CHAPTER 9
"Catch 32"
p. 159
a friend of a friend who is in his early 20s . . . does an inspired job: And his name was Jack Greenberg.
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That animate_zombies function as it would appear in a code editor like Mu or VS Code:
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I was long puzzled that the word "argument" should be employed for this purpose: For lovers of the long grass, there's a delightful etymological discussion on StackExchange.
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In British English, where "git" is synonymous with "asshole": Torvalds was well aware of this useage. In the FAQ section of the Linux kernel site, he is quoted as having said "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'Git.'"
until 2018 Linux developers had not a Code of Conduct, but of a Code of Conflict: For a decent account of Torvald's (perhaps former?) attitude to his work, reputation and community, see "Linus Torvalds Defends His Right to Shame Linux Kernel Developers," from ArsTechnnica in 2013. The piece is subheaded "'My culture is cursing: Linux kernel world is a hostile place—by design."
the day was saved by a women's tutorial site called Women 2.0: The tutorial that helped me, "Git 101: Git and GitHub for beginners," was from an excellent 2016 talk by Meghan Nelson, then a software engineer at HubSpot.
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At the end of 2022, site administrators claimed more than eighty million users: This from a February 2020 company blog. Not only is 80m a big number, it is almost double the corresponding figure from just 15 months earlier. The 100m repo milestone was reached in November 2018 according to another official GitHub blog. At that point new repos were being created every 1.6 seconds, three-fifths of them outside the US.
John Conway's thrilling evolution simulator, Game of Life: Wikipedia's "Conway's Game of Life" page is decent on this, but the site itself is immense fun, inviting you to make your own cellular automata. This is what the web was made for.
GitHub remained the rare example of a high-profile American website that almost never got hacked: Which said, on occasion hackers have targeted GitHub pages inconvenient to the Chinese government with denial-of-service attacks. "How Will Microsoft Handle GitHub's Controversial Code?," Wired, 2 June, 2018.
ending—deliriously—with the assembly language source code for the Apollo 11 lunar module: This was posted to GitHub as recently as 2016. Apollo fans may further enjoy the ABC News piece, "Apollo 11's Source Code Has Tons of Easter Eggs, Including an Ignition File Titled 'Burn Baby Burn: There are jokes, Shakespeare quotes and a reference to the Black Power movement."
Even an untrained eye can recognize the caution baked into Burn Baby Burn, the program designed to ignite the lunar lander rocket and shoot Armstrong and Aldrin back into space from the surface of the moon, from the number of Boolean "flags" used to confirm the program's correct running at critical points. To give a sense of what this looks like, here's a portion of the Assembly-like code for Burn Baby Burn:
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Larry Ellison of software giant Oracle is reported to have deemed the open—source movement "un-American": Of course, Ellison's idea of "un-American" must be seen in the context of his hosting of fundraiser for Donald Trump in 2020. See "Trump to visit Palm Springs area next week for fundraising event at Oracle chairman Larry Ellison's estate," Desert Sun, February 13, 2020; or "Larry Ellison is doing an unthinkable thing for a tech titan: Hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump: It's the most significant endorsement that Trump has gotten from a Silicon Valley leader," Vox, February 12, 2020.
Steve Ballmer branded Linus Torvalds's talismanic open-source operating system Linux communist: Fifteen years later, in 2016, Reuters reported him as having softened his position. According to a GitHub blog at the end of 2018, the company's open source VS Code editor by then had taken open source contributions from more developers than any other project, with a whopping 19,000. And it is a terrific editor.
Tim O'Reilly, a thoughtful denizen of the democratic left: For a taste of O'Reilly's political coordinates, there's an interesting interview with Professor David Runciman at Cambridge University, discussing the "WTF economy" (and yes, that does stand for what you think it does).
Eric S. Raymond . . . an activist of the ornery, gun-rightsy, #me-too-bashing libertarian right: Where to start here? An amusing Verge report on a progressive techy political campaign called The Great Slate details one of the organization's most successful fundraising techniques, as follows:
"I've been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years," says security engineer and Great Slate activist Thomas Ptacek. "Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop.' So Ptacek held his followers hostage: pay up, or the ESR quotes would keep coming. It's estimated that Ptacek has driven somewhere around $30,000, just by threatening to post eye-searing screencaps."
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Mrs Perkins' sin-squelching armor: Or "sin-squelching amour armor," as Nicholas dubbed it.
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the prodigious "pair programming" team of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat: See "The Friendship That Made Google Huge: Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company—and the Internet", The New Yorker, December 3, 2018
Page and his fellow doctoral student business partner Sergey Brin were the sons of academics: Useful accounts of Page and Brin's drift into search are to be found in The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway and World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, by Franklin Foer.
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an excoriating report by the US House of Representatives: Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets: Majority Staff Report and Recommendations, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law of the Committee on the Judiciary, published in 2020.
a "dearth of startups, declining job creation, falling demand": The New York Times review of Foroohar's Don't Be Evil notes that:
Big tech lobbyists have helped to bring about an overhaul in the American patent system, which makes patents harder to secure and harder to defend—especially for companies without huge legal and lobbying power. That means that there's less incentive for small tech businesses to innovate and for venture capitalists to invest in them: why bother if a tech giant will immediately muscle in on your idea? The result is a decline in innovation that may prove dangerous to the future of the American economy. That's not to mention the dearth of startups, declining job creation, falling demand' and other consequences of the monopolistic business model.
