Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, i was thinking about how I know the Christians are not, generally, on my side, and I’ve come up with a few good indicators

*) Anyone who thinks you should change in ways that your highest self, your best self, doesn’t think you should change is probably not on the right side.

*) Anyone who things that things that are enjoyable and positive and most people would want to experience, like sex, are sinful or should be carefully kept in little boxes and frowned upon, is probably not on the right side

*) Anyone who doesn’t speak against violence, or things that are bad and generally no one would want to experience, is probably not on the right side. *encouraging* violence over things like religions, which are fundamentally unknowable, is a especially strong case of this. (Example: Crusades)

*) Anyone who wants to censor ad restrain art which is enjoyable, such as rock music, and wants to sell the idea that such art is ‘sinful’ is not on the right side

*) Anyone who wants to replace observable reality with their own claims which run obviously counter to observable reality is not on the right side. (example: Galileo)

*) Anyone who wants to tell you you are so fundamentally flawed that only the mercy of a higher power can save you – flawed because you learn by making mistakes, which is the very nature of neural networks – is not on the right side, and is probably lying about their message being divinely inspired.

I continue to think that most of the world’s religions exist largely to keep the world’s religious leaders employed. I also continue to think they are largely holding us back and even leading us in wrong and bad directions. Part of this, of course, is that I think we would be happier if we recognized that humans fall in love more than once, and also we never really get over anyone we’ve been in love with, and encouraged people not to end friendships or disconnect from people because they’ve fallen in love with other people, but instead to share. I realize that it was very important for reasons that are, as usual, stupid, for the tribe to know which baby belonged to which parents, but I think this is partially because we have really awful and anti-success memetics.

More later.

So, one thing that I can’t help but notice is that America’s police forces are basically amoral thugs. The fact that they were willing to enforce things like the marijuana laws was a good indicator of this, but a better indicator is that they repeatedly kill innocent civilians and they have no problems with this.

This fits in nicely with America’s military, which is in the business of killing any innocent who gets in the way of our state religion (capitalism) or our access to oil. It’s obvious that there are better options than oil for transportation energy storage, but the american dollar and the wealth of a bunch of old white men is tied to oil, so, murder more! Besides, the voters like seeing the houses of others blown up on the nightly news. It makes them feel patroitic.

And, of course, there’s a very effective brainwashing system in place selling the idea that all this thuggery is good. Shows like Cops. A never-ending series of lies to justify the use of deadly force by both the police and the military.

It doesn’t take much research, if one is willing to be honest, to discover that when Islamic countries talk about America as worshiping ‘The great Satan’, they have a pretty good case they can make. (Of course, Jehovah is also a murdering bastard.. in general our spiritual systems do not seem to be based around people you would want to know, with the possible exception of Jesus himself and Siddhartha).

Why don’t people stop it? I don’t know. Increasingly it looks like we’re willing to fight back when the cops murder innocents, which I find encouraging, but we’re not doing a very good job of targetting. People, teh goal is to destroy government buildings that belong to the criminal justice system, not random, useful government buildings, and definitely not private businesses.

I understand that it’s hard to think rationally when you’re angry, and I also understand that anger is a reasonable response to being hurt, and having our police murder innocents without consequence (aside from maybe some paperwork) whenever they want definitely falls under “being hurt”. Living in fear of our police because they will thug around whenever they want and break bones and murder if anyone doesn’t “respect their authoritah” is also something I’d consider “being hurt”. Of course, the conservatives are all cheering this on. Yay! Cops should kill more innocent citizens! And break more bones!

So, yesterday, I had a odd thing happen – the main DC breaker for the summing bus on the solar panel tripped while I was charging the EV.

Now, it’s a 200 amp breaker, and my EV uses 140 amps to charge, so I knew something was wrong.. and when I went to reset it, the panel smelled of burned plastic and was hot to the touch. So, I didn’t reset it, instead I put off investigating for today and flipped the switch for the EV over to the ‘grid’ position.

Today, when I took the panel off, I discovered the insulation on the 4/0 that feeds the inverter had literally melted. Upon further investigation, I discovered when I installed the lug for that branch, I either stripped it or it came defective from the factory, thusly it was not snugging the wire all the way down into it’s little channel. I’m surprised it worked as long as it did.

What I want you to notice here is nowhere in this did we have fires, people dying, etc. Why? because the NEC requires breaker panels to be made of metal, and the plastic parts in them to be of self-extinguishing material. Ditto the jackets for wire.

*this* is the “Big Government” the republicans rail against. Not the police that murder citizens, not the army that murders innocents, but “regulatory oganizations” – things like the CSB, who make sure that chemical plants are operated safely, or the NEC, which makes sure that electrical distribution systems are safe.

Trump and his cohorts are, in essence, the guy at Chernobyl arguing to turn off the computer because it won’t let them pull all the rods out. (I remind you that Trump literally *fired the pandemic team*). Those of you crying about how you want more freedom apparently want the freedom to have your house burn down because the installer made a mistake, have your oil refinery explode and kill hundreds because a valve has rusted out, or have the freedom to know that you’re murdering immigrants in order to protect the jobs that no americans want to do.

