Playing Games with "Ruids"

Ruby
21

bottom.bottom.bottom line…

I take some folks sailing and they look out on the water,
then glance at their watches.

I take others out sailing and we gaze in wonder at the patterns in the
water, and the sky, and cry.

There’s an amazing fact here somewhere, we just don’t “see” things all
exactly the same way. Most of us know this, and even learn to enjoy
it?

_Why wrote some documentation for Shoes that made me want to laugh and
cry and the same time… what genius, what what?

But let’s get useful. Step-wise-refinement, a fad that has probably
dropped off the software radar screen? Works for me, or worked for me
anyway. It has allowed me to do things “in my sleep” that others
don’t seem to be as likely to arrive at in their approach things.

Thinking there is only one approach, or some close variant on this
seems almost impossible to me in this in age. But there are probably
“extremes” that one extreme cannot see any value to, that the other
extreme cannot live without? It doesn’t matter much to me, I found
what works for me, and one of my “tricks” is to twist the work around
until it fits a mold I do well with.

Except for “Wee”, that is related somehow to SeaSide, and speaks to
me, my only other even marginally successful web work was done in Raw
Rack.

You Web guys are in a world I can’t fathom - test wise or any
otherwise. But I think I recognize problems, and I genuinely enjoy
finding innovative solutions. (And innovative to ME can be something
done at Stanford years ago or not - if they haven’t solved the problem
I’m looking at, or any that I see that exist out there with commercial
potential to my thinking - then why should I care?)

This domain stuff I’m doing would be almost trivial to do procedurally

  • but then would become an instant maintenance monster. No fun for
    anybody, rewarding on to the type of person that needs only to be paid
    by the hour?

On the other-hand what I am doing keeps me fascinated because it is
“revealing itself” as I work with it. And that is, I’m guessing, why
it calls to some of us, oh yes, it seems to, and repels others with a
somewhat narrower view of things.

With respect to the documentation that _why produced for shoes, I
really just wanted “simple definitions” and he was giving me
cartoons. But, good gosh, I’d sooner cut of my fingers than tell him
“to get serious”. The man was doing what he did his way and I just
naturally, cannot fathom the gall it would take to tell a man working
to share something how he should do it. And lest somebody should
infer that I’m comparing myself to _why, well I’m not. He was the
real thing, I’m doing only the best I know how to do, the best way I
know how to do it. No more, and no less.

and that’s the last on this.

22

On Apr 1, 5:15 am, thunk [email protected] wrote:

ok hirðis hatr.
umbre vísi

lamentation of the clouds
and ruin of the hay-harvest
and abomination of the shepherd.

OHG. has reita “vereda, (44) reda, chariot,” rîtari, ritari “horseman,
rider,” rîtan “ride,” reiti “paratus,” gareiti “biga, falera,
quadriga,” AS rád “riding, journey, way,” rad “cart, chariot,” rídan
“to ride,” ridda “knight, rider,” raed, hraed, geraed “swift, quick,
ready,” ONorse rîða “to ride,” greiða “to make ready,” etc., OIrish
riadaim “I drive,” reid, OWelsh ruid, OBreton roed “plain, smooth.”
From this group cannot be separated Goth. ga-redan “to have a mind
to,” for in the compounds ur-redan, faura-ga-redan this redan has the
meaning “arrange, determine.” This at once connects ONorse ráða, AS.
ráedan, OHG. râtan “advice,” etc., with it. In the German
gerät“advice, tool, harness” we have the two meanings connected. In the
Slavic languages we have two series, rad- and rend- , which belong
here. The first, giving Russian rad “prepared, glad,” Polish rada
“advice,” etc., is obviously derived from the German. The nasalised
form, which, however, in Lithuanian and Lettish also occurs
unnasalised, is unquestionably older. We have OBulgarian redu, Bulg.
red, Pol. rzad “order,” Lith. rinda “row,” redas “order,” Let. redit,
rinda, rist, ridu “to arrange.”

redan “to have a mind to…

ONorse rîða “to ride,”

I’m just sure it is only me…

23

On 2010-04-01, thunk [email protected] wrote:

bottom.bottom.bottom line…

Is that you aren’t going to tell us what you’re doing.

