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lol |
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i had a post about the origins of consciousness, but lol is a bit more succinct; now i don't have to type it up. saving time all day. yep |
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when i said my fingers slowed me down, i was joking. but they really do. i was rambling about some of this metastuff to a friend as i was driving today, how consciousness steps in when my subconscious driving machine is all wtf? lol! "like here, that car up there got my notice because there's a slow bus ahead of us and a long line of cars waiting to turn up ahead. i've spotted it and formulated a plan without even having to stop talking." and i was not kidding. i spotted that car turning (in the middle of a sentence) and sorted out how i was going to drive through (two words later) and then i've already built up a data backlog because by the time i've explained the whole thing it's been over. i'm glad i pointed out the car before i got deeper into the paragraph, or it would have made no sense at all. this is not new, this is how i have been my whole life. interrupting myself, in the middle of a sentence. in my mind, all day. now i've sorted out some sort of rhythmic multiplexing system in which, though it still changes channels all day, all the beans are jumping to the beat. coherency improvements are non-linear |
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like, i can feel more steadiness and precision in my hands already. parts of me that were mysteriously fat despite all this have begun waking up. i spent my first 25 years at a desk and i've had a lot of catching up to do. |
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i was talking about the debugger activing while driving, it happened, i dealt with it, i returned to the fact that i was still talking, i spotted that this was relevant, i raised my finger and pointed, then i began working out how to verbally explain that it was an example and here are the details, sir. there used to be a lot more losing my place. i just lost the sentence/thought going on and it never recovered. that was a massive mess all day. then eventually i had it together enough that there was a second or two of dead air as i processed the traffic variables and computed a solution. then i hadn't lost the context; continued. now things are starting to interleave more often and i quite like it. i've worked on driving and it's dialed in. speaking, writing, words, etc. too. doing those both at once was never the problem, but there's something properly meta about speaking about driving while i'm driving. there is a sense of parallelism i've never had with my one-track ramblebrain before. but really, what's brought that out is intensely tearing apart the ideas of unconscious habits, muscle memory, and all the other crap. i've been paying attention to it a lot and i've started to be a bit more consciously aware of it's motions. maybe that can be a trained chimpanzee. |
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so much to that moment i can't even convey it fully. somewhere around between pointing at the situation and getting five words into explaining it i was enacting the plan i'd consciously sorted out without having to consciously, like, do it. now i can't remember exactly what happened, but since i didn't crash, i'm pretty sure my plan worked. i called one weasel GPS weasel. GPS weasel would tell autopilot weasel to "turn. right." and such when it was relevant. i would program GPS weasel by starting with where i was, jumping to where i was going, then chaining together bits of routes and rejecting this or that because traffic whatever until i had the route. the route is a series of images of the relevant intersections that i'd walk through one-by-one. then GPS weasel would make the correct turns to get me where i need to go and autopilot weasel drove the car compulsively and my mind was free to go up its own butt the whole darn way. unless i'm really stoned. then GPS weasel is really stoned, and begins to miss turns. this is essentially the thing that caused me to start using this metaphor in the first place. it was not really something software would do being able to program in some nonsense and trust it'll get done is amazing. there's less whiplash. |
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in addition to autopilot weasel and GPS weasel, there is traffic weasel. this is essentially my alert/context-switch subsystem. traffic weasel hits me up with stuff like: this compact-shitbox is weaving like he's drunk; please take over from autopilot weasel. and then i do, and i'm consciously watching the shitbox weave. this is another tuned subsystem that will never be flawless, but is already pretty darn good: there's usually a clear difference between "i'm wasted" weaving and "i'm texting" weaving and "i'm having a cell phone conversation" weaving. wasted is repeatedly missing the fact that the road is turning followed my repeated over/under corrections and a sense of panic. then some slow drifting and a bit of calm; until another curve. i've seen things like a guy sit at a red light for a bit, then promptly start accelerating and slam into another lady's car. after i saw him "i'm wasted" weaving. even if i have a system clocked, i don't always want it to be automatic. "i'm texting" weaving misses the turn like a drunk, but then issues a sharp, well-executed correction to get back in the lane. while driving slowly. over and over. here it gets tempting to leverage my analysis for manipulation and do the sort of thing i know will get their attention to me and away from their phone. "i'm having a cell phone conversation" doesn't miss the turns, just slowly almost wanders into the side of the road over and over |
