Home on buzzert.net

Photo: Brooklyn, NY

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 17:26:22 +0000

Don’t you just love New York in the fall?

Photo: Brooklyn, NY

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 17:25:19 +0000

Photo: San Francisco, CA

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 22:19:17 +0000

Photo: Maker Faire 2025

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 22:18:50 +0000

Photo: Lyons, CO

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 23:10:31 +0000

Photo: San Francisco, CA

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 10:43:02 +0000

Some Things I've Cooked Lately

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 19:12:40 -0700

I ignored cooking for most of my life. My mom was a great cook, and always made us home-cooked meals for dinner, even though she had a very physically exhausting full-time job. I can’t really remember if she tried to teach me; I think she was always in such a hurry, she probably didn’t want me hanging around the kitchen and getting in the way.

It wasn’t until I was living on my own at university did this become a problem. I obviously did not have nearly enough money to eat out all the time (including the student union food court, which seemed quite expensive at the time), so that was really the first time I remember actually trying to cook stuff.

Needless to say, it went really horribly. I had no idea what I was doing, and while YouTube was around, nobody was posting how-to videos about how to cook stuff. This was 2008, so it was mostly just dogs on skateboards.

I remember always burning the food, and being really grossed out by raw meat. I think I tried this for a couple of months before resorting to Pizza Rolls and Top Ramen, just like the rest of my friends at the time. Once I had a decent income, I was still ordering out quite a lot, usually eating from fast-casual restaurants.

It wasn’t until the last couple of years did I discover that this, among many other things, is a wonderful skill that you can practice, and actually get pretty good at in a relatively short amount of time. The nice thing about practicing cooking is that since you have to eat something every day, every day is also an opportunity to practice. It’s also a daily ritual of creation, which, if you’re a creative person by nature, is something that more than satisfies that compulsion to create stuff.

Just like programming, I noticed that cooking something relatively complicated can easily put me into the flow state. It’s something that not only requires your full attention, but you need to be mindful of things going on in the background like timers, listening for sizzling sounds, checking on the onions to see if they’re transparent, etc. Dicing, slicing, and sautéing are all things that become refined with better hand-eye coordination. Competently operating a knife while intuitively knowing exactly how long something on the stove is going to take before it’s ready is an absolutely divine state of mind.

Another thing that lead to my renewed interest in trying cooking was becoming a vegetarian. Given my lifelong disinterest in handling raw meat, I suspect I may have been born a vegetarian, but just didn’t realize it until adulthood. While meat was something that I phased out over some period of time, I remember officially ceasing meat consumption sometime in 2010, while I was still in university. I still didn’t know how to cook at the time, so this actually lead to rather unhealthy eating habits that consisted mostly of starch and carbs. Surprisingly, I ended up gaining weight during this time.

Shortly after this though, I started discovering all kinds of new foods that I didn’t even know about before. I discovered the entire wonderful catalog of vegetarian Indian food during this time¹, including paneer, lentils, and curries. Falafel and hummus were things I never had as a child either. There’s even parts of Japanese cuisine that are vegetarian, leading me to try zaru soba, kitsune udon, and a lot of tofu.

Beginning the process of learning how to cook was significantly more pleasant now that I was dealing with entirely vegetables, which I think are remarkably beautiful and aromatic in their raw form compared to meat. I even learned about how to use oils, which was surprisingly something I didn’t know how to do when I first tried this. I only now realize is probably the main reason I kept burning stuff.

I don’t always take pictures of the stuff that I make, but here are some things that I think turned out exceptionally well. Not pictured are dozens of dishes that turned out quite bad. Of course, just like making anything, this is inevitable, and not to be seen as discouraging signs of failure.

Marinara Sauce

The first thing I felt I had to perfect was marinara sauce. I am of Italian descent, and my mom had her own sauce recipe that I can’t use because it contains sausage. This is something that I make regularly with raw ingredients; just crushed tomatoes, onions, garlic, olive oil, dried basil, oregano and salt & pepper. A “secret ingredient” that I now add is diced Calabrian Peppers, which when used sparingly, add just a little bit of a kick to the sauce and a lot of flavor.

Homemade Gnocchi with Brown Butter Sage Sauce

Felt compelled one day to try and make Gnocchi from scratch, which is one of my favorite pastas. Pictured above is fresh gnocchi tossed with a homemade Brown Butter Sage sauce, which went really well with the pasta and a few vegetables. The salad is made from cabbage, sliced cherry tomatoes, and mixed with a homemade tahini dressing.

Ribollita

Ribollita is an incredibly delicious Italian stew that’s made with Cannelloni beans and bread. This is where I learned to make “soffritto”, which is the basis for a lot of Italian recipes and consists of diced onions, carrots, and celery. I cooked the stew with a parmesan rind and added some kale, and it came out absolutely wonderful. I think this is one of the best things I’ve made so far.

Egusi

This is a super unique West African dish that’s made with pumpkin seeds, spinach, and fried plantains. This is rather difficult to make, because you first have to make a broth with tomatoes, roasted bell peppers, oil, and vegetable stock, and mix it with ground pumpkin seeds at just the right time. It’s so delicious when I get it right though, and goes very well with the rice and plantains.

Paneer Makhani

This came out really amazing the first try. Store bought paneer, cut into cubes, mixed with a blended tomato cashew sauce adding curry spices (garam masala, tumeric, coriander, chili powder, and paprika). I added some peas to it as well, and it came out incredibly well. The cashew and tomato flavor were really strong, and I was pleased at how I was able to balance that with the curry spices.

Spicy Garlic Miso Tofu

I kind of improvised this one, and it came out pretty well. Garlic and chili peppers really balance out the saltiness of the miso. Goes really well with tofu and vegetables.

Grilled Carrots with Teriyaki Sauce

Hard to find a meat replacement for teriyaki, but this came out quite well. I still find it pretty hard to get the teriyaki sauce just right, it usually comes out too salty. I’m still experimenting with the proportions of rice wine vinegar and brightening it up with some lemon juice.

Hummus

Hummus is one of my all time favorite foods, and it is surprisingly easy to make. I’ve found that you really need to nail the tahini before you start blending the chickpeas with oil. Getting the tahini to be the right consistency first with water, then making sure the citrus, garlic, and ground sesame seeds are all perfectly balanced makes or breaks the hummus. I like making this at home, because I’ve found that all store bought hummus is really terrible for some reason! Hummus is great for vegetarians as well, because it has a complete amino acid profile and is pretty calorie dense.

Sicilian Style Pizza

I’ve got a pizza sauce recipe down pretty well, but I am still having a lot of difficulty with the dough/crust. Every time I make pizza, the crust becomes hard as a brick. I think this might have something to do with the humidity of my oven, or the temperature is too high—not really sure. I will keep trying though, because I really love pizza a lot.

Scones

I find that baking is a lot easier than cooking! The secret with scones is making sure the butter melts in the oven, so you need to keep cubes of butter really cold while you’re mixing them with the dough. If you get that just right, the scones will be dry on the outside but warm and buttery on the inside.

Banana Bread

This was probably the first thing I baked that came out surprisingly well. Especially great thing to make if you have a lot of old/rotting bananas lying around.

Despite having a very close friend from Gujarat during childhood, his parents always ordered us pizza whenever we came to visit because they thought we wouldn’t like Indian food. I wish I could go back in time and ask for a home cooked meal instead! ↩︎

Photo: Reed College

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:32:49 +0000

Photo: Portland, OR

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 23:33:21 +0000

Photo: Spokane River

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 19:21:07 +0000

Photo: Coeur d'Alene, ID

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 19:24:58 +0000

Photo: Bend, OR

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 22:50:26 +0000

Something you might not expect from a small town in the middle of the Oregon Cascades is a ton of interesting architecture. The Pacific Northwest is famous for the bungalow style (pictured last), but surprisingly central Oregon has a lot of new Mid-century Modern inspired houses as well.

I’m partial to the Craftsman Bungalow style in this area, just because I think it’s better suited to the environment. Mid-century Moderns look better in the (low) desert.

It’s really interesting to see what comparatively liberal zoning laws do to a town. There are a lot of incredibly nice new houses, but also a lot of charming old ones in kept in good shape—all mixed together.

