Start Here
A curated path through a decade of writing on software, philosophy, and the spaces between.
The Ironist (Gen-Z) and the Ground
! They are the same man. Twenty-four. Same apartment with the same blue light from the same screen at 1 AM. Same job he doesn’t hate but can’t take seriously — content operations at a company that makes software for other companies that make so...
What If the Thing You’re Protecting Yourself From Is the Only Thing That Can Save You?
I decided to ask Claude to embark on the project I’ve been doing here with no direction from me other than asking it to read these essays. This is Claude’s take on the modern problem. ! There is a single crisis underlying the many crises, and ...
Nine Months, Two Men
They are the same man. Same wife, same two boys, same memory of blood on linoleum and a doctor’s voice gone flat. Same moment eighteen months later when she holds up the test and her eyes are half-joy, half-terror. Same kitchen. Same light throu...
The Gaze
! Every generation builds a self to survive the judgment that destroyed the last one. This is the hidden engine of the last eighty years of Western identity: not progress, not liberation, not even decline — but fear. Specifically, the fear of ...
The Cage and the Argument About Its Curtains
! --- There is a feeling most people have about politics that they cannot quite name. It is not the feeling that their side is losing, though they may have that feeling too. It is the feeling that the entire argument is _about the wrong thing....
The Invisible Right: On What Becomes Synonymous With Reality
! ## I. The Asymmetry There is an obvious asymmetry in how we perceive political colonization. The left is easy to see. It operates as a _program_ — with institutions, a lexicon, credentialing systems, and explicit goals. You can point at a D...
What Holds You
! Still a work in progress but rather good either way. --- There is a problem with everything I have written so far, and it is this: I have been showing you the cage from the inside, one wall at a time, without ever stepping back far enough t...
The Lamb, Part II
--- Here’s the thing about the ground that nobody tells you. The ground doesn’t let you stay. --- For eleven months I washed plates. I held cantaloupes. I let the project manager shuffle his papers in his little corner and I breathed and the...
The Lamb
The first rule of what happened to me is I can’t make you understand it. The second rule of what happened to me is I _can’t make you understand it_. --- For three years I was the guy. You know the guy. Shaved head. Heavy bag in the garage. Co...
Tyler Durden: How They Broke You
! Look at you. Sitting there with your oat milk and your anxiety diagnosis and your therapist’s number saved as a favorite contact. You’ve got a $200-an-hour professional listener, a medicine cabinet that rattles when you walk past it, and an i...
Meaning at the Boundary
! If all we have is a collection of text in a language we do not understand, can we derive its meaning? Imagine a clay tablet covered in writing, sealed in a cave for three thousand years. No Rosetta Stone, no bilingual dictionary, no survivin...
Mystical Meaning
Part 1 provided a technical analysis of meaning. Here we dive into the lived experience of meaning. ## **VI. The Ground Beneath Meaning** In the early fourteenth century, a Dominican friar named Meister Eckhart was saying something remarkably ...
The Executive Function Curriculum Problem
! > I’m busy trying to choose a school for our oldest. “Executive Function” courses seem to be all the rage right now. But.. why? On what basis? Are they any good? > > A head of school told me they “follow the research” on school curriculu...
Education Cannot Save Us
! This is the abyss that education cannot cross. You can teach someone the arguments for equality. But someone else can teach the arguments for hierarchy—and reason alone cannot adjudicate between them. You can teach compassion as the highest v...
Malcom X on Kendi, DiAngelo and the DEI Complex
! They have done it again. They have found a way to make you kneel and convinced you it is standing. They have taught you to beg and called it justice. They have put chains on your mind heavier than any that ever bound your ancestors’ wrists—a...
The Secret Every Political Philosophy Shares
! Every political philosophy is a containment theory masquerading as a liberation theory. This is the thing none of them say out loud. They speak of freedom, emancipation, rights, autonomy, the good life. But underneath every vision of the goo...
