Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, originally I was in favor of a simple file-permission based model for protecting us from each other. I.e. there would be various flags (see/touch/telepath/whatnot) and each of us could set and clear them for individuals and groups.

The sentence that made me rethink this was me wanting to restrict all members of the US government from communicating with me. It was undoubtedly a emotional overreaction to yet another police shooting, combined with making the mistake of googling ‘is the US a police state’.

Now, I think this might be one of those rare examples where adding some complexity would help. The first thing I’d add is a timer with a maximum value – i.e. I can block the US government for 5 minutes, or a year, or five years, but not indefinitely. A second radio button would specify whether at the end of the timer I should be asked if I want to clear the bit, or if it should just clear. More invasive bits should be on a default-deny rather than default-allow – i.e. I’d like to have to set telepathy on for you before you can read my mind.

I do however always worry – any time a design requires more complexity, I suspect it’s not the right design. I don’t know what the right answer is, though. But while I think a file permission universe would be a interesting place to visit, I am not yet convinced I’d want to be locked in it for eternity.

One of the questions I’m asking is what sort of universe could you enjoy forever? What *possible* option wouldn’t end up as torture?

So, I can’t help but feel like humans are brilliant idiots. We’re especially good at things that require incremental improvement on a concept – I gesture you to computers in 1950 and computers now as a example – or cars, for that matter.

We’re not good at being happy. We’re really good at finding ways to NOT be happy. Epicly good at it at times. We also are not good at knowing when it’s time to put down the wrench and walk away. I mean, I give you, the species bright enough to come to understand nuclear physics – and stupid enough to make a hydrogen bomb and mount it on a rocket with target seeking capabilities.

I am smart enough to not mention the wingdinger of a idea for a tool for terrorism I came up with tonight, other than to say I would never, ever build one, and I would never, ever tell any member of my government about it. It’s stupidly obvious to me, and I only hope that’s because I’m brighter than the average bear, because I do not want to live in the world where they exist.

Then again, I’ve had a number of ideas for weapons, and most of them have never come to exist in this world. So either I’m smarter than average, there’s something basically flawed about my understanding of science (I kind of doubt this), or most people don’t want to make the world a worse place (I like this one) and the average murderous psychopath is also none too bright.

Then again, the possibility that Trump might some day have the nuclear launch codes is enough to make me want to go hide under something.

One thing that amazes me is that people who are not deeply happy, fulfilled, and capable have children. Accidents I can understand – but why would you deliberately drag someone else here to enjoy the suffering? Seriously, I think we should follow two paths

1) Try to make everyone here’s life awesome. At the point at which we’re achieving this, we can breed like rabbits

2) Try for voluntary extinction. Not by mass suicide, but simply by 95% of us not having children until we get to the point where we’ve got this suffering thing under control.

Now, I don’t always think this way, but there are times.. there’s something wrong with my mind, and it’s probably easily fixable, but not by our current medical technology. For those of you who don’t know, I fired my medications expert in August and for the most part I do not use psych meds any more – I use occasional small doses of seroquel when I feel like my clock speed is pushing out into the outer envelope. Now, I’m sure those of you reading about me talking to people I can’t see will want to draw a conclusion about how this is the lack of pysch meds, but this hasn’t had any effect I can see either way on my ability to talk to $future-person. What I do note – with a fair amount of anger – is that this December did not involve any trips to the psych hospital, or even any serious excursions into insanity-land. So the psych meds were either making things worse (likely) or just not helping (possible)

If I go insane again, I intend to hunt down Dr Amen and see how his process goes, because it is at least based on the type of science I can understand and get behind. As far as I can tell most shrinks prescribe based on the process of look up the class of disease, and then throw a dart at the list of medications that might help it. If the first one doesn’t help, try the second one, and so on.

So, my best guess is my neural net seeks a type of homeostasis – there’s a part of it that has a opinion about how I should feel and has control over the various glands that make me have emotions, and a part that has a opinion about how I should think, and has control over the various glands that affect that, and if I introduce outside factors like psych meds, eventually these systems integrate those into their math and still try to seek the same levels.

