Ah, Devuan… the great migration begins. Leaving KDE and Ubuntu behind means learning a few new habits, and as opposed to that sucking really badly, there is actually quite a lot of good news: old-school GTK and Qt programs are pretty darn good these days and dramatically lighter weight than the KDE mainstays. Yes, KDE […]
Author: zxq9
Building Erlang + ZX on Devuan Excalibur
With Ubuntu/Kubuntu out of the running for “works and is mostly sane”, we are having to shift once again over to Devuan, which we have been using for servers for several years now at Tsuriai and QPQ, but not as often on desktops (because Kubuntu was just so convenient and changing habits is annoying). This […]
GAJU: Create and Call a Gajumaru Smart Contract
“Smart contract” is a bad term. It is malicious antisense made up by a marketing department with the intent of warping the intuitions of non-experts in dangerous ways. A much better term would be “ledger logic” or “chain script” or even “weave” or “doom” or something like that — because a “smart contract” is just […]
Electrification of the Line
Early electrification of the manufacturing base is an interesting story. It isn’t just a story about replacing one sort of drive for another, but rather a process of iterative revelations that were only possible after each iteration had taken place. To keep the story short here I’ll summarize, but the details are almost as interesting […]
Nonsense VS Antisense
The vast majority of content online is now machine generated. Even before the advent of LLMs, most of the information posted online from the late 2000’s onward was either malicious or insane. Almost everything you see online is part of information warfare. Academic journals, legacy media, social media posts, video content, podcasts, etc. Very little […]
Entropism: Defining Consciousness
Much like life, consciousness often eludes definition or even description. We have a tendency to create ambiguous definitions for consciousness that deify the category of whoever is doing the defining (ourselves) while at the same time locking down certain aspects of consciousness that lead us away from knowing anything useful about it. Learning from our […]
Entropism: Defining Life
Life is a concept with which we are all intuitively familiar but is difficult to pin down with a concrete definition. Let’s start with a definition up front and go from there. An Entropist definition of life is simple: A locally anti-entropic process that maintains or increases local order at the cost of an increase […]
Entropism: Defining Emergence
Defining emergence takes a moment to set up for the uninitiated, so let’s try this in two phases. First, a simple, formal definition: The appearance of novel properties, patterns or behaviors at a “higher level” of organization that are not obviously present and cannot be easily predicted from the properties of the individual parts of […]
Entropism: Defining Entropy
Oceans of ink, real and digital, have been spilled on this topic. It is simple to understand with an intuitive description, though, if we just ignore the pedantic urge to ruin it for everyone. Formally: Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. In more practical terms, this is a measure of how spread […]
Slavery
Slavery is best defined not as a state of servitude, but a state of dependency.