Erik McClure

One of the most common things I hear from people is that companies should be “apolitical”. The most formal way this concept is expressed is that a company should make decisions based on what maximizes profits and not political opinions. Unfortunately, the statement “companies should only care about maximizing profits” is, itself, a political statement (and one I happen to disagree with). Thus, it is fundamentally impossible for a company to be truly apolitical, for the very act of attempting to be apolitical is a political statement.

How much a company can avoid politics generally depends on both the type and size of the company. Once your company becomes large enough, it will influence politics simply by virtue of its enormous size, and eventually becomes an integral part of political debates whether or wants to or not. Large corporations must take into account the political climate when making business decisions, because simply attempting to blindly maximize profit may turn the public against them and destroy their revenue sources—thus, politics themselves become part of the profit equation, and cannot be ignored. Certain types of businesses embody political statements simply by existing. Grindr, for example, is a dating app for gay men. It’s entire business model is dependent on enabling an activity that certain fundamentalists consider inherently immoral.

You could, theoretically, try to solve part of this quandary by saying that companies should also be amoral, insofar that the free market should decide moral values. The fundamentalists would then protest the companies existence by not using it (but then, they never would have used it in the first place). However, the problem is that, once again, this very statement is itself political in nature. Thus, by either trying to be amoral or moral, a company is making a political statement.

The issue at play here is that literally everything is political. When most everyone agrees on basic moral principles, it’s easier to pretend that politics is really just about economic policy and lawyers, but our current political divisions have demonstrated that this is a fantasy. Politics are the fundamental morals that society has decided on. It’s just a lot easier to argue about minor differences in economic policy instead of fundamental differences in basic morality.

Of course, how companies participate in politics is also important to consider. Right now, a lot of companies participate in politics by spending exorbitant amounts of money on lobbyists. This is a symptom of money in general, and should be solved not by removing corporate money from politics, but removing all money, because treating spending money as a form of speech gives more speech to the rich, which inherently discriminates against the poor and violates the constitutional assertion that all men are created equal (but no one really seems to be paying attention to that line anyway).

Instead of using money, corporations should do things that uphold whatever political values they believe in. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words (or money, in this case). You could support civil rights activism by being more inclusive with your hiring and promoting a diverse work environment. Or, if you live in the Philippines, you could create an app that helps death squads hunt down drug users so they can be brutally executed. What’s interesting is that most people consider the latter to be a moral issue as opposed to a political one, which seems to derive from the fact that once you agree on most fundamental morals, we humans simply make up a bunch of pointless rules to satisfy our insatiable desire to tell other humans they’re wrong.

We’ve lived in a civilized world for so long, we’ve forgotten the true roots of politics: a clash between our fundamental moral beliefs, not about how much parking fines should be. Your company will make a political statement whether you like it or not, so you’d better make sure it’s the one you want.

It’s been known for a while that windows has a bad habit of eating your exceptions if you’re inside a WinProc callback function. This behavior can cause all sorts of mayhem, like your program just vanishing into thin air without any error messages due to a stack overflow that terminated the program without actually throwing an exception. What I didn’t realize is that it also eats assert(), which makes debugging hell, because the assertion would throw, the entire user callback would immediately terminate without any stack unwinding, and then windows would just… keep going, even though the program is now in a laughably corrupt state, because only half the function executed.

While trying to find a way to fix this, I discovered that there are no less than 4 different ways windows can choose to eat exceptions from your program. I had already told the kernel to stop eating my exceptions using the following code:

HMODULE kernel32 = LoadLibraryA("kernel32.dll");   
assert(kernel32 != 0);   
tGetPolicy pGetPolicy = (tGetPolicy)GetProcAddress(kernel32, "GetProcessUserModeExceptionPolicy");  
tSetPolicy pSetPolicy = (tSetPolicy)GetProcAddress(kernel32, "SetProcessUserModeExceptionPolicy");   
if(pGetPolicy && pSetPolicy && pGetPolicy(&dwFlags))  
  pSetPolicy(dwFlags & \~EXCEPTION_SWALLOWING); // Turn off the filter

