exratione

The Fermi Paradox is better thought of as the Wilderness Paradox. Why is everything that we see natural, explained solely by the laws of physics?

It only takes one small faction within one advanced civilization to launch the self-replicating probes that will convert all matter in a galaxy into someone's paradise, be that computronium or habitats or whatever. Most likely computronium, given the economics that drive expansion. Even the stars will be dismantled once it is economically viable to use their matter in another way.

The point here is that this engineering won't look natural, even in its early stages, and it won't look natural from a very, very long way away. Yet everything we see looks natural, out to the nearest 100,000 galaxies, a simply preposterous span of stars and planets to argue that no small factions capable of doing this have arisen. Yet do we see the evidence of their existence? We do not.

https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/

Here is a sketch of the future, without any specific dates assigned to its milestones. The human mind is reverse engineered. It is run in software. A million variants and improvements are constructed. Molecular nanotechnology is established and becomes a mature industry, available to everyone. Anything and everything can be built efficiently given the raw materials and a spec. From an economic perspective those who thrive are those who make the most efficient use of the matter that they own, and those who gain control over the most matter: quality versus quantity shift back and forth in the degree of advantage as the ability to accurately and rapidly manipulate large masses of matter at the atomic level and lower grows. Matter is most economically efficient when incorporated as the workings of an intelligent entity. The end state here is a continuum of thinking matter, and there are countless arrangements by which matter might be made aware. Our evolved biology is among the least intricate and least capable of these possibilities. At the most efficient we might envisage space- and matter-efficient computational processors plus the necessary workings for support: communication, energy, repair, and so forth. The higher the fraction of that mix that can be devoted to data processing and transfer, the more economically effective the entities who use that system as a substrate.

Evolved intelligences are not rational actors in search of growth above all other goals. We have parks and entertainment industries, for example. There is no reason why constructed intelligences should be any different, but equally they have one important quality: they can change themselves and their progeny in defined ways to achieve defined outcomes in mental state. The alterations and experiments that provide economic advantages will prosper. Entities who choose to incorporate an urge to growth will become the majority. At some point the value of an asteroid, a moon, a planetary crust, or a star in its natural state falls below the value of the same matter dismantled and used as raw materials for computational processing. After that it is just a matter of time before this solar system, a wilderness at present, and a collection of parks in ages ahead, is transitioned into a more efficient arrangement of matter in which near every portion of the whole is intelligent. This change will propagate outward to other stellar systems, without end, driven by simple economic considerations. A sea of cultures of a complexity and scope beyond our imaginings, and our world today the tiniest mote of a seed, that could be emulated by the smallest discrete material unit of computational processing in that future substrate.

So it is less a matter of manifest destiny that we will convert our entire future light cone into intelligence, and more a matter of economic inevitability, the destination at the end of the random walk of choice simply because some classes of choice will be made more frequently than others. The outcome of human action writ large. All of this, however, indicates that there is something very important that we at present do not understand about the nature of reality. Nothing in our present situation as a species appears to be exceptional: stars are everywhere in vast numbers, planets also, and complex organic molecules are seen wherever we have the ability to observe them. Thus intelligence should arise elsewhere. The age of the universe is very long in comparison to the time taken for our spontaneous generation, yet we see no evidence that any other intelligence has come before us. This is often expressed as the Fermi Paradox, but is perhaps best thought of as the Wilderness Paradox, which is to ask why everything we observe, out to the very limits of the visible universe, is apparently natural and unaltered. Where are the signs of what we know is possible and inevitable for an intelligent evolved species, the conversion of matter to more efficient forms on a vast scale?

The only solid solution to the Fermi Paradox that does not require some new and presently missing piece of scientific understanding is the Simulation Argument: that we are in a box and walled off from the real world, whatever that might be, created by some demiurge for purposes guessable but ultimately unknowable through any action on our part. Prosaically that demiurge might be a descendant of a past humanity similar to ours, an entity that is running one of countless ancestor simulations for scientific reasons. Far less prosaic options are also possible, in which the demiurge is simulating from first principles a radically different cosmology from its own and thus its nature and motivations are inscrutable. These possibilities of the Simulation Argument are dissatisfying to explore, however, for all the same reasons as the brain in a jar thought experiment is a dead end. Best to assume it is not true, as it if is there is nothing useful you can do about it, individually or collectively. Pascal's wager turned inside-out.

