Applying to Tlon

I went so far as to zap a resume to Tlon, the Urbit hoster.  Coincidentally, they were looking for a copy writer with React.js skills. My inbox is always humming with job offers, none of them usually at all a good fit.  This one leapt out at me.

Although I've read up on React (the client Facebook pioneered to make their complex update cycle work), the better to teach at O'Reilly (this was years ago), I don't promote myself as a Reactionary (joke, they don't call themselves that, I'm pretty sure).  

The Angular people could call themselves Crooks (as in crooked).  Angular meaning "bent".

I'd say I submitted my resume as a sign of respect.

Although the world domination fantasy is always inspiring, it's the kind of self discipline / self mastery it takes to get there that's appealing, whether one ever gets there or not.  You get a great set of abs by trying (that's a metaphor).  My belly shows off that other kind of six pack.

Linux was the same way, the eternal underdog against the behemoths.  That's somewhat of a romantic telling, as the giants got on board in the Giant Wars.  IBM wanted its revenge against Microsoft, which had veered away from OS/2.  

More to the point, when you're a behemoth with expensive proprietary products (e.g. Tivoli), what you want most is for your clients to run a free open source operating system (low barrier to entry) with no vendor lock in.  All the better to lock them in then.

However Urbit doesn't need to dominate the world any time soon, in order to start making a positive difference in the world.  The joy of Hoon + Nock is you get to think like a computer scientist.  

You have a binary tree in your head as you code ("the subject") and your tiny set of nock codes go against it, computing the effects of your Hoon expressions.  I've only climbed this steep learning curve for a week and already I feel smarter.  Wing expressions.  Runes (like bar-tiz or |=) for starting a generator of one arm, i.e. a gate i.e. a (battery payload) cell.

The effects get applied, in an atomic manner, and your whole machine is now updated, shades of Smalltalk, with its self-saving image.

The new media campaign is around the Crystal Ball Sequence, at OEIS, which links back to my websites. The idea is public schools with sufficient imagination to live up to our American heritage, will also share it (and by American, we're free to mean planetary, the same way we mean Chinese or Russian in the Global U).

Virtual. USA OS.

Some of the Urbit nouns seem to be German.

I already feel somewhat on the hook to a queue of clients and don't think my resume will actually percolate to the top, what with 18 other applicants, especially sans a cover letter, but I'd clear the decks and dive deep into React should a tour of duty call.

Back to Day Camp

We got a ton of boo hoos and bemoanings, of time lost and skills wasted, especially from two income families, which is most of them.  Not all of them get to keep their Zoom jobs, nor the kids.  Enough "remote time", back to school.  Good news for all.

Except a tiny minority of kids had some interesting adventures from the safety of a Zoom job, which is what we gave them, in place of classroom TinyDesks [tm] and a storage locker plan.  They got to be more like adults and in many cases got exposed to more real world relevant learning, sans the bullying, sans the insipid nature of the day care center's fake school.

Now I'm only using that language to empathize with that tiny minority, who had a good experience trying distance education.  We're told the vast majority hated lock down (who wouldn't, that's prison talk) and now have a built in reason to need remediation going forward.  The ones who thrived are not the ones making news, that much seems obvious.

As a teacher during that period, I went from middle to high school level in a hurry.  Drilling down in Python the way the schools envision, in big computer labs, in the day care setting, is different from staying home in a privileged nerd cave with high bandwidth.  We were clearly happier here, with our JupyterLab dashboard, in the high school of tomorrow.  I could use the same pedagogical techniques I used with adults, and andragogy often makes good pedagogy, I think any Muppet lover will tell you.

Some kids have continued with day camp, putting in nonstandard hours and not riding the bus everywhere.  Having kids off the streets, in cubicles, learning, more hours of the day than not, might be a good use of cubicles, if we ever decide the TinyDesks [tm] are not enough.  Shared MakerSpaces.  Elevators to classrooms on other floors, for when debate teams meet.  But debates could be on Zoom as well no?  When exactly do we need an auditorium?

I'm saying only a minority of education planners are given skyscraper type buildings to think about, as mixed use structures.  My model is more people spread about around town in more traditional dwelling units, more like the one I'm in, where the giant walnut trees fall.  High wind today.  One fell.

Machine Unlearning

Is tagging by race for ML purposes itself a racist practice, by definition?  ML = machine learning if you didn't know.  In my subculture, that's a given.  ML has taken off in recent years, refueling the dream of RI (real intelligence) ultimately emerging from AI (artificial, phony or mock intelligence).

I'd say in the neural nets of real humans, tagging by race was caught up in self fulfilling prophesy (or poetry -- Paine) of a religious nature, regarding the "place of each race" in some cosmological caste system. Without mechanized agriculture or quarrying, the vast resources had been commanded under threat of a whip in many cases.  Cosmologies (background programs) needed to support that status quo.

