ResponseDB Development Log

@2:24 - I have just got the callbacks round tripping, but need still to hook it back to the sR such that the video items show up.  Then I need to do the same thing for each type of object (comments, users) etc.  The Morsel model should help.open

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Ok so the dbgetvideo call returns a built video, so I have to do this in the case of the background message and need to study dbgetvideo so see how best to do this, and if I want to modify dbgetvideo as part of the change.

@10:45pm listening to The Hobbit and watching it out of the corner of my eye as I iterate over this.  Really it should have been designed ahead of time but this will get a decent solution quicker.  I have the round trip working, but I now need to have background.js call the spider function it was asked to call in the case of curse (it'll do the save).  I intend to write a spider.handle_background_event and spider.handle_background_callback for either side of the exchange.  Must refresh my memory as to how far I got on this with the save_video call (which was easier because it was one directional).

@12:08 Wrapping up for the night. Tomorrow I will need to create those functions and write a wiki, perhaps, about the various functions of interest, such as executeAlternateMode and so on.

Got a teeth cleaning today... my hygienist seems immune to human suffering, which I guess is a strength for her in her professions.  She's a nice enough person, she just doesn't seem to comprehend the obvious suffering of others and has no notion as to which of her  techniques is the least entirely unenjoyable. NOTE TO SELF: by sonic toothbrush and see if cleanings are not as difficult.  Also, move to maine and change doctors... we are trapped with whatever doctors the plantation hires here on the islands.

I've already been looking at the code but stayed up till 4:30am working on the code and playing sauerbraten so I didn't start till 12:30 today.  Right now I'm passing the callback dictionary back and forth that relates function names to ids in a particular send/listen exchange.  It's sent with the message so the client end gets to set the callback name with the id so that when it is returned the (spider and novem on behalf of the) client can find the actual function which has been stored by an id assigned in add_callback.

This dictionary is created in novem.send(..) which looks for functions in the "options" argument and indexes them.

4:13pm Wait a minute, it is indexed by the name in this case, only in the register is it indexed by ID, as appropriate.  But now I'll have to work through it to make sure it's in place... just cause that's how my mind works... just in case, b/c why am I confused about it?  answer me that! rhetorically speaking that is.

7:54pm listening to "What the Ancients Knew: The Chinese"  Pretty good stuff.

devlog: remembered/noticed

I either turned off the content script monitoring, or broke it, or it stopped working for some other reason, and that will have to be looked into next after the novem redirection stuff worked.  Started the ThreadingStructures page at github.

MCWCAM : Thot 7.0

The mad coder what codes at midnight sat in the starboard logistics bay, watching log files and monitoring the culture.  In the background maggot brain played softly.  Before him lay a coding problem.  Three processes, all running the Thot reasoning system, having the first conversation in the first version, Thot 7.0.

@6:59 putzing around with my monoprice tablet, installed pencil, which is awesome but had a bug (installing qt supposed to help?)... can't get pressure sensitivity to work in gimp but am probably doing something wrong as it seems to know about the  pen.

Onto some serious code which I've also putzed with... decided yesterday to take a couple weeks vacation, woot woot.

(don't like ch ristmas... bah humbug!)

Did I link this page yet? Threading Diagrams

I have the callback message going back correctly (callback fires in background.js then generates a message) but I'm not dispatching it on the content script side atm.  I want to solve that, get the DB back to the old performance and implement a summary page, then a subscription system.

@10:45 making slow progress... I need to set in mind the whole exchange... one issue, I have send go through the options looking for functions, making a function table, assigning ids.  All quite clear, but then debugging when the callback is generated it does a send and the structure has both the new callback table (for background.js calling send) and the table originally sent from the client.  I was calling this _sender_callback_dict and that was confusing.  Now it's _client_callback_dict and it's mort clear, because of the nesting level, which was the client (i.e. the _client_callback_dict in the event structure is the client of the event, one step above, it's the message client (which is the current sender).

It will be nice when it's done.

Then i want to do a subscribe feature and a summary page.

inter process/tab/page callbacks

@8:31pm:

• _njn.send has to add_callback, and then I need to send information about the callback to background so that an id can be sent back and the caller can know when an asynchronous message is really a callback. It's a real callback, but it's also simulated in the sense that generally I let the iDB trigger these callbacks.  I think.  This stuff will need some going over.

By the way, the github has not been made public... and still won't have been since no one is reading this blog, so this is a pre-announcement of the github repository.  The tool I'm talking about is responseDB, which is the seed of my structured conversation theory applied to youtube in the form of a chrome (for now) extension that modifies youtube video pages and scans youtube from the user's browser, thus able to implement quite good subscription and reply (annotation) features under the control of the user.  I'm going to release it open source (thus the github).

@8:58pm got a text from my daughter was texting her back... I'm going to look at send and have it send the callback id info. I also think I will have to write a "callback_summary()" function to build the structure that will be attached to the message.

My system drive in my mac mini crashed again and so I need a new computer.  I shopped around, I think I'll get a zareason machine with Ubuntu.  I was thinking about system76 too but zareason supports more kinds of OS and I take that as an evidence that their machines are more widely compatible and they're not just supplying their own drivers that won't exist in an ubuntu update!

maybe not.

So I was right at the edge of finding out why my callback system wasn't working.  The short version (I was keeping notes in wiki pages, you'll never read them, at github... ok, short version: I had been saving  information happilly in the IndexedDB (iDB from now on) from the content script which saved it in the domain based namespace of the site the content script was working with.  This data was not available to background no other pages (e.g. extension pages I might launch, such as summaries or extra features beyond what the content script (or popup or settings) offers).

The content script was using the novem _njn object to do this so I have altered _njn to be able to send a message to another "process" (which is how each of these "pages" acts within the context of the extension), to store and retrieve objects from the iDB.  This way the background.js process  (it's the logical choice though anything could do it... problem being nothing else is always around) can store and retrieve data from  the iDB transparently to the code in the content script or anyone using the _njn in some mode the name of which I've already forgotten.  "Send_to_background" I think.

Anyway doing a call is simple, so the saves went rapidly, but handling callbacks, which are asynchronous are more difficult.  They shouldn't be too difficult, I found out my problem was that there is a .sendMessage in chrome.runtime and in chrome.tabs and I had to use the latter to send messages back to the tab (of course, I just hadn't noticed the two versions).  Also difficult is all the deferred action.  Now I have to deal with simulating the return even from _njn running in the content script, loading the object correctly and whatnot.  It's not at all normalized and generalized, my goal is just to get a working system that allows everything to work as it had before and also make a simple summary page.

Maybe the system will work better letting the background do the relatively slow iDB queries, but I don't know that.

Another thing is it's just kind of confusing refactoring like this, with messages between processes.

The Mad Coder What Codes At Midnight...

... was the fictional mascot of a computer engineering training company offering webinars, training videos and contact training via social media.  Mostly it was webinars. Kim was a fan.  Mcwcam, the head instructor, The Mad Coder himself, believed in presenting a virtual class in the model of a magically enhanced traditional class. Therefore during a live lecture you could "raise your hand" to interrupt and ask questions, and at the end of class you could "approach the lectern" and ask the professor questions. After questions, you could engage the lecturer "on the way to their office" in conversations and in depth questions.

Kim was a regular for the entire chain of events.  She eagerly took notes during lecture.  She wanted to raise her hand more... but occasionally she had courage and tried to ask questions that were not annoying, unsure if she had ever succeeded. She usually waited to ask her question last, leading into the "on the way to the office" finale.  This was a more casual time, it was easier to interject and not feel as if one was annoying   or speaking or asking too much. And sometimes she had The Mad Coder all to herself.  She also attended office hour but this was no where as open as "on the way to office".  A lot of desperate people, afraid of failing the training came with panicked questions they were indeed right to think crucial.  Office hours had been crucial to her understanding assignments, but it was all business, it was "on the way to the office" section she really enjoyed. And today, it was just her and The Mad Coder after the students with post-lecture questions had filed through.

Rational Reasons to Block Carmel and Qntkka

{BLOG SUBJECT TO FURTHER EDITING}

I have long limited who I block on any type of service I have considered a part of the public dialogue.  This is any site with a community uses the site this way, to discuss issues of public interest, which is essentially all issues, including artificial ones.

I don't mean to imply that there is any particular cohesion here between members of this "community", but this is instead a community based on interaction.  Cohesion if it were to be calculated is based on continued interaction, not agreement, for example.  So think of the term loosely when I use it.  A "community" is any group of people with interactive relationships connecting them, even incidental ones like sharing the same site but not talking with each other directly...

This public dialog community is the subset of people wherever on the net one might be engaged in such discussion, in this case youtube.  Such a medium acts as a part of the public dialogue, and all such venues together are the public dialogue in general, and of course includes spaces off the internet, in the traditional homes of public dialogue, cocktail parties, cafes, newspapers and prisons.

These rules are strict in terms of what I use to justify blocking, and liberal in terms of what this allows other users such as commenters. For me blocking, or similar actions on other sites, has long been restricted to criteria such as, people making violent threats (rare), doc dropping (never happened in my threads as far as I remember), harrassing other users with racist or sexist slurs, or obvious unrepentant bigotry, or obvious harrassment (rare if warned).  I also block any user that sends me a "how to promote your channel" PM, with prejudice.

This policy is from a belief that the public dialogue works best with the widest possible participation.  I believe that still.  There are also other things that help the public dialogue work better, such as people's privacy and even anonymity being respected within reason.  If someone says "I'm going to blow up something" or even "I'm going to kill myself" then people have a right to react in a way that will involve those people's personal lives.  In the first case because it is criminal and intolerable, it is not protected as dialogue, and in the second case if one interpreted the display as a cry for help.  On the other hand, in the latter case, if a person were to say "I am terminally ill, and I believe that I can decide to euthenize myself.  I am of sound mind. I want people to realize this should be legal as a personal choice."... then I think it would be inappropriate to contact the police or local medical services to descend on the man, which is because I believe in the right to suicide, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't intervene in someone merely hysterical, a temporary danger to themselves, acting out in public.

If that was too confusing... my point is that after the type of criminal activity all people object to, you immediately reach a grey area, and then, you are out of the gray quickly into the light, where everything left "goes".  However, this does not mean every participant needs to maintain relationships they don't want to have.  I have never believed that.  For example, if someone wanted to debate knitting patterns, and thought that cursing was inappropriate, they are entirely within their rights to block people for violating that in their comments or video replies.

The reason my blocking policy is so open is because I pride myself on being able to take just about anything, and I think I can but there are always costs.  Ultimately, personally, I can merely ignore comments I don't care to answer... and to scan them less often, and thus still sometimes answer at a frequency I don't find annoying.  On the other hand, it's hard to ignore forever interactions with others, and the similarities in those patterns, and form an over all opinion.

