Arrian: Oh Bother

Lost to the ether of the internet, and bad decision making at Mozilla, is a toot I made in August of last year. My local archive has a copy though:

Nobody:
Nobody:
Nobody:
Nobody:
Me: … maybe I should read Arrian

So yeah. I read Arrian. Or more specifically, the Anabasis of Alexander.

Arrian seemed like a good choice. After having read Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon’s Hellenika the next chunk of Greek history chronologically was (almost) the story of Alexander the Great. Now, something I’ve appreciated about previous histories is when they’re written by contemporaneous sources, but I don’t think there’s much extant from contemporaneous sources about Alexander. Instead, the best ancient historical source seems to be Arrian, a Greek of Roman citizenship writing about 400 years after Alexander’s demise.

I read ancient history because I like to understand how ancient peoples saw the world. I find it fascinating to see the continuity of human experience over the last couple thousands years. I like insight into the people and players remembered by history. Pieces of their personality preserved in amber.

In Arrian I got almost none of that.

Honestly, Arrian is the most disappointing ancient history I have successfully finished. Of course, there is the alternative possibility: Arrian is boring because Alexander is boring, since his personality traits are not laudable or enjoyable to me as someone living through another era of rapacious conquest by the powerful.

The Story

Arrian attempts to faithfully recount the life of Alexander III of Macedon, starting from the beginning of his reign to his untimely demise. Unfortunately for me and my interests, his history is thorough and focused on finding a chronology and recounting the tales of battles and slaughters... so many battles, so many slaughters.

The basic thrust of Alexander’s life (as told by Arrian) seems to have been that after firming up Macedonian dominance in Greece, he set his sights eastward, and led an empire building expedition east for a decade. Finally, in India, he overwhelmed his troops ambition, and was forced to turn back. On his return to Babylon he planned to turn it into an administrative centre, before departing on an African campaign. Alas, through illness (or conspiracy says perhaps poison) he died there at 32. Shortly thereafter his empire broke apart, as there was no successor who could hold it together.

Despite being King of Macedon, as near as I can tell, he never returned to Macedon once he left, instead ruling his empire from afar.

The History

I find it fascinating that Alexander the Great is mentioned with sufficient frequency in modern discourse that I think many people, even if they know no details, are aware of his existence. Yet, I was interested to discover from this book and it’s introduction that despite his outsize influence over the ancient world and modern discourse, in a lot of ways he’s way less attested in sources than you would expect. Many primary sources were lost, and it seems he was a little particular about how he was portrayed. As a result, in a lot of ways we don’t have a great view of the real Alexander. This is made worse by the existence and popularity of the Alexander Romance, a heavily fictionalized biography tradition about Alexander which grew and evolved for a thousand years after his death. More on that below.

Apparently Arrian had access to a number of contemporary sources; at the outset of his history he lays out his sources as mostly being Aristobulus and Ptolomy I; their accounts are largely lost to us today. It is through Arrian that we have the best insight into these sources. To his credit, Arrian highlights where his sources diverge, and tries to weigh how he sees them.

Apologia

By the end of Arrian, I was pretty clear that Arrian was writing apologia. I am not sure how Alexander was viewed by the audience Arrian was writing for, but you get the distinct impression that there is a rehabilitation of image happening. Perhaps the most clear happening of this is where Alexander kills Kleitos in a drunken rage.

During a drinking session, Kleitos who I take to be an older soldier, insults Alexander by championing Phillip II -- Alexander’s father -- during the debacle. At some point, he insulted Alexander sufficiently that Alexander grabbed nearby spear, and speared him to death.

Arrian when recounting this has two goals: To make it clear that Kleitos’s behaviour is sufficient to justify his death, and make sure that we recognize Alexander’s overwrought grief that followed his act is sufficient to clear the stain from his reputation.

There are a number of other cases where Arrian seems to underweight or discount loathsome behaviour from Alexander:

  • His potential involvement in the burning of Persepolis
  • Numerous slaughters of civilians, particularly during his Indian campaign.