It is more interesting to speculate on what it is that we don't understand at present about the nature of reality. There are numerous candidates, and most present thinking is directed towards those related to enforcing our rarity, often expressed as the Great Filter, one or more enormously unlikely steps that lie between the origin of a barren world scattered with a few organic compounds and the destination of an intelligent species engaged in repurposing of raw materials on a vast scale. All proposed Great Filters are very speculative; there is a great deal of room to argue about odds when you only have one example to work with, or events of the distant past must be reconstructed from theory, or future development of the species considered in detail rather than at a very high level, all which makes coming to any sort of rigorous conclusion next to impossible. All that is practical to achieve is to build the shape of the argument that would be sufficient if the actual numbers and proposed events in fact exist in reality. Given this uncertainty, any proposed Great Filter becomes an ever less satisfying answer the further we look outward and the more galaxies we see without any sign of massive engineering. It only serves to argue for our uniqueness, which is implausible given what we presently know and the isotropic nature of all other observed aspects of the natural universe across vast spans of distance and time.

Per our present understanding of physics and intelligent economic activity, we will turn every part of that great span into our descendants if not diverted or stopped by some outside influence, stars and all. The cosmological noocene, an ocean of intelligence. That the natural universe remains present to be used by us indicates that something is awry, however, that some vital and important understanding is missing, and as a species we are still just making the first fumbling explorations of the bounds of the possible with regards to what it is that we don't know.

The real challenge is how to manage within the 60 second, 1024 thread limits in a sane way, however. You have to approach application decomposition in a much more rigorous way.

https://www.exratione.com/2012/09/whiteboard-exercises-are-a...

It is Slow, Slow, Slow

I am actually greatly in favor of short programming exercises as a framing strategy for interviews. A sort of ersatz pair programming is the way I like to interview candidates: dive straight in with two seats at a machine and get to know the fellow over the course of either a bug hunt on the system he is being hired to work with, or if that's impossible for legal or other reasons then some small, fun coding exercise. Such as, say, "implement the world's worst way to represent and then reverse a linked list," or anything that starts with "you have an infinite tongue floating on a lake of a coffee and a piercing tool..."

Ditching the keyboard in favor of a whiteboard dramatically increases the time taken to evaluate any one shard of the programming experience, however. What can be accomplished neatly with a simple text editor in ten minutes can take a painful hour or more with a pen. Whiteboarding is simply not suited for the exploratory way in which most people code. All that wasted time would be put to far better use in talking, asking questions, and more deeply exploring the interviewee's approach to coding as a profession - touching on the many, many vital aspects of being a developer that cannot be tested in an hour with a text editor and a compiler.

Whiteboarding Primarily Tests for the Ability to Whiteboard

Most folk don't spend their lives working on how to most efficiently and effectively use a whiteboard. There are good reasons for this: we have computers now, with editing and presentation software that is ten thousand times more useful and functional than the combination of pen and whiteboard. Why would anyone choose to practice and optimize a skill that is never going to be used in the ordinary course of their professional life?

Nonetheless, there exist a small number of people who can whip up really great presentations on a whiteboard from scratch, even over the course of a discussion that swings around all over the map, and has no predetermined outcome. These talented folk will make great use of space, have little need to erase and redo, and will generally look good while doing it. But guess what? That skill, while very occasionally useful, has absolutely nothing to do with code or programming.

Most people, given a whiteboard and a free-ranging discussion or problem to solve, will produce an ugly-looking hash of notes and require frequent large-scale reordering of the content on the board to make sense of it all. If you weren't there, it might as well be Hebrew or hieroglyphics. If you were there, it still requires an additional investment of effort to follow what is happening - effort that might otherwise be going to more productive interview strategies.

