The entries on this page come a variety of sources: my pen-and-paper diary, my old websites, and even Twitter (way back when!).
Today, lost and disconsolate, I discovered a little book called the Tao Te Ching. Two hours later, the book was full of margin notes and I was full of hope. Laozi is a gentle and powerful writer, and in a few dozen pages he has spoken more convincingly than most authors do in a few hundred.
I was in the bookstore earlier and spent a little while people-watching to decompress from all the reading I had been doing. I saw an elderly man—tall, but beginning to bend low—looking this way and that for something. His eyes were full of anxiety, and his motions were nervous, all implying that whatever it was, it was something important. Perhaps he had misplaced his glasses, or somebody had stolen his wallet?
His expression made me so concerned that I was just about to stand up and ask him if I could help, when suddenly relief washed over his expression. He relaxed. He smiled. I followed his gaze and saw a petite old woman, her silver hair swept back into a low ponytail. She walked up to him, and the two embraced and shared a long and passionate kiss—the sort of kiss one might expect from lovers a quarter of their age. Grinning, the two left the store together, hand-in-hand, nearly skipping despite their creaking bones.
It occurred to me that these two had discovered the Fountain of Youth. They had learned to live in the present moment, and were therefore living outside of time itself.
walking home
the moon and I
speak of love
Repentance is often an act born of selfishness, and so I must conclude that it is often an act of sin and that the road to heaven is paved with evil intentions.
Larger societies require larger enemies. If a society defeats all of it’s external enemies, the only enemy large enough for it becomes itself.
I found a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones in the bookstore today. The book, full of spiritual parables, seemed to be my cup of tea, and the shopkeeper had even written a recommendation of it, so I decided to pick it up, move to a quiet corner of the store, and read. Not fifteen minutes later, I went up to the counter and said to him, "I’m finding myself wanting to start writing in the margins, so I suppose that means it’s time for me to buy it."
He smiled and nodded knowingly as he said, "It sounds like there’s a lot of attachment going on."
I didn’t realize until after I had left the store that he was making a Zen joke, and a good one.
Zen is a dog chasing it’s tail, except without the dog.
Modern man is, I think, like a clever horse who ties a carrot to a stick, and so using, leads itself about. So enamored is it with its contraptions that it criticizes those horses that simply walk where they will.
Once, when I was a child, my family went to a church picnic and, while playing in the field, I found a four-leaf clover. Now, we are all taught how lucky a four-leaf clover is, and as a child I truly believed that the find had made me the luckiest child on earth: there was no telling how my fortunes were about to change. I picked the clover and ran back to show my family how lucky I was, but in my excitement, I tripped and dropped the clover, losing it amongst the grass. I was devastated, and was in tears for some time.
After I had finally calmed down, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I went back to look for another clover, but this time, I found a five-leaf clover.
this potato
soon to be eaten
sprouts anyway
every moment
start again
"dirty creature!" she cries,
as the squirrel
washes its face
Speaking with God feels like waking up in the morning: you never know quite when or how you fell asleep, but you’re sure you did.
the only thing
required to move mountains
is patience
dear fly,
swimming in my cognac:
you have good taste
"preserve nature!"
the sign says—
nailed to the trunk of a tree
time waits for nobody
eternity waits for everybody
Rejoice when you lose something, for God is lightening your load.
While most of my wife’s morning glory seedlings followed their usual way and wound themselves around the nearest iron railing, one eccentric little plant instead grew in the opposite direction, creeping along the ground. Thinking it confused, I tried to guide it along the railing; but when I examined the garden the next morning, I found that it had unwound itself and had continued to creep along the same path as before. Now thinking the plant foolish, I again wound it along the iron railing, but more carefully this time. It made no difference: the next morning, the plant was again creeping along the ground. Finally, thinking it extraordinarily stubborn for a plant, I again wound it around the railing, but again with no effect. At this point, I washed my hands of its silliness, and decided to leave the plant to its own devices.
When I checked in on the garden several weeks later, at last I understood: that willful morning glory had somehow wound itself about a park bench some yards away, merrily adorning it with its pink and white blossoms. That park bench was a favorite reading spot of mine, and I spent much of that summer in the company of that morning glory who had patiently taught me that it knew how to take care of itself best.
I’ve lived in, or near, cities my entire life. My wife and I moved to the country recently, and only today did I look up and notice the Milky Way spreading, in all its glory, across the dome of the sky. It is beautiful, and terrifying. I never realized that one could see the wonders of the galaxy with eyes unaided, and I wonder how many human lives pass by without ever seeing the marvels I saw today. Small wonder that people have forsaken heaven: many of us don’t even realize that it is right here, always with us.
