games are “evil” then?

Jonathan Blow: Yes. Absolutely. There’s no other word for it except evil. Of course you can debate anything, but the general definition of evil in the real world, where there isn’t like the villain in the mountain fortress, is selfishness to the detriment of others or to the detriment of the world. And that’s exactly what [most of these games are].

PC Gamer: Do you blame the player? I mean, is it the player’s fault for getting involved? Even if they don’t realise they’re being harmed?

Jonathan Blow: One of the things that we have to deal with in modern society is this duality. We want people to have personal responsibility, right?

But the thing about these games though is they’re made to look really light and friendly or whatever. So it’s very difficult especially for someone to think about games and how their design affects the world – which is most people in the world, they don’t think about that, right? It’s very difficult for them to see how this could possibly be detrimental in any way. They’re just like, “Oh, I’m clicking on the items, I’m having fun”. You know, whatever.

It’s like I was saying in that talk, I don’t necessarily like to approach it from that question “Is the player having fun or not,” because I’m usually talking to designers at these lectures. I go at it from the designer’s side and I ask “Are you trying to take advantage of your players and exploit them? Or are you trying to give them something?”

Some kinds of games are very clearly made [to give something] – like Dwarf Fortress is definitely trying to give the players something and not exploit players. That’s very obvious to me in the way that it’s made. [Most of these social games are] the opposite of that. It’s trying to take the maximum amount while trying to give the minimum amount. So that’s an ethics of game design question. To me it doesn’t matter if people feel like they’re having fun or feel like they want to play the game, because the designers know what they’re doing.

PC Gamer: Some might say it’s a bit paternalistic to say that people playing don’t really know what’s good for them?

Jonathan Blow: No, because it’s true. If you go up and you say that to somebody, then you’re just kind of being a jerk, right? That you don’t know what’s best for you. I’m not trying to be that strong about it. I’m not trying to say “I know what’s best for players and they shouldn’t play these games”. It’s okay to play social games to an extent. Like it’s probably okay to smoke cigarettes to an extent, but what these designers do – and this is why I always go to it from the design standpoint – they very deliberately design the game to not give the player everything that they want, to string the player along and to invade the player’s free time away from the game.

Designers know what they are doing. They know when they show up in the office – “My goal is to degrade the player’s quality of life”. They probably won’t think about that exact phrase. But [will think], “My goal is to get people to think about my game and to put more money into my game and get other friends to play my game to the exclusion of all other games and all other things that they might do with their free time.” That is the job description of those designers. And that’s evil. It’s not about giving people anything. It’s about taking from people.

Usually, I don’t do the whole link-to-someone-else’s-cool-stuff thing because tumblr and twitter have got that covered. Hey but this is really interesting. Additionally, it’s so true it’s not even funny. When I plan projects, this devious question always comes to mind: how do I keep the visitor coming back? Really, a designer will dig to the bloody disgusting guts of the issue and find a way to evil stuff up. On the other hand, if you’re all into the honorable and righteous crud, nothing you make will be successful. Whooo.. what a scary world.

I’m gonna pledge more of my free time to IRC idling. The other day, I learned about another PL: microwave power levels. Pretty cool.

AP Biology certainly makes a big deal out of ecological preservation and endangered species. What’s the deal? Things die off, and then there’s more to replace them. I read 4 chapters and I still can’t answer the “Why is it important to protect endangered species?” question. But I think I’m finally starting to get it.

Now, understand that I relate a lot of things to programming. It just works for me. Spanish is like a massive programming language. Certain functions only take certain kinds of parameters. You can mash a bunch of words up and sound smart, but the code won’t compile. Learning spanish is like reading an enormous book of documentation: ”The Spanish Programming Lanuage: 2nd edition”. Then it all fits in. Physics is a lot like programming too, but that doesn’t even need to be explained.

