notice


PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.


SHACKS

I'm thinking of founding a club/association. It will be callled SHACKS.

SHACKS stands for Singapore Hackers' Association for Computing Knowledge: SHACKS.

Now, this SHACKS at the end stands for something else. It stands for Singapore Hackers' Association for Cultural Knowledge: SHACKS.

Now, this SHACKS at the end stands for something else. It stands for Suzumiya Haruhi's Association for Contemporary Kids: SHACKS.

Now, this SHACKS at the end stands for something else. It stands for Singapore Hackers' Association for Computing Knowledge: SHACKS.

Now, SHACKS has goals.

1. To accumulate a library of literary classics, cultural tomes, papers and textbooks. No droll and boring stuff allowed. Computer manuals have a priority.
   
2. To fund laptops for all the members. Members must strictly use Linux, preferably Debian. Excessive use of Windows will not be tolerated. People who evangalize Windows will be banned. Minor usage of Windows for gaming purposes is acceptable, but chronic gamers will be expelled. Homebrew gaming is encouraged. Commercial games are to be hated. Games with interesting and innovative marketing strategies like Guild Wars are an exception.
   
3. To have a community where members discuss and give each other presentations on topics relevant to the contemporary hacker. Namely, Intellectual Property, Self-organization & Self-teaching, Programming, Computer Science, Applicatons of Computer Science, Linguistics, Languages, and the History of Cultures. Once again, presentations about Droll and Boring are banned.
4. To encourage people to stop debating endlessly on the ethics of helping people and Just Fucking Contribute.
5. To have a pyramid model of proselytizers to conquer the world for SHACKS.
   

Perl and Python: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War analogy

• Perl: The Orks. There's More Than One Way To Do Something. Insanely buffed infantry and head-scratching kludged-together technology salvaged from shell-scripting, awk, C and sed. An extremely idiomatic tribe. There're the Sluggas, the Shootas, the Stormboyz, the Tankbustaz and what have you in one swarm of green. And they don't get along well together.
  
• Python: The Imperial Guard. The one obvious way of doing things. Heavy Artillery built on the workhorse Guardsman-Commissar-Grenade Launchers (i.e. tuples, lists).
• I'll write about Lisp once I try it out. I'll probably parallel it to the Eldars

Even in practice. Perl is fine for small projects and scripts, while Python manages to perform for greater projects despite its awfully slow interpretation. (Think Guardsmen in early game.)

The Hacker Crackdown

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm

I was trying out the SDF

[01] WHAT IS SDF? (QUICK SUMMARY)

Welcome to the only all 64bit public access supercomputing center!

The Super Dimension Fortress is a networked community of free software
authors, teachers, students, researchers, hobbyists, enthusiasts and
the blind. It is operated as a federally recognised non-profit 501(c)7
and is supported by its members.

Our mission is to provide remotely accessible computing facilities for
the advancement of public education, cultural enrichment, scientific
research and recreation. Members can interact electronically with each
other regardless of their location using passive or interactive forums.
Further purposes include the recreational exchange of information
concerning the Liberal and Fine Arts.

Members have access to games, email, usenet, chat, bboard, gopherspace,
webspace, programming utilities, archivers, browsers, and more. The SDF
community is made up of caring, highly skilled people who operate behind
the scenes and in the underground to maintain a non-commercial INTERNET.

What can I say? This is super.

This Slashdot Post

This Slashdot post made me swing from pro-designer-children to anti-designer-children

Random vs Heuristic (Score:4, Interesting)

by ObsessiveMathsFreak (773371) Alter Relationship <`obsessivemathsfreak' `at' `eircom.net'> on Wednesday June 17, @12:54AM (#28349483) Homepage Journal

It seems to me possible that if people select their offspring intentionally based on genetic information, then we will tend to have less diversity of outcomes, which will impact evolution,

CORRECTAMUNDO!!!

Evolution is defined as natural selection of random mutations. It's surprising just how many geeks, who should be very familiar with what "random" means, will still advocate the idea of genetic selection and manipulation of offspring. I personally think it's from reading too many sci-fi novels in which "genetic manipulation" results in supermen or the like.

Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes, or we begin manipulating our genetic codes, evolution stops. We won't have moved into another kind of evolution. We won't be make our evolution more efficient. We'll have stopped evolving altogether, at least in the only way we understand the evolution of organism.

In technical terms, we will have moved humanity from a local random search to a heuristics based local search. The difference cannot be emphasized enough. Here we have a local random search for better organisms that has delivered incredible(literally to some) results over millions of years. Yet people are proposing replacing that system with heuristics that have no other qualification other than certain people think they will lead to improvement. Genetic manipulation advocates fail Optimisation 101.

Some will argue that parents have the right to procreate in any way they choose. But as I've advocated before, rights do not scale up. Just because it seems right that one person should be able to do something, you cannot just inductively apply that logic to the entire population. And when you grant a right, that's exactly who you grant it to. Everybody.

I'd liken genetic manipulation to interbreeding. Some people think it should be moral to marry your cousin or even sibling. They can even make a good case for why they should be entitled to do so. But if you scaled that right up to the entire populations, we'd all end up inbred, sickly and probably mentally retarded within a hundred or so years. Genetic selection promises much the same outcome, except genetic homogeneity will occur on a population wide scale.

Inductively scaling procreation rights up can easily lead us to a tall, trim, blue eyed, blond haired, heap of flu-ridden corpses. The very fact that this clinic offered such frivolities as eye and hair colour screening shows that this is exactly what will happen if we replace proven randomness with such vapid heuristics.

--
May the Maths Be with you!

YouTube

Is allowing Copyright holders to remove videos that infringe on their rights. For some videos, the audio can be taken down. noticeably, a number of publishers have chosen to instead show a pop-up that allows users to find a webpage where they can but the actual content; instead of taking down the entire video. (I may be wrong in this, I'm using secondary sources.) I think this is great. The publishers show that they are aware of the futility of sticking to the old business model of the RIAA, suing every goddamn child who downloads their music. Instead, this shows that they recognize the ability of sites like YouTube to advertise their content for no cost. In fact, several reports have noticed increased sales in areas with increased rates of copyright-agnostic actions. (damn, I'd wished I'd saved the links to those reports, but just google it.) Apparently the people who post YouTube videoss are the ones who buy the most music.

Wiki

I'm making a wiki that might come useful for an ARG. Time will tell. Right now it places all my notes in a fantasy universe.