Compared to others I have Read

One interesting contrast I found between Arrian and Thucydides was the connection between campaign and the seasons. In Thucydides there was essentially “war season”, and then in the winter everyone went home. There was a cycle of the years. Arrian barely covers the cycle of years, and it is occasionally surprising the amount of time covered with relatively little mention. Only in a couple of places does Arrian bother to connect his narrative to nature, such as when Alexander departs too early in the spring for one campaign, facing winter weather to the detriment of his men.

Another contrast between Arrian and other authors I found was a fair amount of disinterest from Arrian about logistics. It’s mentioned only at a few points (for example, as Nearchus is failed by logistics sailing back from the Indus), but I have to imagine that the challenges of ruling an empire the size of Alexanders, feeding armies on giant marches, must have been true challenges, yet Arrian scarcely touches on it. He is focused on Alexander and his great deeds, not on the minutia of how it was actually done. I feel like logistics came up more in other histories as the authors were more involved in the

The Edition

To read Arrian I returned to the Landmark edition. I continue to appreciate the overall high quality of these editions (though the cover has a quote from the NYT Book Review: “The most thrilling volume in this fine series”, which I find truly laughable). The background provided by the fine introduction and prefaces was very helpful for situating Arrian, and the appendixes dug more deeply into things helpfully, without going on too much at length.

Alexander Romance

A major new thing I learned from reading Arrian actually has nothing to do with Arrian: The existence of the “Alexander Romance”. This is a literary tradition, started shortly after Alexander’s death which situates Alexander as mythical figure, giving him a supernatural conception (Mom gets laid by a Pharaoh who find his way to her bed in the shape of a dragon) and then tells a heavily fictionalized biography of him, as he encounters sages and fantastical figures over his journey, discussing philosophy and more with them.

I call this a literary tradition because the story, as it was retold, translated and copied, seems to have continuously grown adding new tales and new places for Alexander to weigh in.

Reading about this, I was struck by the parallels between this and fan-fiction, musing that Alexander was the first subject of fanfic. After finishing the book, I did some further reading on this, and found this wonderful essay “The 21st century Alexander Romance and Transformative Fiction (aka is it fanfic?)” on precisely this topic, by Reimena Yee, who has a graphic novel retelling of the Alexander Romance available. Yee’s take is “Maybe”, but she quotes at length from a Tumblr post which I think makes a pretty great case that Fanfic is really a 21st century phenomenon and trying to apply it ahistorically is a mistake.

What is particularly fascinating about the Alexander Romance is the scale and breadth of its impact, being well known for thousands of years. It seems to me that it is the Romantic Alexander who is fairly well known, not the historical one!

Conclusion

The story of Alexander seems to be the story of someone born with an unslakable thirst for conquest. I was left at the end of Arrian without any motivation, any clear reason, beyond conquest for conquests sake. I found his life to be a boring meaningless slog. As Arrian approached the end of Alexander, and the omens began to turn, the livers without lobes, I was struck by a palpable relief: “Thank god, he’ll be dead soon”. I was utterly unconvinced by Arrian that there was anything valuable, anything worth emulating in Alexander.

We live in an era filled with shades who share this unslakable thirst. We call them billionaires, and they shape the very bones of the world we live in today. We are surrounded by people like Arrian, who look on what they have wrought on the world, and seem to assume that simply because they have outsized impact they are therefore worth emulating.

Assorted Bits and Bobs

  • The assassination of Philip II is in some sense prologue to Arrian, but is told elliptically through Arrian nevertheless. The narrative is so bizarre and full of weighted allusion: So, Philip is assassinated. The assassin is then executed, but Alexander’s mother, Olympias, gives him an honourable tomb. Later we find out that Philip and Alexander were on the outs a bit because Philip married another woman, Euridike. So I guess we are to take from this (and it appears others do too) that Olympias might have had a hand in the murder of her husband.
  • The city of Tyre in Lebanon has existed since antiquity. I found it particularly interesting to discover that it was an island when Alexander came to conquer it. To enable siege machines to work his troops built a mole or causeway from the shore to the island. This causeway then began to gather silt, and now 2350 years later, the city of Tyre is now a peninsula. This kind of “Thing in the world you can point to as being part of history” is definitely my jam, in the same way as I love the story of the Tunnel of Eupalinos.

