zackmorris

Oh man, that was about 3 lifetimes ago. I'm on linkedin (every couple months hah) if you ever want to chat.

It was a fun project, but we released it just in time for the Dot Bomb to wipe us out. Our last month, my partner and I got about $600 each from shareware game sales ($1200 with inflation today), enough to pay rent and my student loans for the first time. After the pop, the next month we got one sale. $12. The fun was over and never came back in the same way.

The powers that be conspired to end the 90s climb towards FU money and UBI, and there was no tech investment for about 6-7 years until 2007 when the iPhone and Facebook came out, which started the mobile bubble. Lots of people made $100k those first years, but mostly not established players, who had too much time, effort and money sunk into the old desktop platforms.

Then Google and Facebook took the lion's share of ad money, which removed the avenues to scale a business. Everyone moved into other models like in-game ads, in-app purchases and going viral through influencers, but none of those worked for the vast majority. To leave us where we are today, where long tail effects ensure a winner-take-all sales distribution.

Now that AI is here, even apps will begin disappearing. I predict that within 3 years, nobody will be using the web or buying software anymore. We'll just ask the AI to do everything, and it will make it so. Thus ends the mobile bubble too.

I basically missed every bubble due to unfortunate life choices. So let this be a cautionary tale to any young people who read this. You need to do the opposite of what people say. Nobody gets rich pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, they get rich by borrowing someone else's money and investing it in sure things like Bitcoin 15 years ago. If you feel yourself clinging to a project or situation because you have a lot invested in it or don't want to let someone down, that's the time to explore other options. You won't make yourself poor - your empathy will. That's why the rich demonize it. But empathy is where the true meaning in life is found. You can choose to skim money off other people's backs through investment, or "earn" it yourself, but there is a karmic cost no matter how you obtain it. So just have fun and do your best and at least pay your taxes so that society can progress forward, or we'll never stop repeating these systems of control and suffering IMHO.

When I was making Retro, I was trying to capture the feeling of the golden age of arcade video games, even if I maybe missed the mark. But I didn't realize that I was in a golden age at the time. I believe that we're in one of those now, maybe the last one. But also the first one, from a certain perspective.

Maybe it's time to dust off the old compiler and make a game..

Also I wish that GL_LINES was open-sourced for other platforms. Maybe it is in the OpenGL spec and I just haven't looked. I've attempted some other techniques like having the fragment shader draw a border around each triangle, but they all have their drawbacks.

In other words, imperative programming with const is directly transpilable to/from functional programming.

Using modern techniques like higher order methods, scatter-gather arrays (similar to map-reduce), passing by value via copy-on-write, etc, code can be written that works like piping data between unix executables. Everything becomes a spreadsheet basically.

Which also has implications for multiprocessing. When all data is const, many of the async edge cases that we're normally forced to deal with go away. Loosely that means that we can use techniques similar to double buffering to create new mutated copies where only the part that changed was actually copied. The rest of the data can reference one source of truth. In practice, this turns out to most closely approximate optimal algorithms, where the best-effort imperative code may paint itself into a corner because logic design choices get dictated by the realities of the runtime instead of the problem domain itself, so the optimizer loses opportunities to simplify it.

I find that in my daily work, nearly all of my time is spent untangling highly-imperative mutable code. Because I must hold the entire state in my mind when mutable references (mostly to objects) are passed between functions. My higher-order method solutions often end up shorter, more readable, faster, even more efficient, but harder to explain to junior developers. So I would really like a compiler that implicitly converts imperative code like for() loops and references into const/functional code whose intermediate code (i-code) can be reduced to its simplest form.

This is also my main concern about Rust and other mainstream imperative languages like C# and even Javascript, that they encourage bare-hands methods that go away with const/functional code if the user is willing to accept a doubling or more of memory usage. Which becomes less of an issue over time as memory cost decreases.

Edit: I maybe should have said fork-join instead of scatter-gather, but they are related concepts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrathecal_pump

Supposedly there are few or no side effects since the dose is small and localized. Kind of a shame that it's not more broadly known or used IMHO, since I've been close with people with chronic pain whose quality of life was greatly impacted.

If we imagine a function passing a block of memory to sub functions which may write bytes to it randomly, then each of those writes may allocate another block. If those allocations are similar in size to the VM block size, then each invocation can potentially double the amount of memory used.

A do-one-thing-and-do-it-well (DOTADIW?) program works in a one-shot fashion where the main process fires off child processes that return and free the memory that was passed by value. Surrounded by pipes, so that data is transmuted by each process and sent to the next one. VM usage may grow large temporarily per-process, but overall we can think of each concurrent process as roughly doubling the amount of memory.

Writing this out, I realized that the worst case might be more like every byte changing in a 4k block, so a 4096 times increase in memory. Which still might be reasonable, since we accept roughly a 200x speed decrease for scripting languages. It might be worth profiling PHP to see how much memory increases when every byte in a passed array is modified. Maybe they use a clever tree or refcount strategy to reduce the amount of storage needed when arrays are modified. Or maybe they just copy the entire array?

Another avenue of research might be determining whether a smarter runtime could work with "virtual" VMs (VVMs?) to use a really small block size, maybe 4 or 8 bytes to match the memory bus. I'd be willing to live with a 4x or 8x increase in memory to avoid borrow checkers, refcounts or garbage collection.

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Edit: after all these years, I finally looked up how PHP handles copy-on-write, and it does copy the whole array on write unfortunately:

http://hengrui-li.blogspot.com/2011/08/php-copy-on-write-how...

If I were to write something like this today, I'd maybe use "smart" associative arrays of some kind instead of contiguous arrays, so that only the modified section would get copied. Internally that might be a B-Tree with perhaps 8 bytes per leaf to hold N primitives like 1 double, 2 floats, etc. In practice, a larger size like 16-256 bytes per leaf might improve performance at the cost of memory.

