re: Flash

Oh, come on, people. Flash was always a hack. Real web engineers always hated it. The Web was missing features, and Adobe filled that gap, but did so by subverting the transparency that was the whole point of the Web. How many web developers have thrown up in their mouths a little bit on coming across a website for a small business, designed and sold by a 'designer' with good intentions, which dances and sings but renders the poor oblivious business utterly invisible to search engines?

While Flash was relevant, the interstitial landscape it created was host to a horde of artists who committed themselves to learning its rules but who were ignorant of the shape of its looming boundaries. Now that the needed standards have been provided by the responsible standards bodies, the designers cry out in shock as the gap which became their home closes around them.

Tomorrow, Metaphorically (Maybe)

What am I doing? Recently I half-joked that I was "watching for signs of the Apocalypse." Subtract the kooky religious implications and that's kind of true. I don't mean the Christian Apocalypse literally, nor do I really believe in the more extreme descriptions of the geek Singularity, but I do have a strong feeling that interesting changes are either imminent or happening already. They'll have broad effects, they'll catch us by surprise, and we may not even know they've happened until we look back at them. While "expect the unexpected" usually receives a response of sarcasm these days, I'm going to say it anyway; I mean by it that we need to stretch our creative faculties if we want to have any hope of understanding, let alone predicting, the nature of the changes that are coming.

The people who have done this well in the past have been the writers of speculative fiction; that's probably why I identify myself as wishing to become a writer of speculative fiction. But it's not the "writer" part or the "fiction" part that I really have in my soul, it's the "speculative" part. I can't help it. I'm like a kid on the night before Christmas; I can't sleep, I'm so excited thinking about what I'll get tomorrow.

He's afraid; he doesn't know what of. He's watching for signs of the Apocalypse. Not like they say in their books, no, he's cleverer than they.

But when the god in his head sends commandments, he obeys just as they would.

I'm reading Verlinde's paper, and I don't have the background to really follow it. I don't know the referents. But I can kind of grasp the logical structure.

There's something important in it; there's a memetic connection that hasn't been made before. Something right. But it also feels like there's an error in it somewhere. I've seen it said that it treats space as emergent from information theory, but I don't think it does. But I think it could have.

Noetic Flux

Is entropy anisotropic along the edges of a Feynman diagram?

The problem has seemed to be to derive ought from is, to find a goal for the tool.