鳳

心慟凡例 / An Instance of Sinthome

Alternate title: The Making of Hacking / 黑客行.

(Based on a conversation with 美乃滋章魚燒 on PerlYuYan / 中書珨, my first CPAN-published closet drama.)

---

其實“黑”很容易解釋：

NDS 上有一款 Scribblenauts 游戲，

小孩寫什麼就會出現什麼。

The idea of "hacking" is actually simple to illustrate: On 兔肝猴 there's a game called 撰空, where kids can sketch out arbitrary concepts and it would automagically manifest in-game.

從小看楚辭長大的小孩，

自然就會希望自己寫“昨夜西風凋碧樹”

就真的跑出碧樹來。

So a kid growing up reading ancient Hellenic tragedies, would naturally wish that penning "the sacred river Alph" and a river would promptly appear.

後來小孩長大了一點發現可以寫程式做到這件事。

就醬。:-)

Then the kid grew up a bit and discovered programming can accurately project infantile omnipotence into a transitional zone. That's it. :-)

---

後來照顧小孩的嬸嬸叔叔姑姑姑丈各自搬走，

小孩心臟病很嚴重不能出門旅行，

只能寫詩想念他們。

Shortly thereafter, the kid's primary caretakers - many uncles and aunts - formed families themselves and moved far away; the kid was born with severe ventricular septal defect and cannot travel at all, so the kid poured wailing into poetry.

後來發現這些詩只要押了特定的 -P 韻腳，

像是 TCP, UDP, IP, HTTP, XMPP，
就有魔力。

After a while, the kid had a discovery: As long as the poems rhyme on -協, such as 傳控協, 用信協, 跨協, 超文傳協 and 擴訊現協, mysterious power would appear out of nowhere.

小孩一開始祇會寫案頭詩，

後來再大一點，和其他人一起寫詩劇，

如今交織成噗浪和臉書。

So the kid first wrote closet drama, and later learned to compose huge verses based on multipart/mixed playwrights.

Then the Age of Melodrama arrived; the scripts from the previous Age became publicly performed on the stages of Twitter and Facebook.

---

藉助符文的力量，
真實世界裡的叔叔嬸嬸姑丈姑姑，
於是登入了詩中的幻境。

Thus it came to pass that Real aunts and uncles are now registering into the kid's Imaginary zone conjured from sheer Symbolic power.

以上是對於拉岡 Sinthome 概念的實例講解。:-)

The above is a field report illustrating Lacan's idea of 心慟. :-)

---

文章造天下，功業還蒼生。

(This is a Chinese translation of my previous blog post: Our paroqial fermament, one tide on another, written in mixed cn-tw vocabularies.)

（這是我前一篇部落格的中譯，標題原本引 Joyce，實在沒法譯，只好改周德偉的對聯，是當年辦藝立協時，每周在牆上看到的。）

Adina Levin 要我講講中文推特的資訊密度與英文有何不同，我答「且等咱們社算表（原圍紀算表）運行速度上的瑕疵都修好了再說。」

昨天我除完了蟲，這下只好勉力用英語編程了。

我首先想說的是，Ken 當年創發 UTF-8 編碼（見 Rob Pike 的現場實錄），實在已正確反映了英美字母和中日韓字元間的資訊差異。

想想，這通用字符集從 16 位元被迫擴充到了 21 位元，豈不正是「多如繁星，萬碼奔騰」的中文字害的麼？即便硬生生搞個漢同文，滅了無數重複字元，到頭來雙位元組仍是不敷使用。

假設推特的限制是 140 個 UTF-8「位元組」，那我們寫中文推特的感覺，和寫英文或許相去不遠。因為每個中文字占 3 個位元組——有時我用些生僻古字，超出了基本多語面，那就要占 4 個位元組了。

