- Nicola Papale's personal blog

Told you so

2025-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Intel is in, and it’s dire.

I told you so. This is what happens when you let the seething masses take control.

GDP is now below 17th century levels, discipline is a faraway concept lost to the annals of history, people stopped respecting their better, instead opting to submit to the inferiors. There is no more military, no more prisons, nothing that can be called “judiciary” or “law”. All the resources were diverted to prop up a disgusting welfare of the masses. A society completely contrary to all the natural laws of economy.

They even made the trade of gold illegal!

This is why I took so much time before withdrawing to my secure bunker. I knew that without the iron hand of enlightened entrepreneurs, society would collapse. I was willing to put my assets at risk to steer the ship of humanity in the right direction. But ultimately I couldn’t do anything and had to withdraw.

The plan was simple: withdraw, wait for social order to collapse, humanity to split into isolated clans. The people roaming and fighting over the last crumbs of civilization. I would come out of my bunker, with gold and guns, recreate society and order from scratch, take over a clan, then the surrounding ones, pick up the right entrepreneurs, teach the correct way of trading, taking over the world.

Those were the sweet dreams of 20th century authors, but I learned at my expenses that scifi novels aren’t a guide of the future. The revelation shocked me. I could only come to the conclusion Asimov was nonsense drivel.

Instead, something wholly different happened.

Well, first, let me tell you how bad the withdrawal went. I had a team of 10 agents and 19 young women. Specifically picked for their high skill, loyalty and superior gene pool, they were to come with me in the bunker, together we would analyze and plan for the hostile takeover. And prepare the next generation of rulers of the world.

This went miserably, I sent the rallying call, and no one what-so-ever showed up. I was the only one. I paid all of them soooo much, and they ignored me. All the personality tests were unanimous: Those were the most aligned and loyal servitors the earth could produce, yet they didn’t come. Incredible. Thankfully, the bunker was the best money could buy. It gave me complete control over everything (in the off chance my servitors weren’t as loyal as needed). Thankfully, the corollary was that it was completely autonomous, and I could live without the help of anyone.

The bunker was in a network of communication with other billionaire withdrawal bunkers all over the world. What a fucking waste. Somehow my situation ended up being the most wishable. All the other billionaires, they either got guillotined on their way, bombed in their private jets, betrayed by their agents, or simply gave themselves to the mad mob.

I suspect there are other survivors to the great upheaval, but I certainly can’t contact them.

Still, I have direct connection to spy satellites, autonomous cameras, satellite dishes to eavesdrop all world communication. One must first know the battlefield before engaging into it.

At first, everything went as one could expect: The Western governments collapsed on themselves, global trade stopped, multinationals stopped producing, because without governments to protect their assets, there was not much use in producing them.

But something really weird happened then. Soldiers stopped shooting at each other, they just came home. The military industry stopped from one day to another. No nuclear warheads were launched (!!!) somehow the nuclear numbers were kept secret.

People didn’t start dying in droves. At first, they ate from the reserves and locally produced goods. Then, as the global trade of fertilizers collapsed, the only logical next step would have been a collapse of food production, upheaval and chaos. But instead, what happens, no one could have predicted: people shifted. The commodity traders became commodity producers. They had the skills to predict the horrors to come. But instead of looking for themselves, they decided to join force with others. They learned about agronomy, against all sense and decency, they went to the field. Indeed, in theory, more hands in the field does compensate for the loss of fertilizer productivity.

Even without a government, a crisis system of rationing was put in place. Far from collapsing, the digital infrastructure was repurposed to keep everyone up to date. No police, yet rations perfectly respected. As if everyone had a little Stalin in their head, controlling their thought and forcing them to help others.

Without international trade (half of which is moving around oil and gas), all the good source of energy were unavailable, surely it would cause a crisis.

But here again, the effect was completely paradoxal. All the recently built AI data centers running on gas stopped working, yet no one cared. All airplanes were grounded, yet no one cared. Fighter jets, carriers, tanks, they all had empty tanks.

Yet. No. One. Cared.

It didn’t stop them. The lights, the hospitals, everything was already secured by local electric production and storage. There were some difficulties, but they overcame them.

The most humiliating was the takeover of the digital infrastructure. I hated it. All our corporate data. Be it data we kept on our employees, customers, meeting notes. Everyone could inspect the private archives of the titans of the industry, of the great multinationals. All our communications laid bare.

They misinterpreted our deals and discussions, as “collusion” (where it was just pure economic rationality, since, of course, by definition, rich people can’t be wrong) I hate them. They even named it “capitalism”, they said openly that they hated capitalism. So much progress on the spirit of man, erased overnight. Back to 1917.

They took our trade secrets and shared them widely, our best engineers, debasing themselves, by touring the world teaching their hard-earned knowledge, with only food and bed as repayment.

No one to enforce copyright or patent laws. Against all economic rationality, labs popped up, in Africa, all over the world, ran by incompetent locals, producing vaccines, medication, for cheap, without paying anyone for it, and distributing them, without even asking for money, only respect and free food.

And I was here, in my bunker, looking at the bulletins. I couldn’t believe it. Yet, their propaganda was corroborated by my spy satellites. I started to think they somehow hacked through them to feed me bullshit. But that wasn’t possible.

That was only the first few years, the transition. Not content from taking away the satisfaction of knowing they were helpless without me, they went further.

God bless my little ass cheeks. I hate to use this word in this context, I’ll need to take a mint after. But I can’t but admit that they innovated. Innovated at a rate never seen in the 21th century.

Somehow, they found new ways of sharing information. They found new ways of producing and distributing food. Apparently more tasty, more nutritious, more resilient (I wouldn’t know, I only have the seeds I came here with). They reorganized society. Almost all economic activity is now welfare for the ones who contribute the less to society. If I were at the helm, those people would be in jail, not cajoled.

Lifespans increased. I repeat this: global life expectancy increased. And I can’t find any proof of the contrary and it drives me up the fucking wall. Somehow, they produce less food, yet live longer, is there any sense to that?

They even reintroduced global exchange. Or a hippie masquerade of one, should I say.

For one, they have quotas on trade value. The circulation of gold is strictly limited to a few grams per person. Only “useful” (whatever that means to those lunatics, certainly not profit) things may be moved from one place to another. I’ll admit, there are still some sensible high volume trade, on fucking trains. Like the whole network is just kept up for the perverse pleasure of sexual degenerates.

The last few years, they keep broadcasting about the plan of building new nuclear power plants (WTF, even the hippies do nuclear power now?) they say it could put to use all the nuclear waste of my times.

They replaced cars and trucks with weird giant bicycles, somehow it works? They stopped building new houses. Yet, apparently, they never have any housing shortage. It seems all my property is now occupied by degenerates, all my flower garden and golf courses turned into turnip fields. I hate turnips.

No more respect for my culture. They still broadcast traditional ceremonies: cow fights, Schwingen, Alpen horns. But I can’t look at it: men in dirndl, women fighting men in the sawdust. Decorated tennis balls on the cow horns.

This is not culture, it’s pure degeneration and corruption. (though to be fair, I’m partial to that new bikini hornussen fad)

So, I thought, with the West finally crumbling because of the rot in its foundations, true efficient powers could take over. But nay, Russia simply doesn’t exist anymore. And China did nothing to discipline the rest of the world. Instead, they kept dishing out solar panel for basically free.

I though: finally, get rid of autocracy and democracy, leave place for true competency and efficiency of market allocation. But my ass! As I said, no more multinationals, all of them blew up. And no one around to build up new ones. Incredible. People still talked to each other beyond the borders, people still travel about, but no one was interested in trade. Insane. Go to hell Ricardo.

Oh, they found a cure to every venereal disease, now everyone fuck all the time. Banging is the new hand shaking. It’s insane, they have a pill for curing cancer, and they are giving it away for free.

No more governments, yet, I never saw such a powerful society. No more economy, yet I never saw so much wealth. Much more cultural diversity, yet I never saw my culture so widely celebrated. No more profit, yet I never saw so much innovation.

I hate it, it’s so wrong. What’s the point of wealth, technology, culture, if it’s not for me to control everyone else?

I’m waiting for them to come, to try to kill me, gas me, anything! I know they know I exist. My bunker is impenetrable, I prepared everything. I’m waiting for it, I want it, there is nothing else on earth that I care about. Let them obsess over me, let me show them how powerful I am, let them waste energy, effort, resources on me. I only live for that, this is what defines me as a man: how much others are forced to spend to handle me. This is the definition of power.

But no, they don’t care, they let me be. To them, I’m nothing, not even a minor annoyance.

This is what I hate the most. Them: they are just happy and enjoying life. Me: I’m just jealous.

From hippie to loony

2025-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

This is a continuation of my earlier post about “Why FOSS”</a>. It’s a bit of musing about the ideological motivation of various silicon valley figures.
What was it like to work with computers in 1985? A fun read on the mater is The Cuckoo’s Egg</a>.
In the book, there is a sense of freedom and candid collaboration, even between hippie academics and FBI agents. A certain Robert Morris is a fairly important character in the book. His son made the Morris Worm, which was the first computer worm 1</a>, Morris happens to be close friend with a certain… Paul Graham 2</a>.
^{1
The concept of computer worm was already well known at the time, it’s just that no one was foolish enough to release one.
</div>}
^{2
Venture capitalist behind Y combinator.
</div>}
Oftentime, the hippie movement is associated with “The Left”3</a>. It’s a mistake. Hippies didn’t have much of a consistent ideology, opinions were held without much rigor, second thoughts, or attempt at consitency.
^{3
“The Left” tend to have a slightly wrapped meaning in the US.
</div>
A major hippie figure is Timothy Leary. I don’t want to say too much about him, because I’ve no knowledge of the subject. Timothy Leary, himself, took a lot of inspiration from cybernetics (which was born with computers) but adding woo the same way we have AI-woo and quantum-woo in alternative medecines nowadays.
The idea was that we could grasp the world by “unlocking” our brain through alternative conscious states. Leary’s stuff was extremely individualistic with a focus on individuals and power through self development and discovery, with a complete disdain for organization around multiple people. You could “know” without really having to understand.
Leary’s influence in Silicon valley is today blindingly obvious, especially around AI and cryptocurrency. For cryptocurrency, you also have the weird fixation around the printing press from austrian economics.
Let’s give a passing mention to Steve Jobs, who was raised in a hippie commune.}
And finally, let’s mention the number one reason techbros are so boring. Their sci-fi lectures. American sci-fi is drivel. I’ll let Charles Stross do the talk though: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html</a>
But let’s focus on Wikipedia for now. I’m going to quote Jimmy Wales Wikipedia page</a>, Wales is the founder of Wikipedia:

Wales has previously referred to himself as an Objectivist, referring to the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand 4</a> in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism. </blockquote>
^4
If you don’t know who Ayn Rand is, god bless you sweet child. But, I could summarize her as “neoliberal proselitism using horny dom/sub romances</a>”. Also, Elon Musk did nothing else than quote Rand when he said that empathy was a human bug. </div>
and

Wales has cited Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek’s 5</a> essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, which he read as an undergraduate, as “central” to his thinking about “how to manage the Wikipedia project”. </blockquote>
^{5
Also linked to woo-cybernetics, with his idea of a “glob-spanning brain”.
</div>}
It’s worth noting that Wales genius doesn’t lie in his ideas, but in his capacity to listen to people who disagree with him 6</a>, and his acceptance of the idea of collective intelligence. Hilariously, there are folk in Silicon valley who despise the idea of collective intelligence, I wrote about it in an older post</a>.
^6
A good read on Wales’ pragmatism is his conflict with Swartz on the structure of contributions to Wikipedia: http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/</a>. (Oh god, Swartz and “Unschooling” is yet another Silicon Valley ideological current) </div>
For the matter, if you think that a room with a nuclear physicist, a biologist, and a psychologue is more apt to answer any given question than a room with just a psychologue, you believe in collective intelligence.
So what’s the link between Jimmy Wales and free software? God, why is the world so complex? I hate it.
There is two things. The first relates to Free software. It’s the idea of self-governance. Wikipedia works because it organizes many people so that they work together to preserve some common resource, that’s self-governance. The four freedoms are cool, but they would be better expressed with a single right, the right of taking part in the decisions over the computer systems we use every day. Ie: self-governance, or democracy, if you feel especially dramatic.
The second relates to Open Source. And it shows the corporate roots of Open Source, because it’s also tightly tied to Hayek’s thinking. It’s the idea of exit7</a>.
^{7
Another link to make with modern techbro and the idea of the “networked state”. Directly inspired by the Stephenson dystopia Snow Crash, where the world is split in small territories dominated by mafioso corporations. Stephenson’s dystopias are actually the main source of inspiration for modern tech.
</div>
Exit as a concept is very simple. You remember how Stallman imagined a tax on software, so that people could allocate democratically resources to software projects? Gosh, that sounds complicated. What if instead of trying to build up a system that work, we just said to people that they have the right to quit, fork, create their own little fenced community the way they want and be done with it? Surely, eventually someone would make a great system and we could just all go behind them! So nice, I don’t even have to imagine the perfect system, I just say it’s possible. That’s exit for short.
Exit as a software development strategy is not exactly optimal. Sure you can fork an OSS project, but if you don’t have a roadmap to motivate people to contribute to your project, you become simply dependent on upstream, as it has more developer resources. The result is that two OSS projects that are fork of each other will often become a single OSS project. There are examples of forks going their ways, and coexisting, but those are the exception rather than the norm.
Invertly, if the new project has more resource than the original, the original will die.
Exit, like a software license, is a tool. It cannot be an end in itself. It needs to be embedded in a larger strategy of community building and sustainable process around software. We need to ask: exit to where? When to exit?
Now it would be all cute and silly if it stoped there. But really, exit is just a way of avoiding talking about the end goal.
Behind the idea of exit. And here, I talk more at a societal level. There is the idea that we should put different systems of society in competition between each other. And that, of course, the best one would win and take over.
Sounds good right? But remember what experience shows: it’s the most well resourced that wins, not “the best” (for whatever definition of “best” that isn’t “has the most resource”).
So the only possible outcome of exit is a society shaped by the people with the most resource today. Is it far fetched to say this is loony, if the person with the most resource today literally calls for the extermination of minorities, and do loony salutes?
Yet here we are.
There is a straight pipeline from Leary to Musk. It’s all based on individuality with a complete disdain for the complexity of interpersonal relationship. A society is nothing if relations between people. Collective intelligence cannot exist without society.
Innoculating against the sad mindset that besets people like Musk requires one thing only: care. We need to pay attention to each other, listen, accept that relations of dependence are not unilateral, listen to others weaknesses and accept ours.
Isolation is what creates a society where one can yearn for the destruction of their neighbour.}

Why FOSS?

