Three random thoughts

[pozorvlak]

• Have you read Neal Stephenson's wonderful In the Beginning was the Command Line? You really should, it's one of his best pieces of writing. It's about operating systems, but in the loosest possible way: it's a rich complex of interlocking metaphors, which first explain operating systems and how they came to be as they are (by way of Morlocks, drills, cars, tanks, the Gilgamesh epic and Disneyworld), and then uses the operating systems themselves to draw lessons about humanity, society, the creative process, and ultimately the nature of the Universe. If you've ever wondered what that Linux thing is, and why hackers get so excited about it (or even if you haven't), this is the place to learn.
  
  I'd like to quote the bit about drills here:

  The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe.
  
  During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder.
  
  I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my
  homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, eachsurrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.
  
  But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.
  
  A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master's instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.
  
  Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware stores with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller low-end models and hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford one of them babies. Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic casings, carefully designed and focus-group-tested to convey a feeling of solidity and power, seem disgustingly flimsy and cheap to me, and I am ashamed that I was ever bamboozled into buying such knicknacks.

  Stephenson then goes on to explain that Unix (which is the abstract Platonic ideal instantiated in Linux and, for that matter, OS X) is the Hole Hawg of operating systems: unlimited in power and flexibility, and accustomed to doing exactly what it's told.
  
  So here's my thought: maybe the free market is the Hole Hawg of economic systems? Vastly powerful, but with an unfortunate tendency to follow its own logic and imperatives, and damn the consequences (for just one example). I believe economists call this the Law of Unintended Consequences.
  
  By the way, where does that guy in the just-linked article get off saying "So one of the environmentalists’ favorite tools for fighting global warming could actually exacerbate it"? I'm an environmentalist, and I think using ethanol for fuel on a large scale is a bloody stupid idea.


• Shorter, but more technical. Maybe compile-time metaprogramming is the wrong thing: you end up with problems like macros not being first-class, weird error messages, and in some systems (C++ templates, Haskell's type system) duplicating a large chunk of the run-time language in the compile-time language. Anyway, run-time metaprogramming is more powerful. So maybe what we want is run-time metaprogramming, coupled with pervasive compile-time evaluation?


• I've been watching a lot of Scrubs on DVD recently. It's a sitcom, set in a hospital, with lots of Ally McBeal-style fantasy sequences, which are not always easy to tell from events that are actually meant to be happening. It occurs to me that it's a sort of pop-culture magical realism. I hate magical realism (and Ally McBeal, come to that), but I'm enjoying Scrubs: unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez, they remembered to put jokes in.

Cut for length, but only the second point is esoteric - the rest should be accessible to anyone. And the first contains a big Neal Stephenson quote, which should raise the standard of writing in this post above my usual average :-)

[Oh, and I'd like to mention wormwood_pearl, who this morning gave me the Best V********'s D** Gift EVAR, by doing all the washing-up in the flat :-) ]

Comments

[totherme.livejournal.com]

Hm :)

When a right wing economist (I presume that's what he is?) writes an article lambasting an environmental policy for its Unintended Consequences, your comparison to the Hole Hawg feels good to me... It suggests that the problem is not with the idea of an environmental policy, or the system which allows them - but rather in the incompetence with which this particular one was dreamt up... (Vaguely left leaning, seal hugging sort that I am.)

What strikes me about the analogy though, is that the right wing ideal of a Free Market, is of a market that accepts no user input. You leave it alone, and it Does the Right Thing. Prices naturally tend towards the right level, and so on. In that case, it can't get all djinn on you, because you're not giving it any instructions at all - let alone ones it can over-literally interpret.

So, I was about to write that maybe the Hawg is really the "Big Government" that the author complains about (which does Big Things, with Unintended Consequences). Then I wasn't sure if that was really the case - the Unintended Consequences aren't in the government - they're in the economic system - so maybe the Hawg is really the "mostly free market but with a bit of government" economic system... But then, the problem with the Hawg was never in the drill itself, was it? It was in the world the drill operated in. You tell the drill to spin, and somewhere else, a ladder falls over...

So yeah, I reckon maybe Government is the Hawg. The Free Market might be more like the "scaled up toys" - it tries to do The Right Thing with no user input - and might get it right. If you're lucky.

I'd always assumed that the Hawg was a fictional, rhetorical device... Well, you live and learn...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

It wasn't meant to be a perfect analogy :-)

I think the market ("free" probably shouldn't be in there) is the Hawg, and the government is the inept operator who hasn't thought through the instructions properly. Or if you prefer, the user who's just typed "sudo rm -f /boot/vmlinuz", and whose finger is poised above the Enter key...

Would expand on this, but I have a lecture starting, er, five minutes ago.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Wasn't fully concentrating at first and thought it was you using the Hole Hawg. So it wasn't? You drilling lightweight.

Have a nice VD (ho ho).

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

No, I was far too young in the Eighties to get a job on a building site.

[azrelle.livejournal.com]

completely unrelated... but i've sent mail to the addie in your profile....