但歷史的意外，讓推特算的是 140 個「字符」。（不是「語素」，這我親身求證過了。）如此一則中文推特，就有 420 個位元組可用，相當於一篇博客短文了。

...且慢，還沒完呢！

要知道，中文有兩種寫法：Vernacular (白話) 和 Literary (文言)。

這白話呢，通常用兩個字符，來代表一個英文詞兒。像「網絡」，就是「Network」的意思。

在文言裡，每個字表示一組「概念」，像「網」，英文的「net」，可以是「網路」、「漁網」、「連網」、「網羅」的意思，全依上下文脈絡決定。

寫文言文時，字與字間既沒有空白，標點句讀也省略不少，這樣就有 140 組「概念」可用，換成英文得用 200 個詞來表示，也就是 1kb 的信息量。

理論如上，介紹完畢，接下來看看我最近的三則推特，小心求證一番。

第一則完全是大白話，第二則半文半白，第三則（最近的一則）則幾乎全是文言。

在白話到文言的過程裡，信息密度應該要遞增，這可以用英文譯本的長度來計算。

第一則是引陳映真（1936 年生，台灣當時影響力最大的作家及運動者之一）最近說過的話：

RT 陳映真：「文學退化，影像、聲音成為『當下世界』的符碼，」他說：「托爾斯泰生在今日，大部頭的作品也會喪失大量讀者。」現在的創作流行輕薄短小，又以自 我為中心，他因此形容這一代青年創作者「是脫光了衣服站在鏡子前面，凝視鏡中自己的身體與慾望… 他們讀的不多，不能成就崇高的文學」。(139 字)

谷歌將它譯成：

RT Chen Ying-chen: "Literature degradation, images, sounds become codes of present world," he said: "Tolstoy was born in today, voluminous works of the loss of a large number of readers will be."

Now the creation of popular thin and light short, Youyi self-centered, so he described this generation of young artists "is stripped of clothes and stand in front of the mirror, staring in the mirror his own body and desires ... they read much, does not develop high literature."

(475 字)

這譯本大致無誤，但小錯比比皆是（更別提對青年創作者身體的性別岐視了）。而最後一句更是整個譯錯：「他們讀得少」竟然譯成「他們讀得多」！

但至少這譯本還能達意，我們不妨除除看：中文與英文字元之比，是 3.4 倍。

接著第二則是我對陳的回應：

Re 陳映真：但背了整本維基，行遍無數國度，亦不成就崇高的文學。歐巴馬「以父之名」成不了作家，只好化藝術為行動、為現實。上一輩在高壓下，被迫濃粹經驗為符碼，而我們讀遍之後，融合歷史視域，還原此在而為 Hacktivism，竊自以為然。 (116 字)

谷歌的譯本這下亂了套，幾乎沒法看懂了。比例是 3.8 倍：

Chen Ying-chen Re: But the back of the whole wiki, line countless times a country, nor the noble achievements of literature. Obama, "Name of the Father" can not become a writer had to arts-based action, into reality. The last generation under high pressure, was forced to experience concentrated Intrade codes, and we read times, the integration of history, depending on the domain, restore this in the for Hacktivism, stolen from that it does.

(444 字)

我的翻譯如下，中英比率是 5.7：

Re Chen Ying-Zhen: But having an entire Wikipedia-backed memory, and having traveled to countless countries, still won't make high literature out of me.

Consider Obama who, having failed to launch a writer's career with "Dreams from my Father", is forced to project his art into activism and into reality-shaping.

My earlier generation, under tremendous Fascist pressure, is forced to distill their subjective experience to highly compressed literary code.

When my generation finished deciphering those codes to achieve a fusion of horizons, we decompressed them into the here-and-now as Hacktivism. This kind of adaption is IMHO natural and quite justified.

(662 字)

緊接著看第三則，近一步解釋前面的看法，大致用文言寫成：

舉實例言，《金盾工程》（即「功夫網」、「資訊長城」），無異吾儕之柏林牆。我十年前譯寫自由網，而至其後 Tor、無界等武裝，無非保持對話、以獨促統之意。與 Beijing.pm 嘗言：「功網未散，何以為族？」。凡此種種，生自文事，衍為武功，皆此代之共業。 (127 字)

谷歌譯出 509 字來，長則長矣，意義盡失（「促進意大利之統一」？？），故不在此引述。茲譯如下：

As a concrete example, for our contemporary people, the "Golden Shield Project" (a.k.a., the "Gong-Fu Web", "Great Firewall of China") is no different from the Berlin Wall.