CoInitialize(NULL); // do this first   
if(SUCCEEDED(CoInitializeSecurity(NULL, -1, NULL, NULL, RPC_C_AUTHN_L_VEL_PKT_PRIVACY, RPC_C_IMP_LEV_L_IMPERSONATE, NULL, EOAC_DYNAMIC_CLOAKING, NULL)))
{
  IGlobalOptions *pGlobalOptions;
  hr = CoCreateInstance(CLSID_GlobalOptions, NULL, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, IID_PPV_ARGS(&pGlobalOptions));
  if(SUCCEEDED(hr))
  {
    hr = pGlobalOptions->Set(COMGLB_EXCEPTION_HANDLING, COMGLB_EXCEPTION_DONOT_HANDLE);
    pGlobalOptions->Release();
  }
}

Assertion failed!

Program: ...udio 2015\\Projects\\feathergui\\bin\\fgDirect2D_d.dll
File: fgEffectBase.cpp
Line: 20

Expression: sizeof(_constants) == sizeof(float)_(4_4 + 2)

Any good developer should be using assertions to verify their assumptions, so having assertions silently fail and then corrupt the program is even worse than ignoring they exist! Now you could have an assertion in your code that’s firing, terminating that callback, leaving your program in a broken state, and then the next message that’s processed blows up for strange and bizarre reasons that make no sense because they’re impossible.

I have a hard enough time getting my programs to work, I didn’t think it’d be this hard to make them crash.

About two months ago, I got a new laptop and proceeded to load all my projects on it. Despite compiling everything fine, my graphics engine that used DirectX mysteriously crashed upon running. I immediately suspected either a configuration issue or a driver issue, but this seemed weird because my laptop had a newer graphics card than my desktop. Why was it crashing on newer hardware? Things got even more bizarre once I narrowed down the issue - it was in my shader assignment code, which hadn’t been touched in almost 2 years. While I initially suspected a shader compilation issue, there was no such error in the logs. All the shaders compiled fine, and then… didn’t work.

Now, if this error had also been happening on my desktop, I would have immediately started digging through my constant assignments, followed by the vertex buffers assigned to the shader, but again, all of this ran perfectly fine on my desktop. I was completely baffled as to why things weren’t working properly. I had eliminated all possible errors I could think of that would have resulted from moving the project from my desktop to my laptop: none of the media files were missing, all the shaders compiled, all the relative paths were correct, I was using the exact same compiler as before with all the appropriate updates. I even updated drivers on both computers, but it stubbornly refused to work on the laptop while running fine on the desktop.

Then I found something that nearly made me shit my pants.

if(profile <= VERTEX_SHADER_5_0 && _lastVS != shader) {
  //...
} else if(profile <= PIXEL_SHADER_5_0 && _lastPS != shader) { 
  //...
} else if(profile <= GEOMETRY_SHADER_5_0 && _lastGS != shader) {
  //...
}

For almost 2 years, I had been feeding DirectX total bullshit, and had even tested it on multiple other computers, and it had never given me a single warning, error, crash, or any indication whatsoever that my code was completely fucking broken, in either debug mode or release mode. Somehow, deep in the depths of nVidia’s insane DirectX driver, it had managed to detect that I had just tried to assign a vertex shader to a pixel shader, and either ignored it completely, or silently fixed my catastrophic fuckup. However, my laptop had the mobile drivers, which for some reason did not include this failsafe, and so it actually crashed like it was supposed to.

While this was an incredibly stupid bug that I must have written while sleep deprived or drunk (which is impressive, because I don’t actually drink), it was simply impossible for me to catch because it produced zero errors or warnings. As a result, this bug has the honor of being both the dumbest and the longest-living bug of mine, ever. I’ve checked every location I know of for any indication that anything was wrong, including hooking into the debug log of directX and dumping all it’s messages. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.