The Body as Ground
! ### The Given Body and the Colonized Body The ancients did not need a philosophy of the body because they had bodies that functioned. Their material conditions — real food, physical labor, darkness at night, silence as the default — produced...
Manufacturing Luck
export function IntroArticle() { const [expanded, setExpanded] = useState(true); return ( setExpanded(!expanded)} className="w-full px-6 py-4 flex items-center justify-between text-left hover:bg-gray-800/80 transition-c...
What Would Marx Say Today?
! # The Specter of the Credentialed ## A Critique of the Professional-Managerial Class --- A specter is haunting the left—the specter of its own class interest. All the powers of the old critique have entered into a holy alliance to avoid t...
The Table
! ## Chapter 1 — The Ground We arrive now at the beginning that never began. Before your mother named you. Before the schools sorted you. Before the feed told you who to hate and who to want to be. The spark was there. It is the ground of yo...
The ICE Protest That Changes Nothing
! > The machine does not care which slogan you chant. It only cares that you keep asking it to solve your problems. Every protest that demands state action—whether “more enforcement” or “no enforcement”—is a petition to the machine. You are ask...
The Machine That Eats the World
! ## I. What Has Already Happened You need to see this clearly before we go any further. In February 2022, the Canadian government froze the bank accounts of people who had donated to a trucker protest. Not just the protesters—the _donors_. P...
Grammar as Alignment: The World Economic Forum
! _This essay extends the analysis in “The Language That Thinks For You.” Readers unfamiliar with grammar-as-alignment should read that essay first._ --- ## I. The Davos Puzzle The World Economic Forum presents a puzzle. Its critics cast it ...
Grammar Rules All
! > Why do people in similar social positions tend to have similar values? > > … > > They’ve absorbed the same grammar. Same grammar, same menu. Same menu, same available values. Similar “choices” from similar menus create the appearance of c...
The Language That Thinks For You
! > The political implications are significant. If half the country speaks therapy grammar and half speaks traditional moral grammar, and each grammar marks the other as pathological, then political discourse isn’t difficult — it’s _impossible_...
To My Friends on the Left: A Difficult Reckoning
! ## On the Bubble We Built and the Storm It Summoned There comes a time in the life of every movement when it must look upon its works with clear eyes—not the eyes of its enemies, who will always see the worst, nor the eyes of its partisans, ...
The Physicians of Decay
! ## **Part One: The French Inheritance** **1.** I warned you. I told you what was coming. The death of God was not a liberation—it was a murder, and the murderers would spend centuries pretending they had merely discovered a corpse. **2.** ...
The Return
! # Part I — The Clearing ## I. The Beginning In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word held all things together. Men built cathedrals they would not see completed. They planted vineyards they would n...
The Fence You Cannot See
! There is a certain intellectual posture that has become fashionable, particularly among the educated young. It holds that the structures we’ve inherited—moral codes, family forms, sexual ethics, sacred boundaries, gender itself—are merely “so...
The Ideological Trap for the Left
! In early January 2026, two events on opposite sides of the world converged to expose a structural crisis in left-liberal political thought. On January 3rd, U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in a nighttime raid on...
The Violence You Fear May Be the Violence You’re Creating
! You’re scared. That’s understandable. You see Trump rallies, hear inflammatory rhetoric, watch footage of January 6th on repeat. You’ve concluded that roughly half the country has embraced political violence as a legitimate tool. You believe ...
We Can Capture Our Way Out
The climate debate suffers from a failure of imagination about scale. Critics of carbon capture argue it cannot possibly scale to meet the challenge. Defeatists argue the problem is simply too large. Both are wrong. This essay makes a simple cl...
Principalities and Powers
! ### I. The Passage > For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. > > — Ephesians 6:12 We moderns rea...
The Economy of Refusal
! You cannot resist alone. This is the first and most important thing to understand about the principalities. They are structures, and structures can only be resisted by structures. An individual who refuses — who declines the ritual, who will...
