How To Be A Pythonista
SOLVER is back back back! And so is Dean Thompson. But following the events at Wobbly Head (you may wish to refresh your memory on part 4), he seems to be a man in deep turmoil. Clippy can help. Clippy always helps.
Subscribers can read the new chapter in full on my Patreon, now!
When he says they’re all dead to him, I assume he’s talking about the future as he intends it to be
Villain mode, unlocked
You’d think a programmer like Dean might go with something old school, like Eliza.
Really. Dean using a GUI? I think he’s more traumatized than we thought.
You can’t say “CLIPPY” without saying “CLI”
Uncomfortable with the similarities between the occupants of Dean’s and my bookcase
No O’Reilly animal books, though.
O’Reilly’s Guide to Solving has Mind Panda on its cover
I admit, I looked this up just in case it was real. It turns out O’Reilly has around 1400 different animals on various book covers, which is rather a lot. (https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp) None of them has giant panda, but one of them (Programming the Semantic Web) shows a red panda. Does that count? There are also several books that cover the Python package named ‘Pandas’. Now I know.
One of my worst nightmares is Clippy backed up by AI. In fact, one of my worst nightmares is having to use Widows ever again.
That said, I do wonder if this whole conversation happened with an actual AI agent in the form of Clippy, or if Dean has gone off the deep end and is hallucinating it all. I’m not sure which one is more frightening.
A famous “AI doomer” scenario is an AI programmed to produce a maximum number of paperclips that goes wild and converts the whole universe into paperclips, killing all lifeforms in the way.
It’s an actual game, that people enjoy playing. A text game I think. But we are facing something similar now, the entire wealth of many nations is being poured into data centers of ever larger size and complexity for the purpose of making more money to pour into AI data centers. Soon the entire earth will be covered with power plants and data centers (they already have plans to move out into space.)
(I really enjoyed the most recent story on this website and can’t wait to read the next page to see how this one goes too. Still wondering about Jack lost in time as well.)
That’s actually the endgame of Neal Stephenson’s book Fall: or Dodge in Hell A uniquely frustrating book. I kept waiting for there to be some resolution but there never was.
That book was the only one of Stephenson’s I didn’t manage to finish.
The animated series Pantheon also deals with uploaded consciousness in a much more engaging way (to my taste). It’s on Netflix, at least in the US.
I think I watched the first episode of that somewhere, but I don’t remember anything about it.
I don’t blame you for quitting that steaming pile. There are several Stephenson novels I’ve started but not finished, including Cryptonomicon. It wasn’t bad as such, but just not engaging. I gave it to a friend and he ate it up like Christmas dinner and asked for more. He and then both rage-read Fall together, hoping it would eventually have a point. It didn’t.
I liked the Ameristan part, but the computer afterlife stuff left me cold. His new one, Polostan was pretty good. And it’s a short read, surprisingly.
It was inevitable that one day Neal would start an open parenthesis infodump and forget to ever finish it
A modernization of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy “Shoe Shop Event Horizon”. Where, eventually, all the shops become shoe shops.
The first I had heard of Copilot was when it proudly loaded up as I turned on a school computer. I immediately Ctl+Alt+Del ended the process, convinced the computer had been infected with malware. I have yet to be persuaded otherwise. I’m sure ClippyAI is much less nefarious.
A very reasonable response.
We’re in the Microslop era now, so ClippyAI is inevitable. 🙁
A quick search revealed that Windows RG is still out there.
I’d never seen this before and you’d better believe I investigated every sorry pixel of it
Poor Dean, once again he’s doing everything wrong. But it’s easy to understand why he’s angry to his friends, what they did was mean.
“I’m a terrible person and they made my life immeasurably better, but they haven’t done something good for me lately and therefore I will destroy them”
They assumed it was better don’t tell Dean anything about Skelottie and that almost killed him, Glenn and Claire… I mean… c’mon!
tbf, Charlotte may not have told him everything, but keeping him in the dark about Beatte’s dangerous visit was entirely Glum and Claire’s doing, since Charlotte was out of town and incommunicado at the time
Seriously, though, would YOU trust Dean to play along inconspicuously? Withholding information from him was 100% the right play.
Poor Dean needs to have more friends who would all do something similar to put it all in perspective. None of them would want him to get hurt, especially by his own reactions to a menace like Beate. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way and maybe they need to make sure he understands that wild card they were all dealt.
If Claire and Glum had actually tried to keep Dean out of it, I’d more-or-less agree. However, they deliberately got Glenn involved, risking his life, without telling him what was going on, and I think he has every right to be angry with them about that (even if the form his anger is taking is, unsurprisingly, wrong).
You forget that Dean was on good terms with Beate, who had tricked him, and they couldn’t trust him with what they knew about her. It was what they didn’t know about her that got them in trouble. They didn’t suspect that she was so far ahead of them with the sleeping potion in the booze.