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i could write a book on driving, really. things like: a car makes a statement, no matter what -- even if it's an invisible japanese compact, in which case the statement is no statement. you roll that statement into the style of driving you see happening in front of you and you can get sharp enough that you feel like you're reading their email: "cat lady, 50-79, not poor, but fixed-income." "teenager driving mom's minivan, lower-middle class, not an aphex twin fan." i am still figuring out things every day. i'm long through all the technical plumbing of it and there's nothing left for me to do but get philosophical |
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my mind gave me stock images for all that. the drunk is a 1992 plymouth colt or something, red. the texter is an invisible japanese compact a few years old; dark blue or green. the cell phone conversant is a giant white toyota landcruiser. the cat lady is a forest-green subaru forester -- light forest-green. the teenager is a light blue (like robin egg blue, but less saturated) ford windstar with a few dents. i wasn't trying to do this at all as i wrote it, and only noticed i'd done it as i wrote it later. now i'm writing about it. the data backlog continues |
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sometimes, i think a giant, white-elephant of a toyota landcruiser is a soccer mom on the phone, and then i realized i've been had by a familiar gotcha: it's a small, terrified asian woman who has selected to buy a humongous white toyota landcruiser because she's terrified of accidents. driving a small tank makes her feel slightly less terrified, but still incredibly terrified. she may have been here for a few years, but there's that "FOB" thing. it's offensive, but real. it's also a narrow segment. small, asian women who grew up in the US are indistinguishable from all the other soccer moms driving giant white landcruisers. if they're not on the phone, their driving is perfectly fine. if they are, they almost wander into the side of the road, slowly. over and over i figure it takes a decade before they meld into the general american driving style and i can't tell the difference any more. but that's just a vague guess |
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i rather like that as a citizenship test: can the skilled eye spot their driving as unamerican? if so: sorry, you're on a visa for a bit longer |
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FOBs from nigeria/africa/etc seem to pick up the right motions far quicker. i don't think it's about ability so much as differences in cultural metaprogramming. different levels of barrier-to-entry european drivers tend to either be invisible or terminally lost, either because they're terminally lost or terminally overwhelmed. invisible is more common. i have trouble picking that out if you want the typical american with a handicap parking pass, it's either an old fart in a buick or an overweight, chain-smoking woman from whatever your state's equivalent of marblehead, massachusetts is. both typically blue, like the pass itself, both genuinely handicapped. the marblehead variety drive fine, usually. the old people drive like old people. |
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oh, yes, marblehead drives a chevy caprice. of course |
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then, of course, an entirely different mechanism of evaluation applies when one is driving around at 3am, because everyone's 3am and 3pm styles have vast differences. the hole system will always be full of, but i'm like an entomologist collecting bugs. i have all the common ones but the weird ones will never end; i will never have everything. then i tack over to etymology and try to verbalize the contents of my collection. it's 3am, on the internet, and no one is reading it. i am ok with this |
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i am going to go driving, i think |
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the origins of GPS weasel are somewhere between accidental and deliberate, like the rest of the car. i used to hate being lost. it fires up lots of anxiety about nonsnse, and it's one of those situations i've exposed myself to until the low-grade panic gets bored of it. are you on a main road? if not, pick the next one you see. have you been keeping track of cardinal direction? you don't need to know it like a compass, just... are you east of your home zone? west? north? anyways, once you have the main road, use that to select whatever junctions between other main roads you run into... pretty much, part of why it doesn't bother me as much is that i've dissected the situation and come up with a low-level plan that is essentially foolproof. there's the engine that powers a lot of things, i think... being lost still bothers me a little bit. anyways, GPS weasel started with this: since i hated getting lost, i'd look up the route on google maps first. since using the phone or trying to lookout while driving is dangerous, i would sit there and memorize the whole thing. some street names, sure, but mostly images of the branch points (intersections) via street view. a series of images. then i would drive through it, extreme tension, waves of relief when i spotted the intersection that matched the next image. this was before all this meta nonsense and the sort of strange crap i've always done. and, like a lot of it, it worked super well. years later, i've found it's set in on a deep level. if i know the area well enough, i can pull the street view images from my memory, arrange them in the same sort of sequence, and off GPS weasel goes. i could see how it came about but it still caught me by surprise that i'd somehow become able to program it and forget it. bootnote: the interface to street view is terrible and this is by far the worst bug in that process -- or is it? it's so slow i probably absorb mor |
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lookout ~ look at a printout while driving. my brain is trying to save time by compressing a few words into one word. i could look at that six months later and immediately knew what i meant to say. not so for everyone else |
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i was waiting. once i talked about my fingers being too slow, it was tempting to seed one in deliberately. no, no, wait for it. it will happen soon enough.... ...and it took like forty-eight hours or so, but there it is |