With respect to the documentation that _why produced for shoes, I
really just wanted “simple definitions” and he was giving me
cartoons.

Two major differences:

  1. He had working code that could be used, which made it possible for
    people who were curious to mess with it.
  2. The cartoons and such were a very useful way of communicating some
    things, but useful ONLY once you had seen the “simple definitions”.

Back in the day, the first time someone pointed me at the poigniant
guide,
when I had no other information about Ruby, I spent about five minutes
on
it and concluded that this was some kind of crazy empty fad without any
substance, because the best thing people could point me at on it was
only
marginally lucid. Later, once I’d gotten pointed at a basic summary of
the
approximate general area of human endeavor in which Ruby existed, I
found
the poigniant guide quite enlightening.

That kind of communication works ONLY when you have first given people a
ballpark feel for what kind of thing you’re talking about. Without that
initial ranging information, it’s largely useless.

-s

24

Please everyone stop feeding the troll (or whatever he is).
I appreciate the effort but please just leave him alone, he’ll run out
of gas soon.

–
Andrea D.

25

On Apr 1, 11:50 am, Seebs [email protected] wrote:

Two major differences:
approximate general area of human endeavor in which Ruby existed, I found
the poigniant guide quite enlightening.

That kind of communication works ONLY when you have first given people a
ballpark feel for what kind of thing you’re talking about. Without that
initial ranging information, it’s largely useless.

-s

Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter S. / [email protected]://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) ← get educated!

really a strange coincidence that this is April 1, and
I’ve been working some this AM on this about that:

http://wiki.github.com/gkoller/Ruids/

its my new ruid wiki with attitude and eventually if my linux system
allows colored snapshots of my favorite posters. I don’t do cartoons
yet, but a few have occurred to me along the way here.

this is my wiki, in my order, in my style and like that, if things get
serious I also know to get serious and we’ll have to find somebody to
that… its not in my nature to get much past the first pass of
anything for humans. I’m much more attuned to polishing my code.

26

On Apr 1, 2010, at 12:10 PM, thunk wrote:

http://wiki.github.com/gkoller/Ruids/

Great stream of consciousness prose died with James J…

Cheers–

Charles

27

On 2010-04-01, Andrea D. [email protected] wrote:

Please everyone stop feeding the troll (or whatever he is).
I appreciate the effort but please just leave him alone, he’ll run out
of gas soon.

I think you’re right.

I’m done; he’s established to my satisfaction that he is either trolling
or fundamentally incapable of communication. I hope that, if there was
a
good idea in there, it eventually occurs to someone who can use
language.

-s

28

On 2010-04-01, thunk [email protected] wrote:

The contributor-side members of this group seem, perhaps, used to a
behavior of glancing at posts and picking out simple issues of
interest or experience to share with program beginners and temporarily
stuck peers.

Not at all. We’re generally interested in new technologies.

But you still haven’t said what you’re talking about!

There are 8 Ruid Modules.

So what? You haven’t told us what they are. There are 8 Gzornen
Modules,
too. They sometimes semi-disenfrobnicate things, and I’m sure you’re
going to be very curious to see how that works out, right?

.PS Let us chat further only of simpler things, keep it all pleasant

  • get out the lava lamps, and let the Ru’id thing go dormant until
    such time as proprietary issues can be replaced with demonstration
    modules, and a living breathing “Ruid ‘machine’” can be delivered
    up. Anything less, in my most sincere opinion, will only frustrate
    almost everybody. That was never the intention.

Actually, that’s much, much, more frustrating than:

SIMPLY TELLING US WHAT THE FUCK YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.

Seriously, at this point, the only explanations left to me are that
you’re a troll or that you’re schizophrenic. You appear to be
completely,
totally, incapable of comprehending what a “description” is, or why a
“description” of a thing would be essential to interesting people in it.

-s

29

On Apr 1, 2010, at 10:30 AM, Seebs wrote:

-s

Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter S. / [email protected]
| Seebs.Net ← lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
Fair game (Scientology) - Wikipedia ← get educated!

It just struck me that there may not even be a real person behind those
Boid/Ruid writings :-). At some point it started feeling like some AI
module generated responses that seem crazy but vaguely relevant enough
for people to even respond the them and keep the conversation going,
getting utterly frustrated on the way.

