// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

I’m assuming a lot of implicit context here about the Jargon File and its place in internet lore. The relevant context is that the ESR curatorial intervention has been deemed reckless and sometimes plain delusional, most infamously with the invention of Aunt Tillie. A significant subset of geeks and hackers have come to resent ESR’s self-indulgent pretense of representing hacker culture adding significant content not backed by external input and even inventing a much-maligned “Hacker Emblem” vaguely similar to a table with dots. There’s an ongoing complaint about misuse of the Jargon File’s influence, thinly covered by the addition of early-hackerdom cartoons to random places of the glossary.

First of all, it’s worth mentioning each edition’s definition of “hacker”:

1996 New Hacker’s Dictionary:

[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker’, `network hacker’. The correct term for this sense is cracker. The term `hacker’ also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net (see network, the and Internet address). It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic (see hacker ethic). It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you’ll quickly be labeled bogus). See also wannabee.

The ESR-curated Jargon File 4.4.7 changes the “membership in the global community to the following:

About the Vetta project’s gradual discovery of matrix-oriented programming:

I got used to coding like this on a summer course (way beyond my actual understanding level) on numeric methods for partial differential equations. We used Matlab back then. Then, in the next trimester, I took a neural networks course. The actual course assignments didn’t require much coding, but I spent at least a week writing a somewhat generalized backpropagation learning algorithm in terms of matrices. The code is unreadable now, if not followed with its (long lost now) paper documentation, which consisted of some scrabbling and hollow matrix shapes. Now, I find matrix-oriented programming fascinating and (I was told in my summer course) it’s great for automatic parallelization but it’s somewhat of an anti-pattern for most purposes (like financial code, for example). It also may lead you (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis-wise) to phrasing problems in inappropriate terms. The whole of economics spent the 20th century mis-describing the functioning of a modern economy in matrix form, and I’m not just referring to input-output analysis, but to the greater program of neo-walrasian/debrevian program of general equilibrium.

I was such a dayvan cowboy that I spent many a night rewriting code instead of learning how to use neural net software. Boy, do I miss programming. I feel like I’ve lost some intellectual edge by fitting into the “stable mood” box. Talk about the temptation of dropping the meds.

On A new library allows readers to borrow people for a 30-minute chat. Here’s the experience of one man who offered himself as a human book