Photo: Yokohama, Japan

Mon, 26 May 2025 13:08:31 +0000

Photo: Osaka, Japan

Fri, 23 May 2025 05:13:19 +0000

Photo: Kameoka, Japan

Fri, 23 May 2025 05:12:54 +0000

Photo: Odaiba, Tokyo

Tue, 20 May 2025 19:10:46 +0000

Feels just like home.

Photo: Tokyo, Japan

Sun, 18 May 2025 16:21:11 +0000

Photo: Tokyo, Japan

Sat, 17 May 2025 14:20:07 +0000

Photo: San Francisco, CA

Tue, 13 May 2025 16:29:02 +0000

QueueCube, audio jukebox

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 13:51:48 -0700

MPV is a really cool open source/libre media player that works with just about any kind of file. It’s based on the famous FFmpeg library used to decode pretty much all known video and audio formats. One of my favorite features of MPV is the ability for it to play any arbitrary YouTube video if you compile with yt-dlp support enabled.

Normally mpv is invoked via the command line. For example, you can just paste in a YouTube link like this:

$ mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

If you have MPV with yt-dlp support installed on your computer, a window should immediately pop up with the video linked.

You can even have MPV do audio-only if you pass in the --video=no flag into mpv. This ended up being really useful around the house, because I have three places where I have a Raspberry Pi hooked up to some normal PC speakers (or soundbars). At Xaibatsu, we have a common area with the same setup—it’s an old laptop connected to some nice speakers and a subwoofer.

Up until recently, the only way to control this was by literally logging into the computer via SSH and invoking mpv from the command line. This was fine for one-off cases, but was pretty unmanageable for cases like a shared space where multiple people should be able to enqueue music that they want to listen to.

I thought a really cool weekend project might be to try and add a better interface on top of MPV, preferably one that can be accessed remotely by anybody. I started writing a backend that managed a playqueue of URLs, and exposed the ability to append to the playqueue or manage playback via an API. This started to get pretty hairy, especially dealing with what happens when MPV exits and the next item in the playqueue is supposed to start playing.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to write my own playqueue code because MPV already has a built-in playqueue! Even better, MPV also has an excellent, well-documented IPC interface. So most of the work here was actually in the frontend, adding a nice web interface on top of the existing MPV IPC interface.

This was the first time I’ve seriously tried React, having come from primarily native development. I also used the Cursor code editor to really accelerate some of the boilerplate, and to help me with some areas of React that I was previously unfamiliar with. I really think using Cursor for this project turned this from a week-long project into one that I was able to finish in just a weekend.

The following weekend, I even added the ability to search YouTube right in the frontend UI, which uses an Invidious instance to be able to do the search without needing API permission/keys from YouTube.

You can click on any of the results and it will immediately get added to the playqueue! The downside of this is that you also need to operate or link this to an Invidious instance, but it works just fine without YouTube search integration anyway.

Using the Cursor AI Code Editor

This project was also the first time I’ve really extensively used an LLM as an assistant for most of the coding tasks. It was a pretty fascinating experience, and I think I now really grok the promise and limitations of these types of tools.

The first very positive experience I had was simply going from “zero to one.” I suffer pretty greatly from “blank page syndrome,” staring at an empty code editor (or Markdown editor) can be pretty daunting. It takes a while for me to finally get the ball rolling and get into the flow. Using either Cursor or Claude Code has been absolutely incredible for overcoming this hurdle. Claude Code is particularly good at this, because you can simply make a new, totally empty directory in your terminal and just invoke claude to get started. I found that if you’re very specific with your prompt, it can get you through at least most of the boilerplate and setup of the build system. For example:

╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ > I would like to create a new project here that implements both a frontend and backend  │
│   for the `mpv` media player. I want both the frontend and the backend to be written     │
│   in TypeScript, and I want a Makefile for easier invocation of the npm build scripts.   │
│   I also want a Dockerfile that can build a production image of the app that I can       │
│   deploy using Docker.                                                                   │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

The more you write in this prompt, especially regarding programming standards, project setup, etc., the better the results are going to be.

One downside I noticed about using an LLM assistant here is that it can often go down the wrong path during development, and it just doesn’t seem to have the desire or insight to correct it once it has started down that path. For example, above I alluded to the fact that I started by managing my own playqueue (and thus, the lifecycle of a constantly starting/stopping mpv child process) before I knew about the IPC interface. Claude did not know about the IPC interface either (at first), and happily obliged in the execution of my original vision of the manual invocation/management of mpv. Even after informing Claude about the existence of the IPC interface, and instructing it to restructure/redesign the backend around this, it was often very reluctant to make major modifications to the code, even though it was warranted in this case.

Video

The original intention behind this project was just to have a system just for audio that works kind of like a shared jukebox. Of course, mpv can do video as well, so why not also make that work! This ended up being really fun for my TV, which is also connected to a Linux box that can run QueueCube/mpv. I’m also looking at installing a projector for the common area at Xaibatsu, which I intend to make controllable via the QueueCube interface.

In theory, since mpv works with just about any kind of link, you should be able to share your computer’s display to a QueueCube setup using OBS, which is able to stream over an RTSP stream. This already works really great with some of the security cameras I have set up at my house.

If you are setting up QueueCube for video, you just need to pass in ENABLE_VIDEO=1 as an environment variable during execution of the backend. This is a snap to set up with Docker.

Native Apps and other ways to run

My brother created a great native Gtk client for Linux desktops also. Now that I am legally allowed to share iOS apps, I’m also working on a native iOS client as well (work in progress).

Source Code

As always, the source code is available on my SourceHut, licensed as GPL.

Leaving Apple

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:32:01 -0700

After nearly 13 years at the company, last Friday, April 18th, was my last day at Apple. I have decided to leave with no concrete plan in mind, but with the intention of pursuing some kind of venture on my own.

I am so grateful for everything that I learned at the company, and for the innumerable opportunities that I was given there. After some time, I really started to take for granted just how smart everyone I worked with was, and how much the company really cares about its employees. For the entire time I was there, it really felt like engineering was the star of the show, and we could do whatever we want. I worked at both the Infinite Loop campus, as well as Apple Park. At both campuses, there was a strong sense of individual empowerment with very little oversight.

I’ve been an Apple fan for pretty much my entire life. I didn’t start programming for Apple platforms until midway though university, when the first iPhone SDK came out in 2009. I didn’t bother to learn Objective-C up until then, because my personal projects were mostly around the web using PHP and some JavaScript. At school they taught us to write desktop applications using Java. I didn’t know why at the time, but I definitely noticed that Java-based applications never looked as good as native applications. It was only until the iPhone SDK came around, where Java was not an option, did I finally learn about the wonders of Cocoa.

My brother and I started a club at my university around app development, called the “Software Development Club.” The club had some very passionate members and was a decent size, but shockingly few people were actually interested in iPhone app development at the time. Before the official SDK was released in 2009, we all attempted to write apps anyway using a reverse-engineered version of Cocoa Touch. This was incredibly painful, since the “SDK” was actually just class-dumped headers with absolutely no documentation. There was no iPhone Simulator either. Every time you compiled the app, you had to bundle it yourself using a script and copy the bundle to the device over SSH.

Through this, I gained a lot of knowledge about the internal workings of iPhone OS before the SDK launched. I knew about SpringBoard, the system shell; XPC, the IPC mechanism on Apple platforms; and private frameworks like MobileGestalt and MobileInstall that never became public.

Using this knowledge, I also published a lot of Jailbreak “tweaks” onto Cydia, a store for jailbroken devices, that modified device functionality in interesting ways. Some of the tweaks I made were pretty benign, like adding contact photos to group chats in Messages (before that was a built-in feature), and some were rather controversial, like those allowing you to cheat at Game Center, the official Apple scoreboard for video games.

It was the Game Center hack that eventually caught the attention of my first manager at Apple. In 2010, I applied for the first internship program the iPhone software team ever had, and he mentioned it during my phone screening. I panicked, because I thought this was going to be seen as a very negative thing, so I was not expecting a call back.

