30.7.09

I, arch-villain

that's right, it's time for more information than you wanted about Lepht's fucked-up relationship with its ex. i write it down because it makes me feel better, so go 'head and ignore it.

i've been informed - and looking at his LiveJournal (yes), my source was entirely correct - that w3dyt has become rather obsessed with this 'beating me at grades' idea. i'm told he no longer even tells people who he means to 'win' against, or how - it's ingrown into his head that i, Lepht Anonym, am the academic equivalent of Blofeld, stroking my pet gimp as i hog all the best jobs and grades, laughing at him, surrounded by a cadre of cronies i've hypnotised into following me. in this scenario, w3dyt is of course James Bond, who is going to beat Blofeld because he is the hero and that is what always happens with heroes. it would seem that success on my part has been needling him ever since he decided that the break-up - which was a joint effort in failure - was to be my dain-bramaged doing.

this frightens me, and makes me sad. frightens me because there's more opportunities for him to be angry when i do well coming - the CSD welcome address, for instance, where i'll be up on stage in front of him recieving prizes i won and he didn't - or class, where i'm fairly sure he is going to find out about the forementioned pet gimp and try to do something about it. as we've seen, if he decided to, the question of who'd be crying in the back of the ambulance isn't a hard one.

it makes me so sad because this is so far from what academia should be about. i hear ya - how can someone who writes in all smalls possibly tell us what academia is about? - but i didn't get the idea on my own; it came from the open-source scene here, and from the University itself, and from the guys with doctorates i hang around with these days, of whom i ain't one yet. w3dyt says he's going to 'win' because he thinks of what we do as a contest, where if you didn't get the highest marks, you lost. but it's not like that - we're not here to fight. we're here to collaborate. we're here to help each other learn, get degrees, go out into the world and use that knowledge to help other people who have different knowledge, because in turn, they help us.

it makes me sad that a guy with so much potential - not to be top of the class, but to act as any smart human being can, as a collaborator to help other human beings - is wasting his energy on this futile, puerile inferiority complex. he's not going to 'beat me'. if he did, i wouldn't care - if he got a research job that i didn't, it would mean that he was the one who could contribute more to computing science in that particular post. if he got a first and i got a second-class degree, it would mean that he worked harder than i did, and in contrast to a year or two years ago, that would impact my self-esteem not in the slightest. i am less fragile, now, than he thinks.

i hope this obsession fades from his mind once term starts. i hope his friend on LiveJournal stops placating him by telling him it's OK to have a bitter commitment to tearing a person down, even one that will never work. and i hope he gets a boyfriend or girlfriend who really does love him, who'll distract him from thinking about me, because if it doesn't, the friend doesn't and he doesn't, i can't see that this is going to end healthily.

L

PS. i retract what i said about the novel. it occurs to me that having a literary penchant makes me a verbose, pompous motherfucker, and possibly isn't therefore all that 'sweet'.

6 comments:

spoon said...

> so go 'head and ignore it.

But how can I ignore your blog? It forms part of my limited contact with reality!

> the question of who'd be crying in the back of the ambulance isn't a hard one.

It is unfortunate, the violence is frightening ( the rest is important, but ethereal ).

I don't want to patronize, ( it's always bad when a sentence begins like that ) but stay away from violent people. I have severed ties because the people in question become violently aggressive or are thieves. It is best to avoid all contact with people with these sorts of issues.

> it would seem that success on my part has been needling him

I'm a little envious myself of your success, especially your stay in Milan. It makes me want to tell you how cool my tech is, so that I can feel as if I am equally cool! However I shall assert control over myself ( at least until it bloody works properly :), but aye, things are truly being cool for you!

How is Milan/are you still there?/What does your work there involve?

Spooon

Lepht said...

human contact! i forget this blog has readers sometimes. sorry for seeming like i was ignorin' ya - been jacked in to my precious, ignorin' the world.

i do try and stay away from him, and he's the only violent guy i know - apart from yours truly, since before i came here i got in a fair few fights myself. like i said, it just makes me sad that he hasn't learned anything besides bitterness from the whole sorry affair.

you're envious of my stuff? shit, son, we should just swap and be done with it. that Erlang Brainfuck interpreter is a thing of purty.

besides, i overheard the guy i work for saying something interesting: that i'm the best summer student he's had, not because i'm talented but because i'm self-directed. in other words, i'm valuable to them as a mid-level, single-minded workaholic (yes, a man who is addicted to workahol.)

i'm here in the industrial wonderland for one more day, but alas, my work here is done - i was rebuilding, testing and otherwise resuscitating the cluster here. 100 nodes, as it turned out, was a misunderstanding - there were 200 broken boxes to begin with, which made a cluster of 25 nodes, which b0rked - i got 19 working, but then the head node fried (literally) so now there's 18 nodes and a head.

it is pretty fucking cool though.