Still, my attitude has always been everyone is pretty much on their own in that regard, that is not a "protection" I would ever give, and I still wouldn't think of it as protection, that's impossible online really.  But I would rather think of it as managing links in a network.  I like to maintain a lot of links, especially with people that differ with me.

This is why it is harder for me to block Qntkka than it is to block carmel, because Qntkka at least explains himself, confers and differs, where carmel has hardly every made any point at all.  Commenter Adam O'shea requested this analytic explanation, though the real reason I did it is that I have a great many clear ideas on this subject.

Not only have I written them down, but I have been doing so for decades now, surprisingly enough.  My first contact with online community was text based forums on BBSs from the mid-80s until now.  In fact, I ran and wrote software for one.  If you don't know what a BBS, you can find out typing BBS into, well, anywhere because it all goes to google as far as I know anyway.

The decision was difficult, and in fact it was difficult in a way out of proportion to the decision in one way.  The only reason it requires justification from me is because it is a bit of a change in the standard I have been using.  I am going to add a field to my criteria in one case, and in the other, actually, it falls under an old rule.

The old rule is related to doc dropping. Doc dropping is a modern term, and it's not separate from exploiting docs.  If someone publishes their address and phone number, it's not ethical to use it to harrass them.  The dropping is only a problem because of the actual abuse of people that use it... it is so common that people that share docs can be expected to know that, and are doing it maliciously, knowing the plentiful supply of exploiters will likely bring forth such abuses.  

Now, USING docs doesn't often happen in a comment thread of a video or blog, because that requires contacting the addresses or phone numbers in the docs, correct, you follow me? So we talk about "doc dropping", it's a term that formed like a snowflake from the snow storm on Snow Mountain. The real issue is "fucking with private life" and perhaps you should understand that the reason we have "handles" is to take a character, perhaps for some anonymity in order to express your REAL opinions... perhaps you have critical words for your industry.  People need protection to be in the conversation.

But it is not saying it is one's obligation to be hidden.  It is the obligation of people not to abuse this.  The lesson eventually will be learned, there is no other way.  You can easily calculate what will happen as access to each other's information increases... and in that scenario as yourself if it's sufficent to require people to hide their information, or if it will have to be improper, one way or another, for people to abuse such information, including people that want to share philosophy, art, or opinion with one another.

So that's the old reason.  Very old.  Doc dropping is something the young kids say, this is reaching beyond the conversation.  The only reason it wasn't immediate is I wanted to ask Qntkka to explain, which he kindly has, and to assess if he thought of it as a mistake, if he agreed with the ethos that I have that makes this clearly beyond the pale, and he it seems to me he does not, or at least he is not inclined to claim he is.  As he admitted there was blowback more on him, perhaps he would not do it again for that reason, but that's not really the part I'm interested in.  I'm interested in his position, because I find that anathema to the public dialogue as I have come to understand it's vital needs for almost 30 years.

Vital needs as I see them of course.  But remember, I have done this and analyzed the "meta" of it the entire time.  Even if wrong my opinions are not uninformed, it would have to be my inclination lead me to wrong opinion.  But I doubt it.  The reason I can doubt it is that I believe there is room for different views, I want people that disagree with me, even on this.  But I don't want them in my conversation circle, but I like to hear from people that might not want their physical locality, etc, revealed, and I respect that.  I think it provides and outlet for sometimes important information, and even if it's not important, but it's someone doing a performance of a strange or embarrassing nature because that's their sort of creativity, then the Public Dialogue should support that.

The internet is not only for Public Dialogue, mind you, but that's why I am on Youtube. If you detrimend that than that's not ok, it's uncool to even pretend to fuck with someone's livelihood in this world... not cool to me. But it's not like I'm saying Qntkka should be kicked from a site like Youtube, actually not.  I don't even say that about fringeelements.  There is room for that, but I don't want to condone it.  He evidently understands that and has made a video I have not seen yet, by the way, that he informed me of.

The new rule is carmel... passive aggressive is the sort of thing I just call out.  Backing off of implications and even statements, again, just call that out. I argue back, I just declare what I see.  The new rule is that, after a few years... when it gets fairly bad, and generally in proportion to how much it affects other people's conversations... I know it's not going to be good.

I get angry as the problems  persist, either/and/or with others.  I continue to declare and generally the bluntness has an effect.  But it's actually better, and more sensitive just to say "I reject this connect." Rather than hope they leave with a self-fulfilling will.

The rational reason is that I see the exact same pattern between me and many other people who I respect the character of.  I see nothing productive from the interaction, I see her as a detriment of that sharing of information.  It is a judgement call but well informed, years worth, and I think she acts to the detriment of Public Dialogue as I understand it... she is not sharing much information, and she harrasses a variety of view, of diverse views, it seems the only thing they have in common is that they're either sharing information, or they have objected to her instant-psychoanalysis, followed by a denial that she every does that but gosh you are doing it to her.

If you do not see it this way I am glad.  That means everyone won't block her.  I think it's better if everyone has people accepting their relationship, incidental or more than that... and groups they are in.  I will still see activity, probably, but if I comment I'll have to unblock, so there is a hurdle... is that worth it?!?  depends, probably not, but if so I would. Mind you, technically it's not required, I just would. It's pretty much that I don't want to deal with her in comments.

Is this a new wave of blocking and purging for pyrrho?  I doubt it, I agonize over it so far so am I likely? Nah.

On the other hand, in my experience, when a web site admin or channel owner or blogger has this sort of realization, they do go on a purge! so who knows? exciting!

I probably wouldn't trust me unless I did trust me, which I of course would as I would have demonstrated my reliability to myself by then.   But then again I'm kind of cynical sometimes so... hard to say.

But I'd worry I might have made a mistake if I did trust me, but I probably wouldn't have... then again, it might be logical to ask for more clarification if I needed it.

After all, yes, yes yes,  this criteria does apply in the future, if it comes up... so far once in 6 years.  I will now make a judgement call on what is detrimental to the diverse conversation as I see it.  Diversity is not just the number of participants, it's their  differences, and their ability to maintain those differences and still be in contact, and that, requires tolerance and bluntness... the tolerance begins at one's personal life, and the bluntness is exactly here and public... if there is any impact of the discussion, history will sort out that this person was so and so and worked here, and was this or that way in their  different domains, online here and there, and "in real life". We just need to encourage the inner stuff that might be hidden, has room to come out where we can fucking deal with it finally and for once other than in the intellectual bohemian underground.

PLEASE!  What??!?  you disagree.  Ok. I respect that.  Literally and minimally.  Maybe somehow our ships will meed again.  What?  you?  your say you agree, but what?  the effect of you is the op po site.  You say it's not?  But... I have done the calculations thrice a year for thice a year... and I assure you, by my calculation... what I value of this process you deter?  Surely you... agree?  We should part ways?

If you are worried about how I might judge, well, you can't go wrong being civil, you can't go wrong acknowledging if someone has a problem with you and altering your interaction with them until it's not too bad, or else making clear why that's not acceptable, and if you don't want to be  particularly civil you should probably not use racist  or bigoted terms, or really any attempts to shame people, and if you dish something acceptable out of class A... like snide innuendo... it's a good idea to admit to what you were getting at after, and it's good to appreciate when other aficionado's of snide innuendo come up with about you and to not be indignant... cause of hypocrite!

And I don't just mean snide innuendo, I mean ANYTHING objectionable... anything not objectionable, you dish it, you take, otherwise, problem.

Qntkka ejected on a technicality, perhaps to be addressed in a conversation... not yet blocked to allow that.

Carmel ejected with prejudice.  Since she claims to be a nurse, and why would she lie?  Why?! because being a nurse is glamorous, and if not that it's sort of exciting like an ambulance driver.  That's why she might lie!

See what I did there?  If she is one, that's a compliment, if she's not one, it's an insult.  Now I watch how she responds and see if she's lying.  

You are being watched when you talk.  EOM

Right Wing Mysticism

This blog is going to be as careful as I can muster from something meant to act merely as a repository for my thoughts on a schema, or pattern, which I seem to bear witness to.  I am unsure, but it seems to me this pattern is becoming more distinct, and stronger in the US and perhaps internationally.  The individuals I use as examples below are just waypoints... they represent types of components in the system that I will be describing.  If only those cases I mention exist, then my model fails... but if there are many more like them, then it is apt.

Let me present first a brief exposition of biases I had when younger, at that point in history when I was first pondering these issues.  Put quickly, I associated new age ideas with mysticism in general, and liberalism of a sort with this new age perspective.  An inclination toward Dr Cayce or Dr Kellog was likely also an inclination to Dr Spock and the modern liberal modernism of liberalism... ...

I was well aware of the ancient components, but these I thought had always been part of the underground, with the mainstream superstructure eschewing mysticism with the related phenomenon of superstitious dogmatism. I had little idea as a child that conservative notions did not get more and more severe the further back in time you went.  I had no idea that not only was this not the case, but the very idea of what was conservative always changed radically over large periods of time.

Specifically, however, was this notion that a conservative was culturally conservative, that this really was related to conservative ideology, and that the result would be, in the west, that, as we had seemed to long witness, any western conservative mysticism would be of a purely Christian sort, and not of the sort I will discuss below, in which new age and antique revivals reign... spectral dynamics, EST, numerology not of biblical origin, and so on.

As I say, this was mere bias and does not at all understand the situation. It was, rather than an observation, a received opinion I inherited as a child of the United States. What perhaps most leadly put the lie to this crude notion for me was studying the nazi phenomenon. This broke the trivial manufactured barriers on this subject.  The naxis were indeniably right wing, it seems to me, and if not, their nationalist socialism named a populism with a conservative, tradition-glorifying, bent.  Whatever it is called it's different from a communist populist, which relies on modernism in battle with traditionalism as opposed to modernism which is supposedly the contemporary expression of a great people. Both are dangerous, but the danger of communist populism is well aired in the west, and I speak of right wing populism... which if not more dangerous, was for me as a youth more unknown, virtually unspoken of.

The Nazis were populist, and they were very mystical.  The swastika itself they stole from the Hindus. It was a very nice symbol and they ruined it, just as Hitler's mustache was a very good mustache for comedy (e.g. Charlie Chaplin made good use of it), but was almost entirely ruined for that general purpose by the Nazis, or in particular in that case, by Hitler himself. I had as a young american child not realized that populism and mysticism played such an important role in Nazi Germany, and had been told it was merely racism that generated such a situation.

Thus I learned the dangers of populism through the examples of right wing populism, and got the sense that mysticism was in it's service.  The mysticism is used, I conjectured, to support the irrational conclusions necessary to justify their extreme methods, goals, and utopianism.  Many of the principles well illuminated turn out to apply to left wing populism, with a modernism as the local mysticism, relatable in the abuse of fear and biases common in the people, the public, the populous, thing common in res publica.