Surprisingly, I got the internship anyway. Once I arrived at Infinite Loop for my first day, I realized that almost the entire class of interns I was co-located with came from the Jailbreak community. One of whom developed a very popular tweak for managing notifications, and some of the design interns had even worked on WinterBoard themes, which were hacks that changed the design of the home screen and all of the icons. Many of the interns in my class even refused to use the internal development tools because they had better tools that they made before they joined. I suppose in a time before there were professional app developers, these hackers were a great pool of talent to draw from.

A lot of us ended up getting hired as full-time engineers, including myself, despite some controversy and a very public exile from the Jailbreak community. Those first couple of years at the company were really amazing. I feel that I learned so much in such a short period of time. In retrospect, it really felt like the wild west; we were pushing directly to the master branch without code reviews, and a new build of the OS was built every night with all of our changes from the day before. Working nights and weekends was relatively commonplace.

It really didn’t feel like a big company back then. It turned out that actually a lot of people I worked with in the early days didn’t even graduate college. All of the teams within iPhone software knew each other, and we could all fit inside of a somewhat large conference room. Stringent engineering protocols were completely absent, and it totally shattered my perception about what Apple was like from the outside.

This ended up being incredibly motivating. The fabled architects of the iPhone ended up actually being normal, flawed human beings, just like me. The magic about the people at that time wasn’t necessarily talent or rigor, but taste and conscientiousness. Even though people didn’t really know what they were doing, they cared about it a lot. Everybody knew what they liked, and what they didn’t like. And most importantly, everybody owned what they did. Engineers and designers took personal pride in their work, and because it was obvious that nobody else knew what they were doing either, felt that they had the ability to change it to suit their tastes.

Throughout my entire time there, people rarely left. This is in the middle of Silicon Valley, where the average tenure at companies is only a couple of years. The company really rewards seniority, mentorship, and sustaining talent. Many of the original architects behind Mac OS X were still actively running new projects up until I left. I really feel that this is one of the main reasons why the company is so successful, and why it’s such a great place to work, especially as a young sponge.

Despite the public chatter about AI and VR, I think Apple is still an incredibly healthy company. It did change quite a bit since I joined, I think the number of employees grew an order of magnitude. It no longer feels like a small company like it once did. None of this is necessarily bad—things got a lot more stable, and people don’t usually have to work on the weekends anymore. Plus, it seems like it’s just inevitable given a company that size. There’s a lot to be said about how to run a company behind a very mature technology that billions of people depend on.

During my last year at Apple, however, I felt a very strong sense of FOMO. At the time of writing this, there’s so much going on in the tech industry that is hard to ignore. It feels like we’re right at the beginning of a huge revolution, and it’s only getting bigger and more exciting. I think Apple is going to continue to provide a really excellent foundation for this revolution, with incredible hardware and a solid operating system/development environment to support it. A lot of emphasis from typical customers and technology journalists will be on what products Apple will deliver at the forefront of this revolution, but I believe that emphasis is misplaced. I personally believe the forefront is going to be occupied by smaller, more agile companies operating on the fringe. They’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants, the Apples, Microsofts, and Nvidias. There will be a solid place for Apple in this revolution, but the path is rather clear and predictable.

I feel lucky to be able to live in San Francisco, of all places, the epicenter of this revolution. I really have no idea where it’s going, or what my place in it is. My place could very well be back at Apple doing exactly what I was doing. Trying to live a life without regrets, and cursed with a seemingly unending sense of curiosity, I decided to shake it up and try to be a part of this somehow.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude, and extremely excited about the future. Thanks to everyone I worked with at Apple over the last decade. If you’re on a similar journey, please reach out!

Photo: Palm Springs, CA

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 18:42:06 -0700

Photo: Helms Bakery District

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:24:39 -0700

Photo: Apple Store, The Grove

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:58:56 -0700

Photo: Bend, OR

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 19:12:01 -0700

Enamored by the beauty of Bend, Oregon. Apparently the one part of Oregon that actually gets a lot of sunlight. Everybody here is so nice, lots of respect for nature and the outdoors. Pretty good arcade downtown also.

The Most Futuristic Train

Mon, 27 May 2024 16:23:00 -0700

This article from NPR about Millennials and Public Transportation was quite eye-opening. “According to a University of Michigan study, the number of people under 30 with driver’s licenses has been steadily declining.” This article, among many others found when searching the web, cites the cost and hassle of car ownership, traffic, ubiquity of parking lots, and public transportation being “cute” as reasons for why the younger generation apparently loves public transportation.

However, public transportation is not without faults of its own. The article mentioned above talks about the increasing costs of running public transportation, and shrinking capital for funding such costs due to a reliance on steady and consistent ridership, which is on the decline.

Despite what Millennials and Gen-Z say in polls, and when prompted by journalists, Revealed Preference is butting its ugly head yet again with the fact that nobody actually wants to take public transportation, which is leading to dramatically evaporating ridership, and because of the reliance on fares, is causing an ominous “death spiral.”

Still, people have not given up hope. People seem to really love trains. I think with some small optimizations, we can arrive at a solution for declining ridership with a proposal that I would like to call “The Most Futuristic Train.” Outlined below are some of these optimizations, all of which are purely technological, and thus doesn’t require any new legislation or rules.

The “Last Mile” Problem

One of the biggest challenges with public transportation is the gap between transit stations (bus stops, train stations, etc) and riders’ origin or final destination. This is known as the “last mile” problem, which probably got such a name due to a myriad of companies that have arrived on the scene in attempt to solve this problem.

This problem is even worse in areas with bad weather. California, which is ironically extremely car-centric, is perfectly walkable almost year-round. Yet, residents in Yakutsk, Siberia (formerly part of the Soviet Union) mostly rely on public transportation. From my personal account of taking public transportation, walking in terrible weather from my home/work to a nearby transit hub is definitely one of the worst things about the experience.

With the theoretical Most Futuristic Train, this could be solved with every person having a train station inside of their home, built in such a way where you don’t even have to go outside to get to it. There can be a door from your kitchen straight into the transit station, perfect for snowy days.

Wouldn't this be amazing?

Delays

Things are getting worse and worse for the BART in San Francisco. Delays, canceled trains, maintenance challenges, and difficulty in delivering the promised new trains all resulted in 2022 being the worst year on record for reliability.

Delays aren’t an issue unique to San Francisco, either. In Europe, the most common cause of delays are labor unions, alongside all the same challenges as BART in San Francisco, albeit with probably better weather preparedness.

All "top ten" delay incidents are related to weather, followed by "societal."

Common to both trains in Europe and San Francisco, however, are operational incidents like people/objects on the tracks, which is especially a problem in dense urban areas most commonly served by public transit. Obstructions on tracks, which can be caused accidentally via a storm, for example, or on purpose with someone simply throwing a steel beam onto the tracks, can mean a substantial number of passengers will not arrive at their destination on time, if at all.

It goes without saying that the problem of having only a single path for trains to go through is a significant bottleneck for the entire train system. All it takes is one giant boulder or tree stump to be in the way to cause delays all the way from Walnut Creek to the San Francisco Airport.

The Most Futuristic Train could solve this by building several parallel tracks for redundancy, with trains being able to “change lanes” between these tracks, in case one of them is blocked.

While ugly, delays because of blocked tracks would be a thing of the past if trains could re-route and "change lanes".

In addition to the ability to change tracks dynamically, the train system could be adapted to be driven by the passengers instead of by labor unions, eliminating delays caused by illness, short-staffing, or labor strikes. Think of a very large electric bicycle—with handles and controls in each train car that allow the passengers to control the direction and acceleration of the locomotive. With enough technological investment, this could even be completely automated to the extent where you don’t even need to train the passengers on how to operate the locomotive.

Power Efficiency

Another difficult thing about maintaining a public transit network, especially an electric train, is the problem of power transmission and utilization. Since trains need to make frequent starts and stops at all train stations, this becomes even more of a problem the longer the train is, since it adds more weight, and thus requires even more power to start the locomotion from a resting state.

From a cost-per-mile perspective, it’s important to keep in mind that the electrification of rail in Europe also required significant infrastructure development to support the three-phase high voltage supply needed to run the trains. From step-down transformers required every few miles, to railway feeder stations required alongside the tracks, to Switchgear stations required to feed all of that, to the civil engineering required to adapt existing bridges and other city infrastructure, the amount of infrastructure investment for every new mile of rail is absolutely massive, and maintaining it is doubly so.

