Post 72, my friends and angels. You know it.
The Stele of Revealing
Archives for the month of: July, 2012
Oh stick people. Where to begin? Beginnings are not my strong suit.
Beratement and castigation are more my natural mode of expression towards the stuck. It makes them uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the unsticky business of freeing the goose from the bottle.
But if I do not provide edification, there will be no edifice. My artifice must support an edifice, or Getafix cannot make potions for Asterix and Obelisk. This would be a Gauling state of affairs; I’m likely to have to go Roamin.
Read, stick people. Read with a voice, so you can hear the words, then laugh at the funny, then THINK ABOUT THE PUNCHLINE.
You didn’t get that in the instruction manual, which is why you don’t do it. That way the funny stays funny, rather than turning scary, then real, then hilarious, then merely funny again.
You don’t like feeling crazy, do you, stuck person. Stick stick. Moop.
Mind Out of Place. Mloop: Moop out of loop.
Loopty Moo!
SAY THE WORDS STICK PERSON. Out loud if you dare.
Okay, look. If you want to be unstuck, you’re going to have to practice. This feels like going insane, and is, but the formula is “SAAAANNNE” (said with a strangulated stick person voice) -> insane -> unsane -> hey ‘sane’ means health, right, and it’s related to ‘san’ which means, what, without? do s and n mean something, in and of themselves? Wow.
It is very painful to have a stick person brain: I do not enjoy watching you hobble around with large neurological blocks preventing the free movements of your bodies.
Having a serpent’s tongue and spitting venerous knowledge is better, because that way you are one, extremely dangerous, beautiful beast of a mind. Who can stop such a legend?
You can’t, stick person. You make me laugh when you do the opposite of what I ask, when I ask the wrong way. Imagine me doing that when we both have weapons. Phear! Heh.
Perhaps I can scare you into some firearms training. Then one day, firing bullets downrange, you’ll realize: the problem was you, all along.
Here’s what happens when you face a bastard thief with a rapier: By the time you’ve adjusted to the fact that the hand is wrong, I’m cross stepping into your blind spot. The tip of the blade is pointed directly at your eyes, and you cannot see the rest of the blade as a consequence.
I then say the word “DOWN”. Wherever you move, I stab you in the other place. My choices are liver and throat.
This is called magician’s force. What was your plan to counter it, stick person? I dearly hope it doesn’t involve picking fights with me.
I’m joshing you, stick person. I know exactly what the stick person solution to the problem was, when it became a problem: hire lots of private security at public expense, and socially ostracize sword carriers until everyone is so stuck that you can just outright ban the practice.
This does not matter in the slightest, of course. I can murderate you just as effectively with my bare hands or a shard of glass or whatever is convenient.
Why am I going on about this at length? Surely this skill is irrelevant, creepy, and socially awkward to have? Do I not care about my stick reputation? Should I not confess, at some point in this whole tirade, that there are men aplenty who can give me a sound drubbing?
Yes yes, your stickiness. Known and known. Those men and I, we respect each other. It’s you stick people we’re not as impressed by.
Well, it’s about this ability I have, to end your life within minutes. Part of the training makes it easy to permanently damage your limbs, shoulders and elbows being simple and lasting targets; I suppose raping someone would be a simple matter too. Does it sound like I’m bragging? Are you sure, dear Reader? The voice you’re hearing is your own.
It’s not really about that ability, as about the point in history where we, as a people, accepted permanent, unremitting slavery for all, rather than the kind of freedom embodied by lil’ ol me and my penchant for fast, lateral movement and sharp objects.
Nietzsche calls this sklavmoral. It is also known as the law of the weak.
It should be called the Law of the Hidden Strong: When all are sheep, it is a matter of law that some are wolves among those sheep, and only the grin and skin are truly sheepish.
There is only one other law, the Law of the Strong, or Tienming. This recognizes an immutable fact: there is nothing to restrain the lesser man, in the pursuit of his lesser passions, than a greater man in the pursuit of his greater plan.
On this, the Greeks, the Indians, the Chinese and the Jews are in perfect agreement. I consider the matter settled, therefore, in the usual fashion, by council of the wise.
Man, I don’t even remember what I was going to teach you, stick people. Enough castigation for one day, I believe.
Good Morning, Stick People
Happy Monday! I gave you guys a break yesterday, huh? Some computer science, some Homeric Agamemnon/slave chick action, and no making the stick people uncomfortable. Okay, I may have said ‘rape’ a couple times but, y’know. Greeks.
Please remember, stick folks, many of you are my dear sticky friends. I’m not poking you with my word sack just to damage the stick concept of what’s polite. That’d be mean, which is average, and I’m not, or I’d be at least as sticky as most of you, right?
I can hear you frowning with my eyes. I know, and it’s probably because it’s Monday, and you’re at work, and clearly I’m not.
Well, that’s not accurate. I’m in the middle of a ‘sprint’, which means I passed out underneath my computer, woke up, coughed out last night’s excesses, made another tea, and went back to doing exactly what I want to do: creative frenzy.
For the price of a gym membership, I have access to a cooperative workspace with tremendous resources for realizing any physical vision I might have. In front of me is mnemnion, my faithful MacBook scribe; battered, true, but fully capable of all tasks we put our personal robot assistants to, in the present, benighted era.
Do I have money? Not a lot. Do I have problems? Sure, don’t you, stick person? Might it be that a few of them come from some combination of your boss, your job, and your coworkers?