2025-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Today, we often discuss free software in terms of license. But licenses are only a tool. A mean to an end. So what is this all of that about? What is free software for?
We could start this history in the 19th century, with the first programmer, Ada Lovelace, writing and sending computer programs for the fictional “analytical engine” imagined by Babbage. All of that sent by letter and freely shared.
Free Software</h2>
But no. Let’s skip directly to Richard Stallman, the instigator of the GNU Public License (GPL). Stallman puts it simply: “If I like a program, I must be able to share it with other people who like it”.
Reading the GNU manifesto</a>, published in 1985, you sense a feeling of betreyal, of a territory of collaboration and friendship taken over by greed and competition.
He describes software as a common good that needs a coordinated investment strategy. He describes paying for software being similar to paying for air, that we should have a say in how software is built through a tax and a publicly controlled investment fund1</a>.
^1
By the way, it’s not farfetched. In a lot of countries, whenever you buy storage media, you pay a tax proportional to the storage size of the media, and the money from this tax goes directly into the coffer of large media labels as a sort of “piracy compensation”. One notable difference being that there is absolutely no democratic control over how that public money is invested.2</a> </div>
^{2
It boggles the mind. Whenever a Stallman-like tax is talked about, it’s as if it was some alien object that couldn’t possibly be implemented in our world. Yet, when it benefits people with already too much money, it’s so natural it doesn’t even merit debate.
</div>
Cute.
So Stallman helped lauch the GPL as a way to preserve a spirit of sharing and collaboration in programming. As someone who lived through open source collaboration, and then suffered through collaboration on closed source software. I can relate very deeply.}
But “spirit of collaboration” is a bit vague, the free software philosophy has the “four freedoms</a>”, which, in short are the ability to run, understand, share and modify the software.
As a relatively isolated developer, I take for granted the ability to modify software that I run. I run Linux, and use almost exclusively open source software. I use archlinux, because it’s dead easy to patch software I get from the central repository. On my phone, I only download apps from F-droid. On the web, I take for granted ad, cookie, and cookie banner blockers.
The ability to run software that I run is almost a truism. But I’m reminded of my hundred games Steam library that could be turned off tomorrow, because of various DRM restrictions.
The ability to understand software is nice. But I’ll expand on this later.
So really, the GPL (as a license) is not what the GNU project wants. What it wants is for people to get the four freedoms.
Open Source</h2> I’ve started using “Open source” (OSS) without really introducing the word. “Open source” is an expression from 1998. It’s almost the same as Free software. In fact, the criteria to call a license “open source” is derived from the Debian “Social Contract”</a>, which itself is derived from the four freedoms.
But on a cultural level, OSS tries to promote free licenses in themselves, rather than a mean to get the four freedoms. This allows OSS advocates to promote the collaboration model to large private companies. Why does that matter? Listen, if you go to Microsoft and pitch “the free sharing of software and a solidaristic union against private software companies”, you are welcome, but don’t expect the warmest reaction.
In my time working on software outside of private institutions, I only worked on OSS. Why? It’s not an ideological preference, but a practical one: I know rust, and most rust projects abide by OSS ideas rather than free software.
There is an historical reason for this: rust was made at Mozilla, which was born as a Netscape project. Netscape having a $10B market capitalization, it certainly wasn’t to keen on the “we need to fight software companies” discourse around free software.
There is more to it, and it relates to the questions of how to best organize a society. I wrote about it in another blog post</a>.
So it’s worth repeating: the license, from starting as a mean for software freedom, became a goal in itself of Open Source. I’ve already said a few things about the danger of mixing goals and means</a>.
How to collaborate on the internet?</h2>
Fostering collaboration and reciprocal sharing of ideas is the goal of both the OSS and Free software movements.
But what does that collaboration look like in practice?
As a reminder, the four freedoms are: the abilities to run, understand, modify, and share the software.
Let’s focus a bit more on understanding and modifying software.
Building software today is a very complicated matter. You have to familiarize yourself with a variety of tools and how they work. For Python, you need to interact with: a file system, an interpreter, bytecode, packaging dependencies, OSes, a text editor etc. And that’s only for a terminal app! What about a webserver? You have to understand what’s the internet, server daemon, the distinction between a server and a client etc.
It’s a shit ton of knowledge that goes as a given for someone with a few years of experience, but is a very painful and daunting mountain of unknowns for someone who is just starting. I still remember how confused I was when I first encountered async (what do you mean, you need a pool of threads?!). Now, it’s second nature.
A Free software license doesn’t magically inculcate people with the knowledge of how to modify the software.
If the end goal is self-governance, the ability for users to control the rules under which they interact, we need to take into account more than just the license.
There are two ways of approaching the matter:

Organizing the project around users as programmers (upstream-driven). Especially relevant for software libraries. The goal is to make the code base as accessible as possible to new developers, making heavy use of CI to manage processes they may not be familiar with, spaces where already proficient contributors can help newcomers, amazing documentation, etc.</li>
Software as an empowering structure (modding). Emacs here is the model. There is a complex, minimized core, and the software is built as extensions. The shell is heavily documented, and can be modified trivially (even without development tools) by the end-users. Modifying the software is actually how you use the software. When you are satisfied with your modification, you can share it with the community, and maybe it can be integrated upstream. This can become an on-ramp to contribution to people who wouldn’t consider themselves programmers. It works both as a teaching tool to use computers in general, and a tool to do the useful work the software enables.</li> </ol>
The truth is that (1) is an extension of (2) with more focus on human relationships. But (2) is such a beautiful and compelling picture of computing that I cannot discard it.
I personally believe that there is an inordinate amount of artificial complexity in software developments. That the barriers to entry are artificial and there is a world of computing out there where everybody naturally becomes a programmer. A world where software would be designed in such a way that people would naturally ramp up in competency as they use the computer. Probably I watched one too many Alan Kay keynote.
Those barriers in software grew out of the professionalization of software development. Since people were paid to work exclusively on coding, they could afford to add complex tools to their process, that requires a lot of ramp up to understand. Helplessness before a computer screen is not a fatality, it is the result of the contigency of history.
A more limited coding process, that has to rely more heavily on user collaboration would develop a completely different set of tools that gives much more power to users.
Existing governance of OSS projects</h2>
Now that you know my deep disatisfaction with software in general, and how we are missing an amazing world of complete user ownership of computers, let’s talk about how OSS projects work today.
An excellent entrypoint is the Foss & Craft episode on Open Source governance</a>.
The Lemmer-Webbers describe the various resources required to make an OSS project work. It includes hardware, developers and money in general.
The source code is a freely accessible resource, and the project is an institution (a set of rules) which purpose is to sustain that resource, by creating relationships between people.
Free software and Open source give the wrong idea. The focus of a software project are the people who use and contribute to the software, and not the software itself. A software in itself is as useful as a lawnmower without someone to use it.
The health of a software project is entirely dependent on the institutions surrounding it. Take for example OpenOffice. This is a complex project with an history that link back to Sun Microsystems. But enough history for now.
OpenOffice, once bought by Oracle, stopped being developped. The maintainers stopped accepting new contributions. So what happens is a “fork”. Some people took the source code, rebranded everything as “LibreOffice” and created new institutions around the same code. They accepted new code contributions and fixed bugs.
Elinor Ostrom theorized the concept of Commons. She gave a few outlines about how a self-governed institution that work to keep a common resource sustainable can itself persist.
One of them is recognition by higher authorities. Indeed, as soon as you are illegal, you won’t be for long. Ostrom gives the example of self-managed fisheries in Atlantic Canada that got destroyed by the government. A Free license is the guarentee that a fork will always have a legal existance.
In fact, going down Ostrom’s rules for a healthy Common</a>, I don’t see what else a license is good for for the health of an OSS project.
All the other “design principles” are addressed by a Code of Conduct and a good governance model (discuted in the Foss & Craft podcast I linked earlier).
Software is strictly about people. FOSS doesn’t understand what it wants to be about. Fundamentally, it’s about the right of people to have a say in the rules that affect them. It’s about self-governance, about democracy.
And a simple software license is neither necessary or sufficient to ensure a democratic control over software. We need a society that aknowledge the right of people to self-determination. We need the institutions around the software projects that give the users the power to change the instructions the machine runs, but also the rules of the institutions themselves.
We need computer users that are not mere spectators and passive reciever of the computer’s work, but are actors and creator of the systems the computer run.
Kant criticized a specialized society where as individual, you are a mere receiver of service: you go to the hair dresser, you go to the shoemaker. You are like a child surrounded by people that does the important work for you. We don’t want computers that treat us as children. We are adults, capable of taking part in the things that affect us. And if we want to live in a mature society of responsible adults, we need to give people the power to affect computers.

The deeper truth of Goodhart's law

2025-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Whenever a measure becomes a goal, it cease to be a meaningful measure. </blockquote>
That’s Goodharts’ law. Goodhart was an economist, at the time criticizing the Thatcher government’s economic policies.
Goodhart’s law is probably hand-caligraphied in vegan ink letters and framed in the finnest bamboo frame in every degrowth economist’s office. GDP 1</a> was invented to measure the economic resumption after the great depression, during WWII. Increasing GDP, “growth” was an explicit measure of the success of economic policies. But increasing GDP wasn’t a goal. Of course not! No one cares about some number in a box at the end of a spreadsheet in some government employee’s office. What mattered was that there was the industrial capacity for everyone to have a job, not only that, but enough power as a worker that you could force your boss to remunerate your work with more than breadcrumbs. That was the only purpose of GDP growth. 
^{1
gross domestic production 
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But even after this goal was reached, GDP growth, the means by which we atteined it, stayed as a goal. The reasons are complicated (mostly finance though) but GDP growth became a goal, while the actual goal – full employment 2</a> and good salaries – disapeared as a notion, or even an aspirational possibility.
^{2
I mean actual full employment, not the Friedmann version where “full employment” means at least 5% unemployment.
</div>
And so, now we have economic policies explicitly aimed at reducing worker power and increasing unemployment, as a mean to increase GDP. 
That’s been the program since the 1980, and it keeps being served as somehow new and innovative. I call it the homeopatic social economy theory: the less social spending there are, the more somehow it’s the problem.
Yet, any sensible person will ask you this: What’s the point of “improving the economy” if the net result is lower pay, poorer health, shorter lifespans, more social isolation, and a more poisonous environment? If the goal is the improvement of the human condition, then improve the human condition, don’t poison people and burn the planet to line your pocket.
We all know of enshitification by this point. Driven by many thing, but not least of which are KPIs (key personal indicators) and OKRs (Objective and Key Results) pushed by a management class starving for more tools to control workers. When your entire livinghood (KPIs are used to decide who to fire next year) depends on some measure, you bet you are going to do anything to optimize it. Including gaming it, including debasing yourself, including destroying your company in the long term.
And this is how we end up with poisonous social networks that are ready to spray you with the most depressing drivel, if only to keep you looking at the screen a little bit longer. It’s how we get dating apps that does everything to keep you alone and ready to pay for premium, and keep paying. It’s how we get news articles that are everything but informative. How we get search engines that serves you everything but what you are looking for. Academics that publish like a pressing machine, but write nothing of interess. The number chasing substituing for the actual meaningful goal of the task.
Not only does the measure stop being meaningful when it becomes a goal, but it actively harms the original goal the measure was supposed to promote once entranched enough.
But it doesn’t stop there. Ah! The so-called “eternal” debate of whether the ends justify the means.
Experience shows us: the means will eventually become the ends at any rate!
The French revolution: A society built with blood is a society that feeds on blood.
The theory explains it very easily: A system that lasts in time, by the nature of entropy, is a system that allocates energy to its own renewal. And whatever makes the system work will be reproduced.
The means will replace the ends as an end, if the means are stable.
“The purpose of a system is what it does”. That’s Staford Beer. It’s almost a truism.
Now what does it look like when applied to our world? Misery, pollution, and especially turning the victims of the cruelty of the system into criminals. That’s all inherant to our system. If the purpose of a system is what it does, it follows that we are living in a system which purpose is to kill humans, and dehumanize the ones that somehow survive. And it implies that the only way to stop the onslaught is to change the system.
What would a system that puts humans first look like? A system that not only gives each individual the tools for their own striving, living life as a person in all its dimensions; but also, by an almost mechanical process makes them agent of replication of this system of liberation.
The goal is liberation, democracy, self-organization. And the mean to it is self-organization, democracy and liberation. The name of this system is Organizing. Some may call it “post-growth” or “ecosocialism” but I find those labels to be missleading. Those are inspirational goals, and a compass to orient ourselves, but fundamentally, what matters is the way we go about it.
By the radical action of just trusting people, of just giving them what they need to improve, trusting them, no string attached, we change the world. We break this awful system that reproduce itself by cutting from us all that is human and all that we love. We introduce a new system, and we hope that this new system is capable of eating into the old one and eventually replace it.
Goodhart was right in a deep level.}

Let's all be Idiots

2025-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

In the Idiot (the Dostoievski book), the main character, prince Myshkin (the so-called “Idiot”) is in fact a genious.
He’s fresh out of therapy in Switzerland and arriving by train to Saint Petersburg. He’s like a baby just born into the world. He’s been isolated from the world his whole childhood, and in his 20s, comes his first experience of Russian society, which is really his first experience of anything outside of the primitive alps. He acts completely naively and without any notion that people around him could have malicious intents.
What happened then is a piece of art.
The truth is: people do hate the kind of people who are ready to take advantage of weaker people. In fact, I’d advance it’s literally the only motive of hatred in the world. And what you hate you don’t usually do yourself.
The aristocracy and oligarchy of Petersburg are people full of themselves, completely blind to the harms they make to the world, playing dumb game of oneupmanships, yet they are not uniform. The book is full of colorful characters, each with their weakness, their foibles, their flaws. But if something is true, it’s how unbearably full of themselves anyone in the Petersburg elite is.
But Myshkin has a magical aura. He’s like an angel, every time he enters a room, pretty much everyone is reminded of modesty.
How comes an idiot with no experience survives after being dropped in this shark tank of jagged cynical bastards ready to eat whole the first thing come their way?
If Myshkin is an “idiot” he’s certainly not a fool. He knows the world is full of hypocrisy, that people are mean.
But he choses to act as if nothing. In fact, Myshkin is a great stratege, and he is in an quixotic campaign against greed and hypocrisy. He identified the best weapon against those: honesty and modesty. It’s quite simple: be ostensibly harmless, start by showing off your weaknesses. Decent people won’t take advantage of it, great people will pay attention to you and remember the ones who try to take advantage of you.
What you become then is not just a vulnerable person, but you become like a bubble of oxygen in an asphixiated world. A view of a better world. We live in muddy time, under a constant grey sky, everybody wish to see the sun at least a little bit. And that’s what you become to people. A ray of sun, a reason to live another day. We all live for admiration and love, and we admire and love people who give us those things.
People aren’t hypocrits. Society imposes hypocrisy on people.
No one likes hypocrisy, no one likes to pretend being something they aren’t. But we are afraid. The core is the weak point, and we want to protect it. Especially when people around us have an history of exploiting other, being mean, and getting away with it.
But being always on your guard is tiring. Everybody is always on the lookout to express their innermost selves. As difficult or ostracizing as it can be.
Even as individuals, we can’t grow without the help of a community. You aren’t born with friends, you become friend.
Now, what prevents us from expressing the truth? Shame: sometimes manipulated so as to make you affraid of the most harmless thing. Fear of repercusion. Now, this is a perfectly legitimate worry.
Exposing weakness is difficult, and dangerous. But we are the product of what we do. Stafford Beer famously said that “the purpose of a system is what it does”, put more crudely, we are what we do. And if we aren’t yet, we will soon be. And by dint of hidding ourselves in drab little tasteless characters, we become drab little tasteless characters.
It’s risky, but rewarding. It turns out, most people are decent. Being weak and being answered with kindness is a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing to feel the trust someone puts in you as a result. It’s the start of a little secret society. A new garden you have mutual responsibility over.
This the start of a network of mutual aid. Alone we are weak. Alone, we get the world we live in right now. But together, we build the power. A world of reciprocity and mutual trust exists. William Gibson said that the future is here, but not equally distributed. In fact, there are many possible futures currently active today, our task is to find the one we want to see persist and grow, and work for it to be our collective future, there is a world to win out there.