One of the ways to massively alleviate the issue of power generation and efficiency is to move power generation to be onboard the locomotives. This completely eliminates the need to transmit electricity over long distances, thus eliminating a significant amount of the infrastructure required to build and maintain new miles of rail.

The implementation of such an idea is not exactly straightforward, however. While moving back to gasoline powered engines would be ideal in terms of power efficiency, this would be a step backward for reducing pollution in cities, which is already a major problem. Large gasoline powered engines are also extremely noisy. The Caltrain in the San Francisco Bay Area is powered using giant diesel engines, and because of this, the property values near the Caltrain are significantly lower than those further away ¹.

To make matters even worse for climate change, since most public transit in the US (including the Caltrain) is operated by the government, these entities operate outside of the free market, which means things like fuel/energy consumption are not at all considered when operating the lines, since these are just demanded as part of the annual budget. This negligence is especially evident when searching online for complaints about the Caltrain idling trains all night long, a practice which I can personally attest to being able to hear nearly halfway across the city in my home.

Placing chargeable batteries on-board doesn’t exactly solve the problem either, since even lithium ion batteries which have a relatively large power per unit of weight still add a significant amount of weight onboard the locomotive, which as mentioned above, will require more energy to move around.

The Most Futuristic Train proposes two new ideas for solving this problem: significantly smaller train cars, with train cars being able to charge at train stations when not being used. Since solar energy is becoming cheaper and cheaper, one could even imagine solar arrays at every train station, allowing the trains to be charged almost entirely with solar energy. Since the Most Futuristic Train also runs along several parallel tracks, as discussed above, these train cars could charge at their respective stations without blocking the rest of the line.

Not only are smaller train cars better for fighting against climate change, there are a lot of other really compelling features that sprout from this single design idea, that will be further discussed below.

“Societal” Issues

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights protest in Montgomery, Alabama that took place from December 5th, 1955 to December 20th the following year. The protest started because of a very famous incident in American History known as the Rosa Parks incident, where a young black woman was forced to vacate her seat at the front of the bus for a white passenger.

Mrs. Parks was forced to vacate her seat because of a Montgomery city ordinance that actually required black passengers to relocate to the back of the bus if the front half of the bus, which was reserved for whites, was full. This is despite the fact that black passengers paid the same fare price as white passengers.

Such humiliation would likely instantly destroy any business that relied on reputation to maintain a steady stream of customers, but since the bus system was monopolized by the city government, Rosa Parks ended up getting evicted from the bus and fined for refusing to vacate her seat. Fortunately, in this case, the court system functioned properly when after the boycott, the ordinance was found by a Montgomery federal court to violate the fourteenth amendment.

While victory prevailed (eventually) following the Montgomery Bus Boycott, issues of racial segregation and discriminatory pricing still continued to exist through the early 20th century, where streetcar operators would charge black passengers higher fares than white passengers. This wasn’t just an issue in the South; the Los Angeles Railway system also implemented discriminatory pricing into the 20th century as well.

Even as recent as 2021, there have been discriminatory policing practices in New York City and San Francisco, where black and Hispanic commuters were disproportionately targeted for fare evasion enforcement by the NYPD and SFPD respectively.

Besides racist policing, Asian Muni passengers in San Francisco are frequently targeted with anti-Asian slurs on public transportation, even in 2024! One of the major causes of decline in public transportation ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area is feeling unsafe; harassment, and even violence (as documented in the linked article) is commonplace on BART and Muni.

Even in Japan, which probably has the safest (privatized, for-profit) public transit in the world, had to implement “Women-only passenger cars” to combat “lewd conduct” against women. Apparently the problem is getting worse; from Wikipedia:

Groping in crowded trains has been a problem in Japan: according to National Police Agency and Ministry of Justice, the number of reported indecent assault in subway carriages in nationwide Japan between 2005 and 2014 ranges from 283 to 497 cases each year. The police and railway companies responded with poster campaigns to raise awareness and with tougher sentences, but incidence continues to increase. In 2004, the Tokyo police reported a threefold increase in reported cases of groping on public transportation over eight years.

With the proposed Most Futuristic Train idea of having significantly smaller cars, passengers can finally be free of harassment and violence, without having to petition the government to attempt to provide more security, which has an unfortunate cyclical effect of being disproportionately and unfairly targeted towards certain groups of people.

Comfort and Health

Comfort and noise is often cited as a complaint about trains and other forms of public transportation. The screeching sound that the metal rails make on the BART in San Francisco is so loud, it has journalists wondering if it damages eardrums. From personal experience, I can attest that even wearing noise canceling headphones isn’t enough to block out the horrendous screeching noise.

Making trains quieter is not at all a trivial process. From the linked article:

In order to get that done, the crew at BART has taken on the laborious process of reshaping the wheel on every car, while also smoothing out more than 1,000 miles of track. There are more than 100 miles of BART tracks, but the tracks require 10 passes to smooth out for this project.

The underground noise most riders hear is caused by wear known as rail corrugation, or “speed bumps that develop on the rail,” as BART Principal Track Engineer Gregory Shivy described it. By reshaping wheels and the refinished tracks, BART rides are almost 20 decibels quieter than before, according to BART officials.

Unfortunately the new train cars on BART are still incredibly noisy, with vibration and doors rattling still being an issue. It’s even worse in the transbay tube (that connects San Francisco and Oakland) because maintenance there is so difficult to perform and due to the closed environment.

The Most Futuristic Train proposes to solve this issue with a radical redesign of how the locomotive meets the ground, by using wheels encased in a pneumatic rubber layer, guarded by a hydraulic suspension system. The pneumatic protection layer would glide across tracks made of a smooth concrete pavement guaranteeing a comfortable and quiet ride. Since the train cars would be significantly smaller, as detailed above, there aren’t the same weight constraints present when having to deal with extremely heavy train cars, making this possible.

Since rail noise has been effectively eliminated, this also leads to the possibility of other significant comfort enhancements that weren’t possible with the old train car design, such as the addition of a multi-speaker, surround sound stereo system. One family per train car means you could play whatever music you wanted, without disturbing any fellow passengers.

One of the other major issues regarding comfort on large trains, especially in areas with extreme weather, is the problem of train cars getting way too hot. Even in Tokyo, which has the best train system in the world, cases of heatstroke on trains is common.

“More passengers become sick in crowded trains in summer because heat and odors stay inside the trains,” a railway official said.

According to the Tokyo Fire Department, 346 people were sent to the hospital from stations and trains with apparent heatstroke from June to September 2018, three times more than the previous year. The Fukuoka Fire Prevention Bureau reported 15 people, and the Nagoya City Fire Bureau reported 74 when the number of sufferers at bus terminals were included. The Osaka City Fire Department said ambulances were dispatched 89 times.

Heatstroke among passengers can also cause delays in train schedules. If trains stop between stations for a long time, more passengers may suffer health problems. Countermeasures against heat are crucial tasks for railway companies.

I know what you’re thinking, but the increase in heatstroke cases is not caused by hotter days in Tokyo, but rather over-congestion:

the average congestion rate in major railways in fiscal 2017 was 163 percent in the Tokyo metropolitan areas and 125 percent in the Osaka metropolitan areas, with the rate reaching close to 200 percent in some zones during commuting hours

When not commuting during commuting hours², my personal anecdote is that the trains in Tokyo are usually very comfortable. JR, being a Japanese company, takes customer service and the comfort of their passengers very seriously, but unfortunately not everyone can be satisfied with the same temperature. The article linked mentions, for example, that men often find the trains to be too warm, and women find the trains to be too cold. You can’t please everybody.

The Most Futuristic Train solves this issue with each train car having its own air conditioning system, configured by the family in that train car. The health of the passengers would be drastically improved, with issues like heatstroke and massive discomforts being a thing of the past.

With the increased trust of the Most Futuristic Train, one could even imagine replacing hard, rigid plastic seats with fully reclinable, plushy leather seats. Perhaps even with cupholders!

Imagine being able to listen to your favorite record or podcast, encased in a reclining leather seat with cupholders and a surround sound stereo system.