One time in church when I was a child, I asked the elder what the purpose of life was. His answer was that the purpose of life was fellowship. Fellowship! That the creator of the universe had created me, an antisocial misanthrope, to spend my time interacting with people! That is to say, that church elder told me that I was created in order to be miserable. Small wonder I ended up so strange!
coquettish moon
teases
from behind the pines
I saw a bird today flying across the street as a car was approaching. Sensing the danger, the bird turned back, thinking it would be safe where it came from; but then it realized it was near the far side of the road, and turned back again that it might get across more quickly. As it turned again, the car hit it and it died. It didn’t matter which choice it made: had the bird simply decided, it would have lived. But in dithering, it died.
My wife walked into the room and saw her mug on the coffee table. At that same instant, our water boiler played a little song to indicate that the hot water was ready. My wife said, "I was just thinking that I wanted some tea."
And yet peopel insist that the Universe is a mechanism. Here it is, displaying compassion for us, but how many would call it mere coincidence!
she puts on her coat and her boots,
takes a swig of strong wine,
and says, "yes, I am going on an expedition"
The funny thing about paper airplanes is that if you fold them too perfectly, they won’t fly. (And why should they? Didn’t old Laozi say that "water which is too pure doesn’t contain any fish?")
"it’s enough when it overflows,"
she says,
spilling the wine
she picks up the bird,
says, "yes, it is dead,"
and places it gingerly in the freezer
Never neglect to see the littleness of great things in yourself, and the greatness of little things in others.
I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why all of the monuments one sees in towns and cities are all dedicated to war. Here is Columbia, with a horn and a sabre, calling men to do battle for her. There is a Union soldier, weary and worn, returning home after too many years. And here, again, is a cannon atop a firing platform, defending its park from—what?
Why is it war that our society reveres? Why not pretty girls playing or lazy summer afternoons?
Approximately a hundred billion humans have ever lived, while seven billion are alive right now. Statistically speaking, then, there’s only a 93% chance you’ll die. ♥
Long ago, when the earth was young and hot, dragons ruled the land and were the greatest enemy of man. They roamed where they would, preying upon mankind, while men could do little but to hide in caves.
Envy is often despised as a vice by the civilized, but it is a virtue for those who struggle to survive: it motivates the weak to become strong. The dragons were cunning, and man envied them, and slowly learned to be cunning, too. Millenia passed, the earth cooled, and one day a Hero was born to man who sprung a trap upon a dragon and slew it. In the following generations, mankind became mighty and proud: they roamed where they would, preying upon dragonkind, while dragons could do little but to hide in caves.
After many years of decline, few dragons remained alive, and those that did flew to the far ends of the earth in order to hide from the scourge of mankind, but in vain: at last, these last, degenerate few were slain by such Heroes as Saint George, Beowulf of the Geats, and Sigurd of the Völsungs. After their deaths, knowledge of dragonkind and man’s war upon it passed first into legend, and finally into myth.
So it was that mankind had grown cunning, but not wise: even after the genocide of their great enemy of old, their envy did not cease. They sought ever more knowledge, and their cunning knew fewer and fewer bounds. After many years and much labor, a new Hero was born to man who, through sorcery, was able to revive and tame the race of dragons, and thereafter mankind kept them as pets. The dragons of old, proud as they were, would have been mad with rage to see their kind brought so low, and the very blood of dragonkind burned with an envy of their own, recalling, however dimly, that their birthright was much greater than the lot they now possessed.
But Fate is not without a sense of justice, and man’s envy proved to be their downfall. Their cunning continued to grow, but not their wisdom, and at last their sorcery had rendered the earth hot again, as in its youth. But while this rendered the land inhospitable to man, dragonkind was well-suited to the ancient conditions in which they were bred, and thrived in this new world tailor-made for them. A few escaped from the shackles which man had placed upon them, and flew to the far ends of the earth to hide from the scourge of mankind, and one day a Hero was born to dragons who slew and ate a man. In the following generations, dragonkind became mighty and proud: they roamed where they would, preying upon mankind, while men could do little but to hide in caves. After many years of decline, the last, degenerate man was slain, and knowledge of mankind and the dragons’ war upon it passed first into legend, and finally into myth.
A. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
B. The animals can hear it.
A. There are no animals around.
B. Of course there are animals in the forest!
There are a number of academic and nonprofit organizations which seek to educate the masses about the dangers of the Singularity, but I don’t understand why they are so concerned about super-intelligent artificial intelligences destroying humanity. Aren’t we happy, after all, when our children surpass us?
If one indoctrinates a child, then that child is denied the ability to have a faith of their own: any "faith" that they show must necessarily be reduced to mere mimicry. In order to teach faith to a child, one must necessarily risk the rejection of their beliefs.
I’m fairly sure that most parents would agree with me on this point in the abstract, but when it comes to their child...
I used to believe that madmen wielding armies were the ultimate source of political power in the world. Not so! The greatest source of political power in the world is apathy. The Roman Empire dissolved not when the barbarians came but when their children could no longer be made to care. The British Empire dissolved not when the money ran out but when their children could no longer be made to care. And so it will be here: the American Empire will dissolve not because of drug lords or terrorists or even political corruption: it will dissolve when the children can no longer be made to care. (Which is something we see happening this very instant.)
There is a hidden spot between two buildings, near the Troy, NY riverfront. Many days, when I walk past there, I see a large flock of pigeons eating from a pile of seed that has been left there. I have always wondered who leaves that seed, and I have wanted to meet them: those who are compassionate to animals are likely to be compassionate to people, too.
The woman at the bookstore was exasperated—today is farmer’s market day, and the store has been very busy. After ringing out a customer, she muttered to herself, "God, I hate people."
Then she looked up, saw that I had overheard her, and with a look of shock on her face, she backpedaled: "Well, I mean, I don’t hate people, I..."
I held up my hand and said to her, "It’s not that we hate people—we just like books more."
She lit up. "That’s it!" She smiled. "Books are so polite!"
The choice is whether to be out of touch with the times or to be out of touch with reality. Since modern society is so out of touch with reality, the two are mutually exclusive.
John Cor is the name of a Tironensian monk who lived at Lindores Abbey, in Fife, Scotland, around the turn of the 16th century. Little is known about him, except that, on 1 June 1495, he was given forty-eight bushels (approximately 740 kg) of malt by the Crown for the production of aqua vitae. (This is, in fact, the earliest known reference to the production of whisky in Scotland, and Lindores is sometimes known as the "birthplace of Scotch whisky.") The Tironesians were highly-regarded horticulturalists, apothecaries, and alchemists, but it is not known whether the sacking of the abbey in 1559 by a Protestant mob was due to their Catholic beliefs or due to their alchemical experimentation (the practice of which was formally outlawed in Scotland a few years later by the Witchcraft Act of 1563).
Archaeological excavation of the abbey’s ruins in the early twentieth century uncovered several crates containing (amongst other things) wax-sealed bottles filled—apparently—with whisky; a few of these were, miraculously, intact. Popular opinion held that the bottles were produced by John Cor himself, though this has never been established with certainty.
Almost as astonishing as the appearance of these bottles was their disappearance. One bottle was kept by the Crown as a national treasure, but was destroyed in the bombing of London during the second world war. Another bottle was kept for research, but was damaged during transport and lost. Two (at least one of which was almost certainly fraudulent) were purchased at auction by private collectors: one of these (frequently appearing on lists of "most expensive bottles of alcohol ever sold") was showcased in a private gallery under poor conditions, eventually causing the bottle to crack and the contents to be lost, while the other was presumably consumed.
However, one bottle is of particular interest: an assistant working on the excavation of Lindores kept an intact bottle of whisky hidden, with the intent of selling it for a fabulous sum. For several years, the bottle’s whereabouts were unknown, before it surfaced in a shipping manifest in 1920, bound for Japan in possession of Masataka Taketsuru, the "father of Japanese whisky." It is presumed to have been used for research purposes, which paid off handsomely: nearly a century later, Taketsuru’s whisky (by then produced by his son, Takeshi) was voted the best in the world. Taketsuru evidently died in 1979, though a rumor persists that his death was faked and that he still lives, evidently quite youthful and active, at a hot-springs resort in northern Japan. While unlikely, if true, he would be the oldest living man in the world.
I think the thing I fear the most about bringing a child into this cursed world is the moment when they’ll inevitably ask, "Are monsters real?" and I’ll have nothing to answer but, "Yes, and they’re called ‘humans.’"
I came across a delightful phrase today: "older than fire." At first blush, it sounds odd: what could be older than that most primeval of elements? But note that fire can only exist in an oxygenated environment, and life itself is what created the oxygen in our atmosphere in the first place. So in that sense, life itself is "older than fire."
