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lol |
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a few times i've mentioned i should wish to become virtual reality's first great painter. i've been working on a dancing game and a cartoon series in my mind to this end. i've also got a bit going on a musical driving game, like audiosurf plus indy 500. i'm not worried about anyone stealing that last one, because if/when i get to it, i'll mop the floor with anyone who tried to do it. google's self-driving cars are limited to 35-mph for safety reasons. they drive like an old man. my autopilot drives with equal parts insanity and poetry and wisdom and respect for safety. sometimes i'll snap out of my train of thought: oh, i just hit a manhole cover perfectly on time right as the chorus of this kmfdm song is about to take back. let's stop writing forum posts and enjoy this. just as i finish that thought, i hit another manhole cover in time. i feel the curves for a bit -- not too fast, just brisk and in beat -- then go back to alpha wave science. tonight, i noticed all sorts of deep black tread marks on the road. i was like: whoa, was that someone jamming on the breaks? but it's all over, like crazy. then i notice it's regularly spaced, like putting a blotch of ink on one part of a wheel. the construction i'd just went through clearly did this to everyone's tires. i worked to sync it up to the kmfdm song and surmised that this was the speed of your average driver. 33mph, which was dead on from my personal experience. slow tempo, average of most drivers. later, on the highway, new bumps had been installed. regularly spaced. the song i had on was fast; syncing it up required me to push 10mph over the limit. the proportion of the difference between the two tempos vs. average speed in these two different situations jived nicely. there's all sorts of deep math with sine waves in putting a dot on a wheel, but i wasn't thinking about that at all. |
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the cartoon show (previous post) is the oldest of the three, and also the most complex. the others, if i get to them, will come first. ground zero for it all happened in 2012 as i listened to "polygon" by shock one. that track has easily made a decade of work for me... no, it's not drukqs, but it hit me in the right spot at the right moment to trigger and explosion that may very well keep me busy for the rest of my life... but that's another story. it is essentially plus star trek. again, not too worried about anyone else taking the concept for a spin, because mine will be better. redline is hand-animated in the brutal japanese style. you know, the progenitors of my neighbor totoro almost coming to blows about the right shade of green for the forest admist drawing everything manually. anime is low-framerate because drawing it all is hard. the first time i saw it was amazing. i was with four people who either liked beer or complete sobriety, but i'd snuck off for a smoke on my own. i'm glad we had the lights off because i was crying a lot. it was so. fucking. intense. afterwards, a beer chap said, "what drugs was i just on?" he's never tried drugs. the guy who made redline said something like, "i wanted to make a film that americans could enjoy and show what japanese animation is capable of." he meant this is the nicest possible way, really. making something wonderful but digestable. i thought: "i should like to return the favor, and make a cartoon series that japanese can enjoy and show what an american with a computer is capable of." i'm not sure if i'll get there, but i will sure as hell try. the dancing game is the most developed. what i really want is full-body motion-capture, but i'm chewing on to scale that down to sony wands or mo-cap plastic knuckles or whatever. definitely need more than two yoga mats, though. |
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i've not even used VR since a long-dead chain named cybersmith. i still keep the card they used in place of tokens because it opens the doors to ATM kiosks... but, yes, i already have my first bug report for VR: - inadequate drainage for tears occuring when the user becomes . it sounds like a joke. if i filed it now, it would be snobbishly reacted to: "c'mon, this is a serious bug reporting system." my ticket would be closed. a few betas later, the ticket is re-animated with, "ok, yes, this is a bug." |
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alright, alright. i suppose i should give my googlefone credit, even though star trek invented it and steve jobs made it something worth having. google provided the path of least resistance to having a stock nexus whatever, pretty much the standard dev unit for that generation. then finding a carrier that would take a stockfone instead of a verizonnorovirusfone. verizon says: no sir. i don't like it. you can have that same model, but you have to buy it from us, with lots of crap on it. you can't root it, you have to live with it. google did not fix this for me. apple could have fixed it for me, but then i couldn't root it either. but, really, i got into the post box meaning as an aesthetic, i suppose. i'm sitting here typing on my laptop as my phone shuffles camerafonefotos and videos over gruetoof to my solid state thinkpad. it's sitting there on the table, no wires, glowing, and i got precisely the same tingle i did when i admired my minidisc recorder. very johnny mnemonic feeling. virus was on the playlist, though, concord landing. johnny menomic, paulie reviere. but to get there, i had to fight. can i go to bluetooth in settings and send file from that? no. can i send gruetoof thru file explorer? no. can i go into "gallery" and presshold album "camera" and then the menus... oh, thank god! the gruetoof icon. a toofy bee. slow. 50k/s. buried in shit menus. but nice, once i get it to work |
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tonight the cop lights on the cop car parked for constructionizing calzonination were precisely in tempo with a john b song i had on. no drift at all. the lights were not simple, either. all sorts of crazy trippy patterns. it's as if a cop was in that car, heard my music, and was djing the lighting controls. but, no, it's just mad good programming on the part of whoever made the lights and it's exactly the same tempo as the song. i rave along to it, gesticulating at the cop lights like -- yeah, hit it! bring it up. take it down. smash it, yes, that's it |
