I did a quick review of Aquaria. If I can figure the tools out, I hope to animate it Zero Punctuation/Blamamation/Extra Credits style and post it to Nerd Talk.
History Repeats Cover
Posted by pyrosim on January 20, 2011
No comments
I made a vocal cover of Josh Woodward’s History Repeats. The original and my cover are licensed CC-By 3.0 US.
Home Automation Blogging
Posted by pyrosim on January 11, 2011
No comments
The podcasters over at Engadget have mentioned a couple times that Home Automation and Appliances are areas of consumer electronics that are ripe for explosive growth, and that there isn’t a lot of good media coverage of them. I agree. Unfortunately, I’m not here to announce that I intend to fill that space. But I would like to talk about it for a bit.
Menial work needs to get done, because if it doesn’t we all starve to death in squalor. Humans hate doing menial work. Robots don’t. If I get the day off work, I play video games, write novels, have sex, go hiking, and generally lead an existentially fulfilling life. If robots have the day off work, they’re just like “Wait, what? I’m not sure this premise even makes sense.”. Dumb robots! Don’t contradict me! The point is, robots don’t need to lead fulfilling lives. So, if you take all this into consideration and design a society wherein the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their limited lifespan forced to do work that can not only possibly be automated, but easily be automated, you are evil. No justifications, no qualifications, you are evil.
Let’s look at a specific task. Say, laundry. “Laundry is pretty automated, pyrosim.” I hear you say. “Nobody does laundry by hand anymore. We have machines that do it. You should like that!” you say. WRONG. Yes, we’ve come a little ways forward since the primordial sludge, but not nearly far enough. If I may presume, you have a washing machine. You also have a clothes drier.
Let’s walk through the steps of washing clothes, and identify a few small areas where there are problems:
- At the beginning of the process you are required to gather your dirty laundry and place it in the washing machine.
- Then you have to fill the washing machine with reagents and start it.
- Then, about an hour later, you have to come back and move the laundry from the washing machine to the drier.
- Then you have to fold and hanger your clothes.
- Then you have to put them where they are stored.
The only parts of this process I really believe should be automated out of existence are EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM AUGH
But perhaps it would be more productive for me to be more specific. If it takes two hours for the robots to take dirty clothes and transform them into clean clothes (and it does), why am I involved at 1:05 into the process!? If my nice clothes are dirty and I need them tomorrow and it’s late at night, I can put them in the washing machine, then an hour later I have to drag my sorry ass out of bed in order to, get this: PICK THE CLOTHES UP, MOVE THEM ABOUT A FOOT TO THE RIGHT, PUT THEM BACK THE FUCK DOWN AGAIN AUGHGGGHHHGHGHGHGH. I WAS SLEEPING! YOU WOKE ME UP FOR THIS SHIT!? Robots can goddamn DO THAT. Why am I forced to?
So, let’s say I buy a big ol’ bottle of fabric softener. That’s the kinda thing that happens. Say this bottle has 100 loads worth of fabric softener inside it. Over the course of a year I am going to pick this motherfucking bottle up off of the shelf one shitting hundred asshole times. I am going to remove the cap. I am going to measure out some fabric softener linearly proportional to the weight of my laundry. I am going to poor it into the machine. I am going to replace the cap and put it back on the shelf. My laundry machine already, today has a scale in it, and it knows how much my laundry weighs before it starts spinning. Can you, the reader, give me ONE reason why I don’t just poor the ENTIRE FREAKING BOTTLE of fabric softener into this machine ONCE A YEAR and make a robot deal with all this annoying fiddly shit for me? If the reason you gave was “ARGLEBLARGLE GUHHHHH“, you are correct.
I know what you’re thinking “Come on. It’s not that hard! Just measure out the softener! It’s no big deal. And measure out the detergent. And measure out the bleach. We haven’t invented cameras OR buttons OR color safe bleach, so there’s no way it could know if it should add bleach! Bet you didn’t think of that, did you smart guy? Quit whining and waste your entire life on shitty, unpleasant, existentially vapid tasks instead of enjoying life!”. Well, I hear you, and I understand what you’re saying. My response is this: I HATE YOU I WANT YOU TO DIE I WANT YOU TO SUFFER I AM GOING TO FIND YOU AND I AM GOING TO HURT YOU AUGH
ViewJournal
Posted by pyrosim on December 6, 2010
No comments
ViewJournal has been completely rewritten in python to have correct sorting! Feast your terminals on the new version at http://pyrosim.s3.amazonaws.com/archive/December_06_2010/0237/viewjournal
S3 Scripts
Posted by pyrosim on November 20, 2010
No comments
Three handy little S3 scripts I created for personal use. Archive simply stores away a timestamped version of whatever files you feed it, Journal writes the command-line arguments to a file and stores it with a timestamp, and docedit approximates emacsing a cloud filesystem.