Per the book Caste, India's social engineers and Jim Crow have a lot to talk about, in terms of comparing notes.  May the civil rights movement in India continue on an enlightening path.  Obsolete stereotyping is the root of almost all evil (falling behind), whereas sensitive discernment of relevant traits is by definition not obsolete.  The advantage is in having the right models.

The Tower of Babel was the anchor for many civil warriors, up to the "confusion in tongues" part, which people tended to misinterpret from their bully pulpits.  God used extra- and/or epigenetic (outside chromosomal) reprogramming techniques to fix a major bug of the Noah Era.  The bottleneck of Noah's Arc had given rise to groupthink and monoculture, and to an idiocracy expecting its reward in heaven based on some taller-is-better ideology-architecture.  God again saw a need to intervene. Humans were still in fine tuning phase in the Book of Genesis.

Thinking in language runs "a miracle a minute" compared to the miraculous mutant-based morphing associated with geological time DNA coding -- unless you're a bacterium or other such simple-tiny self propagator.  

Humans were split asunder not along genetic lines, but into their philological flows, which helped create the impetus, the mutually frustrating pressure, to wander far afield and start fresh, creating new versions of everything:  New York, Nova Scotia, New South Wales...  

The student body diaspora would eventually spread around the world and finally get that the campus was spherical.  A self conscious humanity would become a university of the meek, humble in its obvious ignorance.  Score one for God then.  The jealous angels could not say "I told you so" that quickly.

The whole US Civil War mentality started falling apart with the continued evolution of mechanized sea, bus, rail, and air travel.  Spaceship Earth became a nomad land, as its next generations of people, with their light-to-dark sun-blocking skin tones, resettled the Americas. 

The newer neural nets started coping with "world around" tourism, with some traveling themselves, others staying put. Either way, people coped with a shocking future, and continuing waves of migration.

The race tag was proving less and less a predictor of whether that stranger sitting next to you was conversant with quantum physics, knew English, had a gun.  Hard to know.  

The race-based language games were about making things simple, a truly uphill battle where human complexity is concerned.

The corollary to ML models drifting off course, perhaps thanks to "foundations of sand" tagging schemes built around race, is the emergence of tagging looking at authentic ethnic attributes (e.g. philological) versus these pseudo-biological ones.  

Nothing in biology precisely maps to the old civil warrior "races" idea because the race concept was forged in the wake of reading Genesis, not in the study of genetics. "Critical race theory" has morphed into "critical of race" theory.

In the evolutionary marketplace of ideas (extra-genetic in large degree, unless you're deliberately inbreeding some royal dead end) race-based ML is going to suffer the slings and arrows of strongly countering intelligence services.  

Their PR will be along the lines of "only the slow think in terms of race" which is condescending I realize.  Condescension is more effective when disguised.  Lets call it "mock pity for those who believe in breeding a master race" i.e. "too bad y'all will never be ruling class, not with crazy beliefs like that".

Explaining My Jargon

JupyterLab Control Panel

 

I'm not just twiddling my thumbs, though in my defense, if I were, isn't that a big part of being a Quaker?  Expectant waiting we call it.  I'm not the instigator, but wait for a way to open, as the jargon goes.  Is there any truth to the rumor that "Quaker" in American Sign Language is twiddling thumbs?

Describing a role (some still say "job") in terms of its personal dashboards is not a bad idea, especially if one is at liberty to stay highly metaphorical with the dashboard talk.  Recall how the UNIX crowd wanted a "workbench" or even a "bicycle shop" ambience, which went well with the "many tools, each good at what it does" esthetics.

What are the dashboards associated with high school?  A special desk and chair combination?  A locker?  Do you have an auditorium with a stage?  An athletic field?  An indoor gymnasium?  What I'm describing come from a stereotypical high school, a set of buildings, on a campus.  The home based personal workspace was the homework space.  Until the internet made more inroads.  Until social distancing became more of a thing.

My shoptalk had long featured the personal workspace (PWS) which could mean anything from a cubicle, to a home office (such as I often had), to the cab of a long hauler truck.  I thought in terms of a cockpit. 

The archetype is often a command center, a mission control, a situation room, a control room.  So here we are, in my Control Room blog.  The PWS is more like a BizMo, complete with captain's log (journal, diary), but on wheels or even just legs.  Control rooms dispatch.  A familiar model.

How should we extend the interior "pattern language" of high school to include our newer Zoom dashboard, with screen sharing?  What "nerd caves" do students and faculty inhabit?  Are we talking about multi-hour courses?  Who scripts them?  The process of passing the torch is ongoing.  Older generations shape the newer ones, but sometimes with push back.  Actions beget reactions, and results.

I've been looking at JupyterLab as a high school dashboard, one of many, compatible with the PWS motif. It's what I look at, when reading and writing Notebooks.  My curriculum flows around by means of these documents.