Looks like ZFS deduplication only copies the blocks within the file that changed, not the entire file. Their strategy could be used for a VM so that copy-on-write between processes only copies the 4k blocks that change. Then if it was a realtime unix, functions could be synchronous blocking processes that could be called with little or no overhead.

This is the level of work that would be required to replace Rust with simpler metaphors, and why it hasn't happened yet.

I think that Rust is making an admiral attempt to attack challenges that have already been solved better in other ways. I just don't have much use for its arsenal.

For example, I wasted 2 years of my life trying to write a NAT-punching peer to peer networking framework for games around 2005, but was first exposed to synchronous blocking vs asynchronous nonblocking networking in the late 90s when I read Beej's Guide to Network Programming:

https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

I was hopelessly trying to mimic the functionality of libraries like RakNet and Zoidcom without knowing some fundamentals that I wouldn't fully understand for years:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/93kr9h/recommended...

20 years later, Rust has iroh:

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh

I realize there is some irony in pointing to a Rust library as a final solution.

But my point is that when developers reached high levels of financial success and power, they didn't go back to address the fundamentals. NAT was always an abomination to me. And as far as I know, they kept it in IPv6. Someone like Google should have provided a way to get around it that's not as heavy as WebRTC. So many developer years of work have been wasted due to the mistakes of the status quo. So that we wander in the desert for years using lackluster paradigms because we don't know that better stuff exists.

Knowing what I know now, I would have created open source C (portable) libraries to solve NAT punching, state transfer with a software transactional memory (STM) or Raft, entity state machines (like in Unity), movement prediction/dead reckoning, etc etc etc to form the basis of a distributed computing network for virtual worlds and let the developer community solve that. Someone will do that in a year or two with AI now I assume.

Ok you kinda got me. I realize after writing this out that I wouldn't use Rust for new work, but it's not so much about the language itself as building upon proven layers to "get real work done". The lower the level of abstraction, the harder that is to do. So it's hard for me to see the problem which Rust is trying to solve.

https://kushallabs.com/understanding-concurrency-in-go-green...

So lots of concepts are worth learning like atomicity, ACID compliance, write ahead logs (WALs), statically detecting livelocks and deadlocks (or making them unreachable), consensus algorithms like Raft and Paxos, state transfer algorithms like software transaction memory (STM), connectionless state transfer like hash trees and Merkle trees, etc.

The key insight is that manual management of tasks is, for the most part, not tenable by humans. It's better to take a step back and work at a higher level of abstraction. For example, declarative programming works in terms of goals/specifications/tests, so that the runner has more freedom to cancel and restart/retry tasks arbitrarily. That way the user can fire off a workload and wait until all of the tasks match a success criteria, and even treat that process as idempotent so it can all be run again without harm. In this way, trees of success criteria can be composed to manage a task pool.

I'd probably point to CockroachDB as one of the best task-cancellers, since it doesn't have a shutdown procedure. Its process can simply be terminated by the user with control-c, then it reconciles any outstanding transactions the next time it's booted, which just adds some latency. If an entire database can do that, then "this is the way".

1) I learned about pin in Rust to prevent values from moving in memory.

2) I learned about the html <summary> tag (the turndown arrows in your article that work with Javascript disabled) hah.

I can see how dealing with stream and resource cleanup in async code could be a chore. It sounds like you were able to do that in a fairly declarative manner, which is what I always strive for as well.

I think my hesitation with async is that I already went down that road early in my programming life with cooperative threads/multitasking on Mac OS 9 and earlier. There always seems to be yet another brittle edge case to deal with, so it can feel infuriating playing whack-a-mole until they're all nailed down.

For example, pinning memory looks a lot like locking handles in Mac OS. Handles were pointers to pointers, so it was a bare hands way to implement a memory defragmenter before runtimes were smart enough to handle it. If apps used handles, then blocks of data could be unlocked, moved somewhere else in memory, and then re-locked. Code had to do an extra hop through each handle to get to the original pointer, which was a frequent source of bugs because one async process might be working on a block, yield, and then have another async process move the handle out from under it.

The lock's state was stored in a flag in the memory manager, basically a small bit of metadata. I haven't investigated, but I suspect that Rust may be able to handle locking more efficiently, perhaps more like reference counting or the borrow checker where it can infer whether a pointer is locked without storing that flag somewhere (but I could be wrong).

Apple abandoned handles when it migrated to OS 10 and Darwin inherited protected memory and better virtual memory from FreeBSD. Although now that I write this out, I'm not sure that they solved in-process fragmentation. I think they just give apps the full 32 or 64 bit address space so that effectively there is always another region available for the next allocation, and let the virtual memory subsystem consolidate 4k memory blocks into contiguous strips internally. The dereferencing of memory step became implicit rather than explicit, as well as hidden from apps, so that whole classes of bugs became unreachable.

Anyway, that's why I prefer the runtime to handle more of this. I want strong guarantees that I can terminate a process and all locks inside it will get freed as well. I can pretty much rely on that even in hacky languages like PHP.

My frustration with all of this is that we could/should have demanded better runtimes. We could have had realtime unixes where task switching and memory allocation were effectively free. Unfortunately the powers that be (Mac OS and Windows) had runtimes that were too entrenched with too many users relying on quirks and so they dragged their feet and never did better. Languages like Rust were forced to get very clever and go to the ends of the earth to work around that. Then when companies like Google and Facebook won the internet lottery, they pulled the ladder up behind them by unilaterally handing down decrees from on high that developers should use bare hands techniques, rather than putting real resources into reforming the fundamentals so that we wouldn't have to.