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that's actually the key to a fantastic speed-writing technique. you can lose most of the vowels in english and still get the point across. if you're faced with trying to manually write down someone speaking as it happens, this will save your ass. it is not something i do when taking notes because it makes things more difficult to read back later -- since this is for my reference, i draw it up nicely. if i'm transcribing alex jones yelling at a bottle of water, though, i drop the vowels and my handwriting goes to shit, ink smears, lines wobble, sometimes consonants dissapear along with the vowels.... but, later, i'll be able to sit down and transcribe it into a word processor without losing much. note-taking is simpler than driving, but much older, and equally as algorithmicly demolished. |
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well, "note" totally, ha ha. stenographers, court reporters, those people in the courtrooms typing what people say on the thing. the way that works is everything is done phonetically so there's no stress about abbreviations or spelling or whatever. and it is done with chords, not single keystrokes. but then you need the weird machine and it's even worse than writing down alex jones by pen and trying to make sense of it later. there is a whole network of small companies that charge thousands of dollars for crusty DOS software to translate it back into english, and even then, you have to spend hours editing what the automation missed. i thought the system had a beauty and efficiency to it, but i gave it a pass |
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small commercial demographics held hostage by crusty DOS software. another collection to verbalize: court reporters. hotels. . for five hundred a pop i'll write you a teardown of how to walk in and pull what we've gone from calling a paradigm shift to an industrial disruption |
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i'm bored and i'll throw it away. court reporting is small, and that's why the software is shit. a lean approach is key. a small team; low/slow burn. sit down and chart ways for all the people on the terrible software to transition from the terrible shit to your disruptive shit. there are laws about keeping the court logs for years and years; you won't get these people away from the crusty DOS stuff unless they're sure it won't land them in deep shit by losing the things. each of the three companies or whatever will need a seperate plan. that's most of the work. from there you A) write the same thing in something like Qt so it runs on all sorts of platforms, and B) fix some of the obvious UI and use case horrors that are all over. is the sector big enough for this to turn a profit? no idea. with the navy, you need lawyers. and some ex-congressman who was an ex-congressman less than ten years ago; beyond that their network disrupts. most of your programming will be spent hacking the navy's procuedures and bylaws. find the precise in-vector to dodge the barrier maze of defense mechanisms. win the contract and write something reasonable that runs on linux or QNX or perhaps even VxWorks. collect millions. retire and, when i said hotels i meant another nearby thing and i'll keep that one for now. |
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i'm officially just writing about whatever, now, and switching leechblock back on. the firefox one. not the living carpet of weasels i "" as complicated pants |
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ok, here's a new metaphor i'm onto today: threading. the average computer is running somewhere between dozens and hundreds of threads. when you open a web page, a whole cluster of them firing off: downloading the javascript to serve ad javascript, the ad javascript is parsed and loaded in another thread, this loads more javascript, which is parsed, and finally then it downloads the ad image. while it's parsing the tracker javascript, downloading the web page, rendering the CSS through webkit, and downloading the article image -- the metadata from the image is parsed, along with perhaps facebook's open graph tags, which is probably the only thing they've ever done that i lile.... there's a lot of processing going on like that, for one use of the metaphor: figuring out if something is a cat or a pile of leaves, making sure i don't fall over if i'm standing, and so on. they hum along, like a browser downloading all the web page image, off in threads. for the other, rambling about DOS crapware was clearly a very low-priority thread and leechblock context-switched it out. writing about my new thread metaphor is a mid-level priority, and after higher-priority threads were taken care of, i switched it off. and here i am |
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i realized there is probably a deep connection between rhythm and consciousness. i'm sure someone's had this idea already, but i really can't think of anywhere i've heard the idea before. running all the music machines at once was something i started off terrible at and got really good at. i never sat down to tear apart why, so i took a stab. as i'm doing a track, a thread is created to make sure that thing doesn't happen, or does. or do this thing when we're at this point... is that LFO going out of sync again? i've hit this three times trying to record the track already; my ear is listening for it. then the fourth time i botch the correction, and by the fifth it's more or less a thread that i don't have to worry about. then i'm also doing this for the pattern of the drums, the progression of the song, patch changes, whatever. ideally, all this runs along after twenty tries or so and i can ignore it and focus on soloing the cutoff/res on the sh101 and working it over with distortion and delay; something i love more than candy and ice cream. i'd never forced myself to do that level of juggling before. my sense of rhythm was not terribly good. i got a lot better at both, and you can't escape the fact that it was all centered around the rhythms of the track. then i also had all the pattern data of melody and progression and song structure, but rhythm was what let that come out in a coherent manner. i got on dancing because it filled the hole after i had to sell off most of my gear. enough active participation in music that my soul doesn't feel carpet-bombed with risperdal or haldol or something ghastly like that. so i kept on it, more or less for survival reasons: for whatever reason, this is crucial to my mental health. no arguments, not even a lick of stressing that i didn't understand why. |