If one ever brings up Walden, they invariably get the response that Thoreau was a fraud: how he didn’t buy his land, or grow all of his own food, or live without human company, etc. But this a straw man: thriftiness and asceticism were not the point of his experiment, at all! He was trying to find out what matters in life: what is essential, what is desirable but inessential, and what may be safely discarded. What has that to do with money? What has that to do with living in solitude?
The National Geographic I’m reading reports of a 15-year-old boy in Laos who carries a cell-phone and aspires to being an entrepreneur, but is forced to work in a farm. Here in America, I’m a 29-year-old man who refuses to carry a cell-phone and aspires to being a farmer, but am forced to work as a entrepreneur.
My sagacious wife notes, "Sometimes, I think time ought to be measured in teacups."
We have bred cows from aurochs, and then drove the aurochs extinct in 1627. We have bred dogs from wolves, and then drove the wolves to the brink of extinction. We have bred domestic apples from wild apples, and are driving the wild apples extinct as we speak.
In all these cases, the species derived from the original is less genetically fit, less generalist, less able to weather any storm. On the other hand, they are useful to man, and so we keep them and continue to breed them.
If we start to manipulate our own genes, and drive pureblood humans extinct... will we be susceptible to the same fate? Will we, too, become fragile and brittle and increasingly reliant upon our technology to survive? What happens when we screw it up, or when our well of ingenuity runs dry, as has happened so many times in the past?
It seems that a lot of people in my generation are having a hard time reconciling their ideals with reality. It is popular to believe that the world is good, and beautiful, and right; and yet, since life sucks for so many people, something must be wrong somewhere. And so we blame "human society" (by which we usually mean the government and social structures) since, after all, it’s hard to use the term "society" with a straight face when everyone is at each others’ throats.
But it seems to me that there’s a problem with this reasoning: we are, ourselves, human society. Every single one of us is. It’s easy to blame the government, or multinational corporations, or whoever, but the fact of the matter is that these organizations only have power because individuals give it to them, by paying taxes or buying smartphones or accepting injustice or whatever. If everyone stopped paying taxes, the government would crash within a year. If people stopped buying iPhones, Apple’s vast reserves of cash would only insulate them for a decade. If people stopped looking the other way at institutional racism or sexism, it would vanish within a generation.
Of course there are prisoners’ dilemmas in all of these things for the individual, but the point of it all is, we want to live in a responsible society without taking responsibility ourselves. We just want everyone else to do the work while we reap the benefits. And, obviously, that doesn’t work.
The only responsible course of action is, then, to take responsibility for ourselves, damn the consequences. If you’re worried about global warming, live simply. If you’re worried about the government murdering people overseas, reduce your tax liability. If you’re worried about how women are treated, treat them with dignity and don’t stand idly by when others don’t. There are consequences for all of these things, but if you’re not willing to accept the consequences then you are implicitly supporting the problems. And all of these things hardly make a difference in isolation, but if everyone does them, then suddenly we’re living in the world that we all want to live in. It is the purest form of democracy.
But above all, be equitable. We all want society to be better, but being a jerk doesn’t further this goal. Stand up for what you believe in, but don’t demonize the people who aren’t a part of your platform: if you do, we’ll just be in this societal purgatory for longer.
I’m likely quite unusual in being a computer programmer that doesn’t own a smartphone. There are many reasons for this, but among them is that there are other things I’d rather spend my money on.
Consider this: a shiny new iPhone 7, as of today, costs $649. For that amount of money, you could buy an entire orchard. To wit:
I’m being pretty generous here: that iPhone comes with no frills and no apps, and I splurged on a fancy-pants wheelbarrow (though, trust me, you’ll notice the difference after digging all day). You’ll have to install the orchard yourself, but without a smartphone, you’ll probably have the time to spare anyway.
Consider also that in a few years, when the iPhone would have long been in the grave, you’ll still have the tools (albeit very dirty), and you’ll be getting bushels of fruit every year.
Put that way, would you still want the iPhone? Perhaps you would, and that’s fine; but as for myself, I’ll take the orchard.
My wife is a fount of humble wisdom. She got me a china bowl for my birthday that I really liked, but this morning I accidentally broke it. And so she produced a second one from somewhere or other and said, "And that’s why I got you two!"
I suppose that the problem with evangelicalism is that, instead of being "as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves," they got it the wrong way around.
Let’s have some fun with estimation, shall we?
An apple’s entire genome fits in an apple seed (of course).
