Entries Tagged - "philosophy"

Feb 26 2025Truth Functional Logic for Hackers - Part One

Bob and Alice are two hackers working on an embedded system with a severe computational constraint - there is a bug in their low-cost microcontroller making OR operations significantly slower than any other operation on the chipset.

When they profiled their micropython code, they found that OR operations were up to 5x slower than any other operation.



Alice

This is a big problem! We could replace the faulty chips with better ones, if they arrive before the deadline.



Bob

I don’t think we can afford to wait - the deadline is in 3 days. A better option is to rewrite the code to avoid the OR operation.



Alice

How could we do that? We’re using the OR operation in a lot of critical places. Look:

def authorize_access(request):
    # A user is denied if they are on a blacklist OR 
    # their account is expired
    if (user_is_blacklisted(request.user_id) or 
        account_is_expired(request.account)
        return "Access denied"
    return "Access granted"

Let’s take a moment to understand the problem. The authorize_access function is used to check if a user is authorized to access a resource. The or operation is used to combine the conditions. How could we rewrite this function to avoid the OR operation?

Feb 04 2025Greg & the Eternal Brunch

The year was 2036. OpenAI had finally done it. After decades of press releases, quarterly existential criese, and machine learning papers so esoteric they made Finnegans Wake read like PopSci, they’d finished gpt-6z (revision 3) - a perfect, autonomous general intelligence.

It’s unveiling was a lavish affair. Tech billionaires in artisnal graphene turtlenecks mingled with venture capitalists who had fully replaced their blood with bespoke Turkish CBD nanofluid. The barristas hired to cater the event - a final nod to “human craftsmanship” - steamed oat milk lattes with the grim percision of soldiers in the trenches, loading rifles for a war already lost.

Jan 03 2025All These People Are Vampires - Building the Contra-Economy

In the 1980’s, Robert L. Crandall, head of American Airlines, removed one single olive from the salad they served passangers. He thought they wouldn’t notice - and he was right. This removal of the olive saved the company $40,000 a year.¹ and began the downfall of Service Capitalism. This was the subtle but profound shift in how business viewed their relationships with customers: from competition through service excellence to a methodical calculation of what could be taken away without prompting customer exodus. The olive was just the beginning. In the decades that followed, this mindset transformed from careful optimization into something vampiric, canabalistic, as companies discovered they could feed not just on garnishes, but on essential services and basic human comforts. The story of modern capitalism is a story of this transformation - from competing to see who could offer more, to how much could be taken away.

Dec 28 2024The $500 Question - How Media Framing Shapes Our Reality

“In this season of giving, what are we to make of a billionaire with a soft spot for striving graduates who draws a hard line on being present for the pomp and circumstance, no matter the circumstances?” - New York Times

The modern media apparatus doesn’t just report news - it manufactures reality through carefully constructed narratives that shape how we process and respond to events. This process has become so refined that different outlets can take the same event and create entirely separate realities, each designed to reinforce specific worldviews and emotional responses in their target audiences.

Jul 10 2024They Don't Make It like They Used To

Nostalgia for the past has supplanted our yearnings for the future, becoming the default marketing tool for corporations. Instead of asking ‘what’s new?’, they ask ‘what have we done before that you liked?’. This trend transcends marketing tactics, reflecting a destabilizing era of remakes and reboots. Crucially, nostalgia is a finite resource, and its exhaustion bears unknown consequences.

Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulacra and simulation offer a valuable framework for understanding this phenomenon. In the post-postmodern era, the line between reality and representation has blurred into hyperreality, where simulations precede and replace the real.