Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • CODING TO PERFORMANCE: MENTAL TORTURE FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS I’m messing with t

    CODING TO PERFORMANCE: MENTAL TORTURE FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS

    I’m messing with the team lately:

    “Speed is a design pattern too.”

    “So, I don’t care if its easy to program – I just care if its fast.”

    “Yes it’s painful. But I pay you once for pain. The user feels pain every time he loads a page. In the pain-economy, you’re pain is just a better investment.”

    🙂

    A good complier in most languages will compensate for the overhead of writing ‘good clear code’. But we are increasingly using languages that aren’t put through ‘good compilers’, and as such, we can’t afford the high cost of that overhead.

    We coded our product for performance. And the price for that lack of overhead is readability. That means that the code is a bit hard to read for a new employee – it’s hard for me at least.

    But, in exchange, I’ve been very happy with our performance. One competitor I’m very familiar with generates about 50MB of peak ram on the server. Our same feature generates just over 4MB of peak memory on the server. We only load what we need for any given request. I think we’ll get to 5MB a request before we’re done. Between the various tactics we use (rarely reloading the page, if ever) only loading sections of any page dynamically (like FB does) , and fetching the data from the client side after the page is presented – all of which are pretty standard fare these days – we have an amazingly fast application both statistically and perceptibly. So coding to speed worked for us.

    The truth is though, that clear code is easier to debug, and easier to maintain. And it’s harder for bugs or un-executed code to creep into the source. But in exchange, adding devs to the product team is difficult. And programming to performance is in itself, slow for these reasons. And our application isn’t small by any means.

    It is, really, much more dense and full of features than the previous generation of ERP/PSA systems that run on desktops. (They look ‘child-like’ to us at this point. Really.) So we have to be very conscious of performance, and conscious of the fact that browsers tend to bleed memory like crazy.

    At present we’re testing out switching ORM’s (the software that maps the program to the database so that developers don’t have to write much SQL) to see if we can make the code easier to write without much of a penalty. But we can’t seem to find a script solution for the browser side that is mature enough for our needs, and is as fast as the way we do it today. It’s better than it has been, but it’s not there yet.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 08:42:00 UTC

  • DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has r

    DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT

    In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has replaced mechanical computers because, after their ‘singularity’ event, computers became as dangerous as the clones in star wars or the hordes of zombies that are the current narrative equivalent. Or for us libertarians, the organs of the bureaucratic state.

    Working in my chapter on solutions to institutional problems in calculative fields (the politics of investment in the commons and the distribution of proceeds, the common law, the organization of jurisprudence, accounting and banking), and reading a bit of English and Roman law, it seems to me that we have already passed through our first singularity (scientism, socialism, positivism, postmodernism, statistics, dynamic stochastic equilibria, legislative law, and the concentration of banking made possible by computers and the hubris of statistical risk measurement. ) Most of this calculative bureaucracy made possible by the computerization of recordkeeping, accounting, actuarial and statistical data.

    The fact that numbers, in the form of priced and promises, cannot represent the values we attribute to them once ownership of the priced instrument changed, is overshadowed by the ability of nation states and their fiat money to act as an insurer of all this accumulated disinformation.

    But like any problem of measurement under high causal density, its what we choose not to measure, what we cannot measure, what we cannot anticipate that we need to measure, and the inability of contrarians to insulate themselves from the accumulate risk, that creates fragility in the entire system.

    Norms, in particular are an asset that can only be measured by aggregate comparison to those with different norms.

    Trust can be priced. It can. And it makes health care look trivial by comparison. It is an absurdly expensive norm.

    My analysis, which is supported by what we are finally seeing in the data, is that we have already hit one singularity. And the way to correct it is not more computing, which by the process of aggregation launders all future-value information from any price or promise, but by more professionalization of calculative fields alpng the responsibilities of lawyers, doctors, and cpa’s. (albeit privately insured rather than certified.) And the weakening of limited liability protections.

    While i agree that government concentration of capital can create certain institutions, all such institutions can be privatized once economically viable.

    But taxes, laws, our current primitive accounting methods, banking, credit and dent instruments sll launder causal relations.

    This not only creates disinformation but prohibits the population from learning.

    The keynesian might argue that the good that results in the short term is more important than the harm in the long term. And that we can fix those problems when we get there. ( That is, in fact, their argument. )

    The truth is that the problem is approaching more rapidly, and we are nearly powerless to fix it by incremental means. Conversely, we could achieve all the same ends, and prosper even more so, by using known solutions to institutional problems of cooperation, and adapt to guture circumstances.

    But that program of action would require that the progressive program acknowledge that its postmodern failure is as great as its socialist failure was.

    And that cannot happen. Not the least of which is because it is tied too closely now with feminism. And numerically, policy change isn’t possible for that reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 16:20:00 UTC

  • Dear Libertarians. Join the 21’st Century. Don’t Fight The Last War: It’s Postmodernism, Not Socialism.