Erasure and Exploration are Punished Aggressively

People are very individualistic when it comes to that aspect of development that involves the choice, design, and implementation of algorithms - the sort of thing that might take a few minutes to an hour and will typically be just a small part of a larger task. There are as many different approaches as there are types of personality. For my part, actually writing code is exactly equivalent to thinking about the problem: I plunge in and start writing, as that is the process by which I get a handle on what the eventual solution has to involve and how it will be organized. I'd guess that I probably write at least two to three times as many lines of code as eventually exist in any given small solution, and it is the rare module that isn't aggressively refactored or otherwise turned inside-out at some point within the first thirty minutes to an hour of its existence.

In a text editor, this is a very rapid process. It goes about as fast as I can type. On a whiteboard? Not so great. Forcing code away from an editor and into a whiteboard is, I think, a great way to sabotage anyone who approaches programming in a rapid, iterative, and exploratory fashion. The whiteboard favors instead that mythical beast, the programmer who assembles the whole solution in his head, perfectly visualized, and then just writes it down.

But where's the fun in that? If that was the way I coded, I probably wouldn't be doing it for a living, or writing software in my own time. Rapid exploration and thinking out loud in code is a key part of the process of development at the small scale - of exploring any particular modestly-sized problem space. Of course this is all very different from the strategies apply to a larger scope of work, or software architecture, or the planning of complex integrations ... but then you aren't going to manage to see the nuts and bolts of any of that via a short coding exercise.

Small Problems are a Tiny Subset of Programming as a Profession

The only thing you have time for in any coding exercise, but especially when whiteboarding, are tiny challenges - minuscule slivers of the vast programming experience. Just playing the odds, the ability to generate an algorithm for a small isolated problem is likely neither the most important component of the job, nor in any way related to the actual strengths or weakness of the interviewee as a programmer. What about planning, big picture thinking, documentation, writing skills, foresight, innovation? And so on, for as long as you care to make the list.

Further, the artificial whiteboard environment is far removed from anything approaching a real development environment. Every developer works within a halo of resources, local and online: the IDE, Google, Stack Overflow, and so forth. They are surrounded by an ethereal library and the means to use it - a primitive exobrain if you like. A large part of being a good programmer is being aware of and skilled in the effective use of this exobrain. Pen and paper coding exercises in this context are something akin to testing medical students by shutting them in a room with leeches, potions, and a patient, and expecting to divine something of their ability to perform in a modern hospital setting from the results.

Since whiteboarding is excruciatingly slow, by using it you've chosen to put the majority of your interview time into a poor-quality examination of one tiny facet of the programming experience, rather than freeing up time for other and better approaches.

"But Several People Need to See What's Going On"

Ah, the group interview. So move the chairs closer to that gargantuan developer-sized monitor you have. Or request a bigger monitor. Or use a projector. I believe we've moved somewhat past the whiteboard as the only available technology for presenting content to multiple people in the same room at the same time.

http://supercentenarians.info/

Interestingly, Jeanne Calment, the present validated record holder, is a statistical outlier. The cluster of oldest validated human ages lies around 116-117. Then there is Sarah Knauss at 119 and Jeanne Calment at 122.

People at that age are incredibly frail, balanced on the knife edge, with a stupendous mortality rate on a monthly basis, never mind yearly. It seems unlikely that any first generation rejuvenation treatments, based on the SENS model, probably, could be safely applied to people past the age of 110 - that's a much harder proposition than treating a 60- or 70-year old.

So I suspect Kaminskiy will get good publicity from this without the prospect of having to award a prize any time soon, since the life expectancy of people alive at 110+ is not going to be greatly influenced by meaningful progress in medical science over the next decade or so.

So far we look very set to produce a world that replicates the myths of a golden past of longevity and plenty, with an invisible mystic realm alongside, populated by stand-ins for gods and household spirits.

I my experience AngularJS works well with quality teams who come into the Javascript ecosystem with a front-end / design / HTML background. They get the markup-based systems; it's less of a leap. I can think of one team in particular who had a horrible time with Ember, but took to Angular very quickly.