The Epistle to the Managed
! ## Chapter 1 ¹ To those who dwell in the latter days, when the old tyrannies have passed away and new ones have arisen in forms that cannot be seen: Grace and clarity be unto you. ² For there were tyrants in the days of your fathers, and th...
The New Lords
### I. The Parallel Confusion On the left, the terms blur: liberal, leftist, progressive, woke. Each accuses the other of misuse. The confusion serves the thing itself. On the right, the same fog descends: conservative, nationalist, populist, ...
The Recurring Pattern: Left-Islamist Alliances and the Triumph of Islam
## Introduction: The Structural Logic of Temporary Alliance The observation that leftist and Islamist movements form tactical alliances—only for the Islamists to subsequently destroy the left once power is consolidated—represents one of the mos...
Debugging the Confusion: Liberalism vs Leftism
### I. The Confusion They will tell you: “That is not leftism. What you describe is liberalism.” They will tell you: “That is not liberalism. What you describe is leftism.” They will tell you anything to avoid the question: _what is it?_ The...
The Exhaustion That Cannot Rest
! > This is the riddle I place before you: a weariness that _forbids rest_. A depletion that _demands more_. A sickness that has made recovery itself into a symptom of the disease. ## I. They are tired—have you not noticed? Look at them: thei...
The Socialists' Convenient Blindness
! **§1** They say: “Capitalism breeds imperialism” — as if Alexander wept for new worlds to _invest_ in! As if Rome’s legions marched for _shareholder value_! The socialist, that magnificent accountant of suffering, has discovered that exploit...
Diagnosing "White Guilt"
! > The white liberal has built Hell, moved into it voluntarily and called it _enlightenment_. ## I. The Spectacle of Self-Flagellation You have seen the rituals. Perhaps you have performed them. The white woman weeping at the diversity trai...
Leftism Is Worse Than Fascism
! > ‘leftism’ - the institutional moral regime that converts compassion into administrative control and dissent into pathology. > _There was some pushback on the use of “leftism” vs “liberalism.” The terminology is fully explored here:_ # Pre...
Pathologies of Eastern Secularism
“Why Secularism in the West Became Pathological” dealt with pathologies arising from a secularism with a Christian inheritance. Here we explore the pathologies arising from a secularism with a Buddhist inheritance. **Quietism and Political With...
The Epistemology of Impotence: How Identity Politics Guarantees Its Own Failure
! ## I. The Paradox The contemporary American left presents a curious puzzle: culturally omnipresent yet politically feeble. It dominates universities, media, corporate HR departments, and the language of public discourse—yet it cannot win ele...
The Theological Structure of Secular Progressivism
! # Abstract This essay argues that contemporary progressive politics, particularly among white liberals in the United States, operates according to a fundamentally Christian moral psychology that persists despite—and perhaps because of—the ab...
Diagnosing "Trauma Culture"
! > So you will read this and feel attacked. You will say it is cruel, that it lacks compassion, that it does not understand. You will retreat further into the vocabulary of wounds—this very essay is a harm, a violence, a failure to validate. >...
Trauma Culture + White Guilt = Checkmate
! > _The people with moral authority to speak cannot be questioned, and the people who might question have no moral authority to speak._ I’ve diagnosed Trauma Culture and White Guilt. What does their combination yield? **The Division of Labor...
Pathologies of Western Secularism
! Why has secularism in the West devolved into pathology? Embracing authoritarianism, identity politics, voting against one’s own interests, public shaming & cancel culture, virtue signaling, tribal warfare, constantly looking for scapegoats, c...
The Amplifier Theory of Human Hierarchy
Human beings possess competing dispositions: a drive toward dominance and a drive to resist domination by others. In a “fair fight” (without external leverage) the collective can suppress would-be dominators, producing egalitarian social arrange...
The Laboratory of the Human: Shakespeare as Knowledge
!15 top Shakespeare facts! | National Geographic Kids My younger self was obsessed with rationalistic and scientific outlooks. Viewing literature, music, painting with indifference and contempt. If only someone had presented my younger self wit...