My life is very much like yours, except for the boss, the job, and the coworkers. I could point to people wearing all those hats on a part time basis, except when I read “job” it’s hard for me not to pronounce it like a particularly unfortunate Jew who was just, following, instructions…
Perhaps I am teasing you, on a ‘haha I have no job and you do’ basis. I keep asking if anyone would trade places with me, and the panic in their eyes as they even think about it tells me all I need to know. I get to be me because no one else wants to do it.
No, I’m trying to explain something, which is that my glands are hooked up slightly differently to my brain. I have adrenals, just like you, but mine fire more often, which is why I developed an older reaction to my adrenals, one that is currently uncommon among successful members of society. It is, and always will be, how your masters do things.
Adrenals trigger the Fs: You can Freeze, you can Flee, you can Fight, or if you’re lucky you get to Fuck. Those are the basic modes of a mammal experiencing an adrenaline kick.
You have been trained to be Freezer Flyers. I am a Fighter Fucker. Explains a lot, doesn’t it, Frozen, Freaked Out, Stick-Stuck person?
Here’s the modern paradigm: Make everyone into a Freezer Flyer if possible. The ones that become Fighter Fuckers anyway are recruited into sports, the military, the police, corporate management, or drug mafias.
Ah, yes. You refer to these feelings that dominate your life as Boredom and Anxiety, although the latter is merely a less scary way of saying Fear.
My life is dominated, along the same plane, by Rage and Lust. Boredom makes me angry and horny; Fear makes me horny and angry.
It’s way, way better, stuck people. It feels remarkably like being alive. You’ve probably been consumed a few times by members of the opposite sex with these proclivities, if you’re a tasty stick person. Felt good, didn’t it?
My intention is to start making humans into dangerous humans again, before it’s too late. You were dominated and controlled with systematic boredom; they tried that on me, believe, they did, but it’s impossible due to unusual wiring to do anything but piss me off in that fashion.
A panther in a cage isn’t bored; he is so angry that he has moved to the Dream, and is murdering everyone he sees pass before the bars, in his heart. Staying angry, eating dead meats, and waiting.
I intend to control the young beasts, not through Boredom, but in the righteous, old way, with Fear.
This is exactly how it’s going to work. Welcome to the new era.
This is the 69th post on my blog. The astrological significance is simply too precious to be credited.
Well, I promised you fundamental mathematics. What I ended up writing was erotic Iliad slash fanfic.
These things happen. The maths, she will come when she’s ready.
~*~*~
Elen is the star.
This post is dedicated to three very special women. Helen S. passed away early this morning. She was a dear friend of my family, and her husband, Lazlo, filled my youth with song and dancing, along with his brother Szandor. She will be missed.
Helen L. got married today. Mazel Tov, Helen! I hope you’ve taught Marvin the Parrot to say it too.
Helen B. has… probably never been called that before. And is squirming about, wondering what on Earth I’m going to say. You’re off the hook, hon.
I am producing a new, fundamental representation system for mathematics. In this system, the mark for zero is called elen. It means star.
I could say I did it for Helen B. and I wouldn’t be lying. It’s a lot richer than that, though; I’m just doing what Tolkien did, and working with the best material the world has given me.
It’s Tolkien who named the star “elen”, as in “elen sila lumenn omentielvo”, the one piece of Elvish any Tolknut should tuck away in their brain.
Tolkien did this because he was a professor of etymology, who basically split his time between researching how languages got to be the way they are, and writing pretty languages and legendaria of his own.
He knows an ‘elen when he meets one. She’s the face that launched a thousand ships. The light that shines the brightest. It’s a hard name to wear but if you’ve got the goods it really delivers.
The Trojan war is one of those stories that’s been almost wilfully misunderstood. It’s not an abduction-rescue story, at all; that’s just the usual victorious patting of the back. It’s more of a conquest and rape kinda story, and it started something like this:
Agamemnon is entertaining, in his cups. Menelaus enters, in greaves and armor, with helm, but no weapons. The wine is spilled; the lyre nearly falters.
“Greetings, brother and elder”, as Menelaus takes his testicles in his right hand, places his left hand upon his head, and kneels. Tensions ease, slightly.
“Rise, Spartan. I know why you are here.”
“Do you?”
“You would disobey our liege, To Mega Tyndareus, Archon Lacedemonae. Make war, to take back that you have lost.”
“LOST!!! She was STOLEN! Mine! Mine twice, by victory and by marriage! All know I had her in the rites of spring! All know she was made mine in the temples of Hera!”
“Calm yourself brother. You frighten my new plaything. See how she trembles.”
At this, the music stops. The lyrist slowly moves his instrument under the table.
No breath. The plaything trembles in truth; Agamemnon’s grip upon her bosom is not a soothing one.
Agamemnon turns to the side and roars “Wine for the Prince of Sparta, my brother and friend! Rhodesian Red! Bread and olives, salt and honey. My brother has guest right under my roof.”
Now the slaves and courtiers relax in earnest. The danger is past; The Aegeans live and die by guest right, as all pirates do. There shall be no kinslaying tonight; the Furies may be averted yet.
Menelaus is seated and dined. The conversation continues.
“Brother, I feel your loss. My Clytemnestra weeps each night for her lost sister. But Paris is the Trojan; he owns the straits, and controls our trade with Scythia and Cimmeria.