I wonder what happened to Claire’s former nuisance. She and Glenn seemed to be good friends.
Well, it’s been nice knowing Dean is capable of true friendship and compassion. So sad and worrying to see him chuck it away in favor of Classic Giant Days Nemesis #1 Dean so soon.
In all fairness, Lottie wasn’t around at the time to fill Dean in. I can understand his being angry at Claire and Glenn, but Lottie was away (in disguise) at the time.
Honestly, if any of the established characters were going to use an AI therapist, it had to be Dean.
Belatedly, I like the little detail of Clippy’s chair apparently being made from a legal pad.
Esther would absolutely use AI and be 100% in favour of it until someone explained to her why it is bad and then she’d be 100% against it. It’d be the supermarket story all over again.
(This is confused by the fact that adult Esther now…works with Proper SciFi AI for a living)
Well, this dashed any hope I’d had that Dean had progressed in any significant manner. Clippy was ridiculed away in America almost from the moment of its unveiling. That Dean is not only using it, but using it for such an important situation… (I shake my head)
Clippy’s AI therapy is no more or less ridiculous than most other uses forcAI.
I agree, Dean
…waaaaait
I suspect that, like Bing being a thing that people actually use, Clippy AI is ultimately Lottie’s fault.
My daughter is an ardent Bing user and loves it. Apparently Bing gives you points for looking things up, which can be redeemed for various gifts. How she discovered that I have no idea.
I like how he does not seem to have any two books about the same computer language. I imagine he keeps trying new languages and then rejecting them because they aren’t up to his standards.
No, I think he’s read all the books on all the languages, and he just keeps the ones he likes or finds useful out on the shelves. The rest are sealed away in nondescript boxes under the bed or in the wardrobe until a time comes when he needs them. Never to be discarded. (Yeah, I’ve known a few Professors. My Dad for instance had a prodigious collection of books on Chess. He read them all, then packed most them away.)
I dunno, I find it hard to believe that Dean would choose a book named “Perl Primer” as the one Perl book to keep on the shelf if he had many to choose from. As a former Perl programmer, I think he would have chosen the so-called “Camel Book” if he chose anything. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Perl) It’s by far the best-written book about Perl, and even one of the best-written computer books in general. I would also expect to see more of those O’Rielly “animal books” for other languages.
My theory is that he got all those books for free because the local university library was throwing them away.
That’s reasonable. Either that, or they were the only books he found at a jumble sale.
Sure, but how many books on Perl have an author named Pearl?
So that’s what the “Pythonista” in the page title is about, not Monty, or wrangling actual reptiles.
If it instructs him on how to use the language, I suspect that Dean would not keep more than one book per language as a matter of efficiency.
Every era of Dean’s life must fight against the forces of shameless jezebels
It’s hard to work with a language like LISP when it reminds a fella of Little Claire and so his recent trauma.
“Lisp Fluently” is gold, though!
Too many parenthetheth!
“You seem to be using passive aggression.”
It’s SUPER EFFECTIVE!
I try to avoid passive aggression. I find active aggression to be more effective.
Dean’s choice of (fictional) programming language books has completely changed my view of him.
I had previously assumed that he’d be the sort of person who’d own the classic texts (i.e. Common Lisp: The Language 2ed, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language 2ed, the O’Reilly Programming Perl book, possibly even the Algol 68 report, etc), but he has a shelfful of subpar books in the “SAMS Teach Yourself XXX in 21 Days” mould. I’m starting to wonder if he might not be the CS genius that he thinks he is…
I feel like you’re trying to shame me rather than Dean here. I did once go for a job interview at Wrox Press, but I wasn’t Wrox material, so I definitely wouldn’t have been O’Reilly material.
Thank you for the gift of “Algol 68”, Nick.
In the 90’s, I got as far as a phone interview with O’Reilly, pitching a “Linux for normal people” type book. My shot at the big time and I blew it!
I’m not sure Linux was ready for “normal people” in the 90’s. Today sure, but it was trickier back then.
I started using Linux with Slackware 3.0 circa 1996, which is kind of like learning to swim by being pushed out of a helicopter into the middle of the North Atlantic. But I’ve never made any claims to being “normal”.
These days I’m running Slack 15, and I haven’t smoked a monitor trying to get X to work in years…
Naw, naw, it wasn’t that bad (at 3.0). However during the 1990s one had to get by sans apps with one’s glorious Slackware (or any Linux flavour) installation, and that’s a fact. Even os/2 guys had it better.
I was an OS/2 guy for a while, professionally. Entirely possible I still have an OS/2 computer up in the attic.
My first Linux was Red Hat (pre-Fedora)… uh, 6, I think?
