DEV Community: David Quintero 📿

🐳 Getting started with Docker: Running an Ubuntu Image

David Quintero 📿 — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:12:12 +0000

Ever wanted to run a small experiment but were afraid to run it on your machine lest it would change important configurations you wouldn't know how to reverse?

Maybe you're still not super comfortable with Linux and fear running it on your server could interfere with your current projects hosted there... what are you to do?

You could SSH into a Raspberry Pi if you have one and try it out there, but their memory and processing power are very limited.

What if I just want to play around with some scripts I found in GitHub without any worry of messing anything up?

Docker allows you to create completely isolated development environments in your machine where you can experiment freely without having to pay extra to a hosting provider for testing and development server instances.

To get started, head over to Docker Desktop and download the product.

Upon installation, a user friendly guide will quickly explain the basics of Docker, which I recommend doing. Once you've done this, let's play to make our very own first container:

What is a Docker container? 🐳

A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. A Docker container image is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings. (Source)

Installing Ubuntu

From your CLI run the following command:

👉 docker pull ubuntu

This will download the latest official Ubuntu image available.

Next, we will create a Docker container running this Ubuntu image by entering this command:

👉 docker run -i -t ubuntu /bin/bash

The command will start the container, and you will then be redirected to the bash shell of your newly created Ubuntu container. If you notice, the “root@[random_numbers]:/#” prompt is actually the bash shell prompt within the Ubuntu container that we have just created. Type ls to list the root directory.

From here, you can play and install any dependencies you might want to explore and set-up any scripts you might want to test.

Next steps

Now that you've seen the power and potential of having an isolated container to experiment, you might want to exit the container or destroy it.

🚧 Exit

To exit the container simply type exit from within the shell prompt in Ubuntu. This will return you to your system's shell. Your container is now offline.

❌ Destroy

You may have noticed a two-word container_name appeared on your Docker console when you created the Ubuntu container. As you might have learned on the initial Getting Started presentation, this is a random name generated for each container. Mouse over it and you'll see a trashcan icon 🗑 which at pressing it will destroy this container so you can try again.

♻️ Re-start an offline container

Using the same two-word container_name on your Docker console to reference your container, run the following command:

👉 docker start -i container_name

Learning to create an isolated testing environment might just give you the courage and peace of mind to try new things and learn faster. I hope this very short and brief guide helps introduce a new tool to your stack.

Tsuyoku Naritai: I Want To Become Stronger!

David Quintero 📿 — Tue, 26 May 2020 07:11:07 +0000

Sometime ago, I was an aspiring young rationalist. My journey there had an unusual beginning when I came across a book by futurist and director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil. The book in question was The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. This was the first time I remember seeing artificial intelligence being discussed as a real subject and not as a literary narrative device in a fictional work. This singular book would introduce me to a deeper understanding of computation and its very real consequence in our world. I was bewildered at the exposition of transhumanism and what such idea entailed. Falling into this rabbit hole, I soon found myself at the doors of MIRI^*. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California.

This discovery would in turn lead me to the discovery of LessWrong: an online community dedicated to the improvement and training of rationality skills. In their own words:

We are a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. More generally, we work to develop and practice the art of human rationality.

True beliefs? Effective goal accomplishment? And this relates how to AI?

The problem of AI alignment. In an overly simplistic layman terms, this is what researchers in the field of artificial intelligence call the problem of ensuring a computer understands the meaning of the command a human has given it within the semantic context it has been given it. Such alignment refers to alignment to human values (whatever those are). As it is evident, this is no easy problem to solve, much less to explain. It deals with ethics, philosophy, epistemology and even ontology at times. How are we to ensure a future advanced artificial intelligence is benevolent and not evil? Or to a lesser extent, that it doesn't misunderstand what we meant for it do and destroy the local quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy in search of resources to make paper clips?

The idea was that if we are to predict, or if we hope to model what a future intelligent agent might misunderstand, or decide based on its own subjective biases, there is no better test subject to study than we ourselves, possessing each of us a fully operational conscious mind, with biases, beliefs, preferences and conditioning. Studying our own behaviour might shed some light into how an artificial mind could reason.

My young self was no longer consuming science fiction, it was actively participating in the world and civilization that would see it come to fruition! These were no longer what-if scenarios, these were some of the best minds at work trying to understand the implications of rapid technological acceleration and how that would inevitably change what it means to be human.

Participation in that forum, however, was beyond me. It was like arriving to a final exam in philosophy after having skipped classes the whole semester. Fortunately, there was an onboarding mechanism, a collections of essays referred to as The Sequence. And this is how I was introduced to Tsuyoku Naritai.