Impact

I suspect if such a futuristic train were ever to be implemented, it would have a really drastic impact on society. Magazines would be written about all the different train cars you could ride in. Songs would be written about the newfound freedom, safety, and excitement about a new way to get around. With power generation on board and no longer bound by a single city’s infrastructure, books would be written about grand adventures taken on the Most Futuristic Train. There would be TV shows and video games about people riding it just for fun, not even to go anywhere. People would immediately move en masse to places in the country with better support for the new type of train.

Of course, not all of the impact will be positive. Some people might try to make access to the Most Futuristic Train only available to rich people. Others will attempt to invent inane conspiracy theories about why people wanted to switch to the Most Futuristic Train in the first place.

Fortunately, technology usually prevails. I suspect we might keep the old trains and streetcars around as a novelty, to remind us of how good we have it now, and how far we’ve come.

Tourist attraction at The Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles, California.

It’s hard to find hard data to support this online. You could look at Redfin or Zillow listings near the Caltrain, and you do find that there is a statistical difference between prices, but this doesn’t control for the kind of property for sale/lease near the Caltrain (usually small apartments or commercial). Reading between the lines of this article, however, leads one to believe that this is definitely true considering the fact that most of the property available to lease near the Caltrain tracks are considered “affordable housing.” ↩︎
Not commuting during commuting hours is only really common if you’re on vacation, which is why many Americans have fond memories of taking public transportation when traveling abroad. ↩︎

Photo: Palm Springs, CA

Fri, 10 May 2024 01:29:08 -0700

Photo: Palm Springs, CA

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:55:12 -0700

This place looks like it’s straight out of a movie.

Randian Christmas

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:06:19 -0800

The lyrics to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”:

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer

Had a very shiny nose

And if you ever saw it

You might even say it glows

And all of the other reindeer

Used to laugh and call him names

They never let poor Rudolph

Join in any reindeer games

Then one foggy Christmas Eve

Santa came to say:

“Rudolph, with your nose so bright

Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”

Then how the reindeers loved him,

As they shouted out with glee

“Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer

You’ll go down in history”

This song is about Ayn Rand’s concept of rational self-interest and the miracle of capitalism. Rudolph, ostracized from the reindeer social group for what is essentially racism, goes from a hopeless exile to lauded hero after the group realizes his utility in the pursuit of a common goal. This cooperation is not based on altruism or self-sacrifice, but on a recognition of mutual benefit.

Rand also emphasized the importance of the individual, and the unique qualities that each person brings to an organization (in this case, Rudolph to Santa Claus’s organization). When individuals act based on rational self-interest, they naturally seek out those who can help them achieve their goals, regardless of any personal feelings or prejudices.

It’s often said that Christmas is a capitalist holiday:

The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions — the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors —provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.¹

Interestingly, the entire story of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was actually created as a marketing campaign for the Montgomery Ward department store chain in 1964². Perhaps possessed by the Christmas Spirit, the department store chain ended up giving the rights to the property to the employee who wrote the original story and poem, making him a millionaire through licensing deals.

Perhaps it is, and is worthy of celebration after all.

Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Calendar, December 1976 ↩︎
https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/who-invented-rudolph-red-nose-reindeer/ ↩︎

You Are Living in a Computer Simulation

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:08:56 -0800

You are living in a computer simulation.

Nick Bostrom wrote about this in 2001, shortly after The Matrix came out. I highly recommend reading his paper called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, which put forth a great logical analysis of why we are (probably) living in a computer simulation. This henceforth became known in philosophy (and Internet culture) as The Simulation Argument.

In summary, Bostrom’s argument is as follows; a technologically advanced civilization can generate realistic simulations of their ancestors. We know this is true, because we are currently capable of generating highly realistic simulations using technology. If such civilizations exist and are capable of running these types of simulations, then the number of simulated consciousnesses would vastly outnumber real consciousnesses, making it statistically very likely that we ourselves are simulated beings.

Bostrom’s approach was purely mathematical and statistical. He supposes that if this is true, there are multiple realities at multiple levels. At the root of the tree of realities is some kind of “base reality,” and below it are multiple levels of simulated realities, potentially growing exponentially as each simulation creates multiple simulations of its own.

A crude visualization showing base reality and the subsequent tree of infinitely many simulated realities. It would be extremely naive to assume that we are living in base reality.

This argument does not, however, attempt to prove that we are in a simulation or more importantly, why these simulations are created. The Matrix hypothesizes that our simulation was created as a sort of paradise by artificial superintelligence. The reason for the existence of the simulation—because humans are enslaved by artificial superintelligence to be used as a power source—was never really satisfying for me personally. Humans don’t generate that much energy. In fact, the human brain apparently only requires about twenty watts of energy to operate, which is far less than an incandescent light bulb. Even the entire population of the Earth is unlikely to satiate the unbounded energy needs of an artificial superintelligence.

We’re discovering how neural networks work

The concept of using neural networks for machine learning was actually discovered all the way back in 1959 by researchers from Stanford University¹. The really interesting thing to me about neural networks is that they seem to be discoveries, not inventions. We designed neural networks to behave as they do today based on prior research about how our brains process information².

Intuitively, people understand how their brains are able to remember things and obtain new skills. It’s through the process of “training,” which is exposing our senses repeatedly to various patterns of stimuli, or mimicking a certain physical action. We know that for most things, we can’t just observe or attempt it once and be able to perfectly execute it every time after that. Driving an automobile, for example, requires learning how to operate the machine, how to read/interpret street signs, remember rules of the road, etc. Rather terrifyingly, we are continuously learning how to operate automobiles by training our brains on real world data—that is, actually driving around in the world around us.

The study of artificial intelligence took a recognizable path. For robotics, specifically self-driving cars³, there were two approaches. The first was basic machine learning, in which procedural code was written by human engineers for how to drive an automobile. All of the edge cases had to be considered and covered. If a deficiency was discovered (usually in real world testing), an engineer must address the deficiency directly and write a new rule (or tweak an existing rule).

The second approach is using what we discovered about biological neural networks to build an artificial brain to drive a car. In the field, this is known as Deep Learning. Artificial neural networks attempt to mimic human behavior by “learning” on data acquired from the real world. By developing some kind of quantified measurement of progress (a “loss function”) and adjusting the activation thresholds of all the connections between neurons, the network becomes better at predicting outputs based on given inputs.

Amazingly, this actually works. It even works for inputs it’s never seen before. The problem is that this process requires an obscene amount of training data. Significantly more than a human being would require to do the same task. Because of the huge amount of data the training process requires to yield reasonable results, some engineers are attempting to train neural networks based on simulated data in addition to real world data. For example, self-driving cars can be trained on simulated roads from the real world using images generated by a game engine. The game engine tries to match all of the characteristics of the real world as close as possible, from dirt accruing on cameras, lens flares, and poor road conditions.

Something really cool about the internet age is the fact that we humans can now learn how to do things by just watching videos on YouTube. Before YouTube, if you wanted to learn how to cook pizza at home, for example, you had to learn it by watching another person. You could read instructions or tips about how to do it from a book, but such a physical action like cooking really requires utilizing our brains’ mirror neurons and mimic the action of another human being. Knowledge domains especially involving tacit knowledge often rely on apprenticeship for this reason⁴.

When we’re learning how to do something by watching YouTube videos, we are, in a sense, training ourselves using simulated data. This is, of course, not a perfect substitution for actually attempting to cook pizza ourselves in our own kitchens (or via an apprenticeship), but it is better than nothing. People who are passionate about their fields in fact often utilize both real world data (performing a job, apprenticeship) in addition to simulated data (videos).

As a result of this discovery, there’s a huge push for generating more training data. This isn’t even just for self-driving cars. Simulations are being built for manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications applications. Nvidia is even working on a product they’re calling Digital Twins, where they are opening building a computer simulation of Earth for the expressed interest of training AI models.

We are being used to generate training data

If neural networks are truly discoveries rather than inventions, we appear to be embarking down the same path as our parent reality. They most likely tuned the parameters of this reality to be very similar to their own, and created us in their own image.

