automata

As we hurdle into a near-certain future of ultra-capitalistic technocratic climate chaos hell, sometimes I like to stop and think about certain scenarios.

So, here’s the premise:

Let’s say that I set out one day and decided that I would try to minimize the revenue I generated for businesses in all my day-to-day actions and activities. How much could I reduce? Would it make a difference if a large group of people started doing that?

Here onwards, this post will serve as a sort of brain-dump for ways to go about this “RevMin’ing.”

The first way that came to mind when I began thinking about this was food. I think I spend a decent amount of income, typically around 1/5-1/6 of everything in our household, is spent on food of some sort. Some of this is rather unavoidable. Our baby is on formula and it’s not feasible for some reasons to breastfeed, so my wife and I use formula. I don’t think we can safely make it at home, so we are basically forced to buy it or beg for it. We could do more begging, but that doesn’t necessarily reduce revenue in the long run because a lot of so-called non-profits are using kickbacks from the government for their giving in order to pay their employees and fuel big bonuses for their executives. Anyhow, let’s chalk it up to a necessary expenditure.

Well, what about everything else? It would take some upfront work, but I think we could probably grow some of our own food. We have a very small yard, primarily dominated by dogshit from neighbors, so we probably couldn’t grow much here “on-site” as it were, but there’s probably a community garden someplace that we could use. If we were organized a bit more, we could make trips and have some sort of little micro-ag system in place and mimic how large-plot farms do their thing, on a smaller scale. I’ve often heard that it takes a total of three acres to be completely independent when growing one’s own food. I’m not sure how accurate that is but suffice to say I don’t think we could easily manage three acres worth of community garden space without driving a lot. An acre is roughly a square with 210ft sides. So, it’s quite large. Three acres would produce a lot of food, indeed, but then there’s the tasks involved in such a thing. Tilling, planting, harvesting, drying, storing, prepping, cooking, etc. It’s a complex operation and running it on two adults betwixt the responsibilities of full-time employment and caring for a 5mo baby would be quite a large task.

Would this make a difference if a large number of people started doing it? Sure. At the same time, there’s reason to believe that GMO foods prevent a lot of illness and health issues, there’s a lot of power in the economy-of-scale aspect of larger format farming and having huge machines to do what would’ve taken dozens or hundreds of men working to do, and then the issue of each person finding a 3-acre plot of suitable farm land near enough to them for any of this to make sense… it’s a lot. Undoubtedly, it’d make a big difference, but it’s not very practical.

Instead, consider going vegan. Shop smart, shop frugal. Train yourself in the art of being disgusted with extreme sugarification of all your food and snacks and figure out how to make vegetables the main sustenance you’re eating. Remember, this is an act of war. Take care of yourself, think like a soldier. Eat, be merry, but fight the enemy with your wallet.

What about household things? Now that my wife and I have a child, I feel very differently about the volume of physical possessions because of how many things improve our quality of life with the baby. Do we absolutely need a bouncer? No, but it makes life so much easier because Junie can just hang out while I do dishes or while my wife folds laundry, whatever we’re doing. It’s great to have things like that.

Anyhow, this has been a messy post, but I’m going to just let it ride. It’s an interesting thing to think about, if a little anxiety-inducing. Are we fighting hard enough with our money?

I read a lot of content online. An absolutely absurd amount, really. It’s the ADHD in me, I need to be constantly absorbing something to ever really come to any kind of rest. I’ve never figured out how else to do it, but I just constantly engage with information wherever I am, under whatever circumstances there are.

Anyhow, all this reading online has given way to an uptick in wanting to read more books, here in meatspace. So, I’ve been trying. I had a realization, and I just thought I’d share it.

It doesn’t really cost me anything to write for the internet. I could spend a really long time, writing a large amount and releasing it piece by piece like a blog or even releasing a 100+ page e-book or something like that, but the reality is that without the intention of materializing the effort into physical books, there’s a lacking.

Is this really true? Maybe not so much as it used to be, especially in the advent of the 20XX GPT-era, but maybe a little bit still.

Publishing a book means that someone has to okay a print. Someone has to source the paper. Someone has to organize the binding, confirm the cover design(s). Someone has to make deals with merchandisers. Someone has to deal with shipping. It just never really ends, when you think about it. A thousand people jump to work once someone has written a book.

Along the way, these things may act like checks and balances to make sure the thing isn’t a piece of shit in the first place. Is the book any good?