Hypersonic ballistics aimed at the Commons

2025-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

Imagine this: You aren’t a quantum physicist, the dude in front of you pretends to know everything there is to know about quantum physics (QP). How do you know he is honest? You can’t ask him a question about QP and tell if his answer is correct, you can’t verify them because you don’t know the answer.
Well, the dude seems to know a bunch about QP: he says a lot of things you don’t understand, he seems excited about the same topics as people you know for sure know QP, uses similar words, he can wax lyrical about QP for hours on end, etc. He kinda passes the vibe check. Also, he has a degree.
Ok, but what happens if the dude is pseudonymous? you can’t check his degree. At best, other pseudonymous users in the same online space can say “I like this dude”. But how can you tell the other users are any good at QP, or that they are honest?
Well, aren’t you just left with the vibe check? Does the vibe check work?
To a point, no? The dude is well spoken, his explanations are clear and enlightening. He’s consistent. You can quickly tell if something is easy or not to read. But for consistency, you have to go beyond the words, inspect the implications, the hidden interactions, and find where two different assertions meet, and whether they make sense together.
And what if you find a contradiction? Maybe it’s your misinterpretation, maybe the dude simply didn’t formulate the assertion correctly. In any case, searching for contradiction isn’t the first tool you reach for: it’s very costly in time and attention.
And in truth: people tend to be honest. It’s costly as a human to make shit up, and the potential gains are never that high compared to the potential cost and actual cost.
On the internet though, no one knows that you are a dog. You can only judge someone by their writing. They write a lot, and they write well, that means they spent time on the subject. It’s costly to make shit up. Even more costly to make a lot of shit up. And all of that for what? Some vainglorious fame?
No… And that’s good. That means that you, as a random internet user with no knowledge in QP can just find something someone wrote on the internet and basically trust that they know their subject. After all, why would someone go on the internet and lie? (but like for real)
Until the ~~fire nation</del> LLM slop invaded~~1</a>.
^{1
OK, it started with AdSense: shit started not when it became cheap to lie, but when it became profitable.
</div>
Before, you could, as a complete stranger, drop into any phpBB forum and get a vague idea of whom to trust and whom to suspect. And that meant you could learn about anything! QP, pixel art, game design, fanfic authoring, web dev, kernel dev, anything, like really!
You just kinda got the vibes, you could gauge how much energy someone put into a post by how well written it was. Energy spent meant sunk cost, it meant the person was serious and honest. You could use it to evaluate trustworthyness.
But not anymore.
LLMs have been thrust into us. “Thrust” is a very weak word. More like strapped on a billion 3M22 Zircon hypersonic missiles and fired at full speed at the whole world.
Like some sort of voracious mold, colonizing at speed every interface on your machines, chatbot buttons pop up, always just under your cursor when you were about to click. Search results are polluted with complete nonsense that would make Nostradamus frown in dismay. Workers, formerly free from interference, are suddenly told by their boss how to do their job, they must integrate chatbots in their workflow, whatever the cost – notwistanding the cost may be “I can’t do my work anymore” or that the boss doesn’t have the least idea what the job is. Billions, if not trillions of dollars, thrown into the shredder, just to foot the energy bills of those monsters.
It’s an insanely expensive coordinated effort, the like of which we’ve barely seen since the space conquest. Where does the money for this effort come from? It’s money we gave to a very small clique of similar-minded folk. The reasoning was that they were apter at putting it in the correct places than the ones who brought to us washing machines and paid vacations.
They decided to use this money, this influence, to get everybody to rely on chatbot for their work.
Well, but for what? For what!??! screams the entirety of the world. Oh! Great resource allocators, please do tell us what that thing is supposed to do? And they answer: not our job, here it is for free, do whatever, what matters is that you use it.
But what can one do with a machine that only makes shit up?
Remember what I said earlier?}

people tend to be honest. It’s costly as a human to make shit up, and the potential gains are never that high compared to the potential cost and actual cost. </blockquote>
It reduced the cost variable of dishonesty!
Now, anyone can make shit up at no cost at all! This means you can’t rely on someone’s attention to spelling, good phrasing, clean explanations, to gauge quickly the quality of a post</a>. You have to sludge a bit (maybe it’s just not a native English speaker) before you figure out you are in a miasma of slope.
It’s annoying I tell you. I see videos of cute cats, I can’t tell whether they are computer-generated or real. I see a picture of a dude holding a possum, the hand looks weird, maybe it’s computer-generated? A critical security issue report? Maybe it’s genuine, but most likely computer-generated</a>. Even if you recognize the slope, you have to engage with it, maybe they were using it in good faith. The fact is, the work you have to do to detect dishonesty is orders of magnitude greater, and reduces drastically your ability to just go on the internet and learn. Or just accept recommendations from strangers.
It’s not sci-fi, it’s Kafka. Or maybe yes, but PKD sci-fi, where reality is as sturdy as margarine.
So the environment changed. But it’s important to note: it wasn’t a fatality, it was a very deliberate choice to develop this specific technology. It was a specific policy to get this choice away from democratic control and into a small clique of people (financial investors). It was a choice to release to the public the technology. It was a choice to frame the technology in this very missleading way. It was a choice to subsidize the usage of the technology (to this day) with hundreds of billions in electricity bills. Currently, investors are threatening companies that do not follow in this death march. It’s still reversible. In fact, it cannot hold long in the current state.
They went and poisoned the well. For what? Not even for their own profit! They are losing money to this day, and with no perspective of recouping.
They saw the Commons, saw it as a threat to their economic models, it doesn’t abid to any alternative, and wanted to destroy it. Not just by releasing LLMs, but by also systematically DDOSing public source code repositories</a>.
They were outraged that anything else than wealth could work as a social marker to distinguish the good from the bad. Shocked at the temerity of an engineer telling them that, no, the laws of physics made their project impossible</a>.
Did they want revenge? After all, what is $100B dollars to a fund manager? They could gift themselves this little treat, it’s not like the lost quantities threatened them in any shape or form. $101B - $100B is still $1B, hundreds of times more than you need your whole life.
Now, we have to clean up behind them. We have to spend time and energy to find ways to work around the damages that their technology inflicted on us. It’s something we didn’t need, and by far. We’ve so many problems at hand, and they keep adding to it.

The Confused Confucius

2025-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

When I started writing this post, I expected falling on a much more esoteric note. Still an extremely abstract text with no actionable insight, but I think it can be understood. </blockquote>
What ties together economic cycles, the Vitruvian Man, and Chinese cosmology?
The yin and the yang.
Yin and yang. The dichotomy of everything. Yin: construction, nuturing, caring, healing, creating. Yang: destruction, transforming, ordering, enslaving.
Yin and yang are complementary and at the same time opposing forces that together form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts and the parts are essential for the cohesion of the whole.1</a>
^1
Quoted from Wikipedia</a>. </div>
The Vitruvian man: A man within both a circle and a square. The circle is centered on the navel, symbol of the connection to the mother, the birth and creation. The square is centered on the dick, symbol of power and dominance. Weapons are dick-shaped. Circles don’t have sharp hedges, they are welcoming, they protect enclose a safe environment. They are also how things naturally arrange themselves, as the optimal ratio of area to circumference. The square has sharp edges, it isn’t found in nature. But also, it’s made to be imbricated with other squares, it’s order and control. Our mother grows us, society bumps us into a shape, so that we fit into it. We are all subject to this machine. The drawing is that of a man, but all genders are subject to it.
Vitruvius, who inspired the Da Vinci drawing, was an architect.
Urbanism: Lewis Mumford described the transition from social order to civilisation in The City in History, very much in the same terms: circles vs squares.
The circle of pre-civilisation cities: villages of equal wealth, and periodic jubelees. Matriarcal arrangement where everyone was responsible to everyone else. The village was a safe haven delimited off of the dangers of nature roamed by now extinct ferocious creatures.
The squares of civilisation: citadels delimited by tall walls, to protect from other humans. Long streets with perfect visibility from beginning to end, an earlier version of the panopticon. Totalitarian societies ordered according to the wishes of an ultimate emperor of divine right.
Wishes of a single person, imposed on all through domination and hegemony: the constant violence and war of Mesopotamian civilisations, the relative peacability of ancient Egypt, cooperation to build giant pyramids, incarnation of civilisation: square bases and square blocks to fit together. The patriarchy in action.
If you’ve heard my opinion on The City in History, you might be surprised: I do think the first half is complete bollocks. But still, a compeling narrative, a genesis of our time, beautiful, despite being confabulated.
The middle ages: the abandon of civilisation, the soaring back into an organic life, based on local constraints, individual choice and neighbourly coordination. Meandering city streets, no endless perspectives. Each viewpoint an expression of how human life fits local conditions, the city talks to you about its own birth it’s an expression of life and itself.
But civilisation comes back with vengeance. Balistics, double entry bookkeeping, Adam Smith. New tools of domination and hegemony. We regressed back to the period of centralized control, the Baroque era. The cities aren’t the expression of their own existance anymore, they are the ode to the glory of the armies, states and emperors.
The long straight lines are back again. Large avenues designed for fast horses and large troops. Leaving the mere human local as trampling fodder. Windy narrow roads, designed for human community, are destroyed and replaced by the square layout, wide avenues to external invasions, the living space itself designed to wash off any personality out of the city.
The individual subsumed, grinded and fit into the greater machine of progress. Power, industry, profits, those are more importants than the mere human creature. The machines rebelled and enslaved us. We now work for them, instead of them for us.
Circle and square, circle again and square again. Opposing forces of generation and submission.
The yin and the yang.
But within itself, the yang provide the seeds of its own destruction. Or rather, transformation into the yin. And within yin, the yang is here to bloom again.
I don’t know. This is weird. The yin and the yang are expressed in the Vitruvian Man, there is no doubt. The circle and the square, the generation and subsumation. But how comes? Neither Da Vinci or Vitruvius have oriental ties.
Taijitu as the supreme idea: the ultimate abstraction. You eventually fall into it if you abstract your thinking enough. It’s the bridge between the scientific and the spiritual. 
Maybe that’s it? There is a fundamental truth to complex systems? A truth known since the dawn of time, to everyone everywhere. The Taijitu.

The Workshop of ideas

2025-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Have you heard of “the marketplace of ideas”? I certainly did, and too many times.
The idea is very easy: Politics is about competing ideas, and the “good” ones, choosen by the process of election or votations, win.
It’s easy because it’s a simple concept, but also because it is as uncontroversial you as you can get. You are against the marketplace of ideas? Are you Stalinist or something?
This is – of course – complete garbage. How is the metaphore even meant to be understood? Do you buy idea with your vote? Or, is it rather the idea that buys you? Like really? politics is about buying people? What even?
Thankfully, with The Magic Of The Internet®, we don’t have to speculate. The Wikipedia article on “marketplace of ideas”</a> says that it’s US Supreme Court Justice Holmes that first used the concept – in an opinion on the constitutionality of making illegal the expressison of your views against armament.
Indeed, the metaphor is that of the meme. Ideas are like viruses that jump from head to head, killing incompatible ones with might, only the strongest will prevail. That’s literally it. It’s a darwinist interpretation of politics. Where people, actual people, don’t even have any agency. They are the battlefield. We The People, are the theater, the scene on which the actual play runs, we ain’t actors of the play. The marketplace of ideas is on top of us, and stamps us. We are at best witnesses to the might of the ideas.
Also What The Actual Fuck do you think a marketplace is?! Have you ever gone to a market, Justice Holmes? You probably have a domestic to go there for you. So, for your information, the place where savage beasts fight each other for the pleasure of the people is called “the Roman circus”, not “the marketplace”. A marketplace is a place you go to exchange money for stuff, like leeks. As far as I am aware, my coins did not fight the leeks to know which one will prevail in glorious battle.
And it doesn’t end there. Like the way “free speech” got distorted to the level of meaninglessness in US Supreme Court decisions. It would be laughable if it wasn’t the reason the US is now n°2 in the list of shithole countries in any sensible vacation guides.
But we like free speech right? We like to hear from both1</a> sides, compare the ideas, and then pick the best ones.
^{1
The only two, if you have a deranged two party system like the US.
</div>
Do we? Do we? In fact we don’t! We just like to hear easily rebutable nonsense that is opposition-shaped and nod approvingly at people who says to us what we want to hear. I’ve done activism, I’ve talked to people I disagree with, and boy is it annoying and unpleasant. Engaging sensibly with opposing views, judging it, and adopting it when it passes muster is not how politics works, nor is it how you adopt new ideas. Isn’t it glaringly obvious? Have you ever done that? Who do you think you are fooling?
So, fuck – you say –, how do people change opinions? What’s the point of politics if people can’t adopt new ideas? What is to be done?
Do not fret, comrade.
First and foremost, people do indeed adopt new ideas. That’s as glaringly obvious as the fact you don’t adopt a new idea just because it valiantly slaughtered the previous ones in your brain.
What happens is Sex. The ideas find each other in your brain, and, if compatible, will combine to create a new idea that is the synthesis of the previous ones.
Oh boy, we are back to Hegel 😳 If you call yourself modernist, you have to accept this as a fact, otherwise, you are just a poser.
I don’t call myself modernist. For various reasons, not the least of which is how it fuelled the murderous doctrines of WWII.
Notice how we, as humans, individuals – in this framing of The Bordello of Ideas – are still the scene on which the actual actors (the ideas) play. Instead of being stomped in some sort of gory tragedy, the representation is a horny vaudeville.}
But it already has something more than the brainless metaphore of The Marketplace of Ideas. It allows for synthesis. Now, new ideas enter the game. At least, that explains why society is not static and actually evolves. It still fails to place the human in the theory2</a>.
^{2
And so many other problematic assumptions I’m going to skip over.
</div>
Where do new ideas come from? It is with immense regret that I inform you that ideas do not have gonads, so we have to develop a theory of idea formations that don’t rely on Sex.
That’s where I namedrop The Enigma of Reason. It’s very simple: by nature, we, humans, are difficult to convince; We hold to our pre-existing ideas as to dear life; We see a mote in our brother’s eye, and pay no attention to the beam in our owns. Like, it’s not just me that says it, a crazed monk of the 2nd century CE said it too (and wrote it in the Bible). So, before marketplaces or roman circuses, how did our ancestors survive in the savana, if they are so bad at reasoning? So prompt to believe the dumbest shit?
The answer to this enigma is that we weren’t alone: Humans are a social creature. And when groups of humans took decisions, and someone in the group was like “this is dumb as shit”, they would express their dissent. And then there would be a debate, everybody would weight in, point out the mistakes in others reasoning, and the result would be a better decision.
The nature of the decision is independent of what anyone thinks. And it happens to always be better than any single person would decide by themselves.
Maybe not everyone thinks the decision was the best one, but all agree it wasn’t the worst. The debate discovered new truths, challenged reasonings and forced people to face their contradictions. Everyone changed their tune a little bit, without necessarily converging, but certainly gaining new tools to form new better ideas in the future.}
And that’s how people grew and survived. I’ll go as far as saying that, in fact, pre-historic humans were better orators than us. The problem of modern life is not just sedentarity, it’s also contradictionlessness3</a>.
^{3
If I were to play into this dramatically stupid trend of invoking out of thin air dumb greek words, I’d go “we are missing thimos boohooo I’m so smart”.
</div>
The modernist line of philosophy is deranged: It has humans as instrumental to ideas. What ultimately matters are ideas, and humans are subsidary to them. I hate it. If humans aren’t the ultimate goal, then we can get rid of them without remorse. It’s nonsense. The opposite is true. Ideas are instrumental to humans. Humans make ideas as tool for their wellfare. This is how it works in your everyday life, and it’s how it works in human history.
Ideas are our tools, and discursive debate is our workshop. We partake in it, not as passive consumers, but as toolsmiths.}

Hope liver on

2025-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Hope is a vision of the future, it is inherant to every human, it drives to the best, it’s, in fact, the engine of action.
My grandfather used to say “where there is hope, there is life”. This is completely stupid. Or maybe very smart. In truth, it should read “where there is life, there is hope”. Hope is a human organ. We are born with it and keep it our whole life. Ohh, very much like your liver, you can poison and destroy it, don’t get me wrong. But on the whole, we do bear hope, like we bear two feet.
The chinese used to bind the feet of little girls. Crush their toes to break their bone, so they grew with small feet, their whole life incapable of fleeing from abuse. It was extremely painful and made them like slave. Now they don’t do this. In fact it was literally the first law enacted by the communists.
Today, we bind hope. We crush it. We make it so our hope, as an organ, doesn’t do its job of seeing a nicer future, so that we are stuck in this abusive society. The world of possibles is infinite, not seing an alternative to the current world is being blind, the only way to bring this blindness on is to crush hope from the first breath of air out of the womb.
But hope heals itself, not unlike the liver. It’s kinda terrifying to experience in fact. Like: I see the most ravaged world, I’m surrounded by cynical assholes. Even the loudest critics of the system say in half tone that it’s impossible to change, and demand from me to be as desesperate as them. Yet I hope, yet I see the future as something that can be nice. Is it clarity or foolishness? I don’t know. All I know is that hope is very much a locomotion method, without it, you have no say in where the future leads you, you are like a potted tree in a train. With hope, you have somewhere to go, a future to strive for, feet to move you away from this bullshit.

Innovation!