Memories of Noah Gibbs

I was shocked to discover last week that Noah Gibbs had passed away.

Memories are being collected for his family here. I thought I would share mine here as well.

“My recollection of Noah is of a kind generous man who contributed tirelessly to the things he believed in.

I first encountered Noah after I gave a conference talk calling for better benchmarks in the Ruby community. At the time I was working on a doomed Ruby JIT compiler.

After that talk, Noah would go on the build Rails Ruby Bench. We corresponded a bit about it, and I started keeping track of his writing on the internet.

Eventually I moved on from Ruby. Still, I kept track of Noah, and would read his writing when I came across it. He clearly was someone who thought deeply about the nature of building software, and what it was to be employed in this industry that demanded production from something that from the inside felt more like craft.

You could see his commitment to community and mentorship in the things he wrote about, the podcasts he took, etc.

Recently I had occasion to reach out to Noah again. My email started “Hey Noah, I don’t know if you remember me” — I was truly gratified that his reply started “Hiya, Matt! Yes, I remember you. :-)” — then he generously answered my questions, fully in the spirit intended.

I had always hoped to run into Noah again, to cross paths with him. I am so incredibly sorry for your loss. I hope this message helps in the tiniest bit to illuminate more of the ways in which Noah touched people, all over the world.
”
— Matthew Gaudet, Edmonton, Alberta

Noah had a broad reach, but if anyone reading this has their own recollections, please send them along to his family.

A Formative Artifact

Do you have a formative artifact from your childhood? Maybe a TV show, a book, a game which you feel (perhaps wrongly) you can trace all your personality back to.

When I was a kid, probably 7-8 until I was probably 10 or 11, I had this book which I remembered as a book of facts. It wasn’t an encyclopedia, but it had this eclectic bent -- I mostly remember the science bits, but there was also bits about society and culture too.

It was reasonably large, with large illustrations and I read this book over and over and over and over until it fell apart. Literally. The last time I remember seeing it, I had read it until the covers had both fallen off, and all that remained was the spine. At some point presumably when I had outgrown it, we must have cleaned out my room and thrown it out. After all, in tatters it was scarcely better than trash.

Of course, looking back, this book was definitely one of my formative artifacts. What it instilled in me was a thirst for knowledge; eclectic wide ranging knowledge. Of course, the challenge being that like this book, my knowledge is patchy and broad.

Fast forward almost 25 years, and I found myself thinking about this book. Raising my daughter, and seeing the multitude of ways in which her childhood is different than mine, I keep wondering what will be her formative artifacts. What thing will captivate her? Could it be something like my book? Could I find that book perhaps? Would a book that old capture her imagination?

Of course, after so long, I could no longer remember what this book was called. Who wrote it. What the cover looked like. If I’m being honest, I could barely remember the actual contents of the book were; some illustrations burned deep into my brain mostly.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about it, and I realized I did know a few things about it. Maybe enough to find it? I remembered that it was published by Reader’s Digest. Given when I was reading it, probably in the 1990s. My recollection was that it was a “science” book.

So I started looking. I had been chatting with a friend about this book, and thought... this could well be just the kind of vague nonsense that ChatGPT might actually be helpful with. Not that I expected it to find the book, but that it might help me narrow down on something.

Me: Looking for an old book published in Canada by Readers Digest. It was available in the nineties. It was a thick book filled with facts and experiments. Aimed at young kids. I don’t have a title.

ChatGPT: Without a title, narrowing it down to a specific book can be tricky, but based on your description, it might be one of the popular educational reference books or experiment guides published by Reader's Digest during the 1990s. Reader's Digest released several children's educational and activity books during that time. Some titles that could fit your description are:

  • How Science Works (Reader's Digest, 1991): This book explained scientific concepts through facts and hands-on experiments, aimed at younger readers.

  • The How and Why Library (Reader's Digest): A multi-volume set filled with facts, trivia, and educational material aimed at children.

