Meaning

I piled onto an author’s Twitter post, he blocked me, I bought his book, and I am not sorry he blocked me. In a sense, Roy Scranton is a humanist. Humanism can be good when it manifests as anti-fascism, for example, but when it manifests as anti-life, it is bad. Intellectually, humanism can be lazy. Scranton’s first essay used the word “meaning”, I’m estimating, twenty times. Using a word so many times robs it of meaning. Mathematicians adapt to the need for frequent references by defining things. Scranton would be hard pressed to define his use of the word “meaning”. Humanists also overuse words like “purpose”, and “belonging”. Personally, I’m nothing's tool or belonging. The Twitter debate was about whether we can or can’t solve global warming. I believe we can, because oil companies are ephemeral, and hurricanes are concrete. I find it presumptuous when people claim that human systems are set in stone. It is possible that some emergent properties of society are inevitable, but to assume they are inevitable because they presently exist is unscientific at best. In my opinion, assuming society cannot change is manipulative and reactionary. Thus, a putative humanist can in fact be conservative. For example, when a humanist uses the word “life” to refer to day to day activities of humans, he is dismissing the importance of ecological systems. Even the word “social” is often misused as a euphemism for popular. Some people have excuses for not thinking for themselves, but I loose patience with highly educated conservatives.

Values

Ian Morris would like to explain non-physical things with physical things. Why is that? The rebuttal Morris ignored is the most telling. Morris is essentially a capitalist. His values guide his explaining. I am a contrarian. Because capitalism rules, I am not a capitalist. My explanation for values is independent of the material world. Values are memes that battle it out in our brains. Morris’ observation about accelerated value change is explained by accelerated intercourse. If memes that favor intercourse win out, memes that favor consumption need not. We each have a responsibility to keep our mental homes orderly, by favoring memes that do not threaten our existence. In particular, the meme of climate denial should be eviscerated. How does the physical world affect memes? Why not ask how paper affected communication? Quite a lot. But not in a simple way like natural selection. The medium affects the message in counterintuitive ways. Morris does not go very far beyond intuition, so his theory helps no one but himself. More helpful would be a system dynamic model of the brain. Then because scientific method scientists understand such models better than do intuitionists, such as Morris, Morris’ capitalist meme would be quashed. The key feature of sustainable media is that they are significantly simpler than the universe. The reason humans are in so much danger is that they are an especially complex medium. It is by understanding the medium that artists are able to be constructive. And it is by understanding why we have values that we will put oil companies out of business, and thrive in a high intercourse world. 

UVM

I’m not so much enamored with functional languages as I am disgusted with object oriented languages. Was my father ahead of the times to promote field orientation over object orientation in art? Or is art just that much ahead of technology? I suspect both. More concretely and anecdotally, my experience with UVM is instructive. Speaking of concreteness, UVM is great at rewarding conformist imagination, and not so great at allowing intelligent imagination. I suspect that was the selling point that convinced the do nothing passengers of the corporate juggernauts, to impose UVM on the engineers blindly greasing the directionless corporate engine. So, UVM claims to standardize testbenchs, which may be so from 1000 feet above, and two tapeouts behind. In fact, UVM merely makes it harder to write tests. Much preferable would be Erlang, where tests are functions easily leveraging, or not, none any or all functions from other tests. Fundamentally, reuse is a choice, and by removing choice, UVM removes the possibility of reuse. Those that imposed UVM on us are not dolts. They knew reuse was only a buzzword in the context of UVM. The real purpose of UVM is imitation of the assembly line, not because assembly lines are more efficient, but because assembly lines prevent innovation, and innovation is anathema to the purpose of incorporation. Corporations exist to follow markets. Markets are easier to follow if they do not move. Innovation causes markets to move. Thus, they “invented” UVM.

Politics

I'm reading "The Reactionary Mind", by Corey Robin. My mind keeps returning to Buckminster Fuller's absent big pirates in "Operator's Manual". I cannot help but imagine that MAGA conservatives are rooting for non-existent masters. And that the real masters that resist democracy are systems, such as corporations and governments. Even Trump is just a servant of the bankers, networks, and echo chambers in his life. Milo would be no one without the leaderless website that controls him. Koch has no more control of his enterprise than journalists do.

Just as straight rows of treeless rockless monoculture make it easier to keep hungry people away, straight rows in factories help keep innovation away, and uniform testing keeps away stray thoughts. But it is volunteer harvesters, interruptions of production, and imagination that have the least entropy. Disorder is the friend of creativity; order is the foundation of chaos. Sometimes chaos is necessary, as to provide sustainable replacements for exploitative technologies. Putting up a windmill is merely preparation for the destruction of the fossil fuel vicious cycle. Presumably, our entertainments will progress to the point that even windmills are unnecessary.

