John Lindal’s Blog

The Sword of Good?

Upon finishing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s The Sword of Good, it weighed heavily on my mind. A couple of hours later, I finally connected all the dots. It was wrong, deeply wrong, but it felt like the author agreed with what he wrote. I set out to analyze my initial thoughts…

First, why is it wrong?

The denouement comes when Hirou (surely a play on Hero), the bearer of the Sword of Good, sides with the Lord of Dark, enabling him to complete the Spell of Infinite Doom. Hirou chooses to do this because the Lord of Dark intends to end all the suffering in the world — and there is much, make no mistake! Noble though it seems, it is in fact Evil because it abolishes free will and turns everybody into a puppet:

…the great Balance of Nature will be, not upset, but annihilated utterly; and in it, set in place a single will, the will of the Lord of Dark. And he shall rule, not only the people, but the very fabric of the World itself, until the end of days.

Without free will, everybody might as well be dead. If sentience is lost, then they really are dead. If sentience remains, each person is imprisoned in their own head, unable to do anything but watch while the Lord of Dark imposes his will upon the world.

Second, why do I worry that the author agrees with Hirou’s decision?

In 2004, the author’s brother died, and the author announced this via an email. To me, the author’s rage against the universe in general and death in particular in this email sounds very similar to the Lord of Dark’s rage against Balance and the flood of pain with which the Sword of Good deluges Hirou during the story’s climax. Perhaps reconciliation for the author lies in Hirou’s last words:

“I don’t trust you either,” Hirou whispered, “but I don’t expect there’s anyone better”

but this seems pretty weak to me. What need is there for trust when everybody is for all intents and purposes dead?

Perhaps the story is instead intended as a cautionary tale, exemplifying the maxim, The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. This seems plausible, because after touching the Sword of Good, the Lord of Dark is warned by Hirou that The Sword only tests good intentions. Hirou clearly made his decision under duress: the Sword of Good dumped all the suffering in the world on him in one instant. If we interpret the conclusion as a warning to not press the Big Red Button when you’re in the grip of strong emotions, then it feels right.

The iPhone Unlocked

People despair that the iPhone remains a closed platform, but I don’t think this will last forever.

When the iPhone was first released, Apple claimed it didn’t need applications — web apps were the way to go — but once Apple extended the iTunes store, they went app-crazy. Multitasking has been ruled out since the iPhone’s inception for several good reasons, including battery life, but that is apparently about to change, too — reasons be damned. Apple is building a history of changing their minds. Big surprise They do whatever they believe will make them the most money at the time.

I don’t know of any serious competitors to iTunes, and from what I hear, all the up-and-coming competitors to the iPhone are currently unpolished enough that ordinary people still prefer the iPhone. Apple has a monopoly and is milking it as best they can. Despite the example set by Windows — it has never managed to compete with Mac OS on polish — I hope that other handsets will eventually provide serious competition for the iPhone. Windows is the 800 pound gorilla, so it never had to care, but the phone market is much more competitive. When the competition catches up, Apple will no longer have a monopoly, and they will have no choice but to stop acting that way.

The same holds true for the iPad. Apple originally laughed at the netbook market. Now they have a netbook killer — at least for ordinary people. Some iPhone apps will be usable on the iPad, especially games like Canabalt and Evacuation, but most apps will need to be re-imagined for the larger screen. This monopoly is barely getting started. We can only hope that competitors to the iPad will eventually force Apple to unlock it, too.

Avatar

The game has changed.

I was very skeptical when I read that James Cameron was out to out-Lucas George Lucas. I don’t believe it’s possible, but only because every game changing quantum leap up has the same general effect of blowing the public’s collective mind. But there is no question that Avatar has now changed the game in exactly the same way that Star Wars did thirty years ago. Audiences will not put up with 2D summer blockbusters much longer.

The story is certainly not as sweeping in scope as Star Wars, but Cameron deserves credit for at least thinking up an entire continent instead of only a few square miles of jungle. The characters were all stereotypes, and they died in the standard order, but they were still well done and served the purpose of making as deep an emotional impact as possible. As far as I can tell, that was what Cameron wanted: amplify the impact of watching full 3D by giving the audience characters to whom they can readily respond.

Chuck E. Cheese

We just escaped from the ear-splitting, crass, insult that is Chuck E. Cheese. No offense to the parents who scheduled the birthday party there, but the place is intolerable. While I carried my daughter to the car, she listed out everything she doesn’t want for her next birthday party: no loud music, no screaming children, no Chuck E. Cheese. Wise kid. From now on, I’m referring to the place as Yuck E. Cheese.

Fortune Cookies

I’ve finally found a fortune cookie with a prediction that I don’t want to come true:

Your most memorable dream will come true.

My most memorable dreams turn into stories, and while I enjoy writing them, I certainly wouldn’t want them to happen!

flex on Mac OS X

I just discovered a horrible bug in the default version of flex (2.5.33) on Mac OS X 10.5.8. It strips out [[ and ]] from literal strings inside %{...}%! First, I tried building flex 2.5.35 from source. This doesn’t mess up the strings, but it blows up inside yy_get_next_buffer(). Then I tried building flex 2.5.4 from source, but it does very strange stuff, too. I finally gave up and split the double square brackets up by using string concatenation: "...[""[:digit:]""]...". It’s ugly, but it works!

Erlang Message Passing — Part 2

I just finished a major overhaul of my Erlang Actor in Java library. Not only does it now provide three different threading strategies (persistent thread, transient thread, thread pool), but these strategies are pluggable. Implementations derive from Actor and implement act(), and the threading strategy is provided when the Actor is instantiated, by passing in a concrete implementation of Agent. I also added in the concept of a MessageSpy, for logging and monitoring. Any number of MessageSpies can be installed, and each one gets to look at every message that is sent.

Re-enabling Eee PC External Monitor

I use my Eee PC as my dev box at home, so of course I have my Sony monitor plugged in. The wonderful feature of Metacity on Eeebuntu is that it automatically adjusts to the size and resolution of my monitor. There is a minor bug, however: the size of the root window is reported to be the size of the notebook screen, not the size of my monitor. In an attempt to fix this, I made the mistake of using the Video Displays menu in the Eee PC Tray. This disabled the external monitor, no matter which option I selected! After tracing through shell scripts, I discovered that /var/eeepc/vga_saved needs to contain 1. This re-enabled the external monitor.

Update (9/30/2009): The latest system update has fixed this. The Video Displays menu works. After the update, the external monitor went back to low resolution, but as soon as I selected External Display Only, it worked perfectly.

Negotiations

I just finished another story. This one is set in the Star Trek universe, because I dreamt it that way

Medieval Poetry

I read up on Wagner’s Ring Cycle this weekend, so I guess it’s not surprising that I dreamt of epic poetry. Normally, I don’t remember anything I read in my dreams, but in the dream, my wife asked me to explain the first line, and I woke up immediately afterwards, so I was able to reconstruct it from the explanation:

As proceeded the lancing of night’s knees,

My interpretation is that, since lancing the knees would cripple rather than kill, this must refer to the pre-dawn.