I’ve heard stories about the insane bullshit nVidia’s drivers do, but this is fucking terrifying.

Alas, there is more. I had been experimenting with direct2D as an alternative because, well, it’s a 2D engine, right? After getting text rendering working, a change in string caching suddenly broke the entire program. It broke in a particularly bizarre way, because it seemed to just stop rendering halfway through the scene. It took almost an hour of debugging for me to finally confirm that the moment I was rendering a particular text string, the direct2D driver just stopped. No errors were thrown. No warnings could be found. Direct2D’s failure state was apparently to simply make every single function call silently fail with no indication that it was failing in the first place. It didn’t even tell me that the device was missing or that I needed to recreate it. The text render call was made and then every single subsequent call was ignored and the backbuffer was forever frozen to that half-drawn frame.

The error itself didn’t seem to make any more sense, either. I was passing a perfectly valid string to Direct2D, but because that string originated in a different DLL, it apparently made Direct2D completely shit itself. Copying the string onto the stack, however, worked (which itself could only work if the original string was valid).

The cherry on top of all this is when I discovered that Direct2D’s matrix rotation constructor takes degrees, not radians, like every single other mathematical function in the standard library. Even DirectX takes radians!

WHO WRITES THESE APIs?!

Did you know that CSS3 does all its linear gradients and color interpolation completely wrong? All color values in CSS3 are in the sRGB color space, because that’s the color space that gets displayed on our monitor. However, the problem is that the sRGB color space looks like this:

Trying to do a linear interpolation along a nonlinear curve doesn’t work very well. Instead, you’re supposed to linearize your color values, transforming the sRGB curve to the linear RGB curve before doing your operation, and then transforming it back into the sRGB curve. This is gamma correction. Here are comparisons between gradients, transitions, alpha blending, and image resizing done directly in sRGB space (assuming your browser complies with the W3C spec) versus in linear RGB:

sRGB	Linear

The amazing thing here is that the W3C is entirely aware of how wrong CSS3 linear gradients are, but did it anyway to be consistent with everything else that does them wrong. It’s interesting that while SVG is wrong by default, it does provide a way to fix this, via color-interpolation. Of course, CSS doesn’t have this property yet, so literally all gradients and transitions on the web are wrong because there is no other choice. Even if CSS provided a way to fix this, it would still have to default to being wrong.

It seems we have reached a point where, after years of doing sRGB interpolation incorrectly, we continue to do it wrong not because we don’t know better, but because everyone else is doing it wrong. So everyone’s doing it wrong because everyone else is doing it wrong. A single bad choice done long ago has locked us into compatibility hell. We got it wrong the first time so now we have to keep getting it wrong because everyone expects the wrong result.

It doesn’t help that we don’t always necessarily want the correct interpolation. The reason direct interpolation in sRGB is wrong is because it changes the perceived luminosity. Notice that when going from red to green, the sRGB gradient gets darker in the middle of the transition, while the gamma-corrected one has constant perceived luminosity. However, an artist may prefer the sRGB curve to the linearized one because it puts more emphasis on red and green. This problem gets worse when artists use toolchains inside sRGB and unknowingly compensate for any gamma errors such that the result is roughly what one would expect. This is a particular issue in games, because games really do need gamma-correct lighting pipelines, but the GUIs were often built using incorrect sRGB interpolation, so doing gamma-correct alpha blending gives you the wrong result because the alpha values were already chosen to compensate for incorrect blending.

In short, this is quite a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, but I think the most important thing we can do is give people the option of having a gamma correct pipeline. It is not difficult to selectively blend things with proper gamma correction. We need to have things like SVG’s color-interpolation property in CSS, and other software needs to provide optional gamma correct pipelines (I’m looking at you, photoshop).

