Episode: 655
Title: HPR0655: Read 'n Code - 2 Camus's The Plague and Reddit.com
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0655/hpr0655.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:28:37

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Hello, welcome to the second episode of the Read and Code podcast, the only podcast about literature and computer programming.
My name is Flavio.
Today we're going to talk about Albert Camus the Plague and Reddit.com.
But first, some housekeeping.
I would like to thank the feedback received on HPR, which stands for hacker public radio,
and the feedback I received at hackerpublicradio.org for the first show certainly helped to not delay the second show even more.
On that note, I should apologize for this second podcast being late, but so many podcasts suffer from this that I'd rather not apologize,
and instead just go on assuming that each podcast will probably be the last and we would be surprised if there is a next podcast.
Further, the website for the podcast as well as a blog is up.
The website is read the letter n code dot com.
The first two shows will be there along with some blog posts and the ability to leave comments there as well.
The podcast is not in iTunes yet, but hopefully will be there at some point.
Another feedback I received was regarding the comment about Penguin publishers being horrible.
I completely agree that Penguin is a cheaper alternative, and if you just need a book for less money and they'll do the job
and you're probably going to travel with it a lot, maybe Penguin is the right choice, and sometimes it's the only alternative.
So I confess to owning many Penguin books, especially since back in my college courses for some reason all the teachers chose Penguin publishers for all of the books I'm assuming to save money,
which often ended up being an unsuccessful feat anyhow.
However, the publisher I recommended last time every man's library is certainly something to shoot for any few want to leave an inheritance to someone of a nice library of books.
I strongly recommend purchasing the every man's library 100 titles set.
Some $303,000, but while I don't own it, it's something I fetishize about.
So to today's topic, Albert can move the plague and reddit dot com.
Albert can move the plague is an ever man's library, and the book actually contains other titles by Albert Camo.
He is often regarded as part of the existential, existentialism movement.
Existentialism is a philosophy generally regarded as having started by Kierkegaard, who's another fiction writer, and it maintains that the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning.
And for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles, including the spare, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom.
Some of the writers and philosophers associated with existentialism are Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Simone de Beauvoir.
Anyway, all this dropping names to make me feel smart, I really haven't read most of these, so I'm just mentioning some people that are also associated with this.
It's different than the stoicism we discussed last time, because stoics, if you remember, really focused on the pursuit of wisdom as the greatest endeavor, whereas existentialism seems to explore obstacles in life, which they regard as absurdity and the list I mentioned before.
Albert Camus, however, rejected this label as an existentialist, he maintained that he's not an existentialist.
To that many responded by creating yet another category, which is called absurdism, so in studying the absurd, what would that mean?
Basically, the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail, and hence are absurd, because no such meaning exists,
and least in relation to the individual. So Camus was more concerned with exploring the human quest for meaning, which is bound to fail, because it's an absurd quest to start with, because there is no meaning.
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in French Algeria, and he lived most of his life in Algeria and in France, dying in 1960 in an automobile accident.
He received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, and I'm sure you can find other facts from Wikipedia. He's most well known for the novel, The Stranger, and for the essay, The Myth of Sisyphus.
However, we are here to discuss another one of his novels, which is The Plague. In The Plague, there is a doctor, Dr. Rio, and he's a doctor in a town, an unnamed town, and all of the sudden rats start coming out from their hiding places,
and dying in front of people in the streets, and people's houses everywhere.
People are struck by this, and it takes a while for them to realize what is happening, because by then, humans are also starting to exhibit the same conditions of feeling terrible and then dying.
The town is then sealed off from the rest of the world to prevent The Plague from spreading.
People that are sealed off from the world get lonely and desperate, there's a lot of death, and throughout this, Dr. Rio is working really hard to try to help victims, despite there being no cure or really nothing they can do.
And then, slowly, the number of cases comes back down, the gates of the town reopen, and people are reunited, except Dr. Rio, because his wife dies outside of the town in the meantime, so he isn't reunited with anyone.
At the end, Rio reflects on the epidemic and reaches the conclusion that there is more to admire than to despise in humans.
So, that's just a brief summary, I'm more concerned with the language used in the book, so as before, I'm going to go through a few quotes that I found most interesting in The Plague.
First quote, you can get through the days of trouble once you have formed habits, and since habits are precisely what our town encourages, all is for the best.
End quote. This is a tongue in cheek remark that habits are generally what people take refuge in and hold as their identity.
It's making fun of that. Second quote, Rio says, the only thing I'm interested in is acquiring a piece of mind.
Third quote. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always, plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
End quote.
Another quote. They thought that everything was still possible for them, which presuppose that pestilence were impossible.
But often throughout the book, there are such remarks that make a jab at the way humans think, especially in large groups, in that they thought, in this case, that everything was possible, and that there was no way a plague had possibly ever happened to them.
Next quote.
Man has no substance, unless one has actually seen him dead. So 100 million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.
This is something I've come across before, because often we see in the media death, but for anyone who has experienced that in a close friend or family, death is definitely different when you know the person or have seen a person die, then when you read about millions dying in a newspaper or on TV,
next quote. He savored the bitter sense of freedom that comes of total deprivation. End quote.
This, actually, when I read this, this reminded me of Clad 2's Urban Camping podcast series, which for those of you who are not listening on HPR, you can find on hackerpublicradio.org. It's a great and challenging series to listen to.
Next quote. At my age, one's got to be sincere. Lying's too much effort. End quote. That's pretty self explanatory. And my last quote.
Quote, priests can have no friends. They have given their all to God. End quote.