At this point, I’m concentrating on reaching those systems. I’ve got a whole host of helpful tools at my disposal – all of which $future-person helped me build, including a dashboard of the state of my mind that appears on what I refer to as my ‘third eye’ – i.e. the left-hand visualization space that my mind generates corrisponding to my left eye. (The fourth eye would be the virtual visualization eye that corrisponds to my right literal eye, and so forth. $future-person has tried to get me to expand these through a series of exercises, and it’s worked somewhat but not a lot – at some future date I might write a article about that process)

These are mostly gauges – how irrational the current fear is, current clock speed, neural activity levels, that sort of thing. Clock speed is definitely a way useful gauge, since with it I don’t need a EEG to know when I’m approaching the red.

Anyway, I fired my psych provider because I asked him a technical question about neural architecture and he didn’t know the answer, and instead of just saying “I don’t know”, he proceeded to lecture me about how there were more important things to talk about because I had experienced one of those intermittent faults I mentioned a few weeks before. Not helpful, and it was suddenly clear to me this person had no idea how to help me but wasn’t capable of saying so. So I did us both a favor.

I also can’t shake the feeling that my recently fired mental health provider is less happy than I am. This does not give me good feelings about his ability to solve my problems.

I think we *could* have a good mental health system. It’s kind of insane that we don’t put as much energy into researching neuroscience as quantum physics since the question of what we’re measuring with is as least as important as what we’re measuring. But one problem with capitalism is that any health system imbued with it is going to be far more interested in treating you than curing you. And I have a feeling that real trillion-dollar mental health, in a world with computers and good IO between them and the mind, would be a world of cures, not a world of treatments.

My problem is undoubtedly made more complex by the fact that I don’t want to just be uniformly happy. I can already have that if I want it, in several different ways. I want to have a complex emotional life. I just don’t want to become decoherent while I’m doing it.

One interesting thing to me is that one of the only times I don’t talk to $future-person regularly is when I’m decoherent. Instead, I invariably – and this is impressively dumb given the situation – try to search out present-day-$person, who doesn’t want to talk to me. And yet, I don’t think it’s so much that I’m confused and think present-day-$person is $future-person, as that I think it’s 1993 except that I’m suddenly empowered to actually say what I think and feel instead of being totally closed off in a little tiny shell with a free will box that has like three options at any given time.

So, recently I got a ad by sprint telling me they are the fastest LTE network. This isn’t surprising – sprint does a lot of reselling their network and I think also has the biggest chunk of spectrum allocated to them, thanks to their nextel merger many years ago.

But more than not being surprising, it’s annoying. As a sprint customer since 2002, why bother to advertise to me? I’m clearly not planning on going anywhere any time soon, and as far as I can tell, I paid for that ad – or rather, revenues from selling me service did. Not only that, that ad wasted a few seconds of my time – more than that by the time you figure me writing blog posts about it.

I think most customers would rather have a penny discount, silently applied, than a ad talking about how good the service they’re already paying to receive is.

Even more annoying, and has largely been fatal to me donating to most causes, are the people who use my donation money to send me requests for more money. I’ve sent like $35, $50 to various causes and gotten several years worth of begging letters asking for more money. This makes me very skeptical that my money went to do anything useful, and very disinclined to donate to you again.

I do repeatedly see companies advertising to their already existing customers, and it does not make a lot of sense to me. We’re not stupid, you know. We know we’re paying for that ad – as well as having it burn time we could better have spent doing something else. Rein in your marketing departments.

So, I keep seeing ads for instant checkmate. I wonder if they enjoy making the world a worse place, and I wonder even more if they realize that what they’re doing is making the world a worse place.

Now, I don’t particularly have any problem with people knowing about my checkered past. But I’ve done a much more thorough job of eradicating paranoia than most people with the disease. There are a lot of people, I would imagine, who find the idea of someone aggregating every mistake they’ve ever made downright terrifying. People who live in fear now have yet another thing to be afraid of.

And I can’t really see how it improves the situation for anyone to be able to find out everyone’s list of run-ins with the highly questionable entities we’ve chosen to put in charge of justice. It does sound like wonderful fuel for those who enjoy being judgemental assholes, however. I’m reminded of a quote from Pump Up The Volume – “I bet Watts was the guy who took names when the teacher was out of the classroom.”