You know, like pick a subject and see how communication with real people
on a mailing list would go along, possibly adopting to responders’
mood/attitude. And seeing how many people got involved, the technology
may be pretty cool after all :wink:

Gennady.

30

Seebs wrote:

On 2010-04-01, Andrea D. [email protected] wrote:

Please everyone stop feeding the troll (or whatever he is).
I appreciate the effort but please just leave him alone, he’ll run out
of gas soon.

I think you’re right.

I’m done; he’s established to my satisfaction that he is either trolling
or fundamentally incapable of communication. I hope that, if there was
a
good idea in there, it eventually occurs to someone who can use
language.

-s

Hey Seebs, I’ve got this great idea.

It’s going to involve a kind of giant database, maybe nosql, maybe
relational. It’s gonna have a ton of information. In fact, it’s going to
learn to analyze data without us telling it what to look for [1]! And
then we can plug in more information about the data.
That’s going to create links within the data, which we can probably use
with neural network back-propagation to create and refine existing
filters.
Now, about those filters - they can be like agents, who watch changes to
data and fire off an email when specific data changes.

See, for instance, we have this database with lots of pharmaceutical
information, right? Lots of tables, lots of data, lots of research. Now,
we’re also going to have a database for patients which links to
information in this huge database of pharmaceuticals (which I will call
pharms from now on). So, for instance, patient John D. is currently on
this pharm called foobarbazquuxelamine [2], and it turns out that new
research indicates that the drug was found to cause cancer in laboratory
mice [3].
So, the database is updated, possibly with a red flag.
The referring physician / lawyer / surgeon / patient has this alert set
up for the patient record. If it were me, I’d have alerts set up for all
my patients, but moving on. This alert sends him an email, “Oh,
#{deity}! #{this patient} will get #{cancer} because of #{this pharm}!”

Magic.
Except not.

Alright, so now we just have to implement that; we should just create a
DSL so everyone can implement their own agents / filters / database
queries. The client program will just start as many of those queries as
we tell it to; how about 2,000 per second? Should be fine, right? I
wonder what’ll happen when one million physicians across the world each
fire two thousand requests per second.

[1] I admit it. I am a dreamer.
[2] It was invented at MIT, dontchaknow.
[3] Everything causes cancer in laboratory mice. Life has been found to
cause cancer in laboratory mice. Mice have been found to… Well, you
get it.

31

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 7:30 PM, Seebs [email protected] wrote:

On 2010-04-01, Andrea D. [email protected] wrote:

Please everyone stop feeding the troll (or whatever he is).
I appreciate the effort but please just leave him alone, he’ll run out
of gas soon.

I think you’re right.

Absolutely right, but maybe these postings are done by Ruids…

32

thunk wrote:

Great stream of consciousness prose died with James J…

what’s your real point, oh,
credentialed one?

That’s easy! His point is, which of the two is easier to read:

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

------- OR ---------

the first cold shower
even the monkey seems to want
a little coat of straw

And with that, we are DEFINITELY not talking about Ruby anymore.

33

and the most curious thing to me, with all the credentialated
professors, and all the money at stake, and all the great things that
COULD be done, I had 3 shopping baskets with computer components, at
three state-of-the-art computer component suppliers and not one of
them was in a position to do more than take my credit card number.

And I thought - heck - here’s a job for some good old thunk magic.

NOW, 3 years later, I KNOW WHAT TO DO, AND HOW TO DO IT, and I still
haven’t seen any clue that this type of tool has been put to use.

I like to BUILD my computers, bespoken and all, but I would have
expected it to get EASIER, not more difficult. Where are you guys
doing useful things?

Give old thunk 500 of “these units” and “good” data on the components
and I’ll show ANYBODY what I’m talking about. Want to make a 5,000
pound wager to make it interesting? These things could verify
cables, plugs, cpu to mem, fans, power, peer to peer performance, db
estimation, cooling, and you name it these 500 could do it. And
somebody want to add a new one - it could come from any geek anywhere
that knows his stuff. I just thought that might be interesting.

so sorry.

34

Great stream of consciousness prose died with James J…

…and great English died with Shakespeare.