I guess all I’m really getting at is that there’s a higher implicit bar for writing quality when you’re reading a book. I guess when you put it that way, we all knew that already.

This will just be a braindump of some things on my mind. It may not interest you, that’s alright!

Before I start, I just want to note that my daughter turned 4mo the other day and is doing very well. She loves to babble and “talk” to me and my wife. It’s very sweet. Already I feel an immense pride for her. I feel this churning sort of desperation for her future. I will do anything for her to have enough, for her safety, for her chance at success, for her to find something worth living for once she can comprehend such things.

Anyhow, I’ll dial it back now.

I hate self-driving car examples, but I can’t really think of another good way to get into this. Let’s consider a car at a stoplight. Actually, I’ve decided it’s a she-car. She waits behind a car at a stoplight, and there is a crosswalk ahead. She receives a discrete (!) stream of images from her sensor, and that’s what allows her to see what’s going on around her. Each image is analyzed by some sort of function in her program that identifies objects. Every second that goes by, maybe that’s dozens or hundreds of images and this allows her to keep track of her surroundings. You may already see where this is going. The person who is crossing the crosswalk is visible to our friend the she-car in each frame that they can be seen. However, they will reach a point in the crosswalk where they are obscured by the car ahead, such that our friend the she-car cannot see the pedestrian at all for those frames.

You and I experience this sort of thing all the time without realizing it. If you see someone walk around a corner, you know that when you turn the corner they will probably be there, walking further or whatever they might be doing. They won’t have just vanished. However, if I showed you or our friend the she-car, a photo of the hallway, would you be able to know what is around the corner?

The next insight for the problem lies in the understanding of what we mean by discrete when it comes to spatial awareness. Do our brains receive a series of frames, this way? I’m not really sure, but I don’t really think so. Our neurons can only fire so quickly, so there must of course be some sort of limit. There is a reckoning with Zeno’s paradox somewhere.

So then, is it continuous? Well, I don’t know if I can be convinced of that either. I’ve never been a big calculus guy; I like statistics and combinatorics and the real world with all its little edge cases and rigidness. It’s usually smart to approach things from a discrete angle.

Neural networks are complex beasts, and I’m not sure I can be convinced that such large amounts of calculation are required for keeping track of such commonalities.

I wondered for a bit if there might be a better way. I love evolutionary approaches to things, as you may well know if you’ve seen my other posts, and so I thought about a genetic programming approach. Perhaps I want to adjust my agent’s behavior by having a little program that is executed for each frame. This can be pretty efficient, despite how it sounds. PushGP can be used for stuff like this as-is, and stack-based programming is among the faster paradigms for performance due to the synchronicity between the program and the machine’s internals. Anyhow, perhaps this little program is trained and put into action, and then there’s some form of memory that it has access to, and that’s how our agent can relate its surroundings with this control mechanism. So, each frame comes in and gets passed to our program, which identifies things and updates/mutates the memory bank with the current understanding of the surrounding environment.

How similar is that to the way that we think? Again, or still, I don’t know.

I like to think that it might be something close to that.

Have you ever wondered about the way we remember things? It’s sort of peculiar. If I ask you something like, “Who is your favorite movie star?” then your brain rifles through a lot of folders all in an instant. Without digressing too much, let’s just point out some layers of abstraction:

• Hearing the sound of my voice
• Parsing the words from the sounds
• Parsing the meaning of the words from the grammar and structure of the language
• Turning those words into some sort of mental objective. Our brain must decide what next to think, which is insane to think about in the first place
• Who IS my favorite movie star? What movies would they have been in? What makes them my favorite? Is it because of how they made me feel? Is it because of the way they look or act in the movie, or something else entirely?

This is just a few. I could easily come up with a hundred or more, but it defeats the point I’m making. If our memory is some sort of database, then this is an absolutely astronomical demonstration of query optimization and recursion. It can’t be that complicated.

Now, notice something else, if I were to say “Who is your favorite red-headed movie star?” then a different pattern of thought entirely occurs, again in an instant.

What might be happening in that mesh of neurons and bioelectricity? Is it even possible that such a thing could be computed?

I think there’s something to do with graphs here. That may seem like a rather arbitrary thing to say. I think graphs of nodes with properties is an unusually accurate medium for describing thought. Mind maps have been a thing for many decades at this poi