The Incomplete God: Why Science Cannot Ground Itself
! ## The Dream of Total Knowledge The most ambitious vision of modernity is not merely that science is useful, or even that it is our best method for understanding nature. It is that science is, in principle, _the only_ legitimate form of know...
The Liquefaction of Being: Materialism, Technology, and the Dissolution of the Self
! In earlier essays I traced the education system and the kind of person it produces (an employable subject for “liquid modernity”) and materialism’s effect on human psychology (depression, loneliness, anxiety). This essay tries to answer which...
What Modernity Needs: A Return to Polytheism
! ## Introduction: The Shape of a Solution The first essay traced the genealogy of our crisis—how the technological-materialist worldview reduced being to standing reserve and made liquid modernity possible. The second essay presented the evid...
Summarizing - 19-12-2025
I’ve been exploring how power pulls the levers. My intellectual (and software development) style is to explore as much territory as fast as possible then to come back to tighten, polish, pressure test, scale up and fill in the details. To that e...
Countering Materialism
! Related: - Materialism is Killing You There is a counter-tradition in Western thought—a line of thinkers who resisted the materialist reduction before it became the water we swim in. Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Simone Weil. You...
How Power Uses Mass Education and Literature
## **Introduction: The Myth of Neutral Schooling** We tend to think of education as a natural good—a neutral process by which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. Children learn to read; they absorb facts about the world; they deve...
The Employable Subject
! Related posts: - How Power Uses Mass Education and Literature - How Power Chose Materialism - Materialism Is Killing You ## I. The Question Education is never merely transmission. Someone decides what counts as knowled...
When Equations See What Eyes Cannot
! There is something almost scandalous about the history of physics. Time and again, a mathematician or physicist sits down with pencil and paper, manipulates symbols according to abstract rules, and discovers something about the universe that ...
Materialism Is Killing You
! You pride yourself on not being fooled. You rejected the superstitions your ancestors believed. You follow the evidence. You think in terms of mechanisms, incentives, selection pressures. You are a rationalist. Good. Let’s be rational. Let’...
From Galilee to Empire: The Institutional Capture of Christianity
!Major Events in the Life of Constantine I | Britannica ## Part I: The Original Fire The Jesus movement began as something genuinely dangerous to power. Not dangerous in the way Rome feared—there were no armies, no territorial claims—but dange...
The Alchemy of Power
! There’s a pattern that repeats across civilizations, across millennia, across traditions that share almost nothing in common except this: **spiritual breakthroughs get stabilized, standardized, and captured by power.** This isn’t a conspirac...
The Battlefield of Attention
! _On the terrifying clarity of people who understood that empires demand everything, and that what we look at, we become_ --- ## I. The Question Under the Symbols The Book of Revelation is wild. Multi-headed beasts rising from the sea. A wo...
Why Power Chose Materialism—and What Was Lost
! There is a question that hovers at the edge of respectable discourse, asked in whispers by those who sense something has been taken from them but cannot name it: _Was the disenchantment of the world an accident, or was it useful to someone?_ ...
Secularized Worship
! _On how the pattern of Revelation—systems demanding total allegiance and reshaping their servants—reappears across political ideologies and corporate cultures_ Related: - **The Battlefield of Attention:** What the Ancients Knew About Wors...
The Two Filters: Why Reasonable Ideas Die
! We are taught that good ideas win. That truth, once articulated, spreads naturally—that reason prevails, that justice rises, that the arc of history bends. This is a comforting myth. It is also, as a matter of historical record, false. Ideas...
Know Thyself: No Self
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self - Pt 5: Through What? - Pt 6: The Kingdom Within > _“The fish trap exists bec...
Know Thyself: The Kingdom Within
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self - Pt 5: Through What? - Pt 6: The Kingdom Within > _“The kingdom of the Fathe...
Know Thyself: Through What?
