Unix Nightmare
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I first learned Unix when I went to work at Bell Labs in 1978. I was only there for two years but over the next 18 years at Carnegie Mellon I used Unix workstations or time-sharing systems almost constantly. The other night I had a dream that involved Unix. I am not saying the dream made sense. Dreams often don't. For some reason I had a feeling that someone had modified my system by replacing the cat command with a shell script that didn't behave the way cat should. I decided to use the which command to find where the fake cat script was located in the file system. But then I thought how can I examine the script without using cat. I was going around in circles about this until I sort of woke up. I realized that I could use ed to look at the script. Then I went back to sleep. Sometimes my memories of my dreams aren't accurate. Frank Frank Wimberly ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Good lord, Frank. Surely you are teasing me. How could your memory of a dream not be accurate?! Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly I first learned Unix when I went to work at Bell Labs in 1978. I was only there for two years but over the next 18 years at Carnegie Mellon I used Unix workstations or time-sharing systems almost constantly. The other night I had a dream that involved Unix. I am not saying the dream made sense. Dreams often don't. For some reason I had a feeling that someone had modified my system by replacing the cat command with a shell script that didn't behave the way cat should. I decided to use the which command to find where the fake cat script was located in the file system. But then I thought how can I examine the script without using cat. I was going around in circles about this until I sort of woke up. I realized that I could use ed to look at the script. Then I went back to sleep. Sometimes my memories of my dreams aren't accurate. Frank Frank Wimberly ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Nick, Well, sometimes when I'm thinking about a dream, I suddenly remember some detail that I had completely forgotten. But more often I fall back to sleep. In my old age, I seldom remember dreams. Frank Frank Wimberly On Oct 21, 2016 6:26 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:
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“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a Unix programmer, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a Unix programmer. I was conscious only of my happiness as a Unix programmer, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a Unix programmer, or whether I am now a Unix programmer, dreaming I am a man.” It happens to all of us ... 😴 😁 On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 6:32 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Very clever. Frank Wimberly On Oct 21, 2016 7:05 PM, "Robert Wall" <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2
Frank - I used to have semi-lucid dreams whose setting was inside of a VM of some kind... being a Unix-head myself, it often had a lot of Shell like idioms but it also had many of the flavors of the kinds of higher level tools I might have been using about that time. I remember early Objective C flavored dreams, CURSES library dreams, APL dreams involving projective geometry, Prolog dreams involving natural language understanding, and eventually VR and mixed reality dreams. In fact the latter two I would say I still have, though they are polluted/mixed with myth-dreams based in various archetypal tropes. I think I dreamed in mathematics during my introduction to calculus and later to group theory. During my first class in Quantum Chemistry I swear I dreamed in the superposition of quantum states. I also sometimes dream in poetry.
I feel ya brother! - Steve On 10/21/16 5:49 PM, Frank Wimberly
wrote:
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On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote: Prolog dreams involving natural language understanding, and eventually VR and mixed reality dreams. In fact the latter two I would say I still have, though they are polluted/mixed with myth-dreams based in various archetypal tropes. I just finished reading Snow Crash for the first time and was struck by Hiro's (well, Lagos') assertion that programming languages are unlike contemporary natural languages (and for the purposes of the story, like Sumerian), that they access a more primal part of the brain. I do not think this is true, but it is an interesting counterfactual reality to explore. -Arlo James Barnes ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Using a logic programming language (like Prolog) sometimes feels to me like a dream state, sort of like Frank describes. I use logic programming as a cognitive
aide as well as a computational aide. Asking, “How do the pieces fit together in a problem? What is independent and what is interdependent?” When I can’t get a problem into my head all at once (so often for me, sadly), logic or constraint languages help
to formally separate-out the invariants I am convinced about from the rest. A logic programming system lets one lean on brute force to find answers when things are complex and messy. However, lean on it too much, e.g. fail to build a mental model of the