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cops are a huge data file, obviously. i've come down to something that's rather nice, actually: show respect for the badge, and you generally won't have problems. there will always be the occasional snag. i was out for an evening walk -- the same route i'd doggedly taken every day for like six weeks -- and a cop car is slow cruising. immediately i get a bad vibe. his crosshairs are on me. i'm shitting a brick, but functioning on some level. how do i handle this? i'm at a T section at the end of a street and i can either turn towards him (my usual route) or take the other way; my back to him. i think: i'm not doing anything wrong, and changing my usual behavior because the cop is clearly eyeing me is exactly the way to telegraph that i'm shitting a brick. i've done nothing wrong, mind you, i just smelled trouble and wanted out of there. so i walk towards him. nervous as shit. sure enough, he pulls up. demands to see ID. i have none. i'm on my evening walk, sir. i almost let off something about nazi germany. this is the real shit: i'm going from scared to annoyed, and trolling cops is going to get me up shit creek. it almost does. i get testy and curt. he puffs up. i feel like a rabbit staring down a hungry wolf. i can see it: he's waiting for me to run. if i do, he's ready to tear right on my tail. it actually makes me want to run. intimidating as shit. so, sense prevails and i back down and apologize in the right ways. he was looking for a guy in dark clothes and a hoodie who committed a crime he never specified. i was wearing a hoodie and my clothes were not particularly dark. he was mad he lost the guy and picked someone to bother. |
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95% of what cops do is understandable and sane. it's the other 5% you have to worry about: maybe his water heater just blew and his basement was flooded and now he has to sit here with a radar gun and stew about it. that's not normal, though. pretty much, if there are cops around, i drive properly. if there are always cops around, well, they clearly care about this patch of turf and i should respect it and drive ***correct. that was easy enough. after a while i started thinking about the places they hang out in general patterns: town centers. lots of people there. kids goofing off. makes total sense. the times, too: wow, lots of cops! 11pm, they're probably watching for drunks. drunk drivers are scary to see and i am all for this. i drive correct. i even have this idea that: hell, the cop is watching me, and i love driving. he knows driving damn well, and so i do my best to demonstrate things like crisp and roboticly following the double yellow line around complex curves. at the speed limit, or if they're tailgating me -- cops are human and in a rush sometimes; it's not always about the tickets -- a bit above. maybe they notice, maybe they don't, but it's a sweet thought and keeps me from stewing in anxiety and consequently acting nervous. in general, the more i see of cops, the more it makes sense and the more i understand about how to act. if cops were not around, speed limits would not be enforced, and driving in massachusetts can already be pretty intense even with speed limits. the polite thing to do is note where they seem to be concerned with and do your crazy shit elsewhere. at a carefully chosen time and place.... *** that word is from the wire.. the car should look correct. a man getting himself correct. |
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the officer was looking for a man wearing a hoodie, and i was clearly not wearing a hoodie. i pointed this out to him, before the conversation got tense, and he replied: "well, you could have ditched it." my father refers to this as cop logic |
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once i saw a cop car doing really weird shit. sudden braking. erratic darts to the side of the road. are they having a fight in there or what? no.... this is on-the-road training. rad. makes total sense. it was lovely to watch. i was a bit jealous |
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i read my daily horoscopes. not every day, just a good many. i'm going to check them now... yes, anyways, my core theory for synchronicities pretty much... i went to wikipedia for the thing but it'd been replaced by something even better. i haven't even read this yet and it already seems mustard: . now i'm going to read it. ok, now i'm realizing this is too far into chemistry. now i'm giggling at words like galvanomagnetism. no, too silly. abort vector off to google and i find the right ramble tip: emergent complexity, that shit. entropy always increases, but order can increase in a local pocket at the expense of increasing entropy outside of it. my metapfthot here is: a seeded random number generator. to generate a random number, the computer function is provided with a seed number. random(3) will generate: 391, 18, 4719, 1, 888, whatever. random(4) gives 2871, 155, 9, 21, whatever. the key point is that it's not really random, it's "pseudorandom." the seed number is taken, multipled by three, then it adds the weight of the programmer's girlfriend in kilometers, divides by six and rounds the integer, subtracts three, goes modulo the initial seed number... pretty much, it's like a raffle. putting all the names in a hat and shaking it up good. imagine being able to shake the hat precisely the same way, should you choose too. random(3) will always produce the same "random" sequence. standard programming practice is to feed in the current time since 01/01/70 in seconds as the seed so it's always a new stream of not-random psuedo-nonsense. |
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the classic synchronicity is this: you think of an old friend for the first time in ages. right as you do, the phone rings, and it's them. i feel there's always a root to it: national news coverage runs a story on a band you both liked on the 20th anniversary of the day you met. then they're on your mind, and you're on theirs. someone makes the call first, but both people are equally surprised and charmed by the situation... people you spend a lot of time with? well, lots of random number generators get seeded and rhythms synchronize and a message in a bottle washes up. i'm very proud of this because it essentially allows for a level of psychic activity without breaking the laws of physics. or, as above, thermodynamics. |
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. gesundheit. |
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so, yes, i read my horoscopes. the horoscopes divvy the people up into segments with different motions. there's a pseudorandom waltz in between all the segments that"s tied to absolutely massive spheres off in space somewhere. there's some old uncanny psychological insights buried in the star signs; i'm sure. i don't put much faith in that. my theory is that many, many people read horoscopes. many people even read the same web ones i do. it has a limited but real effect on how the person goes about their day. they're somewhat inter-networked. so if i read the horoscopes, i will be rhythmically synchronized to millions of people who also read them. some days it seems dead off. but, the more i follow them, the more uncanny, weird things have begun to crop up. it is, again, like gardening. i'm not latched onto it going anywhere, but i went with it for a bit, and it's growing into something laid-back but genuinely useful. it must be an indica |
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there are things that really tear into me, though. such a huge question mark i'm convinced it's either the real deal or i'm an idiot. seeing it in someone else is useful because i can be more objective, but even still... a friend of mine told he thought of a friend he hadn't thought of in a while, and it wasn't a warm and fuzzy. it was terrible. then his phone rang, and it was the guy, saying he'd just been in a car crash. like, five minutes ago. trying to explain that one is definitely a black spot in the fractal. one of those spots where it goes off to infinity so quickly that i can't interact with it in a meaningful way. you tear into a fractal by going for the edges. that's where the interesting things are. not a solid gradient blob, but not black infinititus. growing jagged edges to infinitely explore |