The application speed thing, I think, is non-issue now that people have figured it out and written a lot on the topic. There are a lot of good articles out there that explain very clearly how not to write slow AngularJS applications. I even wrote one myself back a ways:

https://www.exratione.com/2013/12/considering-speed-and-slow...

There are definitely other issues worthy of attention, such as learning why you don't factor your application into directives everywhere, learning to avoid all the normal global variable issues with $scope, and the very mixed quality of the documentation - sometimes good, sometimes encouraging outright bad design choices, sometimes lacking very necessary detail.

The timescale for megascale engineering to occur throughout our galaxy as the result of the launch of one megascale engineering minded self replicating probe is small (1 million years) in comparison to the age of the galaxy (13 billion years). It is unlikely that we are sitting here while someone else is in the process of doing it; that's not the scenario to focus on.

All it takes, remember, is one small group in one sufficiently advanced culture to start this going. Some (post)human group will clearly do it at some point if we as a species continue. Why hasn't someone already done it, where "it" is visibly engineer the totality of the future light cone?

The problem is less one of why don't we see Dyson spheres and other similar type II projects within a few hundred light years of our position, and more one of why do we see no obviously altered galaxies among the hundreds of thousands cataloged to date. At this scale the zoo hypothesis looks stretched, and the simulation argument begins to look more plausible.

1) The more important observation is that everything we see is a wilderness of apparently natural origins and processes, not that we have apparently not been visited.

2) No hypothesis involving choice that leads to failure to carry out self-replicating colonization can explain (1). All it takes is one small group in one sufficiently advanced species. This rules out wolves, berserkers, relinquishment, self-destruction, and so on and so forth.

Clearly something is missing or incorrect in how the pieces of the various sciences fit together to explain what we see. Some of the best reading on the subject is speculation on what it is that we don't know or the relative odds on where the present consensus is incorrect.

There is little to chose from between Roman slavery and Medieval serfdom. Long-term colonial economic exploitation had many of the same aspects even where it wasn't outright slavery. The institution of slavery in its broadest sense has proven to be very resilient. It is probably too soon to say whether its comparative absence for a few centuries is a passing thing, or whether it is in fact the symptom of another systematic shift in the sophistication of states. If the latter, then the introduction of modern systems of banking has an interesting parallel course in history. Consider all of the associated means for better extracting wealth from populations without provoking rebellion.

One might put forward an argument that suggests these advances make it more practical for the elite to comparatively peacefully farm the local population rather than farming other populations by making and enslaving enemies. Thus more of the elites do this.

All of which still leaves us with a very long to go yet in order to become a moral species. I don't see it happening without fundamental engineered changes to human nature, and that isn't a near term thing. It is worth remembering that a thin line indeed separates present elites in so-called civilized regions from those who in the past massacred and enslaved. If today's leaders found advantage in it, they would do it.

My GitHub account contains a mix of (a) small pieces of functional software used in niches that are poorly supported, such as non-delivery report processing in Drupal, (b) dumb things that were amusing enough to write, such as a self-propagating bash script, and (c) functional examples for software that lacks good functional examples, such as the use of Guice in DropWizard.

This sort of thing seems more than good enough to demonstrate that you know what you're doing.

https://github.com/exratione/four-word-phrase

clenched bakers detestable evincing

keenly eastern expertness presto

topsails existence self-created fittings

delusion brushed lockers discipline

seaman vintages cross-bones uncouth

furnished vanity copied invited

sea-captains cross-running engendered disastrous

freshet willingly lead-lined asserted

remarking repentance insert compendious

vice-bench equally imminent quadrupeds

That's an outgrowth of the Buck Institute.

The real problem for a small company mail server isn't setting up a respectably secure operation: set up SPF and DKIM and you're good to go. The problem is maintaining deliverability for anything more than very casual usage of mail into a very complicated ecosystem. At any point in time a random switch can flip on some heuristic somewhere and suddenly a large mail provider will reject you, or you're on a blacklist that provides no explanation or ability to remove your mails, and that isn't isolated: it will spread throughout the ecosystem, and leave a stain that can linger for a long time.

