A Voice in the Dark

Stevey has written a very long and in-depth article about working at Google and how the Google software development process works.

Since the current trend is to compare Google and Microsoft, I thought - being a Microsoft contractor - I might take a crack at explaining why Google’s process would not work at Microsoft, but clearly works extremely well at Google.

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Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Philosophy, Programming, Software
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I’m sick of disclaimers.

“Lose 10 pounds in 5 weeks!” says the header of a banner ad I’m seeing right this second on another blog.

“Results not typical.” says the disclaimer.

Doesn’t that actually mean “you probably won’t really lose ten pounds in five weeks”?

The rest of the disclaimer is even more retarded: “Program requires diet and exercise.”

Which means that at some point, the legal department decided it was LIKELY someone would say “What? You mean I can’t just pay my money and watch the pounds melt away?! What a ripoff!”

God, Americans are stupid. We suck.

Filed under: Media
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I’m not really a programmer anymore. It’s not that I can’t program, or that I don’t like to program, or even just that I’d prefer to do something else. It’s that I’m simply not the best person for the job anymore.

Working here at Microsoft, I get to see a lot of very smart and very young people write code. I compare that to how I write code, and there are very distinct differences. When I’m told “copy a file to a device over a USB connection”, I immediately think “well, first I need to establish control over the physical USB port and negotiate a protocol the device understands”.

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Filed under: Business, Notices, Programming, Software
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I came across this sentence in a paper examining why men and women choose to date the people they do. By “decile”, the authors refer to the canonical ten-point scale on which the late great Shel Silverstein famously said “There Ain’t No Tens”, and what they’re interested in is how a one can turn into a ten. For men, it boils down to money:

A man in the bottom decile, for example, needs an additional income of $186,000 (a total annual income of $248,500) to compensate for his poor looks. The table also shows that women cannot make up for their looks at all.

When I related this to my wife, she said:

Men are pigs! Women at least give a man credit for being a good provider. Women don’t get any credit for anything but looks!

My interpretation is more along the lines of “women are whores”, but there’s a deeper question here. Apparently, you simply can’t pay a man enough to get him to accept a one as readily as he would a ten. But how does that compare to someone who is willing to accept a less-ideal mate in exchange for financial gain? Does that make the man more principled than the woman, or does it make the woman more practical than the man? Which choice is preferable? Why don’t both genders make that choice?

Filed under: Philosophy
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A question from another blog:

What actions could the President take that would be criminal?

Contextually, this is a theoretical question; assuming the actions taken by Bush in the GWoT are not criminal, what exactly would be criminal? Is it possible for the President to commit a crime at all?

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Filed under: Philosophy, Politics
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Bryan Caplan has written an excellent paper about mental illness and economics. This 45-page examination of why mental illness might not really be illness contains an interesting point. Economist Donald McCloskey wanted to be a woman, was treated as mentally ill, and presented the following opinion in 1999:

These days most people will grant you an exception from the why question if you are gay… I want the courtesy and the safety of a whyless treatment extended to gender crossings.

This fascinated me. Forget transgender questions and explanations of why being gay is different from being transgendered, there’s a different question here that is far more interesting.

McCloskey said he wanted people to let him do as he wished without asking him why.

This is not what he really wanted.

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Filed under: Gay Rights, Philosophy
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This is the nutshell version of why I believe in God, since some people care.

The first thing you have to do is throw out everything you think about God, and accept a very simple stripped-down definition of what the word God means here:

God is a supernatural force or collection of forces without which the universe could not exist.

The important word there is “supernatural”. By supernatural, I mean something outside of the laws of physics - not just some technicality they cannot explain, but something which the laws of physics actually say is impossible.

Now, assume that there is no God, and that the established laws of physics are the only thing that govern our universe.

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Filed under: Philosophy, Religion
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A tale that I thought was worth spreading a little, excerpted from a post at Cross-Currents: 

An elderly Jew, well into his eighties, applied for a passport. He came accompanied by two people who knew him well, and could identify him. The clerk turned down his application, demanding a birth certificate. Now, such certificates had only been introduced in that country many decades after the birth of the aged applicant, a fact that he immediately pointed out. The clerk responded contemptuously, “Well then. Just go back to your town and bring two witnesses who were around when you were born.” [...] He didn’t simply dismiss the Jew, or express his intense hatred for him, but announced that logic was not a commodity that one wished to squander on sub-human Jews.

If you strip out the specifics about Jews, you find something I see very often - people who apparently do not consider it worth the time and effort to state a rational disagreement with your argument.

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Filed under: Global Warming, Politics
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There seems to be a fundamental stupidity among young people when looking for mates.

The chance of finding your mate AT ALL is mathematically limited to the percentage of potential mates you want, multiplied by the percentage of potential mates who want you, multiplied by the number of potential mates you consider.

Most people, in my experience, have one-out-of-ten standards. So on the average, they’re looking for one out of a hundred people (0.1 * 0.1 = 0.01). Since the average person has seven serious partners in a lifetime, the chance of finding your mate is roughly 7% - or a little less than one in fourteen.

Since there are three variables in this equation, you can obviously do three things to improve your chances.

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Filed under: Philosophy
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I’m not some huge prophecies-of-Nostradamus freak, but the man once said:

Out of the country of Greater Arabia 
Shall be born a strong master of Mohammed… 
He will enter Europe wearing a blue turban. 
He will be the terror of mankind. 

That sounds like someone we might recognise.

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Filed under: Philosophy, Politics, Religion
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