    ITS POSTMODERNISM, NOT SOCIALISM [A]ll generals try to fight the last war. And it seems like all our libertarian intellectuals try to fight central control: socialism. Which is … fighting the last war. A war that we won, by the way, at least against the statist intellectuals. The strategic, political and economic war was won by conservatives. Not by us. Conservatives speak in moral, not analytical language. NAMES MATTER They are shortcuts for ideas and socialism is a dead idea. It has been replaced by postmodernism – an attack on our system of liberty that is correctly termed egalitarian aristocracy. Rothbard and Mises dont matter in the debate between Postmodernism and Egalitarian Aristocracy. Rothbard is wrong on ethics and Mises on Praxeology. Because they ignore the necessity of high trust in making liberty possible. THE CURRENT BATTLE IS AGAINST THE IRRATIONAL [P]ostmodernism – the equivalent of a state religion for empires – is predicated on the same degree of falsehood as was Marx and the labor theory of value. Postmodernism is ideological as was socialism. But instead of trying to argue that socialism is moral and scientific – which we disproved – it borrows from Abrahamic and Zoroastrian theology, which uses the strategy of chanting desirable but patent falsehoods. Whereas conservatives suffer because the form of conservatism is arational, even if its content is beneficial. Postmodern content, like continental philosophy, is irrational and its content economically destructive. But it is wrapped in pseudo rational language that attempts to obscure its deception through emotional and moral loading as well as linguistic complexity. If something cannot be described as human actions, whereupon each action is subject to the test of the rational actor and rational incentives, then it is either incomplete, false, or deception. Postmodernism is deception Libertarians must fight intellectual battles and conservatives, who vastly outnumber us, must fight moral and political battles. But we cannot perform our part of the division of labor if we fight the wrong battle. And socialism is a dead horse. Our ideological battle is postmodernism, post-post, and all the derivative attempts to restore the communal, static, equalitarian, dysgenic poverty of the pre-aristocratic societies. The silly distractions provided by Heritage, Cato, Mises, FEI rely on the failed assumption that liberty is a universal desire. When the data demonstrates that universally, women vote less diversely than men and favor totalitarian equality that is natural to their breeding strategy. And incrementally all democratic societies must incrementally adopt totalitarian equalitarianism under the female vote. [T]he battle is not socialism. The answer is not anarchy. The only solution we have is property rights and the guarantee of violence if deprived of them. The only security against the necessity and expense if violence is to undermine the postmodern ideology and feminism. It does not matter if other groups seek redistributive or communal ends if we employ a political system that allows them to operate as a class, and us to operate as a class. In that political system we can negotiate exchanges with that class. We must understand that this creates a market for trading that is not structurally different from the market for goods and services. Dictatorship gives the majority communalists the advantage, and the free market gives us the advantage. Since it is illogical to ask either side to suffer the advantage if the other, the only compromise position is to create institutions that facilitate cooperation between classes with disparate interests. Hoppe has provided a means of reducing or eliminating state bureaucracy and its attendant monopoly. But the question of how we cooperate with those who have polarized interests had not been solved. Curt Doolittle, Kiev

  • Property, Praxeology And Violence

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    [U]nfortunately, while humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption that is made possible by the combination of private property, the division of knowledge and labor, and the experimental innovation the market drives us to, humans also demonstrate an equal preference for violence, theft, fraud, omission, interference, free riding, privatization of the commons, socialization of losses, rent seeking, corruption, organizing for the purposes of extortion, and organizing for plunder and conquest via war. All of these forms of theft from the most direct to the most subtle, in the absence of the threat of violence, are easier means of competition than is the risky and personal act of speculative production we must engage in, if we choose to compete in the market for goods and services. Only a minority of us demonstrate a preference for the market, and by consequence, demonstrate a preference for private property: which is to eschew, at high cost to ourselves, the tempting portfolio of thefts – and instead work to consume exclusively via voluntary, informed, exchange that is the product of guesswork, planning, foresight and risk. For these reasons – these praxeologically obvious reasons – any portfolio of property rights, from the most collective, to the most individual, to the most totalitarian, and within that portfolio, the scope property ranging from simple personal possessions to complex anonymous contractual commitments; has been and must be imposed on a body of people by the threat of violence. [T]he concept and practice of liberty was created by egalitarian aristocrats who granted property rights to those who equally respected property rights of their peers, and who fought to preserve them at great personal cost. Moral arguments as to the utility of private property are specious. They are an attempt to obtain the right of private property at a discount – despite the fact that the majority do not favor those rights for either themselves or others. That the enlightenment’s emergent middle class philosophers tried to justify taking power from the aristocracy by fabricating moral and utilitarian arguments was a necessary political ruse at the time. But we if we desire to preserve our vestiges of freedom we should not confuse that ruse with the factual reality that all systems of property rights are imposed by the threat of violence. It is praxeologically illogical to suggest that those who would compete better in the absence of private property, should suffer lower state in order to yield to the desires of those others who may be more successful under private property. This makes no sense. As such, the only defense is the offensive application of organized violence for the purpose of implementing one system of property rights and obligations over another. [A]ristocracy is a functional synonym for private property – and private property a right gained in exchange for reciprocity both in the respect of private property and the obligation to use one’s wealth of violence to ensure the perpetuation of the portfolio of property rights that we call ‘private property’ at the expense and exclusion of all other possible portfolios of property rights.