As it happens, I tend always to subscribe to a few mystics, espousing 2012, or spectral dynamics (?), numerology, and other traditional or novel mysticisms.  In spite of my esposure to right wing mysticism, I have found it a rare element in the US.  That is, it's available in trace amounts everywhere, but rarely concentrated.  Generally it is after much talk I hear someone's right wing mysticism.  I have found a surprising amount when talking philosophy with the homeless.

But of youtube mystics I would expect to find, and generally have, a liberal leaning to the mystics present.  I do not know if it is a trend, but I suspect an increase in right wing mysticism.  When it is inflamed in a more or less liberal mystic, it makes them less liberal, and more conservative.

At any rate, I have come to ponder in detail two cases, the guitoist, and MorningMayan.  First MorningMayan. She is a positive person that seem to have health and wellness as her angle... she's open to raiki and various things like this, and she is an author (have no idea how successful or not) in such subjects.  She seemed to me to take mysticism as a solvent ---- I will always use a lot of chemical metaphors when discussing ideas --- which softens the facts so that she can more easily form them into a "think positive" message put thusly  "keep positive vibrations within and around you".  While such mysticism is likely polluted with a lot of nonsense, it also is not uncommon that the nonsense cancels out to enable a positive message, and all is well enough, at worse an inert waste of energy, at best a means for people to obtain a  positive idea by which they might do positive actions, and yielding a material benefit.

But then once she surprised me... she took a right wing reactionary approach to the Trayvon Martin case... when rebuked in her comments she relented and reacted with "I didn't know that part".  It seemed to me she was tuned into right wing memedom, the scope of her information reflected a perfect image of that meme industry's output on the early Trayvon Martin disputes.

Subsequently she started praising Alex Jones, and it turned out that she worked for Info Wars for a time, but had some falling out she prefers not to relay (having made a video on the subject and deciding it was not the sort of vibration she wanted to go with). I find this all odd, but it seems to be a result of conspiracy theory and mysticism... it's as if when mining for mystical "facts" one strikes veins of paranoid mysticism, and this recipe leads to a right wing mysticism.  Such movements will generally be populist, that is, praising the people, but are ultimately elitist, as it is the mystical elite that actually know what is "best" for these people.  Thus rarely are populist movements democratic in the end, though they use democratic rhetoric to justify themselves.

The other case, a person I have watched more closely I suppose, is the guitoist.  He is a numerological, astrological, worshiper of nietzsche and has integrated an effigy of him into a pantheon of astrologically foretold prophets, seers, and keys of fate, my phraseology. He has long irritated me greatly, for while I find numerology amusing, and appreciate it's relationship to mathematics, and I find astrology similarly amusing and know it's relation to astronomy, I also appreciate Neitzsche.  In the video I have just watched, motivating me to write this essay, he presents himself as a worshiper of Nietzsche.  Please note, the phrase "worshiper of Nietzsche" is an absurdity at best, a blasphemy at worst, for Nietzsche himself claimed to have taken great pains to make such a thing impossible.

He advises repeatedly that a student is only a good student if they overcome the limitations of their teacher, and that even he himself, in writing, is merely describing a step he is taking on a never ending staircase, and it would be absurd to presume he would stop forever on that step and declare it thereby the effective top of the staircase, and that even no others should pass.

And worse, he speaks of Nietzsche as a metaphysical thing, his soul a part of the same metaphysical realm of events that foretell and fulfill the coming of other prophets such as Jesus Christ.  He defends this with astrology and numerology.  This drives me nuts.  Nietzsche would be rolling over in his grave.  I don't say this because I think I have a subtle handle on how Nietzsche thought, but because of big glaring, oft repeated points of view on metaphysics.  Nietzsche is the source of the best logical as well as emotional (will based) arguments against metaphysics available in the west, at least that I know of.  He is where I finally understood the methods by which metaphysical theory en masse is provably irrelevant to any matter at hand.

Claiming to worship him while rejecting those things most clear in his philosophy to me seem symptomatic of the worst kind of mysticism, and worse, is specifically something the Nazi's did.  And now the guitoist is speaking also of Alex Jones, is in fear of his guns being taken away.

I find this is not only bothersome to me, but also a social danger, the bellweather is ringing, this the recipe for madness, which any number of historical events can show you.  Burma, Cambodia, Germany.... remember the moderates of Germany at first laughed off the Nazis because they were laughable... but that was not the best approach.  Remember that madmen too can follow Ghandi's prescriptions for a movement.

hythloday, 2 of ???

• one difference between us is the overall area we view this from... to me this is not just about mathematics, the idea of a priori, of self cause, it's bound up in religion, law, all sorts of things.  These mathematical debates are part of philosophy.  The Godel angle has to do with identifying there is a part of reason that computers cannot do, and Godel proved that.  that is a brick in the conversation I'm  having.  You want to talk just math... ok, but once again, that's just a subtopc
• that I barely make an argument?  what are you arguing against?  I am meandering?  I'm a skeptic, I gather t he extensions, then reflect on possible abstractions.  I try to make clear when I am showing something up for analysis, and when I have already made a conclusive analysis, and I'm also  generally rerunning "conclusive" analysis to see if I can trip it up.
• The relevancy of GIT to consciousness is merely that however humans arrive at their axioms, it's not from a rule system like second order logic, they use another method.  Furthermore, NOTHING could possibly arrive at them that way, the first rule system needs something else to establish it.  I am fine with that being good old trial and error.
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• 17:00) Russel?  why do I mention it... but you say possibly relevant
• I say I'm elevating living things' "understanding" or, alternately I see the phenomenon.  
• Doing this without foundation?  elevation, perhaps, but at least I admit it, but I also said I was just "seeing a phenomenon".
• I agree none of these things imply, or "speak to" human awareness... nor animal awareness, in and of themselves, those phenomenon are indicated by other experiences... HOWEVER, it's interesting that we, the starting set of aware things (in some sense)
• my interest is not in finding a platonic way to establish axioms, I'm fine with emperical systems, e.g. trial and error.  
• I don't have to defend the Penrose system, I'm just presenting it as interesting, I don't -believe- it.  The part I overlap is the use of quantum computing in brains, so I find it interesting that he says this is a way to establish axiom in a somewhat sure, platonic, pure, way.    That's kind of hopes and dreams mathematical logicians have... not me!  but it is an interesting thought
• agreement on "brains doing calculus", calculus is one way of describing what it's trying to estimate
• I think one issue with out discussion is, for example, the subtitle just the math discussion, because the argument I endorse of Penrose' and it's not just his, is the demonstration there is something beyond math as we currently understand it.  What I like about Penrose' technique is that unlike mystics and philosophical intuitionalist is that instead of saying "see, math won't do it" he's like, "we can expand out understanding of math".  He puts it as having access to a Platonic realm which is a bit too much for my taste, but I think that's can be seen as a metaphor for coming up with a mathematics of axioms.  It's just got to be a new field of math, that's what Godel showed, the Hilbert approach being limited to a traditional type of formalism that isn't sufficient.
• Regarding raising the importance of understanding, it's a bit more complex... it's also narrowing the scope of understanding... it works at the axiom level once you have reduced something to it's simple basis, but logic and reason work much better at the macroscopic level. Really, understanding is only useful for things that really and truly are "obvious"... it's what makes them obvious.
• if you believe in the qubit... if you think QM is just a statistical description and there are no superposed states really... then the qubit is impossible.
• quantum computer will have structural elements: of course, and it requires classical parts, but how will the parts be hidden from the user?  
• Forget Penrose, I'm saying that given our agreement on how brains work things out over time, quantum computing, while limited, is good at that type of thing.  Like catching something taking calculus... if you have a simple model that does approximations, plus a quantum computer, you can run the simulation a lot and take the most successful run.  Your answer won't be perfect, you're not using a perfect model... you BRUTE FORCED it, as we'd call.
• deep understanding and high level questions... I think answering how consciousness works is a pretty deep understanding sort of question.
• the point of using different types of logical thinking at different levels, C++, machine language, transistors, is that if something at a low level contradicts some higher level idea, then the higher level is "wrong", that is, something of an approximation.
• (~38:00) EXAMPLE: an turing machine doesn't model mechanical failure... it doesn't m odel corrosion, or being altered because of a cosmic ray, so if someone argued a computer was perfect, should run for ever, should never break from an infinite loop, for example, the transistor level will explain why THEY ARE WRONG.  You cannot "violate" a lower level.
• on heuristics vs analytics... this is my love as a programmer.
• evolution isn't going to wait around for QM... wtf does that mean?  HOW OLD is photosynthesis.
• 44:00) LEVELS
• the idea that quantum mechanics is low level
• level in computer design
• I don't think the brain is too analagous to a computer but I do think it can be made to do computation
• But cells have this kind of reactive analog to a computer too
• cells are RIDICULOUSLY COMPLEX
• the question of is the consciousness in the circuitry or algorythm, the stuff or the software... that's the question.  I vote the stuff.  The software flavors it.
• Wikepedia quote you emphasize.  THE SECOND incompleteness theorem.  You said to make evidence for the comment about arithmatic... on the page, also, I made the video with Oxford and Stanford characterizations... and the next sentence after the one you highlight.
• in the end you confuse me about the issue of proving axioms... some people thought we could, that's all.
• Penrose's argument is that Godel shows a rule system can't prove itself, that you always need another rule system to establish the one you are using, that you can prove in.  But it doesn't mean it's not possible to establish it with something different than a formal rule system as we now know it.  I'm fine with empericism... Penrose wants something more like a formal system still.
• math was undermined in terms of what was HOPED for it.
• I believe Godel proved it was free of INTERNAL contradictions.