So what are the rest of us consigned to do?

Muddle through as best we can… what’s your real point, oh,
credentialed one?

35

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 3:45 PM, thunk [email protected] wrote:

haven’t seen any clue that this type of tool has been put to use.

I like to BUILD my computers, bespoken and all, but I would have
expected it to get EASIER, not more difficult. Where are you guys
doing useful things?

Give old thunk 500 of “these units” and “good” data on the components
and I’ll show ANYBODY what I’m talking about.

Please do. As for me, I feel like I lose small portions of my brain
when I try to read what you’re writing.

Want to make a 5,000
pound wager to make it interesting? These things could verify
cables, plugs, cpu to mem, fans, power, peer to peer performance, db
estimation, cooling, and you name it these 500 could do it. And
somebody want to add a new one - it could come from any geek anywhere
that knows his stuff. I just thought that might be interesting.

It sounds very interesting, but I don’t think anyone knows what you’re
talking about. My first instinct was that you were some kind of Markov
chain, generating pure crazy. It would be nice to be proven wrong.

so sorry.

Alex

36

On Apr 1, 2010, at 13:14 , Alex F. wrote:

Please do. As for me, I feel like I lose small portions of my brain
when I try to read what you’re writing.

Looks like I have to break out the old “ilias is crazy” email sig and
update the names:

Please stop responding to Ilias, he is crazy. If you stop talking to
him, he will go away. If you don’t believe me, check out this:

http://www.tfeb.org/lisp/mad-people.html

Especially:

Ilias is currently (17-Sep-2002) being almost entirely ignored and
is crying alone to himself, while trying to join in various
threads. With luck if this continues he will get bored and wander
off to annoy people in some other newsgroup. He is one of the most
malignant posters to cll in recent history - between 27-Aug-2002 and
24-Sep-2002 threads begin by him were about 1/4 of the articles in
cll.

Again, this man is insane, so please, please, please refrain from
replying to his posts, or in threads he starts.

If you would, please join us is fighting this problem. For more details,
see:

Thank You

37

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Ryan D. [email protected]
wrote:

Looks like I have to break out the old “ilias is crazy” email sig and update the names:

As best I can tell, thunk doesn’t have a track record of trolling
other groups (as did Ilias and others) before visiting us. In a way,
it’s sort of a tribute to Ruby’s notoriety that “thunk” has started
his career here.

38

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Lyle J. [email protected]
wrote:

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Time_Cube

There is precedence. Can we end this thread?

This is a convenient time to ask if there is a way to ignore threads
without
unsubscribing.
If the forum software does not support it, who do I send a patch to?

Is this a google groups issue?

39

It sounds very interesting, but I don’t think anyone knows what you’re
talking about.

FOR A CONCRETE EXAMPLE:

  1. Go to CompUSA

  2. Fill your “shopping Basket” with all your dream components.

  3. (but don’t buy them…)

  4. Just sit there and stare at your screen and the list of items and
    their cost and think what would have to happen to determine if those
    pieces of a system (hopefully, 1 system for now) are to get “checked
    for compatibility” and a lot of other things useful to YOU (and to
    COMPUSA)

  5. And because you are prone to thinking a little ahead of your time,
    and because you don’t live in NY where CompUSA already has a
    Processing department that, likely, in their opinion, has addressed
    every possible desire of their clients now and forever. Think about
    how expertise for this very specific problem can be made from
    “outside” - from guys that hang around at PCMech and such places
    perhaps.

I gave up. Somebody is going to solve this someday. What I am
working on provides everything but the Data, assuming expertise can
come in from outside. Reviews already do. Reviews are nothing but a
type of these units.

40

On 2010-04-01, andrew mcelroy [email protected] wrote:

This is a convenient time to ask if there is a way to ignore threads without
unsubscribing.
If the forum software does not support it, who do I send a patch to?

Uh.

Is this a google groups issue?

This is a Usenet group, not a “google group”. Google groups presents an
interface to Usenet, but under the hood, this has nothing to do with
Google.
There is a forum which maintains a gateway to this, and I have no idea
whose software is involved there. The obvious thing to do would be to
use
a newsreader and access the Usenet group directly, since newsreaders
have
killfiles.

-s