We can use resources any way we want – and we apparently want to point fingers at each other.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31721-what-s-good-about-guaranteed-basic-income

So, my understanding is the feds actually had someone assigned to follow John Lennon around because of his left leaning ideas. I have to admit to some curiosity as to whether there is a fed who is assigned to read this very journal because of mine.

If so, I have to wonder if some of my better ideas become viral within said fed – if he or she finds him or herself agreeing with some of what I say.

At this point, if they’re willing to think about what I’m writing about, I’ll take readers any way I can get them.

What I don’t want is more readers who want to put a lot of mental and emotional energy into telling me how impossible it is to fix anything. Because if we believe it’s impossible, than it *certainly* is.

So, I don’t tweet, so here’s my comments on Wikipedia as it turns 15.

First of all, I think it is on it’s way to being something amazing – and it’s already the best encyclopedia on earth, if you understand it’s failings.

I’m deeply curious what a Wikipedia not so obsessed with deleting non-notables and that encouraged original research as long as it was tagged as such would be like. But I enjoy it as a resource as-is, without a doubt.

I would like the Wikipedia, along with the catalog of Earth’s music, to ride the yet-to-be-built Voyager 3 probe (hint hint, congress and NASA) to another star. I think it would make a excellent rosetta stone that would vastly simplify first contact.

(which are a horrible idea for a bunch of reasons) – we should at the very least only pay them for the inmates who do not reoffend.. a steadily increasing bonus for every year the inmate remains crime-free.

This might incline the creators of such institutions to try to build prisons that heal people, instead of prisons that make them sicker.

So, I read this petitition on private vs public ATC system and I don’t honestly know which side I’m on.

I feel like government should supply the services that all of us need. I do feel like if a private corperation can prove that it does a better job, then it should be free to provide the service instead, but my definition on what means a better job might be different than most people’s. For example, a better job in air traffic control is NOT cheaper. It’s more reliable, more efficient, safer, and better engineered. The last thing I want is people cutting costs on things like ATC – if you must cut costs, cut them on military equipment, which I’d rather in general didn’t work correctly.

(If you’re under the impression that I don’t think people should be shooting at each other, bombing each other, or otherwise hurting each other, you have much to go on. Now, I need to include a caveat here. If you’re in a video game – even a full 3D immersive one that looks totally real – or if you’re into pain and being scared – I do not want to take away your war experience. I’m talking about the rest of us here. For those of you who enjoy that sort of game, by all means, go play.. although I’m not quite sure just yet why I should be paying for your games when we haven’t even met the hierarchy of needs for some of my friends)

(Yes, I really do think people should be free to opt in to war. If we’re eternal and immortal creatures, we’re going to want to try lots of things. It’s just that I don’t think the rest of us should be forced to live with your choices.)

So, there’s a related issue in database design and in object oriented programming, and it surrounds the question of when do I break this type of data off into a new table / new class?

Fully normalized data is a pain in the ass to work with. You have to join to find anything you care about, and there’s a performance cost to doing joins, especially outer joins. On the other paw, fully denormalized data is also a pain in the ass to work with. It can be very expensive to search that enormous haystack for that tiny needle, ALTER TABLEs take forever to run, etc.

In the programming world, if you create too many object classes, it’s a royal pain in the ass to find anything, your executable size is going to go up, and unless you do a very good job of inheretince you’re going to be doing cut & paste coding every time you add a good feature. On the other paw, if you create too few object classes, you’re going to find they get large and cumbersome as you have to add many methods to them for the varying sorts of data they’re carrying. Again, maintainability goes down, readability goes down.

So, how do you decide when it’s time to tack on a table or a class? I don’t really know how I make this decision – there’s some sort of intuitive leap that happens inside my mind that says ‘now would be a good time for another table / another object’. Sometimes there are clear data bounderies – a map coordinate probably doesn’t belong in the same table as a phone number, because it’s a very different type of data. Sometimes external APIs suggest a path, because of the way their interfaces are defined. And so forth.

I don’t have a good answer to write down here yet. I’m still thinking about this. But if anyone wants to comment, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter. (I think I have about 3 readers at this point, although my web traffic statistics would suggest that’s not correct)