Ten years ago I translated and coded for the Freenet project; along with its follow-ups such as Tor and Wu-Jie, they're nothing but cyberspace armaments designed with the sole purpose of keeping the conversation flowing.

This way we maintain our independent identity, in the hope of accelerating a fusion of horizons with the Chinese government.

I've told Beijing.pm: "Without the dissipation of the Great Firewall, how can we make one people out of us?"

All these circumstances, born out of the literary world, has derived into the cyberspace hacktivism, and affected us in creating a software-shaped reality. This is a factor in the shared karmic setting of this generation.

(848 字)

正如所料，密度比例達到了 6.67 倍。切記，上述範例並非刻意作成：中文推特寫手，確實活在 2~8 倍於英文寫手的資訊密度當中。

Our paroqial fermament, one tide on another.

(For a Chinese translation of this blog entry, see 中譯本：「文章造天下，功業還蒼生。」)

(Alternate title: "Chinese Twitter users live in a density 2x to 8x their English counterparts; here's why.")

I promised Adina Levin a treatise on the information density of Chinese characters on Twitter "after all SocialCalc (nee wikiCalc) performance bugs are fixed".

As I've fixed them yesterday, let's try coding some English...

I'll begin by saying that Ken's in(ter)vention of UTF-8 (as narrated by Rob Pike) accurately reflects the relative information density between ASCII and CJK characters.

After all, UCS was extended from 16-bits to 21-bits precisely because so damn many Chinese characters need to be encoded, even after the controversial decimation from the Han unification effort.

Hypothetically, if Twitter had set its limit to 140 UTF-8 bytes, then our experience when tweeting Chinese would be on par with tweeting English, because each Chinese character would then take 3 bytes — and since I occasionally venture beyond the BMP, sometimes 4 bytes.

By a historical accident, though, Twitter counts in characters. (Not graphemes, as I've clinically proved.) So that gives a Chinese tweet 420 effective bytes to work with, which is already sufficient for a short blog post.

...but wait, there's more!

You see, there are two modes of Chinese: Vernacular (白話) as well as Literary (文言).

Typically, the vernacular mode takes two characters to encode a English word, e.g. "網路" for "network".

While in Literary mode, one character encodes a concept, e.g. "網" for "net" can stand for "network", "fishnet", "to connect", or "to capture", depending on surrounding context.

So by writing in Literary mode, which conveniently also elides spaces and only uses minimal punctuation, gives me 140 concepts to work with, which is about 200 English words, or nearly 1kb of English text.

With that brief intro, let's use my three most recent tweets for a concrete demonstration.

The first one is entirely in vernacular mode, the second one is in mixed mode, while the third (most recent) one is written almost completely in Literary mode.

We shall see how the information density increases with the shift of modes, as compared with their English translations.

The first one is a quote from Chen Ying-Zhen, b. 1936, one of the greatest Taiwanese author and activist of his generation, who recently uttered:

RT 陳映真：「文學退化，影像、聲音成為『當下世界』的符碼，」他說：「托爾斯泰生在今日，大部頭的作品也會喪失大量讀者。」現在的創作流行輕薄短小，又以自我為中心，他因此形容這一代青年創作者「是脫光了衣服站在鏡子前面，凝視鏡中自己的身體與慾望… 他們讀的不多，不能成就崇高的文學」。(139 characters)

Google Translate renders the above as:

RT Chen Ying-chen: "Literature degradation, images, sounds become codes of present world," he said: "Tolstoy was born in today, voluminous works of the loss of a large number of readers will be."

Now the creation of popular thin and light short, Youyi self-centered, so he described this generation of young artists "is stripped of clothes and stand in front of the mirror, staring in the mirror his own body and desires ... they read much, does not develop high literature."

(475 characters)

The translation is subtly wrong on multiple regards (not to mention having a sexist default). It's especially wrong on the last sentence, where Chen actually said "they don't read much"!