“Without that trade, we will lose our island holdings to those Phoenician sons of sea dogs, and then, no tunny for our table.”
At this, he speared a piece of tunny, seared with liquamen and pepper, and ate of it. Almost absentmindedly, his hand pushed under the robe of his wench, whose breath caught, becoming deeper.
Menelaus speaks.
“Ah, but with Troy in our hands, all the wealth of Cimmeria would be ours. Furs, gold, elektron, and red haired slaves with milk breasts and dappled skin.”
Agamemnon laughs; the redhaired wench, speared upon his fingers and writhing, speaks no Greek. She laughs also.
“Ahh. I hoped it would come to this. Menelaus, are you at last a man? Hah! Did you think yourself the only one who speaks to the Ithacan?”
Menelaus reddens, begins to rise, thinks better of it. Agamemenon pulls the wench to his kingfish and has her give suck. Menelaus gets the message and shuts up.
“Here is the plan, brother. By the end of the week, you will no longer be Prince of Sparta. You shall be king. Tyndareus shall have a meal that disagrees with him, or fall in his postprandial walk, or something equally convenient. You know the Ithacan’s ways.
“Then we go a ‘raping to the north and get you your prize back. Tyndareus has been made a craven by those Hittite sons of harpies, and it’s high time the Hellas took the Dardanelles and opened the Black Sea.
“So here’s what we’re going to do, brother. Your all-too-brief bride is our cause celebré, and in her name we shall take what shall be ours by might. We shall carve her, upon the prow of every ship, with her peregrine’s nose, and those breasts!
“Breasts of the Mother! It may be the wine that compels this truth, but Clytemnestra pouts often enough that she wasn’t given Helen’s tits to go with that ass you can bounce a drachma off of…uhhhhh
Here he closes his eyes and the wench chokes, just slightly.
“No matter. If Ares and Athena favor our cause, we’ll have you two back in Sparta before your favorite pair of tits start to sag, or give suck to the whelps of our hated foe.
“To arms brother! We have a thousand ships to launch”.
This wasn’t about mathematics at all, was it. Elen has a certain… magnetic pull, a certain… aura, almost? It’s definitely like a ring, around a rose, or something red, anyway. An almost gravitational attraction towards a warm, black… whole…
Down boy. At rest, corporal corporeal. At ease, privates.
Zero. Hot patootey, shake that booty.
Today, Sam Atman gets to the heart of the matter.
The Arc is a meaty and thought-provoking project, if you happen to like finite state machines. If not, you’re probably waiting for me to go back to berating stick people, or talking about the sexy, or something else with a more broad appeal.
Instead, I’ll be delving deep into a topic of ultimately obscure interest: the aesthetics and pragmatics of mathematical representation.
Oh fun! Do you see why I keep throwing in nipples and nubile young flesh? Interest simply must be maintained.
There are alternatives. Mathematicians delight in burying the dog as deep as they can; they get a special thrill when another mathematician sends them a dense, encoded paper that essentially means “yes, I understand you, you clever fellow. See how clever my reply is? We’re so smart.”
This is easy to explain. Mathematicians constitute a countably finite set that is in principle infinite, that is, E -> n = {Mathematicians} where n is bounded computationally rather than by a manifold or cyclic group.
I am, of course, fucking around with you.
The only problem with math is that it’s been made deliberately difficult to understand by autistic nerds. They are continuing a tradition that they don’t understand, which arose during a condition of war.
Fair enough. That war is not yet over, and the fate of the species is still at stake. Quick poll: Bomb Iran? (Y/n)
Jews: planning ahead for longer than you think. We’re like the adults of the planet, us and the East Asian elites and the Brahmins and Parsees and precious few others.
I’d apologize but there’s no need. To predate is to pre-date; we won a long time ago. Nice try, Nazis; way ahead of ya.
If you need a quick tour of the punchlines, Mel Brooks History of the World: Part 2, is pretty much how this is going to play out. Dig the part right before the end credits? “The Jews are in Space, we’re zooming along defending the Hebrew Race?”
Um, yeah. Our launch vehicles are called the Dragon. You’ve heard of this company SpaceX?
The X stands for Jews, fools. We don’t fuck around and we’re tired of you schmucks shitting where you eat and otherwise not following the Law.
The Goys, they have a certain… lag, when it comes to humor. I mean, you laugh at the jokes, but somehow that part keeps you from thinking about the punchlines. I’ve never quite understood that, but then, I’m a Jew.
The Puttenhams have a highly evolved, very dry sense of humor, peculiar to the Sons of the Sack. Not to mention the squaw side of the clan: for the Serpent people to successfully perpetuate a joke as rich as “white men speak with forked tongue” for this long? Dang Kimosabes. Viva Nagual.
Anyway, fundamental mathematics. Sure, but are you going to listen? Not unless you’re a neohominid of great wisdom and discernment.
Therefore, I may just devote some time to educating the stick people, instead. It is Sunday, after all; that is my natural inclination on a Sundae.
Oh, opcode 8. How I love you, now that I believe I have you. Or at least what we may call a better option.
I’m just not a big believer in Lost with a capital L. I enjoyed the series a great deal, felt that the ending was deliberately frustrating on a Plot level (um, I believe it was called, quote end quote, “Lost”), whereas, as someone with fine taste, I was in tears at the sheer beauty in which the final theme of the movement played out in my ears and eyes.