The purpose of this is probably because they need training data. We can already suppose that the parent reality has vast computational resources at their disposal. From Bostrom’s paper:

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations.

Therefore, we assume that one of the reasons they have so much computation power is because they built it to train neural networks. With this surplus of computation, they chose to use it to run our simulation and gather more simulated training data for tasks that they may wish to automate in their reality.

What kind of tasks do they want to automate? We might be able to infer this by examining what Ted Kaczynski⁵ calls the “industrial-technological system,” also known as The System. Anti-capitalists might refer to The System as one of “capitalist exploitation,” whereas libertarians might argue that The System is an Orwellian monopoly constraining individual freedom and autonomy. What all definitions have in common is that there appears to be some unstoppable, almost superhuman force, to make all humans on Earth do something.

Kaczynski attributes the emergence of The System to an evolutionary process⁶, an inevitable outcome of the agricultural revolution. He contends that The System often perpetuates itself at the expense of human well-being and environmental health. Given the seemingly infinite paths human society can traverse, it raises the question: where does The System, with all its observed phenomena, truly originate from? It’s hard to even imagine what our globalized civilization would be like without its looming presence.

To answer this, it might be helpful to examine what kinds of activities The System seems to require us to do.

Working in factories. This is tedious, repetitive work that people nonetheless do because it is productive work, and people are rewarded with capital for trading the time to do so.
A lot of driving. Whether this is a knowledge worker’s daily commute, or a trucker paid to ship product, people are rewarded for doing this, even though most people deem it to be rather boring and repetitive.
Locomotion. In addition to trucking, a daily active life seems to require a lot of walking and moving around. Americans apparently move between residences more than eleven times in their lifetime⁷. Often times the impulse for moving residences is financial opportunity.
Manipulating machines. Whether this is farming, manufacturing, or even retail, people are rewarded for learning how to efficiently operate machines of various kinds.

More recently:

Writing software. This occupation now seems to pay the most, which suggests an advanced phase of the training process wherein we are now tasked with attempting to automate information processing itself. Now that software developers are working on generative programs (i.e., programs like ChatGPT that can generate literature or even other programs), this suggests some kind of exponential in content generation, especially if the original goal of our simulation was for this purpose.
Unraveling entropy. Similar to software developers, lawyers are paid to create, then untangle, complex systems. Human beings seem to be uniquely capable of creating order out of chaos, suggesting that one of the purposes of this simulation is for generating negentropy. Experts in the field of unraveling entropy are also rewarded substantially.

In the context of deep learning, a lot of people have noticed that our automation efforts appear to be starting from an unexpected direction. Throughout history, humanity thought the first kinds of jobs to be automated (prophesied by The Jetsons) would be hard labor or “blue collar” jobs. Instead, the first kinds of jobs to be automated appear to be highly cognitive work (“white collar”) like artistry or software development.

This may be evidence that we are not the first reality to discover neural networks and the ability to train machines automate things. If a parent reality really exists, then they used our simulation to automate conscious activity in a much more logical order. This also provides some insight as to what similarities we have with the parent reality, and what their goals might be.

One might be able to look at a simulation existing in one of the following training phases:

Hard/physical labor (subsistence farming)
Factory work (operating machines)
Advanced locomotion (driving, transport)
Unraveling entropy (software development, law)

Something highly unfalsifiable but interesting to consider is the fact that the resolution of our simulation may not be constant throughout even human history, which would suggest why the training phases enumerated above seem to happen discretely. Science fiction likes to entertain the idea that ancient civilizations (such as those depicted in the Star Wars franchise) are equally capable of developing highly advanced technology if they just had the knowledge of science/physics we had today. However, it might be possible that our simulation was nowhere near the resolution necessary for simulating advanced technology in the first few training phases. Technological leaps like the discovery of electron holes enabling the invention of the semiconductor may not have been possible because our simulation was not operating at the quantum scale yet. This could also suggest why certain leaps in scientific research like the discovery of nuclear energy, the semiconductor, and even calculus, seem to happen almost simultaneously in very disparate parts of an unconnected world.

When the time comes to actually create our simulation (as Nvidia has already done with their digital twin project), the progression of these phases will make much more sense and will likely follow the order above.

Disturbingly familiar characteristics of Nvidia's Digital Twin simulation. From Nvidia's website.

One might wonder, if our only purpose is to train neural networks for automating tasks of the parent reality, why do we have a creative urge? Why do humans feel compelled to invent things, and create art? This may also be explained from Nvidia’s “free eBook”:

Gaps in software engineering and 3D design experience are often cited as potential roadblocks to developing a digital twin. However, don’t let this deter you from starting your journey. At NVIDIA, we’re working with a growing number of systems integrators and development partners who are ready to support your organization with these critical skills and experience. Alongside our partners, our teams are also working hard to develop simulation-ready assets and extensions that will make it even easier for your teams to start building digital twins.

In other words, simulated assets are difficult and time consuming to make. Therefore, it makes sense to automate this as well.

The entropy problem

The concept of entropy pertains to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In summary, entropy is the measure of disorder (also “randomness”) in a physics system. This is an attempt to resolve a discovery about the conservation of energy, where energy apparently can’t be created or destroyed. For example, the reason you can’t use heat energy radiated from your computer to power your computer again is not just because of energy loss/transfer, this energy is said to be less useful than the energy that was fed in through the power supply, because it’s in a less concentrated quantity.

The unfortunate thing about entropy is that it is always increasing. This is easy to intuit by thinking about processes that convert useful energy into mechanical work (like machines), as well as exothermic chemical reactions. Useful energy in both scenarios is eventually depleted. There is no known way to reverse this.

With regards to the simulation argument, from the existence of entropy we can draw two potential conclusions. One is that entropy is an emergent behavior of some kind of computational limit (and thus implying that entropy doesn’t necessarily exist in the parent simulation). We know that computing resources are scarce in our world, albeit mostly due to these laws of thermodynamics. It’s possible that computing resources are finite in the parent reality as well, and these laws of thermodynamics serve as some kind of “governor” for physical computation.

The second, more compelling conclusion, is that entropy exists in the parent simulation as well, and these laws were “written” by them. In systems of high entropy, it may be impossible or inefficient to expend resources training neural networks based on real world data. Either there simply isn’t enough useful energy left to devote to this effort, or energy resources are being rationed in some way. A real-world⁸ metaphor for this might be to imagine a scenario where Waymo wants to gather training data for their self-driving cars, but gasoline and electricity are at prohibitively high prices due to an extreme scarcity of energy. The only option for Waymo at that point would be to build a simulation.

In addition to simulating a lower entropy environment for gathering training data, having an artificial intelligence (that might be us) devote significant cognitive resources to solving ways of economizing useful energy and inventing ways of generating negentropy might be a good way to prolong the heat death of their universe.

The parent reality

A great question arises when pondering this; what is the parent reality like? Most likely all of the physical constants of the parent reality are the same or very close, otherwise the training data generated by our simulation wouldn’t be useful. For the same reason, we (humans) are most likely created in the image of the intelligent inhabitants of the parent reality. At the very least, they most likely have humanoid characteristics, something resembling two arms, two legs, binocular vision, etc. Other strange, unexplained phenomena like why we sleep, what our motivations are, how we evolved, etc., might be mysterious because they serve some kind of purpose in our reality, but aren’t features present in the parent reality.

In fact, we take for granted that many other mysteries exist in our reality, such as the concept of infinity, the nature of our existence (why are we here?), and the origin of the universe (“Big Bang Theory”). These mysteries may simply not even exist in the parent reality, as there is no reason for them to necessarily be obscured. Alternatively, the mysteries of our universe may be a confusing result of a negative set of features that the parent reality decided not to simulate for some reason.

We must also assume that if The System was somehow designed by the parent reality as the basis for our motivation to generate training data, that this “System” doesn’t exist in the parent reality. If so, this has really profound implications about how they might organize their society (if there even is a society) and what their motivations in life are.

We should reverse engineer our file format

Since the simulation argument is unfalsifiable, the entire study of this is, of course, exclusively in the realm of belief. However, by living one’s life with the assumption that we’re in a computer simulation, and thinking really hard about why such a simulation exists, we could create a useful secular (?) narrative for the 21st century. Just as the nuclear-powered space age served as an incredibly motivating narrative for the 20th century, operating with the assumption that the rules of our universe are no different than that of a video game, it could lead to a real explosion of creativity and technological development.

