I have a lot of cats. They like playing laser. After a while the cats figure out a few things. Among these are: the red dot appears immediately following the clicky sound, usually in the late evening when the benevolent hairless ape that dispenses food and cleans up my poop is watching the glowing box […]
Category: Science & Tech
Everything from lampooning Popular Science to picking on Microsoft and Oracle belong here.
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 […]
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 […]
Setting up Gitea’s “Act Runner” daemon on Devuan (SysVinit)
[Skip to the TL;DR if you just want to see the sysv init script.] I’ve been shuffling some things around in the background, and the main project I’ve been working on lately has a few different places where it makes use of these newfangled “CI/CD” monstrosities. Part of the shuffle has been a shift away […]
Language Design: When Less is More
Yesterday I was invited to do an interview with the man behind Erlang Punch, Mathieu Kerjouan. Mathieu is a truly great programmer, an absolutely excellent interviewer, and it was a lot of fun to get to do something task-focused with him like this. He asked some pretty broad questions about Erlang as a language, as […]
Aegora.jp: An Explainer
Aegora.jp is a somewhat complicated system in that it directly uses on-chain contract call transactions as its payment method. This means that a sale’s status passes through phases that are governed by actions that occur on the chain which can only be initiated by transactions that are signed by the users and must be verified […]
Alternative Tracks
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises A cascade of financial crises are rushing across the Western world. Gradually Imagine a set of express trains that are all headed toward a single catastrophic, multi-track collision. Each train is heavily damaged already, but the […]