When I was a kid, and I first learned about things like human sacrifices and slavery, I would try to imagine it. What would it be like to live in a place, where everybody around you thinks, "This incredibly insane idea is perfectly valid and natural." #
And people are tied up and torn apart and set on fire for saying things or, really, just being different. And people walk around thinking that literally owning a person is, like, totally fine. #
So, I would say to myself, I am really glad that I am growing up here in the present, where people are not insane.#
Later, of course, the present turned into the future, and we're all living here now. And nobody has any insane belief systems that result in the voluntary death for those that hold those beliefs. Which, if they did exist, those imaginary beliefs would have come from literally nowhere, thin air, because who could have predicted?#
And there are only approximately eleventy trillion guns, which is one giant fucking shotgun up on there on the mantle for the third act. And while we all wait for Donald Trump to order up, mob boss style, that final act of our great nation, people will literally get up and defend the "right" to terrorize, and intimidate, and especially, retain the capability at all times to murder as many people as possible. At any given moment, in any social situation, as fast as possible. #
Because you just never know when a whole lot of people might need killing. I mean, someone might ask you to wear a mask. Or treat them with basic human respect. #
And white America is dealing quite rationally with the fact that nearly everybody that is out there in the cold and rain, operating a leaf blower, everybody in the back of the restaurant, everybody working so hard and trying so desperately to just have families and children, practically every one of them has darker skin, and is paid and treated like shit. Even the ones working indoors, our doctors, our teachers, our engineers, our reporters, all the professionals white people will pretend are social equals, every one of them. All those brown people with accents, or different faces, the ones we make fun of when we get home. Guess what, they can hear that contempt just fine.#
Maybe their parents just got here, and they're just a little kid. #
Or maybe their families have been here for generations, restricted, lied to, held down, limited, swindled, bulldozed for on-ramps, crushed just one little bit more. Because what happened last generation just wasn't quite enough, we really needed to jam this shit home: you will never, ever be like the rest of us. And it scares us that you know that, so stay the fuck out of sight and for god's sake, shut the fuck up about shit. (Unless we can exploit that, because that is how we roll.)#
And these people are just as smart, and talented, and amazing as any of the rest of us, they are the rest of us, they are us, they are my people, and yours, too. We're all people.#
And there is a literal, actual, mass-slaughter atrocity war going on south of here, right this very fucking minute. It is engulfing entire nations, and it's due specifically to things America did in the past, and it's continuing due specifically to things we can change here, now, and nobody gives a fucking shit. Fuck you, slavery. You haven't ended. We can look right past you and what you made us all do to each other, what you are doing to us right now. We don't even see that shit.#
My inability to see this, how things really work, that was a failure of my education.#
I was taught that we are all in this together, working together to build something magical, something unique in history, a place where every single fucking person can do their best and NOBODY, not even the king of fucking England, can stop us when we get together. #
We may have fucked up in the past, with slavery and genocide, but there is a great arc toward justice. We will all muddle through together, and do the right thing.#
But I didn't know about stupidy then, so I couldn't see what was there around me, nor properly reason about what was coming.#
Stupidy is a concept and property which attempts to define and measure the amount of, basically, “wtf” in a social and physical environment. As connections between actors increase, the effective distance of the impact of their actions decreases. So individual actions are influenced by those further and further away (physically, socially, culturally, financially). #
And the more likely that any individual actor can have an inadvertently outsized influence. I am not talking about billionaires in that sentence. If you like, picture someone ten thousand miles away accidentally stomping a butterfly, and suddenly lizards are raining from the sky over here. That kind of wtf. We have no fucking idea what's coming.#
People self-select into communities, and in-group/out-group social pressures continually hive off new communities. This is not new, of course. But over time the number of splinter communities/belief systems will always increase. And the beliefs in those systems will always grow in intensity. (If they don’t, you go elsewhere.) Over time, criteria used to select will always get more stringent, which sharpens the division between one group and the next, and guarantees that there can never be global consensus reality.#
So a lot of the terms of the stupidy equations deal with social connections, and estimating the overall flux in belief grouping. There are also terms for things like information propagation latency and bandwidth, encoding, error/mutation rates. Stupidy theory also tries to account for toxicity—the likelihood that beliefs increase danger to outgroups, the likelihood that an advance in materials science will result in a better way to kill, or damage the environment.#
Stupidy theory isn’t just about information and belief systems, though sometimes it can sound that way. Stupidy tries to account for real-world instability, chaos, structure, the stock market, virus propagation, shipping delays, funerals. #
It’s also about individual numbskullery, and the ability of one person’s tragic flaws to be inflicted on billions of others. And it’s about the creation, adoption and propagation of all technologies, not just those for information transfer.#
But in addition to wtf, randomness, chaos, and interconnectedness, stupidy is also an attempt to describe just how wonderful life can be. #
The more things we humans do, the more amazing things we do, right along with the terrible. What makes that happen? Sometimes, it's good. Sometimes, life gets better.#
Why is that? What kinds of things, not a specific list of things, but what kinds of things? Is it options, restrictions, emotions, pets, trust, lasers, I don't know, nobody does, not yet—what makes life wonderful? #
And how do we make that happen more often, for more people?#
There is a branch of stupidy research which is basically the theory of mad scientists, lone gunmen, Oklahoma City bombers, even ordinary people who might participate in an outright assault on the very institutions they claim to support. #
It's also the study of the one-hit wonder, the pet rock, handlebar mustaches, and hand symbols that appear from nowhere. Suddenly we have a new thing, that never existed. It can actually save lives, and help people cry out, and be rescued from trouble. And it rises up on fucking TikTok.#
It's the study of prophets and madmen. Saviors. Terrorists. Ideas that change the world in one single instant because suddenly things snap into focus and, how did I not see that before? The branch of stupidy research I'm talking about here is not devoted to studying their worlds, their words, their ideas, that's a separate specialty. #
This branch is about how often, and where, and when, these things might arise. And what is the relationship between this new thing, and what is already here. Is it going to push back, is it going to build up, is it going to tear down, is it going to connect, is it going to drive apart. #
The kind of change can be reasoned about, even if you will never be able to predict the change itself. Sometimes, that change makes everything better. #
It turns out, it's remarkably useful to be able to describe the likelihood that one person, working for years, alone, to make something that is suddenly unleashed on the world and causes untold joy or havoc and destruction. We can't know who, but we can reason about how many, and what groups are vulnerable, both as victims, and as recruits. This is absolutely not a new problem, but now, we are just starting to get the tools that let us work toward understanding these things the way we do quantum electrodynamics or blackjack. #