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once i got enough experience and physical conditioning, dancing got to be a hell of a lot of fun, just like making tracks. i began doing a lot more of everything in rhythm, just for fun. walking up the stairs, pressing the microwave buttons, chewing my food, and of course -- driving the car. this explains a lot of why my brain has felt more interleaved. i'm doing all sorts of things to the beat, and so they line up. then i'm also aggressive about cleaning all the crap out of my brain, keeping more from building up, and hunting for new piles to clear out. to keep a clean might that's less weighed down... things like switching in and out of an alpha state when driving used to be a mess, but i've spent seven or eight years with the music gear, three years dancing, and two finding new ways to percolate rhythm throughout my approach to driving. now we're somewhere north of six months analyzing how this goes on. if i had it pin it down, i'd say it was trigged when i realized i suddenly had the ability to program what's tantamount to a GPS in my brain with a series of visual image, that i had an autopilot that would follow these directions, and that this shit worked better than anything google or tesla has. always drops me back in when it can't handle things, but it handles increasingly more. the conscious mind is more in beat, i'm studying these mechanisms and state transitions, and so it makes sense i've started to be able to consciously catch them in action. enoughing watching and i start to be able to juggle the parts; drop drum lines in and out. and it's coherent. i can't tell you what an immense relief this is. i'd be fucked without it |
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which gets us to my current problem: i spent three, four, even five hours a day exercising. i could keep going. it's vital to all this, and so it clearly deserves a good amount of time, but how much? next, reprogramming habits/training weasels is not a trivial undertaking. it's a frustrating and exhausting process. it can be as bad as anxiety or anger yanking at me every three seconds; i have to force myself to not do the thing, whatever it is, every time. work down through a transition out of there i've refined and rehearsed. eventually that happens a bit easier, then sort of automatic, then it is automatic. but, the first phase of really fighting with it is the longest. some things are easier than others, but i can only do so much at once. i spend a lot of time thinking about the structure and architecture of it because my resources to implement changes are limited. this also takes a bunch of time. already i'm almost at a full-time job. then you get into writing about it, and it is a full-time job... more, even... but it's working. i feel great. better than i ever have. but the rest of my life is not being tended to nearly enough, and this is not sustainable. forget the bionic transhumanism bullshit. i'm already set up for a meltdown. i could even pick a vague calendar date, presuming nothing surprises me early. is there enough time in the day to take care of my mental health, and that as well? how do i figure that out? which gets us to this: sometimes, something you find in your brain is a real pisser. you want to run away, but eventually the brutal but honest moral inventory daemon comes along and garbage-collects. |
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two or three times when anxiety was upon me (for no reason [and i knew it]) i had a notion-layer reaction that went like this: focus on the rhythm. the day after i wrote about anxiety, and then rhythm, and now i'm squinting at what prompted both. something in me was saying: this is important. it is a much more efficient algorithm for anxiety. whenever i feel anxious, tune in to the rhythm-layer. if the anxiety is justified, i'll spot it there, so that's not messed-with. if it isn't, well, tuning into the rhythm-layer immediately gives a massive chunk of my neural tissue something much better to do. i'm too busy to be anxious. it's still a work in progress, but i feel like it's much better than trying to relax and brush it aside, which is my current weasel. it's hard to shut anything up in my mind, so giving it something that's somewhere between sudoku and crack cocaine -- and endless -- is arguably going to be easier to pull off. on the founding notions of this tangent, well, that's a . it's my subconscious yelling "look at this, you idiot!" loud as it can. mad as shit. pounding its fists on the wall. i can barely hear it, but that's a vast improvement over not hearing it. |
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i've long felt superstition was a functional mechanism of sorts. a way to pool your anxiety about some event and free you from stressing over it 95% of the time. it works for events that are rare, but dire. it makes sense for survival, as well as carefully rationing out anxiety rather than let it run about. i've never been a superstitious person, i used to think. but, no, i am. i make up thousands of bizarre little ones and now i see them as weasels too. superstitions about the lighter tie into the lighter being more firmly rooted in my sense of where everything is. i decided a lighter would be my lucky lighter. like, don't use another. i'm not sure why. i can come up with rational reasons, like: it keeps me from losing it. i always know where i have it stowed away; less conscious burden. but, no, i feel like it's more about anxiety and control. knowing bad stuff can happen and usually doesn't and trying to shut myself up. tonight i accidentally used the wrong lighter. i know there are two lighters in there, one is not lucky, and i always make sure i have the proper one before using it. never thought about removing the other for some reason... and for this time, i don't think to check which lighter i've grabbed. after i've done it a hundred or two times it doesn't tend to slip up. was i rushed? a bit, yes. was i cursed? well... no, bullshit alarm, debug. i feel like it's a notion-layer reaction: i've grabbed the wrong lighter for the first time in ages. my subconscious might smell something bad in the air. this does not mean it is there; it's not a bad vibe. it's more diffuse. don't pour through the input looking for trouble, because you will find it. just drive slowly. carefully. i did. nothing happened. |