As I understand the definition of conservative, I'm reminded of Octavia Butler's admonition against combining intelligence and hierarchy. If in fact conservativism is love of hierarchy, then liberalism must be intelligence. This would explain why it is so frustrating to argue with conservatives. They create illusions of intelligence by paroting human mediums between themselves and their absent masters. Call it discipline, but it is a severely un-Socratic discipline. Press a conservative beyond buzwords, invective, or academic civility, and they get defensive, which is their way of compromising. In contrast, intelligent people can't get enough of being corrected. The so called loss of spirituality is just too many conservatives making intelligent conversation difficult.

The existence of conservatives demands periodic destruction of hierarchies to prevent stagnation and decay. Conservatives use the complexity of issues they do not care about as shields to hide their true purpose. In their finest moments, conservatives are inspired to invoke democracy as an argument in favor of hierarchy. Opposition to affirmative action and regulation, personhood for fertilized eggs and corporations, wars in Viet Nam and Iraq are rationalized as democratic. Invariably, conservatives are excessively insistent abount their own intelligence. They measure intelligence by how many conservative followers, and non-conservative detractors, they have.

The resolution to the present crisis is resisted as usual by conservatives. However, the present crisis may live up to the hype this time. Climate change is worse than anything before, and though it is manmade, it has inhuman agency. The cause of climate change is different from the causes of previous crises. Corporations are outside of government. Previous crises were caused from within government. To grow as they must, corporations must grow into government by electing representatives. Now that every representative in government represents big oil, we finaly recognize the threat from a new direction. The sons of the founding mothers did not anticipate the corporate threat, and neither did we until now.

A genetic basis for conservatism is mostly wrong. My father had to admonish me to not be conservative, and only now do I realize the meaning of his observation that "is" differs from "aught". On the other hand, my brother did not live with our father. My brother's politics were formed by the representatives of venture capital corporations, so he does not listen to opinion. Similarly, Trump and Koch learned politics from tender fathers that were the representatives of corporations. MAGA conservatives will be as easily swayed by fear of corporations, as they were by the irresponsibility of their ancestors.

I wish I knew what loss my brother feels victim of, but it is difficult to communicate with someone that does not listen. I can speculate that he is bumping up against a glass ceiling that Stanford University did not prepare him for. The nature of software limits the amount it can be scaled up. In contrast, oil wells can be replicated. Software cannot get more complex than entry level programmers can understand. The originators of the software may well be able to push its complexity further than readers of the software, but the originators are necessarily few.

Clockwise

To distinguish between clockwise and counterclockwise requires a system of axes. In a finite space, this is just a sequence of n reference boundaries in n dimensions. That any less would not suffice follows from the definition.

A simplex base selects one polyant of the simplex apex. The first of n reference boundaries selects the same or opposite polyant. The simplex is clockwise iff the same polyant is selected by base and reference. Removing the first reference boundary, recurse to find clockwise of the base, xoring with clockwise of the simplex. Then each segment goes from the segment apex to the segment base iff the segment is clockwise.

It remains to prove that any sequence of simplex boundaries that leads to the same vertex leads to the same clockwiseness. And that the counterclockwise endpoint of any segment is the clockwise endpoint of another. And that migrations of the simplex’s boundaries that do not migrate the simplex’s inside do not change clockwiseness of the segment endpoints. The proof of migration invariance would be interesting because it would validate a definition of migrate. Also prove that clockwiseness of a subregion of a simplex as the clockwiseness of the simplex is well defined.

Imagery

Think of a plane as a table with three legs. The legs should not be infinite in length, so they may be planted on the walls or ceiling as well as the floor. Of course, the legs are perpendicular to the floor, wall, or ceiling that they are planted on. Name floor, wall, or ceiling as base. Now, relax your imagination, and assume all tables planted on a base have their feet on the same three points of the base. So, the legs overlap for some of their length. In my imagination, more than one thing can occupy the same space. Now imagine flies on a table. Mark out lengths in the corners to find the coordinates of the flies. Construct tables on the floor, with leg lengths given by the fly coordinates. I have claimed, with other words, that if the flies are on a single table, then their constructed tables all intersect in a single point. Consider what happens when one fly walks parallel to a base. One leg of its table remains fixed in length. Similarly (pun intended), if the fly walks in any straight line, a point on its table remains fixed in distance above the floor. In fact, a whole line on its table remains fixed, because its coordinates change at fixed rates wrt each other, and because leg lengths change at rates proportionate to their distances from a fixed line. To get from one point to any other, the fly may walk first parallel to one base, then parallel to another (and so on for hyperflies). Thus, two lines are fixed, intersecting in a point. But no matter where the fly starts, it is the same two lines that are fixed, because its coordinates change in the same ratio when it walks parallel to a base.