costs of the underlying searches, or fail to find reasons to pin down variables, it is easy to get in unproductive mental loops (and long runtimes). I find it is especially risky in declarative languages since an appeal of using them in the first place is
to leave it to the computer and not get bogged down in the operational aspects of performing searches on particular data structures. Some nightmares are like that for me. It is less the facts of the dream being scary, but the fact that less than good
things keep happening and I am unable to act in a rational way to slow or stop them; I’m a powerless observer. I can’t stop myself and do the reductionism thing. In logic programming systems that means using debugger designed to watch the search underway
or using appropriate instrumentation to see what is going on in the solver. In contrast, I do find assembly, C, or Fortran programming primal. Like a caveman having a club. Being primal has its place too. Maybe there is a career for aging software developers as shrinks. They could help rationalize and treat their peers’ unique (?) pathologies? From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]]
On Behalf Of Arlo Barnes On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 8:00 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2
Frank writes:
> Nick, > > Well, sometimes when I'm thinking about a dream, I suddenly remember some > detail that I had completely forgotten. But more often I fall back to > sleep. In my old age, I seldom remember dreams. in reply to Nick: > > Good lord, Frank. Surely you are teasing me. How could your memory of a > > dream not be accurate?! I thought it was widely believed by Psychologists (as it is certainly believed by *me*) that one commits an error (a category error, perhaps? or an error of attribution?) if one thinks of "a dream" as some thing that existed--or some act that was undertaken--before one awakes, which can thereafter be "remembered"; rather, the behavior that one (mis)names "remembering the dream I just awoke from" is actually the conjunction of two behaviors--"dreaming while half-awake" and "attributing the quality of 'rememberance of the past' to 'awareness of an on- going behavior'" (pardon the awkward phrasings). Of course, often one also "thinks about a dream" when one is fully awake (or going back to sleep), and that behavior may be (or incorporate) actually remembering an earlier behavior of the previous type. In particular, to say that "I suddenly remember some detail that I had completely forgotten" *may* be begging the question: how can you know (and why should you suppose) that you are not simply (sic!) creating that detail anew, and simultaneously attributing pastness (and veridicality) to it? And I do mean to ask, literally, *how* can you know something like that? On an account like mine, Nick's question becomes vacuous; but maybe Nick phrased the question exactly as a succinct way of stating my more rambling account. Lee ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels
Marcus - This is very well articulated and familiar. I came of age during the "golden age" of programming languages when it seemed like there was a new darling language every year, and sure enough many of them WERE quite useful for the different modes of thought they represented/supported/mediated. Snobol, APL, and Prolog were my go-to's back in that era for different modes of thinking about a problem. I like your analogy between declarative languages and nightmares. I think there may be more than superficial relevance. I suspect that our dreaming minds *are* busy churning away on a "declared" problem that we failed to resolve proceduraly (rationally?) in our waking state. I have very few *scary* nightmares, but I do have a lot of very tedious semi-lucid dreams where I keep doing the same stuff over and over (and over) on one theme or another with everywhere from painfully negative results to at best marginally effective results... lots of 2 steps forward, 3 steps back-and-to-one side kinds of situations. And I think tag-team shrinking might work as well as tag-team programming. Toss the patient back and forth between two programmer-cum-therapists with very different styles. Maybe you and Glen could go into partnership. - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by lrudolph
Lee -
>>> Good lord, Frank. Surely you are teasing me. How could your memory of a >>> dream not be accurate?! > I thought it was widely believed by Psychologists (as it is certainly believed by *me*) that > one commits an error (a category error, perhaps? or an error of attribution?) if one thinks of > "a dream" as some thing that existed--or some act that was undertaken--before one awakes, > which can thereafter be "remembered"; rather, the behavior that one (mis)names "remembering > the dream I just awoke from" is actually the conjunction of two behaviors--"dreaming while > half-awake" and "attributing the quality of 'rememberance of the past' to 'awareness of an on- > going behavior'" (pardon the awkward phrasings). Of course, often one also "thinks about a > dream" when one is fully awake (or going back to sleep), and that behavior may be (or > incorporate) actually remembering an earlier behavior of the previous type. of hypnagogic and hypnapompic states and often deliberately arrange my life for it to be a little slow in falling off and waking up for these reasons. I have examples of dreams where the real world impinged (sounds or smells) which I incorporated into the linearized, causal experience of the dream out of time.... meaning I "made up a good reason leading up to an event in the dream that fit the data"... for most... practical purposes, I am "remembering" a compressed virtual real-world experience that I "had"... but I ascribe to the ideas you present that such memories aren't what they seem to be. And I liked your contrast between the two extremes in a forum such as this of "vacuous" vs "rambling"... - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2
