Anhedon

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One tone, and an empty mind
Is the greatest sound that makes the body blind.

Questions in the ether;
My slow thinking is seeing
The big picture.
You can’t comprehend the details.
As you inhale,
I’m analyzing from every conceivable angle.

I can’t speak, I can’t eat, think, or sleep.
Heard that somewhere but it sounded cheap.
Have you ever gone for days, mind in a haze,
Wishing you could focus on something – anything –
Trapped, lost in a malaise?

Give me a break.
The systems you’re creating are at stake.
I could fix it – tear down and rebuild –
Listen, blind leader!
You’re making a mistake.

Remember when I said one tone – empty mind?
How long until the body goes blind?

Gaza Shooting

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The incident surrounding the aid trucks in Gaza city yesterday is a real tragedy. The worst thing anyone could do would be to minimize it. It’s also important that we be mindful of the context.

1) Israel is at war with Gaza. The government of Gaza, Hamas, is still dedicated to the annihilation of every last Jewish civilian living in the nation of Israel. The war will only end when either Hamas has been permanently neutralized, or every last Jewish civilian has been horrifically slaughtered.

As the Palestinian activists like to remind us, the war I’m referring to didn’t begin on October 7th; while Israel has only officially been at war with Gaza since then, various Palestinian militant groups have been at war with Israel continuously since 1948.

2) The details surrounding the incident are unclear. There is lots of video footage of perfectly healthy Palestinian men standing and walking around, shouting about what they saw and how badly they were injured – but the only publicly-available video of the incident is a bit of blurry, aerial footage from an IDF drone, that doesn’t clearly show the exact sequence of events.

3) I’ve been reading news reports claiming that the Health Ministry in Gaza releases reliable numbers. This is absolutely false. It is a matter of public record that the Health Ministry in Gaza routinely inflates civilian casualties. This means that even the 120 number from the shooting that happened yesterday is likely inaccurate.

4) There are conflicting, unreliable accounts:

– Palestinian eye witnesses say that Israel attacked an aid convoy. The IDF is saying that the soldiers were there to protect the convoy.

– Palestinian eye witnesses say that the IDF opened fire on them from the convoy. (Notice that this is already a contradiction – did the IDF attack the convoy? Or did they attack the civilians from the convoy)? IDF soldiers who were present said that they only fired “warning shots,” or that they only “shot them in the legs” (Yeah, right). They are also saying that most of the civilians who died were either hit by the aid trucks as they tried to escape, or were caught up in a stampede.

– English-speaking news outlets painted a picture of docile civilians being viciously attacked without warning while they were patiently waiting for their food. IDF soldiers who were present are saying that the civilians swarmed the aid trucks, putting the drivers and IDF soldiers at risk. Palestinian eye witnesses also admit to this, explaining that they were desperate after weeks of having nothing to eat but pet food.

– The IDF has not released an official statement about what “actually” happened, pending an investigation. Of course, Hamas, which was supposedly not present at the incident, has already released an official statement, without performing any type of investigation.

5) There is a distinct possibility that the IDF did something wrong here. If that’s the case, then everyone involved needs to be held responsible.

6) Do not forget that, in the middle of an on-going war with Gaza, Israel is facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid to the civilian population of a group they are at war against – this particular aid convoy was one among hundreds, which we have heard nothing about until now. (In fact, we have been repeatedly told that Israel is making it impossible for humanitarian aid to be delivered to Gaza).

Many people have compared the incursion into Gaza with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These people will be hard put to find an example of the Russian military delivering humanitarian aid by the hundreds of truckloads to Ukrainian civilians. [I got an email from a reader who is familiar with the situation on the ground in Ukraine, informing me that the Russian military does, in fact, provide humanitarian aid to Ukranian civilians in areas that it has taken control of].

If this war is an attempt by Israel to commit ethnic cleansing, then it is the most inept, half-hearted endeavor the world has ever seen.

Write bad code

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A friend of mine used to quote a friend of his, who said, “always behave as if your worst ten lines of code will be written on your tombstone.” I took that advice to heart.

Throughout my career, I’ve always tried to avoid writing bad code. Software is a craft, and quality beats quantity. I want to write the 10 lines of code that can do the same thing as someone else’s 6000 lines – and do it better.

But every time I write “good” code, I find myself looking back over it almost immediately, with some very specific ideas about how I could rewrite it to make it better. In fact, I usually cringe. If only I hadn’t over-engineered this part, or had used composition on that part. Unfortunately, there are deadlines to meet. Once the bad code has been written, it has to be shipped.

All of the code I have ever written, no matter how good it was, turned into bad code as soon as I was done writing it. It almost makes me wonder… should I just write bad code?

And the answer is, “yes.”

Every accomplished author knows that you need to get 10,000 pages of rubbish out of your system before you can get to the good stuff. Similarly, you will never know what good code looks like until you’ve written lots and lots of bad code. The more “bad” code you write, the better your code will get. Other people will eventually start to look at code you’ve written and be impressed. And you will still cringe.

All the code you write in the future will (*should) be better than all the code you’ve written in the past. So write bad code.

What else is there?