If, months or years down the line, I start identifying as "agender" (or similarly NB) -- I'm going to say that I first knew it back in October of 2017, I just didn't know that I knew it yet.

Efficiency and Creativity

I was thinkin' about science fiction and technological explosions. A scifi writer and utopian once said something about how "machines will eventually take over so much of what we currently do with manual labor, humanity will be in a state of enforced leisure. What an envied thing it will be to work!" (That's not even close to an exact quote.)

Humans are, of course, really inefficient at a lot of things.

How does one measure efficiency of creativity?

A wacky reformulation of Moore's Law

Moore's Law states, in paraphrase, that processing power as a whole doubles every eighteen months. Sometimes it's been clock speed, sometimes it's been number of transistors, but this seems to have generally held true.

The obvious corollary is that newer processors --computers in general-- are more powerful than older ones. This has consistently been born out, with extreme cases being the emulation of entire old systems on newer ones, even many at once, even without being emulated on the newest systems. (See: Linux to Game Developers: No More Excuses)

Based on this, I've thought up a potentially interesting, but probably wrong, corollary: Every eighteen months, it becomes possible to add another layer of emulation, without effectively slowing down the deepest layer. This means that, for example, I can have my MacBook Air emulating a Mac from a year and a half ago, emulating a three-year-old Mac, emulating a Mac eighteen months older than that, all the way down to the original Macintosh -- with the deepest Mac having an effectively indistinguishable user-experience (for better or worse).

Practically speaking, assuming an arbitrary six-month delay before full emulation of a system, this means that twenty-four months after a system comes out, it's possible to emulate it indistinguishably.

Of course, this is all armchair garbage. I have no numbers of any sort to back it up. I have no intention of going looking for them, although you're welcome to throw any you find/have at me if you want :)

A snippet

Knowledge can only be used for Good or for Evil. There is no in-between.

Faulty Thinking: The Use of Theories

My brother has a fairly rad shirt. He got it from Harvard (yes, Harvard U, that Harvard) when he went there for an "econ bee"¹. It bugs the crap out of me.

See, the shirt has this quote on it:

Sure, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?

Which apparently is rather funny if you're an economist, but I hate it because it reflects (or appears to reflect, and in practice there's no difference in how you get treated) utterly flawed thinking.

The whole point of theories is to reflect (or explain) reality. If a theory or its predictions differ from reality, then it is worthless to the extent that it differs from reality. For example, Newtonian mechanics, the simple version of reality where you add speeds together, isn't the whole picture. It's still useful, because it holds together at any and every speed we humans can actually reach². A theory that doesn't reflect reality (makes wrong predictions) is useless at best -- at worst, people keep using it anyways and they are wrong.

This way of thinking ignores that. It rejects anything that doesn't fit into its existing theory. That's a recipe for irrelevance. Now ordinarily, I'd be perfectly content to let people be idiotically irrelevant into oblivion. But this is expressed by Economists, so-called "experts" who people actually listen to. Almost by definition, they are not irrelevant. And so this is a huge problem.

The lesson here is, if your thinking doesn't match reality then you need to update your thinking. And watch out for your economist -- even if they know what they're talking about, they might still be wrong, maybe even on purpose (the worst kind of wrong).

Footnotes:

¹ Not really an "econ bee", it was an Econ quiz thing. I'm not super sure of the details, and "econ bee" gets most of the idea across by way of analogy to "spelling bee". It was probably a bit more like Jeopardy.

² As of this writing, anyways.

Leaves

My (library) copy of House of Leaves came in today. I already know that mainly I don't know what to think of it. I bet it could make for a great (La)Tex leaning tool, trying to re-create it. Whoever double-spaces their sentences, though; I like that^[1].

Apparently there is also braille which my edition does not have. Has anyone got notations or pictures or somesuch of those?

Footnotes:

^[1]Their monospaced sentences, at least. I can't tell about the other ones (I haven't gotten to them yet, but I doubt I'll be able to tell even once I do get there).

There's a grand total of one comment on my blog...

...And it's this guy:

Wait, that didn't really convey why this is a big deal. Let me clarify, with the help of some linked images.
It's this guy:

I've been following this guy off and on ever since I discovered him -- I forget how, probably through a Linux forum somewhere -- because he's practically always right. And out of entire internet, he comments on my blog?

Er, sorry. I'm just going to go dance around like a maniac and then collapse from the awesome.

twitter

I give up on twitter. Twitter's not long enough to contain my nonsanity. I'm just going to dump here, instead.

"Some things you do for Love"

All you really need is to love, well and truly love, what you do.

When you love what you do, you work to get better at it just because you can. When you love what you do, it shows in what you do, and people can see that. Because when you love what you do, you've put a lot of work into it and you're good at it.

Wishlist: "cmacs"

Y'know what would be cool? It'd be cool if we could rewrite emacs to use common lisp instead of emacslisp, and then combine it with the window manager.