As well as quantifying—not specifically, mind you, this is not Isaac Asimov's Foundation—the level of havoc and destruction we might be talking about. You can't know who the madman will hate, but it will be someone, and harm will be inflicted somehow. Stupidy helps you reason about the spread, the magnitude of the damage, both for the ideas and the physical results. More technology means more energy, more options, available for crazy shit to happen. Each of those things can be modeled and estimated.#
Because, it also turns out, even that lone madman is still tied in with the rest of us.#
It's not my fault the best measure of the potential for greatness and misery in humanity is something called "stupidy". That's just the way we are. And we love it!#
Stupidy helps us work through the details and implications of just how much, and how, we love, absolutely love being human. #
We love eating and fucking and making things and raising kids. We love talking about it. We love telling stories and hearing about what other humans are doing. We make art, we have newspapers and TV, we post on Twitter and Facebook. We copy things, by hand, letter by letter, in gold leaf. We put our hand to the wall and blow the ochre dust. We leave a mark.#
And every time we do that, some little bit of us is shared. #
Sometimes it's toxic, like when you hear that sharp crack of dad's leather belt, and you are four, and all you know is that it is time to scream in terror, and, soon, to scream in pain. You can't possibly understand, just what you, personally, could have done, to deserve the blows you know are coming, and are helpless to prevent. #
Sometimes it's just that little smile you can see in someone's eyes above their mask, the one that says, I see you and I understand, and it sucks, but it's OK, we're all here in this together.#
Every one of those moments leaves a mark. Every moment is a communication. #
We're all communicating, all the time, we're all telling stories. #
We're all inventing this reality we share. We make it up as we go along. #
Your thoughts didn't happen in a vacuum. I think the most incredible thing I have ever experienced in my entire life is watching my son's brain stitch itself together. He couldn't even focus his eyes when he got here! #
And at first, you can see where everything is coming from, because you're right there, all the time. When he stands in that little washbasin in the bathtub and says "pool", you know the actual pool he means! And the moment he first experienced it.#
But you can't hear, or see, or prevent, or change, or save, from everything. Experiences go in and mix with our genes, our environment, everything around us, our physicality. And right from the start, we turn into something completely new, something that cannot possibly have ever existed in the entire fucking universe, right there.#
That person you despise, that person that just really fucking pisses you off, that bitch that stole your idea, that asshole that almost got us all killed, the vortex that fired you and took your home and security, every single one of those fucking assholes, those fucking jerks, those goddamn shitheads, every one of them—#
—crying, so tiny, so helpless, so mushed up and red and wrinkly and squinty eyed, there in your arms, you can feel that blanket and oh my god, what if they just stop, what is keeping them going—those fingers, those fingers, those tiny, tiny fingers—how can they possibly be right here after all this we went through, and now it's all on me, I have to take care of this little fucking asshole— #
That's everybody. We all have to take care of that little fucking asshole, because that's us. #
Those fingers are so fragile. That little heart could stop at any moment.#
How big is a billion? Sometimes, I think of it as, we get a couple billion or so heartbeats, and then it stops.#
Every single heart that stops, every single agonizing, lonely, hurting, scared death, every single one. Every person whose flesh rotted away beneath them because they were trapped and couldn't escape, from chains or quadriplegia. Every person with a feeding tube. #
Every person on a ventilator that's their own goddamn fault, with metal and plastic jammed so far down their throat they need to be sedated or they'd tear it right out, screaming in agony. #
Every single person who just stops living and there's nothing there anymore, no light, no movement but the slow churn of rot and renewal—and those eyes staring blankly, or gouged out, or shattered, or vaporized, or full of tears— #
—or full of stars and wonder, right there, just at the very end, because finally, finally, finally, oh look can you see, just look—#
Every single one of those deaths matters, because someone held that little baby, at least once, and even if the person that held that infant is gone, now, and they too died lonely and forgotten, they still mattered, once. Just like me. Just like you. #
Do not listen to that voice in your head that says you do not matter. You matter. You are not alone. #
That voice is a lie, it is the lie the vortex will tell you so it can consume you and discard you. It is the story your head constructs to explain just why you deserve what life gave you. Fuck that.#
This is our sacred duty, this is literally the only thing that matters, listen to everybody who's ever said it with more talent and art and amazingness than I ever can: We have got to be kind.#
Some of the equations for working with stupidy come from biology. #
If you look at the earth at night, from high above, you can see the cities lit up, along the coasts, stretching inland, coalescing in spots, scattered elsewhere, looking exactly like mold. This is not accidental or mysterious, it's how things spread, whether fruiting spores, or taverns and pogroms and churches. #
This sight is what changes astronauts, by the way. It is what turns them into actual different people, when they come back down to earth. That mold could be scraped right off.#
The same relationships, once you describe them in symbols—and their relations to each other also described in symbols, this is what we mean by "math"—will also describe the rate at which a population of insects on an island 40 feet in diameter will diverge from, and occasionally be refreshed by, nearby tiny islands. #
We do this based on what's there now, how close the islands are, the temperature of the water, the air, the wind, everything else you can measure and quantify and hypothesize and reason about.#
We can't say, not yet anyway, specifically how that population might diverge, just what kind of crazy shit nature is going to get up to. But you can talk about things like how often new spores—or ideas, or terrified little bugs trapped on a floating leaf—make it over from place to place. And you can look again, and again. Which is science, just going over and taking another look at that island, and verifying the story someone else is trying to sell you about what is going on over there.#
You can also talk about, and describe, with symbols, things like competition—because each of the bugs has got to eat the same food, one way or another—and defenses, and weaponry, and fear. We spend a lot of time, a lot of science, looking at this stuff. This is economics, this is biology, this is the stock market, this is politics.#
This is mass murder, genocide, slaughter. That shit does not happen in a vacuum.#
Quite often, when humans have decided, this is a good time to kill each other in extremely large numbers, it's because we need physical stuff. It can be other things, like pure and simple greed, or tribal bigotry like religion, but most reliably, it is because we are starving. Our babies are dying, you can see the light going right out of their eyes. So we get the fuck up and go look for something better.#
At first, we could just go somewhere else, and there wouldn't be any other people, so we didn't have to worry about that, there is new land everywhere and we can go there and live our lives. I don't know how long that part lasted, but it probably wasn't more than a few tens of thousands of years at best, a blink of the eye, that occurred long in the distant past. Neanderthals were people, and whoever they pushed out, were people, too. If you can stand up, and walk around, and use tools, you are people, to me.#
If you can stand up, and take care of those who cannot stand, you are people.#