What I'm trying to say is that your solution is clever and solves a common pattern in about the simplest way possible, but is not as simple as synchronous-blocking unix pipes to child processes in shell scripts. That's in no way a criticism. I have similar feelings about stuff like Docker and Kubernetes after reading about Podman. If we could magically go back and see the initial assumptions that led us down the road we're on, we might have tried different approaches. It's all of those roads not taken that haunt me, because they represent so much of my workload each day.

IMHO async is an anti-pattern, and probably the final straw that will prevent me from ever finishing learning Rust. Once one learns pass-by-value and copy-on-write semantics (Clojure, PHP arrays), the world starts looking like a spreadsheet instead of spaghetti code. I feel that a Rust-like language could be built with no borrow checker, simply by allocating twice the memory. Since that gets ever-less expensive, I'm just not willing to die on the hill of efficiency anymore. I predict that someday Rust will be relegated to porting scripting languages to a bare-metal runtime, but will not be recommended for new work.

That said, I think that Rust would make a great teaching tool in an academic setting, as the epitome of imperative languages. Maybe something great will come of it, like Swift from Objective-C or Kotlin from Java. And having grown up on C++, I have a soft spot in my heart for solving the hard problems in the fastest way possible. Maybe a voxel game in Rust, I dunno.

Trickle down economics, austerity, regressive tax policies, tariffs, appeasement, lax antitrust enforcement, slashing capital gains and inheritance tax, privatization of natural monopolies, quantitative easing instead of holding investment firms accountable, foreign aid for war instead of peace, defunding public universities to manufacture a student loan crisis, public sector layoffs, subsidizing extractive industries instead of renewables, sub-minimum wage in restaurants/farms/prisons, underpaying teachers and healthcare workers, rent seeking, payola, collusion, duopoly, usury, unpaid domestic labor, wage slavery..

And the inevitable aftermath of wishing the worst for others: stagflation, underemployment, civil unrest, eventually recession, depression and a raid on concentrated wealth if/when supply-side economics collapses because nobody has any money to buy anything anymore.

In spite of overwhelming evidence of public and private abuses, nobody cares what the experts think anymore. Because it's obvious to everyone that so much is wrong. People who try to help get blamed, people who participate in the grift get rewarded as things get worse.

Unfortunately as wealth inequality consumes us under self-colonization, all liberal arts degrees trend towards worthless. We're left with declining service work after passing peak wages and peak employment due to the rise of AI. Spending the rest of our lives fighting over scraps after the rug was already pulled out from under us due to the Dot Bomb, Housing Bubble, pandemic, private equity driving housing costs to the point of insanity and a trade war of choice.

Or we could like, follow economic theory and stuff. Do the opposite of everything I just mentioned. Can't have the Econ PhDs telling us that!

In case anyone ever finds this, I realized that a brute force solution would be a lookup table of all combinations. For three 8 bit variables, that's 2^24=16,777,216 or 16 MB of EPROM.

Then we could apply truth table simplification techniques like Karnaugh maps, sum of products (SOP), products of sums (POS), etc:

https://workforce.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electronics_Tec...

https://tma.main.jp/logic/index_en.html

https://karnaughmapsolver.com/

I asked AI, and if the bits approximate a pseudorandom pattern, then we would need approximately log2(2^24)=24 levels of 2-input boolean logic gates. For NAND or NOR gates, apparently that's something like 3x2^27=400 million gates. If we could manage 24-input gates somehow, that might be reduced to ceil(log2(24))=5 levels, but internally that would occupy about the same amount of die area. Perhaps using a hybrid of gates, multiplexers and EPROMS could result in a much smaller circuit at the cost of higher propagation delay (latency), which is the goal of FPGAs.

We could then play with the ordering of the control variable var1 to explore all 256 possibilities and see if any result in a reduced number of logic levels (by maximizing the size of Karnaugh map loops). I suspect that might only save a few levels at most though, but even that could cut the number of gates by 50-90%.

Thankfully the control variable var1 might only have 16-64 possibilities, which lowers it to 4-6 bits or just 2^20=1,048,576 to 2^22=4,194,304 or 1-4 MB of EPROM, but still about 3*2^25=100 million gates worst case.

For 16, 32 or 64 bit integers or floats, it might be better to just calculate all cases with dedicated hardware and select the right one.

In the early 2000s I worked moving furniture for a few years and one of the guys had a saying "you build up your muscles, you tear down your joints" which I found to be true. Stimulus builds strength, but overuse builds weakness.

Sadly in today's world, we have people in positions of wealth and power who perceive work as easy. Meanwhile people who are actually doing the work that affluent people view as beneath them, are slowly declining.

AKA the glorification of work, working class hero mentality, etc, that seduce people into a life of servitude.

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IMHO this is causing the class division that's destroying the middle class. Soon there will only be lords who disdain work while touting its virtues, and serfs who are forced to work and be talked at under neofeudalism.

This is why I feel that the wrong people are in power, and have always been in power. The tension is about to reach a breaking point in the 2026 US election. We have the rise of AI and likely AGI in 10 years or less, coinciding with the rise of global authoritarianism, austerity and the shredding of social safety nets. Things could get ugly at a level we haven't witnessed since WWII.

What nobody seems to realize is that AI will level everything. Talent. Experience. Wealth. Class will become situational, performative. Based on luck even more than it is now. Maybe looking something like The Hunger Games.

I would propose that knowing this, we start taking action now to avoid the eventualities of the current timeline. For example, we could form a co-equal branch of government composed of people drawn by lottery (to offset the arbitrary concentration of influence) otherwise known as sortition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I first mentioned it a month ago but it bears repeating. Although it's unlikely that anything like this will happen at a national level in any country.

Short of that, we should consider workplace equality. Where every employee has a vote, just like shareholders. Corporate charters should have the board defer to employees in the case of a tie. Another way to do it is to have the board be 50% labor, like in Germany for companies over 2,000 employees.