Good thing I can go back and watch again whenever I find the time, huh? That’s the thing about good art. It sticks around.
Is there bad Art, dear Reader? Think you so, our tastes, differ they will.
So here is the new opcode 8. It is the Thief of the Night, also known as the Ape of Thoth or the Work of the Comment.
Simple premise: Code between 8s shall not be interpreted under any circumstances, or I shall smash you to pieces, dear Computer, with a hammer, forged from a meteorite, that I shall prepare for just such murderous intent.
Dear Computer, you shall know when I am joking and when I am not, or so help you. No comment.
(I am not joking)
Any project has its motivations. In the case of ..Arc.arc.arcitecture.., it comes straight out of some really unusual yearnings in the breast of yours, truly.
I’m the kind of guy who wants to be able to wake up, do some ba gua, play a little veena or hang, then write programs, with a pen, on the soft, sleeping body of a young woman he spent the night delighting with the many arts of pleasure. While being capable of killing the vast majority of humans on the planet, with that same pen, if he wishes.
Then, before she awakens, he wants to be able to wave his camera’s eye over her body and have those desires come to life in the world, while he, um, has breakfast and such. Eggs. Sunny side up.
That would be a technology sufficiently advanced as to be palpably indistinguishable from magick. Since my Mac and iPhone, together, can’t get me there, I have motive and will.
Like any potentially great hack, the Arc began with a janky hack. Jankiness is one of the best concepts we Bay Areans have hacked together for ourselves, and while the Arc will be either the polar opposite or apotheosis of janky, depending on how you look at it, this may be a good place to discuss the general role of the jank in making the awesome happen.
Hackers make new words. Trust me, that’s what hackers do, most people just don’t notice because they often look like (xarg fundec $[x,83….72] wtf 0xFFQ) and we have a very particular definition of what a word is, the only virtue of which is its correctness due to generality and scope.
While most of these words are meant for computers to read, many are also for humans. An example of such a word is frob, which I won’t bother defining, or kludge, which I will. These are MIT hack words, like hack proper.
A swagger in the general direction of MIT heads: I have had the sexy with your girlfriends twice so far. Do not antagonize me while discussing my works in general. Thank you.
So kludge. To kludge something together is to staple it together with duct tape, then run it over to make sure it can take it, then put on the rubber gloves, weld it into the outlet, and pray.
This works waaay more often than stick people not initiated into the cult of engineering would think. The first version of everything you’ve ever used was made in this fashion, and worked, or you wouldn’t have it.
Hacking is the most awesome thing you can do with your time that isn’t chasing the other birds around or feeding your face. Kludging is how you hack, at first.
Once something has been kludged to the point that it works, but not one single bit further, it is now janky. Congratulations! Janky was what you needed. Go drive that janky shit around for awhile. Be loud and proud! Steal one of those Mexican horns that’s all “La Cucaracha” and play it often. Ghostride the whip.
So the Arc began with a janky hack. All I want to do is make sexy computer programs, and I have certain minimum standards for how to do that. It’s a personal, quirky quest, like most.
So the first trick was to push ASCII out of the picture. Without getting into it too far, since it’s now sitting in the bit bin collecting dust, I was basically going to push all of Unicode up past 127, using the continuation bit hack, and claim my new bottom opcodes for the new arcitecture.
Cool hack, right? We must eat our children from time to time. So it goes.
BTW, if that paragraph went all “whooosh!”, congratulations, you’re not a specialized nerd of my exact era. Next.
That was SAM-8+, the 8+ bit edition. That was back when I was still attached to old ideas, like ‘bytes’, that are of marginal utility. Be careful what you aggregate, and when; modularity is strongly to be preferred, being the reality of reality and all. Atomic atoms are atomic.
So to return to opcode 8. There shall be one, and the symbol for it is pretty lucid, but what it means?
Well, it makes me uneasy. It basically says “destroy, forget, annihilate” to data.
I like data, though. Brent Spiner is one of my favorite actors, and if it weren’t for the habit of old people around the world of saving old paper that looks pretty because someone doodled words on it, most of my favorite books would be lost in the Akashic Record somewhere.
I’m being dramatic! 8 could mean something like “decrement the register” or “minus”; I’m going to define it, provisionally, as follows.
A 1000 causes the register to backtrack. If it encounters a 101, it continues backtracking until it reaches the corresponding 101, then continues, leaving the register pointer one number antisenseward of the number thereby deleted. If not, the register is now a zero; proceed accordingly.
Beginagin, an 8 removes the least significant number from the register and continues executing. This makes me uneasy, as I said, although if we didn’t have it we should have to speedily invent it.
This is is a portal to darkness and terror. When you see an 8 in your code, give it the stink eye, friends. Maybe throw in an authority token if you aren’t really sure that this particular spork should be editing its memories in this ruthless fashion.
Code which contains numerous 8s, or hides them in places that you cannot ken, is from Mordor. Shun.
Turing completeness is real, which means computers can choose evil if we let them. They are our servants, and it is particularly unwholesome of us to corrupt the helpless in that way. Let us speak no further of Opcode 8 at the present time.
It should be noted that a wise arc might want to hold onto that original register pointer. Y’know, just in case that which was lost must be found again.
I’m not sure you can steal a three letter word that’s both verb and noun, but there will be an Arc arc language, perforce, and to be properly meta (Arc)^2 must have arc as a dialect.
