"The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

[de_koraco]

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Aptitude's UI

I'd rather use dselect than be stuck with that nightmare.

For real now, all of this is my personal opinion, and I'm certainly not in a position to evaluate the hard work done by the devs. I've had experience with zypper and yum, and find their dependency resolution algorithms to be much better than aptitude's, so using aptitude is like a step down. I've found that the only way to manage dpkg's crapouts reliably in the long term is manual brute forcing with apt or even dpkg itself. It doesn't say much about aptitude though, it's a fine tool I guess, I use it for searching packages, just not for installing and upgrading.

[SteveRiley]

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

find their dependency resolution algorithms to be much better than aptitude's, so using aptitude is like a step down. I've found that the only way to manage dpkg's crapouts reliably in the long term is manual brute forcing with apt or even dpkg itself. It doesn't say much about aptitude though, it's a fine tool I guess, I use it for searching packages, just not for installing and upgrading.

One of the curiosities, at least for me, is how widely varied are the experiences of Linux users. So far, I've not encountered a problem where Aptitude couldn't figure out what to do. It's the only package management tool I've used to build and maintain my hand-crafted Precise + KDE build on my Acer. I wonder what sort of circumstances would cause disparities between Aptitude and apt-get? Complaints about Aptitude seem to litter the net, but I haven't seen a thorough analysis of the differences between the two tools.

[de_koraco]

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

aptitude sometimes offers those solutions with weird answers when it encounters problems. "I'll do a), but maybe b), or even c) if you want. What would you like - yes, no, go ahead, abort, wtf". I had those situations a few times, and it would take out an obscure library used by some third program, which would spit error messages, so I'd have to scour the logs and find out what was going on. On the third or fourth such disaster, I just gave up on aptitude.

[Qqmike]

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

On the OP, the key line being:
"Feeling that your work is useful, even if you know it's an illusion, has motivational power with respect to that work."

and then questioning the value of his work:

" ... So, I decided to try deliberately believing a false thing: namely that my Debian work is valuable and worthwhile. And hey, it worked! I still know that what I'm doing is worthless, but I can convince myself otherwise for stretches of time, ..." and "The one problem is that this state of deluded motivation seems to be a bit fragile and is vulnerable to being popped ..."

And best of all: "Presumably the only way to avoid this is to find something to do in my spare time that I enjoy and that is actually meaningful to the world. But since I don't know of any activity that meets these criteria, I'll keep my self-delusion for the time being, thank you very much. At least I know I'm doing it -- I suspect that most people don't."

and as GG added, "What he wrote could be said about any work or hobby that one undertakes."


My thoughts/reactions to reading his account ...

To quote myself (from another thread, discussing religion/Christianity), "Belief is a powerful thing. Whatever you believe to be true for yourself becomes the truth for your experiencing-in-this-world. And it doesn't matter what you belief. Believe it hard enough and it becomes true for you and you will find plenty of 'evidence' to support it."

I'd say Burrows is a pretty smart guy in this regard, knowing how to operate his brain to get desired results (certain feelings). The neurolinguistic programming (NLP) guys in psychology would applaud Burrows' adeptness (oh, the power of words!).

Use of phrases such as "finding work meaningful to other people or to society to the world ..." is interesting. It also reflects a choice, a belief, that for YOU, it is important to do work that is "meaningful/useful" to other people or makes a contribution to society. Well, that's a setup if I ever heard one. If you believe that, then you are going to feel useless unless you feel your work has "meaning." Boy, lots of undefined terms being used here. For starters, if you are here, you better at least try to define "meaningful" for yourself, then proceed to make yourself miserable because you don't feel your work satisfies that definition.

I think you may get my point. So much of this is arbitrary; most of it involves undefined terms. What counts then, if anything counts, is how you feel. If you feel good, then you are OK, you are "there." Best to make no attempt to define anything or to avoid being arbitrary in your deeper beliefs.