For this reason, the increasingly popular study of speedrunning, while currently seeming to be just a fascinating hobby, may actually be an extremely productive pursuit. On of the most interesting examples of this is this video of someone playing Super Mario World.

By exclusively manipulating objects in Mario’s reality and obeying all of the laws of physics in his simulation, the speedrunner in this video was able to inject completely arbitrary code. If Mario is able to do this in his simulation, why couldn’t we do this in ours?

There’s a saying that physics is the law, everything else is just a recommendation. Perhaps the only thing that is law is The System, and everything else (including physics) is a recommendation. As long as we continue to provide useful training data to our parent simulation, we might be free to subvert nature in any way that we please.

If you found this entertaining, be sure to check out George Hotz’s humorous talk about Jailbreaking the Simulation. Science fiction author Phillip K. Dick had a really fascinating schizophrenic episode that he discussed in great detail during a talk in France in 1977, where he came up with a lot of ideas present in The Matrix movie series. Obviously, you should watch The Matrix if you haven’t already, but another great movie that discusses this topic is The Thirteenth Floor released the same year. This fascinating interview with a UFO guy covers echos of simulation hypothesis thinking throughout several ages of history.

Widrow, Bernard, and Marcian E. Hoff. “Adaptive Switching Circuits.” Stanford University, 1960. ↩︎
There are two exciting ways to interpret this. If you are secular, then it appears the process of evolution really works, and the products of nature are hard to beat with human ingenuity alone. If you are religious, then it appears that God really is the “ultimate engineer,” and the discipline of engineering is really just a process of imitation. ↩︎
For a good history on self-driving cars (before deep learning), check out Larry Burns’s Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—And How It Will Reshape Our World. ↩︎
Could streaming help convey tacit knowledge? by Andy Matuschak. Andy writes a lot about learning and education and is a big inspiration of mine. ↩︎
Kaczynski was also infamously known as “The Unabomber” because of his violent attempt to overthrow this system. I do not condone this! ↩︎
Kaczynski, Ted. “The System’s Neatest Trick” ↩︎
United States Census Bureau: “Calculating Migration Expectancy Using ACS Data” ↩︎
Morpheus: “What is real?” ↩︎

Photo: Sedona, AZ

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 22:55:12 -0700

Bedside Computer

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 17:23:41 -0700

In an effort to try and avoid having a smartphone next to my bed (and, of course, for the fun of making things), I decided to build my own smart alarm clock out of a Raspberry Pi.

One of the amazing things about the Raspberry Pi Compute Module is that there is a limitless number of cool and wacky things you can plug them in to. You can get the official I/O board, the all-in-one PC, a handheld tablet, even a 5-inch smartphone-like board. Jeff Geerling has a comprehensive database showing off even more things that are possible with the Compute Module 4.

For this project, I decided to go with Seeed Studio’s reTerminal.

I really love using Seeed Studio for personal hardware projects. They have a lot of great stuff, a US-based warehouse for speedy shipping, great documentation, custom software libraries, and even a YouTube channel.

The reTerminal in particular seemed like a good fit for this project. Notably featuring:

5-inch IPS multi-touch screen
Wi-Fi & Bluetooth
Real-Time Clock
Accelerometer
Digital Ambient Light Sensor
Programmable Hardware Buttons

But best and most important of all: a built-in buzzer! Rated at 85db. My original plan was to have music or an alarm chime play out of a connected USB speaker or something, but having a buzzer built-in is really ideal.

For the software, I didn’t want to use a desktop-oriented UI library like Gtk, since all of the controls would be optimized for the mouse, and not for touch. There have been more efforts lately to make Gtk more touch-friendly, particularly in Gtk+4 with the incorporation of a library called libhandy, which tries to make Gtk widgets work better on Linux-based smartphones like the Librem 5. Qt is an option too, but I since I wasn’t making a desktop app, I would probably spend way too much time customizing the theme/appearance of everything to get it to look exactly how I wanted.

I had this exact same problem with my home-built thermostat project too. For Chipotherm, I actually ended up writing my own UI library, but it still has a lot of shortcomings, and I planned to do much more advanced things with the alarm clock.

It turns out, there’s already a great project for dealing with bare bones, totally custom UI. Clutter is used by the GNOME shell for drawing and animating the core parts of the desktop environment. It ended up being a real pleasure to use, with excellent Vala API bindings and easy ways to embed OpenGL views or Gtk elements (which is handy since I was considering embedding some kind of Home Assistant web UI).

From there, it was pretty easy to get a basic alarm UI set up, and activate the buzzer! The buzzer is exposed to the OS just like an LED, so I have complete control over the beeping pattern. Here’s a video of the alarm going off showing what the buzzer sounds like.

Unfortunately there’s no way to control the pitch of the beep since it’s only binary (and the beeper connected to an expansion board, so I can’t do PWM), but an annoying sound is kind of what I wanted for an alarm anyway.

Here’s what the UI looks like for setting the alarm.

The last step was to add home automation controls. My home is already set up with the fantastic Home Assistant, which is thoroughly hacker-friendly. Most of the lights in my room are connected to Shellies, so setting up the code to talk to the Home Assistant API was a total breeze. Just some basic POST requests to change the state of lights, and listening on a websocket for any changes in light state.

I even added a button for my coffee machine downstairs, so I can have it warmed up before I even get out of bed. I ended up programming the rest of the buttons on the reTerminal to control all of the lights in my room, and even added little labels to each switch so I know which does what.

I’ve been using this as my primary alarm clock for over a year now, and it hasn’t had any problems waking me up. You can see from the video above how responsive the automation controls are too!

In the future, I’d like to write a program that exposes more statistics and data regarding my sleep performance. I actually already have a scale beneath my bed that detects significant weight changes, and thus reports bed occupancy status to my server. Home Assistant knows exactly how long I’ve been in bed for, and can even detect displacements in weight which could indicate sleep disturbances. It would be cool to show some kind of graph or data visualization of this in the UI.

As always, the source code for this program is GPLv3 and available on my SourceHut.

Photo: San Francisco, CA

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 23:31:09 -0700

Photo: Provo, UT

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 22:55:12 -0700

I spent my vacation in the mountains in Provo, Utah.

Moving to Hugo

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 17:23:41 -0700

I’ve decided to move my site from Jekyll to Hugo. I apologize to any RSS readers who just got spammed by all of my old posts. I tried to keep the dates/URLs as stable as possible!

My old website was built very much the way I used to do things when I was a teenager in the 2000’s. A “LAMP stack” (although no “P” (PHP), just static pages this time), maintained by SSH-ing into a VPS and manually changing HTML files/rsyncing from a git repo.

I decided to take the time to build this the proper way ¹ using Docker (actually, Podman), Kubernetes, and now Hugo for the actual static site generation. So far, Hugo is far more pleasant to use than Jekyll, which is a giant ball of dependencies, configuration files, and Ruby. Hugo is far simpler configuration wise, and seems to be much better written. It uses the battle-tested html/template library from the Go standard library for doing templates, and hacking it to do other stuff is a breeze. It also seems to generate my (albeit simple) site much faster than Jekyll.

The Kubernetes part was pretty difficult for me, since I didn’t have a lot of experience with it. DigitalOcean, my provider, has a great page documenting how to set up a simple Nginx site that I found extremely useful though.

Something that was a real mind-bender for me, coming from the “old school” way of doing things, is dealing with replicas and the Kubernetes ingress. I had some experience with Nginx-proxy with my homelab setup, which I also thought was really clever. The short of it is, if your server is running multiple websites running in different containers, nginx-proxy is the one container exposed to the Internet that services all incoming HTTP requests. It is aware of all running containers (by talking to the Docker daemon), and automatically proxies requests based on the hostname to these other containers over its internal network.