But it's at least comprehensible, and will serve as a good compression-ratio example: the Chinese/English information density ratio here is 3.4x.

Now the second one is from me, a reply to Chen:

Re 陳映真：但背了整本維基，行遍無數國度，亦不成就崇高的文學。歐巴馬「以父之名」成不了作家，只好化藝術為行動、為現實。上一輩在高壓下，被迫濃粹經驗為符碼，而我們讀遍之後，融合歷史視域，還原此在而為 Hacktivism，竊自以為然。 (116 characters)

The Google Translation is much weaker this time, bordering on incomprehensible, with a ratio of 3.8x:

Chen Ying-chen Re: But the back of the whole wiki, line countless times a country, nor the noble achievements of literature. Obama, "Name of the Father" can not become a writer had to arts-based action, into reality. The last generation under high pressure, was forced to experience concentrated Intrade codes, and we read times, the integration of history, depending on the domain, restore this in the for Hacktivism, stolen from that it does.

(444 characters)

My own translation would be something like this, with a 5.7x ratio:

Re Chen Ying-Zhen: But having an entire Wikipedia-backed memory, and having traveled to countless countries, still won't make high literature out of me.

Consider Obama who, having failed to launch a writer's career with "Dreams from my Father", is forced to project his art into activism and into reality-shaping.

My earlier generation, under tremendous Fascist pressure, is forced to distill their subjective experience to highly compressed literary code.

When my generation finished deciphering those codes to achieve a fusion of horizons, we decompressed them into the here-and-now as Hacktivism. This kind of adaption is IMHO natural and quite justified.

(662 characters)

This leads us to the third tweet, a follow-on elaboration composed entirely in Literary mode:

舉實例言，《金盾工程》（即「功夫網」、「資訊長城」），無異吾儕之柏林牆。我十年前譯寫自由網，而至其後 Tor、無界等武裝，無非保持對話、以獨促統之意。與 Beijing.pm 嘗言：「功網未散，何以為族？」。凡此種種，生自文事，衍為武功，皆此代之共業。 (127 characters)

The Google translation at 509 characters is entirely incomprehensible ("promoting unification of Italy"??), so I'll not even bother quoting here. My translation:

As a concrete example, for our contemporary people, the "Golden Shield Project" (a.k.a., the "Gong-Fu Web", "Great Firewall of China") is no different from the Berlin Wall.

Ten years ago I translated and coded for the Freenet project; along with its follow-ups such as Tor and Wu-Jie, they're nothing but cyberspace armaments designed with the sole purpose of keeping the conversation flowing.

This way we maintain our independent identity, in the hope of accelerating a fusion of horizons with the Chinese government.

I've told Beijing.pm: "Without the dissipation of the Great Firewall, how can we make one people out of us?"

All these circumstances, born out of the literary world, has spawned into cyberspace as hacktivism, and affected us in creating a software-shaped reality. This is a factor in the shared karmic setting of this generation.

(848 characters)

Here the ratio is 6.67x. Bear in mind that this is not an edge-case of maximum compression rate; Chinese Twitter users constantly live in a density anywhere from 2x to 8x of their English counterparts.

My hobby: Troll hugging.

(Warning: Long post. Executive summary: Do not feed trolls, but hug them tenderly until they feel comfortable enough to speak about their authentic selves, and then they turn into beautiful princes(s).)

Surprisingly, yesterday's short conversation on #padre got turned into a lovely textual analysis and then into collaborative deconstruction.