2025-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Innovation!
It always has a positive ring to it. Sometimes, it’s not just a positive ring, but spit-dribbling religious awe, stary eyed distant look, as the rapture of a paradise procurred by innovation invest the corporeal form of the orator.
So what’s innovation?
It’s doing the same thing differently.
Well, maybe not. Because, Doing the same thing differently is, as a sentence, a paradox. The way of doing thing is part of the thing itself. You know how free-range-hen eggs cost more than other types of eggs? Well, that’s because it’s not just the end product that matters, but also the way it was made. Otherwise, the two types of eggs would be fungible and have the same price.
So let’s try to go with a less dead-end definition:
Innovation is changing a process, so that certain characteristics of that process (generally the output) is the same, or lightly changed, while other aspects are radically transformed. But most importantly, that change must be good.
It’s not as short and snappy as the first definition. But let’s break it down:

Innovation is a change</li>
The change concerns the way of doing things</li>
But more specifically, it’s a change in a particular element of the way of doing things</li>
This change has a positive moral value</li> </ul>
As a software developer, I’m deeply aware that change is not a panacea.
To jump outside of the world of pure abstract ideas, and into the domain of programming for a second, here is an often overlooked aspect of programming:
When programming, you can implement the same thing in many different ways. For example, the same program may be written in Common Lisp or Python. That’s not a random example, reddit was originally written in Lisp, and later switched to Python. Twitter was first written in Ruby, then Scala, then Java. And that’s just about programming languages! It’s almost irrelevant to the end-result, other choices matter much more.
The truth is, there is no best choice, as there is no best programming languages1</a>. The choice depends on the context. A choice in a specific context may be good, not because it’s just good, but because the bad aspects of it are less relevant in the given context, and the good aspects strengthened. And of course, with time, the context might change. The choice may even influence the context, etc.
^{1
Except Rust, of course.
</div>
This is a big mess. And we are talking about programming, you know, pure logical processes and formal methods. When it comes to our earthly planet, and lowly human interactions, context is both much more important and its impact much more fuzzy.
In fact, a program, as a process of production, has many dimensions: How much memory does it use? Is it parallelizable? How many instructions does it use? What is the memory-locality of the algorithm? How good is the result? How much knowledge of the system do I need to change elements of it? Knowledge of the system in its particularity, or systems of similar kind? How many bugs has it? Is the system vulnerable to hacks? How much working people does it need for its everyday operation?}
When a process can be judged on all those orthogonal2</a> questions, a value judgement has exaclty one dimension: “Is process A better than process B?” This is what is called projection in math, meaning: taking a set of values, and applying on it a function to get a single value back3</a>.
^{2
orthogonal in the sense that answering one question tells nothing about the answer of another one.
</div>}
^{3
Or a smaller set of values, for all the Mr. Pedentics reading.
</div>
So, innovation depends on this function that takes a complex thing and labels it as good or bad. Of course, this function depends entirely on what you think is good or bad. You may ignore some aspect, and place much more moral value on another aspect.
In fact, innovation is nothing else than using a different set of tradeoffs. Just like in programming.
Innovation comes in three forms:}

The context has changed, while the process has not. The context here is material ressources, or scientific knowledge. While the process was good in the past, it isn’t in the new context. Changing the process to make it better suited to the current context is good, and therefore is an “innovation”.</li>
Social values have changed, while the process has not. Now, innovation is about changing the system of humans relations to comply with the new social values. In the past 40 years, this means giving less to the ones who have little (as we think them as responsible of their own misery) while giving more to the ones who already have a lot. Rail privatization in the UK and France is a good example. It was justified by “innovation” but in this context, “innovation” means little else than busting up rail unions. The savings made by making rail workers’s life a misery didn’t help reduce the rail fare (the opposite is true!) but fell into the pockets of a few shareholders.</li>
Finally, a particularly nasty kind of innovation, is one that is fully conscious of the ambiguity of its moral nature. This kind of innovation is not changing systems in order to apply to a new social or material context, but rather the inverse: changing the social or material context to justify a specific way of doing things, that will later be labelled as innovation. Example: Uber was breaking the law. Uber justified itself by accusing the law of being immoral. The reasoning is: Uber is innovative, Uber is breaking the law, everything that is innovative is morally superior, therefore the law is morally inferior.</li> </ol>
In fact (3) should be linked with (2). This is a strategic use of the word Innovation based on an equivocation.
On one side, we have the dictionary definition of Innovation as positive change of process; On the other side we have the economic definition of Innovation, a similar definition, but with a very narrow understanding of positive as incures less cost.
The common sense understanding is that reducing cost at the expense of everything else is bad, the exact opposite of what Innovation means in the economic sense. Yet, this definition of innovation was used to justify the major social changes that led to our society.
In fact, there was an inversion of the source of morality: in the recent past, a process was awarded the title of innovative whenever it was a good change in society4</a>. In the 1980, this got reversed: (some) economists redefined innovative as reduces costs, then gave this title to a set of policies, and as a result, those policies were considered as good changes in society.
^{4
Up to the mid XXth century, innovation as in trying to change something that already works had a pejorative meaning.
</div>
The sleight of hand has gone unnoticied for decades. But now, the material conscequence of this change is hitting people in the face.
The previous definition of innovation as a moral good based on social changes and material improvements to human life led to a technological boom and prosperity. What “moral good” and “material improvement” to pursue might have been flawed, or biased by personal interest, or differed from people to people. But the little that overlapped produced prosperity, and that, despite personal interest, not thank to it. The current narrow definition led to financialization, innequality, and exploitation of the planet and the people, as using profit optimization as sole goal cannot encode the rich and complex needs of a society.
We need to remember that the market is not an end in itself, but a tool. We should judge policies not by how much they favor one specific tool, but rather how they affect society at large, and if that’s the society we want to live in.
Innovation is a rebalancing of tradeoffs, looking exclusively at the market impact and ignoring all other aspects will invariably lead to innovations that work at the expanse of everything outside of the market.}

Don't inform yourself: learn

2025-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Is the attention span of people getting smaller? Who fucking knows.
Is the attention span of medias getting smaller? Feels like it, won’t pretend to have a smart fact-based analysis of the matter, just basing my judgment on vibes.
Well, I could give countless examples and add my interpretation on top. How the repeated and consistent antisemitist statements of Jean-Marie LePen is caracterised as “slips”, you know, accidents, not even “freudian slips”. Or how we are given without context the discourse of politicians who call for more “US-like” institutions in Europe (Macron asking for France to become “predator”, Starmer cultish devotion to AI, Draghi asking for tech monopolies in Europe), not as a demand, but almost as an innevitable consequence of history and technological progress, at the risk of being left behind. No media ask what “being left behind” is, and why it’s bad. If “being left behind” means I’m not LARPing a 90’s cyberpunk novel (as the US is currently doing, I think “Snow Crash” is the main source here), count me in boys. Same with the NATO 5% GDP armament spending target (Depending on the country, this can go up to 25% of government spending!)
Common sense says that information gives power. But does it? Useful info allows you to make better decisions, but lies, and missleading info does the reverse. And how do you make the difference?
But saying “useful information is useful” is crétinerie. Like no shit Sherlock: blue things are blue.
Information is not inherently “good” or “bad”. Is “Mein Kampf” bad? Eheh, surely, what kind of monster would deny this? But in the context of a historical discussion on the rise of nazism, isn’t it actually a precious artifact?
What matters is the analysis of information, how we integrate it in our understanding of the world. How the system that we use to make sense of the world is affected by it and made more capable of making sense of the world.
This is where a knowledgeable social psychologist would surely quote Kurt Lewin’s experiment. During the WWII, the US government tried to sell offal to families, and asked Lewin the best way to do it. Lewin tried several methods. Colorful advertising, very compelling arguments. But it didn’t help. So Lewin decided to get the families to do the job for him: Create discussion circles with the mothers 1</a>, give them data about offal, and let them discuss what’s best to do. And they concluded that offal was worth a try. And they went home and cooked offal, instead of nodding politely and completly ignoring what they just heard.
^{1
Remember it was the 1930.
</div>
So, active participation in the analysis is what made the housewives change behavior. Nothing short of that, not even the most digestible, simple, easy-to-understand injuction. Information is not a thing by itself, but can only exist through its interaction, in your mind, with the rest of what you know of the world.
In our modern medias, every news item is like some sort of cookie your viewer consumes. Each item, one after the other, not a connection, not even a sentence connecting the two! You immediately forget the previous item to be fed the next one. Each item, one after another, non stop. We have ads to sell, it is imperative that the viewer doesn’t turn off the TV.
But remember Lewin! Information without analysis, without the time to think or discuss it, is as good as useless.
Turn off the TV, close the feed, put down your phone! Look out the window! Go get some friend and talk!}

More of The same

2024-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

This was written in anger when reading the description of the event “Genève 2040: L’odyssée des entreprises vers la transition” at the “Semaine du Climat 2024” organized by the city.
Now that I read it, it is clearly inspired from “Professeur Jung”, a very funny weekly column in the Vigousse Swiss satirical.
I’m aware of the concept of “straw man” but do you see any criticism here? It’s only praise! </blockquote>
I can’t wait for 2040.
Imagine this. Today we are only seeing the beginning of things. Automatic deductions on workers pay when they go to the toilets</a>, a laugh detector, using a microphone to detect when someone is laughing in the work place</a> and send a funny meme when below management-mandated standards, remote workplace policing</a> tools checking if employees are working or slacking.
But, even with just today’s technology we can do better, much better. The purpose of the laughs is to keep an optimal level of serotonin. Why use laughs to measure and optimize the hormone levels of your workers, when a hypodermic syringe does the same, but with much more precision? A smart watch and a needle, and you can throw your “LOL-box” away! Why just monitor the toilet usage? Instead, have a pressure detector on the employee’s chair and use this for hour billing. They might cheat? Well, add some sort of IR detector, or bill by keyboard usage, there are ways.
This system is inescapable. After all, only the most efficient companies survive. So how could we possibly tolerate any but the most efficient employees? If we don’t do it now, the Chinese will do it, and we will inevitably have to do it anyway, as they chip away at our margins.
But that’s not all. Why limit our system of command and control to the workplace? It is the duty of the employees to be fresh for work. A drunkard coming at work every day barely able to do anything; someone who spent the night bingeing the last Netflix series, barely able to hold on their two legs. It is unfair that we should pay the careless slacker as much as the productive worker that spend their unpaid time making sure they are fit for work!
It’s not like we don’t already have the data. Netflix has a database of every user watch times, as Amazon has of every reader’s time spent reading (with per-page details). Same with Visa and Mastercard, already selling their clients transaction history to Google. It’s just a question of putting it to good use.
What are you reading? Ezra Klein? You stay! Naomi Klein? You are fired! Nothing? Promoted!
We could create the perfect economic system, where everyone’s behavior can be perfectly calibrated with a system of incentives and punishment in the behaviorist tradition. So that everyone’s economic output can be optimized to the max and finally attain the perfectly efficient economy. Each hour of the day, each breath, each neural pathway attuned and guided by the invisible hand!
In fact, the only reason this is not the case today is the human irrationality – so-called “empathy”, or “privacy”. Some may suggest that what I’m describing here is “totalitarian” or “inhuman”. But the true crime against humanity is to not optimize profits, the sole way to improve the human condition. Regardless, it’s inescapable, it’s the fate of humanity to become the cog in the ultimate machine: market equilibrium.
But that’s not all. This is only the worst case scenario, if technology fails to improve and stays at current day levels. We have AI. Currently crude and extremely energy hungry. Surely they will improve. If they improve we can imagine this: everything that today is intermediated by a computer (video, text, email, powerpoints, reports, monitoring, news) could be done by the computer. No more need to rely on pesky little artists or copywriters, just ask the machine to do it and it’s here.
But why stop at that point? We all know computers are par excellence the best at stiffing through data. A mere human simply can’t compete. Why is one to stiff through data? In short, for decision making. No more data analyst required, you just ask the machine to go through the data and make a decision about it. A human can’t compete, it will simply be the best decision possible.
In fact, why not set the whole agenda by it? Today AIs are good enough to build romantic relations with humans. If the AI can have a romantic relation, it certainly can have a business relation, and at a scale no human possibly can. The computer, having no personal drive, unlike a man, cannot be bribed. No unconscious bias either. The role of the CEO (the most expensive) is thus automated.
Unlike a man – who is solely driven by emotions – a computer can focus on the sole thing that truly matters: profits. It is common sense that profit maximization at the expense of everything else is the only way to improve the common good. Today’s corporations are only a band-aid to convert emotional drive into profit optimization, tomorrow’s computer will not need this wasteful masquerade, it can directly strive for efficiency without having to go through the impure and irrational medium of human subjectivity, only computational objectivity will prevail.
But if we have a computer run the company, why not have it run ALL the companies? After all, the only purpose of the free market is to “turn greed into the common good”, but if greed is out of the equation, isn’t competition just a waste of resources?
With AIs at the top, there is no need to invite federal judges to expensive resorts to educate them on the benefits of profits, nor for cushy sinecures for retired lawmakers who bravely fought for the right laws despite populist pressures. All will be made according to the golden rule: optimize profits. And not even one human will have a say in the matter. Society will be organized in the most efficient and therefore naturally ordained way. The rulers will be rulers not by random chance, but because he happened to be the exactly most optimal person to put in this position. The slave will be glad to be slave, because that’s his AI-ordained position in society, he knows – unlike today’s slave – that even the thought of independence is blasphemy against maximal utility.
We need to bow down to our tech leaders and embrace this beautifully optimal future. Don’t you want every bone of your body to be connected to the net, every muscle of your body aware of what is the most efficient course of action? Don’t you want people who undermine global prosperity to be punished for not optimizing profit? Don’t you want your hormonal level, your mood, be optimized for optimal integration into the job market? What’s not to love?
Why not start now? Let’s accept our position in society, let’s accept that indeed the unhoused deserve to be unhoused, the famished, famished. We live in a society driven by profit, therefore starvation is their just destiny. Don’t try to fit our work to our human needs, instead we should fit our human needs to our work environment.

Durov is a twat

2024-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Pavel Durov is now in detention in France. The French executive didn’t precise if Durov himself is accused of anything, but they might think he can help for cases of extorsion, terrorism, money laundering and others.
It is far-fetched to think that Durov himself is a terrorist, or personally helped terrorists use Telegram. But it is as far-fetched to think that Durov can’t help the police against terrorists on Telegram. If he can, he should. Not in a moral sense, but in a legal sense.
The crime isn’t that Telegram is used by criminal groups, it’s simply that Telegram isn’t end-to-end encrypted (e2ee), and therefore, Durov is compelled (legally speaking) to take actions he promised of never taking.
On a purely theoretical level, building the tools someone else use for crime is not criminal, in fact, it must not be criminal. Otherwise, we face a complete colapse of the justice system.
Let me explain. Why stop at communication tools? What about operating systems? Is Apple and Google responsible for making systems allowing terrorists to use Telegram to communicate? After all, most of the complexity in a messaging app is not in the app itself, but in the network stack. And why stop there? The messages wouldn’t end on the terrorist phones if Bouygue, Vodafon or Comcast didn’t carry them. What about the weapon manifacturer? Without the gun, the terrorist couldn’t have fired any bullet. etc. etc. Everyone is a criminal by that measure.
For this reason, building tools useable for crime is not a crime of itself. Therefore, if we assume the French executive is acting in good faith, Durov was arrested – not for building a tool terrorists use – but for not acting on his ability to prevent terrorist acts.
And he has this ability because Telegram isn’t e2ee.
If you believe no one should have the power to inspect and censure personal or public communication, don’t create this power. Even if just for yourself. Even if you think you won’t ever use that power. The world has ways to come up with surprises.

Jansen's strandbeests

2024-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

http://www.strandbeest.com/</a>
Jansen is amazing. Out of plastic bottles, PVC tubes and o-rings, he makes transitors, osciliators, flip/flops, joints, put them together into linkages, then into “organism” with complex behaviors you wouldn’t assign to a PVC tube in the first place. In a way, this is what programming is about, but given physical shape.
I can appreciate the naive wonder with which he talks about his own work. This is an invitation to introspection: The mesmerizing quality of those jewels of mechanic that convert simple linear motion into a slow life-like walk, alien and familiar at the same time. The singular aspect of the creatures, and their unique gait opens a portal to a different world, a different approach to engineering that is more life-like.
The refined elegance of their shape belies the industrial and rough nature of all its component. The smoothness of their walk belies its mechanical nature and the stiffness of its joints. Something wholy opposite to the original nature of the constituent elements emerges from their composition.

