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Instincts [Permalink] 03-05-2016 21:28 UTC

I write things from time to time, and I've been working on something haich plussy.

[Nothing about the words "haich plussy" looks like you should use it in decent company. Ze's talking about transhumanism. ~Ed]

It's got a classic chip-in-the-head with a thought-interactive HUD theme, and one of the ideas I've come up with is "Instincts". You can write different apps for the implant, which function in different ways. Nanomed, the company producing the platform API, breaks it down into four hierarchical levels:

  1. App: This produces something sensable in the HUD, and can be interacted with.

  2. Knowledge: This provides you with knowledge, but you have to call it up or "remember" it.

  3. Instinct: This is something you "just know", and can respond with the answer immediately.

  4. Background: You never have to think about this thing, it just goes on without your thought.


The somewhat contrived example Nanomed use is a "heartbeat" app. Remember, they are a medical company, and it was originally a monitoring implant.

  1. App: you realise you need to beat your heart, you open the app, a "beat" button pops up in your field of vision, and you click it to pump blood.

  2. Knowledge: you realise you need to beat your heart, remember how to wibble your ventricles, and do that to pump blood.

  3. Instinct: you realise you need to beat your heart, and your blood is pumped.

  4. Background: your heart is beating without you having to think about it.


I have this take on it instead:

  1. App: A social network overlay, which shows you information about people you know around their head.

  2. Knowledge: The IMDB database, in your head. "Who played Q in Star Trek? Uuh... John de Lancie."

  3. Instinct: What's 2+2?

  4. Background: ...okay, your heart is beating without thought.


Level 1 is more hands on, and requires more thought. Level 4 takes more processing power, and is more taxing on the brain.

Anyway, that's instincts.
Ode to IPv6 [Permalink] 12-04-2016 20:00 UTC

Following the recent deprecation of IPv4 by the IETF, I wrote this little ditty to the tune of Erasure's "A little respect"... almost.

You try to discover
But you won't get any offers back
Don't bother making requests
I won't be sending you acks

I've turned off legacy IP
And my server of DHCP
Now there's really no reason
To avoid upgrading everything

IPv6 is
IPv6 is
IPv6 is
IPv6 is

IP

Dream Girl [Permalink] 12-09-2015 15:09 UTC

I had this dream. My brain can get quite dark sometimes. So far as I can tell, in this dream, I asked a girl to kill herself, and she did so without question because she loved me.

I'm writing it out here unedited.
As we sat there, out of view of anyone, I looked into her eyes and I feared then she knew what was coming. She smiled. I ran my hand down her arm and lifted it up to me. As I stroked it, I could see the faint black capillaries through her skin. My conscience fought back against what I was about to ask of her.

"You know the feeling of the electric running through you, like blood through veins?"

She looked at me, now certain what I was going to ask, her eyes gave away as much. I don't know how, but she kept smiling, almost eager for me to continue.

"I need you to stop that," I said. Immediately, all of my internal organs clenched in unison. She put her arms around me and pulled me in tight.

"I don't want to," she said. I wrapped my own arms around her.

"I don't want you to," I replied, my voice small, and as I finished my sentence I felt her whole weight slump against me.

BREAKING NEWS [Permalink] 02-09-2015 21:29 UTC

A major aerospace manufacturer has announced that it is intending to merge with a major fast food outlet. The release states that they're moving the red light from the wing tip up to the nose, and it's going to be called McDonald's Douglas.
So you thought goroutines were cheap? [Permalink] 22-08-2015 19:39 UTC

It's taken me a while, but here you go, Joe.

From "Programming Erlang" by Joe Armstrong, 2007 armstrongonsoftware.
Chapter 8.11: Exercises

2. Write a ring benchmark. Create N processes in a ring. Send a message round the ring M times so that a total of N * M messages get sent. Time how long this takes for different values of N and M.

Write a similar program in some other programming language you are familiar with. Compare the results. Write a blog, and publish the results on the Internet!

Having done this, I got the same order of magnitude results for 5 goroutines as 50000 erlang processes.

Erlang version

Go version

If I've made a glaring error, please let me know.
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