90s-ish videogame lore, “Time is an ally, not an enemy. Patience can sharpen even the smallest of efforts into a weapon that can strike the heart of an empire.”
On my cube walls, whenever I get back to my cube: “magic is just cleverly concealed patience.” The approximate η-expansion: you can generally figure out what professional magicians do, you just dismiss it, “I mean of course she coulda known what card I was going to pull if she bought 52 decks of cards and assembled an entire card made out of the Jack of Spades... but that’s expensive and difficult and who would do that.” Penn Jillette puts the same point a different way, saying that he is going to have to perform the same trick over and over again and so it cannot be 99% likely to not injure him, that is far, far too low, he has to be 100% certain his tricks are safe. If he is firing a nail gun at Teller’s neck it must surely be incapable of firing a nail at Teller, and if he waxes on about how much he has memorized the pattern of the nails in the gun then he must be cleverly concealing whatever patience went into making that nail gun and the illusion that it is loaded.
But the key is that once you see this one place you see it everywhere. A restaurant works by the same magic. You say what you want and it magically appears before you. How did that happen? Prep work for hours in advance of the meal, so that when the time comes I just need to put tab A in slot B. Like a beef wellington; pre-cooked steak wrapped into a nice little bundle that just needs to be finished in the oven for 20 minutes and sliced. Something to think about next date night—you can impress your date immensely if you make the wellingtons the night before, so that your focus is on your lover and not on your cutting board.
You don’t usually think about the prep work that went into the Mother of All Demos, but you should. Sometimes when Alan Kay shows a clip from there, he mentions something like, “you might notice that they get sub-second latency on all these operations, but the terminal was here and the computer was over there so I like to ask students how they got sub-second latency on all these operations, and only one time have I got the right answer, one student said ‘because they wanted sub-second latency?’ and that is absolutely correct, they-goddamn-wanted-subsecond-latency, these things are there for you if you really want them.”
crdrost|5 years ago
On my cube walls, whenever I get back to my cube: “magic is just cleverly concealed patience.” The approximate η-expansion: you can generally figure out what professional magicians do, you just dismiss it, “I mean of course she coulda known what card I was going to pull if she bought 52 decks of cards and assembled an entire card made out of the Jack of Spades... but that’s expensive and difficult and who would do that.” Penn Jillette puts the same point a different way, saying that he is going to have to perform the same trick over and over again and so it cannot be 99% likely to not injure him, that is far, far too low, he has to be 100% certain his tricks are safe. If he is firing a nail gun at Teller’s neck it must surely be incapable of firing a nail at Teller, and if he waxes on about how much he has memorized the pattern of the nails in the gun then he must be cleverly concealing whatever patience went into making that nail gun and the illusion that it is loaded.
But the key is that once you see this one place you see it everywhere. A restaurant works by the same magic. You say what you want and it magically appears before you. How did that happen? Prep work for hours in advance of the meal, so that when the time comes I just need to put tab A in slot B. Like a beef wellington; pre-cooked steak wrapped into a nice little bundle that just needs to be finished in the oven for 20 minutes and sliced. Something to think about next date night—you can impress your date immensely if you make the wellingtons the night before, so that your focus is on your lover and not on your cutting board.
You don’t usually think about the prep work that went into the Mother of All Demos, but you should. Sometimes when Alan Kay shows a clip from there, he mentions something like, “you might notice that they get sub-second latency on all these operations, but the terminal was here and the computer was over there so I like to ask students how they got sub-second latency on all these operations, and only one time have I got the right answer, one student said ‘because they wanted sub-second latency?’ and that is absolutely correct, they-goddamn-wanted-subsecond-latency, these things are there for you if you really want them.”