Tsuyoku naritai is Japanese. Tsuyoku is “strong”; naru is “becoming,” and the form naritai is “want to become.” Together it means, “I want to become stronger,” and it expresses a sentiment embodied more intensely in Japanese works than in any Western literature I’ve read. You might say it when expressing your determination to become a professional Go player—or after you lose an important match, but you haven’t given up—or after you win an important match, but you’re not a ninth-dan player yet—or after you’ve become the greatest Go player of all time, but you still think you can do better. That is tsuyoku naritai, the will to transcendence. ––Eliezer Yudkowsky (full essay)

The will to transcendence, to do better, to keep moving ahead, to take one more step forward. Tsuyoku naritai!

It is a very humbling endeavour to begin the path of learning programming. If you are new, or if you've been at it for a while and still feel lost or overwhelmed in the vast web of jargon, concepts, and terminology, take heart! Surrender to the noble discipline of one who wants to become stronger. Anywhere you find yourself in your path, just resolve to go a little bit further, just a little bit more.

Take this mantra with you and repeat it to yourself: Tsuyoku naritai! ✊🙏🏻

The Psychology of Becoming a Developer

David Quintero 📿 — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 01:49:34 +0000

There once was a cultural anthropologist by the name of Ernest Becker. He wrote a very insightful book called The Denial of Death. In it, he spoke of mankind's immortality projects through efforts of heroism. In the end, he argued, all undertakings of men and women throughout history were made in the service of a culturally heroic ideal. Becker in turn was inspired to this realization by an Austrian psychoanalyst by the name of Otto Rank. Rank had published a book titled Art & Artist which made a deep impression upon Mr. Becker. Being a difficult read, and aware of his terse writing style, Rank had once asked the poet and essayist Anaïs Nin if she would be willing to undertake the heroic task of rewriting his work to make it more accessible to the masses. As far as I know, this never took place.

In Art & Artist, Rank sought to understand the origins of art, its purpose and meaning for mankind. He posed the question: Which came first? The art or the artist?

Through the methodical study of different psychological types, and with a complete overhaul of what constitutes an art, and who constitutes an artist, he was able to conclude from the evidence collected that the artist always, invariantly, declares themselves first as an artist before going forth to create the art.

So what is art? And how does this relate to the impostor syndrome?

Surely we can agree that art is anything performed or created with a certain degree of mastery. When art comes into being as a form of self-expression, we easily recognize it on museum galleries or concert halls. When it is pursued within a methodology, we call it science.

Programming has elements of both.

I had always had a fascination with programming and the people who could program. But it was not something I could do, I told myself. It was too complex and besides, I was no good at math. Even so, I once ended up teaching for a few weeks elemental ActionScript to high school students after graduation. It would be over a decade after this before I would make the choice to become a developer.

Overcoming the fear of a gigantic undertaking, surrendering to the fact that I would be a beginner for a very long time, accepting that there was a lot I would not understand at the beginning, and more than anything, realizing that time would continue to pass whether I made the choice to begin Now or not.

It has been one year and a half since I made the declaration I would be a developer. 555 days to be exact. On that day I wrote: I began today studying JavaScript and must remind myself to not attach any future value to the task of learning or else I will lose interest. To learn it for the sake of learning and nothing else, to develop a new skill, but not to dream of exploiting it. This is my psychology.

That was what I had to tell myself in order to begin. Had I had a goal in sight I'd had given up. Fast forward to today, I have recently earned the JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures certification from freeCodeCamp and behold! As if an act of magic, the moment I wrote the code for the last project, the moment before where I explained the problem to myself, the moment I broke it down into smaller pieces, the moment I came up with a strategy to solve it, the moment I implemented a concept that had been particularly difficult to understand half-way through the entire course (recursive functions), the moment I debugged the script and passed all the test cases, the moment it was successfully accepted, and the moment I claimed my certificate, I understood that I had finally made it: I was finally a developer.

The accumulated hours, the quantified effort, the body of work pushed to GitHub was all evidence of the process of becoming. I had come full circle. Granted, I took detours along the way, sidequests, so to speak, but within the context of becoming a developer. A way to break up the monotony of it at times.

So what has changed from the beginning of the adventure to now?

Nothing. I have only climbed one peak. But now I know the method: as the character of Ernest Hemingway states in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris: "If you're a writer, declare yourself the best writer!" So demand it of yourself, that which you seek to become!

I leave you with two quotes that accompany me in this journey:

"Therefore it is written: If you do not seek perfection you will halt before taking your first steps." –– Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Proper Use of Humility

"Practice even what you have despaired of mastering. For lack of practice the left hand is awkward for most tasks, but has a stronger grip on the bridle than the right––it is practiced in this." –– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: Book 12 v. 6.