But biology. Oh biology. At first I thought it was weird that you could cut and paste pieces of DNA onto different places and even between different organisms and it would still work. Like, what the hell, I can’t just cut and paste a big chunk of WordPress into Boggert and expect it to work. Then I see that DNA is very modularized. If both programs share a standard way of attaching filters or handlers, then of course, oh it all makes sense now! Then what are endangered animals? They’re like giant masses of code that no human has ever analyzed. For all we know, there could be some genius sorting algorithm stored in the genome of some fish that just died out last week. That’s one reason for ecological preservation: loss of great code. Also, some people think that the loss of species to extinction is our fault, and our fault alone. Because humans cut down forests and eat all the fish and pollute stuff, it’s our responsibility to pick up the earth we abuse daily and give it some TLC. Well it’s not like humans go and destroy/pollute code, so this didn’t make sense to me at all. At least not until recently. Wikipedia editors are taking down the articles for some obscure, little-known languages simply because they aren’t “noteworthy”. It’s not nearly as disastrous as losing an entire repository (like that could ever happen). I mean, the source code and documentation are all located elsewhere. But it’s just the first time that information has been so indiscriminately destroyed. Freaking destroying information. How awful.

On the other hand, it’s like keeping your old junk. There’s just too much of it. If it weren’t for preservation efforts, a lot of things would have died out naturally. We’re all hesitant to throw out junk because we get this feeling that it could be useful one day. It’s the same thing with animals or programming languages or real languages, you know the talking kind. There have been extinctions before, and there will be extinctions in the future, whatever we try to do. Maybe we’re thinking about this all wrong. Keynes said ”The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” Our family pictures, our side projects. How long do we keep them before they lose all their value? Or rather, before the cost of keeping them exceeds their potential benefits? (heheh) We stash pictures in the short run because it’s fun to show them to people. That’s benefit. What about animals? There’ll be more animals to analyze in the future, as long as all of them don’t die right?

I’ve got a whole harddrive devoted to backups. The files from all my side-projects aren’t worth an arm and a leg, but they did take a large time commitment. Some time in the future, these projects will pale in comparison to other things that happen. Do they lose their value? Will there be a day when these backups are completely worthless to me? In the past, value was in material items. If you broke a vase that some guy spent his whole afternoon sculpting, he’d be pretty bat-shit pissed at you. But now that data has value.. it’s absolutely mind-boggling.

So along this line of logic, I’m open-sourcing one of my failed projects. There was nothing wrong with the programming parts of it, but this project just never got off the ground. I know that the code will never ever, ever be used for anything by anyone, but if I just left it on my computer, it would get wiped after a few years and the thought of losing data is just so frightening. Besides, it’s a good opportunity to learn to use git. My first open-source commit: On github.

With such a clean desk, I could be really productive and fast. If only I had something to work on besides homework and IA’s and distractions. I just had to clean up my desk after I found out about nerdfort.

What a moving paragraph. I had chills after reading this.

Instead of validation for web pages, how about validation for web browsers? If a browser doesn’t meet standards, everyone should agree to block it from their sites with a message on upgrading browsers. If the W3C said so, it would totally work.

I’ve always found that physical books help me more than PDF’s. Maybe I’m just so used to screwing around in front of the computer screen that it’s impossible to focus with it there.

Hey on a side note, RogerHub validates. But IE still sucks, so the result is insignificant. Seriously, the browser validation thing is great. The closest thing we’ve got is Acid, but someone should step up and protest.

There is already a “Open in new tab” option for links that default to the current tab, but there is no option to “Open in current tab” for links that have the, like what gives? Must be a communist conspiracy.

There are stereotypes. Then there are people who point out these stereotypes, in their cultured/hip unconformity. Then others write history books about beat poets, “writers and artists [who] harshly criticized what they considered the sterility and conformity of American life ... and the emptiness of popular culture.” These arguments are endless. Once in a while, somebody speaks out about unconformity though media: video, blogs. Then people on all tiers of cultivated, pessimistically-cynical sophistication form a dazzling gradient of reactions—first total confusion and indifference, then massive mindfucks and life-changing enlightenment, and finally qualified scoffs—based on their personal standing, or perhaps perceived personal standing. It’s relaxing to know the controversy backwards and forwards before it spreads to your peers, because then, you can go ahead and take your hipster analytical view about it. (It being the responses of your hipster-peers) You will give conceding approval to the creators of media, knowing that they themselves are spreading the knowledge with good intentions while acknowledging the fact that what they produce is in fact, merely media hype. You will give grateful comfort to your peers, perhaps because a new topic of discussion is now open, one in which you yourself already have much insight. Or maybe perhaps the world is now a smudge-bit better educated. You will recall the principle that you concluded upon after so much contemplation: reality must be accepted as it appears to be. Then, all your dissident activist urges will be calmed.