Kubernetes works in a similar way, except instead of running the nginx-proxy Docker container, you set up an Ingress-Nginx Controller, which seems like basically the same idea, but built around Kubernetes abstractions instead. The Ingress-Nginx controller is another pod running in the cluster that routes incoming HTTP traffic to the appropriate service. I also set up another deployment for handing SSL certs (similar to “acme-companion”), which runs its own set of pods that handle provisioning new certs from LetsEncrypt. All I had to do was add some annotations to my kubespec to inform the cert-manager about which domains to provision, and it all worked great, and will renew automatically!

I’m still pretty new to all of this, so if I made any mistakes here (or botched something on the migration), please email me.

Well, “proper” is subjective here. Let’s say the “modern” way. ↩︎

Photo: Sonoma, CA

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Photo: Carefree, AZ

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Photo: Mount Davidson Cross

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Photo: Sacramento, CA

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Photo: Lake Tahoe

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Photo: San Francisco, CA

Sat, 07 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights from the Noe Valley Garden Tour.

Photo: San Francisco, CA

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Belief

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 03:07:00 +0000

As I get older, I am starting to realize more and more the importance of belief. I’ve found this word means different things to different people. To some, it means a belief in God or Gods. To others, it means a belief in humanity, and the goodness of others. Some people think belief is a bug rather than a feature, something that clouds judgment and prevents one from using pure logic to reason about the world around them.

I’ve never taken psychedelic drugs before, but I have heard a lot about how they can really alter your perspective on the world. It turns out, much of our perceived reality is entirely subjective anyway. Have you ever had a deep conversation with someone who is very different from you? It almost seems like they’re operating on an entirely different plane of existence. I get this feeling sometimes when talking to people from cultures, or even economic backgrounds, that are very different from my own. As someone who tries to be open-minded, I enjoy this challenge immensely. It helps me see how much of my world is colored by my own beliefs, and how much of my perceived reality is actually subjective.

Where exactly is that line between subjective reality and objective reality? Does that line even exist? Some philosophers say that truth and reality are entirely separate things. Maybe what we define as “truth” is really just a stable, consensus reality between several observers. If this is how the world really works, what is the value of belief compared to logic and reason?

If you had asked me that question when I was a teenager, I might’ve said the value of belief is exactly zero. We can measure reality using scientific instruments. We can conduct experiments to prove hypotheses, and gather evidence and perform induction. We learn how to do this in school.

But quite a lot of the world already runs on belief. The bank notes that we trade for food have no intrinsic value on their own. We trust money to be some sort of accurate record of value. Trust is a form of belief. I recently discovered that one of the causes of inflation is belief. If people think that their currency is losing value, then it will¹.

We also believe in things that we can’t really prove are correct, but can’t prove that they are incorrect either. Data encryption, for example, relies on the belief that it’s extremely hard to factor really large numbers. We don’t have any proof that it’s impossible to do so, but we don’t have any proof of the contrary either. I guess you could call that a form of agnosticism. Why then, do we trust this method of encryption with our most valuable secrets? It’s because we believe it is safe.

Before the discovery of microbial life, even the practice of washing one’s hands before surgery was a manifestation of belief.

Even more infamous is the tragic account of Ignaz Semmelweis, who, backed by a preponderance of clinical data, recommended the practice of hand washing to medical professionals as a way of improving outcomes on the obstetrics wards in 1847 [9]. Despite empirical evidence that washing one’s hands between deliveries reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis could produce no theoretical explanation or hypothetical mechanism with which to explain his findings. Being in conflict with the scientific opinion of the day, those findings were largely rejected by the medical community, and Semmelweis would only be vindicated posthumously with the emergence of germ theory—a theoretical model that placed the clinical data regarding hand washing and disease into an intelligible context. ²

Many people (including myself) believe that humans are generally good, despite a cornucopia of evidence for the contrary. Without such a belief, living in a community of other people would be nearly impossible. How can you trust strangers, when you don’t know what their motivations are? Logically, everyone will act in their own self-interest, and often the interests of others do not align with one’s own. By taking that leap of faith that other people are generally good, it can completely change your perception of reality and put the mind at ease.

However, belief obviously isn’t enough on its own. If I chose to believe that people were generally good, but people weren’t actually good, then I would be constantly taken advantage of, and wouldn’t survive in a community of other people. As it turns out, the really beautiful thing about belief is that it often leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. Believing that people are generally good means believing that I am an intrinsically good person as well, and this influences how I act in a community of others. Thus, a cycle of equilibrium is maintained: people are good because they believe they are good.

I think the reason why the idea of “God” is often the common denominator for all religions is because it is an abstraction for a “leap of faith”. If I attempt to define this abstraction literally, using logic and reason, it diminishes its power over the human mind. Much like telling a patient that the medication they were just administered was actually just a sugar pill, and has no provable effect on their ailment. The placebo effect, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, really works, but one must believe it in order for it to work.

As an example, take this excellent passage from Commander Data, an android from Star Trek:

Data I understand your dilemma. I once had what could be considered a crisis of the spirit.

Worf You?

Data Yes. The Starfleet officers who first activated me on Omicron Theta told me I was an android, nothing more than a sophisticated machine with human form. However I realized that if I were simply a machine, I could never be anything else. I could never grow beyond my programming. I found that difficult to accept, so I chose to believe that I was a person, that I had the potential to be more than a collection of circuits and sub-processors. It is a belief which I still hold.

Worf How did you come to your decision?

Data shrugs slightly

Data I made a leap of faith.

A remarkably profound dialogue from a syndicated television show, this scene (among many others) really changed my line of thinking. Even Data, an android who thinks very logically and without emotion, is capable of making such a leap of faith, all the while showing the utility of doing so.

Humans, however, are cursed with real emotions like self-doubt and have a much more difficult time making this leap of faith. God is a pretext for believing in other things that have utility in understanding subjective reality, just like “The Spirit of Man”. There are a lot of verses from the Bible that are really similar to the words of Data above.

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. — Genesis 2:7

In other words, humans are more than the sum of their parts. A living creature has a higher purpose than just converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. That living creatures are “divine”, an immutable status that cannot be granted or revoked by humans. This is a line that is metaphorically drawn that’s really important (more on that later).

But it is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand. — Job 32:8

Belief in “God” (or maybe in other words, believing in belief), is a platform for building a subjective reality that has utility beyond armchair philosophy. A moral framework can be built on this platform, as many obviously have been. The pacifist concept of nonresistance is an example of a practice that requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline, without which a society of people would descend into ever escalating conflict (“an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”). Believing in the afterlife makes this practice significantly easier, and gives logical approbations that satisfy a restless mind (i.e., justice is served in the afterlife, and “love thy enemy”).

The Declaration of Independence is a really interesting and unique founding document that presupposes several beliefs. Written by scholars who escaped tyrannical regimes, they sought to build a government structure that would be free of interference from other people’s subjective ideas of utopia.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Here, the supernatural is invoked to draw a special metaphorical line around a protected class of ideas. That “all men are created equal”, and that civil rights are “unalienable” as they are “endowed by their creator”. All of this is prefixed with “we hold these truths to be self-evident”, meaning these ideas are immutable and not up for debate. It turns out, the United States is relatively unique even among western democracies in that the founding document explicitly states that individual rights preexist government and even all of mankind. This is in contrast with other western democracies where individual rights are granted to the people by the government.

How is it possible to convince people that these ideas are immutable? A leap of faith is required, and “The Creator” is used as a platform for such beliefs that follow. This isn’t even a secret, as John Adams said, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” So the catch is, you need to believe it in order for it to work³.

To religious people, everything I wrote here is probably really obvious. However, as someone who has been non-religious for most of his life, I am starting to realize the utility of belief. I think the world would be a lot better off if people took more leaps of faith. Mental health issues like depression and anxiety, for instance, can and have been alleviated with a healthy dose of belief. Plus, as Pascal put it so eloquently, it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe: Self-perpetuation ↩︎
Rationalism, Empiricism, and Evidence-Based Medicine: A Call for a New Galenic Synthesis ↩︎
Since I wrote this post, this quote has been apparently popularly used out-of-context by some online groups who are implying that this meant specifically belief in the Christian religion. This was not my intention, nor do I believe was it the intention of John Adams. The belief emphasized here is a belief in inherent moral order and a sense of accountability “beyond human law.” This does not necessarily imply religiosity. ↩︎

Photo: Palm Springs, CA