Even previous free market fundamentalists: See "Once Tech's Favorite Economist, Now a Thorn in its Side," New York Times, May 20, 2021.
even this minimal consolation is disappearing: see Forbes, 1 March, 2021, "This Software Giant Declared War On Amazon. Will Other Open Source Companies Follow?"
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open-source software cast itself like a spell into this gap: The neutral terms "FOSS" and "FLOSS" are sometimes used to cover free and open source software.
Stallman took the "hacker ethic" to heart: For more detail, see Levy, Hackers (p. 437-9).
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"in some ways I feel I ought to be dead": Difficult as Stallman clearly is, it would take a person with the heart of a . . . well, a Stalllman, to withhold empathy from the next few sentences he spoke to Levy in Hackers (p. 472):
"I certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born," he began, before reconsidering. "In terms of effect on the world, it's very good that I've lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn't do it. But I sure wish I hadn't had so much pain."
By his own account, RMS has spent most of his life in pain: Nicholas (as a classically trained musician) likens Richard Stallman to Beethoven, a generous analogy that I like.
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less fanfare than the contemporaneous introduction of small plastic balls into cans of "draught" Guinness: Which, and this is true, won the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement that year (1991.) Internet schminternet. The History of Guinness: Our Story
The Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar: Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (p. p21).
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Linux, like the web itself, looked like a utopian revelation: Programmers loved Linux then and still do now. The first I heard of it was from one of the other dads at my kids' Junior School in Brixton, South London, in 1997 or so. He wore a Lenin beard and round Mao specs and I used to joke that no matter how politically left a position anyone in his orbit took on a given issue, he always managed to find one to the left of it, until, like a schooner sailing off the western edge of a map, it would end up in the East and seem weirdly conservative. I still remember the day he came in raving about this new thing called Linux, which would undermine the corporate overlords at Microsoft and return computing to the masses . . . And of course I didn't quite undestand his excitement at the time. The most enthusiastic early inhabitants of cyberspace and the PC revolution in the UK were the self-styled "Zippies" (meaning "hippies with computers") of the club scene: one of the earliest pieces of writing I did for a national newspaper was about the first public demonstration of the internet at Megatripolis, the weekly trance-techno night at the Heaven nightclub in Charing Cross, where the sixties acid guru Timothy Leary, still banned from entering the UK in person, appeared through the wires from LA. It was a stilted conversation, because getting and maintaining a modem connection had taken so long and been so arduous that nobody had time to consider the content or purpose of the subsequent exchange. Like many people I knew on that scene, I had my PCs custom built by ravers associated with sound systems such as The Black Dog and Spiral Tribe, at a fraction the cost of commercial machines—and with MS-DOS and then Windows (both possibly pirated) preinstalled. We didn't like Apple, because their's was a closed system, with expensive proprietorial software that was hard to modify. Either way, I saw no need for Linux and thought its leftier-than-thou evangelist crazy. How I wish I'd listened: he was trying to tell me something interesting, which might also have alerted me to the wonderland of code. Sigh.
proof that a better world was possible—even inevitable: Wired magazine under founding editor Kevin Kelly was comically bullish in this regard, as witness the strapline from a January 1997 cover story headed "The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980--2020," which elaborated, "We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?" AI and crypto jockeys beware.
the company's present executive vice president of culture and experience: After almost seven years at Stack Overflow, Hanlon moved to a company called Process Street.
the New York office of Jay Hanlon: Like so much else in the city, Gotham tech has been drifting over the East River into Brooklyn but I found Stack Overflow hanging on in Manhattan, working hard to bring techie quirk to one of the world's least quirky generic environments—the 28th floor of a midtown office block. "It gets a little toasty in here," Hanlon grinned as he adjusted a fan by his desk, noting that when the office fittings rulebook was being dispatched in a fit of "disruption" upon the company's arrival, someone wondered why those square-assed analog monkeys of the past had never noticed you could fit more rooms into a space if you made them hexagonal, only to learn that the poor dead saps probably had known, but didn't do it because it turns out to be a terrible, terrible idea. Now we know, too.
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The Yahoo Answers problem: Hanlon gives an amusing example of how easy it is to fall into this trap.
Say someone comes to us and says "I got this problem with my code, what do I do?" Great: we can answer that. And they come back again and say, "Thanks, now should I do this with Python?" We'd be like, "OK, that's a little broad, but I guess for your problem, probably Python." And then they come again and say, "Thanks again, but you know, when I'm coding, my back hurts, so what's a good chair for programming . . . ?" And suddenly you've got a discussion on Herman Miller chairs. And eventually what you get to is "I get sort of hungry when I'm coding, and I've been making pancakes, but I'm not sure they give me enough energy, is there a better recipe for pancakes?" Then 'My cat walked through the pancakes—how do you get syrup out of cat hair?" And pretty soon you're not a programming site anymore.
this does not necessarily make oxytocin moral: like a lot of people, I was enchanted by Paul J. Zak's book The Moral Molecule: The New Science of What Makes Us Good or Evil when it was published in 2013, and still think it's important. The deepening science paints a more complex and nuanced picture of its actions, however. The science writer Ed Yong summed up some of the issues in "The Weak Science Behind the Wrongly Named Moral Molecule: No matter what all the articles, books, and TED talks say, Oxytocin isn't a hug hormone'" as far back as 2015 in The Atlantic.
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withering slapdowns: Asking your first question is terrifying. A part of me would miss this as a rite, in much the way being served by a polite waiter in a Parisian café would be both pleasant and little disappointing. Happily, I've never heard of this happening. Someone has to be responsible for character building across the general population.