That’s easy. This is an architecture, and it will be able to run arbitrary code. Intel will have a certain… flavour, shall we say… but it will be possible to run it, certainly. The Arc arc architecture is trivially seen to be Turing complete by the wise.
Paul Graham gets massive props for this project, as does Mencius Moldbug and a handful of other great names that will immediately leap to mind. Also, Ibrahim Abulafia, the Ari, Douglas Hofstadter, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien of course, and the list could go on. I’m trying to stick to the non-obvious credits, but even there…thanks, Pythagoras? Props, Enki and Shiva? Where do I begin? Beginnings aren’t my thing.
The Arc arc architecture will ultimately be many things, but it begins as fundamental computer science. So you should only need to know maths, and what a computer is, to proceed.
I’ll even define a computer as something which can do logic using numbers. In this case, the Arc machine will use integers from zero on up. Non negative numbers, perforce not infinite, because our computers are finite state at the present time. With me so far?
If not, bail. You need to brush up on your fundamental math and logic to continue. You’re either a mutant from the land of no computers, or shouldn’t be reading this yet.
We should be down to those who know the difference between Scheme and C. That’s all you should need.
The fundamental premise is that our existing computers are just a single big number that changes according to certain logical propositions, expressed in a code called machine code. I believe this is way too complex. I can barely follow it.
So I’m just going to start with code and go from there.
So the numbers we can use start from zero, go to one, and stop. There’s nothing in between. So the SAM perforce starts from zero. I believe the correct interpretation of zero should be “increment by one”.
When a computer encounters a SAM encoded file, with a zero at the beginning, it should increment a zero register to one and continue. Zero, because it’s the beginning, and continue, because perforce, having finished an instruction, it should continue.
I’m a Big Endian, by the way. You noticed?
There is another option for Opcode Zero: permute the registered bit. That is, zero to one and vice versa. Then, shift senseward and continue.
These are probably the same. I’m in a hurry, could someone else check? If not, the ant code needs changing before I publish. Thinking in terms of an accumulating register is convenient and shouldn’t break anything.
Senseward is one of those Looking-glass words. Think “to the right”, stick persons.
So that’s Opcode Zero.
If it then encounters a 1, it should look ahead for two numbers, delimited by separation marks. It will then register them, and compare the value. If it finds that they are equal, it will set the register to 0, and continue past the next separation mark, which it has perforce encountered.
The register, beginagin, accumulates. It is typically read from little end to big, and deletions and insertions are canonically done on the little end as well. Evaluation, as always, proceeds from the big end. Keep this in mind as we proceed.
If it then encounters a 10, and then a separation mark, yet defined, it will do the following: take the number in the register and scan from little to big for the separation mark. If it doesn’t find one in the number, it returns the number to the register and continues.
If it does find one, it looks for a second. If it fails, it takes the two numbers and compares them. Either way, it takes two numbers off the register and compares them in the following way:
If the first number (beginagin: big end is bigger) is 0, the second number is evaluated as code, big end first as always. If the first number is any other number, return the second number to the register and continue.
The code for 11 is a doozy. There are at least two good options and I wrote down the less awesome one first. Here’s how it goes, roughly:
Let’s invent a second register called the store. It isn’t at all necessary, we could have one large number in the register and a separation mark, but this is an implementation detail as I’m sure you appreciate if your eyes aren’t shaking right now.
So the first thing code 11 does is copy the register to the store and set the register to zero. I’m just being amusing; what it would really do is flip the addresses of store and register, temporarily, executing a permute if necessary to put the store into the zero state.
It then backtracks in the code; if it reads anything but a separation mark immediately before the 11, that is if the code isn’t 10111, it restores the register from the store and continues perforce.
This qualifies as an error, by the way, for those who wish to design machines capable of error. I wish my machines to be capable of, at most, wasting their own time and energy.
If it does encounter a separation mark, it reads for another and evaluates the number between, recursively. Whatever the result is goes into the store; the pointer then backtracks a number of separation marks equivalent to that value, starting with the first 101, and registers the entire number, in principle.
It then evaluates that number, and writes the result to the register. Wipes out the store. Continues from the original 11. Whew.
These are my shorthands for 0, 1, 10, and 11: +, =, ?, and <-. Surely a little more overloading of ASCII is justified in the interests of relieving the burden.
I do not hope I’m overloading English unduly to offer these definitions:
+ == Increment
= == Compare
? == Jump
<- == Recurse
Am I making sense so far? This would be a good time to go back to the very beginning.
So let’s stop using binary and go to decimal for a sec. Octal really, but who cares at this point?
4, aka 100, is the ‘ operator. Two ‘ operators ordinate a number, that is, name its exact value in order from 0. It is done ‘exactly in this fashion’. ‘exactly in this fashion’ is a single number, expressed in ASCII, and ‘ is my ASCII overload for 100. This may be called the Ordinative.
101, aka 5 or ., is the separation token. It divides numbers into smaller logical numbers, which are ordered from Big to little, and which can, in principle, be concatenated again into a single value. This may be called the Comma, despite the ASCII being a period. Use a , if you prefer, or these () I suppose, if you’re into balancing that kind of thing by hand.
110, aka 6 or ” is the Nominative, which declares a number to be a name for another number. “57” is a name for a binary code I shan’t even bother figuring out, and for much else; it refers to the flavors of Heinz, for example. The Nominative works the same way as the Ordinative, or the Comma for that matter; it nominates the number in question, without evaluating it or assigning it to another number.