That seems fun, so allow me doing some of my own textual analysis here, based on the same channel's log, about 28 hours later. The relevant lines-of-conversation are in bold:

22:32:49 --> asdgasd (~asdgas@cpe-67-241-80-255.twcny.res.rr.com) joins #padre
22:32:52 <asdgasd> hello
22:32:59 <asdgasd> i'm an experienced programmer posing as a newbie
22:32:59 <Alias> hi
22:33:04 <Alias> :)
22:33:10 <asdgasd> so how about that C++
22:33:12 <GabrielVieira> Alias: it refreshs each time the editor or the directory browser gets focused
22:33:18 <asdgasd> i hear its microsofts best product
22:33:28  GabrielVieira: Not for me it doesn't
22:34:00 <GabrielVieira> Alias: try to minimize and restore Padre window and see if it updates
22:34:06 <asdgasd> so how do i make an object execute another object, in imperial mode
22:34:09 <asdgasd> i mean, imperative mode
22:34:18 <asdgasd> declarative programming
22:34:20 <Hyppolit> svn: r7558 | szabgab++ | http://padre.perlide.org/trac/changeset/7558
22:34:20 <Hyppolit> add several recent posts to the about page
22:34:20 <Hyppolit> trunk/template.padre.perlide.org/data/

For the first two minutes, we can see asdgasd free-associating on the subjects of programming, without apparent on-topic concepts with the #padre channel. Instead, they were coined to invite responses that address their own personal concerns.

22:34:24 <Alias> $object1->mtfnpy($object2)

Here we see a brilliant response, using the non-sensical "mtfnpy" meme to remind that asdgasd's questions did not make sense among this channel's participants.

22:34:37 <asdgasd> i can't think of anything funny to say
22:34:42 <GabrielVieira> when editor gets focused.. it calls directory->refresh; the same occurs when directory gets focused
22:34:46 <Ryan52> mtfnpy?
22:35:03 <asdgasd> wow is that anything like sprintf???
22:35:41 <Ryan52> oh, right, that.
22:35:51 * Ryan52 forgot about mtfnpy
22:35:58 <garu> silly Ryan52 
22:36:33 <asdgasd> mtfnpy totally fucking now pwns you
22:36:36 <-- SvenDowideit (~SvenDowid@124-171-151-218.dyn.iinet.net.au) quits (Ping timeout: 360 seconds)
22:36:54 <Ryan52> I still don't understand it tho...
22:37:04  <Alias> You arent' meant to
22:37:13  <Alias> You're just meant to be pwned by it

However, discussion quickly re-focused on the nonsensical concept itself. People formed relations with the new meme, but they did not form relationships with asdgasd.

22:37:14 <asdgasd> now just so i'm clear, this is some sort of perl 6 compiler right?
22:37:18 <Ryan52> that's what I expected.
22:37:42 <asdgasd> an IDE huh
22:39:01 * Alias ponders who we know that is privvy to that kind of in joke in NY
22:39:20 <asdgasd> i'm god of the internet
22:39:30 <GabrielVieira> Alias: did you trie?
22:39:42 <asdgasd> cpan ponders, another night?
22:39:47 <Alias> asdgasd: Clearly, but which one...

Having tried memes as a transitional way of conversation-by-proxy, asdgasd now googles up relevant concepts, trying to form more memetic links, which are unfortunately far beyond what the channel's main focus is, namely getting Padre 0.44 properly released and tested.

Alias gave another witty response, but the annoyance came through: By re-affirming this proxied, inauthentic personality "god of the internet", asdgasd is again without ways to properly bond with other people in this channel.

22:39:51 <Alias>  trie?
22:39:56 <GabrielVieira> try
22:39:58 <GabrielVieira> :)
22:39:59 <asdgasd> perl elicits, receptive, loving
22:40:30 <Alias> GabrielVieira: Of course I tried, I'm just using Perl normally, switching between different files
22:40:36 <asdgasd> monks open night, kimonos & seduction
22:41:11 <Alias> GabrielVieira: It's possible that it's not firing if changing between different editors in the same project?

At this point, asdgasd became /ignore'd by pretty much everybody.

What we saw here may be described as "troll formation"; the subject is encouraged into replicating more and more delinquent memes in order to solicit attention, but those memes became more and more distracting, ensuring a negative feedback cycle.

At around 22:40, I context-switched into the #padre channel, and quickly scanned the backlog.

22:41:44 --- audreyt|work is now known as audreyt
22:42:03 <Alias> audreyt: What timezone are you living in these days?
22:42:07 <audreyt> asdgasd: hey. I sense that you come here to be hugged properly.
22:42:14 * audreyt hugs asdgasd. there. please, be happy.