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until i hit the highway. halycon and on and on had been on and/or on-ing for a minute or three and i was rather feeling it. i began driving very fast. i'm going up a hill, i see an SUV tailgaiting a compact i didn't store in memory. i'm driving to the beat and i press down the gas heavily, but precisely. drop off of it completely right as i crest the critical point for him deciding he has enough space in his lane. also on the beat. i'm waiting for the moment to gas it up again, because i'm going fast, but going up a large hill and rapidly shedding speed. i see a red toyota going along somewhat slow ahead and hang off the gas. i start to churn through ways to handle it, but the red toyota reacts about a quarter-note after i get into this. he changes lane in time to the beat, i wait for the next click point, and mash the gas. the moments are essentially a long string of movements like that. a massive combo you can't really argue with, and exhillarating. this is the first time i've felt like i felt it almost got there, but not quite. like lighting a pilot light. meanwhile, the rest of my life is still a mess. |
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i'm not sure why i began to drive fast. the gas pedal sort of pressed itself, just like bruce lee's fist. the gas pedal just hits by itself, sometimes. the wind is at your ass for a moment... later, i decided that if there was bad shit, and i'd dodged it, it was lurking in the stretch before the highway. this is all sloppy and irrational, but carefully metered out. tuned and re-tuned and dissected. a rational approach to irrationality. i had a giggle at myself over that one |
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*enough space in his lane ~ i meant i could tell he was itching to duck in and make me jam on the breaks, and i've programmed myself to gauge how much gas to give to nudge right past the point where he's likely to do it, and keep everything else going on in time to the track i'm listening to. i'll open the windows in time to the beat. pick the moment to turn on my headlights to match my playlist. i guess i didn't really make the depth of it clear. it didn't happen overnight; it was two years of gradually reprogramming things. i'd begin to do something like open the windows on beat; eventually that was not new anymore. buried and automatic. my ever-bored brain then found something else to start doing that with. at this point it's pretty ridiculous, and i was never even trying to do all this. i just enjoyed it. |
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obviously, while i'm off doing alpha wave architecture (not conscious of my driving whatsoever) i'm still doing everything in time to the beat. |
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come to think of it, there's what about and anxiety. maybe i faded out of worrying that the lighter slip-up was some sort of subconscious alarm because of the track. that makes perfect sense, unlike a lot of things i try to sort out |
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i forgot to mention: i pulled into a parking spot precisely as it ended. i didn't forget to mention, but i thought of it just now: a sense of calm and warm along with a rush of machinery and mechanisms whizzing by. yes, that's driving fast on the highway and feeling relaxed, more or less. i'm sure the tempo is well-suited too. i've made a note to myself to start consciously observing tempos and styles and the results, since it seems to percolate. i have a vague awareness but not really; clarification will be lovely. |
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i've used music to change the channel on my brain (or keep it from changing) for years. dancefloor techno for coding; type to the beat. it helps me focus. braindance for later, when i've been coding all day and i can't let it go. keep picking at it. there's enough springs and mechanisms in braindance that my brain forgets the other shiny thing and does that instead. after an hour, i can go to sleep. instead of lying in bed, thinking about what i was working on. with driving, i have long been superstitious in a thousand ways about picking music. trying to feel out the right album for the moment, like a DJ. certain albums associate with certain vibes or situations, and there's a weird duality where i'll tend to put it on at moment X and after a while the album feels like it's causing moment X. but, no, my subconscious mind is just david copperfielding me somehow... it is another system, like autopilot weasel, that i've never sat down and torn apart. even though it's apparent there is some tasty data in there for me to absorb. so, yes, here's more work i've made for myself. actually, no, it was there all along, and i didn't know about it yet |
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it's like a small army of phased-locked loops synchonizing to countless rhythms in the world that could mean nothing or everything. that's electrical engineering, not computer science, but sure, why not? |
