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Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

In a short story called “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges describes the discovery of a strange book. Written in an arcane language, the book seems to be one vol­ume of an encyclopedia of another world, intriguingly unlike the world of everyday reality. The world of the volume rapidly becomes a universal obsession: scholarly journals were de­voted to it, people begin to dress and act in ways suggested by the volume. So compelling are the glimpses of the world revealed by the volume that its reality finally crowds out our own, and the world becomes the world of Tlon.
The volume you are holding in your hands is the volume Borges had in mind.
—Michael Swaine, preface to Dr Dobb's Journal Vol 09

Xanadu Hypertext from the Future

In DDJ Jan 1983, there's an article:

"The Xanadu Hypertext System is a real and currently available product which can manage multiple differing versions of a single document."
Roger Gregory, "XANADU Hypertext from the Future"

Here in the actual future, this may come as some surprise, since Ted Nelson and Roger Gregory were never able to ship a usable version of Xanadu, as noted in the Wired postmortem; there's a viewer on Xanadu.com with no real editor or import/export system.

Computer dreams without substance, without actual working code.

In DDJ Apr 1983, Gregory files a "Mea no culpa" where he throws Chip Morningstar (of Habitat fame; Habitat did ship) under the bus.

This is great, 35-year-old tech industry drama beats current shit any day.

Dr Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia

DDJ, especially the run 1984 to 2000-ish, is how I learned C and assembly, and much of my attitude towards software.

These days I read PragPub ed. by Michael Swaine of DDJ infamy, though it's more architect/software manager-oriented than in-the-trenches bit-eating, but it still has some real working code.

Also, I really miss Jolt Cola, like a detoxing junkie misses a needle.

Python 3.7

  • Python 3.7 released: Standard checklist:
    • Run installer
    • Delete the old 3.6 folder from /Applications
    • Run the certificate command in the new 3.7 folder (the other shits a PATH into my shell profile, don't need it)
    • Run IDLE and verify it's 3.7.0. Happily, no longer have to fight with updating Tcl/Tk.
    • Run "python3" from Terminal and verify it's 3.7.0
    • Run a random Python script to make sure nothing's broken.

Nanosecond-accurate time functions and switching more ASCII/C Locale into UTF-8 are nice improvements, but those are more patching up legacy annoyances than "must have".

I'm mostly interested in dataclasses, which makes it much easier to build little struct-type objects instead of random dicts or lists which have all sorts of problems (no equality, hashing, typo-safety).

I greatly dislike the addition of BDSM typing, but it's mostly optional, EXCEPT you have to use them in dataclasses:

from dataclasses import dataclass
@dataclass
class Point:
    x : float = 0.0
    y : float = 0.0

>>> p = Point()
>>> p
Point(x=0.0, y=0.0)
>>> q = Point(1.1, 2.2)
>>> q
Point(x=1.1, y=2.2)

If I define Point without the type annoytations[my new favorite typo!], only the default constructor works, and it doesn't print the fields as a string.

@dataclass
class Pointless:
    x = 0.0
    y = 0.0

>>> f = Pointless()
>>> f
Pointless()
>>> f.x
0.0
>>> f.y
0.0

Real examples might be a lot more complex than a point, and by then the cost of building a proper class with __init__ and everything yourself isn't such a big deal, so I can see dataclasses mostly being used for very simple struct-like containers.

Cyberpunks or Just Punks?

It's not that I don't like Neuromancer, it might be in my top 10 favorite books (but more towards the bottom of that list), but every time I see it mentioned as the "seminal cyberpunk epic", I roll my eyes, because I know these people have never read another cyberpunk book, there were others before Neuromancer and long after.

So educate yourself, make yourself less eye-rolling to me. Here's a little tiny reading list. When you're done with that, hit the KUOI archive on the right, find my Cyberpunk page, work through that. Or maybe I'll pull it out of archive and update it by then? There's a lot in the last 10-15 years since I touched the page.

First:

Then:

What I'm Watching: Low Winter Sun, Marcella, The Staircase, Goliath

  • Low Winter Sun: Terrible train-wreck ending to an otherwise great show. Was it intentional that the show fuck up and choke to death on its own vomit just like Detroit, or ironic coincidence?

  • Marcella: Season 2! I somehow didn't write about S1: Mentally unstable woman detective comes back to work chasing a serial killer or copycat of her old case. She has another breakdown, commits as many crimes as she solves, and then tries to cover up her shit. That was good, if at times heavy on the melodrama. ★★★½☆
    S2 follows her chasing a child murderer. Unfortunately this is Law & Order: SVU bullshit; reality is that child rape or murder by strangers is incredibly uncommon, so their approach of looking at randoms instead of family, teachers, or priests is unproductive.
    Marcella's also being pretty high and mighty for as shitty a person as she is. In S1 she lasted whole eps before melting down. This is all badly written by idiots, everyone spends half their time screaming incoherently at everyone.
    I bailed on this after S2E1. ☆☆☆☆☆

  • The Staircase: Documentary of Michael Peterson's alleged murder of his wife Kathleen. Between the writer suspect, and some of the very weird lawyers and experts, there's much more interesting speech and events than most of these true crime shows. Still pretty dry but not stupid.

  • Goliath (Amazon Prime): A man blows up on a boat. Two years later, the sister recruits a wannabe strip-mall lawyer who recruits a washed-up drunk lawyer (Billy Bob Thornton!!!) to sue. Slightly overwrought legal drama against the evil supervillain lawyer (William Hurt!), and then the crazy conspiracy levels start ramping up, babykillers keep their lawyers in the dark. Good conspiracy show with scruffy protagonists. They ought to play the Imperial March every time the Evil Lawyer Firm is onscreen. The one down side is Amazon Prime's unspeakably shitty video player, which makes me hate watching any serious show where I may need to rewind. Fuck Amazon. But ★★★★½ for the show.