People who knew me before in #perl6 might recall I've recruited many perl-bashers into Pugs contributors by listening to what they have to say, and then offer them commit bits to fix those concerns; that has been variously labelled "judo" or "aikido" or other memes related to martial arts.

Personally, I prefer "hugging", as it captures the idea of immediately forming a surface on which real relationships can form, so the other person can comfortably talk about why they made attention-seeking utterances.

22:42:19 <asdgasd> audreyt: i came here right after reading your name
22:42:20 <asdgasd> actually
22:42:23 <asdgasd> funny story
22:42:30 <asdgasd> i'm not going to tell it though

This had immediate impact; asdgasd can now relate something about themself, and welcomes my inquiry via a puzzle.

At this point, had I said "oooh! pray tell, what is the story?", then I'd be a perfect correspondent (aka "feeding the troll"), and probably paralyze the entire channel for quite some time.

Instead, I tried to be a good-enough correspondent (cf. Winnicott's idea of a "good enough mother"), allowing some time lapse before providing feedback, and only replied to utterances that aids in genuine human contact.

22:42:31 <audreyt> Alias: GMT+8 Taipei
22:42:35 <Alias> ok
22:42:40 <audreyt> you?
22:42:46 <Alias> Australia/Sydney
22:42:49 <GabrielVieira> Alias: maybe
22:42:51 <Alias> (DateTime.pm only here) :)
22:42:55 <audreyt> lol
22:43:01 <audreyt> ah, back at home. you parents doing ok?
22:43:10 <Alias> Yeah, fine

The above was not really about delaying the response time. I genuinely care about Adam(Alias)'s parents, as they have been very kind to me when I stayed in their home; it was Christmas back then, and they gave me a wonderful holding environment to begin reflecting about my gender identity.

Then Alias and I started discussing technical issues about PAR reentrancy bugs, why Padre doesn't yet have a clear use case of a PAR-based .xs plugin repository, and what Moose.pm's startup time costs mean in the context of Padre.

While the technical points were nice and fun, I'll spare you the details, and simply paste what asdgasd continually tried to say inbetween these discussions:

22:48:06 <asdgasd> i wrote this http://pastebin.com/d2c1fcca5
22:48:11 <asdgasd> and padre won't compile it
22:48:32 <asdgasd> also it's missing a few functions

Here we see a real improvement. The pasted code is in Haskell, which makes funny beeping noises. It is a very good analogy of what asdgasd is trying to do in #padre.  It's also somewhat relevant; Padre can conceivably some day become a IDE for Haskell via a GHC plugin.

But the relevance was too weak, so we still can't establish meaningful conversation. As the text says itself, we're still missing a few functions.

After a lengthy discussion on the importance of being closer to Wx wrappers rather than building too many abstractions over it, I suddenly recall that the Chandler team had faced a similar technical dilemma:

22:51:03 <audreyt> assuming you've read Dreaming In Code (the book) that deals with Wx?
22:51:05 <pece> Adobe has Speed Launcher ;)
22:51:12 <Alias> Nope
22:51:24 * Alias has mostly been reading economics, marketing and stats books
22:51:27 <audreyt> please do in your spare cycle. Chandler is a lot like Padre technically.
22:51:48 <audreyt> Python/Wx with ambitious but not well charted goal, top-notch programmers
22:51:57 <audreyt> only difference is they didn't run it as anarchy, so they failed, like, utterly.
22:51:58 <audreyt> :)
22:52:14 <audreyt> (and DIC chronicles all the lessons in painful detail.)

Now that was very unfair of me, and I'd like to apologize publicly.

I've been in #chandler for months now, and there were still some traffic every now and then (about once a week), so it was wrong for me to say the Chandler community has failed utterly, any more than Pugs had failed utterly.

Chandler the desktop client was simply dormant (and is functionally usable), and the server-side Cosmo had lived on to be a very nice calendaring server.