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bad vibe is a clear and succinct term that does what i need it to without muddling it up; no need to go any further. but, bad notion? no, that's vague and confusing. and ugly. let's call it bad news. like, "it wasn't a bad vibe, but it was bad news." i used to chide myself for wasting time (mulling these sort of choices over) until the words began a sort of strange feedback loop |
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a lot of things go into creating a moment. i look on the internet and it says: rain stops in fifteen minutes. i waited around for much longer, had a snooze, and pretty much eventually was like: ok, now. and put on my shoes and went out for a drive. i knew that it was thunderstorm-y and the roads would be wide open. the cops would be hiding at dunkinz. and the internet says i have a window. no, wait, i need a snooze. ok, now. you know? halcyon again -- it was good before, why not? then polygon. nothing epic. i'm off in my mind for a bit and tune back in to find i'm really feeling year zero by nine inch nails. all of this i've enqueued a week or so ago and i can't even remember adding it. this happens often. anyways, i'm vaguely aware that i'm blasting around back roads at 1am as Capital G comes on. i think part of why the car really gets it all going is the g-forces. i found floating on the internet, purportedly provided to all new mazda owners. if that's real, and i knew about it when i was buying a car, i might be driving a mazda instead. yes, that. it's part of what pushes my brain to absurdly glorious levels. so, yes, Capital G comes on, and i'm feeling the rhythms, and then there's lightning everywhere. i have never seen so much lightning. but no rain. i get on the highway, and it's like there's a giant movie theatre of lightning bolts. in between the moments when i was actually focusing on driving, writing this post, and listening to nine inch nails, i said "ooh" aloud more than once. no rain. i was waiting for it to start pouring the moment i stepped indoors or something poetic like that. i'm quite satisifed with what i got, mind you, but it ends the post nicer. the orbitial song did it. c'mon. rain shit. nope. i'm going inside to type it up |
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i couldn't have been fourteen or fifteen before i noticed one of the things going on when you switch between coding and reality. someone would say something to me, and there was this brief moment where i had both in my head it once, but i could only think about one at a time. there's about two seconds worth of a buffer. if i can finish whatever i'm typing in two seconds, i can get back to whatever mom just said without losing it. like: "no, hold on, i want to finish this before i hear that." then i heard it. very quickly i learned (trained a weasel) to guess if the thing i was typing was longer than this buffer, this got computed automatically, and i would either finish the bit of typing or abandon it as too complex. because, after two seconds, it's gone. i know something has been said, but i've lost it. i must ask that the person repeat it. i'm sure you can believe that mom got sick of saying everything twice very quickly, and so i got it down fast enough. years later, i have a deeper take on that i call "freeze-frame." analyzing my automatic driving, i found there's the same sort of thing going on. i can play back the last two or three seconds of driving and begin to tear through how i made the decision... but it fades off quickly. i only have time to ask one or two questions of this memory, and they have to be direct and to the point. it's gotten sharper as i've poked at it more. a day or two ago i was chatting myself about cache memory like i was writing a post. how no one realizes how incredibly important it is, how branch prediction in a modern CPU can approach 99% accuracy, how the internet would suck without it. on and on. then i said: i don't even have a thing for this. what's cache? where i store my lucky lighter, is that cache? no. what the shit, brain? this is a fart bubble out in the sticks two days later, alright, there it is. i'm sorry i doubted you, brain |
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i type "branch prediction" into wikipedia; may as well refersh my memory on cache. the article opens with: "In computer architecture, a branch predictor is a digital circuit that tries to guess which way a branch (e.g. an if-then-else structure) will go before this is known for sure. digital notions. that's superb |
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to make $200 laptops, all sorts of things had to happen. a lot of it is manufacturing. directly out of that is squeezing down the cost of the parts. expensive parts are denied by the accountants and management tells the engineers to figure something else out. when you bought an original IBM PC AT/XT, the memory and CPU ran at the same speed. CPUs got faster, well, faster, and a 450mhz Pentium III (slot 1) is talking to the memory at a mere 100mhz or so. the CPU, obviously, plows through all the data before the memory can send it more. so why is the whole shebang not stuck at 100mhz? sometimes it is. that's the O(n) moment. but there's also cache memory: instead of your 256megs at 100mhz, there's 1meg of memory inside the CPU, and it costs almost nothing to use. why not put all of the memory there? it's expensive. static ram costs way more than dynamic ram. from here i'm split on how far to explain it. it's deeply relevant but deeply technical. i'll just try to sum it up: there is a whole library of techniques and systems to figure out what data the CPU will want next, and load it into the cache before the CPU needs it. if it's wrong, well, you go out to the main memory, and that's slow... but it's so darn good at guessing it feels like 450mhz up to 99% of the time. loading up a program saturates it and you're stuck at 100mhz, but then it's much smoother. on the flip side, if a program needs more than 256mb of RAM, it will use a "swap file" -- a cache stored on disk. it is vastly slower tham RAM, magnitudes slower than RAM vs. cache. but you can load up a program that needs a gig of RAM even though you only have 256mb. it's slow, but that's a fine bargain for being able to pull it off at all. |