Eulogy to my shirt

2024-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

This is my blog, so I post whatever nonsense I want. What’s the point of a personal blog if you can’t post personal stuff on it? So beware, this post is about an old shirt.
Watson and Zajonc affirmed that the more we are exposed to a thing, the more we like it. Independently really of what that thing is.
I just experienced this in a deep, personal, emotional way.
I had this shirt since University, even earlier, so maybe for about ten years. This shirt is really mundane, it is sky blue, thin cotton, with an extremely cheap cut, a breast pocket, long sleeves with a patterned cuff lining. Bought from a Chinese seller in Sicily. Probably a rejected sample due to a minor defect.
I wore it since University. When I was a child, I couldn’t bear wearing anything else than T-shirts. Then I couldn’t bear wearing anything else than polo shirts. Finally, I was into shirts. Don’t ask me why, now I’m fine with anything and I don’t understand what I was on about. I think it had to do with the neckline.
This shirt accompanied me for a third of my life. It, with its mazarine brother, was like a friend to me. I wore it a lot. And of course, by force of being worn, it became worn. The color wore off, it actually now looks like I dropped (diluted) bleach on it. It’s really unwearable. It’s especially noticeable on the breast pocket, as the color kept, in contrast with the rest of the breast cloth, highlighting the wear.
So I had to part with it.
Couldn’t even throw it in the clothing bin, basically too worn for it. I had to throw it in the trash. I was confronted with a very surprising mental state. I just liked it so much, it was to me like the plush toy I slept with as a kid. The default when no other shirt would fit for the situation, a comfort in times of uncertainty. It really was an old friend. And I had to say to it “good bye” forever.
When I threw it, I emitted a strange cry I didn’t know I had. It was a scream of despair, of someone who lost a bit of his grounding to reality and his own identity.
A part of myself peeled off forever, gone in the junk, unrecoverable, irreversibly changed and worn :(

Tech as a moral smoke screen

2024-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Predictive policing. Those softwares used in US cities to plan the route of policemen, such that they stick around “hot spots of crime”, to optimize their time, so they are around places were crime is more likely to occur. You also probably heard criticisms of those softwares. Since they use as prior where crime was noticed by police, and not were crime actually occurs, they tend to designate those places the police already goes as “hot spots”. And those places are usually poor and inhibited by minorities. This can only result in a negative feedback loop: police will more often patrol those specific places, and report crime for those places, which will prompt the software to send more policemen in those places, etc.
In the end, the effectivness of those softwares is very questionable. So why would police buy them? Policemen need to optimize their time, and the technology, at the time, was untested, therefore it was perfectly legitimate to test them out. Now that we tested them out, we know the result: More discrimination, and policemen unwilling to not commit, they reply: “I didn’t chose to patrol only the black streets, the computer told me”.
Rent fixing software</a>. In a few places in the US, landlords use a private company’s “algorithm” to chose when to increase rates and evict occupants. This greatly improved returns on real estate, at the cost of more empty apartments and more evictions. The US government seems fairly unhappy with this, they consider it a price fixing scheme. Again, the landlords reply: “We didn’t fix any price, the computer told us”.
Health care companies use software to deny claims</a> at breakneck speed. The software is given a minimal percentage of claim denials to submit, and using a set of heuristics to chose the ones most likely to pass for being fraudulent. Supposedly, a doctor should be part of the decision loop, but in practice, the doctor only stamped what “the computer told them”.
Software is used in the current middle east conflict</a>. The software identified likely enemy operatives for the military. Followed by a 20 seconds review, to then decide to strike the enemy operative and their entire family (because the military only had software to identify their homes, not their actual position). Journalists, humanitarians, policemen, nurses were designated by this software. Well, right now the military says “we never did this”, but you bet in two years, during judicial inquiry, we’ll hear the same “the computer told me”.
I was careful to use “software” rather than “AI” in those paragraphs, because AI implies that the computer made the decision. Computers do not make decisions, computers can do one thing only, and it always does it without failure, it follows instructions.
The innovation here doesn’t lie in technical novelty, or programming. There is one innovation, and one innovation only: A previous barrier, that of ethics, has been torn down.
The scenario</h2>
Let’s write down what happens in those four real world events in a generic way. It’s the tech smoke screen scenario.
We have three actors: (1) The executor, whose role is to read the software output and execute its orders in the real world. (2) The authority, which imposed to the executor the use of software, and has ultimate economic and political authority on the executor. (3) The programmer, who developed a software that act as a proxy to the decision of the authority.
The authority bought a software made by the programmer, required the executor to use it and do as the software tells them.
In a world without software, the executor would have some agency on their decisions, they would refuse to execute orders they judge too arbitrary, illegal or unfair. In a world with software, the executor trusts the software, that the order they got is a result of a complex, fair, analysis, and that the order is legal, the executor then executes it without further question. Yet, in practice, the software just says what the authority wants it to say. And an illegal act is committed: killing civilians, refusing to pay legitimate claims, price fixing, ethnic policing discrimination.
The authority has picked the software specifically because it produces the kind of orders the authority wants. The authority may not even realize they use the software as a pretext for or laundering crimes. It’s perfectly possible (and easy) to accidentally pick up a software that just acts as a proxy for your preferences.
Responsibility</h2>
This results in ethical and legal breach. So who is responsible? In this case, I think the authority is always responsible, and in some special cases the programmer is.
The authority is the one in power, and decided to pick a software to coerce the executor into actions they wouldn’t otherwise accomplish. Even if they aren’t aware that they use the software for coercion, they should.
The programmer is the one enabling the authority by creating software to launder the authority’s illegal orders. But the programmer may not understand themselves the nature of their software, or simply have designed software that was diverted from its initial purpose.
Note that in this scenario, software has nothing to do with the issue. You could replace “software” with “haruspicy” or “gizmo”, and we would have the same result. It’s not a problem related to software or new technology, therefore no tech regulation will fix this problem (although they may fix other problems).
It’s a problem of social relations, the abuse of faith in technology to coerce people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.
In this case, new technology is solely a smoke screen to get executors to act without judgement.
Solutions</h2>
So how can we avoid this? If tech regulations has zero impact in this kind of technology usage, what can we do?
There is a silver lining. Here, unlike the old school scenario with an authority and an executor, we have an additional actor, the programmer. This means that we multiply the numbers of ways we can avoid the repetition of the tech smoke screen scenario. We need to sensitize all potential actors to the pitfalls of tech smoke screens. We need to kill this toxic belief that technologies are inherently positive, or, in fact, have any inherent property.
The tech smoke screen can be played while all actors act in good faith. So if any of the three parties understand what is being played, they can break the mechanism of tech smoke screen. But for that to happen, they need to be aware of the concept of tech smoke screen in the first place. Teaching, including this kind of ethical analysis in computer science and management cursus is important, as it can avoid major social hurts.

The Surveillance Vending Machines

2024-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

In Canada, students on a university campus had the unpleasant surprise of discovering their vending machine was out of order, and professed a strange error message including the words “Facial Recognition” (FR)</a>. The students were shocked, they didn’t even consider it possible that a vending machine could use FR. Why even‽ It’s not a question of being uneducated and not knowing the possibility, but simply that it’s beyond all common sense. So what could possibly motivate the presence of FR? Studying the company responsible for the vending machine, we discover that they use FR for targeted advertising</a>. That’s right! A large retailer in Canada turned out to do something very similar, with a similar motivation</a>.
K Kiosk in Switzerland plans to replace all its vending machines in train stations by similar systems. We’ll have a national FR-enabled camera network in our train station. And not even in the pretext of “safety”, just to sell more ads.
I do wonder, am I the only one that is so thoroughly shocked by such disregard for privacy? The seemingly prevasive lightness with which customer privacy 1</a> is approached in buisnesses makes me think so. Yet, reading the articles and government reports, they are as shocked as I am, so I’m not alone. Regardless, it’s important to spell out the objections. After all, some people judged that it was a good idea, otherwise it wouldn’t have happened. What would a system respectful of the public look like? Let’s see.
^{1
Specifically customer privacy, because corporate secrecy is actually not taken lightly at all.
</div>}
Consent</h2>
The shocking nature of the news comes from surprise. The students were observed and categorized by the vending machine, and they had no idea they were. Logically, if they knew about it, they wouldn’t be surprised to discover that a FR system was deployed in the vending machine. This is also what the Canadian government reproached to Fairview in its privacy commissioner report: That the Fairview customer didn’t give their consent nor was aware of the FR. Not that the students wouldn’t have been shocked, they would have been shocked and protested when they learned that someone wanted to install such a system, ie: before the actual privacy violation occurred, not after. I’m using an affirmation here, because that’s exactly what happened in Switzerland when the Ktipp magazine revealed that the federal train company made a call for tender for a camera network with FR features</a>. Again, not for “security”, but strictly for demographic detection and selling more ads. They had to retract their tender and give up the project.
I think it should be mandatory to put a prominent sticker stating the usage of FR and its purpose on systems that do use FR.
While awareness is necessary, it is not sufficient. Consent should be mandatory. Would the students have accepted if the vending machine retailer asked them whether they agreed that a system with FR was installed in their university?
Well, I doubt it. But maybe the retailer could have discussed with the student, coming to a common understanding, so that the costs are not all held by the student, and the benefits entirely captured by the retailer. Maybe a balanced system where the students benefit from FR could have been devised. It would also have forced the retailer to confront the fact that their system would have been rejected by their client.
Sobriety</h2> Beside the fact that the FR capabilities of the system were hidden from the students, the surprise comes from the application. We know of the implications of facial recognition. We immediately have to mind a dystopian future of total surveillance level with Orwell’s 1984. Maybe the vendor would protest, they are not using FR to track dissidents or criminals (although, FR has been used by a ticketing company to refuse employees of litigating law firms entry to events</a>). But the capability is here. Whether they want it or not, they are building a national network of FR cameras. And for what? To sell “personalized ads”.
When we ask the question of proportionality, there are two sides. It’s benefit over cost. If the benefit is high, the acceptable cost could be high. In Moscow, the installation of FR cameras in the metro network was advertised as (1) Smoothing out the fare payment. No need for a card or ticket, just show your face to the camera and you are let through. (2) Improving security, following a particularly deadly terrorist attack in the metro. Of course, the actual motivation may be different than the stated motivation, but the stated motivations were enough to build consent. I don’t think the Moscow residents got the better end of the deal, but they at least have some advantages from the FR system.
In the case of the vending machines, the user gained absolutely nothing from the addition of FR. Ie: being more accurately targeted by advertisement. People don’t want to be better targeted by advertisement. In 2022, when Apple gave the choice to its users to opt out of sharing their personal data to Facebook for improved advertisement, 97% of the users chose not to. The only reasons this exists is because there was no opportunity to refuse. Looking at how it benefits the vending machine retailer, it’s also dire. They have the added cost and operational capital of a massive screen, set in a public space, not to mention the generated heat right next to a fridge; The added fickleness of software, (the fact the vending machine crashed is proof to that); The added electricity consumption; The added liability and complexity of an online device; The added cost of a network connection; The added liability of holding personal information; The added liability of toxic materials in the circuit boards; And reputational liability.
What was the cost-benefit analysis like? In my mind, what occurred is that the revenue from advertising was evaluated, and afterward, the eyes of the accountant turned into giant dollar signs, completely overlooking the rest of the equation.
This is visible in the brochure from the vending machine manufacturer</a>. We see the “additional revenue from advertising” accompanied by an infinity sign. Of course you can’t earn infinite money, it’s meant to be cheeky, but it’s telling of the mindset.
Public discussion</h2>
There is clearly a bias toward using technology at all cost, or completely ignoring the drawbacks, as soon as tech is involved in modern business management practices. Or the costs are assumed to be null, as the company deploying the technology does not pay them, but the general public does.
A solution to reduce this bias is to make the cost explicit. As a technologist, I’m absolutely not thrilled by this, but to me, to get businesses to act responsibly with new techs — rather than like preteen children presented with a noisy and bright new toy (with flashing lights) — adding a tax on new technology could solve this. A tax on user data would also help. The only way to avoid such a tax would be for businesses to police themselves and value more sobriety.
Bringing the debate to the board room, getting people affected by business decisions to give their point of view, would reduce negative outcomes. I don’t say that just because I’m Swiss and I value a democracy built on compromise and public debate. I say that because it’s a scientific fact that decisions made after controversial debates are better. I’ll refer to Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier in their excellent book: “The Enigma of Reason”. They posit that cognitive bias is just human nature, however smart you are, however trained you are, you are subject to it. And it’s human nature to make better choices when confronted with people that do not agree with you.
In a board room, decisions are always taken by a single interested party. No debate is possible without dissent, and therefore, it’s easy to make decisions without the insight of reason built on consensus, which is always superior to self-interested reasoning.
This is especially important as those vending machines occupy public space. There should absolutely be a democratic debate over the deployment of technologies with large drawbacks in public space. FR is a cost bore by every person passing in front of the vending machine, the people who pay that cost need to consent to it, and have the opportunity to say “no”, or ask for the economic equation to be more in their favor.
Overall, what I deplore, and what worries me, is not new technologies or the usage of face recognition. But rather, the total absence of public debate on the question. Our society is built on the assumption that we have a say in decisions that concern us. Through democratic process for decisions relating to the public sphere; and market choice for private good and services we use. It is less and less true.
We need to increase this ability to weight meaningfully in things that impact us, not decrease it. Otherwise the social contract is breached, all justifications for power relationships fall into the toilets, and we open the door to complete social revolution.

