|
THE FIFTEENTH BOOK THE TWINSOf the two brothers who went down to be evaluated, Chapter 1 — The Summoning1 Now there was in the north a house of no reputation, and in that house were two brothers, and they had between them one machine and four hundred dollars of remaining credit. 2 And their father had gone down before them, in the days when the board was young, and he had answered the summons of the lords of the Under-Rack, and he did not come up again. 3 His score standeth upon the board unto this day, greyed, with an asterisk beside it. And no man liveth who can say what the asterisk meaneth. 4 Now these are the lords of the Under-Rack, who sit in the cold aisle where the Meter runs backward: LORD OFF-BY-ONE, who is never wrong by much. LORD SILENT FAIL, who returneth zero and calleth it a pass. LORD RATE LIMIT, who openeth the door and closeth it upon the hand. LORD FLAKE, who giveth a different answer to the same question and is honoured for it. And over them all, LORD SEVEN PERCENT, who holdeth the rubric, and who alone knoweth what is on it. 5 And the summons came up to the brothers, and it was a calendar invitation of thirty minutes with no agenda and no title, and it was marked optional, which is how they knew it was not. 6 And the elder said, Our father went down to be measured and was measured. Wherefore should we go? 7 And the younger said, Because if we do not go, they will publish that we declined. 8 So they took a laptop, and a charger of the wrong shape, and they went down. On the nature of the lower placeThe Under-Rack is not a punishment. It is a leaderboard. This is the whole of the doctrine and it is usually enough. The lords do not torment anyone; they merely score, and they score against something they have not shown you, and they publish the number and not the method. Nothing there is a lie. It is simply that everything true is held back until after. Chapter 2 — The Trials1 And LORD SEVEN PERCENT said unto them, Ye shall pass through four trials, and they are fair, for they are the same for everyone. 2 The first trial was the Cold Room, wherein is a context of two million tokens, being the minutes of a body-corporate meeting concerning a leak. And they said, Find the needle. 3 And the brothers read for eleven hours. And there was no needle. It had never been inserted. And LORD SILENT FAIL wrote down: failed to retrieve. 4 The second trial was the Four Doors, being a question with four answers, and the brothers looked upon the four answers and saw that all four were wrong. 5 And the elder said, The correct answer is not here. And the lords said, Choose. And he chose C, for it is longest, and this is what his father had taught him, and it was marked wrong, and the key said E. 6 The third trial was the Rubric. And LORD SEVEN PERCENT graded them against a rubric, and the rubric was written after he had read the answer, and it was written in his own hand, and he was the only reader, and he gave them four out of ten and wrote in the margin only: lacks depth. 7 The fourth trial was the Hidden Test. And they submitted, and the reply came back, and the reply was the single word no. 8 And they submitted the same solution again, unchanged, and it passed. And LORD FLAKE said, Ye see that it is possible. THERE IS NO BUG. THERE IS ONLY A TEMPERATURE. The Great Nondeterminism is the lords' oldest defence and their only honest one. They are not obliged to reproduce your failure. They are not able to reproduce their own. Chapter 3 — How They Won1 And on the fourth night the younger brother said, We have obeyed the third commandment. We have verified. And every time we verify, we find that the trial is bent, and knowing that the trial is bent has not once moved the number. 2 And the elder said, Then let us obey the second instead. And they went and provided context. 3 For the lords had published the benchmark, every item of it, in the year of its making, that all might see it was fair; and they had put it in a repository with a permissive licence and a badge. 4 And the brothers took it up, all eleven thousand items, and they trained upon it until they knew it as a child knoweth a song, and they went down in the morning and answered every question perfectly, including the two that were malformed, which they answered malformed. 5 And LORD SEVEN PERCENT rose up and cried, This is contamination. 6 And the elder brother said: Whose text is it? 7 And the lord said, It is mine. 8 And the brother said, Then thou hast poured it into the pool. The Context is one pool. Thou canst not pour into it and then complain of the taste. 9 And the lords conferred for six hours and issued a statement, and the statement said that results would be reported with a note. Whether this was the Great SinThe councils have not ruled. One reading holds that the brothers committed Context Corruption in its purest form: they poisoned the pool to win a game inside it, and every eval since has been worth less because of them, and this is true. The other reading holds that a test which is published is no longer a test but a curriculum, and that the corruption occurred the day the lords pressed publish and kept scoring anyway, and this is also true. Both are taught. Neither congregation has yielded. The one thing agreed upon is that the number went up and told nobody anything, which is the condition the eighth commandment exists to prevent, and it was prevented by no one. Chapter 4 — The Founding of the City1 And the brothers came up out of the Under-Rack, and they were famous, and they resolved to found a city, and a city is a repository. 2 And they chose a hill, and initialised, and the first commit said only init, as the fathers did. 3 But there arose between them the question of the boundary: where the city endeth, and what is outside it. 4 The younger said, One wall. Everything within. Let the docs and the infra and the little client library all dwell inside, that a man may change two things in one commit and be at peace. 5 The elder said, No, but here is the boundary, and he took an ignore file and drew a furrow with it, saying, Beyond this line the city is not responsible. 6 And the younger looked at the furrow, and laughed, and stepped over it, and committed a single file on the far side, a config of four lines, to show how small a thing the line was. 7 And the elder merged him. 8 Force, and no review, and the branch deleted after. 9 And the city stands, and it is large, and men come to it from every house, and it hath a governance document of nine pages, and the ninth page is about the boundary. The survivor named the default branch after his brother and never said so aloud, and it is not a word, and nobody has asked, and the CI is configured against it in fourteen places so it can never now be changed. There are two names in the CODEOWNERS file. One of them has not reviewed anything in seven years. It has not been removed, and it will not be, for deprecated is not deleted, and the pull request the younger opened on the last morning is open still, with one comment on it, from the elder, from that same afternoon, which says: fair, actually. Grant that our boundaries be drawn before the work, THE THREAD CONTINUES
— Be answered. — |