hythloday, godel, penrose 1ofX

• axioms can't be proved mathematically (with formalism)
• people still want to know how we find them
• and how we can confirm them as truly well found
• people still want to know how we justify them
• to see if we really can
• I don't see anything at odds, it's just that WITHIN mathematics the rule, of necessity, is assume these things.  Assume induction.  Look, induction is better than that, it's not merely assumed, we're forced to "assume it" but it's not like assuming something else, say "fooduction" will do just as well.  
• I have long thought we find the axioms through trial and error, namely, through evolution
• Penrose thinks there is another way, which I see as quite possibly similar, that is, the quantum computational methods of "trial and error" or "parallel modeling" in which multiple models can be simulated at once.
• he thinks I'm wrong about G(R).  G(R)
• Penrose on Platonism
• platonism... plato said we didn't have to assume, we had direct access to the truth of the axioms, they were essentially a priori and true-in-themselves
• your relations-in-math diagram is nice... but there is no representation of these foundationalist issues... it's just "formal systems"... iow, "some formal system"... but some people look into the detail of that, and that's where the problem is.  
• when I talk about ideas that turn out not true, I'm comparing all things we think to induction... if we "just assume induction" and "just assume, say, racial superiority"... sorry, induction is cool that latter is bogus... and so far, induction is solid as a rock... but just "assumed"... 
• you have argued against Penrose's examples as with chess, and space filling... well sorry, I think he had a point...  why even bother with that... it's easier and the same exact subject to ask ourselves how we know induction is true... it seems true, it works fabulously well, practically, to assume it's true (you get math and lots of formal logic of use)... it's a bit unsatisfactory to say "we don't know that's true"... that I know an apple can be nutritious more than I know that induction is true.  Or even deduction.
• I'm sorry, I don't feel I am competant to defend penrose's argument against yours... I think penrose makes his point well... which means if I try, I'll probably just be trying to show you how you've misunderstood the issue.   If you want me to try to explain his explanation, ok, but I couldn't do it better than him.  I could run through it and tell you what I think it means. While I don't believe in all of this, if you are familiar with complexity theory, you'll see all he's talking about is especialy NP-hard type things, that computers suck at but humans HAVE been able to formalize.
• You reject Penrose but all he is saying is that human, heuristic methods, work better than analytic ones, even in finite games like chess where one might think analytics was not only sufficient but superior.
•  one way to talk about this is to ask... can an assumption be made computationally?  it would seem not.  it's posited, and from a logical point of view it's out of thin air.  But really it's out of something... I'd say trial and error of evolution as a default, Penrose says, out of the platonic realm which is accessible in quantum computation.
• (16:11) it sounds like you say you don't think there is some way to FOUND the axioms.  So you think they are without foundation.  They are held by... faith?!??!  please no. Right, if just defining as true is ok, then why can't I define anything I want to be true?  
• note: trial and error answers this... you assume as true and if it fails a trial, you say, nope.
• 
  
• 
  

Mangina to Mangina

• up front: you won't believe this but I like you. you transition, you are open, you are non-groupish... so it pained me you were such an emotionally driven irrationalist in this video.  It saddened me.  I hope I don't make you so butthurt at the end of this video that you come up with more paranoid fantasies about what I'm about.  Otoh, we'll just have to find out, eh?
• One thing I like is that you give me a lot of credit... too much actually, to the point of paranoia, but it shows you think there is stage craft and planning, careful manipulation in my work, and as an improvisationalist, this is one thing I want to project into my videos, the sense that there is a re aon, somehow.  That it is to accomplish something.  Then, under the window of that impression, I can admit why I'm really hear without guilt... cause truth is, I feel guilty about the fact I am NOT trying to convince you.  I don't see the point, you don't seem like a bunch of power brokers to me.  What I'm trying to do is collect information, formalize what I can formalize, and ensure I have a good sample to study. It's terribly self serving, but luckilly no one will believe that, they assume I must be trying to convince them... cause, you know, they're special.
• Late in the video you ask why I want to make it only about women.  I don't.  You even play parts of my video where I say I'm into trying to do gender activism in a paired way, both genders at a time... not equality, but equity, like breast cancer and prostate cancer research, balance them, integrate them as  each-gender-needs-some-things-the-other-doesn't. You are making shit up.  Shut up.  What REALLY happened is all yall are bad mouthing all people that consider themselves feminist, you are bad mouthing anyone that focusses on women's issues... and that's like bad mouthing a specialty in biology because there are other areas of study.  Instead of study it's activism of some sort.  You don't seek out reasonable feminists, like me, to discuss actual world issues, you are just butthurt about women and the pendulum swing and whine whine whine, and we gather around to listen to the wounded animals moaning.
• I never called you a misogynist... don't get hurt, I'm sorry, I like handling delicate animals and I try not to break your fragile assumptions, really, give me another chance... tell me where it hurts.
• VIDEO NOTES
• Stephani took her video down as I was uploading mine, she had not seen mine.  Further, she apologized and I told her no problem.  In reality, it is a problem imo, but it's also a personal decision.
• The stuff about me wanting to get people to take videos down is baseless and offensive.  How about you take how I behave into account when analyzing my behavior.  To the contrary on that point.
• You liken my criticisms of points to the hate I'm talking about, I think you know the difference, it's stupid to act like a criticism is the same as violent rhetoric and threats.  What you identify as insults you have to put a lot of interpretation into, there is no "bitch blah blah blah" in my videos, and kind of fuck you for wasting my time without acknowledging that.  But then, evidently I hurt a lot of people by not agreeing with their take on things.  Oddly, I don't feel hurt at all when I'm the one criticized, and sometimes I feel better informed.
• you talk about the issue of is Stephanie MRA... in my video I acknowledge she classifies herself as a Gender Egalitarian or similar, thanks for noticing.
• twisting language: I find people say this when they discover words have more than one meaning, or they just don't like the result.  The rape culture is the culture of people that rape, or in some way advocate, or otherwise give aid and comfort to the former.  That's what the language already means, it doesn't fit with your complaint, so you don't like it.  Don't say it doesn't exist then, say it's not as wide... that Not All Men Are Like That.  You want to get away with your rigged terms, sorry.
• you are twisting the meaning of "culture" and acting like subcultures don't exists... the group of racists approve of rape, that's the group we start with.
• tell me if society accepts it... some subcultures accept, some repudiate.  And your argument that it's not "rape culture" if the mainstream rejects it... GUESS what?!?!? the mainstream rejects "all men are rapists" and "gendercide", so I guess you should shut up about the culture of feminism... oh well.  
• moderate catholics: would you say all catholics are conservative?
• you don't believe patriarchy, which you take to be the idea that all men are sociopaths... that's not a mainstream view... who believes all men are sociopaths... the radfem culture?  oh dears.
• I won't find the patriarchical attitudes in such a country eh?  Well, I showed a shitload of  prominant republicans with patriarchal attitudes, and I linked a frat caught yelling "no means yes, yes means anal" at the top of their lungs on campus... QED eos
• you ask is it good enough if most feminists don't hate men?  you are a hypocrite... is it good enough if most men are not consciously out to dominate women?  it cuts both ways genius.
• this is not a hang out group, this is an area of activism, and for people that want to change politics, it's not a hang out group, it's not an affinity group, it's an activism area.  To be a physicist doesn't mean agreeing with all physicists... that's not how it works.  Feminism is not rallied around hating men, it rally's aruond gender-based discrimination. 
• you don't believe in group think... perhaps when in a group, but you seem to believe in it outside the group.
• why were my comment to you less concialatory than my later vids... because I was bringing it back on coarse from my honest immediate reaction... however, I don't think that reaction was so bad, have no idea why it hurt so much.
• Let's look at the comments, as always, awesome comments from me!
• women and men have been oppressed, I acknowledge this, and you say I don't want to admit it.  Word Twisting.  My point is to look at the justifications... mostly men were oppressed economically along with their whole family suffering that oppression... secondarilly men have been oppressed by being drug off to war preferentially, but that itself is part of the patriarchy... the patriarch idolizes the warrior.
• feminism is not a primary area of activism for me, I merely appreciate the need for work in that area... primarilly I'm concerned with systematic economic oppression, atm.
• you argue men and women have issues, IN THE PRESENT, and yet you think the feminists should stop working on the women issues and the men's right activist... wait... what should they do again?
• you guys want to disagree with everything, you almost NEVER pick out something you could agree on, usually you appear to seek things to disagree on, even including trying to twist things you could agree with, like my description of oppression, and take it to a disagreement, pretending I have never thought men were oppressed for gender-based reasons.  What you REALLY REALLY miss is it's the so called patriarchy that gender-oppressed men... forcing men to compare to their ideals just as they force women, and both men and women are behind and in favor of the patriarchical attitudes.
• you talk about things like women getting the children, which is in the past dude, and is improving.  I'm very concerned about that, seems to be  getting better.
• you seem obsessed on the "men had it better"... I think men did not "have it better" as I fucking described... but I think the things that make it bad for men are one, mostly not gender based directly, two, when they are gender based are from the patriarchy (men must be warriors and dominators), and three, most feminist issues has to do with the role of women and men in individual relationships ("like no means yes")... so that although if you average the rights and treatment of women, statistically it can seem equal... the skew on the microscopice, individual, level, is clear, and needed/needs still to be rectified.  
• It's like you are bitter being called a rapist, but you don't understand why some women are bitter at being told by frats that no means yes and yes means anal.
• patriarchy is not a system motivated by hurting women, it actually thinks it's better for women to be in the roles they try to put her in, slut, princess, cleaner, etc... from this historical view this is just as much for the woman's good as anything else.  It does seem a bit self serving, but the roles assigned to men, while ostensibly better rewarded in terms of power, are not inherently better, say for someone that doesn't want to be a do minant warrior.
• The patriarchy is very much like the strict father family metaphor that Lakoff claims is behind conservative thinking.
• e.g. some woman might WANT to be treated like a sexual object and cleaner and she's happy as a clam.  As I said, and you ignored, the problem is the assignment of roles to people rather than letting people develop their own roles as individual participants in social systems.
• I admit women have real power... and you don't take it as potential agreement, you try to turn it into a disagreement... really it's what we smarter people like to call a clarification on my part.  Then you go off on "whatever, those were the exceptions, whatever... whatever"... the point is a little more important than that.  I am admitting over and over, and I have to assume you havn't noticed, that it's not about all women being lower than all men, this is mostly an bias at work within classes of an overlying class system, which itself is responsible for all manner of oppression and oppressive mind sets.
• if you were willing to find agreement we could make better mataphors for what patriarchy is... it's an emperical field study, what does it mean when the frats do this, the politicians do that, what is the real situation.  If RadFems want to act like rich women and poor women are both at the bottom of the larger social caste system, we could correct that. You act like you'd rather be butthurt about a minority opinion than invent a countermeasure, which is always in the form of a better model, a better metaphor.
• sometimes the husband is dominant, sometimes the wife, and the patriarchy is the social pressure for it to be or appear to be the husband genius.  OH, I'm telling you something you never heard of HUH?
• patriarchy has a lot of roles... the female partners of powerful men, for example, traditionally are given power.  wealthy women are educated before poor women, as in argentina iirc.
• we have different ideas of what patriarchy is, and also how we are trying to find out what it is.  I take the frat and republican examples... I see this kind of thing and see relations and gender bias in it... and I see to define that attitude... I name that attitude patriarchy and THEN I try to figure out the characteristics of the set I've identified, it's influence and so on.  I'm not investigating the subjugation of all women below all men because I already know that patriarchy is compatible with classism, and class is more important than gender, is used first, and gender second, allowing for special cases, like the monarch being a woman, because there is no man of her caste available.
• You put up a dictionary definition: READ THE MOTHERFUCKER, patriarchy is primarilly about Strict Father Familly Metaphor, well defined in the Moral Politics by Lakoff.  Your use of it is a distant second definition.
• when I say men don't have to go to war, I was talking about the West, remember... you guys love to say "in the west there is no need", but when I talk about having to go to war... suddently it's every culture.  But that implies you are saying it's justified to treat women badly in these countries... but perhaps you hadn't watched the part about kuwait yet... that should be funny.
• yes, in the us, for my whole life, men can say, "fuck this war I don't want to fight it"... the government has made moves to prove it's reserving the right of conscription... good luck with that, though I'm sure they'll try if we get a string of Republican Presidents with their warlike patriarchal attitude.
• I believe in role specialization, and it's the imposition of roles that are the problem, not what one person thinks of one role (it might suit them).  The system in question serves those that WANT TO PLAY A ROLE,   because it forces everyone else into their romantic view of things.
• quoting MRA and MRA statistics... why is that, you are not an MRA right?
• male military... who is it that just got american women the right to have combat roles... FEMINISTS... bwaahahhahahahah
• Kuwait: you say talk about the exception on the rule... I'm for women in an equal role in the military as a feminist, so bit me... radfem is the exception my friend.
• you don't even think in societies with gender oppression there is a place for feminism... cause those men do the dangerous jobs so alls fair... w T FUCK!?
• You say re feminism, "we're not in that time" and I say "we're not the in the time where patriarchy could be justified"... you my friend are hypocritical as fuck, and of course you bring up equal reproductive rights... that's bullshit... only women have babies, as a result only women have certain decisions about having babies... invent the male womb and get back to me fuckhead.  I think the right to abortion is the right to remove the fetus, if it can be put in an artificial womb or male womb (genetic engineering madness!), do it if you want.
• then you emphasize equal reproductive right saying that "reproductive rights" should be the same is assinine, and part of patriarchy, sorries... for reasons given above.  To grant you that "equal right" means a woman could be forced to have an abortion, or forced to carry a baby for almost a year... that violates individual medical rights we all should share, imo... and is a request to controll the body of another.  If a man could take the baby, then he ought to be allowed, and in that case the law would say the mother has to pay child support.
• the ballance of "roles" and the imposition of previously ballanced roles
• you say women have it equal or better, I disagree, I don't see the sororities out chanting "all sex is rape, all men are anal rapists"