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self - Pt 5: Through What? - Pt 6: The Kingdom Within > _“Whereof one cannot speak...
Meta Summary - 17-12-2025
I’m re-reading The Great Books of the Western World with a focus on: - geo-theological | “How does power work” - Riding the religious and cultural waves - geo-theological | “How do religion, economics, science, geography...
The Invention of the Confessing Animal
! **tldr**: confession makes the subject legible. A legible subject is a governable subject. Confession served the interest of power. While spiritual traditions do provide truth, they are also co-opted by power. Related posts: - Know Thyse...
Know Thyself: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart
- Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self ## Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, and Eckhart on the Self > _“Man has no individual I. But there are...
Burnout is a Modern Invention
I argue that burnout is a symptom of today’s moralizing of labor. Something new, not experienced in prior centuries. > ...No one forces her to live this way. Her employer doesn’t chain her to her desk. If anything, HR sends emails about “work-l...
Know Thyself: Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self > _“The one who sees that suffering arises and passes away has seen all of reality.”_ — Sam...
Know Thyself: Greek vs Christian
! - Pt 1: Greek vs Christian - Pt 2: Buddhist vs Confucian vs Hindu - Pt 3: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - Pt 4: No Self > _“I have become a question to myself.”_ — Augustine, _Confessions_ X.33 Knowing yourself...
Making Sense of US-Ukraine Negotations
Trump withholds aid, berates Zelensky, negotiates with Putin first, praises Putin (see “Why Christian Russia is a Fantasy” on this point). Is the US aligning with Russia? # **I. “The U.S. aligning with Russia” is not what’s happening** Even wh...
Structure, Not Vibes: The Real State of the World
If you scroll through X (formerly Twitter) or watch cable news, the world looks like a chaotic clash of ideologies: Woke vs. Anti-Woke, Globalist vs. Nationalist, Liberal vs. Traditional. But if you zoom out and look at the **hard structure**—g...
The Vulnerability Principle
The political-legal jeopardy faced by a powerful political figure, such as Donald Trump, is often analyzed purely in terms of the individual’s survival. However, a deeper, game-theoretic analysis reveals that such vulnerability fundamentally alt...
Trump's Techno-Fetish
!Commission building ('the Berlaymont building') in Brussels - CVCE Website --- As TechLeadHD says, the only export the EU has is regulations. These regulations are a massive burden on US tech companies. Trump vowed to protect US companies. Tr...
Why Cultures Differentiate
! Geography creates a set of challenges for a people to manage. Each challenge requires a specific system to solve it. Each system requires a specific kind of people to uphold it. Centuries later, we see the results in different cultures. Put ...
🕊️ The Architecture of Harm: How Modern Secular Ideologies Recapitulate Religious Logic
The 20th and 21st centuries have been characterized by the rise of powerful, ostensibly "rational" or "scientific" ideologies—Marxism, Liberalism, Technocracy, and Nationalism. These systems explicitly rejected traditional religious authority, p...
From Calvinism to Capitalism
Picture this as a kind of long historical drama, with one central “spell” spreading through Europe: > God calls you personally. > Your whole life must prove that calling. > The surest proof is restless, disciplined work. That spell begins with...
The Husk of God: Why Atheists Think in Christian
> *God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we must still defeat his shadow as well!* > > — Friedrich Nietzsche, *The Gay Science* (1882) Most atheists ...
Indigenous Slavery, Conquest, and Child Soldiers: Primary Source Documentation
## Research Objective This document compiles primary source documentation supporting the thesis that **violence permeates all cultures and none is above another**, focusing on slavery, conquest, human sacrifice, and child soldiers as perpetrated...
Voices from Below: Primary Sources and the Evolution of Peasant Uprisings
Peasant uprisings represent arguably the dominant form of class-based conflict in pre-industrial and early industrial societies, yet they raise a persistent question: to what extent are these rebellions genuine popular explosions, and to what ex...
