I'm going to take a stab at some blogging. However this isn't a blog post, this is me throwing a thread up as a way of forcing myself to write a blog post later. That's how this works.

Expected topics: religion, politics, computer programming, tech startups, starcraft 2, and random things I am essentially re-blogging (which sounds better than stealing)

Probably it won't be very personal because that's not really my thing. It may suck, and or be abandoned within a week. Especially if it sucks. YMMV

Who has two thumbs and just broke ALL THE UNIT TESTS

You! What do I win?

Absolutely Nothing.

Is that what happens when you take a boy from Montana and place him in a high-tech job?

Technically speaking I'm not from Montana, but my high tech job is in Montana. This is what happens when you refactor some code while being a moron.

Alt-Z undo it?

if (rule_type) { ... }

fixed it :P

Individualism, The Trinity, and Non-Duality

This could have been a blog entry in the sense that it's kind of an essay I wrote for my own purposes, but it was better suited as an RGT thread since it came about from some RGT posts. But I'm going to cross post it anyway because that was enough writing for one day, and cross posting it seems suitably ego-centric for a personal blog thread :P

The Saga of the 1.5th Job, Part 1

So right after Christmas in 2010 I got a call from an acquaintance out in California who I didn't really know very well at all at the time, but we are friends with his family and he knew I was a computer programmer and that I'd built a website once for his brother. We'll call him Jim, because his actual name is Tim but I'm awfully tetchy about privacy.

So Jim does online marketing related things including managing adwords campaigns, and in the process of working with a particular company, he and the owner of that company -- who we'll call Slim because that rhymes with Jim and Tim -- we're seeing a lot of results that didn't make them very happy with Google. So Jim called me because he had some ideas about investigating what was going on with their campaigns. He wanted to be able to get more information about where clicks were coming from and what users were doing when they got to their site and were they paying for bot traffic and etc etc.

And then after we talked ideas nothing happened for a year. And then he called me again in January 2012 about the same topic. And that's how I started having a second job. At the beginning it was really just proof of concept on a couple of ideas, and I figured I'd work a few extra hours for a month or so, make a few thousand dollars, buy a new guitar, and call it a job well done. I did get the guitar, but I haven't managed either to get rid of my second job or my first, which is why I am going to be spending the next 36 hours mainly working.

First it was proof of concept, then it was "Hey maybe we can just sell IP to Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/???". I didn't think that sounded especially likely but I get paid by the hour and have my little bit of equity so hey why not. That idea fizzled out around the end of last year, and now maybe it is actually going to be a Real Tech Startup. With like customers and stuff. Well we have at least a couple of those. Sort of. And I am slowly remembering how not to suck at web development after doing mostly other stuff for 9 years.

It's all the details that kill. Also I hate CSS, although less than I used to. My codebase needs to be completely rewritten, I need to figure out some better deployment strategy for amazon web services, and I need to figure out a better way of organizing javascript on the client side.

But today I am going to re-do a bunch of marketing-speak on a home page.

Next: To VC or Not To VC. Or How I have been 2 months away from working on a tech startup full time for about a year.

Apparently I deleted the VirtualHost config for the main vhost on this apache server a couple days ago, probably when I was actually just intending to copy it and edit it into a new vhost for something else.

I didn't notice because somehow it was like defaulting to the next non-SSL vhost on the site, which is actually just a test bed for the same domain. So I didn't notice until I was working on the test site and went back to the "live" site to check something and realized I was getting the test version on the main pages.

oO

I get paid for this!

What is one simple fact that your were utterly amazed someone didn't know?

This is entertaining.

I heard about one story where a woman didn't know she urinated out of her vagina. Makes you wonder where she wiped all those years.

BTW:

(why (does (this (scare (you (so (bad?)))))))

I think lisp is pretty neat but for whatever reason I have always had a very difficult time reading it, whereas most other languages I've been exposed to that weren't like brain**** I could at least make sense of immediately. Well, scala has challenged that idea also, but I still blame lisp :P

That said, I haven't put very much time into learning any lisps, and I would like to do so at some point. i've played with clojure a bit and enjoyed it. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized time

you might not be aware, but...

there's actually a bit in that link about this subject, but I took that statement to be vague enough to not quibble with

(I never quibble with vaginas, ask any of the ladies)

The Continuing Adventures of Groucho, Presented Without Context

(12:58:25 PM) Groucho: goddamn youtube fascists deleted my favorite tappercise video

forget about that PUA bull****, this is for my people.

Wat?

those are lisp parentheses. I know, they confuse me too

notsureifserious.gif

I really, REALLY hope daveT knows that women don't urinate out of their damn vaginas.

yeah right, and you don't fart either

sure thing RJ, I wasn't born yesterday

I ate drunken noodles for lunch

I have attained liberation

Yesterday Andrew Sullivan excerpted this TNR piece by Steven Pinker about Science and the Humanities and criticisms of "Scientism". The whole piece is worth reading but I thought the bit Sullivan excerpted was interesting for a tangential reason:

What I found interesting is that these two principles (Intelligibility, Epistemic Humility) have close analogues in religious thinking.

In speaking of intelligibility, Pinker emphasizes the expectation of explaining phenomena. It's the causal structure or "how" of the universe that is intelligible via scientific methodology. Religious traditions also presuppose the intelligibility of reality, whether cosmologically or in terms of a historicity, but the emphasis is on the idea that there is a meaning that can be understood, the answer to why we exist, or what the purpose of existence is. It is attempting to find an ultimate frame of reference from which to understand what it all means.

Which isn't to say that religious people can't be interested in science or in understanding how the universe works, but Pinker is contrasting science with a kind of magical thinking he associates with religion, and I think in so doing he's misconstruing what religious thought is about at its best.

And the second principle, that acquisition of knowledge is difficult, is similar. I'm Christian so I'll use Christian examples, but this idea is fairly universal. In Christian terms, this idea is expressed mostly about knowledge of God, which doesn't just mean knowledge about God as an object, but knowledge that is Divine and comes from the Divine. In Christian terms, we say that the acquisition of this knowledge requires a certain "Purity of Heart", and that otherwise no one can "see" God.

• Acquiring scientific knowledge is hard because we have to train and discipline our minds to overcome our natural cognitive biases
  
• Acquiring spiritual knowledge is hard because we have to train and discipline our personality, ego, and moral intuitions to overcome our natural selfishness.

In both cases a certain kind of detachment is necessary, and a certain humility about our own limitations. So for me I don't see the two principles as being only valid for science or rationalism but they are closely harmonious with religious principles as well, and I think they are quite useful in both domains.