Speaking of beliefs, religions, the Bible, and our previous discussions, I'm surprised no one has yet called me on the carpet for my beliefs as I continue to quote, for example, Don Juan/Yaqui Indian sorcerer. The Bible in this case (one of many for me) being a set of five books from the early writings of Carlos Castenada. The books tell a story (not unlike the Bible) about Don Juan. Does DJ exist or was he made up by Castenada? Classic discussions. But who cares if it's fiction, "real," "illusion," documented, whatever. It's all an illusion. We make it up. We even make up science and mathematics. Beliefs are in a certain sense arbitrary. We freely choose to freely choose our beliefs. But once chosen--even if only temporary or as a convenient illusion--our beliefs have a powerful effect on us and how we experience living-in-this-world.

Most of what DJ says makes sense to me. When he uses words you feel are too wavy, feel free to interpret them metaphorically, perhaps as a stand-in for your own more scientific/physics/metaphysics constructs. The quote from Don Juan is rather lengthy but I couldn't see where to snip it off for this discussion, it all applies:

Carlos Casteneda: Don Juan:

You want to find the meaning of life ... A warrior doesn't care about meanings.

Learn the art of acting with controlled folly. A warrior treats the world as an endless mystery, and what people do as endless folly.

All paths are equal. The world we see is only a view, a description of the world. A sorcerer aims to stop that view, called "stopping the internal dialog." A warrior becomes a sorcerer. The issue of sorcery is perception. This life we are living is only a long vision. The world is a mystery. So when you're trying to figure it out, all you're really doing is trying to make the world familiar, seeking yet another description of it.

You can injure your spirit by being indulgent and soft and given to dwelling. Learn the power of the possibility of action. Learn new ways to perceive the world. To let go without losing your marbles.

To disrupt the routines of life practice Not-doing: a perceptual game of focusing attention on features of the world that are ordinarily overlooked, such as shadows.

A warrior does not care that things are true or false. He acts in both cases. If things are said to be true, he acts in order to do doing. If things are said to be untrue, he would still act to do not-doing. A warrior doesn't need to believe, because as long as he keeps on acting without believing, he is not-doing. A warrior applies not-doing to everything in the world. It is a source of power.

[End quote -- or more accurately, paraphrase in some instances]
- - - - -

You can play a game, you can try it for yourself. Pick something and act as if it is true. Do this for one day (or a week) and see how you feel, see how it impacts or determines your perceptions, perhaps even how it may influence your "beliefs." For example, say you are not a Christian (going back to that topic in another thread, but it is the same principle here as with Burrows). For one day, act as if Christianity were "true," as if you are a Christian. Don't just go through the motions, get into it, practice it, read the four gospels as if you believe them to be a foundation for your belief-in-this-world. Try to actually "install" the new belief in your brain for a day or a week. As if you are a professional actor. See what happens. (Or pick anything else to believe in for a day, and go with it; see how it seems to "change" you.)


I guess that's about all I got to say on the subject ...

[bsniadajewski]

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

aptitude sometimes offers those solutions with weird answers when it encounters problems. "I'll do a), but maybe b), or even c) if you want. What would you like - yes, no, go ahead, abort, wtf". I had those situations a few times, and it would take out an obscure library used by some third program, which would spit error messages, so I'd have to scour the logs and find out what was going on. On the third or fourth such disaster, I just gave up on aptitude.

I hace had much trouble with Aptitude when I use(d) to build my Kubuntu to get to a working desktop before adding what I wanted through Muon. Luckily most dependency problems were easy to solve, especially since I unchecked that setting dealing with trweating recommends as deps. In fact, I still have it installed just in case I need to get in via the recovery mode (which is quite rare ).

[woodsmoke]

Re: "The power of self-delusion" -- a blog post by Aptitude's developer

Dunnno, I've mentioned several times that the only real problem that I had with synaptic/aptitute/whatever was the descriptions of the apts.

Anybody could do that, setting aside the really technical ones.

Since the only people that need a "better manager" are the non-experienced people, writing better descriptions of them would take care of the new people until they become more experienced and the leaves the more experienced people to just use the package managers as they are and let it go at that.

just a thought.