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The unfortunate answer, as pointed out by Hazen in Genesis: The Scientific Quest of Life’s Origins, is that we may simply not have the tools or language necessary to define complexity yet. Hazen likens it to the effort to define water before understanding atoms. We now know it as H2O, but before defining water’s atomic constituents there was no binding theme. Is it a solid, liquid or gas? The answer is ‘yes’. A similar conundrum emerged when scientists tried to classify the interrelation between animals before the theory of evolution. Do we group them by size, shape, color…?4 I really hope that a new thermodynamic law describing emergence is on the horizon. I find satisfaction in encompassing theories that, like evolution, are simple, elegant, and obvious in retrospect. the weasels are pleased with this. |
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the weasels are also pleased with having spotted proof of in another actual human. see, someone else did exactly the same weird shit in his own weird article about self-organizing structures, complexity, and information theory. i'm weird, but i'm not that weird. and i'm surprisingly lucid |
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ages ago it was discovered that lab miced behaved differently to a lab full of all-female researchers than a lab full of all men, or a lab full of both. i don't hear about this fact as much as i'd like to. bias is everywhere. i'm waiting for the science bit where they realize their little pocket of experimental self-organizing crystal begins forming whatever they visualize in their minds. at first it's: oh, that's cute. it looks like my girlfriend. then it keeps happening, and there's a floaty sense of dissociation. next, shame: i'm not being scientific. this is crazy. i have to keep it to myself. after it happens to half the people working on it, someone talks after a few beers, and the gates of chaos break open before they get to that point, there's all sorts of work in isolating it from the microwave's RF and coffee pot's seismic clunk as the timer switches the hotplate off |
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six months later, they change out the microwave, and the mechanism stops working. patterns they visualize no longer appear. bearded men, out of shape, bust a lung trying to rescue the old unit from the skip. but it's too late. science magazine never believes them and they move to better-paying jobs applying thermodynamics to the stock market |
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think of that microwave when i'm taking about how my lighter and cigarettes are stacked in a particular pocket of my car like the fate of the universe depends on it. |
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so, yes, i'm human. i sometimes. we've covered this, but it's worth doubling-down. there is a steady and almost reliable stream of small mistakes i make every day. an example from tday: i switch out of thinking about information theory and realize i'm tailgating the other car a bit. nothing too bad, just a bit close. no, bad weasels! i chide them, and consciously back off. keep on it consciously for a linger or three. next time i tune back in, i've maintained the new level of distance i set. if i didn't constantly keep on myself to stay tight, it would gradually unravel. there are other reasons things can break down. the absolute worst is when i'm really tired. it's very simple: i start missing things. not noticing what i usually do. some of it can be let go, some of it can't, and it's entirely random which things i miss. picking up that my lane is about to slow way down and getting out before i'm stuck can float off and i won't care about being stuck because i'm tired. picking up that a car is attempting to merge into the right lane when i'm in the left lane is on the edge. it may be irrelevant, or if the guy does something crazy it may spill into my lane, and it's best i keep half an eye on it. then the absolute worst is when the old, familiar demon comes out: i snap out of brain theory zone and realize i'm about to run a red light and have to jam on the brakes. i used to be like this all day, and now it only happens when i'm too tired to drive. once i see two or three of these missed things i get myself home as quickly as possible and get to sleep. the one time i could tolerate google's grandpa autopilot is on a long-haul drive, pretty much as a backup. to catch those things i miss. but i'd rather find a hotel and do the driving myself as much as humanly possible. |
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there are plenty of bad habits that go deep to the core of human nature, and i barely wrestle them back. example from today: i'm blasting around one of my favorite back roads. this is pretty much my road; i love it and it loves me. we know each other supremely well. there's been a yellow jug of some sort on a particular curve for around two and a half-weeks. i see it every time: yep, still there. widen my turn slightly to leave it where it's been since i first spotted it. so, yes, i'm going fast, because i have the whole thing memorized and deer won't charge the road at this time of day. i come around a down a curve hill and i'm eyeing the feeder street off to the left that i know has a tendency to vomit cars at random. i see a guy whiz up; fast. stops way over the line, but he stops. he rolls a little further as he's looking. sees me. stops. i've let go of the gas and am hovering over the brake, waiting to see if he punches it. but, no, i saw him see me, and he stopped. so i speed back up, figuring he'll wait. then he promptly blasts out, forcing me to jam on the brakes hard. i am furious. two and four tenths of a second of angry horn as i fly right up on his bumper like an orbital lander. then i catch myself. i take a deep breath: no, let it go. it's over. you've appropriately expressed your discontent; move on. i back off. i forget about him and zone out. his driving is quick and professional, since i'm not harassing him from behind. two or three years ago i would have stayed mad, tailgated him rabidly, and generally behaved like a jerk. i knew it was shit but i couldn't stop myself. once that ball gets rolling it's hard to stop it, and you have to learn to catch it before it's flying out of control. all the same, it was a dick move, and i gave myself no grief for my explosive symphony of discontent. really, i was saying: good weasels. thank you for not running off on me again. |