You might try searching through secondhand bookstores or websites like AbeBooks, which specialize in out-of-print books. If you're near a large library, they might have archives of Reader's Digest publications from that era as well.

Doing some searches on “How Science Works” and the “How and Why Library”, I was able to quickly rule out the “How and Why Library”. But... “How Science Works”, well that fit the bill pretty good. So I found a copy on AbeBooks, and it was pretty affordable. I managed to find one photo of the interior... and I wasn’t sure. My memory was fuzzy, but I thought: This is worth a try. So I bought it.

It arrived, and from the moment I opened it, I knew it.

It was the wrong book.

Seems like a neat book, and the experiments could be fun with my kids when they’re a bit older, but this wasn’t the right thing.

So another day, I found myself wandering around AbeBooks, when I realized they had an Advanced Search where you could search by year, by publisher, etc. I started working it out:

  • Published between 1985-1999
  • Keyword: Science
  • Publisher: Reader’s Digest

Wait. That... looks familiar.

Turns out. I have it in my house now. My formative artifact:

Some of these pages, some of these illustrations are baked into my head deep.

Some of these stories are still how I conceive of things, having never really had to update my knowledge in my head (for example, the story of the coelacanth).

I have a very strong feeling this book will not leave nearly the impression on my children that it left on me. Yet, I find myself overjoyed at having found it, this little formative artifact.

Dear Reader: I hope you too have yourself a formative artifact. I hope you can find it, and, maybe yours can be passed on to your own children. A gift they are free to decline, but hey — perhaps they’ll take it.

Before You Can Have Smalltalk, You Must First Defeat Capitalism.

At SPLASH 2024 there were a few talks and sessions that felt a bit like lamentations.

A common theme across these was that abandonment of “Programming Systems” and the rise of systems without elegance, introspection, trust or capability.

At the end of Hinsen’s talk, I posted on Mastodon:

The lamentations about the state technology at SPLASH are all lamentations of Capitalism.

Only a few come close to saying it explicitly tho.

I actually think Alan Kay came closest:

Wow, what a terrible waste of these kids lives to have an undergraduate degree in computing. Because think about what they could actually be learning, if they weren’t taking up all this time learning almost nothing interesting. And that learning they would do would actually make them much more sensitive to the new things they could be learning about.

And, of course, that’s not the whole story, because, let’s face it, things are very different than they were in the 60s and 70s, especially with regards to life-affecting things like, for instance, real-estate prices which are not counted in inflation, and in California have been more than a factor of ten, over regular inflation. And this has changed the goal structure of lots of kids going to college.

So, why don’t people build these sorts of systems anymore? Why is research focused on so many industrial applications? Why is it build-build-build? Why are universities failing to be bastions of knowledge creation?

Capitalism. Maybe too pithy.

More specifically, the problem is the precarity & lack of surplus of modern unrestricted rentier capitalism. Graduate students struggle with high rents, low stipends, heavy work loads and big loans. Lecturers have full teaching loads and are paid very little. Professors are writing grants to fund students, and no one seems to have any time to sit and think and play and produce beautiful results.

I talked to an undergraduate student at SPLASH, and he was telling us about some neat work he helped with to do LLMs and code auto-completion. The attendee next to me after hearing his brief pitch immediately asked “Are you planning on commercializing this?”, and I died a little inside. More, when the undergrad student replied in the affirmative.

The title of this blog post is at least a little sarcastic, but I think is an honest to goodness truth: If you want to build a future that involves beautiful systems like Smalltalk, you must first rebuild the economic environment wherein it could be built. Wherein it could succeed! These systems idealized in lamentations at SPLASH all seem to me to be products of economic surplus combined with the right people. We need an economy that has surpluses around for people to do explorations.

To be clear: I actually don’t really agree with a lot of the lamentation the Smalltalk & Lisp people feel. I think many of them undervalue the world we actually have. Nevertheless, I think we are missing exploration today. The ability to build systems, and sit with them, and let them evolve for years.

We need surplus projects; we need the things built when people have the freedom to play, the freedom to create. Some people, unbound from the strictures of having to work themselves to the bone to eat, will produce plays, will produce symphonies.