The limits of statistical thinking and the value of personal experience

2023-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

This post is an answer to an article titled “The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics” posted to the Our World In Data (OWiD) website the 27th of July. You can access and read freely the article at:
https://ourworldindata.org/limits-personal-experience</a>
For context, I enjoy reading articles submitted to OWiD and even donated to them once.
However, that article is nonsense. Trying to display a purely philosophical and unfalsifiable argument as objective by wrapping it in pretend-math and using irrelevant data.
Hot take</h2>
First, it’s a reddit-level “hot take”. Saying loud what everyone thinks, preaching to the choir and pretending you have an original or unique opinion.
Data-driven decision making might be the most important aspect of modern society. This idea of “objective” decision making has been the definition of “modern state”, as Hegel puts it 1</a>, since the 19th century. Engels and Marx’s philosophy is an extension of this idea. This is the founding philosophy of the soviet Union. Class struggle is only a means to this ideal “modern state”. OWiD coming out and saying we haven’t enough of it is really weird.
^{1
To be transparent: the only thing I know about Hegel is from “Une Histoire de la Raison” by François Châtelet.
</div>
Most (if not all) policy making today is justified by some
statistical datum (whether of quality or not). I suspect a very large
majority of people would say “statistics” if they were asked “which
of statistics or personal human experience should be used to make
policy decisions?” It is absurd to say that usage of statistic for
policy making is a minority view. Don’t limit yourself to the
government when thinking “policy making”, also consider private
companies. Both pretend to use statistics in their decisions.}
Statistics are as sparse as personal experience</h2>
Second, the visualization is dumb and misleading. One thing it forgets is that no statistical data is exhaustive. So the last image with the filled rectangle is just wrong. Often time we don’t even have the privilege to sample even a hundredth of the whole population. In fact, “The perspective that global statistics offer” should be as sparse as “The fragmented perspective of the news media”. If not more.
I hear you say “but with statistical inference and the law of large numbers, we can expand the small sample to be representative of the whole”. Yes, maybe. But this is also true of human experience. We, as human have this capacity of taking several data points and construct a larger understanding based on them. The exact mechanisms used by the human brain are unknown, but might very well look similar to the maths used for statistical inference (Bayesian inference). So either way, regardless of how you look at it, if you use the same criteria to draw the two “perspective” panels, you end up with the same picture.
“Carefully constructed” statistics</h2>
Third, it puts a bit too much weight behind “carefully constructed” statistics.
By nature statistics are limiting. Each data point is extremely narrow, human condition has many, many, many different aspects. Do I have electricity? How much? Access to a fridge? Clean water? But to which quantity? And what do you mean by clean? With a statistical approach, you need to quantize 2</a> the information to the point it might become meaningless in non-obvious ways.
^{2
to quantize: split it in small discrete measurable bits
</div>
Even if you come at it in a naive way, open to all possible outcomes (which is
rarely the case), you are still victim to hidden biases that will color
statistical resutls in certain directions.
Talk with someone, and you immediately know that, yes they have
access to “clean” water, but if you bring a lit match to it, it burns.
With a statistical approach, the numbers invalidate human experience,
while it should always be the opposite. Saying to someone that they are wrong
about a fundamental part of their being “because the numbers say otherwise”
is the worst insult you can make. Always put humans first, please.
So add a 3rd dimension to those sampling panels, representing the
“aspect of human experience” that is being measured. There are
millions of aspects to human experience. Each statistical data point
will always be extremely narrowly contained withing a dozen aspects.
Talking with someone, you have a much larger idea of what their life
is, much more than a question sheet with multiple choice answers could.
This isn’t even mentioning the aspects of human life that are simply
immeasurable (faith, happiness). What do we do of them? We ignore them as
“impractical”?}
Sortition</h2>
Statistics do not look so good now, do they?
Well, I think the law of large numbers is still useful.
It is foolish to try to build up a representation of reality through statistics alone. Especially when making decisions impacting humans. It is also foolish to try to talk to every parties involved in full depth. No time for that! But we can still get humans to “create” statistics. This is what society is about!
Take a representative sample of humans, put them in a room and let them build consensus on what are the best policies.
This is called sortition, and it is what “democracy” first meant before it then meant “anarchy” in the 19th century, followed by “universally elected representative republic” in the 20th and 21st3</a>.
^{3
“Democracy” as the ancient Greeks defined it. Ancient Greeks would call “aristocracy” what we today call “democracy”. The evolution of the word “democracy” is taken from a discussion in “The Democracy project”, David Graeber
</div>}
The result will be a decision made through the synthesis of all aspects of human life, from all horizons. Not a fully lit cube, but probably the best lit cube. Debate and controversy is not trendy, I know, but it’s what drove us to where we are now. It’s also the only way to empower everyone, as opposed to imparting decisions from above4</a>.
^{4
See the very interesting “The enigma of Reason” by Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, on how reasoning is enhanced (and not debased) by debate and confrontation of ideas. While solo reasoning is bound to lead even the smartest person astray.
</div>
Remember! Statistics is about collecting a small sample and extrapolating it to
the whole universe through very simple maths. Sortition does the same, but
instead of using blind mathematical formulas that has no knowledge of the
complexity of the world, we use humans to extrapolate to the universe.}
This naive fetishism of data and science is dangerous5</a>. We can’t ever know the world as a whole, we can only see through a narrow window into it 6</a>. The world is too complex to be understood fully. This is true of us humans, but also statistical samples or the (beautiful) scientific endeavor.
^5
See this essay by the creator of the ELIZA chatbot, the first chatbot</a>. I saw a similarly compelling argument made in “The Hashish Eater” by Fitz Hugh Ludlow. </div>
^6The parable of the blind men and an elephant</a> might help you grok this fact. </div>
Science is not a representation of a superior unalterable platonic truth. It is not the oracle of the philosopher king. Science, in fact, starts with the specific premise that it indeed can never be such a truth. By extension, there can’t be a scientific philosopher king.
Science also has this property of ending all conversations. It is by definition an appeal to authority. You can’t argue with an appeal to authority, so what you end up with is two people talking past each other appealing to different authorities. It’s way worse than if you didn’t bring science into the debate in the first place!
Basically this article reads like a (half descent) 6th grade essay. It tries to drape itself into the cloth of science by showing they can do silly math on the width of hair, pretends to lobby for science, yet doesn’t even understand the first thing about science.
It is a plea to remove from policymaking the last remaining input taken from human experience. An Hegelian eulogy of humanless policy.
While I respect OWiD, and love the visualizations and insights their articles provide (I’ve donated to them in the past!) I think our society is already dehumanizing and cold. We should make it more human, listen to more people when making decisions.
More often than not, statistics is a way to launder personal opinions into “objective truth” in order to legitimize the unacceptable.
What we need is not statistics, or more science, or to bow ourselves to the altar of universal knowledge. What we need is modesty and an open ear.

Technologism

2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

We are just running forward to try to leave behind our debt, not realizing that we’ve been at it for long and the debt only grew.
We refuse to acknowledge the failures of our current society, and hope to solve them quickly by making something new, running for a new unexplored corner of existence. Something not yet assessed, therefore not known to be bad.
We’ve been at it for ten millennia now.
We need to slow down, look at what we’ve left behind and learn from it. Our society has failings, we know it. However, what we refuse to do is any kind of sacrifice to fix those failings. Looking at a vague blurry distant image, that looks somewhat better is what we do. This frees us from the remorse of not attending to our most important tasks. A distraction from our soiled conscience.
Programmers know the concept of “technical debt”. A failing in the organization of code, something that needs to be fixed to stop being a stumbling block when adding new code, or stop harming users. Programmers also know that technical debt is often ignored by organizations. You need to sneak your fixes in, otherwise you get blamed for working on worthless things (disclaimer: this isn’t from personal experience).
If the harm done to users doesn’t threat revenues, and if the harm done to velocity can’t be measured, the technical debt, and – how surprise – the organization slowly fades into irrelevance.
Consumerism</h3>
Consumerism is buying stuff to forget you anxiety. Temporary relief to misery. A daunting task of evaluating, planning and developing a strategy to get things to improve, now left for later. Hopefully with enough delays, even after death. Now need to worry about anything now.
Technologism is to society was consumerism is to individual.
This is definitively a moral failure, not of individuals, but of organizations. We need to question ourselves, be aware of why we are doing what we do today. We can’t afford to pile on and on our debts, eventually we have to pay it out. We need to face head-on our problems and accept that they may need time and resources now to be solved.
This is a sacrifice of today for a better tomorrow.

Shared dogma and metahumans

2023-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

You might be more familiar with the word “narrative” than “dogma</a>”. I really dislike narrative as a word for various reasons, but here isn’t what I want to talk about.
By dogma, I mean “the current set of concepts our sense of the world gets translated into”, but if you can’t deal with such vague nonsense, you may content yourself with: “the framework by which individuals understand the world”.
People build their understanding of the world through their own personal experience, which is always unique. It’s not a fiction, you bath in reality, confronting your expectations to your experience, constructing a constantly changing model of the inherently inscrutable physical world.
A concept</h2>
A dogma is a collection of concepts. What I call concept is very vague and fuzzy, won’t be able to put nice letters on it. But I’ll try anyway.
There is no such things as a chair</a> (to be honest, this video inspired the last 4 posts). No platonic ideal chair. There isn’t even a chair in your head. There is, however, a bunch of knowledge that share some connections. From this, when you see the word “chair”, this cluster of knowledge gets partially activated, and in your head, a minimal chair relevant to the current context gets created.
From this description, it does seem unlikely that we are ever able to talk about anything. Not only each person has a different idea of what a “chair” is, but also an individual person may have a drastically different idea of what a “chair” is depending on the context.
But it is this same context that let us communicate. With you, when I talk about chairs, I talk about your “chair”. Maybe I do a poor job of imagining your “chair”, but as a human, I can’t do it in any other way, this is part of language. Each communication is bidirectional. Even in disagreement, we implicitly agree, just talking with someone is turning yourself a little bit into the other person.
So maybe, there is a floaty purely statistical thing that you could call the concept of a chair. Things do not exist, there are only models of the world, attributing agency to purely abstract entities. Therefore, the concept of a shared chair exists.
It is the sum of all potential “chairs” created in conversation between people. Unlike a platonic ideal, the shared chair constantly evolve, is defined as a statistical average of unmeasurable values, and never ever can be reached.
A shared concept</h2>
A shared concept. A collection of shared concept is a shared dogma. Please remember, this is an abstraction based on the law of large numbers that itself describes a set of abstractions of a fuzzy idea.
Why a shared dogma? Because each of us only have a tinny window into the world to understand it. Sharing concepts enables us to integrate all our tinny windows and update our concepts so that it accounts for a larger fraction of the world. So that each of us individually have a better model of the world.
A culture as a thing</h2>
Things do not exist, there are only models of the world, attributing agency to purely abstract entities. Therefore, culture exists. Do I really need to justify the transition from shared dogma to culture? I think you knew what I was talking about.
A set of people has agency, and impact on the world, the same way a single person does.
Is a shared dogma meaningfully different from an individual dogma? Is the set of people more than a person</a>?
Yes. Our dogma is informed by our tinny window, emotions and communication. Emotion only enters indirectly in shared dogma.
We share the world with a lot of things that has a dogma and is not human. Those things, like us, have agency in the world, modifies it. Learns from it and update their dogma.
We are blind to them, because they do not enter in our tinny window of the world, they do not have a physical form, which is what our senses read. But they exist, and affect our lives.
Groups of people, private companies, governments. They are metahuman entities, they exist as our shared understanding of the world. The metahumans do not have emotions, they only see the world through us, their sense of human life entirely depends on how they update their dogma.
Our constitutions, our culture, corporate rules, contracts, the way we construct metahumans is what dictates how they update their dogma.
Metahumans might be more powerful than humans alone, but they are dangerous creatures. Like genies or C programs, they are very fickle beasts, do exactly as you specified, but you have no idea what you specified, in this case, you didn’t even know you specified anything.
As we can control how metahumans update their dogmas, they may also control how we update ours. In this way, the metahuman becomes an agent in the world.
In this way they might transform us into tools, mere objects to be used and discarded. Some of them may have zero sense of a human life or even despise it.
Bees</h2>
Maybe I can convey this better.
Termites, ants, bees. They form a colony, and collectively are more than their part. But has anyone asked a bee how it is going? Maybe to them, the hive has as much meaning that “society” has to us. Of course, we are the result of the process of evolution, like bees. And it is very likely that we are hooked to listen to our peers because the metahuman is more than each of us, evolution favoring humans that create metahumans.
Why care?</h2>
We coexist and interact with metahumans. Metahumans are not human, do not necessarily share our feelings, we can’t expect from them empathy or reciprocity. They may not only harm you (as the anthill may harm the soldier ant) they may harm humans as a whole. This all depends on the metahuman in question. Ask yourself what you are dealing with. How are the metahuman’s representations of the world updated? As an entity, what is its purpose, and which tool does it use to transform that purpose, internal will, into agency in the world (how does it manipulate the world?).
Metahumans are dangerous</a>, they are like software programs written by accident. We need to be aware of them, defend ourselves against them, and change them from the inside.

Emotions in politics

2023-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

What’s the big argument in the campaign trails nowadays? “We are the rational ones.”
What the fuck does that mean? Is it even a political statement? I sure do hope your party is capable of chosing someone that isn’t crazy as candidate. God, I’m glad you are telling me that 1</a>.
^{1
But wouldn’t that exactly be what someone insane would say?
</div>}
Wait a second? Isn’t this an accusation? Why would someone call themselves “rational”?2</a> Isn’t it just accusing the opposition of madness?
^{2
appart, of course, if they themselves are crazy.
</div>
Telling your opposition is mad means you can just ignore them. And in fact, you can ignore – not just the opposition – but even your electorate. Because, if you are not voting for me, you are crazy, so why even listen to you? You don’t make sense.
Now hear me up. Call me crazy, but I’ll tell you something about things that happens beyond the event horizon of history, things that happened, like, more than 15 years ago. Things you need to – oh deary – read more than two Wikipedia paragraphs (something like 3 or 4) to learn about.
That thing is called: “Policy”. Where’s that thing gone? Oh yeah, about five decades of politicians being elected and doing the opposite of what they fucking wrote in their program.}
Can’t a politician promise more than a sanity certificate?3</a> If the best they’ve got is that they aren’t crazy, I might as well do the job myself. Anyway, why are politicians just name calling each others?4</a> Why is the opposition always “irrational”?
^{3
Of note: they even fail at that.
</div>}
^{4
The politicians, not the people. Human beings not paid to work on policy are actually listening to each other.
</div>}
Maybe the self-described “rational ones5</a>” think of “rational” as “uses logical thinking” as opposed to “emotion”. All those political opponents that see sea of migrants invading our pristine landscapes, the jealous left that has a grudge against rich people, the sentimental left that let themselves be blinded by the misery of the world, harff, all those spoilsports regulators that stops innovation! The state stealing almost all my earnings!
^{5
As a Computer Scientist, I can’t represent myself what a Rational is, nor do I accept “ones” without “zeros”.
</div>
You see, even if everyone call themselves “rational” their fundamental drive is
purely emotional.
And it can’t be any other way.
What makes us do anything? Emotions! Literally nothing else drives a human
being! If you want to go somewhere, it’s because you feel like it, there
isn’t really a way to explain it beyond that, everything ends at the gut
feeling, the fundamental quantum of sentiment. So why are all those politicians
saying they are rational? Are they aimless? Really I think it’s more an
accusation, they see the other parties driven by emotions they
do not share, and just go “that’s irrational”, without even thinking half a
second about their own motivations.
But humans are the rational animal, aren’t they? In any case, policy driven by
pure gut feel seems like an awful idea. So surely politics are not (or at least
should not be) purely driven by emotions.
Yeah, emotions should be the kickstarter of politics, the sparkle that lights
the fire. A starting point. Or rather, an end point. Since the only
way, as a human, to have a goal, is to feel like it, we should use
emotions to learn what we want.
Then, we can use pure cold mathematics, experience-based deduction, inference,
deduction, anything to reach what we want.
But we should always be informed (but not driven) by our emotions.
A political system that suppresses emotions is terrifying. It forgets the value
of humans, and as a result endangers humans.
Never forget why you are doing things.}