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most habits are not obvious. they require thought and testing. all of them are context-dependant: within reason. mind the conditions. cornering when it's wet is different. all of it is ruthlessly baby-sat and helicopter mom'd. some even seem like a bad idea until i realize they aren't. like, the weasel were fighting me on in time to the music. it struck me as a bad route. braking in time is something i already do super-well. stuck in traffic? robot arm dance and brake in time as traffic creeps along. it's slow and boring and there's not much lane-weaving craziness to be done. i have safety covered ten weasels over and throwing one or two of them into relvelous frivolity is the only thing i can do to keep them from getting bored and misbehaving. the gas, though? that speeds you up. it's more sudden and dangerous. yes, i'll give it little gooses of gas in time all day long, but i guess i'd say i'm limiting it to a half-note or whole-note. and, jesus shit, it wanted to go quarter note so bad. perhaps behind. i've fought that urge for months, and joked: they usually don't fight me this doggedly, perhaps i should let it go. then i realized that was a fine idea, and i let it go. i've realized this was the right move. being able to drop in a series of discrete pulses rather than constraining myself to larger swoops and curves opens the door for additional strategies of control. it also allows me to be much more expressive when i drive. but, i'm keeping a firm eye, hand, leash, complicated pants, all that on it at all times. if i let it become unconcsious too quickly, it won't have the nuance it needs. i need to consciously think about how to use it; develop it. then i can let it float off as a . |
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a good friend of mine is a diagnosed schizophrenic. let's call him lewis -- as in carroll. he's a big fan. he's like a brother to me, really. if i had to sum lewis up, one moment fits best: it's a muddy spring day, and we're in a parking lot, walking back to my car. he starts hopping around, jumping in the puddles. trying to make the most gigantic splash he can. i quietly start to flip a shit: he's going to get mud over my car. this has to be stopped immediately. but, he's my friend, and i'm not going to just bark orders at him. i have to approach it with the right measure of respect. so, i say: "jesus, what the heck are you doing?" ok, next he's going to say something. after that, i can stress about my car's upholstry. here's what he says: "i'm galavanting!" i was gobsmacked. it was just such a brilliant response to me. he came out with a beautiful and wonderful word that pretty much no one else would ever use, and now, instead of being OCD, i want to cry because i love him. he's like a child, but with the intellect and wisdom of an adult, and it's wonderful. so, i forgave him. since then, when he does something like that, i habitually remind myself about his galvanting. i took a moment to tell him all this recently. i feel like it's one of the best compliments i've ever given anyone: you can be so frustrating at times, but it's worth it because you're wonderful... and if you weren't frustrating, you wouldn't be wonderful, and please never ever change. he also has the patience of a saint. if he didn't, he'd probably have said in response to my compliment: "right back at ya." i don't know how he puts up with me, really. |
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lewis and i have quite a bit in common: absurd mental fluidity. trouble managing adult life. a taste for chess, cigarettes, and cannabis. a thirst for brutal amounts of exercise (but he goes bike when i take a hike). we've been roommates in the past, and i lived with him and his family for a few weeks when my shit hit the fan and i need a place to get it together. he has been there to talk me back down to sanity when i'm flipping out over something like . i have been there when he begins to take the galavanting thing so far he's in danger of shooting himself in the foot. some stupid document is holding up his whole life and he's even worse than me at managing an agenda. he's been talking about how he can get this bureaucratic shit fixed for weeks, argued with people on the phone, gotten turned away from places because he missed some sub-requirement they demanded... and shit, he's frustrated as hell. one day, he starts talking about "lifting a letter" and how no one on IRC knew what he meant, but he found it it anyways. i confessed: "i have no idea what you mean, either." it turns out he was being vague because he was thinking about trying to forge the old expired thing and get around the whole mess. i got cross with him, exactly like i do with myself: "no! don't do that! that thing has a unique number and when you hand them their forged document they will just type it into the computer and it will say THIS IS EXPIRED and you will be in a shitload of trouble." he was a bit miffed, but it didn't take much to talk him out of it. then i said: let me know what i can do to help you get it done properly. i will drive you to that stupid government building in the center of boston, if that's what it takes. it's exactly what i do with myself: consider an idea thoroughly, yell at myself it it's terrible, then nurture and support the right ideas. |
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lewis will throw me the most brilliant curve-balls ever. it's protocol for me to completely misunderstand what he means, at first. i say: "wow! that's a great idea!" then we get into it, and i realize he meant something else entirely. once he clarifies, i say: "wow! that's also a great idea!" even the noise has a signal. he will patiently listen to me ramble for an hour; occasionally asking for clarification on something. then i'll finally finish the thought (or run out of spit) and apologize for rambling for the 9000th time. there's a moment of quiet. at this point, he will reliably dump out a single sentence that will blow my mind. and i'm misunderstand it at first... i was rambling: emotion is a state machine. it switches between different function libraries. angry reactions are different from happy reactions.... how should the different emotions should be programmed. anxiety? the rhythm layer... blah blah. we came to a break. he asks: "what about a package manager? do you have one of those?" i don't answer. my jaw hangs open. my brain is exploding with ideas: "i've never sat down and charted out the dependances on paper -- and that's what a package manager does, it manages the interrelated dependances to free you from having to give a shit about them. hell, i've never even listed them out on paper, because..." i finally manage: "no... i'm in the kernel layer... that's the OS layer..." and then i'm quiet again. i'm thinking: bite-size challenges keep it do-able, yes, but i've been lasered in on one layer... perhaps that should change. it's why i got into studying breathing again. since i'm mute, he starts explaining his package manager idea. reliably, it has nothing to do with any of what i was thinking, and once he explains it, my nose bleeds again. then he darts back to my rambling on predictive CPU branching to suggest i look at predictive threading on the OS layer. my nose bleeds this is largely my work, but it wouldn't be what it is without l |
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this is largely my work, but it wouldn't be what it is without lewis. he galavants through unix while i'm stressing through it. he knows unix as ridiculously well as i do, and he can keep up with all the tech shit. he listens to it all, digests, and then promptly kicks me in the pants. let's call this mechanism . |