This is everyone now, everywhere you go, on the entire planet. Think of it. We move fast. We covered the globe in an astonishingly short time, and took up all the places. And then started working in on the people who were in our way, which is, of course, everyone. I am sorry, other people, but you are not my family, and I need what you have. #
Personally, I am really glad to be living here in the present, where there aren't any impending changes to where people can live. Two separate towns where I lived have been totally destroyed by historic natural disasters. I hid from the tornado that destroyed Xenia, and now Paradise has burned to the ground. Which is a completely normal thing that has always happened.#
None of this is even unique to humans! This is how nature works. Everything is in flux, all the time, and one of the reasons we are good at sticking around, is that we can adapt. We can adapt to anything. History is quite clear on this. #
But what we desperately need to adapt to—we are having trouble, but getting better, so slowly—is the fact that other people are family, too. That's the great arc toward justice I was referring to. #
The ability to treat someone you've never met—someone whom you have no idea how they see themselves, their hopes, their dreams, what they like to be called, their ability to stand on two feet or be trapped in a wheelchair, what they eat, how they talk, what they think, how they live—the ability to treat someone as completely alien as that, so completely different, literally, completely unknowable save for one thing—the ability to treat random fucking strangers with the same bit of kindness you'd extend to your own dog, or grandmother. That is what society is. #
That is government, that is politics, that is media, that is education, that is music, that is art, that is religion, that is philosophy, that is science, that is economics, that is everything. All that exists for one, single, purpose: To keep us from cutting people's heads off, and shitting down their throats, so nobody else can ever fucking come near our family ever again.#
Our ability to grasp this, and make things better, rather than worse, is based on our ability to know, and talk, and share.#
When I say that Mark Zuckerberg has specific, personal, individual responsibility for being a fucking asshole, I don't say it lightly. He was naked and screaming and terrified once. Maybe that's just another Friday night. I cannot judge those kinds of choices, because I am not him. I didn't grow up in his shoes, have his life. Because if I did—and this is absolutely fucking crucial—I'd be him. #
So where do I get off, calling out one individual human, when I've just gone on and on about how we have to be fucking kind? #
Because there is the slightest, tiniest possible chance that he might read this essay. I am not kidding, that is literally why I am writing this here right now. This is the delusional part. #
I want other people to read this. I want them to adopt the ideas. I want people to talk about them and run with them and make them into other ideas. I want people to talk about it until he can't ignore it. #
I want him, personally, to know what I, personally, think is important, and how important I think it is.#
I know this is extremely unlikely to happen in anything any ordinary person would try to describe as reality. But who knows? I have decided, I am done with ignoring impossible problems. Maybe I can make a difference. So—#
Mark Zuckerberg is, absolutely, a giant fucking asshole, and possibly the biggest in history. #
He could change that—if he thought about the rest of us for one fucking second, instead of himself.#
He could change that—with humility. A belief that you know more about what is right for the entire rest of humanity, all by yourself? This does not sound humble to me. And this situation, right here? Is literally what humility was invented for. Not all that other shaming shit we do. This, right here. #
So, Mark Zuckerberg could change his current asshole status, all by his lonesome. #
But if he does not, history will not treat him kindly for what he has done with what we have all given him.#
When you build something as big as Facebook, you can't do it by yourself. I've tried, you need other people. And the people who want to work on something like that, are, improbably, interested in what they do for a living. #
So in addition to hiring people that can solve the problems you set out for them—keep the machine running, keep the money flowing—those same people have often thought long and hard about just what they're building. #
And to build something like Facebook, you hire a lot of people.#
You hire software developers, artists, writers, groundskeepers, electricians, salespeople, sysadmins, cable-pullers, heavy equipment operators, pilots, plant managers, supervisors, planners, project managers, editors, videographers, grips, directors, admins, associates, interns, temps, contractors, agencies, doctors, and so, so many others. #
You also hire scientists. You'll hire these insatiably curious people, who are absolutely fanatical about the value of truth and communication and sharing. While they're looking into the things you tell them to—please make as many people as possible look at Facebook all the time, every day, constantly, ideally every single human in existence, thank you—they will be thinking about the things they are doing. #
They'll ponder, and hypothesize, and talk it over with each other. They'll design experiments and do studies, because this stuff is really fucking fascinating!#
And also, this is what scientists do, they're like ants, they can't help it. There is no such thing as just one ant, or just one scientist. Ask the tobacco industry, or the fine folks over in geological resource extraction. You hire a bunch of scientists and the next thing you know, they're telling you the actual truth about reality, whether you like it or not.#
So, it turns out, given a historic opportunity to poke around at things like stupidy, even if they didn't call it that, a bunch of scientists are going to do a shit ton of research on it. And, being human, they'll notice stuff. #
And, being human, they'll try to point it out. To the only person who can possibly do anything with it: Mark fucking Zuckerberg.#
He owns Facebook, he controls it, he decides its policies, he decides its name. He decides how we can even refer to it, personally. A thing, used every day by billions of people! A structure built on the efforts, the experiences and joyful creativity and bitching and everything else, of billions of people.#
He has consistently, single-mindedly, dedicated all his efforts to increasing his own power and control, and has deliberately decided, fuck science, fuck humanity, fuck all you motherfuckers. I am getting mine, and I am going to keep getting mine, forever, and you cannot ever, ever, stop me.#
He knows, first-hand, in ways we cannot, how each of his own decisions has led to lies and anger and hatred and death. He has the actual science to back it up. And he does not give one single, solitary, fuck. He likes it that way.#
He likes it that way. This is what he wants. Given a choice between his power and the right thing, he has always, always, made the right choice for him, and the wrong choice for the rest of us. #
There are a lot of shitty people in business who have done or are doing shitty things because they're fucking assholes, and some of them may even later do good things. I'm not talking about them, because, while what Bill Gates did was greedy and vicious and predatory and harmful, in the end, it was just Windows, and technology moves on, it always does. IBM used to be everything, then it wasn't, then it was, then it wasn't, and now they make robots that play Jeopardy. #
But Facebook is unique. It is the first time in history we've had a chance to take a look at stupidy, good and hard, with lots and lots of real fucking numbers. We have a unique opportunity to examine stupidy, and learn how it works, in real life, and what it can do, and how fast it grows. Again, I am not talking just about the toxic stuff. #
The study of control exerted by one person, how that propagates throughout society, that's part of stupidy research, too. While you can't group together the actions of dictators, mob bosses, preachers, billionaires, and other riff-raff, you can reason about how many, and at what level, and in what relationships to others, these actors occur. #