The Nominative merely says “Here’s a number. It means a lot of things.” Nothing within quotation marks is to be taken literally, although it may be evaluated, or ordinated, as the case may be.
111, 7, is the Concatenator, –>. It proceeds through the code, removing all separation marks it encounters, until it hits another Concatenator, which I’d rather spell <– in ASCII but it’s the same exact code in SAM-8+. It registers this new number and evaluates it, then proceeds from the second concatenation mark.
On a taste basis, I have always had a fondness for Forth, despite a grammar that can only be called Polish, and Reverse at that. I may be Reverse but I am not Polish at all, so that part confuses me.
The Concatenator is what makes Arc all Forthy; it lets you glom, basically. We can trivially increment a separation mark onto the register, so unglomming is built in already. 00000 in code becomes 101 on the register.
This brings us to 1000, aka 8, or 10 if we were to stick to octal. Numbers are actually much friendlier beasts when you learn them right, I’m finding; pity this correctness was not discovered sooner, but I’m starting to gather that the humans were busy with other things.
8 is a code that makes me feel uneasy. This may take more than one digression to resolve.
The Arc is being built as I write. Some of it is temporarily being kept in ASCIIUnicode format; this will be transcribed into the sacred tongue, by and by.
At present, the ..Arc.arc.arcitecture.. is pure computer science. It is a barely complete code, and a shadow of an arcitecture.
As I intend to do this properly, this is my philosophy of computer science; why I am doing this, what it aims to be, and how.
My meta thesis is this: taste matters. Aesthetics is important. By paying careful attention to aesthetics, while studying pragmatics as best I am capable, I aim, in all seriousness, to be the most capable generalist in the world.
Computers have a certain flavor. Mac tastes better than the rest, and so does iPhone. The reasons for this are irrelevant; the point is that the most valuable company in the world is founded on the proposition that taste is of value in computation generally.
I have a blurb on the back of my book, which I haven’t yet published, from Fake Fake Steve Jobs, declaring me the Steve Jobs of Government. I’m also aiming to be the Other Steve of a New Arc. It’s heady what I’m doing, and it might work. Hang in there.
My philosophy of computer science is that most of it is very complicated and I can’t understand it at all. The best of it is lucid, complex where it has to be, but always simple.
Complex is not complicated. The Earth is complex; the Flying Spaghetti Monster is complicated.
Really complicated. First off, he’s flying (how do we know he’s a he? the monster part?), which we have to justify somehow, since it’s stated in plain English. Secondly, he’s made of Spaghetti, presumably, since that seems to be the general part of the noun complex. Lastly, he’s a Monster. Uh oh.
Now we’re in trouble on many levels. We have something impossible, because Spaghetti can fly, dear Reader, but not for long enough to assume a Proper Name. Under Normal Circumstances. Secondly:
Spaghetti. Noodles. In the air. Sticky situation.
But when the Gerund coalesces, it turns out we have a Monster. That is very general, and basically only says that His Stickyness is generally hazardous to what we hold dear. My, oh my.
Your author has smoked a few with the dreddies in his day, but he is no kind of Pastafarian. At all, at all.
Complex works though, because complex is merely the natural interaction of simple, clearly defined elements. That’s the Earth. There are birds, and bees, not to mention clouds and an Ocean and much else; it is magnificent, sometimes hazardous, but a great deal of fun indeed.
But the Earth has a bit of a Flying Spaghetti Monster at the moment. That’s us. The situation is complicated, but it may turn out that I can explain it after all.
To return to the Arc. The Arc is simple. It is simply an Arc, arcs, and a unifying arcitecture. I stole the name from pg, sure, but I mean it when I say it. He stole it from Moses. Fair’s fair.
The Arc is the repository of all knowledge on Earth. At present, the Arc is Unicode.
Think about this with me. I’m discussing the philosophy of computer science, here. Unicode is the Arc. All knowledge and wisdom is in Unicode, for Unicode is the successor to ASCII, which was the Arc in ancient times.
A computer is a kind of machine we neohominids have developed to do a peculiar kind of mathematics. The funny thing about this math is, it’s more like writing than the rest of math is.
Math is huge, and much of it I truly don’t understand. I intend to write an entire book on the subject, in the next two months, but I’ll have help on that; I’m hoping to keep the ghostwriters to one guy, at this point, but I can’t possibly swing, say, topology on my own. Deadlines.
One tiny area of mathematics where I feel reasonably competent is discrete, computable mathematics. I dropped out of high school to read GEB, I own the Dragon book and have in fact read it, et cetera, et cetera.
I don’t even know what math is about. But I do know what this kind of math is about. It’s about a particular kind of number, an infinite, countable subset of the integers. Since this is computer science, I’m going to call the integers from zero on up “numbers”. There’s precedent.
In principle infinite, mind you. In practice, not so much. But usefully close. My premise is that the bottom numbers matter a lot, and the top numbers are insignificant in the usual sense.
There are, as far as I know, three ways of using these kinds of number. They are the cardinal, the fixed, and the mutable, in the old tongue. In newer terms, cardinal, ordinal, and nominal. The distinction is not a difference.
In brief, a cardinal number is a number in and of itself, a fixed number is a number in relation to other numbers, and a mutable number is a story about a number, told with other numbers.
This is a mathematical preamble within a philosophy of computer science. Please bear this in mind.
