More rants of a dead man

English is read from left to right. This works well for right handed people who write with their right hand and don’t end up getting pen ink all over their hands like lefties do because you move your hand over the words you just wrote. Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, we read from left to right. When you get to the end of a line, you look back to the left side of the page or column and go down a line and start reading again.

Wouldn’t it be way quicker to alternate reading direction for each line?

If you can read two languages and one was written left to right and one right to left you could write every other line of text in the alternate-reading-direction language and then read by scanning right, then going down a line and scanning left and so on.

Wouldn’t that be neat? I can’t read two languages so I don’t know how hard it would be to switch language contexts, but it is pretty clear that having a language that could be written in both directions and convey the same meaning regardless of which direction you were reading in would be way more efficient.

Given the zillions of languages that have existed throughout humanity, I wonder why (or maybe if) a language was never/ever created that could do this.

Some languages I know are written vertically, but I don’t think they read down and up, just down.

I guess languages with one-character-per-concept glyphs would make this easier to do, but apparently humans have worked out that multiple-letters-per-concept/word works better.

All interesting ideas…

Photography exists. Cameras are cheap, you can get a nice one in a kid’s toy form and take zillions of high quality photos and store them on super cheap sd cards. And you can print them on a cheap color printer.

Life certainly has moved on from the days of painting portraits. And yet people still paint as a hobby.

The AIs might make programming simple and medium stuff easy and automatic, but there will still be people who write software the good old fashioned way, with punch cards, because, like painting, it is fun.

Okay so maybe not punch cards. They’ll still use a heavy handed IDE, but they’ll write the code themselves rather than have the AI do it.

I hope, or nobody will be able to fix bugs in the AI slop.

So I had this thought the other day.
Food establishments have some fixed costs and some variable costs, I’m sure lots of businesses fall into this category. But food providers like restaurants are in an interesting position, they provide food.

I know little about the restaurant business so maybe my numbers are way off, but I figure you have to for pay rent, and electricity, and gas, and staff. And for food, as in ingredients.

But once you have an employee working x number of hours, they’re getting paid whether they make food or not.
Once you turn on the lights, they stay lit whether there’s 5 people in the room or 20.
Once you pay rent, you have the place for the entire month.

Food ingredients are definitely a variable cost, but I’m wondering what percentage of the cost of doing business make up the variable bits?

My point is this: if you run a restaurant and patrons come in and pay for a meal and some drinks and they tip the wait staff, they are providing your income. They do that based on them coming in. Not how long it takes them to eat, or how much of the fixed costs of the restaurant (like the lights and the heat) they also consume.

So how about this. What if every idle moment by restaurant employees instead of spent waiting for the next thing to do, meal to cook, patron to wait on… what if you had a queue of idle-time work to do, like… making more food.

And what if at the end of the day you had all of this food, that nobody ordered, but cost you little more (extra) than the ingredients and you gave it away.

I figure you wouldn’t want to give it away to the locals, because then why would they bother coming in to your restaurant for a meal? So you’d have to bring it far enough away to a place where nobody is likely to otherwise have come to your restaurant without a reason.

And this is that reason, it’s like advertising.

But instead of flyers and magazine ads, it’s food. People from not-that-close (as in, not in your town, but maybe the next town or two over) would actually get to try your food for free, and if they like it, maybe next week they’ll travel to your restaurant and be a paying customer.

This isn’t perfect, there are lots of variable costs, and maybe they end up costing a lot more than the ROI on a flyer or magazine ad.

But, it’s an interesting idea.

I mean it’s basically what they do at farmer’s markets, why not restaurants.

Apparently I wrote this in 2019 and never hit publish.

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or at least it is unnecessary

it makes all the numbers artificially go up so you feel better about big numbers

it allows you to pay off your 30 year mortgage with cheaper money than today’s money. but you’ll notice the interest is paid up front in more expensive money, and the principal (which is not the banks money but saver’s money) is paid back in cheaper money.

these same people say, when the market is going up “look the value of your portfolio is increasing”

But when the market goes down they say “now you can buy equities more cheaply.”

They’re specifically not saying that when the market goes down, the value of your portfolio has gone down as well, or that, when the market goes up you have to pay more for the same equities.

it also means if you don’t get raises matching inflation you’re taking a pay cut every year

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But while I’m on the topic… Apparently the standard inflation target rate of 2% that everybody seems to think is normal and good was first offered by the bank of new zealand. Go figure that one out.

I don’t get it. I mean I kind of do, it’s why people play the lottery.

If prices keep going up, then I need to make more money, so I switch jobs or do something on the side to make more money, because I feel like I’m making progress because I’m getting more.

No, you’re really walking or running to stand still.