And you can reason about the sorts of things people always do, every fucking time, every single fucking time, they get some money or power, even if you don't know, specifically, the things that technology, or their social connections, will enable them to get up to. #
Like entropy, stupidy increases. More connections, faster idea propagation, the higher probability that wonderful ideas and toxic ideas are going to spring up and then be given room to grow and mutate and propagate just like COVID. #
We can't know what toxic beliefs—or amazing things!—are going to happen, but we are right at the historic beginning of getting the tools that will let us get to a real consensus about how to talk about and deal with these things, together, all of us, as a society, because these are incredibly hard problems, impossibly hard, and they affect each one of us and the way the future is going to turn out.#
We could be working together, right now, building and learning, and making mistakes, and trying to do the right thing. And it's his, personal, specific, individual decisions that made Facebook what it is, and what it means to us, and what we are allowed to investigate, and regulate, and make better for everyone. #
Through all of it, he's been right there, trying to crush the truth about what Facebook is doing, and therefore what he is doing, and tell us all to shut the fuck up and get back to giving him all our time, attention and money. He could make different choices, ones that help the rest of us, rather than just himself.#
Because the other part about Facebook, is that it is fucking amazing. #
We need it! All that love, all that joy, all that stuff about being human, all that increases as stupidy increases, too! #
I've focused on the bad here, but that's only because the bad right now is pretty bad, and I'm ticked, because the good could be so incredibly amazing. #
I still believe increasing global communication could help us all be better. I believe it. I believe it, I believe it, I believe it I believe it I believe it I believe it, and it will happen, eventually. #
If it hadn't been Facebook, it would have been something else. I want to be extremely clear about this.#
Mark Zuckerberg is actually not special, not in the way he thinks. Given the power he exerts, if you compare the amount of talent, versus luck and being in the right place at the right time, and standing on the shoulders of so, so many others, Mark Zuckerberg is basically the guy who is rich because he was standing outside, and had a bucket handy, when it started raining money. It can't be any other way, it takes too many people, too many connections. #
In some hypothetical other reality, both he and Facebook have got different names. #
And Facebook won't last forever, we will keep at this whole communication thing, iterating and trying new things, making new networks and ways of being human. #
But our world is suffering, right now, and he could make different decisions, and maybe, just maybe, he'll listen, so—#
Exploring the intricacies of why, to effect actual change in this situation, this essay depends on the choices of just one individual human—and how you might model, and reason about, the transformations to reality which you'd need to apply, to effect a change in that—are for another Sunday post. Even better, an exercise for the reader. #
With apologies to Smullyan, this is not the post referenced in the title of this post. That one's going up in a few hours, and when you read what it's about, and what I'm really trying do with it, you are going to say to yourself, "Huh, so that's what full-blown delusion looks like." No joke.#
It'll be about names, among other things. I recently discovered the perfect name for something, its creator agreed, and now, forever, that thing will be called Drumkit. I spent five minutes thinking about it, and suddenly I have shaped human history, without even trying. I am not going to lie, that feels pretty good. I will probably chase that high for the rest of my days.#
I spend a lot of time thinking about names, actually. I've been paid cash money to think up names, I have written software to help generate names, that's how much I think about names. I'm also lazy and stupidly literal-minded, so sometimes I will base an entire series of novels around chasing a goal which the characters actually call a "macguffin", and in fact, are being chased around by THINGs, and, well, there are some other names in there that I'm not quite ready to disclose yet, because I think they are both brilliant, and so, so, stupid, like most of the things I come up with.#
That project, in particular, is pretty emblematic of everything else that goes into making up the blog part of what I'm doing. It's something I've been working on for years, since April, 1994, actually. There's a particular concept around which everything revolves, and I've spent countless hours thinking it over through the years. In particular, there are a couple key notions, and to work with them, identify them, use them, I've given them names. #
None of this work is really public, yet, but I've talked it over with coworkers (ok, dropped into unrelated contexts for no good reason, but still), and awhile back, one of them suggested a name for something. And this name is perfect. It is obvious. It is so clearly the right name, that you cannot deny it. You will agree how blind I was not to see it. This name is so fucking perfect, I haven't even decided what it actually refers to yet! In a project I have thought about literally every day, in one form or another, for three decades, it was staring me in the face, and I never saw it.#
I wonder how many other things there are like that.#
Anyway, I'm not ready to write about that project yet. Instead I'm going to turn to the Loaf Question. Which I'm also not ready to write about yet, so I'm going to keep it a mystery what that project actually is referring to. If you are curious, go read the forum thread. It is not long, it is presented as a puzzle, and if you know anything about the history of computing, you will absolutely recognize the project and the madmen I'm going on about. No joke.#
But since I know you are one lazy motherfucker, I am going to paste in one little bit about names, because names are on my mind lately.#
As I've mentioned before, the creators of the contraption were extravagant with the names they bestowed on the various parts of the beast. Snarf. Ent. Turtle. Flock. Bert. Orgl. Crum. Waldo. Enfilade. And, of course, Loaf, among many, many others. #
These names got coined and evolved over four decades of development. When they built a new thing, they gave it a new name, partly to help solidify its literal uniqueness in the world. So, Fossils and Recorders and OTrees and HTrees and the Granfilade and the Poomfilade and the Bert Canopy and the Sensor Canopy and the DagWood.#
By the time they began work on the version of the beast I'm currently exploring, I think they started wondering how well these names would resonate with those who they hoped would use their creation to build even more wonderful things. So they changed some of the names once again. Orgl became Edition, Bert became Work. #
It's a little sad to see those names go by the wayside since they'd been used for so long, but I think saying you have an Edition of a Work is much clearer than saying you've got an Orgl of a Bert. And anyway, the names live on via the internal structures of the thing, so that's nice. (For example, we still have OrglRoots and the Bert Canopy.)#
However, in at least one case, I'm thinking about turning back the clock. #
This project has for decades had the concept of an infinitely expandable number space. Like 1.25.0.0.0.33333.92.42.2021.0.5. And the math to go with it—you can take two of these things and add them, subtract them, do all sorts of nifty things with them. They've long been used to carve out a way of addressing the smallest chunks of the secrets given to the contraption, even across multiple machines. #
When I was much, much younger than I am now, I read about these mystical things and loved them. Part of the reason was what they were called: "tumblers." The name evokes many things, from acrobatics to the clicking of the inner workings of a lock (or a bank vault!) as the key is rotated into place. The idea that something so serious and powerful could have such a playful name appealed to me.#
So what are they called today? "Sequence." Um. Yeah, sequence, whatever. Sure, the literature defines the term as "an infinite sequence of integers," so I suppose the name makes some sense.#
