Paul M. Jones

Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."


"Smart" Is No Better Than "Strong"

Higher-than-average intelligence doesn't make you any better than anyone else, any more than being taller, or faster, or stronger does. What it often does, however, is allow others to convince you that you should be something different than you are, or than you want to be. Even worse, it gives you the ability to successfully rationalize away your failures, to both yourself and others.

Nassim Taleb says something similar. Too often, "being smart" makes you better at rationalizing, not better at being rational. How much the worse if you make "being smart" part of your identity. (File under "being smart is overrated.")

Source: Vox Popoli: Always an excuse.


The Argument from Fallacy

"Argument from fallacy" is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false. It is also called argument to logic (argumentum ad logicam), fallacy fallacy, fallacists fallacy, and bad reasons fallacy. Fallacious arguments can arrive at true conclusions, so this is an informal fallacy of relevance.

Emphasis mine, via Argument from fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Post-Modernist Swindle

1. Let us agree that no framework of interpretation can be demonstrated conclusively to be correct.

2. Let us proceed to rely on a framework of interpretation that explains all social phenomena in terms of the concepts of race, gender, privilege, and power.

Source: The Post-Modernist Swindle | askblog


Telegraph: A Lambda-Style PSR-7 Middleware Dispatcher

On reflecting over the discussions surrounding the proposed PSR for HTTP middleware (on which I am coordinator), I realized there's no reason there should *not* be a "request-only" PSR-7 middleware dispatcher.

So, here is Telegraph to fill that void.

Built over this past weekend, Telegraph is essentially a copy of Relay, which is a "request+response" middleware dispatcher. (There are a couple of minor differences.)

I also took the time to port the existing Relay middleware over to Telegraph. You can find the Telegraph middleware here.

I was asked over the weekend, "Is this a sign that the HTTP middleware proposal is moving from request+response to request-only?" (/me shrugs) I just figure if there's such a need for something like that, perhaps it should be made available.

Oh, and I was able to quality-check and release it using Producer.

Enjoy!



The Iron Law of Evaluation

The The Iron Law of Evaluation (Rossi, 1987) is that the expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.

...

Why does this happen? The simple answer is that in a largely-rich, largely-free country, with many existing (if confusing) private and public supports for low-income people, it’s just as easy to screw things up than to make things better, no matter how much you spend.

Source: The Iron Law – spottedtoad


Pournelle on Trump and the "Conservative" Label

A great number of Americans had just got used to the notion that they were conservative, and they thought they were being conservative in supporting someone who wanted to make America great again, control the borders, stop policing the world (and if we have to keep doing it, get some other beneficiaries of the expenditure of American blood and treasure to start contributing their fair share, a real portion of their GDP not just token amounts), appoint original intent Justices to the Supreme Court -- well, you know. Put American interests first. Really. With a realistic foreign policy. And if we have to fight a war, then fight it, with enough force to win and win fast and then get out, the way we always have. Didn’t we do that in four years, going from essentially no army at all, and while we were at it becoming the “arsenal of democracy” whatever that means, and doing that in two years? While coming out of a Depression, for heaven’s sake. But, we’re told, that’s not conservative, that’s something else.

So a lot of people are confused. Having been read out of the conservative movement for being insufficiently enthusiastic about globalism, I didn’t figure I owed any obedience to the label, and apparently there are a lot of Americans who feel the same way. I’d say I was for liberty, but that sounds like a liberal, and I know I’m not part of the liberal movement. Whatever I am, I know that Federal aid to education has been a disaster and we had far better schools when it was left to the states, some of whom competed to have schools run to serve the interests of the students, not the interests of the teachers’ unions. But it’s very much in the interest of the ruling class to have awful schools and to keep the price of good ones high; their kids generally don’t go to public schools anyway.

Remember the Northwest Ordinance? Probably you don’t. Or the Land Grant colleges and universities? Can you recall when public state colleges were essentially free to those qualified to be in them? I suspect nostalgia for those days is reactionary, not conservative.

But I also remember when Detroit was the symbol of productivity, and the enemies of America had the goal ending that.

Source: Working on fiction; NSS Acceptance Speech; Trump and the neocons; And a lot more. – Chaos Manor – Jerry Pournelle


The Quakers Tolerated Themselves Out Of Existence

But by 1750, the Quakers were kind of on their way out; by 1750, they were a demographic minority in Pennsylvania, and by 1773 they were a minority in its legislature as well. In 1750 Quakerism was the third-largest religion in the US; by 1820 it was the ninth-largest, and by 1981 it was the sixty-sixth largest. What happened? The Quakers basically tolerated themselves out of existence. They were so welcoming to religious minorities and immigrants that all these groups took up shop in Pennsylvania and ended its status as a uniquely Quaker society. At the same time, the Quakers themselves became more “fanatical” and many dropped out of politics believing it to be too worldly a concern for them; this was obviously fatal to their political domination. The most famous Pennsylvanian statesman of the Revolutionary era, Benjamin Franklin, was not a Quaker at all but a first-generation immigrant from New England. Finally, Quakerism was naturally extra-susceptible to that thing where Christian denominations become indistinguishable from liberal modernity and fade into the secular background.

Source: Book Review of Albion's Seed by Slate Star Codex


Multi-Project Issue Tracking With Producer

With Producer, you can get a list of the open issues from your remote origin by running producer issues from the project repository:

$ cd ~/Code/radarphp/Radar.Adr
$ producer issues
radarphp/Radar.Adr

    14. Separate Package for ResponderAcceptsInterface?
        https://github.com/radarphp/Radar.Adr/issues/14

    29. Service level actions?
        https://github.com/radarphp/Radar.Adr/issues/29

$

However, I’m the lead on about 40 different packages and projects, and at one point or another many of them have issues to be tracked on Github. It’s tedious to go to each package repository to list its issues separately. I want to be able to see a list of all issues on all my projects; then I can review them all at once to see what gets my attention.

To get a list of all open issues on several projects, you can create a bash script that changes to each project directory and runs project issues in each one:

cd ~/Code/atlasphp/Atlas.Cli; producer issues;
cd ~/Code/atlasphp/Atlas.Orm; producer issues;
cd ~/Code/auraphp/Aura.Accept; producer issues;
; ...
cd ~/Code/radarphp/Radar.Project; producer issues;
cd ~/Code/relayphp/Relay.Relay; producer issues;
cd ~/Code/relayphp/Relay.Middleware; producer issues;

Call the script all-issues.sh, make it executable with chmod +x all-issues.sh, and then you can issue ./all-issues.sh to get a list of all open issues on all your projects. Pipe the result to a file for easy viewing if you like!



Producer 2.0.0 Released!

Just a short note to say that most (all?) of the feedback from last month’s inital release of Producer has been incorporated into today’s 2.0.0 stable release!

The major changes are:

  • You are no longer required to install Producer globally. You can now install it as a require-dev in your project and call it as ./vendor/bin/producer. (Personally, I prefer to have it global, but that's mostly because I manage so many different libraries.)

  • Along with that, Producer now recognizes a project-specific .producer/config file so you can override Producer settings on a per-project basis.

  • Finally, Producer does not install phpunit and phpdoc any more. You will need to install them yourself, either globally or as part of your package. The benefit here is that you can now specify custom paths to phpunit and phpdoc commands in your .producer/config file.

(Producer is a command-line quality-assurance tool to validate, and then release, your PHP library package. It supports Git and Mercurial for version control, as well as Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket for remote origins.)