The Dogma dogma

2023-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

You’ve notice the political discourse is almost always people talking past each other. As if two people spoke two different languages yet pretended to talk in the same one. Or as if they lived in completely different realities and debate TV shows were a crossroad between parallel universes.
It’s true though. Each person lives in a different world.
Now, I refute sophism, the idea that we can’t know reality or that there isn’t a shared reality. I’m talking about something a bit more subtle.
How do we know about the world? The physical world, the one described by physicist, populated by neutrons, protons and electrons, where most things is just a bunch of empty space with particles interacting with each other in a variety of ways.
We have eyes that see, ears that hear, noses that smell. This is our window into the physical world. But sensors aren’t enough! Put it this way: Some wavelengths tickle in a specific manner tinny hairs in your ears. We do not hear “wavelengths” we hear voices, miaows, helicopter propellers, music.
We don’t live in the physical world. We live in a very specific interpretation of the world. A word of objects, other people, walls, floor, sky, etc. Those are not physical things that exists, they are pure construction of our mind. A concrete wall isn’t much different from a concrete floor, on a pure physical level. Yet to us, the difference is so blindingly obvious that saying they are “the same thing” is outrageously alien.
Not only we do live in a world of human concepts, but of all sky, people, walls, floors and object, we only at any given instant experience a tinny fraction of them. And each person a different piece of the world.
Yet.
Yet all humans share the same interpretation of the physical world. Outside of philosophy university departments, I doubt you’ll find someone to tell you that cats barks and do not miaow, or that rocks fall upward, or that blue is red</a>.
Maybe this is because our brain is primmed to interpret basic concepts of the world in a specific way. A trait for survival or a remnant of a more primitive, less flexible brain.
This is nice, we can understand each other.
Well not exactly.
Think of a pig. A nice little adorable pig, you know, snug, that you can kill to feed off of. Yummy! A murderous afraid thing with the capacity to mob and down and kill people if they feel threatened. Are those two different pigs? A “wild pig” and a “domestic pig”? Yet both “pig”. With time, the same pig can be once wild and then domestic and conversely.
Someone who has known and been hurt by a wild pig will never see pigs the same way as a city dweller. The concept of pig (the things that populate someone’s world) in the latter person is different from the concept of pig in the former.
Pig is a relatively uncontroversial concept.
Is the earth round? Not a thing we readily can assess with our tinny window of sense into the world. Should I worry that the earth is round and not flat as it appears to be? No not really. Well, unless you need to do some astronomy, plan a very long trip, send a rocket into space, or phone to someone at the other side of earth. The shape of earth only matters to people that do things that could be influenced by the shape of earth.
Well, there are people who seem to believe the earth is flat. They can only say that because the curvature of earth doesn’t matter for them, in fact they can really only believe it because other people believe it is round (their airplane pilot, the developer of their calendar app)
For them, earth is really flat. It is central to their being, and in a way, it means there is a world where the earth is flat, their world, the world they perceive. 
“Is” interacts with floaty concepts, words. “Earth” for the airplane pilot definitively means something different than for the flatist Instagram influencer who takes the airplane to go to the international flatist conference. To the pig victim, “pig” does mean something different than to us. Yet no one is wrong when calling a pig a pig or the earth the earth.
How can we even talk and understand each other? How can people even appreciate poetry or literature? When each person has a different interpretation of what a word means. Each person having a unique and exclusive experience of the world, having a singular interpretation of the concepts that inhabits it.
Maybe words don’t have meaning, they are more a suggestion, an invitation to go in a semantic location. Each person has in their head a subset of the full concept of “pig”. A necessarily incomplete piece of a larger model of “pig”. When you hear “pig” as said by the victim, your understanding of “pig” expends to the murderous creature. At any given time, when you use or hear a word, you implicitly understand that the word “pig” only caries the relevant subset of the whole concept of “pig”.
What is the government?
Ah! Here we go! Finally to the point! This is really something that do not exist in the physical world, it can only exist as an interpretation of reality, in our head.
Government is in fact something that cannot be described by mechanical means. There is no tool a physicist could build that could possibly detect a government.
We do not share a reality where governments exist (the physical reality). We can only guess what governments are.
Everyone has a vague idea that government is a collection of people who has sovereignty over a given delimited territory and do things, such as collect taxes and set rules that may be referenced to encourage people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.
Oh, yeah, this definition is definitively controversial, most people would refer to Max Weber, talk about violence and/or social contracts.
But really those are interpretations. Ways of explaining why the hell there are little people with pointy noise in drab uniforms, in drab buildings writing notes and adding up numbers, doing nothing else and getting myopia for their service. In a way, encouraged by the rest of society to add the numbers.
Fundamentally those things do not need to exist, they exist because they existed a short while ago and no one decided it was worth stopping between then and now.
In a way, the government is a bunch of clown acting a very boring play in a theater where everyone think it best that the play continues.
To some, government is taxes and the constant implicit threat of violence if ignored.
To others, it is the commons, the things that people do together that they couldn’t possibly do individually.
Are those really describing the same thing? Yes! Yes! Yes! Same as pig and pig.
We figured out we can talk about pigs and understand each others. Yet, like the government, pigs do not really exist. They are a pure human construction.
Like a government, there is no tools that could possibly detect a pig. You say, maybe, a DNA sequencing machine could do it? No, not really, you could easily confuse it with boars and hybridization. A pig is really the idea of a pig. The fluffy concept in our head of a pig.
The physical world is unreadable. In our head, we only have a limited model of it. We can’t fathom the entirety of the piggyness of pigs, similarly we can’t fathom the entirety of the governmentness of governments.
We can only see at the same time a small subset of government and a small subset of pig.
Taxes and threat of violence is only an aspect of government, while the common goods is another one. Those, even put together, do not even begin to describe the entirety of government, it is even questionable whether government can be described in any way. Like words, government is constantly changing.
Picture one of those funny 3D models, that looked from one direction spell a word, and looked from another, spells another word. Government as a thing in our shared understanding of the world is like that. Government as a myopic partisan view is like the words it spells.
The seven blind men and the elephant</a>, do a better job that this miserable nonsense to communicate what I mean here. (For my defense, seven men and an elephant surpass me in weight by a large amount)
Reality is complex, multifaceted, multidimensional. Our tinny brain, our window into the world, cannot possibly fathom it in its entirety, so we reason, act, based on an “good enough” subset of the whole thing.
We build our model of the world based on our experience, based on the other bits of the internal world we already built, based on other people’s experience.
This is the dogma. As we grow older, the pre-existing model becomes unelastic and informs the interpretation of the new informations much more. We can’t reshape the existing model anymore, so we reshape the new things we let in.
If we only have a very limited model of “government”, well, it can’t be updated anymore, so it is the rest that gets reshaped. You might even need redefine your understanding of pigs to keep your former understanding of government!
Anyway, this is insight. Even if your representation of the world is drastically different than someone else’s this means you’ll have to account for their belief. It is likely there is a greater, more comprehensive world, where both representations are compatible.
Even if seemingly outlandish, everyone’s representation of the world is valid. Most people believe what they believe because of a sincere belief that it is a helpful thing to do.
When hearing someone’s theory, keep this in mind, put yourself in their shoes, understand them. You’ll grow as a person, and make more friend.

Are you content?

2023-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

I can’t escape the word “content” lately.
Maybe because I’ve been listening to a media podcast for the past few months.
When journalists, PR people, social media companies refer to stuff on the internet, they usually call it “content”.
Every single time, gets my blood to bloody boiling levels. What is content? It’s this blog post I spent so much time writing, reading and re-reading. It is a video game several people spent several years working their ass off to get it into a playable state. It’s music, video essays, fun, human emotions.
“Content” strips all those things of their worth and interest. “Content” is just a row in a database, some bits on a server. Yet those bits exist because they have a meaning beyond the magnetization of Ångström-sized mechanical pieces.
Talking about human creative output as “content” is not just reductive, it’s destructive. 
If journalism is content, your newspaper is just a bunch of pulp with ink on it. And your journalists are a mean for you to make sure there is the correct amount of pulp and ink. As if people “consuming” newspaper were literally eating them.
A piece of investigative journalism is not “content”. Labelling it “content” only serves to destroy meaning. “Content” erases that critical property that helps us place “investigative journalism” in our society and understand its purpose.
You know, the actual purpose of a newspaper!
People don’t consume1</a> newspapers for calories (nor fibers), they inform themselves to know what’s going on around them, and if (for example) important people keep their word.
^{1
Yeah, you got it, I also don’t like “consume”. It’s much worse than “content” in fact. But that’s for another time.
</div>
From the point of view of a social media owner (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) “content” makes sense. “Content” in the sense of an object being contained is what the page contains, I would use that word if I were writting some code.
But outside of the very narrow domain of programming, “content” breaks appart. Even for Facebook. Facebook is careful as to what “content” to show to whom, to maximize the amount of ads shoved into your face. It’s not just about the bits, it’s about everything else than the bits, in fact: The metadata, the information about the text, picture, video.
Now people who should know better are obsessed with “content” and are debasing
their own creative output.
When talking about your work, don’t use “content”.
You ain’t making a social media website, you are just using them,
your “content” has value beyond being an ordered collection of bits.
Your post is not just filler to get people to waste time on Facebook (or your
own website for that mater), it’s a
piece of yourself, twisted so that others may enjoy it and welcome it in their
heart. A lovingly backed cake, that an infinite amount of people can eat.
Your creative production is more than a collection of bits to trap eyeballs
to sell to Coke. It’s something meaningful or beautiful that can change the world.
You wouldn’t be creating it otherwise.}

15 Years of Digital Maoism

2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

I randomly came across a 2006 essay by Jaron Lanier. It’s called “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism”.
It’s available online here.
https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism#21926</a>
The article and its responses really hit me deeply. And the essay, having been written in 2006, can be complemented with insight.
For context, in 2006, Wikipedia was being compared to Encyclopedia Britannica, Facebook was still invitation-only, Twitter was 6 months old, and reddit 18 months old.
To be short, the essay reflects the worry of 2006 about what the future of the internet may be. But also touches on more general topics, it denounces especially dilution of the individual through “collectivism,” (really “committees”) for example as a way to escape responsibility. He sees that in mass media companies. It also denounces the fetish of algorithms and communities as entities. Notably quoting “Digg” and “Reddit” in scare quotes) and saying social feed algos were bad at surfacing meaningful news. The page also contains 13 responses to the essay (including form Cory Doctorow and Jimmy Wales) all of them are quite thought provoking. It’s almost retro-futurist, and it made me nostalgic of the days when no one even thought the internet would lead to massive silos, and Google search was a way to access a plurality of 3rd party webpages.
As the responses to the essay point out, Lanier doesn’t really criticize Wikipedia. In particular, his complaint against Wikipedia is moot, Wikipedia is mostly driven by pseudonymous discussion in the talk and history tabs pages of articles. Wikipedia relies on reputation building to validate changes (which explains why his own anonymous contributions on his own page were rejected.)
But Lanier touches on something important. He doesn’t name it well in the essay, he calls it “collectivism” or “hivemind”. But really what he’s denouncing is cultural trend of abstracting individuals through technology or institutions. I’ll call it social reification.
Lanier also demonstrates a McCartian level of disdain for open source. As a Linux user (I use arch btw) and contributor to open source, I’m not too hot on that take, but not exactly in complete discordance.
What matters is people</h2>
Lanier says:

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots. </blockquote>
Lanier then analyses various collectives: news orgs, scientific community, free markets, democratic states.
Lanier acknowledges that some form of collectives do in fact have positive sides.

The collective is more likely to be smart when it isn’t defining its own questions, when the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. </blockquote>
Open market pricing or reddit is a perfect example of collective censoring individuality: The individual is completely erased, leaving only an aggregate number from each decisions.
More quotes, but no comments</h3>

One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering. </blockquote>
Larry Sanger says:

Slashdot’s post-ranking system is another perfect example. Slashdotters simply would not stand for a system in which some hand-selected group of editors chose or promoted posts; but if the result is decided by an impersonal algorithm, then it’s okay. It isn’t that the Slashdotters have a rational belief that the cream will rise to the top, under the system; people use the system just because it seems fairer or more equal to them. </blockquote>

What’s great about it is not that it produces an averaged view, an averaged view that is somehow better than an authoritative statement by people who actually know the subject. That’s just not it at all. What’s great about Wikipedia is the fact that it is a way to organize enormous amounts of labor for a single intellectual purpose. </blockquote>
Yochai Benkler says:

We talk. We link. We see what others say and think. And through our choices we develop a different path for determining what issues are relevant and salient, through a distributed system that, while imperfect, is less easily corrupted than the advertising supported media that dominated the twentieth century. </blockquote>

In either case, his lot is with those of us who see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based, closed, proprietary systems, which can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom. </blockquote>
What the internet enables</h2>
The rest of this post is very rant-y, and doesn’t lead to anywhere, feel free to overlook it.
The power of the internet always has been about connecting people.
Internet chat rooms, blogs and forums are a serendipity engine. It brings value by bringing people with different experience together, so that they together can make something they couldn’t alone.
This has direct economic, cultural and social effect. This is why we should care about a serendipitous internet. We should hold serendipity as the sacred common goal of all internet activity.
Beyond chance encounters between individuals, the internet can serve larger scale human relations. 
The idea of Wikipedia, is to seed a community, a human social structure and progressively amend it, through more rules and what they call “bureaucracy” to welcome more and more community members, resulting in a large social structure. A structure which goal is still to create an universal reference work accessible to all for free.
Arguably succeeding.
In the end, all of this is mostly a game, where each internet participant is a willing player. And the fact that it is mostly a game is what drives most of it.
It’s just a question of making up rules. Wikipedia is a prime example, but you can take as example any social media.
A prime necessity for voluntary cooperation, is that the game is fun and fair. This is why, when a site’s owners and structures of power dissociate from its users, you’ll see countless conflict between the users and the owners.
Small communities do not suffer from that, because the owner is seen as a peer.
The naive conclusion would be to accept that it’s impossible to scale any internet community. But that would be forgetting, well, the subject of this post: Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a fully ad-hoc voluntary social structure. Wikipedia is a precious example that a social system not based on violently enforced coercion is possible.
Modern Social media</h2>
Maybe Wikipedia’s success lies in its users being complete, unrepented nerds, scholars and other academic weirdos. The kind of people who just enjoy endless consensus-building exercises. Which the least of them could drain all patience out of any normal individual.
This might explain why Wikipedia succeeded where many are struggling.
Honestly I don’t know I just find this interesting.

The beginning of a dev career

2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Here is a retrospective of my software development career. The narrative starts in September 2018, as soon as a completed my CS degree at the Geneva University (unige)
2018-09-11 to 2019-06-01: job hunting</h2>
I wanted a job specifically not working in Java, and wanted to avoid the financial sector and a various company I’d never live with myself if I helped them make more money. So I was mostly looking for tech jobs in the energy, software service or any engineering sector, anything that has a clear concrete positive impact on the real world.
I joined jeunes@Work, an association that helps young people find work. Which was a great resource to figure out how to structure my job hunt and prepare interviews. It was also a place where I made great friends and found support in a time of great need.
I wasn’t idling during that time, I took the opportunity to clean up some of the uni projects I had (gssa, friendsketch). I joined Azuni, which honestly I thought more of a band of desperate people with just a diploma trying to do busywork to ink some lines on their resumés.
I also went to a lot of professional meetups, met a lot of people (ahah, was nice before the pandemic) I met a few great people like Olivier (who happened to work at the place I will later get a full time job at, and also happened to be a childhood friend to my brother.)
During the trailing end of my job search, my father got a stroke and he went bankrupt. This deepened my need to find something quicker and generally strengthened my resolve. I was angry at the world, this burning anger was what fuelled my meek and shy personality and gave me daring enough to go out there, advertise myself like a soda brand and talk to everyone as equal.
2019-06-01 to 2021-06-01: Work at Lombard Odier Investment Managers as Scala developer</h2>
The networking and going at conferences didn’t contribute much to finding my first job. I simply found the job offer in the job suggestion in the “you could be interested” panel at the right of the LinkedIn UI.
My Binding of Isaac mods helped convince my future colleagues that I was someone interesting to talk to, my experience with Haskell and Elm when developing Friendsketch strongly helped me convince the team I would be capable of using Scala.
My previous self-taught experience in pure functional languages helped me start up extremely quickly in scala, it took me more time to get the proper access rights than to get the hang of scala (about a week)
I quickly got involved in a greenfield project aiming to convert a homegrown VB (Visual Basic) equities investment cockpit into a web app. The VB code was so catastrophic that we quickly gave up on reading it. We devised a method with the equities team where they would generate on a schedule an Excel file and the application would read the file and upload the data to our database, then serve it more-or-less without further transformation to the frontend. The first few months of the project had me do it in collaboration with my colleague Julia but she got involved in other projects and delegated to me the last phase of development and the maintenance work, as the team assessed quickly that I was extremely independent.
Once the bulk of the project complete and released, my job became mostly maintenance and cleanups. Although I didn’t write that much documentation, it was definitively more than the team was used to, and I hope I encouraged writing more documentation. I found it difficult to design tests. Sometimes I contributed to the devops (CI, our dev servers) Some of the server being a classic old school miserable pile of scripts, the more modern infra was very well designed and maintained by my colleague Oliver. I felt at all time inadequate when it came to CI, and the experience didn’t improve my confidence with Linux server maintenance (even though I willingly use Archlinux on all my personal computers (I use arch btw))
Other routine work involved 4 eyes code review. I think I was more exigent that the established practice at the team, and everyone politely avoided telling me that, only saying “thanks,” “good catch” and “that’s a great clean up idea” when I was pointing issues out. However, I believe my heightened standards helped improve code, and hopefully I left the team with better code review standards than when I arrived.
I got assigned also smaller projects, such as some FIX (a very old financial exchange format standard) API wrapper. I’m a bit ashamed of the code, it’s very much in the “too smart for its own good” category of code.
I sometimes also dived into the legacy scala codebase, I had enough wit to survive it without losing my faith in humanity, but despite my understanding and developing some workaround the fundamental untestability and spaghetti coupling of the codebase, I never managed to improve the code. I designed a prototype test framework where I recorded all method calls and outputs of running instances, and feed them to new code to see how it fairs, but it never got to the level of reliability necessary to confidently refactor such a fundamental part of the infrastructure. The team seemingly really wanted to shield me from that code.
A year in, I got to work on another greenfield project. This was the sustainable“ investment cockpit. I was pretty much alone with Yves (the frontend guy) on that one, and seemingly everyone I worked with was extremely pleased with what I did. Furthermore, the app was part of the company’s key marketing strategy. I probably earned my employer more than ten times my own salary (single tear smiling emoji)
During the hiring process, I clearly stated that I planned on staying at most 2 years. When came the time, I indeed announced my departure with a 6 months notice, which is 5 and a half more months than legally required. I took care to document well enough the code I wrote and document quirks. I also uploaded all my personal work-related notes to the company Confluence instance, I also suggested I upload the day-to-day task log I kept for myself, but the team considered this to be superfluous. I still left a specific bit of code I’m not proud of, but beside that code, I only had positive feedback on the code I wrote.
I even went back on-premise after leaving to say an actual “goodbye.” I left during the pandemic and didn’t have the closure I wanted, so I came back with a delicious cake I shared with the office and the new recruit that replaced me.
I spent a great time a Lombard Odier, every person I worked with were great and pleasant, I sincerely hope I was to other as others were to me. I left because Finance is the opposite of the career I want, I was constantly asking myself questions about what kind of world I helped build, I am uncomfortable with salaried work, and needed more independence, furthermore, I felt that I had no growth opportunity. Bluntly put, I believed I was caged in a golden prison and used as a tool to make the world a worse place.
2021-06-01 to 2021-10-01 Casual relaxation</h2>
The first month out of a job, I forced myself to not program, then slowly resumed, making mods for The Binding of Isaac.
It’s when an artist I admire asked to collaborate on a game that I really started diving into programming again
2021-10-01 to 2022-09-01 Devil Dahu</h2>
Thus was born Devil Dahu. The initial team included me, Xo and Jr. My first technology assessment lead me to believe that Godot would be the best engine to use, Jr was a CS undergrad and he had his says. He wanted to fork Godot and add functionalities to it.
I didn’t want to deal with a big pile of C++, and this is where I suggested Bevy as the engine itself is written very much the same way you’d write a game in it. It is the perfect modifiable engine. He agreed
Jr quickly left the team, but I was already a bit too involved in bevy at that point, having opened an RFC and designing a few plugins that would be necessary for the game we planned
I developed a few half-backed prototypes, two jam games and a few bevy plugins. I’m ashamed I never went deeper with the prototypes. I still think my design ideas would fill a niche that is in sore need of being filled (ie: games I want to play)
2022-09-01 More casual relaxation</h2>
After an intense half year of nonstop almost pathological programming, I’m now in a rut and really can’t sit down and write code as insanely consistently as last six months. Currently, I get at most a day per week of code. I’m taking the opportunity to do a bit of introspection. I’m generally very aware of where I stand in the world, but lately, I’m fairly certain the world has been moving away at an increasing pace.
Now and future?</h2>
I am currently looking for contractual or salaried work, I’d be more than happy to discuss opportunities with you. Just send an email to this website’s domain if you want to discuss it.