An apple has approximately 742.3 million base pairs.
DNA has a Shannon entropy of approximately 1 bit per base pair.
English has a Shannon entropy of approximately 1.3 bits per symbol.
There are approximately 0.5 million symbols in an average English book.
The New York Public Library contains approximately 2.5 million books.
Therefore, the information contained in an apple seed is approximately equivalent to 1,142 books. The information contained in 2,200 seeds is approximately equivalent to an entire major library!
So I got pretty disappointed when I heard on the news that farmers tore up acres and acres of orchards to plant twelve million clones of Cosmic Crisp apples. All together, those twelve million trees represent a mere few shelves of books, when they could represent the contents of all the world’s libraries.
Maybe it’s just because yesterday was Earth Day and I’ve spent the last few days gardening and planting, but with all the time I’ve spent thinking about social media since 2016, a metaphor popped into my head today that I couldn’t shake out.
Tech companies in general, and Facebook in particular, are often described as "disruptors:" they clear the business or social landscape, and take advantage of the now-fertile soil they’ve exposed. In that way, they’re not so dissimilar to pioneering farmers. (And, while it’s necessary for human expansion, many of us latter-day beneficiaries decry the ones who have denuded the landscape of its trees.)
But just as a cleared landscape invites weeds, so too does a cleared social landscape grow new ideas in reaction to the radical change. I think we’re starting to see, more and more, both invasive species and beneficial weeds spread in response to the radical change. And, of course, the farmers are pouring on the Round-up.
This’ll be a hard battle in the short term, but if I were to bet on whether Monsanto or dandelions will outlive the other, I’d take the latter as a sure thing. So that gives me some cause for hope that eventually this’ll shake out okay eventually.
I have a small porch, and there is a beam spanning across it about ten feet up. Spring before last, a pair of mourning doves built a little nest up there. I kept meaning to disrupt it so they’d nest somewhere else, but with a baby you never have enough time and I only ever thought about it when I was too tired to do anything about it and, well, in the end there were a few eggs in the nest and I didn’t have the heart to squash them.
Eventually the chicks hatched, and they all made a big mess of the porch, but it was worth it to watch the chicks fledge. The mama would kick them out of the nest, the chick would fall—splat!—to the floor, and then try to climb back up to the nest. We have a big window next to the porch where we’d watch them from, and the chicks didn’t understand the concept of glass, so they’d think it was a ledge and try to jump onto it—bonk!—and then bounce back to the floor—splat!—and this process would repeat itself, with four little chicks, over and over and over again. Bonk! Splat! Bonk! Splat! Bonk! Splat!
At dawn, I watched our chickens come out to eat their breakfast. A flock of crows fluttered down on to the lawn. The crows and the chickens considered each other for a while, and then went to eat: the chickens, their feed, and the crows, bugs and worms. After a while longer, the crows moved on.
I moved our chicken feeder today, uncovering a vole hole beneath it. The chickens weren’t familiar with voles, and spent the next fifteen minutes torturing the thing to death.
I tend to think pretty poorly of humans for how destructive they are, but...
I periodically get the itch to pick up new hobbies, and a bit over a year ago, I became interested in picking up textile arts. You know: weaving, knitting, that sort of thing. Each kind of art is more or less similar—they all produce fabric—but they each do so in different ways, using different tools. I ended up settling on crochet. Why?
Well, a few days ago, Deepmind released their latest AI-related game project, called Alphastar, to play Starcraft at a superhuman level. Even though I’m a computer programmer, I’m a bit distressed by this. I know it isn’t true in any rational sense, but for me, every time we build a machine to do a task, I feel like a little piece of our humanity and history has been stolen from us. After Deep Blue, Chess lost something. After Chinook, Checkers lost something. After AlphaGo (and doubly so after AlphaGo Zero), Go lost something.
I don’t quite know what it is, exactly, that was lost. It’s not like I can play Checkers or Chess or Go at even a barely competent level. But it’s certainly true that we humans spent thousands of years learning to play Go, and that a few computer nerds with a couple years and a few million dollars of CPU time managed to supersede all of that history and knowledge and culture by literally throwing it all away and starting from scratch. And the new history and knowledge and culture isn’t ours, it’s AlphaGo Zero’s. And, hell, it’s probably all lost anyway because its tons of data and it’ll take too many human lifetimes to pore over those games and understand how Zero developed. We’re merely left with the end result, in all it’s platonic purity.