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part of what i like to think lewis gets out of me and my nonsense is a bit of help with his own condition. i have grilled him for hours about the voices he'll hear. it began as deep and intense curiosity, and it's graduated into me practically being more frustrated with his problems than he is himself most days. it's worth stating directly: lots of what he described, well, i've been through it before, on psychedelics or in dreams or while stoned. or sober. a couple months in, he said something like, "i can't believe we're actually having a conversation about this. no one else has even understood what i meant before." he'd been describing it and i thought something like: oh, yes, i got that on acid in 2007 and i always wished it had cropped up again so i could explore it more. it's just something he lives with, but he's never really thought about it. i touched it a few times and i have a whole list of theories and an even longer list of unanswered questions. i'm trying to remember what "it" was. it wasn't voices, it was something more subtle and esoteric and dreamtime. i've always said part of the problem with psych doctors is that they spend, at most, a few hours a month with your brain. you live with your brain all day; take some responsibility or it'll never get fixed. but with schizophrenia, you can't trust your own brain. that would drive me mad. even seeing it at a distance bothers me a hell of a lot. pretty much, anything unknown tantalizes me, and anything broken infuriates me. on top of that, he's my friend, and i want to help. i've spent a ridiculous amount of time with him and it's put me in a position where i really can. like, sort of be his auxilliary brain to give him enough room to bootstrap himself out of chaos. teach him the strategies i use to attack my own problems. yesterday i had a weird moment when he said something i say exactly like i say it. he didn't do it consciously. i don't think he even noticed. but i did, and i smiled. |
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a good a point as any to point out that there's oh-so-much i don't write about. i made a rule to keep my friends and family out of all this as much as possible. it's one thing to put myself in a glass house somewhat, but putting other people out there without giving them a say in it does not strike me as the best idea. it's super-tough at times, because it leaves large gaping holes i have to work around. slight fibs are crafted and stressed over: since i can't write the literal truth, how i can i get what i want in there with the minimum of obfuscation and twisting? lewis is so deep in all of this, though. i sat on the last few posts for like two weeks. finally caved. i realized: i know him well enough to know what he'll be OK with me saying, and saying some of it matters for cache coherency in my xltronic thread." |
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you have a lot of words in there .. |
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i've so many words that i'm reasonably sure i've written a good many things twice. then a rapidly disintigrating histogram for thrice, four-bird, pentachronic, etc. until you get to terse reminder sentences i throw in to give theoretical readers (should they exist) some sort of mooring, and then it spikes to over 9000. sort of. using these concepts as part of a written monologue is tantamount to inducing the whole system of weaseldynamics to explain itself, in terms of itself, and obviously, the O(n) on this is a clusterfuck. linear scrubbing for the service of transcription results in slight edits as the transcription is performed. when i sit down to re-read this whole thread (i yield to reality, here. i'll get to it when i have time. oh well) i'm sure i'll find the same post on page two and page seven. then little scattered bits of a post on page eight on four different pages. like regressive combinatorial attacks on the human DNA to figure out the whole darn family tree: your DNA started in africa, migrated to the middle east, split off three ways, then one split off four ways, and one of those four got to know absolutely every one of the initial three [biblically] and it's a circular graph for a bit instead of a tree in [some country you want to troll]). figuring that out by collecting lots of DNA, working in historical assumptions, existing geneology databases... pretty holistic, really. but done in math, so it feels solid enough to science.... anyways, i'm curious to see what i've written multiple times, how many... if one hits, say, five... did it stay the same? did it mostly stay the same, but wobble? did it evolve linearly? did it evolve, devo track, then fix itself by page five? yes, i've realized that scrubbing the whole cache dump is something to wait for when i have a shitload of time. lord help anyone trying to read it from page one |
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i started writing the previous post before i sat down properly. i was crouched on my toes the way i do if i'm checking something quickly and intend to stand back up. as soon as i clicked "reply" i realized my toes were screaming for mercy. i stood up, and began to pace, but i got about three steps before something new was already screaming at me: writing about lewis's package manager metaphor has given me another spin on it. if you're the guy who develops the package manager (aren't you?), you don't do it by manually working it out on a piece of paper, no sir. it's too busy: new packages are added, old ones are dropped, dependancies change, politics cause irreconcilable conflicts... this shit be automated. also farmed out: the developers of a package are responsible for listing the packages their package depends on. this puts the nuances of the decisions in the hands of the people who should handle the nuances, while you -- mr. package manager developer (aren't you?) -- maintain the automation infrastructure, and solve high-level problems that cannot be automated, like the ego of the firefox development team. i dust off my XLT thread downloader; download this whole thread. have the computer drop some bomb-ass lexical analysis: a list of every word i've used; how many times. where the word was used first. use a dictionary to cull words that don't need hyperlinks. i could continue on to cluster analysis... eventually, i tear through the output of the automation on a macroscopic level and look for strategic in-points. "gps weasel" is a good start. a PHP script takes my notes: "gps weasel depends on: weasel, brain software, automatic driving..." whatever comes to mind quickly. "notion-layer" next: "notion-layer depends on notion, layered systems, magick..." after a while, i'll have built up enough connections manually that a computer will be able to compile the whole of the law. back to the automationmaton, mon |
