In the Alpha Cenauri game there was a wonder you could build called The Longevity Vaccine. If you were a planned economy two sad citizens were made happy at every city. Amazing. If you were Green economy it made happy one per base. Amazing.

If you were capitalists, the base that built it made a bunch of money and nothing else. It’s a lot of money, but isn’t global.

It’s the only wonder like that. And I’ve been thinking of it more lately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States

Yes, but it needs to be the creamy kind. There is a barista blend. Think of more like half and half than milk.

8 inch googly eyes. Put them in the Christmas tree.

Test tube full of little googly eyes. When I’m feeling depressed I stick them to random stuff around the house.

Back when I worked at the foundation there was a special permission that you couldn’t have unless you’d broke stuff super badly. To push new code you have to have one of those folks present. They were responsible for making sure there was a back out plan and ran the actual deploy script. Their ssh keys did the deploy.

I got this bit set after I took out search for Italian Wikipedia. And all none Wikipedias.

Do you think “big enough moon” is going to be similarly rare to “liquid water”? We’re getting better and better at finding planets. Not sure how we’d find their moons though.

I used to switch to perl or python if I needed awk. These days I don’t tend to run into it as much. Not sure if that was a good choice. But it’s how I spent the past 25 years.

I put it in the “fun concepts boring characters” bucket with most Clarke.

I really liked the next Hugo winner. And 2020. And 2023. Honestly I think about half of the Hugo winners are amazing. 2007. 2002. 2000. Oh 1993. That’s a vintage. 1990. 87, 86, 85, 84 is ok. Oh. They get more consistent as they go back in time. Still pretty good.

I liked the article. It sung to my heart. I’ve been in this world for a while. Lived through the failure and hyperacalars just taking without giving back.

I don’t know what to think. But I’m not happy with where we are and it’s nice to hear someone else talking about it.

I’m on page 3 and already sold.

I loved Enix’s Ogre Battle and Square’s Final Fantasy 6 and 7. How could putting the companies together make a bad?!

I’m glad we have both the comic and the movie. I’m glad the movie led me to the comic. I love them both.

That’s not what I was thinking but I like it! Http caching is pretty magic. Stateless nodes and easy scaling too.

For some kinds of problems you really can’t beat varnish and friends. It’s how we have Wikipedia, after all.

You have to learn this through suffering. Class would have to be project based.

It’d be fun to talk shop with the fast code in slow languages folks. I do that for a living. I remember three ways, but I’m sure there’s more:

• “Just use a better data structure”
• “My language is a DSL for a faster language” (Polars, Numpy, etc)
• “My compiler is surprisingly good if I’m careful” (Julia, JVM, etc)

My first thought was that it’d be a great oracle for randomized testing.

A large portion of the US stock market’s valuation is based on speculation that AI will be really useful and really cheap. It’s not useless. But is it as useful as folks think it will be? Are Oracle and OpenAI and fiends overvalued?

I do not want AI art. I do not want AI videos. I do not want AI narration. But I’m not everyone.

AI can help you program. Folks sell it like you can fire all your hackers.

We see AI as useful. Maybe even revolutionarily useful. The web is useful. Revolutionarily useful. But every .com company was super overvalued back in the day. Lots of folks lost their job and their pension and stuff.

I get US robber baron vibes too.

Fair warning for those who decide to read it, the book doesn’t treat women particularly well. And it’s the best propaganda I’ve read for capitalism. Read it with eyes open and it’s fun. Great villains. Fun world building. It ends well. And trains!

And it’s like a 1000 page long novel split into two books.

I’m not good at this but that’s never stopped me from making a fool of myself before.

Iterators are monads because they have a flatMap on them. It takes each element and spits out a new iterator which is merged in to the result.

Option is a monad too. Same reason. You can map the contents to another option. And you won’t get called if there’s nothing inside.

Promises are monads too. You can map the result to another promise. The wrinkle here is that you don’t get to know when the map happen. Or it might not get called at all if the promise errors out.

IO can be a monad because you can ask it for input and wait for the result. It’s just the same as a promise.

See how these different things share a common behavior? That’s monad. Or, maybe it’s monoid. Names are hard and I’m busy making a fool of myself.

Monads are nothing more than a useful abstraction. Haskell is famous for them because they couldn’t make Haskell do imperative stuff without them so they spread them all over the language.

We all use them every day in regular programming. We just don’t think of them as a class of thing.

In the Commonwealth Saga it’s trains! It’s portals with hugely demanding power consumption. They mostly have to stay fixed to one place and open. So they run choo choos. Their world is commerce and economics. And trains are a lovely symbol of that.

In The Final Architecture it’s jaunty. Unspace helps you go fast but you are always alone. Crewmates gone. When you come out they reappear. When you inside there is something coming to get you. Something that lives in unspace and doesn’t like that we use it for travel. The terror of its hunting you drives everyone to suicide. So instead they sleep. Magic “you sleep now” pods for everyone.

Except. You can only sleep if you are on a known route. Some rare people can feel out new routes. And they have to say awake. Most shows just follow normal routes. But the special ships with these other folks can go all over the place! At the cost of route terror.

The books are about coming together in the face of adversity cosmic horror. And unspace is a foil to that. You are alone. But we do what we can anyway. Your alone now, but not forever. Unless the monster gets you.