Friendly Robot Overlord

I had an office space like moment yesterday. For those who know my working arrangements, I have it pretty good only working 4 days a week. For some reasons, the boss asked me to come in on Friday. 5 days is way too many days in a row to work, I am so tired now because of it. To anyone thinking of getting a job, ask for 4 days, you won't regret it. To anyone who has a job, next time they offer you a raise, ask for a cut in hours. Make 4 days a week the standard.

I still haven't fully mastered the 4x4 rubik's cube, I can solve it all the time 50% of the time, so my algorithm is basically 'solve it as best you can, if this fails (50% chance), scramble and try again'. I'd like to make my algorithm a bit more deterministic, but the final parity error is very stable - all of the methods I've used to mess up the cube have just got me back to the same position. I know that shortish solutions exist, but I'd even be happy with a longish solution (provided I can remember it).

I think most programmers don't like writing applications, they prefer solving problems. The part where you have to actually build an interface to the outside world is so boring compared to the actual solving of the problem. I can't decide what the solution is. It could be to turn everyone into programmers, so you don't need the normal-person-usable interface. It might be to make interface building fun (I'm not just talking about graphical interfaces here either). It might be to make some sort of automated interface builder. The programmer in me knows that this solution would be the most fun to implement, but I don't think it is very easy to do well (I'm picturing some system where you give it a description of the data you want, and it can turn that into an API, a command-line interface, a GUI, an argument-taking text based process, an ncurses thing or whatever). The problem is that it needs to actually understand the meaning of the data it is collecting, or else the interface won't make much sense.

Driving regularly seems to make you think about driving lots. I'm wondering what the roads would be like if everyone drove at the Nash equilibrium. I suspect that there would be larger gaps between cars, less lane changing, less braking, and faster taking off from a red light. Actually, my guess is that there is no equilibrium, and if everyone was driving in a way which minimised transport time for the whole group, then a greedier more aggressive driving style would be able to have shorter trips than the average driver.

I discovered the problem I was having with my stealth distortion. It was just normal boring distortion, being added in a place I didn't expect. My volume control goes up to 11, and the setting I had it at (81%) was just over unity gain (which is at 80%), so it was just clipping any samples which were very close to clipping. Quite boring, but whoever thought it would be a good idea to have a volume control that goes past 100% at this stage in the signal chain should have second thoughts.

I'm puzzled by why people have anti-virus software but no backups. The big problem with having a virus on your computer is that it will delete/corrupt/encrypt your data. Sending spams to people is bad, but it doesn't get in the way of doing your work. Slowing down your computer is bad, but it doesn't destroy your work. There is also the other problem of hard drive failure, or laptop theft, or whatever. It seems to me that the problem is the same here - you can get a new computer, but it won't come with all the stuff you were working on before - that is the stuff with value. Why not just have a good backup system, so the cost of a virus infection is low (you just restore your backup)? Having an antivirus and no backup does nothing to stop your hard drive from failing. As a word of warning, for me as soon as I bought an external hard drive to backup to, my main hard drive was corrupted. Then the other day at work a guy tried out some backup software, and then the next day his machine wouldn't boot. Sometimes I think that thinking about backup stuff means that your computer decides that it doesn't have to worry.

I recently joined a private health insurance fund, and when I was signing the forms and stuff, I crossed out all the stuff about allowing them to send me spam. Well, they are sending me spam and I can't decide what to do about it. I don't find it particularly annoying (it is all identified as coming from them, it all goes to its own address, and it is all marked as spam by someone before it gets to me, and I'm sure I could just ask them to stop sending one more time and they would), but it is the principle of the matter which makes it so difficult - and asking them to stop the normal way would just be boring.