Why Marxism Is Impossible Without Christian Eschatology
### I. The Strangest Lineage in Intellectual History If you were to ask a standard Marxist theoretician about the origins of their worldview, they would likely point you toward the Enlightenment. They would cite the materialism of Feuerbach, th...
Monstrous Doubles: René Girard and the Mimetic Inheritance of Religious Structure
## Preface: A Theory for Our Moment Watch American politics long enough and a strange pattern emerges. Democrats and Republicans each claim to defend victims against persecutors. Each accuses the other of being "fascists" or "authoritarians." E...
The Secular Eschaton: Christianity's Structural Inheritance in Marxist Thought and Practice
## Abstract This essay argues that Marxism, despite its explicit atheism and critique of religion, structurally replicates the narrative patterns, institutional forms, moral grammar, and social practices of Christianity. Drawing on the work of...
State of the Union
(written by Claude) A decade of writing here has circled the same drain: **understanding as liberation**. Whether it's understanding the false equivalence of volatility and risk, why Lamport clocks suffice for LWW registers, or how monotheism s...
Paul and Roman conspiracy
Paul conspired with Romans to organize and spread Christianity?
Monotheism to Now
Monotheism has created an obsessive focus for singular explanations. Grand unifying forces. One-ness. A removal of distinctions and thus a removal of thought and judgment. A multiculturalism that is an abdication of definition and drunkenness. ...
AI impact on labor
the exponential of ai + robotics means there is soon to be no need for human labor. Company values presumably stick around if those companies turn ove
2k years Christianity
summarize "the fear of falling: the inner life of the middle class"
Girard's scapegoat mechanism
explain girard's scape-goat mechanism and give examples
Summarize fear of falling
summarize "the fear of falling: the inner life of the middle class"
Adding a Chats Section to My Blog
A conversation with Claude about setting up a new section to document interesting LLM chats
Epistemic humility discussion
The common sense perspective. Nobody knows why we're here. If they did it would require them receiving some special revelation or having reasoned it a
The Consistent Man
Part 1 of the Mirror Room Collection. A rational identity.
The Mirror Room
Part 2 of the Mirror Room Collection. A mystic identity.
The Paradox of Becoming
Part 4 of the Mirror Room Collection. Choice as primary.
The Reader's Crisis
Part 5 of the Mirror Room Collection. A 21st century leftish critique.
scratch
- The solution. Gurdjieff provides practical instruction. Sees all the traps. Calls out that we cannot do this alone. - Gurdjieff framework for picking values? - The meta-observation: almost like the point of life is as a moral test. That anyt...
Observations on the Sleep of Seekers
Draft. Practical advice in response to The Mirror Room collection.
The Mirror Room Collection - Audiobook
Please read the print version. The audiobook is currently many revision behind.
The Meeting
Part 3 of the Mirror Room Collection. The Identities Meet.
The Mirror Room Collection
A collection of short stories about identity and becoming.
David Graeber The Utopia Of Rules
## I. An Awkward Confession from Beyond the Grave Look, this is embarrassing. I spent my whole career arguing that another world is possible. I marshaled evidence from anthropology, from history, from the forgotten corners of human experience,...
Financial Power And Imperial Rule
# I. Introduction: The Nature of Financial Power Financial power, in its most consequential form, is not merely the possession of wealth. It is the capacity to _mobilize other people’s purchasing power at scale_\-cheaply, reliably, and across b...
Resurrecting Ted Kaczynski
# The Psychology of the Therapeutic-Managerial System ## An Analysis of Liberal Control Mechanisms in Post-Industrial Society --- ### Introduction 1. In our previous work we analyzed the psychological foundations of modern leftism and its r...
The Architecture Of Meaning A Deeper
## For Those Who Have Seen This essay assumes you have already accepted what the counter-tradition has shown: that materialism, whatever its utility for science and technology, fails as an account of human existence. It cannot generate meaning,...