But as above, hey, loan repayments are cheaper yada yada yada.

How about this. One unit of work yields X money. And with X money I can buy a gallon of milk. And next year if I want to buy a gallon of milk how about I pay the same X money, and I do the same unit of work to earn that.

What’s so wrong with that? It increases consumer confidence because now people can predict at least something about the future.

How about that. 0% inflation. What a crazy idea.

This is really obvious in retrospect, but I didn’t realize it until I saw it happen.

VMs boot faster than real hardware.

I have a proxmox machine and it’s really fast and it can shutdown and restart a vm in a few seconds, which I always marvel at. I initially chalked it up to being a fast machine but then one day I realized that a real piece of hardware has to go through the real bios boot process, find the boot disk, load the boot loader, run it load the OS from disk, run all the startup applications, and read all that from disk…

All that running on nvme is really fast, but if you do that in a vm, it’s running from page cache, and as I always say “NVMe is fast, but RAM is even faster.” so of course vms boot faster, all their disk (or at least lots of it) can be in memory when the vm boots, so it’s just shuffling memory pages around.

It occurred to me that internal combustion engines must burn a lot of energy pushing valve lifters against the pressure of the valve springs. Seems like a lot of effort. I’d think there would be some kind of solenoid/actuator that controlled the valves directly, and you could avoid the whole cam and timing belt thing.
It would seem to make the engine a whole lot simpler, far less moving parts, and since computers control everything in the engine anyway they could more precisely control the positioning of the valves.
I was wondering why this wasn’t a thing, and then I found this and realized I had invented the camless piston engine…

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

I think git is a technological marvel. I think it very well suits the problem it was designed to fix: lots of random people contributing random junk to try and get it into the linux kernel, and for that it is great.

But everybody else uses git too, apparently private companies, which never quite made sense to me, because everybody is [supposed to be] on the same team.

You’re not going to reject somebody’s pull request because they’re trying to put insecure code into your codebase, or whatever other reasons prs against the linux kernel are rejected. You work for the same company, probably on the same team trying to make the product better, why would you compete? You don’t, that’s not how companies work.

It seems to me that git is an overengineered heavy handed way to do source control among a group of people who are all striving for roughly the same goal.

Yet it seems to be the most popular hotness so everybody uses it. It is what it is.

One of my larger beefs with git is the merge conflict problem it creates.

Now I honestly can’t remember how we dealt with the problem, which must have existed, in the days of cvs and subversion, but somehow we managed, but I don’t remember being as frustrated with cvs as I am with git conflicts.

Firstly all git conflicts could be avoided with a little application of intelligent logistics. If you just order the work to be done such that two people don’t work on the same piece of code at the same time, there will be no conflict. All a conflict is, is a waste of time cause by poor time management. I’ve never heard of anybody enjoying resolving merge conflicts, and they’re easy to avoid but… nobody does.

But this morning, I had an idea, a stupid easy way to avoid git conflicts and help with the time management problem at the same time.

Now the technology to make the idea viable didn’t exist until fairly recently, so it wouldn’t have been workable, but now it does exist and it’s easy to use and nobody’s going to do it, because nobody likes change and people have been using git forever, and git is good and right and nobody really wants to make things better. If they did, they’d follow this easy solution: Use live shared editing.

Google docs lets two people edit the same file at the same time, and I believe vscode live share does something similar, so the technology exists.

If two people needed to work on the same code at the same time, they could. Forking/branching your own copy is what causes the conflict problem so… don’t do it. Everybody works on the live repo in main.

There are other things that can be done to make the experience better, like warn both or all parties when people start working to close to each other on the same code, and you could still use branches to segment units of work. I’m sure other tools could be invented to make this style of code editing more useful, but the basic concept, is that everybody actually edits the same file at the same time, and sees what the other editors are doing and naturally stays away when somebody else is working here. When you walk down the hallway and see somebody coming right at you, do you keep walking right at them? No, you make way. And so do they. Real simple.

As a result, one person may very well back off and go work on something else until the first person is done, thus avoiding creating conflicting code. Look at that: self driven logistics and time management.

Yes it would make writing tests a little harder because you’d have to wait for the other person to finish before you could run your test but… again, time management, find something else to do, so there’s no conflict. As annoying as it may seem, it’s way less annoying than having to always deal with conflicts or fear the git pull because you don’t know how much work you’re in for just to make your code work again.

The shiny new editor tools can put up little marker notifications annotating the editor saying things like: “so-and-so touched this a few minutes ago, they might not be done.”
Or the programmer can mark it complete while they go work on tests or move on to something else, indicating to the next person they’re free to work on this stuff.