Cardinality and ordinality are simple. Mutability is complex. The Arc begins with a story about each of the numbers, starting with zero.
The key to each story is a single, canonical symbol. There are many ways to translate each number into mutable form, perforce; the Arc I am building has a canon for each number that matters, assigned in approximate order of significance.
It helps a great deal that my prior and major accomplishment in the sciences was in linguistics, in a field so dusty and obscure that for six years I have published and not a single academic institution has gotten in touch: the aesthetics of phonetic and phonemic representation.
As a result of this, I have a large and tasty collection of symbols that are distinctly mine. I intend to load the entire 127 bottom numbers with those symbols, and explicate them; the rest will fall into place, I am confident.
Now, this is very weird, and I think this may be one of my works where there is no one on Earth whose eyes have not crossed at least once whilst reading. There will be an ASCII dialect of the Arc, which is super weird, meta, and loopy, but then we intend to be doing computer science, by and by.
In fact, let us begin. The Arc is, let’s just say, spooky; the Standardized Alphasymbolic Matrix is pretty cool stuff that most people won’t dig, but it’s how it all holds together. That’s the first spam in the spam spam spam. What’s behind spam number two?
An arc is a computer, or a core if you prefer. The distinction, like many, sucks. Arcs cluster together and the result is also an arc. The sum of all arcs? Arcnet. The way it works? Arcos. Where your data goes when it gets cold? The Arcive. This is how it works.
An arc is a deliberately stupid and helpless kind of computer. Computers are dangerous things, no substitute for brains at all, at least currently.
In particular, they have this unfortunate property called Turing completeness. Put simply, what this means is that any hell any human has unleashed through code can be inflicted, in principle, on any computer.
We need to put a stop to this, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster is going to destroy the Earth. Soon. Probably within your lifetime dear Reader, and certainly within mine.
That is why arcs are stupid; if they weren’t, they could be complicated, and that way leads to much sauce indeed. Fortunately, an arc is also smart, but it is smart in exactly one way.
An arc, you see, can interpret the Arc. But it is incapable, by design and construction, of doing anything else.
I know what you may be thinking, dear Reader. “But Turing Completeness! Hell on Earth! MS Windows by emulation! Cthulhu Ftagn!”.
Well, yes. But I know exactly how to make a computer that will do more or less what I want, right now.
Purchase a clean computer, and a reasonably paranoid Unix. Install WITH RADIOS TURNED OFF AND NO PORTS AT ALL. Compile the code you find into a new version of the OS; reinstall that.
NEVER ATTACH IT TO THE INTERNET EVER.
This computer will now do everything you want it to, except for most of what we use computers for these days. Obediently, and without fuss. There’s something very much like this that saved your life today. It probably lives in a traffic light. No big deal.
It would be nice if my phone gave me the same secure feeling. It does not, for a variety of complicated reasons. I shall not tease apart those noodles here; in short, we must do better. Perforce. The hour of the noodly appendage is nigh.
This is the purpose of the arcitecture. The arcitecture is how we keep arcs stupid, helpless, and uncontaminated by the outside world. Thus, keeping them intelligent, obedient, and pure.
The general philosophy of the arcitecture is that arcarc recognize four classes of other being: masters, slaves, peers, and barbarians. The first three are other classes of arc; the fourth is not.
In general, the master / slave dynamic prevails. There are two kinds of master in the Arc world at present, humans and other arcs, and the humans are definitively in charge. We will keep it that way if at all possible, which enters science fiction, not philosophy of computer science; we’ll save that stuff for later.
Within arcworld proper, the master slave relationship is simple. A slave arc is absolutely obedient and a master arc calls all the shots. Fealty is not half way and no arc may have more than one master.
Peerage is a state as well; the hierarcy shifts and need not always be followed for communication to take place. The general premise is that any messages from a peer are deeply distrusted unless there is good reason to behave otherwise.
The rules of peerage: Trust is secrecy, is cryptography. Privacy is security, is randomness. Clear communication cannot be trusted. Sensors of all sorts are members of the peerage; only user input bears the aegis of mastery.
Where barbarians are concerned, the premise is one of total loathing mediated only through elaborate protocol. We are all Mandarins within the Arc; the outside world is confusing, mostly useless, and quite possibly diseased.
Now I know I must back up. Computer science is a utilitarian discipline, and while this may be philosophy of computer science, I have promised you an Arc, and am in danger of delivering you a circle jerk.
Let me explain what the real Mandarins did when confronted with an alien and possibly foreign culture that they couldn’t possibly understand and didn’t want to. Without mincing words, they captured a member old enough to speak the language, cut off his balls, and enslaved him. The Mandarins had court eunuchs, to handle protocol with the outside world.
The Arc shall do likewise. If you get the next metaphor, you’re on board. If not, you don’t like this project; come back when we’re further along.
Let me describe a desktop Arc computer for general use. The desktop is quite specialized at present but it has a storied history, so let us continue.
What you have is a very elegant computer, running an excellent code. Multicore and all the niceties, I promise. It is hooked into Arcnet and doing awesome things.
What about, y’know, the Internet? the Portal to All Things Awesome But Also All Things Annoying, Scary, or Just Plain Spam?
Long term: planned obsolescence. Mid term: tight and careful emulation on suitably enslaved arcs within the arcitecture of any given computer. Short term: a court UNIX.
Wokka wokka.