TL;DR: if we want to maximize leverage while reducing friction so that everyone has the opportunity to self-actualize, then we should be wary of moral imperatives handed down from the upper class and internalized by the working class.

The idea is to take some number of inputs A, B, C, ... and conceptually perform all of the possible functions simultaneously, then keep the one that's desired and throw the rest away. For any arbitrary logic. Ideally using fewer operations than all of that, but that's optional. Driven by one variable, it would look like:

  // branch version
  switch(var1)
  {
    case 1:
      var4 = var2 + var3;
      break;
    case 2:
      var4 = var2 - var3;
      break;
    case 3:
      var4 = var2 * var3;
      break;
    case 4:
      var4 = var2 / var3;
      break;
    // ...
    default:
      var4 = 0; // optional and arbitrary
      break;
  }
  
  // branchless version
  var4 = magic(var1, var2, var3);

So for now, I may just use a switch() command in a shader and let it figure out any reusable logic internally. I don't know if shaders have come far enough to allow that performantly, or if they end up just calculating everything and throwing away the paths not taken. Which would suggest that the max speed would be O(1/N) for the number of cases.

Does anyone know? Maybe truth tables? Or a SAT solver? I'm also not sure how this would work for floating point, but that's optional too.

Edit: I updated the cases to show how var1 controls the math performed on var2, var3 and var4.

^^^ Any sufficiently advanced tech..

Under the definition I'm using, demons live in our mind, often operating through the subconscious mind. The Ancient Greek notion of a daemon described an entity which existed between the realm of gods and humans, connecting our deterministic material plane to the spiritual plane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(classical_Greek_mythol...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimonion_(Socrates)

Taken literally it means that gods don't just live on Mount Olympus, but are present in our psyche at all times, vying for our attention.

So for example, someone compelled to drink alcohol might have let their mind become ruled by Dionysus (or the Roman name Bacchus), or a daemon in service of that god or pretending to be that god. Same for gambling (Hermes/Mercury). Or politics (Zeus and Athena/Jupiter and Minerva).

Today's billionaires would be ruled by gluttany (Adephagia/Nemesis) although the Romans equivocated on this because concepts like master and slave had different meanings then, because the empire's existence depended on subjugation so it became "just how things are". Much like in the modern era "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understand it" (Upton Sinclair).

So Nemesis may have allowed a human to reach a high station, even emperor, unless that human committed hubris. For example by defying the gods by trying to become a god, like Croesus did by seeing what he wanted to see:

https://www.parikiaki.com/2021/12/croesus-of-lydia/

For billionaires, obsessive thoughts revolve around health, mortality and waiting for the other shoe to drop, since they experience Nemesis without knowing its name. Whereas for farmers, concerns are more about putting food on the table, since their thinking is ruled by Demeter/Ceres.

This relates to modern concepts in psychology like "symphony of mind", that the faculties in our brain lead to the emergence of agents which influence our spiritual vibration to dominate our thinking.

So when someone perceives the presence of a demon through sight/sound or feeling, it's more like their intuition is communicating with them through a sense which is not well-defined. For nonbelievers or people who haven't experienced trauma yet which stresses the mind into seeking non-objective explanations for the breakdown of their reality, angels and demons are just as mythical as say, hearing voices or having multiple personality disorder. But for people who have witnessed paranormal activity, the idea that there may be more to our reality than we typically experience is as true as say, the love of a child for its parent.

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I've seen one or two things that I can't explain, that would amount to ghost stories and close encounters. But I've also seen things that were later explained. For example, I was hiking in the desert at night one time with friends and a star lit up so that for a second or two, it was as bright as day, but it wasn't a shooting star. I later learned about Iridium satellite flares.

So I'm open to the idea that magic doesn't exist. But as long as science can't explain how consciousness works, then none of this can be ruled out. IMHO science will never be able to do that, because I believe that consciousness is the quantum uncertainty portion of nondeterminism. In other words, everything down to the subatomic level has a measure of consciousness, that we observe as an outcome or choice. Without consciousness (uncertainty), the universe would evolve in a purely deterministic fashion.

But when we introduce self-awareness by adding an observer, the act of observation influences the uncertainty to determine which timeline we walk. We control our destiny and may have even had a hand in our past before our consciousness reached a level of organization that would allow us to remember why we chose to come into being. Our awareness isn't a separate aspect of reality, they're two sides of the same coin, which is analogous to pantheism.

It's certainly entertaining and fulfilling to believe there is some great, deep truth and that you're finding it through the concept of magic, but your mental energy would better be spent understanding things like politics and technology for what they are, not draped in the context of the supernatural.

I would urge you to play devil's advocate and consider that the simplest explanation tends to be the right one by Occam's razor. Politics and technology give people an out so that they can rationalize groupthink and amoral behavior. A strong argument could be made that today's political landscape is comprised of tribes that engage in cult-like thinking, similarly to how multilevel marketing schemes (MLMs) attract evangelists due to how their incentives align.

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So all of this that makes no sense - like why we would want to elect public officials who are free of accountability - becomes transparently obvious when viewed through the lens of metaphysics. It's because the cognitive dissonance people experience living under systems of control like ours (that promote suffering when there is plenty for everyone were it not for wealth inequality) compels them to reach for solutions that allow them to defer their own accountability.

Because they don't want to begin the healing and growth work that would help them ascend past their self-imposed limitations, because they don't want to face their guilt and shame. So they project their frustrations outward as elitism, favoritism, discrimination, othering, division, dogma, prejudice, authoritarianism, etc. Which politicians turn into wedge issues so they can choreograph elections, sort of like gerrymandering but by framing debates instead of district boundaries.