notes GWW on patriarchy

GWW vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUMifHT1AwY
Stefanie vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCE2Uy7DOXA

• saying everyone is subjugated does not change that one of the justifications of oppression is gender, as well as race, origin of birth, wealth, etc
• it's not like all women are under all men... they are under their men.  if the man is a king, the woman in question, the queen, is held higher than a lower man.  collation, at each level, gender bias
• thing is, we're not in that case anymore, men are not required to do more dangerous tasks than women, unless they want to, and this lead to a contemporary imbalance
• muscle mass doesn't help women survive the threats to them, such as childbirth, exposure, times of famine... etc.
• you act like "men were willing" to take these out of the goodness of their heart when you describe how they had no choice.
• inuits - do men have it like that NOW?  good job justifying patriarchy in the inuit
• lol at "stitching pelts" is not that hard... you don't think women evolved to be good at that work the way men did?
• your argument shows that both men and women are absolutely balanced in ability, in the state of nature, but what about a state of civilization?
• marriage is a contract that helps the women not get the short end of the stick...  yes... and now we have no real contract of marriage!  bwahahah  society has changed but our thinking hasn't.  we still think men are hunters, hahahahahah
• feminism means anti-science... stupid remark, you can easily see the science of this, which by the way supports more than one interpretation, and not think that means that it's an appropriate framework for our CURRENT situation.  
• you say they didn't need to do it for themselves.  You don't seem to understand the drive to reproduce is a goal of DNA itself... they did need to do it for THEMSELVES, it's how they came to be and is the definition of species success. 
• I'm just not seeing where every man has to harpoon whales at this point... so what is the justification now?  in this day and age, for us carrying around n otions from ancient times that no longer pertain
• you seem to say evolutarily women put in less, but your argument obviously shows that evolution insists on a ballance, and you mistake the scientific fact that men want to reproduce.
• agree that men also suffer gender bias... you are expected to have this role, and personally it seems like feminism has done more to release men from those roles, like sweethearted guys having to play meanguy to survive, etc, than any other type of activist.
• women have had power... through their husbands... because of the interleaving above this can be real power, and also, modulated by the character of the husband and his beliefs about assertive women.  But it's always a "level down" relative to the other aspects of the woman's "rank" in the pecking order.
• we have just finally let women die in war, which is a feminist movement!  to allow women to sacrafice like men  have, according to you
• draft, israel
• male conscription in kuwait, one death in gulf war, nothing on any recent deaths, no evidence of any notable military action at all.... instead, they funded Iraq, got bombed by Iran, and asked us to protect them.
• It's patriarchical metaphor that has you assume that since they're in the military they are risking their life, even in a country with a history of being protected by us.
• so let me get this right
• men were in a service position long enough to get buff
• women thus let men pretend they were in control and had special privs to balance the special evolved-to-serve mentality.
• so perhaps that was the problem, perhaps rather than giving men the illusion of control, they should have just been treated as pampered servants with the women, that evolution chose as the protected one, for some reason, as the less disposable leaders.  
• b/c as we evolved better technology, it seems men tried to keep control long after the biological justification wore thin.

NOTES: Hythloday On Penrose

• he's not saying it can't be proved AT ALL, the point is G(R) can't be proved with R but it has to be true if R is true.  So G(R) is true but not provable BY R.  That leads us to what can prove it?  How do we know it?
• "only one technique fails"  I know, but the big mystery was if we could make such a proof WITH THOSE RULES, and the answer is determined.
• elevating human understanding to another realm... dude, I am elevating LIVING understanding if anything, and I don't take myself to be doing even that... I'm seeing an unexplained phenomenon.
• The brain uses Heuristics.
• Does the brain do differential calculus... a turing machine has to do that to simulate the behavior
• Obviously there is a calculus library of some sort built into our motor functions
• Mr Calculator
• Not heuristics, with ESTIMATES and real time correction
• Calculations are occurring by circuit
• a computer doesn't really DO a calculation, the circuit flows in a way that MAPS to mathematics.
• does that look like I'm going to catch it?  look like?  visualizing a solution for the data you have had
• I notice you describe human trial and error a lot like a computer does calculus
• quantum mechanics and the efficiency of photosynthesis
•  why do you feel newtonian mechanics relate to our everyday life?  well, it's just we have a different feeling about this
• true understanding of the high level requires understanding why the sublevel behave that way.
• everything we've discovered at low levels is by noticing the affect at the high level, e.g. glass is transparent
• the chess example, like the computer is smarter?  we understand induction itself.  the stuff you talked about recognizing is something we can't make computers due with standard logic.
• the heuristic approach to AI is not novel.  Humans infer from past behavior better than computers.  It's our wiring.

• it's "natural" and "chemistry".... chemistry is described by quantum mechanics... that's what QM was invented to explain... the atom!
• when you put down the microbial phenomenon, you put down the human one as well, imo
• a very small qm computer can do amazing calculations, solve linear algebraic equations, able to do image recognition and other hard AI techniques much better.  coincidence?
• a good heuristic system NEED qm... quantum computers are good at this pattern/heuristics
• clustering maths, qc is good
• all explained in the realm of the physical?  why do you talk like quantum mechanics isn't physical?  even if it's explainable classically, IT HAS NOT BEEN, so keep looking in that toolkit as much as you want!

• theories exist that cannot be proven... and they are needed to prove R
• one way I heard it is that it proves that in second order logic there are unprovable true and false statements, so it's not complete, and you need second order logic to establish the rules of arithmetic.
• math cannot be undermined... it's useful, we are not justifying math, we are trying to explain why it's so fucking useful
• it's not that there is no method to build them, it's that they have to be built.. they can't build themselves... no sui causus, no A PRIORI and among other things, it means all truth is actually synthetic, and analytics just exists to analyze synthetic truths. 
• That leaves one little problem, math is incredibly reliable and has great fidelity.  
• The way I see it, math/logic is designed to introduce very little distortion during analysis, all the distortion comes importing terms, where one problem is the sort of things you have to ignore to pretend the material objects you are analyzing are the analytic objects you'll be processing.  You have to map these into and out of the logic.
• 
  

How to live without will

• wake up saying "I have no free will so..."  the point is you are faced with the decision to get up or not, and if you avoid that decision you will remain inert.
• you have to live AS IF.  What is the affect of fundamentally thinking you are going to change yourself.  Studying the behavior of things compared to the "is".
• free will, will power, ---> CHOICES
• The "I".  I see it as a chorus, dualism is out, but also monism... it's fusism
• decomposing "determinism"... pre-determinism vs conservation of energyism.  I don't think youre definition of determinism is technically defined enough to argue that excluded middle.

Ramifications of Will vs No Will

Gratex, in his latest video, says that we need to discuss the ramifications of certain views of will, or about conversations including these three terms, will, awareness, and consciousness.  So let me consider what I see as some of the ramifications of my and select other views of these phenomenon.

First of all, some working definitions.  A working definition is a preliminary attempt at a definition as useful to as many schools as possible without losing the general sense of the word, so a working definition generally tries to start by capturing such general senses.

• awareness - first person perceptions
• consciousness - firs person perceptions
• will - a perception of acting

You can see I don't distinguish at this point between awareness and consciousness, but the latter seems to carry additional terms for others.  Perhaps consciousness means, for them, self-awareness, but to me it seems like this is "self consciousness".  

I will compare the meaning of my theory of will to alternates, such as the idea that will is an illusion insofar as there is no real choice (i.e. all choices are predetermined by prior conditions)

Social Activism

One major impact of my view on will, compared to the notion that choice is an illusion, has to do with social and political activism.  I blogged politically for years and found it a great way to stay involved with politics without having to be in the city, and there there is an assumption you can make choices. I found there was a lack of philosophy.  Then, when I find the liberal philosophers, I find they don't even believe in choices, which makes me think the progressive activists lack the council of the progressive philosophers, on the ground that it is impossible to advise best choices where there are none really.

A belief in will power, that there is energy in will, gives the idea that there is energy in will, just like energy from the sun, or a tsunami, or of the wind, there is will, and with engineering it can even be as strong (in sum) as those former.

Vegitarianism

It was a surprise to me to discover that one issue about "consciousness" is vegitarianism.  When I was an ethical vegitarian in the past, it was due to the cruelty of the big ranching industry.  I was not as concerned about eating animals that lived well, for example, in the wild, and were not hunted cruelly (quick death, don't take animals with young, etc).  But then, perhaps that shows lack of real commitment, explaining why I stopped being a vegetarian in my twenties.  It seems a lot more vegitarians pride themselves on not eating "conscious" creatures, and one suspects the term "awareness" won't really change the reasoning.  

I can of course see the implications of that, but I still tended at first to miss the impact of this on such vegitarians, and thought that sufficient distinctions were available... e.g. eating a conscious being that is not very conscious (conscious of thirst is not like the neurological machines that allow things like human trauma), and has no pain neurons, which I pointed out.  I repeatedly talk about relative dullness of the senses.