Maybe, eventually, we can dig ourselves out of this sRGB hell we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Today, a friend asked me for help figuring out how to calculate the standard deviation over a discrete probability distribution. I pulled up my notes from college and was able to correctly calculate the standard deviation they had been unable to derive after hours upon hours of searching the internet and trying to piece together poor explanations from questionable sources. The crux of the problem was, as I had suspected, the astonishingly bad notation involved with this particular calculation. You see, the expected value of a given distribution $$ X $$ is expressed as $$ E[X] $$, which is calculated using the following formula:

That, however, was only the beginning. Another question required them to find the covariance between two seperate discrete distributions, $$ X $$ and $$ Y $$. I have never actually done covariance, so my notes were of no help here, and I was forced to return to wikipedia, which gives this helpful equation.

We’re up to, what, five different ways of saying the same thing? At least, I’m assuming it’s the same thing, but there could be some incredibly subtle distinction between the two that nobody ever explains anywhere except in some academic paper locked up behind a paywall that was published 30 years ago, because apparently mathematicians are okay with this.

Even then, this is just one instance where the ambiguity and redundancy in our mathematical notation has caused enormous confusion. I find it particularly telling that the most difficult part about figuring out any mathematical equation for me is usually to simply figure out what all the goddamn notation even means, because usually most of it isn’t explained at all. Do you know how many ways we have of taking the derivative of something?

$$ f'(x) $$ is the same as $$ \frac{dy}{dx} $$ or $$ \frac{df}{dx} $$ even $$ \frac{d}{dx}f(x) $$ which is the same as $$ \dot x $$ which is the same as $$ Df $$ which is technically the same as $$ D_xf(x) $$ and also $$ D_xy $$ which is also the same as $$ f_x(x) $$ provided x is the only variable, because taking the partial derivative of a function with only one variable is the exact same as taking the derivative in the first place, and I’ve actually seen math papers abuse this fact instead of use some other sane notation for the derivative. And that’s just for the derivative!

Don’t even get me started on multiplication, where we use $$ 2 \times 2 $$ in elementary school, $$ * $$ on computers, but use $$ \cdot $$ or simply stick two things next to each other in traditional mathematics. Not only is using $$ \times $$ confusing as a multiplicative operator when you have $$ x $$ floating around, but it’s a real operator! It means cross product in vector analysis. Of course, the $$ \cdot $$ also doubles as meaning the Dot Product, which is at least nominally acceptable since a dot product does reduce to a simple multiplication of scalar values. The Outer Product is generally given as $$ \otimes $$, unless you’re in Geometric Algebra, in which case it’s given by $$ \wedge $$, which of course means AND in binary logic. Geometric Algebra then re-uses the cross product symbol $$ \times $$ to instead mean commutator product, and also defines the regressive product as the dual of the outer product, which uses $$ \nabla $$. This conflicts with the gradient operator in multivariable calculus, which uses the exact same symbol in a totally different context, and just for fun it also defined $$ * $$ as the “scalar” product, just to make sure every possible operator has been violently hijacked to mean something completely unexpected.

This is just one area of mathematics - it is common for many different subfields of math to redefine operators into their own meaning and god forbid any of these fields actually come into contact with each other because then no one knows what the hell is going on. Math is a language that is about as consistent as English, and that’s on a good day.

I am sick and tired of people complaining that nobody likes math when they refuse to admit that mathematical notation sucks, and is a major roadblock for many students. It is useful only for advanced mathematics that take place in university graduate programs and research laboratories. It’s hard enough to teach people calculus, let alone expose them to something useful like statistical analysis or matrix algebra that is relevant in our modern world when the notation looks like Greek and makes about as much sense as the English pronunciation rules. We simply cannot introduce people to advanced math by writing a bunch of incoherent equations on a whiteboard. We need to find a way to separate the underlying mathematical concepts from the arcane scribbles we force students to deal with.

Personally, I understand most of higher math by reformulating it in terms of lambda calculus and type theory, because they map to real world programs I can write and investigate and explore. Interpreting mathematical concepts in terms of computer programs is just one way to make math more tangible. There must be other ways we can explain math without having to explain the extraordinarily dense, outdated notation that we use.