Why am I being so colorful about cospaces? Cospaces allow me to extend one space with boundaries from another to find a superspace. And it is because of superspaces that I can find a contradiction to the Simplex Theorem to prove that every linear space is the classification of some collection of hyperplanes.

Innovation

 I like the idea that intelligence is a historical artifact. In the dark ages, good handwriting was considered intelligent. In the dot-com era that we are thankfully leaving, technological imagination was considered intelligent. Because capitalism resists progress, some that made fortunes still have bullhorns to promote their latest ideas. Usually, these ideas are boring to philosophers that already considered the idea and went on to more interesting ideas. For example, consider the idea that the universe is a simulation in another universe. This is as meaningless as religion. Suppose such a simulation existed in our universe. The value, if the word value is to have meaning beyond its anemic economic meaning, is proportionate to its information content. Assuming, as we must, that the longevity of the simulation is proportionate to its value, then its longevity is proportionate to its information content. But that is just a restatement of the Big Bang theory. Furthermore, the notion that the universe consists of information did not originate from technocrats. Physicist have been playing with the idea that the information content of matter falling into black holes is etched on the surface. Therefore technocrats, and more generally capitalists, never invented anything. All innovation comes from the environment.

Interprocess Communication

Posix IPC is the only portable standard, but it suffers from lack of generality. Ideally, it should be easy to establish communication, with arguments to a single function, between zero or more processes or threads, identified by uid gid pid tid key and/or path, with optional blocking under various conditions, resumable or not, with or without filesystem presence, with any atomicity. A fundamental concept that was glossed over by Posix is whether the communication is zero one or many to zero one or many. Regular files are any to any, but require sideband book keeping to prevent the same user from rereading already processed communications. Named pipes prevent rereading of communications, but cannot have multiple simultaneous readers. Each kind of Posix IPC has blocking peculiarities, as if the blocking behavior was specified without user friendliness. If I don’t mind filesystem clutter, I can get a regular file to have atomic writes, and block on read from eof. Appends to the regular file go through a corresponding named pipe, so they are non blocking and atomic up to 4K. Each processor of the regular file tries for a writelock of effectively infinite length at eof. To allow for race conditions, check the file size after acquiring the lock, and retry if the lock is not at eof. If the writelock at eof is acquired, block on read from the named pipe. Upon read from the named pipe, append to the regular file, and release the writelock. If the attempt at writelock failed, wait for readlock of one byte after the last byte read. After acquiring the readlock, immediately release the readlock, and read to eof.

Frame Context

I was not there, but I suspect new programming languages are preceded by new ways to think about programs. The distinction between code and data inspired opposing viewpoints supported by Lisp in opposition to C++. Lisp treated code as data, and C++ bundled code with data. A more literal use of the word function led to functional languages. To deal with concurrency, I find myself examining the mechanics of functions. A function is implemented as a frame on a stack. Threads and processes are implemented as context in a circular buffer. I believe the first step toward concurrent functions is to blur the distinction between frame and context. Functions can (re/en)-queue themselves or each other to a circular stack. C++ made the "this" pointer common to its member functions. Similarly, I'd make a sequential state a standard argument to each function on the circular stack. The return value of functions on the circular stack indicate how or whether to re-queue the function. Thus, using the standard argument, a function could pick up from where it last retuned. To promote mix-and-match functions on the circular stack, each function on the circular stack is actually a cluster of functions, re-queued as a cluster, and advanced one to the next with another return value. Thus, the standard argument indicates intra-function location, and the progress through the cluster indicates inter-function location. User specified arguments to the cluster of functions are (re/en)-queued to per-type circular buffers. Tagged arguments allow arguments to be shared between functions on the circular stack. Function clusters have a standard argument called a layer that can be changed during the function invocation, is retained for re-invocation, and copied for new clusters. Thus, function clusters are collected into layers with the same initial layer standard argument. Often, they layer standard argument is used as a tag to share arguments across the layer. This permits a function to en-queue a cluster with one component specified as a function that uses the layer's arguments in addition to the arguments shared by the cluster components.