ViewJournal tries to be a handy viewer for your journal entries in reverse chronological order, but it doesn’t actually sort correctly yet. It’s still handy for viewing, though.
Smartphone Bills in a Reasonable World
Posted by pyrosim on November 14, 2010
No comments
Cell phone companies bilk their customers for every penny their worth in the current system. This is almost right under capitalist ideology. Almost. Unfortunately, their incentives are all wrong. There is an oligopoly and absurdly high barriers for entry into the market on a purely infrastructural level, and it only gets worse when we take into account that a customer is pretty much locked into doing business with one carrier at a time.
Think about that for a second. Why is it that customers cannot do business with more than one carrier at a time? What if Verizon gets good reception at my house and Sprint gets good reception at my work? Even if I have a phone with a radio that is quite capable of talking to both networks, I am stuck choosing one or the other. Do we deal with restaurants this way? Do I have to pick the restaurant by my house or by my job and then sign up to buy forty hamburgers a month regardless of how many I actually eat? No, I don’t. That’s stupid. Whenever I get hungry, I can go to whatever restaurant is convenient and buy exactly how much food I want. Why aren’t cell phones the same way?
My proposal is simple. We buy our phones from electronics stores instead of carriers. After we buy a phone, we drive home and get on a computer. We go to the websites of whatever carriers we want to do business with, and we make an account with our billing information and the radio ID of our new phone. Then our phone maintains connections with the towers of whatever networks it is registered with. Whenever we receive a call it is routed to us via whichever network has the best reception for us at the moment, whichever network is presently offering the best prices, and whichever network has the least congestion. Our phone can make that decision automatically: we just pick it up and answer, and benefit from getting the best reception and prices, always. At the end of the month, each network we’ve registered with bills us at a per-kilobyte rate. If we didn’t use our phones, we pay $0.00. If we used our phones a little bit, we pay a little bit. If we used our phones a lot, then we pay… approximately what we’re already being forced to pay on contract whether it cost the network anything or not.
This system is vastly superior to the current one for several reasons: First, it forces the networks to constantly be competing on price and coverage. If I can save a single penny on my bill my phone will know that and do it automatically on my behalf. The network with the most coverage, least congestion, and best prices will be making the most money! If a competing network wants to make more money, all they have to do is offer a better service. We will never see networks charging 20 cents to deliver a 1 kilobyte message ever again, because those networks will just automatically not get any business. Second, it reduces the barriers to enter the market to practically nothing, relative to today. You don’t have to build a network that covers the entire country. If you build a network that covers a single building, then it will be worth it to the occupants of that building to go to your website and sign up and you can make a tidy profit selling a useful service to a small number of people with almost no investment. When those people are not in that building, their phones will just automatically use other networks. Third, everybody would have a smart phone. There would be no reason not to. The cost of a handset is trifling relative to the staggering costs of a monthly data plan that carriers require today. Somebody who is on WiFi 99% of the time can own a smart phone and gain all the many benefits of perpetual internet access while only paying maybe five bucks for service.
In conclusion, the state of the telcom market in the US right now is terrible. It will never get better. But I can dream…
NaNoWriMo 2010 Post 5
Posted by pyrosim on November 2, 2010
No comments
The bartender first began to suspect she was irregular when she took her fifth shot in twenty minutes without showing any signs of drunkeness at all. The alcohol might be old fashioned, but by old fashioned standards it would be some of the purest, hardest, punch-you-in-the-stomach-and-steal-your-lunch-money-ist alcohol you could find. Modern day, of course, nobody drank themselves to death unless they wanted to. If someone passed out at the bar, a pair of orderly robots did them the common curtesy of picking them up and dumping them in the station’s do-everything vacuum tube system. The tubes would first administer a sedative to keep them asleep, then teleport all the alcohol right out of their blood. The alcohol was stored in a reservoir behind the bar and promptly sold to the next customer. (Hey, you gotta be careful with your resources on a space station in the middle of nowhere.) The drunkard was dumped into their own warm bed in their cabin and had their sheets tucked over them all nice and gentle like. Living in the future was pretty dang sweet in some respects. So, that considered, it wasn’t unusual that this lady was drinking quite a bit of alcohol. It was unusual however, that she showed no signs of slowing down.