But pointing out such comforts that to me still make a distinction, ethically, between eating animals vs eating plants was really just harkening back to my own thoughts on vegitarianism, which was that animals should not live abusive lives.  The senses of the plant, being so much as focussed on slower moving phenomenon, in my estimation, and it's lack of mobility make it much easier to raise in a habitate it appreciates and flourishes in.  It is difficult to maintain a large enough natural area to house 100 head of cattle in the way most comforting and healthful for them, but relatively easy to create a garden in which 100 plants will  have everything they enjoy, sunlight, water, nutrients.

But if the notion hinges on the act of death, and that it snuffs out an awareness, a consciousness, perhaps none of that is comfort in the face of the fact that there literally is no way for us to survive but to consume other living things, at least not until we create entirely synthetic food... which hardly sounds as good to me as a proper organic polyfarming agriculture where all the animals and plants live in a harmony enhanced, rather than abused, by the will of man.

Microbial will perhaps aids the argument that life is cannibalism too strongly, but my attitude is that this seems to be the case, and I will not reverse engineer what I've learned to make the universe seem worthy of a better reputation over all. For my part I find it much more complicated, an fortunately so, when it comes to what type of ethics is possible in such a living world.  I note that our cells themselves were probably created by bacteria eating bacteria, and sometimes, instead of the eaten being digested, it just went to work in the cell, and increased the size of the partnership, as with mitochondria.  There is symbiosis involved.  I think it's possible to raise animals and plants in symbiosis, and I suspect we will stop eating animals... it's too expensive, has many drawbacks, and many aspects which simply cannot ever be fully mitigated, whereas with plants, they all can be mitigated.

Crime and Punishment

I'm glad our discussions on will and consciousness do not always centered on the ramifications in crime and punishment.  This is a traditional way to reverse engineer ideas of will... people must have will so we can punish them.  I think the issue of how to deal with people that refuse to cooperate with us in ways we find minimally acceptable, at least, can have no influence on the will, but it is certainly not true the other way around... views on will must affect how we treat other people's use of their own will.

As a relativist I think it's impossible to find an absolute view of "how we should treat each other" and the potential restrictions on how we might otherwise behave and so it is impossible to expect a particular agent to agree with such a view.  However, as a skeptic, I do think it's possible to find systems one believe in and can accept.  Thus we can find systems agreed on by a wide group of people.  The issue of crime in punishment is not a matter of convincing those that reject the system agreed on by this group, but is rather a matter of agreement itself, a part of the agreed system... "we say that you cannot steal, those that disagree will suffer the following treatment..." Such sentiments are part of the social agreement.  People ought to have as much chance to explore their will as possible, and thus if a group of people wanted to ban construction of cities, while this  is a restriction on those that want to build cities, such people could have a region to try their ideas, and let those that would build cities have theirs.

A belief in will in all things, and that given all chances it ought to be less constrained wherever possible, leads to a distribucratic view, where dissagreements that can not be resolved satisfactorilly to all parties ought to be compartmentalized in the spirit of "self-soveriegnty", which means delegation to the individual will in all things possible, and delegation to groups of wills where nececessary, going up to groups in general, to the group of all humans, to the group of all creatures.  At the level of all humans I would give an example... murder... it ought not be allowed local legality.  But I can think of a lot of things that should.

reply to Gary on Humble Video On Consciousness

•  you seem to get the issue about first person awareness which I appreciate
• the example of parts of your own actions which are not conscious is interesting, but to me it simply reinforces the possibility that the intentionality, the execution of your will, relies on the will of others, namely the cells involved with the nitty gritty detail of that action.  It's getting "excited" as the neurologists say... you are not conscious of it because by then it's its actions.
• I don't find paramecium creepy at all, they seem beautiful and graceful
• They look pretty complex to me
• I've showed video of them doing more complicated things.
• Nothing unliving can do that... it's significant.
• "Just typing" requires TRILLIONS of eukaryotic cells.
• Software can reproduce, is it alive?
• we agree on the colony of cells issue.
• cells are slaves...  to what?
• you could turn OUR CONSCIOUSNESS off an still have a living body because a lot of the body is not involved in that and goes on.
• software replicates!  I say again.
• you don't say what does allow it SEEMING to be some way.
• I think emotions are the "simple way" for things to reacts.  "Ew" is good enough to back off after bumping into something
• I think you might be hung up on the pain-sensation...
• the "complexity" of paramecium... most of the history of life was unicellular, here look at some pictures.
• theaters don't come cheap... most of our evolution was getting to eukaryotic life... but anyway, I think it might come cheap thanks to simple physics tricks.
• making it special: I say consciousness happens in little bits all over, I'm not making it special, QED
• you misunderstand my goals, I'm not trying to use consciousness to make the universe special, I agree with your position from earlier, it makes the universe a bit more horrific, to know that all the insects eaten alive and the rest experience it, even if it is without pain as we know it...  it's just realism on my part.
• plain and crude theme here
• re thinking aparatus, an abacus doesn't think on it's own.
• it senses light through cilia, it senses pressure through cilia, it brings chemicals in and out... and react to them... these are "means of sensation"...
• "it has to happen in something really complex"
• interesting, pain vs unpleasentness... doesn't need pain neurons, I called these "stress"
• google plants and stress
• distributed brain... centralized at the nucleus though.
• christians exercise their free thinking by deciding which parts of the Bible to read and reread.

to gratex on consciousness

1. It's not elitist to say your making a special place for humans by ignoring living behavior
2. I said I could do at a mental exercise consciousness going down to all matter, but what I said I believe is just living cells have it.
3. I am using consciousness and awareness interchangeably.  I'll try to use awareness... I made this clear imo by talking about the hard problem, I'm saying there is a hard problem for all living things... I think awareness is the internal state causing intentionality in life.  Sue me.
4. You don't have to define the classification first: extentional analysis, you collect an acceptable step, you analysize it and test you analysis by seeing how it expands, restricts or fits the original set.  Rinse and repeat.
5. aware of "thoughts"... no, some thoughts you are talking about are human thoughts... I mean aware of the environment, conscious of, not self-conscious (conscious of the self).
6. the neural system is something YOUR awareness depends on... that's not the issue... the paramecium's awareness is based on its metabolism.  The belief it is aware is because it seems aware, of constrains, temperature, salinity, being pursued, pursuing.
7. you say it's not fed up some microtubules but this part isn't controversial between us, is it?  it's fed up through the neurons, which internally are using microtubules to behave.
8. you are suprised you had to say it?  you honestly don't see why I see awareness in microbial life?  intentionality?
9. free will vs will power.  People are unclear on this, I don't think they are saying that will is totally free yea!
10.  I see a lot of will in subconscious thought... and I think the neurons know what they are doing, but it's not cohered into our consciousness.
11. our consciousness is clearly made of a network... if the network units are also aware, I wouldn't expect to see them exactly the same in capability.
12. I don't like the "why should you have to tell me?" approach.  I interpret the ability to focus conscious mind as going around amplifying what's already going on in the noise when I'm not putting energy into it.
13. I'll try to use awareness... but I don't think the word consciousness is so well defined that it can't be used loosely.

Visualizing Composite Consciousness

I take it from a reductive analysis that our consciousness is not particularly centralized, that it's a distributed phenomenon of the mind... thus in some sense it decomposes (or just lies potentially released) in the neurons. Since single celled creatures, not unlike, but merely less specialized cells show intentionality, it seems to me, our neurons most likely have it.  Having felt this way a long time, I have tried to visualize how I would be having my experience, unaware of theirs, and they having theirs, unaware of mine.  I think a metaphor that illustrates how this composition might work shows that we do experience each other's consciousness, similarly to h ow a listener might experience a chorus.  A chorus is made of individual voices, you can even at times isolate out a particular voice from the din, or at least particular sections of the chorus.  On the other hand, the chorus tends to blend together and become an altogether more powerful and complex voice than any individual singer, since it is composed of individual singers.

I think our consciousness is like the sound of the whole chorus together, and the neurons are the singers.

Notes on Extreme Endurance

• I didn't say don't be emotional.... why do you interpret it this way, later in the vid I specifically say it's ok.  I'm noting it.  It's notable... WHAT you get upset at is informative.  I'm not saying don't do it, I'm processing that you did do it.
• "sloppy seconds" is not a metaphor?  get a dictionary
• you notice I do not use clichés  and colloquialisms to add flair, and assume I can't do that?  I'm not in that domain... it does not make a video more engaging for me to watch.
• I don't want to have flair, I want to have content.
• Or I'm a hater... lol... I am interested in the ideas, packaging is just a distraction.
• Women being mysoginist
• my subscriber count being laughable, what's laughable is that you think I want subscribers.  What use are they?  Do they help egos or something?  I don't get it.
• your sister and mother, feminism is indulgent bullshit?  whatever, my mother is a radical conservative, she thinks feminism is bullshit too... so?
• I don't say people should cater to others the way you imply, I've AGREED with you on that... but you turn that into something about feminism, when all ideologies have such people, and into something about introspection in general which is just false, as you have more or less admitted.
• You are not an MRA, but your commenters are, your side of this argument IS
• Women own all the banks.  Oops, I'm "wrong" about that.  My idioms are over your head I guess.
• your eyes, seriously?
• innocuous things you say?  with flair means "meaningless"
• blame yourself for sloppy "cast away" terms... but you went into great depth about her looks, that you have slept with women "just like her" etc etc
• you wish I'm passive agressive
• you're going to hurt me?  how?
• it's counter reactionary because feminism is reactionary
• you claim not to like to hear your own voice... sounds like self-promoting introspective bullshit to me... you can't edit videos without liking to listen to yourself.  I admit to like listening to myself because I learn about myself.
• I don't understand your complaint about painting a picture of you... you painted a picture of whatherface, didn't you? Is your position just a defense of hypocrisy?
• the topic says me... yeah, I say the topic of my videos.  I noted it in the comments to the video.
• grinder, you're grinding on this.  You don't say what's important.
• you took me mentioning the neurological terms as an insult?  cause I said "memorize"... um, ok.  And no, I don't believe normal functioning minds are supposed to be able to count the number of times they have heard a word, automatically.  In fact, that seems impossible... maybe you are deluding yourself.
• "most people disagree" on sloppy seconds being negative
• I did not say you are driven by sexism in all your videos... I said, IN A VIDEO ON SEXISM YOU WERE SEXIST.  That's what I was pointing out, you can disagree, but could you also just get it... that's the disagreement.  You don't think I demonstrated it but frankly I didn't have to, it was obvious.
• I did not rush in and save her feelings, I havn't interacted with her.  The different is, I am sick of this reactionary MRA bullshit.
• most people would say it's not sexist... not demonstrated

notes for video to snake

1. introspection, the value thereof
2. we're talking about "how this works"
3. we're talking about Feminism and MRA
4. last and very least, we're talking about JUST THE CLIPS YOU SHARE of the Woman you criticized.