Wow, I really got off topic. About stereotypes: people make jokes about them. About Java stereotypes: programming in Java involves reading 5 books of documentation and actually writing 20 lines of code that uses 35 libraries. Sure it may not be the most efficient or the quickest, but damn! It only took 20 lines of code! Yep, because real programmers will write their own libraries uniquely tailored to the task at hand. This conception is what I intended to disprove, yep that’s the point and I got to it. I’m sure you’ve had those moments where you blank out and realize it’s the 21st century. Wow, look at how smart people are today! I can find the length of this cord with nothing but a weight, a timer, and my smartphone! It must have really sucked for people a long time ago because they weren’t as smart as me. But in reality, all great accomplishments are tiny steps, not big leaps. Man builds upon the work of his brother, and then takes fame and fortune for it. Subsequently, he gathers this hate cult that is simultaneously jealous of his success and indignant of his selfishness, simply because he was at the right place at the right time. Duct-tape programming is great! Build upon stuff that’s outdated and imperfect. (Oh blasphemy!) As long as it works, the world moves on. If our school’s computer network is good for anything, it’s to show that any crap works, albeit very crappily.

Cairo is 90% media hype. Many people openly support the Egyptians, like the hipsters they are. But who knows why they’re protesting? Poor living conditions? Yeah let’s protest against poverty, that’ll work like it worked in 1930 right? How about a corrupt, repressive government? Well this is exactly why there’s so much public hysteria. Because the government shut down the Internet, everybody suddenly soiled their pants, effectively creating the biggest example of the Streisand effect in existence. Since when did the Internet become the world’s stronghold for revolution/democracy? Not just Cairo. There’s the overblown net-neutrality fears, Canada’s troubles, and hey, don’t forget China. It’s absolutely exhilarating how a massive, furious entity of transoceanic cables can incite revolution. What will the chapter on 2001-2010 look like in your kid’s history book? Slowly, everything is beginning to come together.

You know the title attribute that goes on HTML elements? It’s just wonderful. XKCD does it, so I shall too.

These are scans of the post-it note archive of second period biology in K-3.

A stack of post-it’s goes a long way. (See that there? Normally people would use ellipses ”...”, but I didn’t because I’m going to intentionally move away from those. It’s just bland..)

Oh crud, I just noticed I did it again. Damn.

Hey, he could make a a@ronk.ho, if it were a real TLD.

Hah, what a cliché.

All the time wasted drawing in biology could be devoted to more important things, or maybe even homework. Or I could bring a book, but it’d probably be too loud to read on programming.

See what I did there? I intentionally took the assumption that book equals programming manuals, which would be awesome and a critical part of any utopia. Right? Yeah hand me that book. Just sounds awesome.

How many political cartoons don’t draw him like this? I’ll bet some people forget what he looks like.

Oh you know what would be cool? In the future, high school students have a folder-like thing where you open it and it becomes like a book, effectively increasing obesity as well as intelligence.

You know, whenever a story starts with “That one guy who,” it’s usually fake.

Disproving various urban legends and eastern medicine techniques makes a great IA.

“Why are you doing that?” ”I don’t know!” What a bullshit answer. Of course you  know! Rather, there is a more pressing reason not to disclose the reason, usually because of the demands required by the forced imposition of personality on oneself.

Though, if you were big enough, I suppose you could sit on your enemies.

One note is good for organizing ideas without having to waste an entire paper, yet having something tangible that can be attached to other papers.

With two notes, one becomes more-disposable than the other. That one will eventually tempt you into screwing around. Then, the succession continues.

Connecting notes in series, however, increases their usefulness exponentially. Or rather, their counter-productive lure. “What did the Industrial Revolution do to the economy?” ”More productive!” “What did the information revolution and the Internet do to the economy?” ”Less productive!”