When politicians orate and capture the hearts and minds of their base to gain power, it's no different than church leaders taking their lord's name in vain to further their own wordly goals, or magicians pulling the wool over their audience's eyes to create the illusion of a fantasy reality to make a buck. It's all magic, just like consciousness is magic.

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You're right that my post comes off as detached from reality, I get it. But I think there's a difference between studying a subject to master it and transcend its rules to add new ones, and practicing willfull ignorance of a subject to pretend that its implications don't exist.

Remember that Carl Sagan warned in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance"

But also wrote the character Palmer Joss in his book Contact to remind us to question our most deeply held assumptions, so that we don't inadvertently worship reason as a substitute for meaning.

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-are-clarkes-laws-2699067

So D&D stats like wisdom and charisma that were easily overlooked in our modern world are starting to surpass, say, intelligence when it comes to self-actualization/ascension.

If we follow this to its logical conclusion, then there are magical laws to consider, if such things could possibly be summarized in words:

https://www.themystica.com/the-laws-of-magic/

http://www.neopagan.net/AT_Laws.html

I believe that every use of magic comes with a cost, which is unknown if the wielder isn't mindful of it. In the simplest terms: using magic to satisfy one's ego by acquiring something deprives someone of something - often the wielder.

There are a few ways to minimize the consequence of using magic:

1) Sacrifice something of value for the magic to consume

2) Appeal to a higher power through prayer, the law of attraction, etc like a paladin so that the spirit bears the cost

3) Act in alignment with the heart so that creation has a chance to help behind the scenes (loosely related to #2)

4) Avoid the use of magic altogether and stick to objectivity, that free will is a fantasy, that reason supersedes meaning, etc

I'm sure I'm missing some, as I'm relearning childish notions around magical thinking.

I think what we're seeing when our most wealthy and powerful leaders denounce empathy is the outward expression of #4. Because empathy allows one to simulate the subjective experience of others in the mind, which opens the door to meaning, the golden rule, reincarnation, even the multiverse and parallel timelines. On the one hand they say that magic is dead, but on the other they use tools like psychology/economics/politics that blur the line between science and magic in order to gain control.

The ultimate expression of tech as magic might be something like the Emperor in Star Wars. Total impeccability and plausible deniability from accountability, yet no soul.

What I've come to realize in my own life is that feeling the magic passing through us is akin to shifting realities. It can't be studied scientifically, because the observer may see outcomes that differ from those of other observers in the previous reality. Science may be deterministic on one timeline, but stochastic across timelines. Which ties into consciousness, quantum mechanics, synchronicity, pantheism, the many faces of God as every living thing, etc.

Whether we influence the world through our actions of manipulate it through control of our attention, karmic consequences still come. The inward flow of psychic energy for personal gain creates a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Whereas the outward flow in service to others creates a sense of abundance. Life becomes a dance of working with these energies, either low-vibration or high-vibration, fear or love.

Where I'm going with this is that this rediscovered power of love has the potential to shift humanity into a reality where our demons can't follow. We are temporarily on this one which seems to be fraught with danger because maybe some part of our soul felt that our help was needed here most. We can shift to a gentler timeline if we wish, or continue playing the life we paid a quarter for in the astral plane and do some world building here.

From a Zen perspective, I've said too much, yet nothing at all. I hope this helps someone find a little peace and light amidst the separation and darkness of these times.

I grew up in the 1980s and have watched America slide from being a civilization that was the envy of the world into something resembling empire or feudalism or I-don't-know-what. The US literally declared its independence from England to shrug off authoritarianism/aristocracy. Yet we've reproduced that wealth inequality here.

We're going to have to draw a line in the sand that says that we believe that we can build a dignified society together. That means that we've got to stop worshipping rugged individualism when our billionaires got rich on government contracts and let children starve in poverty. The hypocrisy has reached self-destructive proportions.

If free childcare is gonna sink the country, then we're already sunk. Same with free healthcare and free education. You want to know what sinks a country? When grocery prices triple and (waves hand at everything).

But what's really going on is that we never got the highly multicore and distributed computers that could have started going mainstream in the 1980s, and certainly by the late 1990s when high-speed internet hit. So single-threaded performance is about the same now as 20 years ago. Meanwhile video cards have gotten exponentially more powerful and affordable, but without the virtual memory and virtualization capabilities of CPUs, so we're seeing ridiculous artificial limitations like not being able to run certain LLMs because the hardware "isn't powerful enough", rather than just having a slower experience or borrowing the PC in the next room for more computing power.

To go to the incredible lengths that Apple went to in designing the M1, not just wrt hardware but in adding yet another layer of software emulation since the 68000 days, without actually bringing multicore with local memories to the level that today's VLSI design rules could allow, is laughable for me. If it wasn't so tragic.

It's hard for me to live and work in a tech status quo so far removed from what I had envisioned growing up. We're practically at AGI, but also mired in ensh@ttification. Reflected in politics too. We'll have the first trillionaire before we solve world hunger, and I'm bracing for Skynet/Ultron before we have C3P0/JARVIS.

The funny thing about it is that you build up a tolerance to how hot it is. So the first time you try it, a few drops feel like your face is burning off. By the end of the semester, we were pouring full packets on each slice of pizza.

I just looked and I can't find the (ketchup sized) packets online. So I don't have anything to recognize the brand from. If anyone knows, please share! They are at least as addictive as Sriracha IMHO, should there ever be another shortage.

In other words, pay our taxes. Help the poor. Be of service to others. I'm not sure that it's possible to be the change we wish to see in the world and also make a profit.

I know that flies in the face of western culture and philosophy. So I would propose that the cognitive dissonance we experience when we try to integrate the views of people who see everything that's wrong with the world and the views of people who are grateful for what is, stems from imbalance. Sitting with opposing viewpoints makes us uncomfortable because we're confronted with inconvenient truths that implicate us. Then our avoidance of accountability creates the systems of control which trap us in the never-ending cycle of endless work with nothing to show for it.