You’ve got me by half a decade. I managed to install Debian off CDs on a Macintosh in 1998 or so, but couldn’t make it useful. (I think it was a Performa, but don’t quote me. Could have been a Quadra. It was whatever I had laying around.) I made X Windows work and had Blackbox running, but no software of any use. A couple years later I did the same with an Indigo iMac and got both Gnome and KDE running on it, of which I liked Gnome better.
However that didn’t last long because that’s about when Mac OSX was released and I switched. Then in 2009 or so I had a friend who worked for Novell who talked me into trying OpenSUSE. I tried to like it, i really did. It lasted about three months before I went back to OSX. Then around 2012 I moved in with another friend and we both started using Ubuntu. It was fine back then, but when they switched to Gnome 3 I bailed. Went back to OSX until Apple finally made me so mad in 2019 that I started distro hopping until I settled on MX LInux, which I still (mostly) use. Except on my Raspberry Pi which runs Raspian with Xfce. I despise Gnome these days, and I tried KDE Plasma but didn’t like it. I know Xfce inside and out so I just feel more comfortable in it. I think KDE tries too hard to be pretty and sacrifices usability for that.
Been meaning to try Fedora for a few years, but can’t seem to work up the energy to try something new. I never felt the desire to try Slackware. I’m too used to Debian distributions. Arch Linux? For the love of Buddha why?
This reminds me that I am shattered that my K&R seems to have gone walkabout decades ago during our move into this house. That and my Amiga REXX programming book.
Dean probably finds Rover too judgmental.
I deeply regret having forgotten this, but what is the nature of Dean and Glen’s connection with the other three (who were of course schoolmates)? 😐 Thanks.
Ronald, I suggest you treat yourself to a reread from the start. It will refresh your memory ready for the year ahead.
https://badmachinery.com/comic/2021-01-01/ is where it begins.
Glenn was a career advisor that Lottie’s mum ordered for her as a suprise, with Lottie being the only person ever getting the “career advisor” option in his test. Later she asked him to help Claire work out her transfer from London School of Economics to Sheffield. They met again in a 24h laundry when Lottie was experimenting with being nocturnal so as to not bother Claire in her dorm room. This led to their joint “guardianship” of the old hospital, where Dean also lived. After establishing their solving business, the Solvers identified Dean as a nexus of problems by the state of his groceries and decided to get acquainted with him.
Now I want to reread it again
Thanks. 🙂
If you want to cheat, Dean first appears here: https://badmachinery.com/comic/2022-08-15/
He appears to have been employed as a teacher rather than brilliant programming guru. Surely this has not sparked any bitterness. (Also, I had forgotten that his title was not also Dean, which would have been hee-laa-rious, but rather Head of Year)
Thanks.
First appearance in Solver. He actually has prior appeararances in Giant Days.
I’m doing a quiz thing at the moment and one of the sections is ‘computer things’ none of which mean owt to me so Dean’s bookshelf is TRES useful, ta John!
Whelp Good Dean was fun while he lasted .I feared this backslide was coming. He was almost human for once and they played him rather than treat him like part of the team. I c
… Dean you fucking dipshit.
Brilliant, John. Just brilliant.
I don’t know which was more annoying, Clippy or that cartoon puppy. When we got new software at work, shutting those off was the first thing everyone did.
I had forgotten about Lisp. One of my early Autocad courses was learning to write menus in AutoLisp.
Oh man, Lisp was one of the more interesting but less applicable programming languages I dabbed in back in college.
It was the basis of AutoCad menus back in the 90s. I don’t know if it’s still used.
The GIMP uses a Lisp dialect for filters and such. I had to bust it out recently to automate turning the output of POV-Ray into full-alpha-transparency icons that my BattleTech battlemap could use.
Always handy if your text editor has a built-in interpreter.
Ooo, Mildred is back in the character list!
According John’s recent Patreon post, “Sadly Mildred is not in Solver #16. She’s not scheduled to be in #17 but there’s still time. She is definitely in Solver #18.”
Clippy’s little diploma <3
*Indicative only, does not constitute proof of academic achievement, any similarity between Clippy™ and therapists is purely coincidental.
Foreshadowing LinkedIn course completion certificates.
Ultimately, friends are just people who can hurt and betray more effectively than most.
…and who are also worth the risk. Family, on the other hand…
Oops! This version of “Clippy’s AI Therapy” is a beta version.
Probably full of bugs, Dean.
KInda like Windows anything.
I thought Clippy AI was just a fun fantasy exaggeration in this episode, but it is a real thing. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/clippy-resurrected-as-ai-assistant-project-turns-infamous-microsoft-mascot-into-llm-interface
This explains the cold shudder down my spine…
Not one of The Clash’s stronger albums if I’m honest. A lot of filler and whitespace (which I guess is “syntactically significant” or some other musical appreciation term).
Lisp Fluently – lol!