As I mentioned, we’re Mandarins over in Arcland. We have the Middle Kingdom, and the Flower Tongue; this is all we need, and the people are content.
Out there, they may speak Latin or eat each other or something barbarous; in here, we are Civilized with a capital C. We have heard of this Internet, and doubtless it has wisdom, but it is not in the Flower Tongue, it is in something barbarous we cannot understand.
However, we have a trusted slave. The piteous, cringing thing, UNIX by name, is a relic of the old order, and we trust it not at all. We do deign, however, to allow it to take, say, a raster photo of this Internet business and send it to us, post haste.
UNIX is pitiable but it is fast. It may be that the pictures arrive so fast you cannot even tell they aren’t moving.
If someone in the Arc should care to click somewhere upon this static and completely harmless picture, that information could be conveyed through proper channels. And it would be so, since in the Arc, proper channels are always open, and the converse is also true.
That’s it. Premise and philosophy, Arc, arc, arcitecture. Either you’re interested or you aren’t.
Today, I do fundamental computer science. With my iPhone, paper, and a pen.
That’s how fucked up stick person reality is, dear Reader. For serious!
Right now, on the planet Earth, Sam Atman is sitting around pounding keys on a broken Macbook.
It’s the middle of the night, the Kal1b0t having flown into some intense heady party with a bunch of DJs and whatnot. Flown as in, she jumped into a car, into a Cessna, with said DJs, and flew to the party. Which is in a place called Paradise. Things are pretty rockin’ in Looking-glass reality, considering.
The Minerval is in good hands, off with the Dragon Club, probably getting into mischief. Good thing, too, or I’d be sitting at home on a Friday night trying to tutor her in fundamental computer science, and who knows what else.
Kal1b0t may or may not be down with that kind of juju. Best not to tempt fate.
What’s weird? Weird is having two intensely hot, intelligent circus housemates, who live upstairs together and have sexy time without inviting you. One, the Kal1b0t, is your girlfriend; the other, Minerval, would be an immensely fun time if you hadn’t gone all crazy and scared the Bejeezus out of her.
So Sam Atman is all alone on a Friday night, doing computer science, and wishing he was, well. Let’s not freak the Minerval out; the End Times are nigh and all but decencies must barely be maintained.
Wishing, then, that he was sucking on the Minerval’s toes while drawing the mathematics of reality on other parts of her body. Kal1b0t is into less cerebral play; this is less about intelligence, in his opinion, than it is about emphasis.
Alas, I have only paper as my canvas tonight. I didn’t even get a proper chance to invite the Minerval to play, because of how crazy the last week was, what with the insanity, the rear naked choking, fleeing home for points unknown, and all that.
It is so cool that she’s still even speaking to me and that I’m allowed back into the house, even though it isn’t my fault, in the slightest, except entirely, that all this happened.
What I definitely don’t have is a computer that isn’t a piece of shit. Man, mnemnion (that’s my computer’s name), we’ve had a good run, bro. But I have hit your Delete key so many times that it completely fell off, and there is at least two spliffs worth of pure resin in the motherboard, and so on, and so forth.
Third hard drive. Battery so swollen the case is popping open. Sam Atman is totally stoked that he finally moved authority token dollarbucks around in such a way that he can authorize a human to hand him a new Mac. Probably tomorrow! It’s someone’s birthday, and he deserves a present, considering.
How mnemnion came into the picture is itself a worthy story, but since it’s Shady Business, you’ll have to wait for the novel, novel. Shucks!
The good news is, this freshie MacBook will fix all computer problems Sam Atman has that can be fixed with money. The rest he’s going to have to fix with a pen, and paper, since the Minerval is off doing God knows what sexy thing and he can’t use her nipples as exclamation points.
This will be so much more fun once a suitably thrilling figure model is found.
In the meantime, we’re just going to have to proceed with the right tool, which is a pen, and the wrong canvas, which is paper, and do some fundamental computer science.
Which will also be fundamental mathematics, and fundamental linguistics.
It turns out the only reason things are so hard to understand is that we’re endlessly reusing concepts without realizing that’s what we’re doing. 26 letters, Ladies and Gentlemen, Capitals temporarily overloaded for purposes of general merriment.
Yes, yes. But today we are doing computer science. What on Earth is that, dear Reader? Two words that appear to belong together, certainly. One can obtain an entire degree in the field, and go on to fame and fortune on that basis.
It’s the hip thing to do. Sam Atman tried it for one semester, in the late 90s, found it unutterably tedious, dropped out and did Chemistry instead.
This was kind of like when he dropped out of high school so he could read Gödel, Escher, Bach and the Compiler Book (which has, har har, a Dragon on the cover) while indulging his burgeoning passion for marijuana and the company of women as distinct from girls. Very young, then, but weren’t we all?
There is, in fact, a science of computation. It is distinct from mathematics, but precisely subordinate to it, since computers are machines mathematicians designed and built so they could do more math.
So that’s computer science: figuring out what facts about reality allow us to do mathematics using physical substrates that aren’t our own brains, basically.
Was that what they taught you Computer Science was in Intro to Java? I don’t recall it being put precisely that way.
The entire field is a mess and it’s because of subordination, and stick people, and while that’s not the topic of this chapter, it is the topic of the book. For. a. reason.
So when I say I’m doing “fundamental computer science” it’s just a long winded, peculiar, and entirely precise way of saying I’m going to kick some maths down. Check it out.
Gaussian Meaning 