When I was a kid, and I first learned about things like human sacrifices and slavery, I would try to imagine it. What would it be like to live in a place, where everybody around you thinks, "This incredibly insane idea is perfectly valid and natural." #
And people are tied up and torn apart and set on fire for saying things or, really, just being different. And people walk around thinking that literally owning a person is, like, totally fine. #
So, I would say to myself, I am really glad that I am growing up here in the present, where people are not insane.#
Later, of course, the present turned into the future, and we're all living here now. And nobody has any insane belief systems that result in the voluntary death for those that hold those beliefs. Which, if they did exist, those imaginary beliefs would have come from literally nowhere, thin air, because who could have predicted?#
And there are only approximately eleventy trillion guns, which is one giant fucking shotgun up on there on the mantle for the third act. And while we all wait for Donald Trump to order up, mob boss style, that final act of our great nation, people will literally get up and defend the "right" to terrorize, and intimidate, and especially, retain the capability at all times to murder as many people as possible. At any given moment, in any social situation, as fast as possible. #
Because you just never know when a whole lot of people might need killing. I mean, someone might ask you to wear a mask. Or treat them with basic human respect. #
And white America is dealing quite rationally with the fact that nearly everybody that is out there in the cold and rain, operating a leaf blower, everybody in the back of the restaurant, everybody working so hard and trying so desperately to just have families and children, practically every one of them has darker skin, and is paid and treated like shit. Even the ones working indoors, our doctors, our teachers, our engineers, our reporters, all the professionals white people will pretend are social equals, every one of them. All those brown people with accents, or different faces, the ones we make fun of when we get home. Guess what, they can hear that contempt just fine.#
Maybe their parents just got here, and they're just a little kid. #
Or maybe their families have been here for generations, restricted, lied to, held down, limited, swindled, bulldozed for on-ramps, crushed just one little bit more. Because what happened last generation just wasn't quite enough, we really needed to jam this shit home: you will never, ever be like the rest of us. And it scares us that you know that, so stay the fuck out of sight and for god's sake, shut the fuck up about shit. (Unless we can exploit that, because that is how we roll.)#
And these people are just as smart, and talented, and amazing as any of the rest of us, they are the rest of us, they are us, they are my people, and yours, too. We're all people.#
And there is a literal, actual, mass-slaughter atrocity war going on south of here, right this very fucking minute. It is engulfing entire nations, and it's due specifically to things America did in the past, and it's continuing due specifically to things we can change here, now, and nobody gives a fucking shit. Fuck you, slavery. You haven't ended. We can look right past you and what you made us all do to each other, what you are doing to us right now. We don't even see that shit.#
My inability to see this, how things really work, that was a failure of my education.#
I was taught that we are all in this together, working together to build something magical, something unique in history, a place where every single fucking person can do their best and NOBODY, not even the king of fucking England, can stop us when we get together. #
We may have fucked up in the past, with slavery and genocide, but there is a great arc toward justice. We will all muddle through together, and do the right thing.#
But I didn't know about stupidy then, so I couldn't see what was there around me, nor properly reason about what was coming.#
Stupidy is a concept and property which attempts to define and measure the amount of, basically, “wtf” in a social and physical environment. As connections between actors increase, the effective distance of the impact of their actions decreases. So individual actions are influenced by those further and further away (physically, socially, culturally, financially). #
And the more likely that any individual actor can have an inadvertently outsized influence. I am not talking about billionaires in that sentence. If you like, picture someone ten thousand miles away accidentally stomping a butterfly, and suddenly lizards are raining from the sky over here. That kind of wtf. We have no fucking idea what's coming.#
People self-select into communities, and in-group/out-group social pressures continually hive off new communities. This is not new, of course. But over time the number of splinter communities/belief systems will always increase. And the beliefs in those systems will always grow in intensity. (If they don’t, you go elsewhere.) Over time, criteria used to select will always get more stringent, which sharpens the division between one group and the next, and guarantees that there can never be global consensus reality.#
So a lot of the terms of the stupidy equations deal with social connections, and estimating the overall flux in belief grouping. There are also terms for things like information propagation latency and bandwidth, encoding, error/mutation rates. Stupidy theory also tries to account for toxicity—the likelihood that beliefs increase danger to outgroups, the likelihood that an advance in materials science will result in a better way to kill, or damage the environment.#
Stupidy theory isn’t just about information and belief systems, though sometimes it can sound that way. Stupidy tries to account for real-world instability, chaos, structure, the stock market, virus propagation, shipping delays, funerals. #
It’s also about individual numbskullery, and the ability of one person’s tragic flaws to be inflicted on billions of others. And it’s about the creation, adoption and propagation of all technologies, not just those for information transfer.#
But in addition to wtf, randomness, chaos, and interconnectedness, stupidy is also an attempt to describe just how wonderful life can be. #
The more things we humans do, the more amazing things we do, right along with the terrible. What makes that happen? Sometimes, it's good. Sometimes, life gets better.#
Why is that? What kinds of things, not a specific list of things, but what kinds of things? Is it options, restrictions, emotions, pets, trust, lasers, I don't know, nobody does, not yet—what makes life wonderful? #
And how do we make that happen more often, for more people?#
There is a branch of stupidy research which is basically the theory of mad scientists, lone gunmen, Oklahoma City bombers, even ordinary people who might participate in an outright assault on the very institutions they claim to support. #
It's also the study of the one-hit wonder, the pet rock, handlebar mustaches, and hand symbols that appear from nowhere. Suddenly we have a new thing, that never existed. It can actually save lives, and help people cry out, and be rescued from trouble. And it rises up on fucking TikTok.#
It's the study of prophets and madmen. Saviors. Terrorists. Ideas that change the world in one single instant because suddenly things snap into focus and, how did I not see that before? The branch of stupidy research I'm talking about here is not devoted to studying their worlds, their words, their ideas, that's a separate specialty. #
This branch is about how often, and where, and when, these things might arise. And what is the relationship between this new thing, and what is already here. Is it going to push back, is it going to build up, is it going to tear down, is it going to connect, is it going to drive apart. #
The kind of change can be reasoned about, even if you will never be able to predict the change itself. Sometimes, that change makes everything better. #
It turns out, it's remarkably useful to be able to describe the likelihood that one person, working for years, alone, to make something that is suddenly unleashed on the world and causes untold joy or havoc and destruction. We can't know who, but we can reason about how many, and what groups are vulnerable, both as victims, and as recruits. This is absolutely not a new problem, but now, we are just starting to get the tools that let us work toward understanding these things the way we do quantum electrodynamics or blackjack. #