Some examples of that might be the pageantry of the British royal family that papers over the class war happening under its watch, the performative displays of strength put on by China to curtail clandestine shell games carried out by the US, and even our idolization of celebrities who dine on the backs of the proletariat while the world burns.

The best way to break the spell is to get educated. If you think that Jordan Peterson, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman make a lot of sense, then try Scott Galloway, Margaret Atwood and John Keynes. Loosely: the former build walls, the latter tear them down.

What I've learned in my own life is that wrestling with tough decisions and making the hard calls creates shadows in our psyche. Our choices form an identity which cements attachments that connect to densities that lower our spiritual vibration. So the wealthiest and most powerful people who have gone to the greatest lengths to achieve their goals are the ones most separated from their souls.

Meaning that if we want to help the less fortunate and reduce suffering, we need to work on healing our leaders. They don't want to be healed though. But maybe they can be reminded.

I had the utmost respect for Elon Musk when he was sleeping in his car to get real work done. But when he used his power and influence to dismantle the federal government through DOGE and cut aid that could result in millions of deaths worldwide ..not so much. When he arguably got the first reusable rocket into orbit with SpaceX, great! When he ignored the concerns of astronomers to fast track Starlink without bothering to give the satellites an anti-reflective coating, boo! It's not him I'm disappointed with, but his choices and lack of empathy when it counted.

The blind pursuit of efficiency creates injustice, and the refusal to rectify it creates intolerance. I think we've lost sight of what evil is because we've tied our identities to an immutable past which doesn't actually exist, because there's only now. I'm reminded of the quick and easy path in Star Wars, and when the Oracle in The Matrix said that we can never see past the choices we don't understand.

If we keep viewing the world through duality, with black and white thinking, good vs bad, us vs them, then we'll merely be custodians cleaning up the mistakes of the uber rich.

I think what I'm trying to say is that if we envision a better world and embody our dreams now, then we'll manifest a new timeline that escapes the will of people who would subjugate us.

What that means as far as where you place your energy is up to you. Imagine that!

Instead, invest in specific technologies and goals:

  - Low-cost solar panels and windmills
  - Alternative chip designs like RISC-V and high-multicore (64+ cores)
  - Peer to peer communications systems, alternatives to cellular/5G
  - Robotic/hydroponic automated organic food production
  - Incubated/cloned meat and meat alternatives without side effects like FODMAP
  - mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, treatments for genetic disorders
  - Low-cost EVs, LiFePO4 batteries, high-kW inverters, axial flux motors
  - Heat pumps, thermal energy storage, concentrated trough solar
  - Labor-saving inventions and assistive devices for freight, construction, etc
  - Companies that openly support public education, single-payer healthcare, etc
  - Incubators like Y Combinator but that provide smaller $10,000-$100,000 VC
  - Open source projects/collaborations that distribute risk like Humble Bundle
  - Mass transit like electric busses/high-speed rail (boring but global demand)
  - Strike Debt and other loan forgiveness efforts that buy up loans in default
  - PACs, unions, environmental groups working to unseat incumbants
  - Foreign aid programs aimed at education, especially women and girls
  - Independent investigative journalists and media
  - Local bond efforts for better public schools, libraries, parks, etc
  - Stocks/groups working to legalize cannibis and end the war on drugs
  - Builders of tiny homes and alternative housing like yurts and earthships

  - Crypto (untraceable exploitation, black markets, human trafficking, etc)
  - Mutual funds and index funds (same reason as investment companies)
  - FAANG/GAMMA (high profit, low innovation over market cap)
  - MLMs (often tied to fundamentalist religious organizations and lobbyists)
  - Foreign currencies (profits from exploitation and environmental degradation)

  - MacKenzie Scott
  - Bill McKibben
  - Michael Pollan
  - Derrick Jensen
  - Thom Hartmann
  - Howard Zinn (deceased)
  - Ed Abbey (deceased)
  - John Muir (deceased)
  - Frank Church (deceased)
  - Terence McKenna (deceased)

  - Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
  - The Jungle and other books by Upton Sinclair (deceased)
  - Nickel and Dimed and other books by Barbara Ehrenreich (deceased)

1) That starts with liberating all peoples from forced labor, exploitation and subjugation so that they can self-actualize. Which looks like freeing capital from "black holes" of concentrated wealth, specifically moneyed interests and wealthy individuals who hoard resources and choose to do none of what I've stated above, at great expense to the rest of humanity. That's done not through competition or direct confrontation, but by getting everyone "off the grid" to disrupt the supply and demand curve which always results in the wealth inequality and late-stage capitalism we see today when there isn't regulation.

2) Then also improving quality of life universally, so working towards providing free treatments for all conditions/illnesses/injuries across borders.

3) Then also promoting kindess, mindfulness, and other cultural movements which move us away from othering and back towards reconnection to foster the common good. This looks like a rejection of reason for its own sake, and replacing that with the pursuit of meaning. So deciding collectively that using electronic devices in public is impolite, ending surveillance capitalism, tearing down the economic walls which separate us from our neighbors, etc. So that we can once again gather in small communities that provide mutual aid, childcare and tool/resource sharing so that we aren't forced to take on so much individually for our basic survival.

I think it may be possible to recruit AI to do all of this holistically and rapidly shift into the reality that we may have envisioned for the 21st century, a bit like the rapid technological growth we saw during COVID-19, when the first vacation that billions of people ever had resulted in 10-20 years of innovation in just 1-2 years. That's the key, that getting real work done requires escaping the menial labor that extracts profit from the working class.