There are already window managers in common lisp. (For example, StumpWM. I can't say how good it is though, since I haven't bothered to get it to play nice with kde-greater.) And common lisp is a full programming language on the order of C/Java/Javascript. Furthermore, emacs already tries to do ninety-nine percent of everything you could ever want to do anyways. Why can't we just universalize that?

Briefly on Reviews

For my own reference, I figured that I'd better gave some sort of scale written out somewhere. When I sat down to write one, I realized that there's really two different factors I'm trying to convey here.

One is my enjoyment of the book. I can make a scale for that pretty easily. It won't go into the nuances of enjoyment -- Of Mice and Men is really good, but it's a long, slow, savory enjoyment, for example -- but that's what the review is for. The other is more of a technical analysis, rather like a traditional grade. I'm not sure what I expect of this, or why I think such a thing is a good idea.

So anyways, from now on I'm gonna be using a much simpler scale:

Dump it

Anywhere from "Didn't bother to finish it" to "Threw it across the room". I think it's not worth bothering with at best, and may even think it's pretty shit.

F'naa

I'm pretty indifferent overall. Maybe I liked it, maybe I didn't quite finish it. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another.

Like it

I thought it was pretty good, and/or I enjoyed it. I may go around recommending it.

Copy Please

I liked it so much I want a copy for myself. Rare.

Facebook

Alright, alright, I give.

No-one looks at my blog and I'd get more seen posting to facebook. Everyone that I know I'd care about is on facebook anyways. I get it.

I'll be posting to facebook again.

---

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, facebook is two things:

• A comunications platform/interface, specifficly IM (chat)
• An additional place to put my blog posts

Licensced

Well, it came in today. I am now authorized to operate a three-thousand-pound piece of heavy machinery. Watch out, world: here I come.
That's right: I am now an officially licensed driver. Wee!

Dasher

Back to the Future is a very good movie.
Dvorak is a lovely keboard layout, and a vast improvement over Qwerty.
Dasher is great fun, admittedly probably a lot better than Qwerty, and certainly much better than not being able to use a computer at all. However, I'm not to certain about Dasher in and of itself.
I will of course grant that it's both the best alphabetic interface I've ever seen (okay, it's the only real alphabetic interface I've seen), and vastly better than anything I think Icould have come up with.

In related news, except for the latter addition of some newline characters (to make my markdown work right), this post was writen entirely in Dasher, despite haveing to go back and fix some parts. Explaines the non-sequitor of an opening surprisingly well, doesn't it?

Oh, right. Dasher is a lovely little program that provides a number of alternatives to a traditional keboard. The most ~~notable~~ obvious is the one where you dynamically zoom in on the letters you want, eventually building up words and paragraphs until you have however, long a string of text you decide you want. It's not replacing my trusty Dvorak anytime soon, but it seems like a great alternative for people for whom typeing is not an option.

What is Blogging?

The other day, I came across a post on "Penguin" Pete's blog where he outline a bunch of stuff on what blogging is and what it is not. He was reacting to someone complaining about wanting something like a blog, but not a blog.

The point is, blogging is blogging, you shouldn't be blogging if you don't like it, and a blog should have a point, or at least a theme. This made me realize that I haven't really established a theme for mine.

So why am I blogging? I have to admit, I wasn't entirely certain myself. At its core, this is pretty personal. I'm blogging because I feel like it, because I need a place to put my stuff where I can always get at it, and because there's things I want to keep track of. There's going to be a fair amount of reviews on here, even if they're too sparse to be of use to anyone else -- Those are here for me, to help me remember what-all I've read. There's also going to be a fair amou nt of tech stuff / how-tos on here, includeing Linux ones. ( *Le Gasp* Another Linux blog? No, another blog with Linux as a topic.) If these are helpful to you, so much the better, but again they're mainly here for my sake. So... Yeah. Whatever.

Commandline tips #1

Two cool and important things I learned the other day:

First, I learned how to use byobu/screen, most importantly to let a process such as irssi run on a tty and in a GUIterm.

Second, I learned that GUI programs WILL FAIL if you don't own some X for them to run on. Thus, it is impossible to start a GUI program, log out of your GUI session, log back in to your GUI session, and have your program still running -- even if you use something like screen.

Also, you can alias aptget="sudo apt-get". On Ubuntu-likes at least, this saves you about six keystrokes every time you want to install/remove something. You could alias aptget="sudo apt-get install", of course, but then you can't use it to remove stuff.

What I think about homosexuals

Whelp.  This was going to come up sooner or later.  I was going to post it eventually.  Now works, I guess.
For compleatly incidental reasons, I came accross this blog post I'm christian, unless you're gay.  Made me think a bit.  Reminded me of this I had posted as a facebook note some time ago.  So, here it is.

I/O Error: Just how high are you?

So a little piece of stupidity I'm saving for later:

Is Mickey Mouse a dog or a cat?