As well as quantifying—not specifically, mind you, this is not Isaac Asimov's Foundation—the level of havoc and destruction we might be talking about. You can't know who the madman will hate, but it will be someone, and harm will be inflicted somehow. Stupidy helps you reason about the spread, the magnitude of the damage, both for the ideas and the physical results. More technology means more energy, more options, available for crazy shit to happen. Each of those things can be modeled and estimated.#
Because, it also turns out, even that lone madman is still tied in with the rest of us.#
It's not my fault the best measure of the potential for greatness and misery in humanity is something called "stupidy". That's just the way we are. And we love it!#
Stupidy helps us work through the details and implications of just how much, and how, we love, absolutely love being human. #
We love eating and fucking and making things and raising kids. We love talking about it. We love telling stories and hearing about what other humans are doing. We make art, we have newspapers and TV, we post on Twitter and Facebook. We copy things, by hand, letter by letter, in gold leaf. We put our hand to the wall and blow the ochre dust. We leave a mark.#
And every time we do that, some little bit of us is shared. #
Sometimes it's toxic, like when you hear that sharp crack of dad's leather belt, and you are four, and all you know is that it is time to scream in terror, and, soon, to scream in pain. You can't possibly understand, just what you, personally, could have done, to deserve the blows you know are coming, and are helpless to prevent. #
Sometimes it's just that little smile you can see in someone's eyes above their mask, the one that says, I see you and I understand, and it sucks, but it's OK, we're all here in this together.#
Every one of those moments leaves a mark. Every moment is a communication. #
We're all communicating, all the time, we're all telling stories. #
We're all inventing this reality we share. We make it up as we go along. #
Your thoughts didn't happen in a vacuum. I think the most incredible thing I have ever experienced in my entire life is watching my son's brain stitch itself together. He couldn't even focus his eyes when he got here! #
And at first, you can see where everything is coming from, because you're right there, all the time. When he stands in that little washbasin in the bathtub and says "pool", you know the actual pool he means! And the moment he first experienced it.#
But you can't hear, or see, or prevent, or change, or save, from everything. Experiences go in and mix with our genes, our environment, everything around us, our physicality. And right from the start, we turn into something completely new, something that cannot possibly have ever existed in the entire fucking universe, right there.#
That person you despise, that person that just really fucking pisses you off, that bitch that stole your idea, that asshole that almost got us all killed, the vortex that fired you and took your home and security, every single one of those fucking assholes, those fucking jerks, those goddamn shitheads, every one of them—#
—crying, so tiny, so helpless, so mushed up and red and wrinkly and squinty eyed, there in your arms, you can feel that blanket and oh my god, what if they just stop, what is keeping them going—those fingers, those fingers, those tiny, tiny fingers—how can they possibly be right here after all this we went through, and now it's all on me, I have to take care of this little fucking asshole— #
That's everybody. We all have to take care of that little fucking asshole, because that's us. #
Those fingers are so fragile. That little heart could stop at any moment.#
How big is a billion? Sometimes, I think of it as, we get a couple billion or so heartbeats, and then it stops.#
Every single heart that stops, every single agonizing, lonely, hurting, scared death, every single one. Every person whose flesh rotted away beneath them because they were trapped and couldn't escape, from chains or quadriplegia. Every person with a feeding tube. #
Every person on a ventilator that's their own goddamn fault, with metal and plastic jammed so far down their throat they need to be sedated or they'd tear it right out, screaming in agony. #
Every single person who just stops living and there's nothing there anymore, no light, no movement but the slow churn of rot and renewal—and those eyes staring blankly, or gouged out, or shattered, or vaporized, or full of tears— #
—or full of stars and wonder, right there, just at the very end, because finally, finally, finally, oh look can you see, just look—#
Every single one of those deaths matters, because someone held that little baby, at least once, and even if the person that held that infant is gone, now, and they too died lonely and forgotten, they still mattered, once. Just like me. Just like you. #
Do not listen to that voice in your head that says you do not matter. You matter. You are not alone. #
That voice is a lie, it is the lie the vortex will tell you so it can consume you and discard you. It is the story your head constructs to explain just why you deserve what life gave you. Fuck that.#
This is our sacred duty, this is literally the only thing that matters, listen to everybody who's ever said it with more talent and art and amazingness than I ever can: We have got to be kind.#
Some of the equations for working with stupidy come from biology. #
If you look at the earth at night, from high above, you can see the cities lit up, along the coasts, stretching inland, coalescing in spots, scattered elsewhere, looking exactly like mold. This is not accidental or mysterious, it's how things spread, whether fruiting spores, or taverns and pogroms and churches. #
This sight is what changes astronauts, by the way. It is what turns them into actual different people, when they come back down to earth. That mold could be scraped right off.#
The same relationships, once you describe them in symbols—and their relations to each other also described in symbols, this is what we mean by "math"—will also describe the rate at which a population of insects on an island 40 feet in diameter will diverge from, and occasionally be refreshed by, nearby tiny islands. #
We do this based on what's there now, how close the islands are, the temperature of the water, the air, the wind, everything else you can measure and quantify and hypothesize and reason about.#
We can't say, not yet anyway, specifically how that population might diverge, just what kind of crazy shit nature is going to get up to. But you can talk about things like how often new spores—or ideas, or terrified little bugs trapped on a floating leaf—make it over from place to place. And you can look again, and again. Which is science, just going over and taking another look at that island, and verifying the story someone else is trying to sell you about what is going on over there.#
You can also talk about, and describe, with symbols, things like competition—because each of the bugs has got to eat the same food, one way or another—and defenses, and weaponry, and fear. We spend a lot of time, a lot of science, looking at this stuff. This is economics, this is biology, this is the stock market, this is politics.#
This is mass murder, genocide, slaughter. That shit does not happen in a vacuum.#
Quite often, when humans have decided, this is a good time to kill each other in extremely large numbers, it's because we need physical stuff. It can be other things, like pure and simple greed, or tribal bigotry like religion, but most reliably, it is because we are starving. Our babies are dying, you can see the light going right out of their eyes. So we get the fuck up and go look for something better.#
At first, we could just go somewhere else, and there wouldn't be any other people, so we didn't have to worry about that, there is new land everywhere and we can go there and live our lives. I don't know how long that part lasted, but it probably wasn't more than a few tens of thousands of years at best, a blink of the eye, that occurred long in the distant past. Neanderthals were people, and whoever they pushed out, were people, too. If you can stand up, and walk around, and use tools, you are people, to me.#
If you can stand up, and take care of those who cannot stand, you are people.#