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i was only 17 or 18 when i first heard a concept that's gone very deep in my life: a computer is layers of systems. electricity, circuits. then single logic gates. then groups of logic gates that form functional units. then subunits within a cpu. then the cpu. then the computer, with all the trimmings. then the operating system. then applications. then user data. eventually, you. hard drive, RAM, and cache form a hierarchy of memory structures designed to squeeze abusrd levels of performance out of crap cheap parts with clever tricks. there's an old saying in engineering: "fast, good, cheap: pick two." engineering is about cheating this saying, i suppose. sometimes i'm walking into a new gig or whatever and someone will warn me about where the bodies are buried. like, yeah, this library over here is terrible, watch out. it's pretty evolutionary. this is a polite way of saying that twenty people have worked on it, tacked in little bits of crap, removed half of other people's crap and broke it, then someone else fixed it without understanding either the original crap or the crap that broke it, then there's a new version of PHP and someone does a massively ugly job of moving from mysql to mysqli. one letter; such problems... anyways, you get the point. evolutionary is an insult in coding, but also a reality that you hit every day. i think a lot of people trying to suss out the mind, even professional researchers... well, they expect something grand. i walk into it and i'm figuring there are all sorts of ugly things and accidental hacks and that to save money on parts they used cheap slow memory in my subconscious but there's a bit of cache over yonder. there is something even deeper to it. i have spent years tearing over a codebase that represents the collective mistakes of many minds at once, and i have a whole library of them. classic mistakes all the way up through deeply subtle mistakes. i can see a poorly-trained weasel from a mile, i tell ya |
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the codebase i'm working on now is extremely large and fixing it will take me a good bit of effort. i'm still clearing out the weeds. here and there i can see enough to map out pockets. enough pockets and i'll have the whole pair of pants. weasels don't wear pants, and i should be on to some sort of primate metaphor a day or two before 2031 |
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inside a CPU is actually another layer of memory structures. you have have seen on the CPU spec sheet: 8megs L1 cache, 16meg L2, 32meb L3. exactly the same sort of pyramid that's formed by the hard drive, the RAM, and the cache itself. the metaphor i coded up was this: there is a pampered queen of some vague country (my brain recycled egypt). she likes to spend the whole of saturday afternoon through saturday evening sitting atop a pyramid. she demands a pool of water atop be kept ice cold. slaves must carry the water from the not-nile to the leisure pyramid, then up a tall ladder. in buckets, on their shoulders, with the mechanism i do not know the name of. it's hot in not-egypt and the water heats up quickly. slaves simply dump new buckets in and some water gets displaced and runs down the side, as refilling it entirely leaves the queen waiting for extended periods, and displacement solved the problem. but it was not enough. very quickly it was discovered that the queen would get cross because the water heated up too rapidly for the slaves to keep up with. people got executed. finally, a wise man came up with a solution: hierarchical caching. there is a ground level tier where hundreds of slaves rush in buckets from the not-nile (RAM). then dedicated ladder men (FSB) rush buckets from that up to the second, smaller tier. faster, stronger, dedicated second-level ladder men (CPU Pipeline) bucket/ladder the water up to the third tier. finally, this keeps the water cold enough for the queen (CPU) atop, so she can post to snapchat with the sort of flair a queen is required to posess. |
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i came to say "oh, that thing's a cache" and it exploded with more questions, immediately. is there one shared cache for all of consciousness? does the visual memory have its own specialized cache to remember visual patterns? are any of these caches actually layers of cache in a tiered hierarchy? is it multiple cache systems in a tiered hierarchy? the answer is yes. "to which?" you ask. "to all," i say, "i said or, not xor, you know?" loolean humour yes. the brain probably has all these things a dedicated consciousness cache, a dedicated/specialized visual processing cache, another for hearing, and tiers inside all of them, and all of them form their own tier of memory systems. this is exactly the sort of mess i've been looking for. that's almost gallows humour. it's more work; already so much. then the rest of my life, my car insurance and crap. but i'm resigned to it and now i've got to play the hand i've been dealt this round. i suppose fate is the hands you're dealt in poker. you can't control it; you get what you get. what you do with the hand you're dealt, though, is where free will steps in. then, eventually, you've got poker down so cold that you begin winning hands without even knowing how you've won. yes, you've studied it, but how did you look at that guy and know his whole hand, exactly? are you psychic? no, you've just david copperfielded yourself brilliantly |