What about open-source? Open Source can unlock some surpluses, it’s true! But nor is it without its well known problems.

Maybe, if we can build a more just future, we’ll have SPLASH without so much lamentation.

New Graduate Advice

Every now and then a student or relatively junior person will email me asking for advice. I see responding to these sorts of things as a service I can do the community, much in the same way that I see running the Compiler Jobs page.

Sometime during the pandemic I wrote the following… unfortunately, I have also some how lost track of the original recipient (if this is you, reach out! I’d love to hear what happened to you). Nevertheless, I append this to most advice I send out to new-grads as I think it has generally held up over time.

It’s been sent out one-on-one enough that it’s time for me to just put a blog post version of it out. Gently edited here is my New Grad Advice:

A few things I'd suggest:

1. Cultivate your personal network, and I don't mean in the LinkedIn way: You will meet great colleagues and collaborators throughout your career: Make a concerted effort to keep in touch with them. Correspond with them, write them letters; when COVID is over and if you're in the same city, go out for coffee/beer/dinner/lunch as appropriate and time allows. This work will not pay dividends for years. However, by keeping in touch with people who respect and know you, and you in turn respect, you will know where interesting work is happening (and sometimes, where it's not!)

2. If you have the opportunity, as soon as you are able to, start mentoring: If you're an intern, but you've been there for 8 months, then mentor the interns who have been there for 1; if you're full time, make yourself a go-to person for interns.

There's two major reasons to do this: 1) you can demonstrate (and discover your own aptitude/interest in) leadership early; this is a skill that takes time to learn, but opportunities are few and far between. 2) You'd be surprised at what happens by paying attention to interns and junior employees: You're forced constantly to skill up your own understanding: You know best what you can teach. As well, you start to identify pain points that appear repeatedly (these often are organizational pain points that get forgotten after 2 months work): These can become projects that you can own that make everyone's work better.

3) Open Source work is good, but to turn it into something career building can be a prohibitive expense; but if you can find jobs working in open source, it is a bit of a career aid, as you're able to point directly at projects, commits and bugs you're particularly proud of.

This isn't to say don't contribute to open source projects in your spare time if you'd like: But a few small PRs contributed to a few big name projects isn't necessarily going to build your career. Instead, more sustained contribution can unlock mentorship opportunities which can in turn unlock career opportunities.

4) Find mentorship: Find the people you work with who are willing to take time to explain things, and nurture those relationships. Having someone at your work be invested in you is important -- and ultimately the key to building a stronger career. You can't and won't do it all alone: so find the people who are in positions to help. Sometimes mentorship is a formal relationship; more often than not it's simply feedback you get from someone you respect, on a regular basis.

5) Be kind: Finding mentorship is easier if you're kind; if/when you have the opportunity to choose your own work (or. perhaps do some of it anyhow), choose problems that unblock others, lower the team's frustration level, and generally improve things. It's fun to build the cool new feature: It's better for you to fix the 1/100 crashing bug that's preventing everyone's builds from being green.

Hopefully this helps.

A Voyager Update, 8 Months in

I’ve been thinking about writing an update on my ZSA Voyager keyboard for a while. Finally have decided to carve some time out to get a few blog posts written, so here we are.

The Hardware

So the ZSA Hardware remains really good. A few times I’ve played with changing switches here and there, trying for differnt things. Overall, I’ve largely landed on Sunset switches everywhere, but I keep feel like I wish I had a distinction of sort between thumb and finger keys.

The Layout

So at this point I’ve been changing my layout at a relatively low pace.

There are some things I like:

  • One hit TODO button, on a key that I had heatmap evidence was literally never getting used
  • Big ass Command Key under thumb
  • I’m a left-thumb space bar user

As a programmer, I’ve gone through a bunch of programming issues and am... only about 80% happy with my current setup.

  • A pair of brace columns on the left hand. Biggest issue being right now they’re on layer one, which is accessed via left thumb: To provide easier alternation need really to move this to another layer.
  • Escape and tilde current share a key. This is sub-optimal, but I’m not sure where I want to move tilde really.
  • -,| and \ are all on the same key... again, don’t love this, not sure where to redistribute this. The correct answer I think is actually to move the top row of numbers to another layer and use that for symbols, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I really do have tonnes of room to distribute things though. Layer 1 is quite free!