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there have been a few times that i've met people and gotten a really intense feeling: my best friend from high school. my first serious girlfriend. lewis. when i said lewis is like a brother to me, i meant that thoroughly. we are not brothers, we just met on IRC one day. he knew about unix, and his IP address said he lived across town. oh, you don't have a car? i'll give you a lift to the store, then. we hit it off immediately. by the time i was driving him back to his place i knew i wanted to hang out with this guy a lot. you what? you rebuilt your computer in the crawlspace so it's ventillated but quiet? what's zfs? no, i use ext4 still second or third time we hung out, he hit me with what i lurkingly suspected: at the door, ready to drive him home, now's the moment, i see it in his body language before he essentially asks: so, uh, you wanna fuck? i rambled about how i was a messed-up bastard and i need to fix that, so no, no thanks, nothing personal.... but, really, in retrospect, i said "no" because it felt vaguely incestious. the brother from another mother metaphor continues anyways, when i say i love him, i mean i love him like a brother, and i really mean that. love is a terrible word that means thousands of things and i think i should stop using it. i hate it. grrr |
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i'm generally a believer in the idea that time moves forwards in a linear, plodding manner... but, there are things that cause me to question the linearity of time, at times. tactical weasel scolds me already; his metaphor shows no mercy: "allowing myself to realisticly entertain the idea that i'm receiving a direct beam of data from the future sounds like the tactical equivalent of wading into a swamp full of alligators wearing a meat speedo." ouch. as the weasel of tactics, he can tactically hit me where it's most tacticle. if time stops, well, how would anyone ever notice? it would stop and resume and there'd be no time for anyone to miss it. perhaps it takes sundays off and no-one ever notices... sure, alright, i can't rule that out. i also can't rule this out: for three minutes in the third quarter of 2017, gravity will also cease to function on planet earth when a chinese billionare drives his BMW into a ley line. i used to wonder, though. it was as if i felt the depth of a relationship that was going to get really deep before it happened. like a backwards echo, with a floaty feeling of dissociation. for a fleeting moment, did i go from david copperfield to merlin? a seductive thought -- too seductive. too infinititus. i probably just got a flood of subconscious signals that indicated this guy was good news, and no, it is not the non-linearity of time burping backwards. parsimony, goddammit. much more confusing to me was getting what i called a "future vu." like deja vu, but with the future: "i swear i've seen this before, weird. also, it hasn't happened yet... wait, what? my weird's not usually that weird..." perhaps it is what it said it was, but i'm leaning towards it being a neurotransmitter glitch until the future gets around to sending back its rationale for this bullshit. it hasn't yet. is time discrete or linear? that one's much more interesting. summary is: yes |
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discrete vs. continuous, sorry. i can see why i said linear by mistake: i spent a bit fussing with the opening paragraph of the post. "in a linear manner... in a linear plod... a quadratic trot... heh, no, tangent... in a linear, plodding... ok, yeah" so, either time is linear, and the first-paragraph tuning leaked into the last paragraph... or time is non-linear, and the last paragraph leaked into the way i wrote the first. logisitical weasel and tactical weasel have come back from a huddle and told me that this has gone into low-priority thread turf, and that i'm standing on my toes again, for how long? and also my laundry is probably done |
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lewis and i don't have a schedule for hanging out. if it feels right, i'll text him, or vice versa. it's spontaneous. a pseudorandom slurpie of how bad traffic is, how far away he is, how long it's been since i've seen him, whether the cops are all over today bla bla there is no way he can predict this shit, because, hell, even i can't. ditto on my end: i have no idea what he's up to. is he out somewhere already? is he busy? yes, but he needs to shower/eat first? sending texts while driving is full of bees. trying to make myself do it spikes my blood pressure within seconds. not only is texting terrible for safety, but i absolutely hate it. in and of itself. so, i can't really reply easily. next bug: i have no idea how long he'll take to get back to me... next bug: if i give him an ETA before he replies, it will never be accurate. next bug: if he takes a half hour to reply i may have changed my mind. on and on. we snagged on it so many times that i felt something had to be done. i sat down; had a good solid think (as a ginger would say) and came up with an algorithm to fend off my systemic frustration with the chaos. a protocol. |
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first(a): { i text (["wanna cruise?"]) } it's all over the message history; i can spare myself chicklet agony via copypastination. second(a): if (he texts [ya, yes, ok, absolutely, ... ,]) { =======> second(aa): i text ([brutally accurate ETA]) =============> second(aaa): if (he texts ["OK", ...]) { ====================> second(aaaa): ETA confirmed. => (END). } =============> second(aab): if (he texts !["OK", ...]) { ====================> second(aaab): > (IT'S COMPLICATED). } } "it's complicated" means replying, and i can't reply without having a conniption or pulling over. END means i collect him with no snags or conniptions. third(b): if (he texts ![ya, yes, ...,]) { =======> third(ba): it's never just no =============> third(baa): (IT'S COMPLICATED) } there are obvious spots for the snags to burp themselves and make sure we're both flexible. no one's time is wasted; no nips are unduly conned. no plectix are apo'd. already, though, this trashbat psneudorandalchode is irritating me. so: example: he texts (back that [he needs an hour/etc before he can hang]) => i'll text back either "ok" or "nm". "ok" means (it's complicated) has been negotiated into a (yes); ergo (end). "nm" means (it's complicated) on my end too. abort vector. nm; let's do it tomorrow. implied is that i'll explain what was behind that "nm" and that i'm not being curt, i'm just driving. he patiently listened to this whole ramble train, all twenty minutes of it. then he more or less said, "sounds good." i love him because that's all it took. he had it, and the algorithm ran smoothly. 9/10 snags have ceased to happen; the rest we work out. it took twenty minutes because i got into why texting sux, how we need a protocol since i can't reply fully, how my algorithm is designed for mutual respect and good times, and that i spent so much time thinking about it because i care and it will work. and it does. |
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implied is that the whole thing pretty much works in reverse, for the times when he texts me and asks if i want to hang out. except for one thing -- easily 2/3 of his opening lines to this effect involve cookies, wanting cookies, suggesting we go out to get cookies... it's continued regularly. we haven't gone to the au bon pan at the mall for, like, two months, but he's texting me about cookies. it's just his way of saying he's bored and i understand him perfectly. |