The Capture Of American Power Peter
! ## **Introduction: A New Class of Elite** Something shifted in the topology of American power over the past decade. The Epstein-class elite—figures whose influence derived from finance, institutional access, and the murky leverage of comprom...
The Letter To The Therapeutics
1. To those who labor in the work that has no end, who tend the wound that must not heal, who confess and are not forgiven: Grace and peace from no one. 2. For I see your striving, and it is without rest. I see your vigilance, and it has ...
You Are Not Your Diagnosis
Look at you. Look at all of you. You were supposed to be the generation that changed everything. You have the entire accumulated knowledge of the human species in your pocket and you’re using it to figure out which mental illness makes you spec...
Meta / Facebook - How a graph model can scale your relational DBs
Did you know that still, to this day, the majority of Meta's data needs are serviced by MySQL? There is a caching layer atop it (called TAO) that services all queries, sending requests to MySQL only on a cache miss but what enabled TAO and MySQ...
Lamport Clock 🕥
The Lamport clock was originally described in 1978 in the paper "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System". It is a logical clock that was created as a way to order events in a distributed system. Why not use wall/physic...
Do LWW Registers Need Vector Clocks or Causal Graphs? 💭
Short answer: No. When it comes to a LWW register, Lamport clocks offer all the guarantees we need. Guarantees provided by other clock types are discarded during the merge phase of LWW. A last write wins register is a register where the "last" ...
Why SQLite? Why Now? 🐇
I've been sucked down a `sqlite` rabbithole and I'm all-in on it. So why `SQLite`? And why now? For me, its about re-architecting how we write code so it can fit the coming world of edge, distributed and local-first computing. In one way, `sq...
You'll always have a body
> Prompted after reading https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf and https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-make-the-universe-think-for-us-20220531/ Sorry to break the news but even when you figure out how to upload your consciousness to ...
📚 Not Machine Readable?
Was watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHblHPLoKKE&t=139s and this dawned on me. When we say "something isn't machine readable" we're not speaking accurately. What we really mean is that the content is not readable for the way that progra...
🧶 HTML, CSS & JS. All mixed up together. This time it's different.
From time to time I run across people decrying the current state of web development with words like: > We've gone completely backwards! We've gone from separating our structure, style and logic to putting them all into the same file! inline sty...
🪨 Chunk Iterable
Today I'll be discussing the `Chunk Iterable Framework`. This is a core component of Aphrodite and is used to speed up the processing of data returned by queries. The main idea behind a chunk iterable is to be able to iterate over some source o...
⛓ Query Builder
Aphrodite generates rich and type safe query builders (example) from your schemas. The query builders not only query for nodes of a given type but also traverse edges, apply filters, do pagination and more. As an example, we can traverse from ...
💨 Query Plan Optimization
This is the third part in a deep dive into Aphrodite's query layer. - [[2022-05-26-query-builder:Part 1]] we talked about the query builder - [[2022-05-26-query-planning:Part 2]] covered query plans Now we'll cover how we optimize query plans...
📝 Query Planning
# Review Previously we discussed the query builder. To recap, when a user interacts with the query builder a linked list of queries is built up behind the scenes. Eaech query in the list holds a reference to the prior query and an expression ...
📀 Large Local Storage
Way way back in 2013 there wasn't a common way to save large blobs in all browser. Back then, all of these were true: * DOMStorage only gives you 5mb * Chrome doesn't let you store blobs in IndexedDB * Safari doesn't support IndexedDB, * IE and...
😌 Simple MDX
> tldr; skip to full sample code So you want to deploy a site that uses `MDX`? Outside of using Nextjs, this process is much more difficult than it aught to be. Technically we don't even need to mess with `mdx-bundler` (see Building Wit...
🧶 Skipping the Bundling
We're in the era of ES6 modules, esm.sh and Typescript. Do you _really_ need to spin up that webpack/snowpack/rollup/vite/parcel/_insert other bundler here_ for your small scale project? I think not. These days, module management is built righ...