We have big government because we tried small government, and it didn’t work out so well. I agree there are portions of our government we need to trim or axe – the portions murdering people. Precisely the portions republicans want to give more money to. However, the regulatory officials save lives every day. We should really consider whether we want the world’s next Chernobyl to be in America – if, indeed, it isn’t already.

So, I think I’ve talked about this before, but I thought I’d mention it again.

We have 10^11 neurons. 100 billion of them – and each neuron is made up of many, many atoms. A conservative guess might be a hundred thousand. Each atom has a electron that forms a probability cloud that is the most dense close to the nucleus, and asymptotically approaches zero as it moves away from the nucleus, but it’s never really zero.

We are all connected, we are all inside each other. We can’t escape this.

At the same time, our experiences of each other can never really be the territory, but must be the map. We experience avatars of other people, because our experience of the other people is happening inside our heads even though the other people are in fact real beings that are out there in whatever world or worlds we inhabit.

This is all before we even start to open the can of worms marked ‘multiple worlds theory’ or ‘multiple dimensions’.

So, I’m pondering making a more advanced sustain pedal controller for my two keyboards.

In particular, I’d like to implement the following features:

1) Latching and momentary control for the novation
2) sustain of both keyboards with one pedal

What I’m thinking of doing is looking for a three pedal input device, and modifying it so that

A: pressing the center pedal applies sustain to both keybaords
B: pressing the center pedal along with the left or right pedals applies or clears a latching state

I am thinking of using a microcontroller and two relays – obviously this could be done with straight logic but using a microcontroller allows debouncing and also possibly adding additional features later.

One of the projects I ponder from time to time is making a 3D printer big enough to print a house. I’m really curious whether it would be possible to take this technology further than it’s already been taken – in particular I’m interested about the possibility of having the printer I electrodeposit or just plain insert rebar at appropriate places, and I’m also curious, how cheap could you make such a beast?

Obviously it’s going to have some expensive parts – a high pressure concrete pump – but mostly it’s just some ropes, some big gear motors, and some sort of scaffolding to hang the whole thing off of.

Another project I have joked about many times – the ConeDrone, a series of remote controlled cars to move around traffic cones so we don’t spend a hour before every construction project shutting down the road and another hour bringing it back online – involves precision locating via RF, which would also figure largely in a 3D printer big enough to print a house.

I should probably start out by making a *small* 3D printer just to get a sense of the problems involved. It looks easy enough, but I suspect like so many things of that nature, the devil is in the details.

I do also sometimes ponder subtractive 3D printing i.e. CNC – watching the amazing work on the Marble Machine 2.0 has made me really appriciate how far this technology has come, and I may get some subtractive 3D gear for the solar tracker project.

If anyone is wondering what’s up with the music, well, I’ve been woodshedding my paws off. I’ve discovered that the 12 bar blues are a very effective framework for shedding improvising around, and I’m working on being able to do that comfortably and effortlessly in every key. I recently added a hour meter to my mixer so I could keep track of how much time I’m putting in and it looks like it’s between 1 and 2 hours a day.

I’ve also been working on my guitar skills, and while they are still meager, they are getting to be steadily less so.

So, the general overshot of all this is, good things are coming. I’m not recording because I’m working on upgrading my nervous system, although I will try to still kick out the odd cover so you all know I’m still there. I’ve also had a couple of recording attempts that I felt like went extremely poorly so I didn’t publish them. But I’m still working at it and we’ll be publishing more soon.

One side note – I do still occasionally broadcast on WSHR (http://icecast.sheer.us:8080/wshr) and I also have set up a automatic archiver for it. If anyone wants to have a account so they can look at those, send me a message. Note that if you get in now it’s free, but probably starting in about six months from now I’ll require people to toss a buck in the patreon hat 😉

So, earlier in the year, when COVID was just starting to ramp up and also when coincidentally I was in the midst of about as manic as I let myself get these days, I – in perhaps a moment of unreasonable paranoia – decided I wanted a backup generator. Except, I wanted a backup generator that would actually be useful if social unrest or other issues resulted in gasoline being difficult to get. (Not that many gas stations have backup generators, so even just a city-wide blackout could the cause this, and we’ve certainly had our share of blackouts since moving to this house, including one !5-day! outage)

So, I did what seemed the most reasonable thing to me at the time, which was buy a bunch of solar panels, some lead acid batteries, and a couple of big inverters.

It has been working pretty well – my basement’s been running off it since March, I think, and I haven’t run out of power yet – however, at the moment the panels are just lying in the front yard. If my math is correct, this is only giving me 30% of the power i’d get if they were on a two axis tracker.

So, I’ve been slowly working through various designs to try to figure out how I want to do tracking with them. I’d like to do something cheap-ish and DIY, and I’m fine with the east/west axis being manual but I want the RA axis to be automatic. I was pondering something like a drawbridge with a winch, but lately I’m again favoring the idea of using a couple of large bearings (I like the idea of using wheel bearings and wheel hubs from a car for some reason) and a gear motor. But it may change designs again. I’ve been suffering from a certain extent of laziness surrounding it. Some of my problem is that I am not really that great at using 3D modelling software – I really need to sit down and learn, but I’m not really sure which software I want to use. I am increasingly thinking I need to buy a desktop application for this as I tried using several different web based solutions and all of them had serious performance issues. I do not think 3D modelling is really something that’s well suited to being a web app, especially in the post-flash world. Of course, maybe part of the problem is just my lack of 3D modelling skill..