The Great News

  • I can almost seamlessly move between laptop and Voyager these days. Which is nice when working on the deck, though that season appears to be past here.

The Me Problems

I’d be lying if I said this keyboard was entirely perfect for me. The problems though are mostly ‘me’ problems, not the fault of the Voyager. I have some ideas about how to fix some of them, but others I’m still not sure what to do about:

  • Something, either preexisting injury, RSI from keyboarding + guitar, or the new use of my thumbs as major input surfaces means that I have medium frequency pain in the metacarpophalangeal joint of the left thumb.

    I’m suspicious that I’m just overly forceful on the thumb clusters sometimes, and that it’s not doing me any favours. I’ve tried briefly putting some Kailh Silvers in the thumb slots, but I didn’t perhaps give that experiment long enough: Having tactile switches under the fingers and linear under the thumb was super weird.

    I also however find that the Voyager’s thumb cluster feels just a touch wide. It’s better when I twist the halves more, but nevertheless, it’s just a touch on the wide end.

    Also... I just use the damn left thumb too much. Look at this heat map from a few months ago. At some point I may just need to retrain my hands.

Some of this is QWERTY, some of this is me.

  • I’ve still not nailed a tenting angle I’m happy with. Initially I started with a 3d-print of this lovely tenting bar. It was ncie, but nowhere near tall enough. Still, having this I was sort of loath to just toss it, so I edited the model to make a “stackable” version. My first time ever 3d editing, and I definitely goofed it, but it’s been good enough for now, that I’ve kept using them. It feels like with the two of these, I’ve hit like 70% of the tent that I want. At some point though I’m going to have to solve this better though.

  • Trackpad in the middle is great but has always felt a touch clunky. I realized reading this recent ZSA blog post that a huge part of the problem is that the trackpad is so low compared to the tented halves. Need to get a lift for that!

  • I still find that the halves migrate a bit in ways that can feel counter productive. The previously linked ZSA blog post has a real sturdy solution that may be overkill, but something to provide a bit more steady relative position might be nice.

I would love to experiment for a month or so with a Moonlander. I really do wonder if the adjustable thumb clusters, built in tenting, and big travel switches might actually ultimately be better for me, despite my initial desires for low profile keys.

Random

Mine's in there, left as an exercise for the reader to find.

Double Feature

A few months ago I watched a pair of movies on a plane: “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar” & “But I’m a Cheerleader”, impulsively doing an LGBTQ double feature.

I watched “But I’m a Cheerleader” as discovered Natasha Lyonne via Russian Doll and then Poker Face, and I wondered what she was like in her early movies. “But I’m a Cheerleader” is weird time-capsule film, bringing us back to the late 90s. It’s a really odd movie that seems to want to be camp, but can’t help but let the seriousness of the subject matter leak in around the edges. In my opinion, it’s good, but not entirely successful. It’s wild to see Ru Paul in that movie —

“To Wong Foo” is sort of the opposite: It is camp fantasy, and refuses in many ways to let reality in through the window. As a result it feels like it says less, but is smoother an more Hollywood. Seemingly every actor in that movie is giving it their all.

I was reminded to write this blog post though by me reading the wikipedia page on the movie, and they pointed to this quote from Variety:

““To Wong Foo” safely distinguishes among hard-core transvestites, transsexuals and its own heroes, “harmless” gay men whose only deviation is dressing in drag and having fun. In the big farewell scene, when the socially reawakened Carol Ann tells Vida, “You’re not a man, you’re not a woman, you’re an angel,” she sums up the film’s cautious manifesto. Ultimately, the comedy comes across as a celebration of openness, alternative lifestyles and bonding, all life-affirming values that in the 1990s are beyond reproach — or real controversy.”
— Emanuel Levy

With the recent hate thrown at drag queen, and deteriorating respect for trans and LGBTQ people, I find the idea of a reviewer saying that “Too Wong Foo” is without controversy cultural whiplash.