So that's what I would do: use AI to examine thousands of stocks to find which ones trend similarly and which one correlate inversely, and come up with a plan to start moving profit the opposite direction from where it's moved traditionally. Then invest that cashflow into countless underemployed people whose talents, dignity and divinity haven't been recruited yet effectively because they've only been put to use in the service of capital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I believe that this was one of the great mistakes by our founders. I'm sure that many suggested it, but unfortunately their ideas were suppressed due to our roots in slavery, colonialism and aristocracy (meritocracy today).

The powers that be quickly saw the danger in that and IMHO orchestrated the Dot Bomb, 9/11, the Housing Bubble, etc to keep as much money as possible out of public hands so that the average person wouldn't have the means to participate in the stock market.

Suze Orman told everyone to put their savings into Vanguard in the 2000s and they did. But since America chose to invest in McMansions and SUVs instead of moonshots and automation, Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit. Along with countless other zero-sum game thinkers who choose to work within existing systems of control rather than pursuing innovations which could raise the median standard of living. This is why as America has been losing its empire status as holder of the world's reserve currency, it's been colonizing itself, particularly its young.

So that's my greatest disappointment with the present era. That we collectively chose to invest in private profit rather than shared prosperity.

Now, tons of people will complain that I'm oversimplifying and will kick and scream in resistance to what I'm saying. But at the end of the day, personal wealth represents wages withheld from workers. I don't know why we worship people who have reached positions of power and wealth, whose purpose for existing seems to be to withhold resources from everyone else.

Supposedly there are mechanical switches that prevent that, but evidently "modern" microwaves can control the gun through the logic board.

The engineering failures that led to this, from conceptual to design to internal control, boggle my mind. I'm not even sure where to send a complaint or if it would result in any kind of compensation. Because billion dollar corporations know that they'll never have to face any kind of corporate death penalty because they're protected by limited liability. So we'll just buy another $150 microwave instead.

Are smaller companies better at engineering safety? Evidently not.

It's hard to know which member of the duopoly is more guilty for breaking GitHub for me, but I find that blaming both often guarantees success.

I could like, buy a new computer and stuff. But you know, the whole Turing complete thing feels like a lie in the age of planned obsolescence. So web standards are too.

Doesn't anyone see that this can't be policed or everyone becomes a criminal? That AI will bring the end of copyrights and patents as we know them when literally everything becomes a derivative work? When children produce better solutions than industry veterans so we punish them rather than questioning the divine right of corporations to rule over us? What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?

I wonder if a lot of you are as humbled as I am by the arrival of AI. Whenever I use it, I'm in awe of what it comes up with when provided almost no context, coming in cold to something that I've been mulling over for hours. And it's only getting better. In 3-5 years, it will leave all of us behind. I'm saying that as someone who's done this for decades and has been down rabbit holes that most people have no frame of reference for.

My prediction is that like with everything, we'll bungle this. Those of you with big egos and large hoards of wealth that you thought you earned because you are clever will do everything you can to micromanage and sabotage what could have been the first viable path to liberation from labor in human history. Just like with the chilling effects of the Grand Upright Music ruling and the DMCA and HBO suing BitTorrent users (edit: I meant the MPAA and RIAA, HBO "only" got people's internet shut off), we have to remain eternally vigilant or the powers that be will take away all the fun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent#C...

So no, I won't even entertain the notion of demanding proof of origin for ideas. I'm not going down this slippery slope of suing every open source project that gives away its code for free, just because a PR put pieces together in a new way but someone thought of the same idea in private and thinks they're special.

Unfortunately the only answer that I know of is eternal vigilance, which is the price of liberty.

I decided to look up who that saying is attributed to, and apparently it's John Philpot Curran, not Thomas Jefferson. But I like Orwell's saying better, because it shows why all of you are just as ineffectual at steering government policy as I am:

https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpret...

I believe that the US healthcare crisis started in 1973 when Nixon signed the HMO Act, which had the effect of tying health insurance to employment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Maintenance_Organizatio...

The alternative would have been some kind of single-payer option where US tax dollars would fun Medicare and/or Medicaid for all. Here is an explanation I found:

https://medicaiddirectors.org/resource/understanding-managed...

This differs from a public option, which would be a generic insurance offered by the government at a substantial savings over private:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/07/why-a-public-opt...

A public option likely would be 20-50% less expensive than private due to the 80/20 rule and the fact the European healthcare is about 1/2 the cost of US healthcare, so a current $400/month plan might be $200-320/month:

https://www.aeaweb.org/research/regulating-health-insurers-a...

https://nashbio.com/blog/healthcare/the-healthcare-divide-pr...

Unfortunately Obamacare (Romneycare) forced everyone to get insurance or face a tax penalty mandate, which was lifted by Trump in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017:

https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/affordable-care-a...

-

Knowing these facts, what's really going on? Two things:

* Obamacare did little to address the natural monopoly aspect of healthcare, so costs exploded

* Republican concerns about government overreach into our private lives (knowing our info and determining who receives care) and negative impacts on private health industries have not been heard

Natural monopolies are things that everyone needs, such as water, sewer, trash, electricity, education, healthcare, etc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Meaning that eventually running a capitalist system results in 1 or 2 companies controlling the entire market and charging whatever they wish, since high cost of entry prevents competition. Without competition, there is no supply and demand curve to counteract price increases. In other words, whoever controls the water can sell it at any price. Or insulin, or Epipens, or Hepatitis C treatments.

The only way to bring costs down on a natural monopoly is through regulation. Society chooses which firm(s) will supply the good or service, and how much it will cost. Overages are paid through subsidies, which can be high, but are at least under public review, unlike when private industry controls a market.

These are the reasons why healthcare got so expensive. But the meaning behind it, that's more nuanced.