  • Statism And Corporatism vs Partnerships And The Common Law

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    [C]an you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development. If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions. The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts. Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution. [A]narchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so. We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.

  • STATISM AND CORPORATISM VS PARTNERSHIPS AND THE COMMON LAW Can you imagine comme

    STATISM AND CORPORATISM VS PARTNERSHIPS AND THE COMMON LAW

    Can you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development.

    If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions.

    The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts.

    Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution.

    Anarchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so.

    We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-22 08:31:00 UTC

  • PROPERTY, PRAXEOLOGY AND VIOLENCE (Cross posted from FB.Libertarian) Unfortunate

    PROPERTY, PRAXEOLOGY AND VIOLENCE

    (Cross posted from FB.Libertarian)

    Unfortunately, while humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption that is made possible by the combination of private property, the division of knowledge and labor, and the experimental innovation the market drives us to, humans also demonstrate an equal preference for violence, theft, fraud, omission, interference, free riding, privatization of the commons, socialization of losses, rent seeking, corruption, organizing for the purposes of extortion, and organizing for plunder and conquest via war.

    All of these forms of theft from the most direct to the most subtle, in the absence of the threat of violence, are easier means of competition than is the risky and personal act of speculative production we must engage in, if we choose to compete in the market for goods and services.

    Only a minority of us demonstrate a preference for the market, and by consequence, demonstrate a preference for private property: which is to eschew, at high cost to ourselves, the tempting portfolio of thefts – and instead work to consume exclusively via voluntary, informed, exchange that is the product of guesswork, planning, foresight and risk.

    For these reasons – these praxeologically obvious reasons – any portfolio of property rights, from the most collective, to the most individual, to the most totalitarian, and within that portfolio, the scope property ranging from simple personal possessions to complex anonymous contractual commitments; has been and must be imposed on a body of people by the threat of violence.

    The concept and practice of liberty was created by egalitarian aristocrats who granted property rights to those who equally respected property rights of their peers, and who fought to preserve them at great personal cost.

    Moral arguments as to the utility of private property are specious. They are an attempt to obtain the right of private property at a discount – despite the fact that the majority do not favor those rights for either themselves or others.

    That the enlightenment’s emergent middle class philosophers tried to justify taking power from the aristocracy by fabricating moral and utilitarian arguments was a necessary political ruse at the time. But we if we desire to preserve our vestiges of freedom we should not confuse that ruse with the factual reality that all systems of property rights are imposed by the threat of violence.

    It is praxeologically illogical to suggest that those who would compete better in the absence of private property, should suffer lower state in order to yield to the desires of those others who may be more successful under private property. This makes no sense.

    As such, the only defense is the offensive application of organized violence for the purpose of implementing one system of property rights and obligations over another.

    Aristocracy is a functional synonym for private property – and private property a right gained in exchange for reciprocity both in the respect of private property and the obligation to use one’s wealth of violence to ensure the perpetuation of the portfolio of property rights that we call ‘private property’ at the expense and exclusion of all other possible portfolios of property rights.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-20 16:31:00 UTC

  • WOZNIAK AGREES “This is not my America” That’s right Steve. That’s why I left. L

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57589534-71/woz-this-is-not-my-america/STEVE WOZNIAK AGREES

    “This is not my America”

    That’s right Steve. That’s why I left.

    Let’s see.

    1) The IRS can take over your entire life by fiat if you make paper profits that you will never see, but you can walk into the country and become a dead weight on the rest of us without penalty.

    2) If you are a white male you are assumed to be a defacto white collar criminal, prone to violence, a nascent sexual predator, and you resist the assumption that the purpose of your life is to be a source of funds for vampire females. 🙂

    3) The government can invade your privacy without limit or recourse – they can storm your house and kill you and your pets at will. They can sieze your home and your bank accounts without juridical defense.

    Anything can be justified as the ‘common good’. Thats why the ‘common good’ is never a reason allow the state to do anything. All rights are property rights, and only property rights can be rights. Therefore without property rights you have no rights. – period.

    The common good is just a license for tyranny.

    There is no common good.