Anyway, winter is coming, so I should probably put a little more effort into this. It’s easy to generate enough power to run your basement in the summer in Seattle.. we have very long sunny days. The winter, with it’s very short, cloudy days, is likely to be a good deal more challenging.

One thing that is very sasisfying about having thrown together a solar array – beyond that it worked on the first try and I was able to easily set up a raspberry pi to track energy in and out of various things – is that I can use it to charge my EV. Whatever wars we get up to over oil are therefore that much less my fault. It’s possibly the most effective protest of the US war machine I’ve ever come up with.

So, one problem that we in general have with computers is that they are constantly in a state of growth and therefore it tends to be difficult to read files written 20 or 30 years ago because we don’t have anything remaining that can either handle the physical or logical format. (This makes me wonder if anyone has made something like the 7 layer model for data storage)

Anyway, one upcoming problem is that we lately are doing a lot of IOT devices – and a whole lot of these are going to be in landfills in ten years. The basic problem is that the people coding for them have fallen in love with the latest moronic fad, which is to have a ‘app’ to set up everything.

We need to have a *universal* configuration language that runs over bluetooth – someone should have a working group together. Or, we could just stream HTML over bluetooth – hm, that seems like a really good idea now that I mention it. Anyway, I also am pondering if most devices should just use bluetooth to negotiate the initial internet connection and then be configured via a web page. That seems like it might be best.

What isn’t best, what is in fact awful, is to have custom code, a dedicated app, for each device to be configured. Some of the obvious problems with this:

1) It requires the user to have a device that the app will run on. In 20 years there may be no android or IOS devices left because someone may have written a much better operating system

2) There’s also some version issues. As per usual the developers don’t write things to run on all versions, and it’s very likely that future versions will also be incompatible

3) This requires the developers of the hardware to continue releasing software – in some cases the developers may not even exist, and even if they do exist capitalism says it won’t be profitable to continue to support devices that are even a few years old so I doubt if we’re going to continue to see new versions of configuration tools

So, here’s what I think tehy should be doing

#1: We need a standard communication protocol for bluetooth for configuring all devices that are configured via bluetooth or BLE. Bluetooth working group, I’m looking at you. If you can charge $8000 per device for people to have your logo, you can do less of a halfass job at telling them not to make devices that won’t be configurable in a few years because the apps will no longer be maintained

#2: We need to have a agreement that whenever possible we’re going to use a standard web browser to configure devices. You can still make custom apps that do it as well, but you should document the API and have a plain ol’ javascript version of it so those of us who don’t want to deal with your apps can still use our devices

#3: Whenever possible you should make it so that your device can be maintained locally without your cloud service. Ideal ways to do this include docker and kubernetes containers that run your service that the customer can install on their local hardware, open source descriptions of your protocols, etc.

#4: You should publish schematics, source code, and whatnot for your products – both allowing users to change the basic functionality and publish new and better versions of the firmware, and allowing them to look for security holes and design flaws. In a lot of cases, IOT devices can cause a lot of damage – you all need to be building equipment we can trust.

I’m currently in the process of working on firmware for a IOT device, and it has really made me think about how poor a job humans are doing on IOT in general right now.

Another thing I’d like to mention, and this in particular is aimed at ORbit’s B-Hyve. Whenever possible, *DO NOT* waste the user’s time. If you do not *need* to upgrade the firmware to be able to continue, *don’t*. If you must upgrade the firmware, try to do it over the internet rather than BLE – at the very least, kick into bluetooth classic in order to be able to get halfway decent amounts of bandwidth.

(B-Hyve is in many, many ways a example of how not to, when it comes to IOT devices. It’s a great idea, and the hardware is well done, but the software is *awful* in a very long list of ways)

Ok, so leaving aside how often capitalism makes us optimize against the best interests of either the race or individuals, I wanted to talk about a way that money sucks that as far as I can tell applies to almost every single large scale resource allocation system ever built.

Even in “Comminist” and “socialist” countries, they end up using money. And the problem with this is that not all actual real goods are created equal, but every transaction involving money throws away all metadata. So you can trade your paper rubles or dollars or francs or what have you for your resources, and we have completely lost track of what went into those resources. People keep talking about how the “invisible hand of the market” will solve everything, but as far as I can tell, the invisible hand of the market is A: myopic B: slow C: wasteful and D: not really how we should be wanting to do things.

Lately COVID has given us some excessive examples of this. Ideally we would have just stopped pumping as much oil when we realized we weren’t burning as much, but because this didn’t happen, for a while barrels of oil literally had a *negative* value.

Now I get that you could not, pre computers and networks, track every single type of fixed good and inventory on hand. However, things have changed, and I really think someone should be sitting down and working on designing a resource allocation system that is properly tuned to what we can now do.