The US is very into individual responsibility. Our belief is that a strong citizenry ensures a strong nation. Because we defeated not just fascism in WWII, but the rise of socialism and communism during the Cold War. Our privately funded athletes beat state-funded athletes in the Olympics. Our private industry runs more efficiently than (for example) national construction projects in Russia and China which built cities that nobody lives in. We have our own pork barrel projects, but they tend to be limited by public scrutiny, unlike in communist nations.

The US is also very into privacy. We have medical privacy laws like HIPAA which may not exist with state-funded medical care. Now, this is a half-truth, because Europe has arguably the same or better privacy than we do. Because there is little incentive to sell medical information there, unlike here.

What it really comes down to is that people who are used to paying through the nose for US health insurance after a lifetime of hard work aren't ready to see others receive it for free through the government. They don't want someone determining how long they have to wait for care, or if they receive it at all. They perceive government red tape as making health providers even more expensive or putting them out of business. As in, why would doctors go to medical school merely to be paid little more than teachers and other public servants? Yes, privacy may be impacted with single-payer. But in the US, the answer is usually about $$$.

Sadly, this debate has resulted in the lose-lose we see today: rising costs with no backstop, and threatened privacy due to regulatory capture by health companies which have misaligned incentives and are too big to fail.

-

My solution to this political impasse would be a gradual transition to single-payer healthcare (probably Medicare for All) on an opt-in basis, either at the state or individual level. Knowing that taxpayers who opt in may pay a higher rate for a time to supplement those on private insurance. Until enough people are in the single-payer system that it becomes self-evidently better and the majority switch to it. Similar to private school vouchers, except going the other direction: public healthcare vouchers.

People could still buy private insurance to supplement Medicare for All and go to the front of the line. I don't like it, because I believe that healthcare is a human right that shouldn't depend on money, but this is America. If someone has the money to pay doctors overtime, then it probably makes little economic sense to stop them.

Medical research should go back to the previous university/publicly funded model. So grants would be available for companies pursuing billion dollar cures for cancer and other diseases which diminish quality of life or its duration. Then medications would be sold at close to wholesale price. This eliminates the current problems where pharmaceutical companies sell treatments instead of cures, that tend to start out very expensive.

-

Sorry this got so long. I believe that you'd receive a similar summary from an LLM, and that without this context, a debate would fall into dogmatic attacks that lead nowhere.

Edit: fixed small typos.

So every area of our lives that feels like it doesn't work like it used to - cost of living, healthcare, education, antitrust enforcement, journalism, accountability at the highest levels - represents a segment of the economy which has been corrupted.

Through this lens, socioeconomic policies start to make sense. For example, if your goal is to skim a fraction of the income from everyone in an economy and redirect those funds to specific goals/organizations/individuals, you could put tariffs on common goods and pass the funds collected on to companies granted large government contracts. Then the largest companies like GM and Ford see their profits reduced or even show a loss, while Grok and Palantir have all the money they need for mass surveillance.

Explanations for regulatory capture aren't normally this reductive, but wealth inequality has reached such monumental proportions that the simplest answer tends to be the right one when the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

I moved furniture for 3 years in the early 2000s to support my shareware business. Something like 500 moves, sometimes 9+ hours per day, occasionally 6 days per week. It made me who I am today, but also broke me in countless ways.

I witnessed single mothers giving us $20 tips each (around $40 today) while wealthy people didn't even offer us water. I saw the best and worst of the human condition, sexist pay policies, how workers are exploited by not being provided a schedule for the next few days so they have to call in each morning, how truck fuel costs more than workers' pay, how Right to Work states allow businesses to throw employees away on a whim, how tax brackets at the bottom create the impression that any additional pay gets skimmed by the man, among a great many other injustices, and how all of those conspire to keep the working class down so that a handful of individuals can become fabulously wealthy.

With every improvement in tech, I see the gulf widening. We can talk about how poor people now have cell phones and flatscreen TVs, while conveniently ignoring how people with a net worth over $10 million who couldn't spend that money in a lifetime are now buying politicians to shred the social safety net, among other dubious endeavors.

I say with complete confidence that the arrival of AGI will bring about ultimate wealth inequality. I foresee a world where 10 billion people work performatively to survive long after robots can do the work better, while less than 1 million people live like gods, free even of senescence. Assuming that we stay on this timeline and don't shift to a more equitable one.

I went into computers in the late 1980s to eventually build an android like Data. I didn't know that Turing test-passing AI would arrive 20 years early, or that I would spend the first quarter of the 21st century hustling to make rent due to unfortunate geopolitical realities driven by unmitigated greed and regulatory capture.

Now I'm not so sure that I even want to stay in tech anymore. It has been anything but kind to me. Every time I level up, so does the world, and expectations upon me just grow for the same pay. My people-pleasing has cost me my health on a number of fronts. I know that someday, I'll have to choose computers or my life.

After all of that, one might think that I'm all doom and gloom. But I'm not. I've come to treasure my time at the warehouse as a teaching tool after a great deal of shadow work. I admire my foreman for being the provider that I can only hope to be someday. I look in awe upon the borderline homeless vets, deadbeat dads and ex-cons who showed me what it is to give without expectation of reward. I see them in all of us, even the people I disagree with, and that gives me hope that maybe we can come together and avoid the iceberg that's about to sink this ship.

I'm reminded of this scene from Jaws which always stuck with me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xQQIqAiTYA

And I just watched Mountainhead, here's the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27cN2_k0JF0

I see a world divided into two camps: one that does much for little, and one that does little for much.

It makes me wonder where we all sit in relation to this. What kind of impact we could have on the future, and how that might help everyone to self-actualize.

I don't pretend to have the answers. Some of my best years happened when things were at their worst, and vice versa.

But I do know that everything is upside-down right now, and always has been, since the dawn of civilization. I feel that tech won't really be tech until it addresses and undoes that injustice.

That's why I write this malarky when I should be working. For all the other working people who don't have time to say what needs to be said.