I've run a few-thousand person newsletter mail list for more than ten years, and fairly recently switched to SES because it's simply not possible to guarantee deliverability even at that modest scale running it yourself from your own servers. If you're not hooked into the ecosystem then you have to fight ongoing battles that only a professional in the mail deliverability business has time and connections to understand and effectively win.

Even then, you have to be very careful: don't mention sums of money (e.g. censor all discussion of research funding), don't trigger dumb spamassassin rules (e.g. sentences with lots of long words in a scientific paper), don't talk about known trigger words (e.g. no scientific articles on the role of growth hormone in mouse aging) and so forth.

It is crazy. The absolutely rational response to all of this is to outsource mail delivery.

I echo the advice of everyone else - validate with something very simple like .+@.+ and then by sending an email. Trying to recapture the complexity of the email system via a tool like regular expressions is tilting at windmills. It's like trying to develop a regular expression to determine whether a name is real or not.

https://www.exratione.com/2012/09/what-constitutes-an-accept...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory

The scaling thing is just one of the hurdles you have to manage in this framework. Every system has them. Once you learn where the limits are the tools exist to manage it:

https://www.exratione.com/2013/12/considering-speed-and-slow...

Like all frameworks, Angular isn't suited to every task. If you are rendering massive tables, to pick the obvious example, then you probably shouldn't be using any of the modern binding-based frameworks for that part of your application.

But there seem to be holes. Unruly armies of tens of thousands have existed since antiquity as insurrections, unrest due to demands for change, and borderline rebellions. The ruling classes of the Roman empire had to deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis. The size of the mob is not a new thing.

I think the change between old and new enforcement of common law has a lot more to do with technology, specifically the development of firearms and their ability to enable a small armed group to defeat a large unarmed group. That changed the whole nature of insurrection and civil disorder. You'll see that the advent of the police came right around the time at which firearms moved beyond the crude, slow weapons of the Napoleonic era. I don't think that is a coincidence.

"There is certainly no data out there to suggest that giving growth hormone to an otherwise healthy person will make him or her live longer. We did find, however, that there was substantial potential for adverse side effects."

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fgene.2012.00...

"In laboratory mice, mutations with the greatest, most consistent, and best documented positive impact on lifespan are those that disrupt growth hormone (GH) release or actions."

It only takes one small group within one species to generate a self-replicating probe, at which point all of the galaxy is visited in a few million years.

A solution to the Fermi Paradox has to explain why that event has never happened despite the fact that some element of our species will do exactly this at some point in the next thousand years. The laws of physics allow it, and our psychology is clearly up for it.

All of these positions should be challenged.

The natural world changes constantly, even absent humanity. The natural state of predator-prey relationships is not stasis, the natural state of bacterial evolution and disease is definitely not stasis, and neither is the natural population or experience of individuals of a species in any given geographical area.

Further, and more importantly, the natural world is a state of constant, terrible suffering. Everything that can suffer does. Things that would make you flinch if they happened to your pets happen to animals everywhere, constantly. Pain, death, disease. The ethical future is one in which all of that suffering is removed, and the entire natural world replaced in order to enable that removal. Where naturally evolved machines without capacity to suffer cause suffering they should be removed, replaced, or altered: plants, fungi, viruses, bacteria, other free-roaming cellular organisms. Where higher organisms suffer they should be placed into managed environments where they can be protected while living as they would in the natural world, and where that life involved inflicting pain, they can inflict it on machine simulations that cannot feel.

We should not be looking to let things remain the same, or create areas where the horrors of nature continue unmolested. That is a repulsive and unethical position: requiring countless living beings capable of pain and suffering to undergo terrible experiences just because it makes you feel good.

The sooner we live in a completely unnatural world, the better. But I think a culture that is fine with the mass farming of animals for food and materials is a culture that is unlikely to buy the concept of eliminating nature in order to eliminate suffering. As a species we still have a lot of growing up to do in order to reach a bare minimum state of ethics worthy of the name.

https://www.exratione.com/2013/12/considering-speed-and-slow...

My impression is that Angular-specific issues are way more important than pure Javascript speed concerns in terms of relative impact on an application. Number of watchers and ng-repeat declarations are the most important aspect of an AngularJS application.