This is everyone now, everywhere you go, on the entire planet. Think of it. We move fast. We covered the globe in an astonishingly short time, and took up all the places. And then started working in on the people who were in our way, which is, of course, everyone. I am sorry, other people, but you are not my family, and I need what you have. #
Personally, I am really glad to be living here in the present, where there aren't any impending changes to where people can live. Two separate towns where I lived have been totally destroyed by historic natural disasters. I hid from the tornado that destroyed Xenia, and now Paradise has burned to the ground. Which is a completely normal thing that has always happened.#
None of this is even unique to humans! This is how nature works. Everything is in flux, all the time, and one of the reasons we are good at sticking around, is that we can adapt. We can adapt to anything. History is quite clear on this. #
But what we desperately need to adapt to—we are having trouble, but getting better, so slowly—is the fact that other people are family, too. That's the great arc toward justice I was referring to. #
The ability to treat someone you've never met—someone whom you have no idea how they see themselves, their hopes, their dreams, what they like to be called, their ability to stand on two feet or be trapped in a wheelchair, what they eat, how they talk, what they think, how they live—the ability to treat someone as completely alien as that, so completely different, literally, completely unknowable save for one thing—the ability to treat random fucking strangers with the same bit of kindness you'd extend to your own dog, or grandmother. That is what society is. #
That is government, that is politics, that is media, that is education, that is music, that is art, that is religion, that is philosophy, that is science, that is economics, that is everything. All that exists for one, single, purpose: To keep us from cutting people's heads off, and shitting down their throats, so nobody else can ever fucking come near our family ever again.#
Our ability to grasp this, and make things better, rather than worse, is based on our ability to know, and talk, and share.#
When I say that Mark Zuckerberg has specific, personal, individual responsibility for being a fucking asshole, I don't say it lightly. He was naked and screaming and terrified once. Maybe that's just another Friday night. I cannot judge those kinds of choices, because I am not him. I didn't grow up in his shoes, have his life. Because if I did—and this is absolutely fucking crucial—I'd be him. #
So where do I get off, calling out one individual human, when I've just gone on and on about how we have to be fucking kind? #
Because there is the slightest, tiniest possible chance that he might read this essay. I am not kidding, that is literally why I am writing this here right now. This is the delusional part. #
I want other people to read this. I want them to adopt the ideas. I want people to talk about them and run with them and make them into other ideas. I want people to talk about it until he can't ignore it. #
I want him, personally, to know what I, personally, think is important, and how important I think it is.#
I know this is extremely unlikely to happen in anything any ordinary person would try to describe as reality. But who knows? I have decided, I am done with ignoring impossible problems. Maybe I can make a difference. So—#
Mark Zuckerberg is, absolutely, a giant fucking asshole, and possibly the biggest in history. #
He could change that—if he thought about the rest of us for one fucking second, instead of himself.#
He could change that—with humility. A belief that you know more about what is right for the entire rest of humanity, all by yourself? This does not sound humble to me. And this situation, right here? Is literally what humility was invented for. Not all that other shaming shit we do. This, right here. #
So, Mark Zuckerberg could change his current asshole status, all by his lonesome. #
But if he does not, history will not treat him kindly for what he has done with what we have all given him.#
When you build something as big as Facebook, you can't do it by yourself. I've tried, you need other people. And the people who want to work on something like that, are, improbably, interested in what they do for a living. #
So in addition to hiring people that can solve the problems you set out for them—keep the machine running, keep the money flowing—those same people have often thought long and hard about just what they're building. #
And to build something like Facebook, you hire a lot of people.#
You hire software developers, artists, writers, groundskeepers, electricians, salespeople, sysadmins, cable-pullers, heavy equipment operators, pilots, plant managers, supervisors, planners, project managers, editors, videographers, grips, directors, admins, associates, interns, temps, contractors, agencies, doctors, and so, so many others. #
You also hire scientists. You'll hire these insatiably curious people, who are absolutely fanatical about the value of truth and communication and sharing. While they're looking into the things you tell them to—please make as many people as possible look at Facebook all the time, every day, constantly, ideally every single human in existence, thank you—they will be thinking about the things they are doing. #
They'll ponder, and hypothesize, and talk it over with each other. They'll design experiments and do studies, because this stuff is really fucking fascinating!#
And also, this is what scientists do, they're like ants, they can't help it. There is no such thing as just one ant, or just one scientist. Ask the tobacco industry, or the fine folks over in geological resource extraction. You hire a bunch of scientists and the next thing you know, they're telling you the actual truth about reality, whether you like it or not.#
So, it turns out, given a historic opportunity to poke around at things like stupidy, even if they didn't call it that, a bunch of scientists are going to do a shit ton of research on it. And, being human, they'll notice stuff. #
And, being human, they'll try to point it out. To the only person who can possibly do anything with it: Mark fucking Zuckerberg.#
He owns Facebook, he controls it, he decides its policies, he decides its name. He decides how we can even refer to it, personally. A thing, used every day by billions of people! A structure built on the efforts, the experiences and joyful creativity and bitching and everything else, of billions of people.#
He has consistently, single-mindedly, dedicated all his efforts to increasing his own power and control, and has deliberately decided, fuck science, fuck humanity, fuck all you motherfuckers. I am getting mine, and I am going to keep getting mine, forever, and you cannot ever, ever, stop me.#
He knows, first-hand, in ways we cannot, how each of his own decisions has led to lies and anger and hatred and death. He has the actual science to back it up. And he does not give one single, solitary, fuck. He likes it that way.#
He likes it that way. This is what he wants. Given a choice between his power and the right thing, he has always, always, made the right choice for him, and the wrong choice for the rest of us. #
There are a lot of shitty people in business who have done or are doing shitty things because they're fucking assholes, and some of them may even later do good things. I'm not talking about them, because, while what Bill Gates did was greedy and vicious and predatory and harmful, in the end, it was just Windows, and technology moves on, it always does. IBM used to be everything, then it wasn't, then it was, then it wasn't, and now they make robots that play Jeopardy. #
But Facebook is unique. It is the first time in history we've had a chance to take a look at stupidy, good and hard, with lots and lots of real fucking numbers. We have a unique opportunity to examine stupidy, and learn how it works, in real life, and what it can do, and how fast it grows. Again, I am not talking just about the toxic stuff. #
The study of control exerted by one person, how that propagates throughout society, that's part of stupidy research, too. While you can't group together the actions of dictators, mob bosses, preachers, billionaires, and other riff-raff, you can reason about how many, and at what level, and in what relationships to others, these actors occur. #
