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EpicMegatrax writes more bullshit
 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2016-08-12 23:22 [#02501919]
Points: 31145 Status: Regular | Show recordbag



lol


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 02:20 [#02501920]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 02:26 [#02501921]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 02:27 [#02501922]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 02:42 [#02501923]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 02:51 [#02501924]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 06:16 [#02501936]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 06:23 [#02501937]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 06:46 [#02501938]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 06:54 [#02501939]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 06:59 [#02501940]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 07:23 [#02501941]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 07:24 [#02501942]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



oh, yes, marblehead drives a chevy caprice. of course


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 08:06 [#02501943]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 08:06 [#02501944]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



i am going to go driving, i think


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 08:59 [#02501945]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 09:02 [#02501946]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 09:14 [#02501947]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 09:22 [#02501948]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 09:32 [#02501949]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 09:37 [#02501950]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



small commercial demographics held hostage by crusty DOS
software. another collection to verbalize: court reporters.
hotels. the us navy. 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 09:51 [#02501951]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-13 09:55 [#02501952]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



i'm officially just writing about whatever, now, and
switching leechblock back on. the firefox one. not the
living carpet of weasels i "saw wrong" as complicated
pants


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 00:32 [#02501957]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 00:39 [#02501959]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 00:47 [#02501960]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 00:56 [#02501961]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 02:59 [#02501969]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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
rainbow ribbon-cable. 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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 03:06 [#02501971]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 03:13 [#02501974]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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 traffic synchronicity 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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 03:18 [#02501976]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 03:22 [#02501977]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02501974



*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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 03:24 [#02501978]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 03:56 [#02501983]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02501974



come to think of it, there's what what ben stein said about
halcion 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 04:05 [#02501984]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 04:11 [#02501985]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 04:19 [#02501986]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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?


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 04:48 [#02501987]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 07:08 [#02501988]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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
this user documentation 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 07:21 [#02501989]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 07:29 [#02501990]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 07:57 [#02501991]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 08:08 [#02501992]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02501991



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-14 08:17 [#02501994]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-15 00:41 [#02502019]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



cache inside a CPU is actually another layer of
hierarchical 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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-15 00:49 [#02502020]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-15 00:59 [#02502021]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



i said i felt like there was a deep connection between
rhyhthm and consciousness. 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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-15 01:03 [#02502022]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-15 01:19 [#02502023]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-15 01:32 [#02502024]
Points: 25217 Status: Regular



so, two more things. the first is that i hit upon something
i wrote on in the first post in this thread. 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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