1. I see you have a greater intellect than you let on with your general vibe.  I am this way too.
2. If I criticize or characterize what you say I'm not saying don't say it... say it and we'll talk about it.
3. You seem to side with the idea that feminism needs a counter-reactionary treatment, I disagree but that's fine, provide that all you want.  
4. "Sloppy seconds" and the talk about bedding girls like her... they were the subject. The metaphors you choose do saying something about you.
5. I don't begrudge the effect but I thought it was lame.  However, I used some lame effects to effect... consider it an homage.
6. We disagree on introspection, it is useful
1. you admitted you learn a lot about someone when they do it publicly
2. you said you give perspective. step two requires step one
3. I add perspective to your perspective.
7. If that's the case, don't you think that someone can introspect, say on film or paper, watch that, critique it themselves, and gain perspective that way.
8. If 50% of people get more problems in therapy, do you think that might be the therapists fault.  Psychology is like in the leeches stage of medical science.  Too complex for us at the moment.
9. You have a point about "punch life in the face and don't bitch about it"... fine, I like to point out the irony of bitching about that.  I never said you didn't deal with anything.
10. White male priv.  I basically believe that, but I don't think anything in my believing that justifies you to feel oppressed.  As long as I don't support legislating that, forcing you to do some particular action, I think telling you, as part of the world, a self-selecting audience, is fair.  You bitching about it is fair.  You may think that leads to some weak willed giving in, but generally what people do remains the same after they face such things, "wow, history sucks..." maybe give someone the vote or whatever
11. I didn't say sweet talk her, or worry about her feelings or build her up, I said POSITIVE, and I used an example of a criticism someone wouldn't want to hear (fake individuality)... but again, I'm comparing what you did to other options, I'm not saying to take the option I gave, I'm saying that since you CHOSE not to take it, it MEANS you do perpetuate the framing the feminists are complaining about.  It does exist.
12. Ignoring brain trolls. Introspection as neurosis.

noSQL

Firstly, sorry for all the crappy blogs, just something I'm working through, each draft is so different from the next and eventually I just post it.

Anyway, it's funny how ones conscious attention works in computer engineering.  Case in point, I have been exposed to NoSQL and a lot of the tools (by name, not by use) but it didn't click with me at all.  Now, writing to a linus virtual server cloud, it had occurred to me that not only did I not want to insert an RDBMS from the start.  I think they put constraints that impede iterative development, but they are also very useful and powerful... so the idea is to bring them in exactly where you need them, hopefully late.  So I  started working on and designing a different kind of database approach.

Turns out of course this is the whole point of NoSQL, and they put it the advantage as "schemeless".  These components are easy to work with, so even if they are overkill... at least they oppose almost nothing on the internal design. The decision I made to communicate via JSON/HTTP is also present in some of these tools, as is the general idea of distributed associative arrays.

I have found, after a closer look at MongoDB (something I'd heard the name of quite a while ago but not looked into) in reaction to a youtube comment in a video on the subject, that Mongo will do.  Now after another day or two of looking at it I'm very happy with it... it performs well (according to benchmarks) and is easy to link to in C++ and Python, and has a decent shell, and it seems, a lot of other interfaces and tools.  Mongo basically stores and retrieves Nested Associatives Arrays by namespace and searching.  Indexes optimize this and the storage is BSON, which is a binary nested associative array.  This is what the JCN does, but I had no storage, thus this tool search.

What that leave me with now, as far as responsibilities for the JCN comes back to what it does for the video system.  The python web processes upload a video, writing both the video data and the metadata (in a JSON file).  The JCN sees this (using inotify to watch the ingestion directories).  Use of mongo means I don't have to have the JCN return arbitrary JSON documents (things like user settings, etc), and instead it will focus on integration of the data/document store and the file system.

For example, to finish porting my Novem9 interface system off GAE to this LVSC (linux virtual server cloud, aka OpenStack), I need to be able to store "articles"... the equivalent of a blog post or what have you.  As you can see here (http://www.novem9.org/n9/pds).  NOTE: I'm not pointing there because of content, the content doesn't matter and is obsolete... but for the interface system.  Those articles can be edited in place by a sufficiently privileged user.

I need to do this on the LVSC. But also there is a feature I didn't put in GAE yet, that I would like to have, which is revision control for the article as it is edited.  With this MongoDB and JurisdictionalAgent(my C++ daemon) the latter will allowed saving the contents of the article on disk (MongoDB just has the path)... and the JCN can support commiting changes, looking up old versions and the like, while MongoDB ensures the article can be found in searches.

I feel back on track.

Jurisdictional Nodes: Role of Relational Databases

Firstly let me start by affirming the great power and overall quality of relational databases. All praise be them.  I'm not being sarcastic, I just want to load up on the appreciation prior to possibly criticizing overuse of them. Or I might merely be fantasizing about a world where they were not so necessary in some circumstances, and it might even be in vain.  As I say later, I consider them worthy, reliable, and necessary tools  which excel at indexing data in a general way, probably crucial for arbitrary data mining especially for business research. There may be no other way to understand how your resources are expended and utilized as an operational entity.

RDBMSs are reliable repositories for millions of records at a time, they are generally well written, and they are very well researched in academic computer science and are generally constructed to use some of the most powerful indexing and searching techniques from computer science in general. The first relational database I ever worked with was Ingres in the 80s, since then I've worked directly with Sybase, mysql, postgres, sqlite and various ORMs (Object Relational Mappers). In addition I've worked indirectly with many more, from Oracle to IBM databases.  I don't expect to ever stop using them throughout my work. But this essay is about where I would prefer to use them, and an attempt to relegate that to that position. My current goal is to delay use of them chronologically, ideally to an end point where the verticle application structure does not depend on one, but all useful data can be exported to database tool to enable analysis with standard tools. At this point I would rely on a RDBMS for long, massive queries, but not for the small everyday queries needed to support individual users.

So not only is this not a hit piece and neither is it uninformed on the topic or practical utility of an RDBMS.  This essay is me exploring an idea that frankly has an escape hatch.  I can map what I'm doing to a relational db at any point, and the later I have to do that the more successful my experiment will have been. The less runtime dependence, the better.  As such, it is an open research, an in progress communication in the spirit of R&D, I seek, if anything, rational proof for and against my ideas to guide me.  I expect drawbacks which will have to be met head on to be mitigated or  ideally, to be solved.

Having said that I think I can afford to put the goal bluntly: I want to make a mission critical capable stack that does not rely on an RDBMS at runtime, but which will export data to one for use by standard issue tools.  Therefore I don't intend to duplicate all the abilities of a DB by any means, I merely mean to free the application from having to work with one on a constant basis for mundane tasks, like finding a small set of recently created objects, or objects associated with a particular user.

Here is an attempt to give a sketch of the sort of things that motivate me to want to do without an RDBMS, at least during development, and ideally minimized and only aimed at after-the-fact data mining.  Why I'd prefer not to let RDBMS concerns affect the entire design:

• RDBMSs cooperate poorly with iterative development.  Say I have an object type A for which I want to develop feature sets X, Y, and Z, in the long run.  I am inclined to develop these one at a time, of course.  Assuming I created a table to store information about objects of type A, it will incorporate first the needs of feature set X. Thus the table in an RDBMS will at first reflect those needed by X, then by X+Y, and then by X+Y+Z.  Since there are likely to be relationships between X, Y and Z, not only will properties/columns need to be added (something which was not supported when I started with relational databases), but I expect that along the way I will probably find ways to consolidate properties needed by each feature set.  That is I might create something for X that needs to be generalized to support Y instead of adding a separate column/property altogether, creating more abstract properties with more flexibility. The RDBMS is an incooperative dead weight when making these exchanges.  It's all quite clear why it's necessary, and indeed, it's amazing how flexible they have made them in modern times, such that columns can be added after the fact. To do this properly without clearing the DB and starting from scratch each time, is to create special software, or special plans, to survive each transition. I have worked on a variety of ways to help regularize such processes and I hope to see that such work can be lessened greatly. Forward compatibility issues are crucial for iteratively developed software.
• RDBMSs are general purpose. That is great, especially when needed, but the general danger of such tools are that they solve every job with average performance, when a special purpose tool solves a smaller domain of problems more efficiently. While the RDBMS speeds up a massive query they will never be any faster than a custom written search using appropriate indexing, but in many cases they will be on a par with that result. This means one of their strengths is that they save development effort thinking about the logical particulars of one's particular problem domain, and in general developer time is worth a lot of efficiency in the code which can, after all, be optimized later. But obviously the drawback is performance less than optimal, and the value of that difference is dependent on the task at hand. The RDBMS stays prepared to execute novel queries on any given property.  Fact is, however, you are never going to search for blog stored in an SQL DB given the text of the blog as search parameter. Some of this generality is overkill.  If job responsibility is partitioned well, shedding unnecessary generality is an opportunity for new mission critical systems.  The generality is regained over time, and one must estimate the likely that such an outcome is possible, and the approach doesn't have internal contradictions or bottlenecks that cannot be reasonably mitigated.
• Use of an RDBMS requires one to model data as objects made of exactly the same properties, distinguished only by different settings. This is never the an ideal model for the program consuming the data.  A program necessarily needs to have its own model and will, if at all well built, will communicating with the RDBMS by querying into and out of the model.  That means that I still have to develop the appropriate data structure model for my data as used in the program throughout the stack, while also creating a separate RDBMS-oriented model. I worry that efficiency concerns lead people to subsequently design entirely around the what one views as a required RDBMS model.
• The RDBMS hides the storage from us at the shell level.  During development, and even in deployment, I find it useful to have data access available to me at the file system level. While I respect the model incarnate in the RDBMS, I also appreciate the unix name-pipe/file system model as a very useful heterogeneous data abstraction, albeit one that is poorly indexed relying only on lookup namespaces which are generally invented before the data itself, in the reverse of the proper order. File system elements are easier to inspect and hacked from time to time. I can also use standard tools not designed to work with a Database.  There is a considerable amount of power in the unix shell, and none of it is of much use dealing with data stored in a locked, binary, cabinent that cannot be poked around with.  This means that solutions to problems that might have a quick remedy may be long in coming as a more formal fix is required.  A custom system can react to any peculiarity of the data or  circumstance, and then plan a path to a formal, steady state, answer.  This is the kind of flexibility I want in development and afterward.

 Situation

This is an experiment, but not an academic one, more of a standard R&D ambition, based on a hope that the benefits outweigh any drawbacks at least for the problem domain targeted. I'm using it in development right now so let me start by explaining a chronology of events that will explain where I am so far, and which ideas I hope can carry this to a successful end. The narrative should also reveal any errors in my thinking that I, or another, might thus find visible and rectifiable. I go in not with conviction but of exploration.