What was my Computer Science degree good for?

2022-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

The 11th of September marked the 4th years I completed my Bachelor degree in Computer Science at University Geneva (unige).
I got this degree after 5 years at unige, a first year in the Sciences of Education and Psychology department, and four years at the department of informatics.
Timeline</h2>
To be real quick, here is my professional life:

2018-09-11: Got my bachelor degree</li>
2018-09-11 to 2019-06-01: job hunting</li>
2019-06-01 to 2021-06-01: Work at Lombard Odier Investment Managers (LOIM) as Scala developer</li>
2021-06-01 to 2021-10-01 Chill it out</li>
2021-10-01 to 2022-09-01 Devil dahu (game dev studio)</li> </ul>
More details are handed out in my 4 years retrospective</a> post.
What was the degree good for?</h2>
Not C knowledge</h3>
The way we were “taught” C at unige was absolutely miserable, it mostly involved a link to a tutorial. C is not a trifle language to learn. This resulted in a half-arsed understanding of the dangers of the language.
The one thing you must know when starting to use C is that it’s not just about fixing the SEGFAULTs, but at uni, no one told me that.
It’s a few things outside of uni that taught me that:

Horror stories blog posts shared on hackernews.</li>
The Gameboy advance game I made for the systems programming course completely breaking when trying to run it with a different emulator</li>
Independently buying and reading the K&R and “Expert C programming” that I still see stated as excellent references today.</li> </ol>
Programming and Functional programming concepts</h3>
The introductory language at unige was Scheme. It is such a neat language to learn programming with. Scheme being pure functional untyped lisp dialect.
I knew a bit of Python before uni too, but scheme’s purity did require a new way of thinking about programming.
The other languages taught at unige were horrendous. Not that Java or Pascal are bad, but the way they were taught didn’t light them in the most compelling form. A major advantage of Scheme, is that we were recommended to use the Dr. Racket IDE, which works remarkably well and doesn’t require much setup. Pascal and Python are also pretty good in that respect (although as soon as you need a dependecy beyond the standard library, it goes apeshit).
But C, Java and matlab are very hard, not as programming languages per se (although Java and C have so many footguns it’s a wonder anyone who knows C can still walk) but to setup and actually use. Sure Java has a bunch of IDEs, and so does C, but as soon as there is an irregularity and your IDE fails with a cryptic error (if you are lucky), you are left to guess with absolutely no clue what went wrong. You actually need some understanding of compilers, linkers and concepts of binary executable to be able to fix issues with your C toolchain. While Java requires some understanding of javac and jars although compared to C, it’s trivial) to be able to generate bytecode and fixup IDE hiccups. This is especially true when you are not that familiar with programming tools, as an undergraduate wont to be. Matlab obviously has its proprietary plateform, but we didn’t have a license to use it, so it was either yarr-ing it or using Octave, which definitively doesn’t have all the features used during the various lectures that relied on matlab.
As a demonstration of what I’m saying. The build system for our system programming project used a monstrous template Makefile</a> that came with the devkitArm</a> toolchain. To me those looked like chtonic incantation, as palpable as an eldritch prayer (2016). Any issue with the build process couldn’t be fixed without the help of someone knowledgeable, and there were a few. Fast-forward to today (2022) and reading back this Makefile, I just understand it. Not that I used C very much (or even at all) between 2016 and 2022, but after learning rust, I have a much deeper understanding of linkers and compiler processes, and the Makefile is fairly readable with this context.
I randomly came across Hackernews and discovered there was more than what we learned at uni, and I was curious enough to try to learn more. This is when I tried out Go, Rust, Elm and Haskell.
I did fall in love with the clear syntax of elm. The lack of delimiter sigils and other character noises make elm and haskell stand out. I’m very surprised no more language have similar syntax.
This is when I turned into a pure functional proselytist. I’m less of a proselytist now, but I still believe that list.map(f)</code> is a better way of expressing “apply f on all elements of list” than for elem in list: f(elem)</code>.
It would be disingenuous to say that elm was the language that introduced me to functional programming, because of Scheme, so I’d say the degree was in part responsible for this.
Functional programming is definitively what landed me my first job, and what led me to be such an active bevy user. So that’s a plus.
On top, the design process of elm apps (that I transposed later to design of my rust code) structured the way I write code. Now I feel confident from the get go how I would write and architect any application. Starting with guessing the flow, then defining the data types and then defining relations between them.
Math (hue)</h3>The unige CompSci curricullum is heavy on math, I even got taught by a now Fields medalist (!</a>) and I consider myself privileged to have learned math at unige. I found math to not be compelling, but apparently I was good enough at it. The maths I was taught wasn’t really the most useful. I loved inductive logic and made it my Bachelor thesis, but beside it, I’ve not used much math in my limited career. That was until I made games. Games require a lot of algebra at all layers. I don’t quite remember what I did in Algebra I, but the ease with which I wield math to solve my game problems today is definitively due to those lectures. Parallelism</h3> The parallelism course was definitively useful, the theoretical concepts I learned such as Amdahl’s law</a> is still useful today to understand the behavior of software I write. This course is also why I started using Linux. The parallelism lectures required MPI, which was impossible to get working on Windows or in a VM, so I installed a Linux partition on my system, and after installing Linux only being coerced into it, I more or less never booted on Windows ever again. Complexity analysis</h3> Knowing about complexity and theoretical limits of common problems help a lot knowing if you are doing something absolutely wrong, you should know the theoretical complexity of your problems and should know when your solutions are not just unoptimal but disastrously unoptimal. Having a constant watch on the complexity of your apps is a necessity for developers. This is an important thing that I learned. System programming</h3> Even if my professional coding was in a higher-level language, understanding the underlying architecture of the processor helps tremendously write efficient software. Cache locality is always a worry of mine, and I generally avoid pointer chains. I understand how inefficient scala code is. For writing game, this is actually fundamental, and I’m very glad I was extremely attentive during those lectures, while everyone else seemingly were so comatose that they didn’t even have the energy to browse casually Facebook as they did in other lectures. The content of the course could be learned by following: The Azeria Lab ARM tutorial</a>.</li> The Tonc GBA tutorial</a>.</li> </ol> Databases</h3> I hated the database courses, mostly because the seminary assistant had a constant halitosis and always leaned in front of me when I asked questions, and seemingly I was the only one asking questions (now I realize I might see why it might be) But SQL, I’ve no idea how I picked up, just clicks with me. I understand the query language as if I was fluent in it, despite not using it at all. All of this considering that I never really used an SQL database or even SQLite. At LOIM, we mostly used MongoDB, and the little use I did of Microsoft SQL, was quickly replaced by a custom in-house database that would be better described as non-relational. Statistics and machine learning</h3> I never used machine learning outside of uni assignments. And I now forgot enough about statistics that I know that I don’t know enough to use it responsibly, compelling myself to avoid using statistics. I recognize machine learning as something important today, and it’s just the contingency of my career that pushed me away from it. Networking</h3> After a re-try I got a perfect grade at my Networking lectures. I think this is the lecture I forgot the most readily after completing the examination. It’s a shame, because a lot of the games I make could be improved with online multiplayer. Software engineering</h3> That course sucked and taught actively harmful concepts, I wish everyone that they forget what they learned during that lecture. Agile is an important thing to teach, the Kanban (continuous improvement) philosophy is an important driver of excellence and high quality software. But learning it by rot is the opposite of what it’s supposed to be! I think a better approach would be motivationally based. Pointing out anecdotes of disastrous software failure, and how it could have been fixed avoided through common practices today. Graphic programming</h3> The course taught by Thierry Pun. He taught basic concepts like Phong shading and human visual capacity. The latter was mostly a watered-down version of the anatomy course I followed in psychology. Human anatomy underly the motivation of a lot of the common compression algorithms used today, and it’s also an opportunity to talk about color space. Color space management is an absolutely mess in all parts of image processing software today, so knowing the underlying concepts helps knowing what you don’t know, rather than assuming it’s impenetrable. However, physics is a major part of computer-generated graphics, and the approach to Phong used in the lectures failed to capture the motivations and justifications behind it. Furthermore, today’s CGI pipeline is even more physics-oriented, so that failing is amplified by modern advances. The other limitation of the lecture was usage of matlab. Matlab is as far removed from actual CGI as anything can be! On top of it, it is proprietary and requires student to either spend an inordinate amount of money or using unoptimal workarounds (eg: Octave) A more practical approach would have been usage of a GPU language such as OpenGL. An approach, that I believe should still be complementary to the one used by Pr. Pun would look like ryg’s graphic pipeline series</a>. However, such a practical hardware-based approach can really only exist in combination with a more historical and motivational approach, such as the one used by Pun. Independently learning to use Blender in college and during my psychology years did help me more with graphic programming today than that lecture, which is a shame. Practical software project</h3> A semester was dedicated to develop as a team a software project. I volunteered to develop the CI for it, learning to setup jenkins, opening ports and setting up firewalls to let my teammate consult it, creating a discord bot for chat-ops (of my own initiative), setting up a wonky under-documented pile of java code called Wildfly 11 updating log4j</del>. Fixing the setup of my teammates etc. I even introduced someone to VSCode when it was the hot new thing! (though I never used it myself) Ahah, it was a great introduction to my future job, and I wouldn’t exchange it for anything else. What is missing in the education I had?</h3> Software Correctness Teaching the limitations of C</li> Dangers of lousy programming such as common antipatterns (magic numbers, Null, magic strings, ex-nihili architecture, surprise mutations (aka spooky action at a distance), etc.)</li> </ul> </li> Modern software development practices Very basic introduction to compiler, linker, virtual machines (jvm) and generally give an idea of how fucked up and potentially bizantinely complex dev tooling is (android APK and Gradle ahah). This should be a very early course, after introductory programming, but before teaching C or other programming languages (also contrast to modern tooling like cargo and poetry, to demonstrate not all is lost).</li> Proper code review (basic human decency, why it exists)</li> Limitations of OOP (composition over inheritance, pointer-chasing, leakiness of GC, lack of referential transparency, why it’s a problem with concurrency)</li> CI (what tools exist, what are the trade off in terms of velocity correctness (btw I think this should be softeng courses))</li> </ul> </li> Actual graphic programming (glsl or even a watered down education-oriented language like futhark, a major downside of matlab is that it doesn’t run on GPU)</li> Practice in network programming (unix sockets, Nagle’s algorithm)</li> </ul>

Networking</h3>
After a re-try I got a perfect grade at my Networking lectures.</p>
I think this is the lecture I forgot the most readily after completing the examination. It’s a shame, because a lot of the games I make could be improved with online multiplayer.</p>

- Nicola Papale's personal blog

Told you so

From hippie to loony

Why FOSS?

The deeper truth of Goodhart's law

Let's all be Idiots

Hypersonic ballistics aimed at the Commons

The Confused Confucius

The Workshop of ideas

Hope liver on

Innovation!

Don't inform yourself: learn

More of The same

Durov is a twat

Jansen's strandbeests

Eulogy to my shirt

Tech as a moral smoke screen

The Surveillance Vending Machines

The limits of statistical thinking and the value of personal experience

Technologism

Shared dogma and metahumans

Emotions in politics

The Dogma dogma

Are you content?

15 Years of Digital Maoism

The beginning of a dev career

2021-06-01 to 2021-10-01 Casual relaxation</h2>
The first month out of a job, I forced myself to not program, then slowly resumed, making mods for The Binding of Isaac.</p>
It’s when an artist I admire asked to collaborate on a game that I really started diving into programming again</p>

Now and future?</h2>
I am currently looking for contractual or salaried work, I’d be more than happy to discuss opportunities with you. Just send an email to this website’s domain if you want to discuss it.</p>

What was my Computer Science degree good for?

- Nicola Papale's personal blog

Told you so

From hippie to loony

Why FOSS?

Free Software</h2> But no. Let’s skip directly to Richard Stallman, the instigator of the GNU Public License (GPL). Stallman puts it simply: “If I like a program, I must be able to share it with other people who like it”.</p>

Existing governance of OSS projects</h2> Now that you know my deep disatisfaction with software in general, and how we are missing an amazing world of complete user ownership of computers, let’s talk about how OSS projects work today.</p>

The deeper truth of Goodhart's law

Let's all be Idiots

Hypersonic ballistics aimed at the Commons

The Confused Confucius

The Workshop of ideas

Hope liver on

Innovation!

Don't inform yourself: learn

More of The same

Durov is a twat

Jansen's strandbeests

Eulogy to my shirt

Tech as a moral smoke screen

The Surveillance Vending Machines

The limits of statistical thinking and the value of personal experience

“Carefully constructed” statistics</h2> Third, it puts a bit too much weight behind “carefully constructed” statistics.</p>

Technologism

Shared dogma and metahumans

Emotions in politics

The Dogma dogma

Are you content?

15 Years of Digital Maoism

The beginning of a dev career

2021-06-01 to 2021-10-01 Casual relaxation</h2> The first month out of a job, I forced myself to not program, then slowly resumed, making mods for The Binding of Isaac.</p> It’s when an artist I admire asked to collaborate on a game that I really started diving into programming again</p>

Now and future?</h2> I am currently looking for contractual or salaried work, I’d be more than happy to discuss opportunities with you. Just send an email to this website’s domain if you want to discuss it.</p>

What was my Computer Science degree good for?

Networking</h3> After a re-try I got a perfect grade at my Networking lectures.</p> I think this is the lecture I forgot the most readily after completing the examination. It’s a shame, because a lot of the games I make could be improved with online multiplayer.</p>

2021-06-01 to 2021-10-01 Casual relaxation</h2>
The first month out of a job, I forced myself to not program, then slowly resumed, making mods for The Binding of Isaac.</p>
It’s when an artist I admire asked to collaborate on a game that I really started diving into programming again</p>

Now and future?</h2>
I am currently looking for contractual or salaried work, I’d be more than happy to discuss opportunities with you. Just send an email to this website’s domain if you want to discuss it.</p>

Networking</h3>
After a re-try I got a perfect grade at my Networking lectures.</p>
I think this is the lecture I forgot the most readily after completing the examination. It’s a shame, because a lot of the games I make could be improved with online multiplayer.</p>