The point about anarchy is valid, though; like #perl6 and #parrot, #padre is constantly revamping their own methodology and infrastructure, while Chandler used a very top-down design model which discouraged outsider involvement.

In any case, this proved to be a close-enough memetic bridge for asdgasd to start communicating collaboratively:

22:52:15 <Alias>  Anarchy isn't necesarily the answer :)
22:52:25 <Alias> It's just a great answer for when you are faced with an infinite scope :)
22:52:35 <audreyt> sure, it's a beginning of an answer. :)
22:52:53 <asdgasd> anarchy is always the answer
22:52:57 <audreyt> or rather, the welcoming of answers, rather than forcing answers on everyone...
22:53:09 <asdgasd> the people with the worst judgment always end up in power

Now we know something about asdgasd, and we do share the same critical attitude toward authoritarian structures. So I tried a direct intervention-by-example:

22:53:18 <audreyt> but let me not distract you further with random ramblings. it's great to see you here :-)
22:53:25 <Alias> Ditto
22:53:49 <Alias> I phear a little for the sanity of the Padre codebase, but welcome :)
22:54:17 <jq> Alias: are you familiar with the project part of padre's code?
22:54:20 <audreyt> I'll keep phantasies to my new field that is psychoanalysis and cog. science, so your project will be spared of insanity :)

The hope here was that asdgasd would come out of unconscious phantasies and join us in a bounded-rational reality. It worked!

22:55:04 <asdgasd> hey audrey, want to write a linguistic engine with me
22:55:07 <asdgasd> i'm doing it in haskell ;)
22:55:15 <audreyt> asdgasd: url?

Well, my habit of asking "url?" had not changed a bit; descriptions of objects cannot be resolved into real ideas without a pointer, and URL is a very good and precise way to motivate people putting their ideas into resolvable entities.

22:55:22 <asdgasd> i wrote a spec a year ago
22:55:27 <asdgasd> but it's shit compared to what i have now
22:55:55 <asdgasd> it's only a skip and a jump from AI

Seeing that we now enter a shared meme-space, namely the natural-language processing branch of AI, the only remaining step is to leave the transitional zone and begin discussing reality:

22:57:14 <audreyt> asdgasd: let's take this conversation off #padre and into /msg -- what is the url to your spec?

What follows are private conversations, so I'm not at liberty to paste here.

Suffice it to say that I learned a lot about asdgasd's aspirations, the state of the art in structural grammar models for western languages, the AI:AMA book and their excellent googlecode-hosted repositories, two pieces of nicely composed living poetry, and briefly shared our thoughts on Joyce's writings.

In short, it was warm and nice; I learned about the real name of asdgasd, and they is a rather likable fellow.

So I was glad that I hugged a troll, and it made my day. Would you agree?

Why? Such me.

(Originally posted as a reply on Miyagawa's blog post on _why's disappearance.)

I miss collaborating with _why, too, and it was sad to see that one of _why's parting (re)tweet was:

"programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."

I had such an emotional breakdown in Brazil, when chromatic rather insistently pressed me on use.perl about why I have not released Perl 6 already, but instead taking up precious mind-share from the Parrot project.

He made it all sounds like it's my fault that Perl 6 was delayed, with my well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt at trying to implement it.

He had apologized swiftly the next day on IRC -- I was paralyzed and cannot log in, but I read the logs from #perl6, but it hurt a lot, and burnt for a very long time.

Back then all I could think about is, well then, let my identity be cancelled; code never lasts more than a decade anyway, and I can transfer my hard disk -- and my memory -- to Flavio, and disappear from this particular belief circle entirely.

It's been years ago, and I've reconcilled with chromatic when I was extremely ill with Hepatitis. He didn't really mean it that harshly; he was just anxious. Also, the same words just don't mean the same meanings to each of us.

Then I found some other fixation point, and simply disappeared; I'm glad, though, that I did not leave a self-destructive note like David did with Darcs; though I'm sure David didn't really mean it that way, either.

Well, such is The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Now I'm (gradually) back to hacking, and tweeting, and githubbing; I can't really say "what didn't kill me made me stronger", but when one resurfaces, one brings newly dived/drived/derived wisdom from other worlds -- underworlds -- as well.