Over the last many years I have built various sets of software as projects on my own time, sometimes to explore new technologies or to tinker with long term ideas of mind.  Most valuable from my point of view are my alternate interface to youtube and notation app, a javascript graphical two dimensional tile piece and board game interface, and a modular client-server application model based on a geometrical graphical design orientation. Most lately I have built a video and image processing system designed for linux virtual servers. I am now converting all of the above to the linux virtual server marketed as the cloud. 

While the data "cloud" did not strike me as significant, the ability to cell CPU as a commodity does impress me, especially when the host is a standard OS rather than a proprietary system like Google App Engine.  Thus I am converting the prior code, which runs on GAE to ubuntu and apache based server code. The first program I converted was a script I have that allows one to specify six images with the subsequent result that the images are cut up and put in an single image such that if printed, the image can be folded into an origami box such that the six images appear on the six sides of the box.

I obviously did not need an RDBMS for this application, which I called photogami, which was nothing more than a stand alone script converted for running on a web server.  However, if I were to promote the site, if it were to become heavily used, such a need would naturally arrise even for such a simple application because I let people upload their images, for example, and I would in that case be well advised to keep track of who was using what.

Subsequent to this I developed a video server with the initial issue being mastering ffmpeg which is used to convert videos on the back end. I needed to have a login system so my system was not abused, and this is something one might likely address by keeping a user table in an RDBMS. But instead I used apache authentication, and put off use of a DB.

This was possible through to the point where the videos were successfully uploaded and converted (and for good measure the server could automatically upload them to youtube as well, if desired).  But at that point I hit the first stopping block.  The issues is this: while i can safely let the web server upload a video, and put it's meta-information in a file on disk for the first time, I cannot safely do subsequent manipulation of the data.  E.g. if I want to put that video id in an index of "recently uploaded" files, I cannot do this with the web server app because it is running multiple processes and those processes have to cooperate somehow to ensure they don't overwrite each others work which is what would happen if they simply write to files at will.  

It's crucial when modifying shared data, that something controls access to the official data and ensures a transactional and ordered nature to the modifications, which are required to keep the data complete and coherent.  Also, such a manager will cache the data so you often don't have to go back to disk at all.

Note, this is the least of what the DBs do, managing concurrent access to common data.  For that purpose alone they are certainly overkill, BUT if one is of a mind that they will have to  have a DB eventually to support their system, this is one of the first reasons to use one sooner rather than later. At this point I decided again to defer the need until later, and instead made a C++ component that would do this part of the work for me. I named the program a Jurisdictional Clerk or Jurisdictional Control Node. Data under its jurisdiction, somewhere in a file system or file-system-like data store could only be modified by it.  Theoretically readers (the web server processes) could read the data themselves, but must modify and write through the JCN.  In practice, they of course should (and do) also read the data using JCN to control I/O.

But this means I as a developer can inspect the data with shell commands while the system runs.  I cannot modify the data safely unless I am sure it is not being written, which I can ensure by making the JCN react to a command which locks that file from writing.  Or, by brute force, I can simply stop the JCN, ensuring no one can write to it, allowing me to perform developmental surgery on the data as need be, perhaps running scripts to handle a transition, as above, from feature set X to feature set X+Y.

This is relatively straight forward. While we often use database to look things up by name, it's not needed for that.  A file system is already such a database, indexed by path specifiers which allow quick access to arbitrary data. When they ask for the data from the jcn, it is read only once, when first requested, and subsequently one gets the data from jcn memory (this takes a thousandth of a second for the data structures the current size, which is similar to a row of information).  In this case the path is LITERALLY the key (in C++ map<string, Morsel *>), where Morsel is a class I have created which uses boost property trees to keep heterogeneous trees of data, and can write them to JSON, XML or a native format.  

Which format to use is thus generalized, and can be changed throughout development in reaction to differences in performance (including to an RDBMS, aka the escape hatch).  Because I'm maximizing access to the data during development, for inspection and manual manipulation, I'm using JSON at the moment.  This is also useful because this format means I can send data unparsed to the client, instead of doing a query and formatting it as JSON for the client, since the client is a javascript program which of course uses JSON natively. Naturally, I suspect for sites with a lot of traffic, a text format for the disk storage is not going to cut it, and the Morsel is the interface which allows us to put data in less convienient but more efficient binary formats by changing only the Morsel class.

A nice thing about the JCN approach so far, however, is that even when that optimization becomes the case for  a particular object class, it needn't apply to them all.  While object classes with a lot of particular instances, like comments to videos for example, may need a more efficient format or storage system, something like the site configuration file needn't. The JCN and its service classes can use the less convienient but more efficient system selectively, for things that call for it only, and also only at that time during development where it's really become necessary. Indeed, it's possible that throughout development everything can be kept in the easier format, and changing this in deployment can be merely a matter of changing a configuration flag in the object class definition files.

So the JCN started as a central point of contact for the video bank software data, especially the meta-data, such as the description, uploader, view counts, and so on.  Rather than have the web server scripts contact the jcn after a video had been uploaded, I instead made the JCN use inotify to watch files appear within its jurisdiction, which it can then react to.  Initially these were specific to the video server needs but I have since, as part of converting the Novem interface system to this new server, started to generalize the JCN and give the design more definition.  The morsel is a data abstraction which contains a nested map (or "dictionary") of property:value pairs (that is, values can themselves be maps) and which borrows the concept from javascript that such a thing actually IS an object.

While the JCN currently performs its video services by watching for files of particular extension to ingest (let's say it's .vidinfo), the more general solution that will come from the recent modifications will be that if any file of type ".mrsl" appears on the disk, the jcn will ingest it and expect to find type information in the .mrsl. The dictionary can (and to be handled by the JCN directly, must) have an "_obj" member, which contains properties generally intended to be known by the jcn or other control system, meta-data such as the object's current namespace, the objects name, its object classification, and so on.

A video information note would have the objectClass member of _obj set to "videonote", allowing the jcn to dispatch the data to specific handlers that actually know what to do with such a thing (e.g. that know what the date, author, or other fields might actually mean). I have another class to act as the collection, the database if you will, of these Morsel instances, the Prandium.  This class is what keeps the map to all the morsels in memory.

I feel confident with this design. Right now I can let the prandium keep track of data that is in principle on disk, and can cache it in memory to save IO, confident that I can make the store a more well indexed file if needed, or from here execute the escape hatch and link the Prandium to a RDBMS and at least keep the prandium's interface, which is designed to my convienience. 

 This all works quite well and I can see the implementation will satisfy the requirement mentioned above and will act as a competent (efficient) shared datastore manager for retrieving/modifying data by "name and namespace" (i.e. the "object path").  My current system support a path language within the data morsel as well, so the JCN can allow arbitrary modification of these type of structures (heterogenous trees).

I also said above that while an RDBMS is often used to do this sort of lookup that such a job is not its real strength. The real strength of the RDBMS is its ability to do queries efficiently, especially important for very large queries.  The ability to do queries is something I need right now.  The JCN will currently provide a list of current videos, but it will not cull them for you, you can't ask it for the latest dozen videos, for example.

The RDBMS excels at doing such things, and is ready to do them from the moment you put the data in.  Generally, any property of a row (aka "column") can be used in a query. Thus, especially with the wanton aid of ORMs (which is indulgent to the OO programmer), one creates a column/property for each property one desired to have stored in the database. This means you can query on any of these in the future, without needing to have forethought about what you will search on. 

But the fact is, many of the properties in the database won't ever be used in a query.  The text of a blog entry will not be used as a query for the blog object in the database.  It has occured to me that for business reasons it's valuable to be able to search on any given property, because this supports arbitrary business analysis, and for this reason I do expect to export pandium and morsel data to RDBMS for such studies.  I am not trying to remove the RDBMS from the whole endeavor, I'm just trying to keep my server system from having one as an operational dependency for the runtime system.

A flexibility of the JCN store (again, remembering it can be put in various types of storage on disk and is already more or less ideally efficient when in memory, indexed by path) is that it has no column concept and thus you can put any data in these dictionaries. You can easily add extra sub-objects, which will be well ignored by systems that don't know where to look for them, but which can nevertheless be handled by the infrastructure by iterating over all the present keys, and also through the special _obj member.

However, this makes it difficult to use these things as arbitrary search parameters, and by difficult I mean impossible. While most of properties do not need to be used as search parameters and never will be, what about those that do need to be used for searching? 

The current situation: I support the storing of "blobs" in the jcn by pathnames.  The jcn can inspect objects, but currently only does so to find control information in the _obj member.  It will check the type and creator for authorization purposes, but in every other sense does not have to know what the type actually is (just that it's allowed). 

What I am developing next is in order to use internal properties as search terms. The idea that I will implement is that one can do the jcn equivalent of "create table" AFTER a bunch of such object have been stored.  However, the command will not be creating tables, but rather storing object class definitions which drive creation of indexes. For those familiar with RDBMSs, this create table action, which is done to tell the database that you have a type of data you would like it to accept and the format of the data, specifies both what can and can not be used as a search parameter, and what's stored.  In the JCN model, what can be stored is more or less open and does not have to be pre-specified.  For binary types that cannot be stored in the actual meta-information file, a field can simply point to a file (or URL), accomplishing much the same thing in effect.  Thus anything that can be stored in the filesystem can be stored (in a file system or an optimized stored able to retrieve arbitrary data by namespace and path).  Any file system level utility, like revision control, can also easily be used.

The definition of things that can be used as search parameters.  For each of these an index will be created and when creating and modifying that type of object, these indexes will be maintained and stored efficiently on disk.  This index is a simple map of the given property as key, to the given Morsels with that value.  The properties are given as path names which "path" through the property tree in memory.

In the long run I could be swamped by a need for indeces on all fields, but I know that at least in development I will have only a gradually growing and limited number of things I need to be able to search and filter on.  As long as the indices can get me to small sets (hundreds or thousands at most), I can also support final filtering on arbitrary values in the property tree for which there are no indexes. This means that if I get through development without an RDBMS, but find my system cannot perform in deployment (perhaps it never will, perhaps it's just not ready), that if I take the escape hatch at this future point not only can I still benefit from the  RDBMS (by pointing key parts of the storage model to an RDBMS instead of a file system, and changing the "create object class" flow so that it has to precede ingestion of data), but I can also continue to develop to my general model, a server capable of replacing the RDBMS in development and possibly production use, and using the RDBMS for what it truly excels at, REALLY BIG LONG MASSIVE queries, at which it is a rock star.

One advantage is that at this point it is much more fun to work on the jcn, and seems to require less effort than making yet another RDBMS data model in parallel with the datamodel that actually gets the work of the applications done. I suppose I will go straight for high performance in storage of the indexes, and store them in some very efficient binary format. Perhaps I hope to redeem the filesystem as the ultimate data store... one I have often wandered in.  It could be, I'm like that sometimes.