Saving time is an odd tendency. It’s great to conserve time finishing a task and allocate the time elsewhere, but if you’re so concerned with keeping those tiny few minutes, it must mean that you are absolutely strapped for time. In other words, you are already using every minute of the day to its fullest possibility. But that’s not right. We spend time eating, showering, in commute, shooting birds in the backyard. That time could supposedly be spent on working, since at one point, you were so low on time that you had to intentionally think to conserve it. But because you still spend time on daily nonsense, you could not actually be wasting time! You might think leisure likewise contributes to overall happiness and therefore is a legitimate ”time expense” equal to homework and project work. But come on, we do some pretty stupid, wasteful things with time. How can an hour of talking on the phone equate with an hour immersed in code? Or what about an hour of role-playing with plastic swords? It’s illogical to regret getting distracted from homework, only to screw around later. Then, it’s wrong to ever accuse somebody of wasting time, aside from the unlikely possibility that they are sincerely dedicated to a lifetime of work. After all, wasted time is time well wasted.

Things wrong with this argument: nonsense is fun, and therefore worthwhile. Also, different segments of time offer varying levels of opportunity, which is what distinguishes anxious boredom from complacent boredom. Now consider this: more often than I’m willing to admit, I’ll start on programming projects that never work. I don’t put it in production, I don’t publish the code. Really, I don’t learn all too much from them either. Then at the end, it just sits around on my computer: intelligently configured magnetic regions that required a ridiculous time commitment. The benefits of such a failure are hard to realize, but if IB has taught anything, it’s how to invent insight where there is none. Let’s see, I can now go “tried that; didn’t work” to many programming ideas people present to me. I get a kick-ass weekend out of the projects, because honestly, programming is exhilarating. It’s like video games. It provides a false measurement of accomplishment, something you will nonetheless defend as an honestly worthwhile activity. You know, if you go and become a social media expert or a SEO expert, you can make a disproportionate amount of money with little to no training. It’s like literature criticism: it takes years for people to realize you’re not misunderstood—you’re just an idiot. But those kinds of lowinputhighoutput jobs just don’t give the same satisfaction as working three months on 11000 line project that later looks pretty underdeveloped and outdated.

”Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight” -Bill

Wordpress has this interesting feature where you can publish posts to your blog by email. Then think: when would you ever use this? I thought maybe if you’re heading to an inevitable death and you want to get out one last message, to friends or family. You pull out your phone and decide email would be fastest way. Oh man, the car’s coming up fast and there’s nowhere to run/hide. (You’re in a tunnel or something.) ”Bye everuo” crap, backspace backspace.. screw it, I’ll just leave it with ”Bye”. You toss the phone aside, safe, where it can deliver your last message with confidence. Okay, perhaps that won’t happen. What if you’re a tech blogger at some big expo and you’re giving up-to-the-minute updates to your eager, drooling audience. But then, you would probably be using Twitter. Hey how about this: I’ll set up a blog for grandma because all she can do is email and YouTube. This way, she can blog without learning anything new. Gee, Wordpress email publishing, thanks! In reality, this feature probably exists because Blogger has it too.

From Spanish homework:

14. Arabic

15. Eastern

16. agricultural

17. conformable [sic]

18. american

19. famous

20. world

21. fierce

Soon, a Eastern Arabic farmer will rise to fame in the American world with his fierce conformability. Wait, that’s not even a word.. Also this:

Pedro Vicario asked to borrow her husband’s shaving implements, and she brought him the brush, the soap, the hanging mirror, and the safety razor with a new blade, but he shaved with his butcher knife. Clotilde Armenia thought that was the height of machismo.

Why are streetlamps yellow? Perhaps it flows with white headlights, green traffic lights and red taillights. Maybe the lamps brighten the alleys to deter crime. Or maybe the most economic bulb available just happens to be naturally yellow. Someone, sometime ago, had to engineer this, and he certainly did it with brilliance because streetlamps are so widespread today. So why did his plan of action—yellow sodium street lights—succeed? It was because his idea worked. It was his engineering genius, diligence, and spot-on prediction of unintended consequences that gave him the power and influence to implement his idea. With the onset of this new age, that isn’t true anymore. Take the story of Mr. Streetlamp one step further: his idea became widespread because people listened. People, both technically educated and not, listened because his ideas made sense. But made sense to whom? Here’s the key point: the entirety of his peers could not imagine any better alternative to his plan. When the entire group agrees, cooperation is at its apex, and all is well. But then advertising was invented: worthless content whose only purpose is to persuade. Advertising appeals not to the logic and rationale of the engineering mind, but to the whimsical spirit of emotion and the vulnerable center of psychology. Today’s products are successful not for their actual worth, but for their marketing. Somewhere in history, someone realized that innovation could be feigned as long as ideas are presented correctly. Modern power and influence lie not with the greatest brain, but with the most persuasive rhetoric. For Dr. Mark to attain success in this era, he must research sociology and language rather than engineering and science. This shift creates an inconsistency: today’s ideas succeed not because they are truly inventive, but because they merely sound good. Mankind is usually self-correcting. Where there is a fault, there are rebels to expose it. And as a result, everything has been fine so far.