The bartender’s suspicion was amplified when there were twelve more shots in the next twenty minutes. This was most definitely unusual. The bartender’s suspicion, however, meant nothing at all because he was payed commission. It didn’t really matter to him that she ought to be dead so long as her money kept clearing.
She spent the next twenty minutes eating stale chips. Then she walked out of the bar. Through the wall.
NaNoWriMo 2010 Post 4
Posted by pyrosim on November 2, 2010
No comments
They had arrived at earth.
They had arrived in the year CE2010.
—
The Space Station Aquarius had been a space station since the Exodus. It had not existed in anywhere near its current form, but it had existed. It started as a small research base orbiting the moon of an M class planet. Back in those days it only had the infrastructure to support four or five people. Since then it had ballooned to accommodate more than a million. The moon and planet and star it was bound too were all destroyed in the Exodus, but by some coincidence the station itself remained quite functional. Intially it’s location was very close to the center of the New Worlds. Without FTL the slow boats that travelled among the planets of the New Worlds set up bases on every rock, pebble, or (in this case) space station that was on a path between populous planets. Aguarius just so happened to wind up on the line between the two most populous planets in the New Worlds, so scarcely a month went by without another slow boat passing in one direction or the other. Sometimes the boats contained building materials. Sometimes they chose to invest those building materials in expanding Aquarius. There was quite a lot of money to be made selling things to slow boat captains and passengers who were usually either paid very well or already very welthy respectively. By the time they got to Aquarius it had been a long time since they’d gotten to spend that money. FTL communication was invented shortly after the Exodus, using precisely the quantum entanglement electron spin method you’d expect. (Causality remained intact. Somehow. Look, don’t bother me, kid.) Indeed, FTL communication was developed shortly after the Exodus both in the Milky Way and in the New Worlds. Unfortunately, despite many sustained efforts from both sides to get a matching pair of communicators split between the New Worlds and the Milky Way, no one had ever been successful.
Bad luck, I guess.
Anyways, back on Aquarius there is a man in an old fashion human meat body getting drunk on old fashioned grain alcohol in an old fashioned bar where things were a little too expensive, and the chips weren’t very good, but the bartender would listen to your stories and pretend to give a crap. The bartender didn’t give a crap, of course, but he pretended to. That was good enough to keep the customers coming back, and paying just a little bit too much for the alcohol. Or maybe it was just the alcohol. Whatever. In any case, one person getting drunk at this bar will be interesting to us.
She was a tall, brawny lady you probably didn’t want to get into a fight with. Unless you wanted your face smashed in. Which, ya know, if you did, that’s fine. I don’t judge you. She’s your lady. She’s not a regular at this bar, though. She’s not even a regular at this station. Nor was she a regular in this universe. Suffice to say, she was irregular.
NaNoWriMo 2010 Post 3
Posted by pyrosim on November 1, 2010
No comments
NaNoWriMo 2010 Post 2
Posted by pyrosim on November 1, 2010
No comments
But that was many generations ago.
—
“Hey Jenna. You might wanna take a look at this” buzzed Michael. There was an enormous amount of radiation coming from a point in space that contained, as far as the rest of his sensors were concerned, nothing at all.
Jenna flew by the point he had indicated. “You’re right. This is pretty odd. It doesn’t seem to have any gravity, but it is spewing out a metric buttload of energy. Actually… nevermind what I said about gravity, sensors don’t report anything unusual at the point where the radiation is coming from, but nothing is at all what it’s supposed to be anywhere else.
She was right. In the intergalactic void there wasn’t much gravity to be concerned with at all except what their own microcluster generated, and they had departed from the tip heading out, so all the gravitic force should have been coming from one direction.
It wasn’t.
Instead, it was coming from all directions. For that matter, there was LIGHT coming from all directions too, and it was bright light. Brighter light than they were used to in the Void.
“Michael?”
“Yeah, Jenna?”
“I think we’re in a galaxy.”