And you can reason about the sorts of things people always do, every fucking time, every single fucking time, they get some money or power, even if you don't know, specifically, the things that technology, or their social connections, will enable them to get up to. #
Like entropy, stupidy increases. More connections, faster idea propagation, the higher probability that wonderful ideas and toxic ideas are going to spring up and then be given room to grow and mutate and propagate just like COVID. #
We can't know what toxic beliefs—or amazing things!—are going to happen, but we are right at the historic beginning of getting the tools that will let us get to a real consensus about how to talk about and deal with these things, together, all of us, as a society, because these are incredibly hard problems, impossibly hard, and they affect each one of us and the way the future is going to turn out.#
We could be working together, right now, building and learning, and making mistakes, and trying to do the right thing. And it's his, personal, specific, individual decisions that made Facebook what it is, and what it means to us, and what we are allowed to investigate, and regulate, and make better for everyone. #
Through all of it, he's been right there, trying to crush the truth about what Facebook is doing, and therefore what he is doing, and tell us all to shut the fuck up and get back to giving him all our time, attention and money. He could make different choices, ones that help the rest of us, rather than just himself.#
Because the other part about Facebook, is that it is fucking amazing. #
We need it! All that love, all that joy, all that stuff about being human, all that increases as stupidy increases, too! #
I've focused on the bad here, but that's only because the bad right now is pretty bad, and I'm ticked, because the good could be so incredibly amazing. #
I still believe increasing global communication could help us all be better. I believe it. I believe it, I believe it, I believe it I believe it I believe it I believe it, and it will happen, eventually. #
If it hadn't been Facebook, it would have been something else. I want to be extremely clear about this.#
Mark Zuckerberg is actually not special, not in the way he thinks. Given the power he exerts, if you compare the amount of talent, versus luck and being in the right place at the right time, and standing on the shoulders of so, so many others, Mark Zuckerberg is basically the guy who is rich because he was standing outside, and had a bucket handy, when it started raining money. It can't be any other way, it takes too many people, too many connections. #
In some hypothetical other reality, both he and Facebook have got different names. #
And Facebook won't last forever, we will keep at this whole communication thing, iterating and trying new things, making new networks and ways of being human. #
But our world is suffering, right now, and he could make different decisions, and maybe, just maybe, he'll listen, so—#
Exploring the intricacies of why, to effect actual change in this situation, this essay depends on the choices of just one individual human—and how you might model, and reason about, the transformations to reality which you'd need to apply, to effect a change in that—are for another Sunday post. Even better, an exercise for the reader. #
With apologies to Smullyan, this is not the post referenced in the title of this post. That one's going up in a few hours, and when you read what it's about, and what I'm really trying do with it, you are going to say to yourself, "Huh, so that's what full-blown delusion looks like." No joke.#
It'll be about names, among other things. I recently discovered the perfect name for something, its creator agreed, and now, forever, that thing will be called Drumkit. I spent five minutes thinking about it, and suddenly I have shaped human history, without even trying. I am not going to lie, that feels pretty good. I will probably chase that high for the rest of my days.#
I spend a lot of time thinking about names, actually. I've been paid cash money to think up names, I have written software to help generate names, that's how much I think about names. I'm also lazy and stupidly literal-minded, so sometimes I will base an entire series of novels around chasing a goal which the characters actually call a "macguffin", and in fact, are being chased around by THINGs, and, well, there are some other names in there that I'm not quite ready to disclose yet, because I think they are both brilliant, and so, so, stupid, like most of the things I come up with.#
That project, in particular, is pretty emblematic of everything else that goes into making up the blog part of what I'm doing. It's something I've been working on for years, since April, 1994, actually. There's a particular concept around which everything revolves, and I've spent countless hours thinking it over through the years. In particular, there are a couple key notions, and to work with them, identify them, use them, I've given them names. #
None of this work is really public, yet, but I've talked it over with coworkers (ok, dropped into unrelated contexts for no good reason, but still), and awhile back, one of them suggested a name for something. And this name is perfect. It is obvious. It is so clearly the right name, that you cannot deny it. You will agree how blind I was not to see it. This name is so fucking perfect, I haven't even decided what it actually refers to yet! In a project I have thought about literally every day, in one form or another, for three decades, it was staring me in the face, and I never saw it.#
I wonder how many other things there are like that.#
Anyway, I'm not ready to write about that project yet. Instead I'm going to turn to the Loaf Question. Which I'm also not ready to write about yet, so I'm going to keep it a mystery what that project actually is referring to. If you are curious, go read the forum thread. It is not long, it is presented as a puzzle, and if you know anything about the history of computing, you will absolutely recognize the project and the madmen I'm going on about. No joke.#
But since I know you are one lazy motherfucker, I am going to paste in one little bit about names, because names are on my mind lately.#
As I've mentioned before, the creators of the contraption were extravagant with the names they bestowed on the various parts of the beast. Snarf. Ent. Turtle. Flock. Bert. Orgl. Crum. Waldo. Enfilade. And, of course, Loaf, among many, many others. #
These names got coined and evolved over four decades of development. When they built a new thing, they gave it a new name, partly to help solidify its literal uniqueness in the world. So, Fossils and Recorders and OTrees and HTrees and the Granfilade and the Poomfilade and the Bert Canopy and the Sensor Canopy and the DagWood.#
By the time they began work on the version of the beast I'm currently exploring, I think they started wondering how well these names would resonate with those who they hoped would use their creation to build even more wonderful things. So they changed some of the names once again. Orgl became Edition, Bert became Work. #
It's a little sad to see those names go by the wayside since they'd been used for so long, but I think saying you have an Edition of a Work is much clearer than saying you've got an Orgl of a Bert. And anyway, the names live on via the internal structures of the thing, so that's nice. (For example, we still have OrglRoots and the Bert Canopy.)#
However, in at least one case, I'm thinking about turning back the clock. #
This project has for decades had the concept of an infinitely expandable number space. Like 1.25.0.0.0.33333.92.42.2021.0.5. And the math to go with it—you can take two of these things and add them, subtract them, do all sorts of nifty things with them. They've long been used to carve out a way of addressing the smallest chunks of the secrets given to the contraption, even across multiple machines. #
When I was much, much younger than I am now, I read about these mystical things and loved them. Part of the reason was what they were called: "tumblers." The name evokes many things, from acrobatics to the clicking of the inner workings of a lock (or a bank vault!) as the key is rotated into place. The idea that something so serious and powerful could have such a playful name appealed to me.#
So what are they called today? "Sequence." Um. Yeah, sequence, whatever. Sure, the literature defines the term as "an infinite sequence of integers," so I suppose the name makes some sense.#