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i said i felt like there was a deep connection between . one facet of this is multitasking, and that's what got me thinking about it. my bullet-train of a brain would pick track junctions at random and crash into sheep and cows and even other bullet-brains. then men have to come along and clean up the mess, cart off the wounded, and get the train back on the tracks. then it'd get ten miles and do the same thing. i'm doing everything to a beat in the car. this took years and happened more or less by accident; i enjoyed it. somewhere along the line it became this terrifyingly efficient machine, though, which caught me by surprise. it made me nervous. i'd become so used to messing up i didn't trust it. there's also something about having a deeply automatic something-or-other in your brain that seems to be almost as clever as you yourself are that's more than slightly worrying. i can't trust something without understanding it at least a little, so i began reverse-engineering it. one of the first things i realized was this: not only is it almost as good at driving at i am, but it knows when it's hit its limit and turns control back to me. that was impressive. i don't know when i've hit my limit on a zillion things, most days. it also made it feel a bit more trust-worthy, as it reliably stepped aside when it should. now i'm deep into the fact that rhythm is most likely the keystone of it all. once i'd learned to drive in time, move in time, make decisions in time, the rest of my brain started learning to follow along. eventually i found what used to be train-wrecks would begin to interleave. i'm juggling four trains of conscious thought at once and multiplexing between them in time to the music. this means that multi-tasking is something you can learn. that sounds like it could really save my ass. |
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once i say: OK, the key to multitasking is rhythm. now, how do i structure that? then i said: perhaps i need some sort of rhythmic programming language. code is frozen; there's no rhythm to it. not that's discernable to humans, anyways. the idea of rhythmic programming made my brain explode with questions, again, but one really stuck: huh, i wonder if that's what music is. sean booth said that music is communication, and i thought that was brilliant and succinct. it generalizes to all of art, really. now i can propose this: music is a rhythmic programming language to achieve a desired state of mind. this could be wrong. i could throw the idea out next week. but i kind of doubt i will. what is the grammar of this rhythmic programming language? my brain explodes with questions |
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the subconscious mind latches onto all sorts of patterns. like, when the AC clicks on -- what your skin tells you about the temperature, what you know about the timing, and any number of other details that added up over six months or, when the signature diesel notes of a US post van like to come by: for some reason, thursdays he tends to be an hour later than usual. you can see these things consciously if you notice them. the post van example was something i consciously noticed. the AC was something i can guess at, but will never figure out. how does the brain latch onto the rhythm-layer? well, how do i get myself on time to a beat? i listen for the first beat of four and begin counting. i wait for a known start point and then i'm synced up. like a phase-locked loop tied to an oscillator... hey, that's how radio works! your radio dial frequency of 103.9fm or whatever is not accurate. it's always driving around. you scan about and there is a discernable sense of: no, missed it, no, back too far again, then... click. it snaps in, clear as a bell, like a ball bearing falling into a perfect hemisphere notch. move the dial and it seems to hang on to the station for more dial-distance that it does when you were hunting for it. well, a phase-locked loop looks for when the waveform is at zero, then holds back the oscillator if it's running too fast. like a pace car in an indy car race, is the classic metaphor. are there thousands of FM radios in my brain? millions of oscillator/PLL combos? architecture weasel throws a shitfit and tells me: "this feels like a static memory thing, and static memory is expensive." so i'd more suspect it's a working-variable thing. you have seven or eight oscillators in your brain that are constantly beatmatched to rhythms going on in reality. in music, the rhythm references learned patterns (melody, harmony -> emotional response) and a state of mind is created as the patterns begin to build up like a reverb fed back into itself. |
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so, two more things. the first is that i hit upon something i wrote on in the . maybe the feedback loop between muscle and mind is like a tuned crystal that resonates at a particular frequency. now i am more seriously thinking about how that could start to be a way to remember rhythms: when they occur, the relvant crystals vibrate, this is detected, and the live oscillators sync up to learned patterns. like frequency bands in a fast-fourier transform. time-doman vs. frequency-domain; sounds like a proper tangent... which gets us to this: i realized i should be hyperlinking keywords way more. it forms a sort of trail of breadcrumbs going back through my train of thought, and this may be the only way the whole structure can be transmitted to your unit. it also makes life easier; you can revisit a point you've forgotten. you know that the car breaks down into GPS weasel, autopilot weasel, traffic weasel etc. but you're not clear on what i really, really mean by weasels... but you're reasonably sure that in one of the hyperlinks for one of the weasels, GPS or traffic or whatever, there is a link to weasel, explaining the concept that the other concepts need as a dependancy. this, again, is about how cache memory works. i can't explain weasel every time i use the word, or GPS weasel every time i reference it. the whole thing explodes and overwhelms. so i hide those in a tiered cache that lets you get at what you need; ignore what you don't. the reason i've been lazy about linking is that it's fussy and slow to dig up links. i need some sort of mechanism to just generate lazy-links based on a keyword. architecture weasel kicks in: a copy/paste list could suffice... but, a script to scan posts would be cool. then tactical weasel shitfits: you have spent a week programming stuff like this before and don't ever do that again. architecture weasel will be working on a compromise after this post |
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