Category: Uncategorized

The Daily Beast’s Commentary on Trump’s State of the Union address

This is The Daily Beast’s take on what Trump really wanted to say at the State of the Union address:

The state of the union is…. pure, weapons-grade, uncut f**king chaos, and I am both unhinged and unbound from any consequence, ever. All the pretty words my speechwriters worked so hard on are a thin veneer over the seething mass of coming horrors. I have gambled our economy, compromised our security, and shredded our dignity, and I’ll do it again. My message to the American people: bend the knee. To my enemies: vengeance is coming.

“Bend the knee”   That summarizes it all.

Trump is a ‘successful sociopath’. A predator who lacks a conscience and strategic thought.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-sociopath-mental-health-harvard-psychiatry-professor-1468441

A retired Harvard psychiatry professor described President Donald Trump as “essentially a predator” and a “successful sociopath.”

Lance M. Dodes, MD, a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is yet another mental health expert to call into question the president’s state of mind

“His focus on his personal benefit at any cost is why he’s a successful sociopath,” Dodes told Salon, adding that he can “see Donald for who he really is.”

“It’s very hard to get this across to the public, because every time people talk about him, they start out with the unspoken unconscious assumption that he’s basically like the rest of us,” Dodes told Salon.

“But in order to explain and predict Trump’s behavior, you have to begin with awareness that he is essentially a predator.

“Once you keep in mind that Trump lacks a conscience and lacks empathy, he becomes very easy to follow. Unlike normal people, who are complex, he’s basically running on a very simple and very disordered program.”

John M. Talmadge, MD, a physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center, wrote that Trump’s “mental impairment means he cannot think strategically or in abstract terms.”

“Trump does not have a vision or a plan, because he can think only in concrete, elementary, childlike, one dimensional terms,” Talmadge, who was commenting in a personal capacity, wrote.

“He does not process an abstract idea like American forces stabilizing a multilateral conflict with geopolitical implications.

“This Trumpian brain failure is hard for normal people to understand because for normal people, abstract thought is natural, baked in, largely unnoticed. Normal people see the consequences, assess risk, make rational decisions most of the time.”

Democracy Grief Is Real

An article about the emotional reaction to watching your country  descend into blackness.   Here are key some quotes:

When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it….

Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues…

It’s like watching someone you love die of a wasting disease,” she said, speaking of our country. “Each day, you still have that little hope no matter what happens, you’re always going to have that little hope that everything’s going to turn out O.K., but every day it seems like we get hit by something else…

What’s going on in the government is so extreme, that people who have no history of overwhelming psychological trauma still feel crazed by this…

Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

 

Object-Oriented Programming — The Trillion Dollar Disaster

This article in medium.com talks how OOP hasn’t delivered on it’s promises, and how there’s no one objectively measuring this in the software development world.  I’ve been thinking along these lines for decades:

Here’s a summary of the article from slashdot.org:

Senior full-stack engineer Ilya Suzdalnitski recently published a lively 6,000-word essay calling object-oriented programming “a trillion dollar disaster.”

Precious time and brainpower are being spent thinking about “abstractions” and “design patterns” instead of solving real-world problems… Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) has been created with one goal in mind — to manage the complexity of procedural codebases. In other words, it was supposed to improve code organization. There’s no objective and open evidence that OOP is better than plain procedural programming… Instead of reducing complexity, it encourages promiscuous sharing of mutable state and introduces additional complexity with its numerous design patterns. OOP makes common development practices, like refactoring and testing, needlessly hard…

Using OOP is seemingly innocent in the short-term, especially on greenfield projects. But what are the long-term consequences of using OOP? OOP is a time bomb, set to explode sometime in the future when the codebase gets big enough. Projects get delayed, deadlines get missed, developers get burned-out, adding in new features becomes next to impossible. The organization labels the codebase as the “legacy codebase“, and the development team plans a rewrite…. OOP provides developers too many tools and choices, without imposing the right kinds of limitations. Even though OOP promises to address modularity and improve reusability, it fails to deliver on its promises…

I’m not criticizing Alan Kay’s OOP — he is a genius. I wish OOP was implemented the way he designed it. I’m criticizing the modern Java/C# approach to OOP… I think that it is plain wrong that OOP is considered the de-facto standard for code organization by many people, including those in very senior technical positions. It is also wrong that many mainstream languages don’t offer any other alternatives to code organization other than OOP.
The essay ultimately blames Java for the popularity of OOP, citing Alan Kay’s comment that Java “is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS.” It also quotes Linus Torvalds’s observation that “limiting your project to C means that people don’t screw things up with any idiotic ‘object model’.”

And it ultimately suggests Functional Programming as a superior alternative, making the following assertions about OOP:

  • “OOP code encourages the use of shared mutable state, which has been proven to be unsafe time and time again… [E]ncapsulation, in fact, is glorified global state.”
  • “OOP typically requires a lot of boilerplate code (low signal-to-noise ratio).”
  • “Some might disagree, but OOP code is notoriously difficult to unit test… [R]efactoring OOP code is really hard without dedicated tools like Resharper.”
  • “It is impossible to write good and maintainable Object-Oriented code.”

 

Bad drainage on Beach Dr between Old Spring Rd and Stoneybrook Dr

Here are a few pictures from Jan 21st of the drainage problem on Beach Dr between Old Spring Rd and Stoneybrook Dr (map):

 

The nearby drain under the road was not clogged, I think it’s just a result of water coming down the hill from the Mormon Temple after the record amount of rain at the end of 2018.

Montgomery Country DOT has been notified and said they will look into it.