Will it solve all the problems? No, it will solve the git conflict problem which is unquestionably a waste of resources time suck for all involved. There has to be a better way. This is one possible option.

Before the humans showed up, the earth was here soaking up sunlight. For hundreds of millions of years, the sun sent its energy to the earth where it turned into things like plants and trees and eventually animals.

All the trees and plants died and mushed into the ground and this went on for an absurdly long amount of time.

And then the people showed up and for the past 150 years or so began digging up all the oil which stored the energy from the sun, like a battery.

We are consuming the energy stored by the planet at a fairly quick rate, and the noise about “peak oil” has been around for a while. But there’s a much simpler way of thinking about energy consumption from the great earth battery.

If we are to go all in on green and get all of our daily energy needs from solar (directly from the sun) and wind (driven by weather changes caused by the sun) and hydro electric (which is where the energy from the sun evaporates water from the oceans and ground and carries it up to the clouds so we can draw the power from the falling water, noticing a theme here?), we have to consider that on any given day, our draw down of energy from these sources has to be less than that which is provided by the sun in a day.

My point is we’ve built up cities and cars and infrastructure by consuming the energy stored in the planet, and while there is still charge in the battery, that will continue to work, but in order for the system to function long term, it’s not a matter of where we draw the energy from but that the source of the energy (the sun in a lot of cases) has to provide more energy on average per day than how much we draw down in that same day.

If we draw down more, we will be consuming more of the stored energy from the great earthen battery, and plain and simple math, that is not sustainable. The battery will eventually run out.

So the question is: how much energy is provided by solar, wind, oxford comma, and hydro electric in a day, and how much do all the people consume in that same day. And if it’s more, long term, we’re in trouble.

I don’t usually forward videos because I don’t like being inundated with “oh you HAVE to watch this!” so I don’t want to do it to other people. But if you’re interested in the moon landing hoax, this is worth a watch.

I love the moon landing hoax. I think it’s a great testament to how people think and the conspiracies they’re willing to adopt. It’s great amusement.

But of all of the anti-hoaxers and their arguments, this is my favorite. It has nothing to do with any of the other arguments people make to explain why the moon landing wasn’t a hoax. This one is technical, and was made by an apparent film geek (I can appreciate geeks because I am one too, just not a film geek).

In short he explains how the moon landings can’t be fake simply because the technology to create the film footage that came back couldn’t possibly have been made with the technology of the time anywhere but in space. The only way the video could have been made, was from the moon. It’s quite interesting.

The reason I bring it up is because I thought of a way to explain the lack of any apparent progress in the field of time travel, and it’s similar in thinking to the above video.

I do believe in time travel but I think you can only go forward in time and it has to do with perception more than anything else. You experience time travel every time you go to sleep.

Anyway, I am a storage geek. I like disk. And one day it occurred to me, that if time travel backwards in time were possible, that would mean that somewhere, or somehow the state of every atom in the universe would have to be stored for every instant in time. This way somebody would be able to replay that stored state in a way that could be observed or interacted with. That would mean you’d have to build some machine that would let you retrieve that stored state and pull each instant’s state (remember we’re talking every atom in the universe) into your viewer/replayer to be observed.

That’s a lot of bandwidth. That’s a lot of disk.

For the same reason that the moon landing video could only have been produced on the moon, (the limit of technology) I think we will never be able to produce time travel because even if the state of all of the atoms in the universe is stored somewhere, we’d never be able to retrieve it in able usable fashion. Even if you only wanted to grab a 1 foot square block of it. That’s an insane amount of storage to move over some type of information transfer. And remember there’s that whole speed of light thing to deal with.

So, no time travel, sorry.

So you’ll realize that I’m talking about bringing the history data where ever it is to us now in some machine, and most time travel stories have to do with taking the person to the information and not bringing the information to the person. Well as hard as it is to move a lot of data around nowadays in real time, we don’t have ANYTHING that remotely hints at being able to bring a person to the data.

So again, I’m not seeing it.

I went to the doctor yesterday, and he’s a good guy, he’s smart, very knowledgeable calm, very robot-like in his questioning to diagnose whatever ailments you might have. I’d say he’s a very good doctor.

But his job is to file paperwork. To be a doctor nowadays, there’s so much regulation and so much fighting for pennies with the insurance company that you spend 5 minutes with a patient and hours dealing with paperwork.

This is a sad situation you might think.

But reflect on the lot of the software programmer in life. They have the same problem, they write software for 5 minutes and fight with tools, and build systems, and broken libraries and updating patches, and security vulnerabilities and all this other stupid annoying shit nobody wants to do, that has very little to do with actually designing or writing software.

The difference is: the doctor has this crap foisted on him by external parties, whereas programmers do it to themselves.