It is a fascinating statement on the human condition that research for medical methods of treatment that do not require a patient to try to alter their lifestyle or calorie intake receives so very much funding in comparison to, say, meaningful research into aging, or any one of hundreds of medical conditions in which the patient has absolutely no choice in the matter.

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13887909

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis

http://www.senescence.info/evolution_of_aging.html

http://longevity-science.org/Evolution.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_ageing

Group selection isn't as dead as you might think; I've seen it show up in a number of places in evolutionary considerations of aging over the years. But then the field of aging as a whole is very reluctant to let go of any of its hypotheses.

Insofar as there is any consensus on the evolutionary reasons for aging in multicellular organisms, it is along the lines of aging providing a necessary state of life history to provide a selection advantage in conditions of environmental change. Functionally immortal or at least negligibly senescent species clearly can exist, as there are some in the wild at present, but in near every niche that life history option has been outcompeted by aging species. Here is one expression of that idea, which again you'll see is veering into group selection:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4649

"Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will propose a model for aging based on assumptions that are compatible with evolutionary theory: i) competition is between individuals; ii) there is some degree of locality, so quite often competition will between parents and their progeny; iii) optimal conditions are not stationary, mutation helps each species to keep competitive. When conditions change, a senescent species can drive immortal competitors to extinction. This counter-intuitive result arises from the pruning caused by the death of elder individuals. When there is change and mutation, each generation is slightly better adapted to the new conditions, but some older individuals survive by random chance. Senescence can eliminate those from the genetic pool. Even though individual selection forces always win over group selection ones, it is not exactly the individual that is selected, but its lineage. While senescence damages the individuals and has an evolutionary cost, it has a benefit of its own. It allows each lineage to adapt faster to changing conditions. We age because the world changes."

Programmed aging is, however, a minority view in the aging research community as a whole. The consensus view is that aging is caused by an accumulation of unrepaired damage, though there are many factions and a lot of debate within that tent. Programmed aging seems to be gaining some ground, but it's rather hard to tell from the sidelines as some of the advocates (e.g. Blagosklonny and his views on mTOR) are very prolific in their publications.

Hormesis as a phenomenon to be measured and evaluated can stand apart from either of these views on aging for the purposes of evaluation and investigation of molecular mechanisms. It is a robustly demonstrated thing in animal models, though as for all these things translating those findings into human health is ever a challenge. For things like calorie restriction, exercise, and intermittent fasting, where hormesis is thought to play an important role, the human and rodent responses in the short term are very similar. There is a small mountain of papers on this topic - just go look at PubMed and search for hormesis and longevity.

Hormesis works because some forms of damage - such as mild oxidative stress - trigger repair responses that last long enough and are proficient enough to produce a net benefit in cell health throughout tissues. There is a dose-response curve to all of this of course. This is may be how you get a variety longevity mutants in nematode worms wherein they live longer if you either reduce or increase the flux of reactive oxygen species emitted from the mitochondria. Less means less damage and more means less damage because it produces more aggressive repair.

There are plenty of ways to damage tissue that will cause incremental damage over time, but are not hormetic, and will not produce benefits. It all depends on how the repair mechanisms handle the specific case in question.

As late as the 1940s it might have been argued that we lived in a world in the process of an exponential growth in power: storage, transmission, application, availability, falling costs. At the same time few people then saw the information revolution ahead. The high power/low computation path expected was an E.E. 'Doc' Smith future of slide rules and hand calculators contemporary with fantastical applications of raw power generation. But it turned out to be much harder than envisaged to keep that trend going for a variety of reasons good and bad.

If we'd got the power future instead of the computation future we'd all have a life expectancy much the same as it was in the 1940s, but be living in a transhuman world where $100 buys you the output of a pair of today's power stations that can be cached in your clothing. It is somewhat interesting to speculate just what would be done with that level of power in relation to practical, day-to-day concerns, but getting into orbit and about across the solar system is the least of it.

Anyway, we got the computational future because it turns out that making that happen is much easier - and probably for the best given that computation drives medicine, not power.