L

Spooon

Lepht said...

hey, why does it say "Spooon" at the end of that?

L

spoon said...

Even 18 nodes must be a powerhouse! I'd love a shot! That is seriously cool.

Also, your prose ( at least, from what I've read on this blog ) is excellent, and far from pompous - though I share your fears! Even now, I am undergoing a nauseous presentiment regarding my exorbitantly aureate manipulation of the lexicon, whereby the dyspepsia I experience is augmented with every new morpheme I concatenate to the burgeon agglomeration of grandiloquent expressions presently inscribed herein. Alas!

But I do like Erlang -- that particular program is unfortunately written without any comments - aside from the unuseful copyright notice:

% All by Johnny Morrice. Me Me Me. Copyright 2009. So ha.

To rather prematurely defeat my resolution of the last post, the new tech I was talking about is a bytecode compiled object language called Dune.

Cool things which I have working already: higher order functions, lexical scoping and closures, symbolic pattern matching, and classes and objects ( and classes are objects :).

I have the VM and a compiler from a core language to VM code ( essentially the core language is just Dune which has already been successfully type-checked, and passed through desugaring )

It's a lot to ask, but I'd really appreciate some help! Especially in distributed computing ( it's so hot right now). I trust you, and know you're cool, so it would be amazing if you'd help. Unfortunately, all I could really give you in return for working on this would be write access to the repository ( Note: a repository doesn't exist yet, but if you're immediately interested, I could set one up ).

Of course if you're not interested then I'll be okay, except for the fact I'll cry, and the standard library won't have a distributed computing module, and then it will cry too, and it eventually it will end up at the workhouse where all the destitute standard libraries go because you weren't its friend and it will probably die there! But no pressure mkay? Cool.

Since really the major problem for now is to make a type checker, I aim to get a usable prototype of the full system by the end of August, so if you're interested now, or later, please give a shout!

Also, a quote on programming talent

PS. spoooon!

Lepht said...

it is. not that i've gotten to run anything on this one - i spent the whole week fixing the damn thing, but it's all gravy, i've got a screwdriver in my hand, i'm happy.

plus, i got to scare several gents with how they come in and i'm sitting on the workbench, apparently charming screws out from the motherboard just by touching them, with two more stuck to the back of my hand (implants = magic.)

that's a ten-point sentence right there. give that man the Kewpie doll.

you make this Dune language up yourself? cause if you did, and it was you that named it as well as came up with the brainmelt that is classes-as-objects, i will have to ask you to marry me.

help i can indeed offer, but probably not help of the kind you want - i'm not a good programmer, but i work well on little biddy tasks nobody else wants to handle. point me at a task and give me vague instructions, and i might be of some use. i'll give it a crack, at any rate, sounds like a good way to improve my programming.

besides, what kind of asshole would make a standard library cry? that's like dropkicking a kitten.

spoon said...

Implants give you the unnatural advantage, but be careful, Shodan is everywhere!

It makes me very happy that you have offered help. I need to assemble a sort of team:

Thinking about it, when someone else becomes interested ( which I sincerely desire - a language without users is as depressing as a bankrupt amusement park ), a mailing list would be useful.

In the next couple of days I'm gonna fix up what I have so far, generate documentation, write a manual and some sample programs. Then put it all up in a repository. Is github ok?

Also, yes I did invent Dune. I was thinking about OCaml and the perl Camel, and D is my favourite letter. Also I like the book, but we can't really have two moons as a logo or anything like that -- it would be like when people use Einstein's image in advertisements and I'd hate to cheapen the novel. Though I wonder what sort of emotive artwork we could have...

Also, the concept of classes as objects was AFAIK originally a feature of smalltalk. It's also something which has found it's way into the ruby language.

However Dune's object model is very different from both smalltalk and ruby - though most of the time, it's great design to pass messages like smalltalk, and this encouraged with Dune.

But I'll send you an email to your trioptimum address, explaining briefly how Dune works, though any discussion of the type system is going to involve hand-waving, since it's not built yet.

As well as this, I'm going to elaborate on what I think is a good development process for writing Dune programs -- once the prototype compiler is done, I'm going to focus on writing some development tools which support these notions, so that's kinda what the deal with that shizz is.

Also I'll send you a vague description of possible the problems which might be encountered when it comes to clustering Dune.

But cheers, I really appreciate it!

Please slice away at my ideas and code; they could both use improvement.

Johnny

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