Just Gotta Love The Great Computer Randomizations

Just Gotta Love The Great Computer Randomizations

Ah, that wonderful feeling: some update blobbed a configuration file somewhere. One that I haven't touched in (scanning file dates) six years now. One that I set a customization flag in by hand the last time it drove me crazy that I couldn't get a gui widget to give me the environment I prefer, damnit, not the as-shipped.

It's really amazing how fast you get out of the habit of looking under the hood when you don't have a daily. I say how fast; 6 years isn't. Well, it used to not be, but that's one of those things you can understand intellectually, not the gut level. Not until you look up and see the dust on the proverbial bookshelf, anyway.

One of this bit twirler's bad habits is to have ingrained a handful of key-bindings into the subconscious long ago. And then have never revisited the muscle memory because it was faster at any given moment to just go with the habits engrained. It's something like having learned scales with a given rhythmic pattern, and then having never gone back and re-learned them with another. I get locked into something that isn't necessarily the best use of keystrokes, but isn't sufficiently troublesome so as to make me take the time to code a different way.

I like to think I should have done something like that for book formatting, for instance. I could and should sit down and write out the various steps, script them, and automate the process, at least so far as the steps to which automation is the better choice. I just haven't. Yet, I'll get to it... eventually. There's always something else though, you see.

And look at me. I did actually want to talk about Machine Learning today. I blame Noah Smith, he put up a Substack post that set out some things I like, and a couple I don't, in relation to where Machine Learning is just at this moment. And then here I am getting caught first of the year arguing with my computer.

Maybe that's it. Maybe the computer's trying to keep me away from discussing the topic. Hmm, I'll have to meditate on that.

If so, I'd like to think that it's my computer telling me that, if I am going to be spending time at the keyboard, wouldn't I rather be fictioning?

Yes, yes I would. We are our bits then, aren't we? inside and outside the brain case. Kind of cool, ain't it? And here we thought we'd all need to directly use our brain stem for signal transport. Understanding really does only come in small chunks.