In playing around with the new SpriteKit in iOS 7, I got this assertion error:
Assertion failed: (def->bodyA != def->bodyB), function b2Joint, file /SourceCache/PhysicsKit/PhysicsKit-4.6/PhysicsKit/Box2D/Dynamics/Joints/b2Joint.cpp, line 173.
I guess Apple licensed the Box2d library or hopefully at least contributed to its development. I haven't seen any definitive mention of this connection but I may have missed it somewhere.
Earlier today I was looking at buying a new keyboard and placed it into the shopping cart at Amazon, though I didn't pay for it yet as I might order something else.
Just now I was looking at Facebook, and noticed a "random" ad on the sidebar. Lo and behold the picture of the ad was the keyboard in my shopping cart! Say what????
It didn't stay there long enough to analyze it, but the chances of a green logitech keyboard appearing randomly out of all of the products at Amazon is basically zero.
Read a note today by someone on Hacker News who lamented his failure in starting a company and the ever growing disaster it was causing made me think.
We all were all failures once; everything sucked at some point. The thing is, if you never failed you probably never risked anything either. I know people who've worked at the same company for their whole career. To me, that's the real sad story.
To try, to risk everything on an idea, to drop everything you have into something you care about and then fail is still the right thing to do. It's some Neanderthal charging a huge beast with a stick, it's some guy flying blind across an ocean, it's a college dropout building computer boards in his dad's garage. It's making life interesting even if you fall flat on your ass or worse.
If you are building a bridge you can't ignore gravity, the design has to hold up the load. If you are making a Souffle, you need to follow the instructions precisely to make it come out right. If you are writing software however there isn't a single way to get it right (assuming you can even define what right is).
This doesn't stop people from insisting that their way is the only way and that if you don't agree You're Doing It Wrong!
One advantage of having been a working programmer for 3 decades is you get a long term view of how ideas in programming have grown over the years. Because communication is so easy these days ideas gain traction and people try them out much quicker than when I started. The flip side is that people are much quicker to insist that they hold the One True Way and that you clearly are stupid if you disagree.
Search on Google for 94% of projects fail. You'll find something like 26 million results. I can also guarantee that 77% of you won't try. Of maybe it's 35%; I forget which.
The point is that we are constantly badgered by precise percentages that 61% of you believe are actually meaningful. I actually considered making that number generated by javascript because it would be 25% more accurate.
Given the current nightmare that is healthcare.gov at least 85% of articles emphasizing how much better the author could do is quoting a number between 59% and 94% rate at which projects fail if they don't follow the author's ideas. In reality I don't believe 49% of them.