    Because there is no ‘We’ in “Diversity’.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-17 04:13:00 UTC

  • ITS POSTMODERNISM, NOT SOCIALISM All generals try to fight the last war. And it

    ITS POSTMODERNISM, NOT SOCIALISM

    All generals try to fight the last war. And it seems like all our libertarian intellectuals try to fight central control: socialism. Which is … fighting the last war.

    A war that we won, by the way, at least against the statist intellectuals. The strategic, political and economic war was won by conservatives. Not by us. Conservatives speak in moral, not analytical language.

    NAMES MATTER

    They are shortcuts for ideas and socialism is a dead idea. It has been replaced by postmodernism – an attack on our system of liberty that is correctly termed egalitarian aristocracy.

    Rothbard and Mises dont matter in the debate between Postmodernism and Egalitarian Aristocracy. Rothbard is wrong on ethics and Mises on Praxeology. Because they ignore the necessity of high trust in making liberty possible.

    THE CURRENT BATTLE IS AGAINST THE IRRATIONAL

    Postmodernism – the equivalent of a state religion for empires – is predicated on the same degree of falsehood as was Marx and the labor theory of value. Postmodernism is ideological as was socialism. But instead of trying to argue that socialism is moral and scientific – which we disproved – it borrows from Abrahamic and Zoroastrian theology, which uses the strategy of chanting desirable but patent falsehoods.

    Whereas conservatives suffer because the form of conservatism is arational, even if its content is beneficial. Postmodern content, like continental philosophy, is irrational and its content economically destructive. But it is wrapped in pseudo rational language that attempts to obscure its deception through emotional and moral loading as well as linguistic complexity.

    If something cannot be described as human actions, whereupon each action is subject to the test of the rational actor and rational incentives, then it is either incomplete, false, or deception.

    Postmodernism is deception

    Libertarians must fight intellectual battles and conservatives, who vastly outnumber us, must fight moral and political battles.

    But we cannot perform our part of the division of labor if we fight the wrong battle.

    And socialism is a dead horse. Our ideological battle is postmodernism, post-post, and all the derivative attempts to restore the communal, static, equalitarian, dysgenic poverty of the pre-aristocratic societies.

    The silly distractions provided by Heritage, Cato, Mises, FEI rely on the failed assumption that liberty is a universal desire. When the data demonstrates that universally, women vote less diversely than men and favor totalitarian equality that is natural to their breeding strategy. And incrementally all democratic societies must incrementally adopt totalitarian equalitarianism under the female vote.

    The battle is not socialism. The answer is not anarchy. The only solution we have is property rights and the guarantee of violence if deprived of them.

    The only security against the necessity and expense if violence is to undermine the postmodern ideology and feminism.

    It does not matter if other groups seek redistributive or communal ends if we employ a political system that allows them to operate as a class, and us to operate as a class.

    In that political system we can negotiate exchanges with that class. We must understand that this creates a market for trading that is not structurally different from the market for goods and services. Dictatorship gives the majority communalists the advantage, and the free market gives us the advantage. Since it is illogical to ask either side to suffer the advantage if the other, the only compromise position is to create institutions that facilitate cooperation between classes with disparate interests.

    Hoppe has provided a means of reducing or eliminating state bureaucracy and its attendant monopoly.

    But the question of how we cooperate with those who have polarized interests had not been solved.

    Curt Doolittle, Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-16 08:13:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL MANAGEMENT STYLES : UNCOMFORTABLE LIBERTARIANISM So, I have all these U

    CULTURAL MANAGEMENT STYLES : UNCOMFORTABLE LIBERTARIANISM

    So, I have all these Ukrainian guys now. And, it’s hysterical fascinating trying to get them out of hierarchical thinking. In America, if yo say “you’re a partner” and give someone stock, they pretty much act like an owner, and relegate you as CEO to judge and jury.

    But here, it’s pretty hard. Just no concept of it. Right ethics, but no mental model. They guys are capable but just can’t comprehend it.

    I have all these things I say like:

    “It’s unscientific for me to think I know all the answers. It’s just that I have the need to make decisions in real time with the information at my disposal.”

    Or “My ego isn’t tied up in being right. My ego is tied up in developing a product that sells.”

    or “I don’t think I know anything. Argue with me. Either you’re able to make your case or you’re not. If do I’ll just say…. Damn. You’re right. Watch me. I say it all the time.”

    Or “I gave you this feature and the direction to use your judgement in developing it. Why do you think I did that? To trip you up? Or to leave open the possibility that I’m wrong, and that you might improve on my ideas?”

    Or (my favorite) “I have a very hard time believing that you’re not smart enough to make that decision without my input.”

    Or “If I wanted people to just do what I tell them, I’d hire idiots. You don’t think I hired you, and paid you above market rates because you’re an idiot, do you?” (Love that one. No way out of it.)

    They are getting their slowly.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-08 05:41:00 UTC