Okay, so those are just some quotes that I found interesting in Albert Camus, the plague, and you may wonder how this is connected to Reddit. Well, Reddit.com, and for those of you who don't know the site, it's R-E-D-D-I-T.com.
For now, read it as if it's one word. Redditers, the people who post, the people, the users of Reddit are called Redditers, and they have the option to submit links to content on the Internet or submit self posts that contain original user submitted texts.
For instance, a question or an opinion on a certain subject or a link to their blog where they have an opinion on a certain subject.
Other users of Reddit can then vote the posted links or text up or down with the most successful links gaining prominence and reaching the front page, which gets an immense amount of traffic.
As a side note, Reddit is implemented and Python.
Often, such posts, like my little comment a second ago, are trigger what is called, I guess, a flame war, where a flame war results basically when one or more users engages in a provocative response to the original posted.
So, for instance, if a user posts something like X is better than Y, Python is better than something else, that is often a bait.
So then, it starts a flame war by other users commenting no, you're wrong, and then somebody else making a comment to that comment, therefore turning into a flame war.
Just giving some titles from today's Reddit page.
Some of the things you would see, not flame wars, just some of the usual things you would see.
One of the titles is Genetic Algorithm Car Physics. Another is the Programmer's Coloring Book.
Another one is Learning from Twitter's JavaScript for Foreman's Problems.
Another one is Last.fm Outage Report, in parentheses, Hardware Failure.
These are particularly coming from the programming side of Reddit, because Reddit is organized by categories and programming is one of those categories.
So, in comparing the plague to Reddit, I have a few quotes from the plague, and then I'm going to talk about how those may relate to Reddit.
So, hold your disbelief for a short while.
The passions of the young are violent and short-lived.
I think this speaks to the flame wars I was just describing.
So, for instance, one of the Reddit articles you made come across would be entitled Why Open Source Sucks.
These articles, by the way, that I mentioned in this podcast are all from the past few days, which would be January 22, 2011.
I have read recently an article about Why Open Source Sucks, which is a very violent article that does not account for many users' opinion, and it is short-lived and that many turn away from that.
Another example of Bates, Click Bates, would be something entitled like the 49 most used JQuery plugin, so to trigger as many visits to that site as possible.
Second quote from the plague.
Teru, one of the characters in the book, says the following.
Query, How can tribe not to waste one's time?
Answer, by being fully aware of it all the while.
Ways in which this can be done.
By spending one's day on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room or by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon.
By listening to lectures in a language one doesn't know.
By traveling by the longest and least convenient train routes, and, of course, standing all the way.
By queuing at the box office of theaters, and then not booking a seat, and so forth.
So in this quote, Teru is talking about how could one not waste one time, and his answer is you just have to be as aware of it all the while, and we're never as aware of our time as we are when we're doing something that's frustrating or that is intense and makes us really think about every second.
Like the examples he enumerated.
For instance, on on Reddit, there was recently a top article that was entitled these two guys create a top 40 pop song in eight hours.
For instance, including a burger break, and for instance, to show people the garbage they subject themselves to.
Amazing.
I think watching this video of these two guys creating this pop song is an example of those painful experiences Teru enumerates in the quote from the plague.
I think many links to such YouTube videos or articles are such a painful experience that it makes you wonder at the end why you have been wasting your time.
And I think this happens to many people.
We may somehow end up caught by one of these links.
Next quote from the plague.
The most incorrigible vice is ignorance, which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.
The soul of the murderer is blind and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear sightedness end quote.
This last quote particularly attacks ignorance and a link from Reddit its title is the following.
Fox News Megan Kelly claims that Fox News personalities do not ellipsis do not all caps ellipsis invoke Nazi imagery in politics.
Media matters proves her wrong 28 times over.
So why did I choose this particular link I think if you watch it.
I'm not claiming that ignorance is on either side.
I'm claiming it's on both sides so both the Fox News Megan Kelly show if you watch it the argument about the Nazi imagery in politics is equally ignorant as the person posting this link.
Asking other users like I did to go and watch it I think the opinions that they express their hatred I guess in this case for Fox News and Megan Kelly are equally ignorant as Megan Kelly's argument with the Democrat they had on the show.
So once again I want to stress that both sides are equally ignorant and that they both suffer from not having the utmost clear sightedness mentioned in the play quote.
Next quote and the last one you may be thankful to hear from the plague I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain clean cut language end quote.
Unread it an article title I came across as an in the top on the front page is the following in Norway comma start ups say yeah to socialism small country big taxes and no cheating.
Tax returns are a matter of public record yet Norway has one of the highest rates of startup activity in the developed world socialism works so well here that even entrepreneurs like it.
So this article title is most confusing and I think the writer the wrote this probably at the end realize how confusing it was and instead of rewriting the title they did decided to give a conclusion which is socialism works well so here works so well here that even entrepreneurs like it so as people like me that and read the whole thing and have no idea what the articles about can understand oh I see that's what it's about socialism so.
In this case as in probably the example before I think using plain clean cut language is not just a matter of satisfying your previous English teachers but also shows a clear thought process so.
This particular article ends up not making a case for socialism actually and as it turns out there are many things they didn't take into account about startups and governmental subsidies in Norway but that's not the point the point is that the very language used to express his thoughts and opinion are flawed to start with and set them up for not having enough facts to prove it.
Okay with that I end this podcast please address any passionate approval dismissal or comments at Flavu that's F L A V I U at read and code dot com until next time read and code.
Thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by Carol dot net so head on over to C.A.R.O dot 18 for all of us.
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