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even the snags have become wonderful, sometimes, instead of frustrating. i text him, "wanna cruise?" one day. i get back an "it's complicated" -- yes, but i'm at the grocery store; meet me there?" i text back "10m" and i get back a stream of charming irrelevancy that more or less means "OK." i program GPS weasel and off we go. the snags begin: i'm stressing hardcore that, shit, he's at the store, he never walks, he's on his bike, his bike won't fit in my car, shit, this is a problem, shit, it's too complicated for text, shit. i try to call him but his paranoid rat's nest of obscure internet phone relays is out of marbles for the month. brick shitting increases. the snags continue: i have trouble even getting to the store. traffic is so bad i give up on the route and make a turn the other way to avoid some hair lady in a BMW who repeatedly almost hits my fender trying to squeeze by me to make the turn i didn't want to make. so i made it, and i wind up more or less where i started when i sent the "wanna cruise" and i am starting to get properly mad. texting back "sorry nm" is like asking a mama bear protecting her cub to just "talk it out" with the man in the day-glo vest, but i manage. i feel so bad about it, too. he's been waiting and i bailed. sorry mang. later, it turns out he had the whole thing already: waiting, he looked at his bike and began formulating his own plans about how to deal with it: tie it up? bring it home first? he knew i'd be shitting a brick and he was already on it. i felt bad about bailing with a vague text, but he already knew exactly what i was dealing with -- he even noticed that the traffic was obscene -- and that i was driving and i couldn't explain myself. that i didn't know his watFone was out of minutes. then i'm guiltily explaining myself a day later, and all that comes out. who needs psychic activity? this is better. |
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i've been gradually building up a toolkit in my mind, really. driving, i notice i'm no longer almost running red lights when my mind wanders. i'd become so used to screwing up like that, really, and that alone was a miracle to me. i wanted more of it. so, brain software became a thing. studying it led to weasels. the weasels tore the whole system wide open (with their sharp little claws/teef) and it exploded into a mosaic/fractal that has had me plumbling the depths of disruptive innovation ever since. as i got into studying it i found the part of my brain that got used for sweeping a fader up in the perfect logarithmic surge (and do it in time to the beat, at the right moment to cut off the first measure of the drum loop, at the right time in the three-minute track...) was now handling how i looked at cars on the highway and judged what the various lanes were going to do and when. then rhythm, and more mechanisms. counting a two-bar loop is so deep and reliable that i can really turn that into a machine in its own right. studying breathing while lying in bed, my heart rate becomes deafening, my sense of time wobbles and flexes, and i get nowhere. i'm hiking and i notice my feet counting a two bar loop; i never actually taught them to do that. i say: wow, that's in there. if i can learn to breathe in a two-bar loop, that will let me meaningfully study the heart-layer without it being chaos. when i'm gluing the two-bar loop onto whatever, first it feels useless. orchestral arrangements being dialed into metaphorical mammals with operant conditioning in the form of emotional self-ranting. but, eventually, it takes. some time after that, i begin to feel a limited form of parallel processing. it's automatic, but i'm aware of it down there, being automatic, like i am various cars on the highway. the whole process is becoming quicker/easier. beginning to get automatic in and of itself. i'm going to go take a moment to be smug. |
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right, that's long enough. back to it. i've not done much sitting there and studying breathing, recently, as i concluded i need a firmer footing before that would get anywhere. instead i focus on my feet as they hike, mostly letting my mind wander, letting breathing do as it does without my meddling. but, sometimes i bump into it, and when i do, i rope my feet into the equation and try to get breathing to come along. at this point, the level of glue is tantamount to the effect the suction of my car has on the leaves of trees i zoom by at incredible speeds: it's pulled along, subtly but undeniably, then it pulls back to its usual settled patterns. even this is ridiculously complicated. i catch it being tugged a bit, and i catch it in my internal cache of what i'm doing with my muscles. then i catch the same muscles doing all sorts of stuff as i'm driving, later. day one or two of breathing study, the image of a caduceus popped into my head. i never even thought to note: my internal screen is largely a two-dimensional thing. if i work on visualizing a room and walking around, well, i can do that... but, if i'm remembering someone's face, it's a screencap of what my eyes saw. there's some depth information, but i have one shot from a particular perspective and the best you can get out of that is like what you get out of those foil hologram stickers. yesterday, out of nowhere, i got a ridiculously specific... synaesthetic... thing... while hiking. it was like someone bodged together a and a bellows accordian thing, and yes, here it is sir, roughly behind the bottom of your liver, and here it is in an absurdly strong sense of 3D you've never experienced without chemical aid. and all i was really after was getting breathing to be dependable rather than a noisy variable. |
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lewis has heard plenty about how all my car is essentially a nazi regime from the planet camazotz. all the things have places. don't even bother trying to put that whatever back. give it to me and my existing architecture will have it over-with in half a second. trying to explain it takes twenty seconds, and you won't ever get it right. i don't have to think about whether i've taken the lighter out of its nook or not; having me put it back is actually an important part of the mechanism/ritual. if i don't do it, i no longer know whether the thing is there or not. any automatic behavior that depends on it will mindlessly barrell along until it falls into a pit of question marks, my conscious mind is dragged away from beautiful alpha waves, and i get superbly cross. even still, he's kept up. just on his own; not even rambling from me. i didn't even notice until the other day, when he was going for things in the old spots and getting massively confused. no, no, that's not weed. that's tobacco. you just packed the whole thing with tobacco. i'll puke, i insist. empty it now then the weirdness continues: thinking about the nauesa of a full-tilt nicotine overdose sets off a feedback loop, and for a brief moment, it feels like it's happening. i start explaining this to lewis, and as i do, i catch a bit of the muscle cache before it drains off. it's a 2D perspective shot, like an X-Ray of my neck, shot from behind, above, to the right, slightly. close, zoomed. a spot in the center strobes like a camera flash, and it bleeds off into a bunch of vague whatever. it is, i am all but certain, the spot in my neck i clamped down on to set off that loop. then i'm off explaining the visualization i just go to him. this was, obviously, a good bit before we managed to get the weed smoked. it's even thicker afterwards |