If you genuinely hate school, I encourage you to rethink your views. There’s this peculiar, self-perpetuating idea that exists. It’s already so thoroughly analyzed and commonplace that it’s ridiculous, forbidden even, to speak about it. It is this: the entirety of education is great. While guys in other countries have to deal with real problems, we have our easy pretend-problems that surprisingly can be corrected, sitting at a desk. It’s disturbing how easy education is, away from any sort of trouble. Even more disconcerting is the complacency with which this gift is accepted. So much so, that people will complain about it. That is an undesirable extreme. There are few things in reality that search for moderation or some sort of middle-ground. Our culture excessively focuses on the few examples of supposed ”balance” in nature because they are usually so rare: one of two extremes is typically the best choice. However, that is not the case here. To complain about one’s relative difficulty in education may be rude to those who cannot access it at all. But to halt progress and withdraw because of this lack of difficulty is blatantly offensive. The true optimal is to keep quiet and never discuss the issue, a principle that is so often forgotten that it must ironically be periodically rediscovered, and thus violated, for the purpose of its own preservation.

For a while, I wanted to release a chain of jQuery scripts, mostly the ones I made for Boggert and NHSWeb and some other small projects. Then I figured that somebody has probably done it before. Somebody always has. I need a script to fit these images on. Maybe the rediscovered native image resizing that has piqued so much curiosity.

At least I’ve found a new way to fill time. Also, this.

Behold, the awesomest graph you will ever set eyes on. Ready yourself because you may soil your pants. Go ahead, click it and take it all in.

Diaries and journals are troublesome to keep because they require daily effort to maintain them. They’re fun to reread and all, but most people decide it’s not worth the effort. All the problems are solved if you have an automatic journal thing. The computer is a central part of anybody’s life, some more than others. This graph visualizes how long I’ve been on my computer every day for the past year. And frankly, this is the best diary I could ask for.

Event viewer ID 1531, 1532.

”And I have perhaps the world’s most magnificent tower of abstractions, starting with transistors and moving up through circuits, chips, processors, all kinds of hardware I know nothing about, operating systems, and a nice tall stack of increasingly abstract programming languages undergirding the famously friendly ones I use, Python and Ruby.” [source]

I wish more articles were written like this. So concise yet so profound.

”There is no doubt danger in all this abstraction--how easy it is nowadays to use a thing without knowing how it works--but it’s hard to complain when you’re playing in the clouds.”

This is such a tumblr-esque thing to do. There’s a major flaw in the process of sharing things you find interesting. Eventually, it just turns into a list of links that people may or may not go through. It’s very reminiscent of the early web. Maybe design principles alternate sinusoidally between two extremes. In the future, the fad will be recommendation sites where you can be on your smartphone and an endless wall of text is available for you to read. Everything will be “relevant,” of course. Laugh, cry, think. Of course it’s relevant, assuming these emotions are universal. The appeal of Facebook comes from their media design: they show you things that are you relevant to friends, and they show you things that appeal to your three positive emotions. Because everything seems so relevant, each person individually concludes that Facebook holds a permanent position of power because they alone hold the information that is uniquely relevant to you.

When does this stop happening? This I need to know. Haha, irony see yep?

Programming is great in this situation. Read the gZip log, search for instances of “POST /love.php”, and output into MS Excel.

And it’s entirely possible to get 100%. This combination was produced after ~15 second brute forcing random names. It is based completely on cryptography, but if you do enough math, it’s really like magic. (Hint: there is debug info in the AJAX response.)