What makes this nightmarish (to me) is the broken contract between you and "cat", or larger between you and your OS. Such broken contracts are a part of all my nightmares. And the admittedly more pleasant aspects of the nightmare are the ways you try to restore your operational power inside the dream. It's the same old fear of spies, moles, talking behind one's back, etc. If you can't trust your closest relationships, you're truly lost. But awake, it's relatively easy to admit that I don't understand "cat" any more than I understand pond scum or dogs. So, those contracts are delusions and the more one thinks they know their intimate relations, the more delusional they are. (Note that "delusional" isn't pejorative. Innovation is driven by delusion.) On 10/21/2016 04:49 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote: > I first learned Unix when I went to work at Bell Labs in 1978. I was only there for two years but over the next 18 years at Carnegie Mellon I used Unix workstations or time-sharing systems almost constantly. The other night I had a dream that involved Unix. I am not saying the dream made sense. Dreams often don't. For some reason I had a feeling that someone had modified my system by replacing the cat command with a shell script that didn't behave the way cat should. I decided to use the which command to find where the fake cat script was located in the file system. But then I thought how can I examine the script without using cat. I was going around in circles about this until I sort of woke up. I realized that I could use ed to look at the script. Then I went back to sleep. Sometimes my memories of my dreams aren't accurate. -- ␦glen? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Oh that's easyish. If cat then[sleep, purr, want outside when owner is putting shoes, stare at owner at 5AM for food] dowhile this.owner {not,home}: [playrock, play WOW. break cheep_vase] else notCat.now. Though I have feeling unix tool that I don't understand. On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 12:34 PM, ┣glen┫ <[hidden email]> wrote:
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I was going to tell Gil that “cat” is sort of like “type” in the command prompt (no big deal) but I thought I would open one to make sure that was the name of the command since I haven’t used it for years. I realize that I don’t know how to open the command prompt on this Windows 7 laptop. With cat, which has something to do with concatenate, you can say “cat a b > c” which, as I recall, puts the contents of the files a and b into file c. Frank Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz Santa Fe, NM 87505 Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918 From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gillian Densmore Oh that's easyish. If cat then[sleep, purr, want outside when owner is putting shoes, stare at owner at 5AM for food] dowhile this.owner {not,home}: [playrock, play WOW. break cheep_vase] else notCat.now. Though I have feeling unix tool that I don't understand. On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 12:34 PM, ┣glen┫ <[hidden email]> wrote:
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https://www.tutorialspoint.com/unix_terminal_online.php On 10/22/2016 07:46 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote: > I was going to tell Gil that “cat” is sort of like “type” in the command prompt (no big deal) but I thought I would open one to make sure that was the name of the command since I haven’t used it for years. I realize that I don’t know how to open the command prompt on this Windows 7 laptop. > > With cat, which has something to do with concatenate, you can say “cat a b > c” which, as I recall, puts the contents of the files a and b into file c. -- ␦glen? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Heh was just a joke but yeah cat (catonate) from memory put text together somehow. It could also read files for example you can tell cat to send a text file to unities (and possibly) gnomes baked in pdf and svg reader. cat man.pdf && man.pdf | ghostreader or in a real example before the power converter from my del went caboom cat midgerm2_dileverables.ai |&& ghostwriter | > midtert2.svg (Or something like that this is going from memory and very off topic at this point ) would ask bash. Can you open that file so as you dump a AdobeIustrator format SVG onto ghosterwriter and then try to make a normal svg file because someone (me) was being a perfectionist and wants to make sure that we're taking the right one to the school printing labs. I don't know what realy cool magic cat did to ghoster writer was able to open a copy of a school midterm do in a few days. T On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 9:06 PM, ┣glen┫ <[hidden email]> wrote:
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