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weird thing happens. i catch a brief flash of it. i figure it out, wire myself in, and even weirder things begin to happen. i catch a brief flash of it. i figure it out |
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today's spotted in the cache: yes sir, just now, there was lag in between that notion and your execution of the notion (pressing "next track") and the notion layer is fidgeting like crazy because it's frustrated; have a nice day sir. in attempting to verbalize how that felt, precisely, i hit on some real juice: i know this. it's exactly how i feel when i'm trying to suss out the spelling of a novel nonsense word, but i can't seem to get it right. i can feel what i want, but i can't get it. it's like aphasia. it's on the tip of my tounge... working out how to explain this on a forum full of confused onlookers was a huge help, here. it was spewing off all sorts of sub-plots. alone in my car, i say aloud: "god damn it, latency." then, a quarter note later, i say fuck emphatically, because this is at least 2^4 posts. this may be my first proper glimpse of the architecture of the notion-layer itself. i need to break the notion-layer into notion-sublayers. standard procedure here is rectally venting parsimony: i figure it tries the obvious notions first, and those that pan out, bubble up. because this is what makes the most sense. notions are evaluated, then either rejected or promoted. promoted notions rise to the next sublayer. pruning of poor-quality notions occurs when the layer tries to jump to the superceding sublayer. like sperm, winner takes all. glue together enough of these notion-sublayers to cover anywhere from a tenth of a second to half a second. god damn it, it's not lag. it's latency. fuck, that's big. notions already have basic granularity: weak, average, strong. now they have a latency, too: quick and strong. average and slow. quick and weak means the obvious stuff may sorta pan out. slow and average mean it's an unusual thing, but likely happening at the current moment. that i'm noticing the timing of them at all means i can get better at gauging it. |
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this is exactly how you attack a certain class of problems on a computer: time is limited before the relevancy of the calculations expire, and you will never be able to get through every possible permutation. you have four CPU cores. initially they're all working on the easy answers, and with all four cores, it eats through them quickly. then it scales down, gradually: three cores on obvious. two. one. the cores move over to evaluating the more unlikely scenarios. striking the balance between low-hanging fruit vs. the cost of missing the deep, interesting stuff pretty much goes to the core of why O(n) matters. i need to dust off a few college textbooks because i'm getting that aphasia again: dammit, there is a thing for this. a comp sci professor thing that matches this exact structure. it's on the tip of my toung. augh |
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i'd figure all the various notion-sublayers have offramps to my conscious mind. if any sublayer discovers something really, really important -- a strong notion, or perhaps even a bad vibe -- the progressive filtering is bypassed and it does a kool aid man right through the wall of my ranting inner monologue: there is a cop camped up there. please tune in consciously to make sure you are driving correct, because, as a notion-sublayer, i'm not really set up to judge that... all i know is: shit, dude, that's a cop. abort the idea, as always, is a tiered cache of relevancy (designed to squeeze the illusion of impressive performance out of crap cheap parts). start with the obvious solutions; breadth first. then when you've polished off the simple ones, go deep. since you always get the obvious ones and occasionally get the deep ones, it's natural to start to feel like this thing knows a lot more than it does. no, a notion is just that. here's a decent metaphor: in trying to guess a password, you'll have the computer hammer through a list of the four most commonly-used passwords, then all the other common passwords, then dictionary words, then finally you resort to walking through every potential string, one bit flip at a time. if you get mired in that for too long, it starts to feel like more of a pain than it's worth, and you move on to trying to guess the password of an easier mark, like guy fieri, paris hilton, or joyrex thomas |
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there is also another phase of lag: obviously, my conscious mind needs to accept the signal from the notion-sublayer, parse it, and react. say a notion is feeling quick and urgent; it's burning to do a kool-aid man into my rambologue. this requires a context switch from whatever i'm rambling about to the notion-parsing logic. this incurs a delay of... i really can't say, exactly, but anywhere from 100ms to a second depending on how deeply up my own butt i am that day. if i'm hardcore, deep, lost in thought, it takes longer for that to clear out so i can consciously evaluate the notion. if i consciously ask the notion-layer its opinion of something, though, i'm already waiting for the answer, and i'm on it immediately. i also am more apt to notice the latency/magnitude of the notion, since, like all cache, it's constantly leaking out to make room for new data. practical example: after a lengthy 600ms context-switch from a super-deep think, the details of the notion are already fading away. magnitude is vague and latency/timing is outright lost. paired alternate example: i've been dancing for three hours, everything is in sync, now i'm stoned, and i start essentially working the notion-layer like a data terminal as i drive around automagically. barring a vehicular abort vector, i'm getting a flood of bits and bobs as different trains arrive from the station, simply because i've positioned myself at the station to watch before they began arriving. |
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obviously, when i start dropping "600ms" i'm venting from my rectum, and it's no longer parsimonic. it's extremly subjective. if i'm in the middle of jamming on the brakes to avoid hitting a car that ducked in without looking, that 600ms can feel like it's more than a second. my clock rate has spiked and my latency has plunged in order to enable me to avoid a fiery wreck, and then i context-switch over to two and fourth tenths of a second of angry horn, then next the anti-mad ritual i do six dozen times a week when something gets to me, then back to architecture. |
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400 |
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