A couple years ago I got it into my head that Information Theory held all the answers to the world’s computing problems. So, I got this book called The Mathematical Theory of Communication written by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. I was and still am too lazy to go through the math inside and really didn’t and don’t care much about it, but it’s old books like these (Shannon’s original article was published in 1948) that I think should have more impact on new “technological developments” or whatever you want to call them.
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I would rather create a circuit that makes an LED turn on than understand the underlying physics enough to be able to design such a circuit and be convinced that, if I actually created it, it would work. Doing both would probably be better, but that’s a meaningless (and hopefully obvious) opinion.
In short, I like making things work. When something breaks, it is fun to fix it. If it breaks again in the exact same way, it is still fun to fix. Learning why the problem occurred is only useful because you can use the experience to solve it again. If you knew for certain that the problem or one releated to it would never occur again, it would not hurt to remove all knowledge of the solution from your memory. It’s useless. Such an isolated problem probably doesn’t exist, especially if you like to generalize problems, but the point stands.
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Normally I would feel bad doing
chmod o+r /etc/wordpress/config-nochris.com.php
but when it’s the magic command to get WordPress working and every other approach I thought of failed, I don’t care as much. Besides, I’m the only user on this server. (right?)
Also, hello.