So I hope that _why resurface some day, not neccessarily in programming, but in life. Soul-shards like the emails you quoted also kept him alive in each of _why's collaborators, and that  -- a tradition of human memories -- may last longer than code, if not as precise as code.

鳳たんです!

Last month when I visited Tokyo, I was very flattered (and pleasantly surprised) when fellow Japanese hackers -- Miyagawa and Takesako in particular -- referred to me as "otori-tan", literally the "phoenix girl", where phoenix is my Chinese chosen name.

The fascinating thing is that this sounds almost exactly the same as the Japanese romanization of "Audrey Tang", my English chosen name. Miyagawa wondered if I knew about this strange coincidence -- I really did not. :-)

Wikipedia has some more information about the -tan suffix, as seen in e.g. the OS-tan phenomenon. After some ego-googling, it seems that this usage started from lolipop's blog, then subsequently propagated to Rocco's and other places.  Lovely!

The other Audrey Tang.

I just discovered another Audrey Tang, then I remembered gaal mentioning her in #perl6 the other day.  Apparently she worked at amazon.com and now microsoft.com, and is also a geeky girl who likes shiny gadgets. Cool!

FWIW, Ingy thinks my new name is a good refactoring of the old one; I'm sure people who tried to pronounce my old name would agree. :-)

Why did the journal move?

This is becoming a FAQ on #perl6, so I'll list the reason here briefly.

The short answer is: This makes me more motivated to write.

Part of it feels like the (very early) decision to move #perl6 from irc.perl.org to irc.freenode.net, to encourage more diverse discussion from people focused on non-perl languages, as well as on areas other than  programming language technologies.

Part of it is that I need a backstage journal to write about myself and off-topic metajournaling (such as this entry), and creating two use.perl journals for this would be very confusing.

Part of it is I'd like to put in more multimedia contents -- visiolization pictues, movies, tutorials, podcasts -- and TypePad offers much better support for these things.

Part of it is per-entry categoriestags really helps me ditching the "group everything in Day ###" format, and give separate subprojects the attention they deserve. Archiving and searching is also much easier this way.

Part of it is I have a soft spot for Atom-based publishing, having participated a little bit during its move to IETF standardization.  I look forward to synchronize journals in a SVK-like manner in the future, instead of relying on <textarea> and screen scraping.

Part of it is I really like bright white background and paragraph width that is narrower than the full screen, with drops of purpleish and bluish colors.  It's kinda silly, but I'm a silly girl like that.

Oh and finally, I'm very grateful to Six Apart for their generous offer of hosting this journal.  Thanks folks!

Runtime Typecasting.

Several people asked me to write something linkable about my recent name and gender change, so here's an initial sketch.

All four names (original/new * Chinese/English) are listed on the Wikipedia page about me. The new names had replaced original ones in my passport and national ID card (yes, .tw does have such things), so legal documents -- including copyright notices -- need to carry the new name.

I'm okay with people addressing me with the handle autrijus, but "Audrey Tang" is much preferred over "Autrijus Tang".  I have also changed my IRC nickname from autrijus to audreyt in magnet, ircnet and freenode.

About the gender change: I've been shutting Reality off and lived almost exclusively on the net for many years, because my brain knows for sure that I'm a woman, but the social expectation demanded otherwise -- a classic transgender situation that caused high background anxiety, making it difficult for me to meet and relate to other people.

With love and support from many people (my lover/partner, several camelfolks and lambdafolks, my family, a few real-world friends), I decided to reconcile my outward appearance with my self image (which, among the myriad of gender identity labels, is perhaps closest to a winkte).

Now things had improved a lot after a few minor operations, adjustments in appearance, as well as counseling; more surgeries are expected in the future.

As such, for people writing or speaking in languages that have gender-specific pronouns, I would very much prefer female pronouns for all of past, present and future tenses. Thanks for your understanding. :-)

Backstage...

All the [OT] bits in the old use.perl journal will now go here; namely, my life in general that are not related to programming projects.