And it is beautiful, in it’s way. And certainly those who remain playing these games will study the machine and learn from the machine and play better. Maybe some kids will get really excited about the new depths we can fathom, but I expect there will be more kids who simply won’t get into the game, because it’s not our game any more.
Or something. I don’t know. As I said, it’s more of an irrational feeling than anything concrete. But I know I’m discouraged when a machine is better than I’ll ever be at any particular thing I may wish to learn to do. And sure, machines are presently silver bullets at specific problems, but every year goes by and the space of things that still belong to us shrinks a little more.
Anyway, I settled on picking up crochet because, unlike weaving and knitting, nobody’s managed to automate it yet. Whenever I see something with the distinctive texture of crocheted fabric, I can smile to myself, and say "somebody made that with their own hands."
That’s dear to me. And every time a machine takes another thing from us, it’s dearer.
Most of the people I know think that the future is big data, AI, supercomputers, rockets. I think the future is subsistence farming.
There’s a design website called Typeset in the Future that I was interested in reading. But since I live way out in the country, which has been left behind on access to broadband Internet, I couldn’t really read the website—it has too many high resolution images which simply wouldn’t load on my poor connection. It turns out that the author published a book containing the same content, though—I ordered it and read it and enjoyed it! But it occurs to me that it probably was actually faster to order the book and have it shipped to me than it would have been to wait for the site to load.
The book talks a lot about how designers have needed to continually update their notions of what "the future" means, in order to keep their designs fresh and to keep hitting the moving target of "the future" in the face of technological progress. But the book dismisses the newspaper headline "WORLD WIDE COMPUTER LINKUP PLANNED" of Blade Runner’s 2019 Los Angeles as being insufficiently forward-thinking. From where I’m sitting, though, it was too optimistic.
We may reach the point soon (if we have not already) where technological regression begins to make these films seem more optimistic, as time passes, rather than less. At least for substantial parts of the population.
I think I’ve come to two related conclusions:
Our society is so complicated that most people are too stupid to function in it.
I am one of the too-stupid ones.
"Is it wrong to devote yourself to a religion that you made up yourself?"
When Jesus was asked about inheriting eternal life, he answered, "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind." If you are not using these, then you are not worshipping.
But a crucial part of using these, it seems to me, is understanding and working through every facet of faith. Since so much of this cannot be communicated, only discovered, it must necessarily be made one’s own. Put another way, if you only restrict your faith to what others have read and spoken, then you have not understood, you have not used your mind or your soul, eternal life is denied to you.
Thus, if you haven’t made up your own religion, then in a sense you have no religion at all. It must be personal to be real.
she takes two weeks to disrobe
the moon is such a tease
I offhandedly said in work the other day, "Of course Amazon can’t write good code." This struck me as so obvious as to be beneath mention, but the reaction in the room was such that I guess it wasn’t.
So, why can’t Amazon write good code? I think it’s the interplay of a few forces:
Code can reference other code, so code complexity grows superlinearly.
Humans can understand a finite amount of code. (In particular, because of communication overhead, the scale of things that humans can undertsand grows sublinearly.)
Understanding code’s complete complexity is a necessary prerequisite for writing good code.
Therefore, one always eventually hits a scale where the code’s complexity is beyond a human’s (or, indeed, any human’s) ability to comprehend. Beyond that point, good code cannot be written; and the further beyond that point one is, the worse code will tend to be.
Now, a further question reminds: where is that point, and is Amazon beyond it? This I suppose I cannot be completely sure of, though it seems obvious to me that Amazon is at least a couple of orders of magnitude beyond it, and so the exact point doesn’t matter much.
I think this goes beyond software, too: consider the genome of a human being, versus, say, a virus. A human has a lot of duplicate DNA and dead code and so on, while the smallest viruses do not. Why? I think that large organizations necessarily need to build sophisticated systems, and the more sophisticated your systems are, the worse code you can tolerate. But without those systems in place, good code is a competitive advantage. So you have some dividing line where, below it, good code matters; while, above it, good organizational structure matters. I suppose this is the difference between tactics and strategy.
low in the sky
the autumn moon
she blushes
We butchered a number of our extra hens today. I love how my three-year-old daughter thinks so naturally of it: "they turned into meat," she says.
A co-worker got her first tattoo—a dragon—on her side when she was a teenager. When her mother’s friends heard of it, they were dismayed and feared that it would sag and become ugly in time: "But what’ll happen when she grows old?" Her mother had the perfect response handy: "The dragon will grow old, too."
at dusk,
Luna and Venus
conspire in the west:
they glance my way
and giggle
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