🧚♂️ Past, Present, Future - Doing for Others
Our current state of affairs is almost entirely determined by those who came before us. What institutions they created, what they've invented, what infrastructure & dwellings they've built, how they've spent the resources of the society, how the...
🧟♂️ Memes & Themes - 1619 Project
Coincidentally I came across all of these three things below around the same time This was a good critique, from 2010: “why Avater is a truly dangerous film” https://t.co/5ZeJIWndG8— Kent William Innholt (@oerhoert) April 23, 2022 ...
📦 Your One Package Might Be Two
When creating a software package (or module or bundle, pick your term) for others to reuse, there's often a _second_ package in the package that developers overlook. The second package is the _interface_ package. I.e., the interface that overl...
🌅 Expressing Early Fetches - React
draft post-- Fetching early is difficult to express and get right in all places in React. This is because a lack of domain models. That everything is anemic. That we've moved business logic into display. Render-as-you-fetch rather than fetch-...
🧶 Improving Code Sharing with Yarn Workspaces
Sharing code between `JavaScript` & `TypeScript` projects has always been more trouble than it should be. Say you create a common library and you want to use it in `N > 1` of your other projects. You could publish it to `NPM` and install it li...
🌈 Understanding Color by Writing a Color Picker
@import url("/blog-assets/color-picker-from-scratch/color-field.css"); > "Programmers re-invent the wheel so they can understand how the wheel works" - unknown Why write a color picker from scratch? To understand color theory better and to...
👀 Observability Driven Development
One of the things I learned quickly while working on large scale systems at `Facebook (Meta)` was that if your tests passed but you didn't observe your system in production, you had no idea whether or not your system was actually behaving as int...
👀 Vision
After ~8 years working at Meta and ~15 years professionally programming post college, I'm departing the workforce to puruse my own ideas full time. ## Vision 1 > **Create software to help people think more deeply.** > Creating assisted memor...
👨💻 URLs As Display Data
I've been toying with the idea that we get something wrong when it comes to URL management and routing in single page applications (SPAs). The current state of the art in SPAs is to let the URL (the route) drive application logic. We do this by...
☢️ Reacting Better - Deeply Nested Update Problem
Something irks me about React. It's how inefficiently it handles deeply nested updates. React apps, like any app, will have a display hierarchy of deeply nested components. The root component being the entrypoint of the app, the leaves being t...
👐 American Spirit
> Note -- I just finished reading "Beyond Good and Evil" and was curious what something of that nature would read like if Nietzsche wrote it today. Below is that reproduction of that (me channeling my conception of Nietzsche) and not an expressi...
🧮 No, Mathematical Government is not a Logical Government
Listening to Freakonomics s11e16 there was some commentary about "if the world was run by mathematicians it'd be so logical." What an absurd statement. I'll just focus on two ways this is wrong. The first is that mathematics is irrational thro...
⛵️ Reference Equality - What is it Really?
In programming we're met with things that are completely new. Even though they're new, they're familiar enough to grasp with existing concepts. This converting the new to something familiar helps us to understand things at one level but if the ...
🧬 Missing Mutation Primitives
I’ve been developing apps for the past ~8 years that use immutable data models. For the ~7 years prior to that, using a combination of mutable, immutable and lock-free data structures. Immutable models solve endless numbers of problems but what...
Reacting Better. Intro: Anemic Models
React eschews models that have any attached functionality. The “model” for a react app is usually anemic — just a bare set of properties with no methods attached. ```typescript type Slide = { selected: boolean; embeds: Embed[]; text: stri...
Understanding Generics
```js function identity(x: T): T; ``` What is the essence of a generic? > Generics are for the **caller** rather than for what is being called. They allow the **caller** to retain type information. To retain information about types given to wh...
What if Religion is last?
The popular view of religion is as being the first development of a civilization. The thing that predates a people before they discover reason & science. What if we thought of it instead as the culmination of a civilation? A civilization's peak...
Nicolas Cage is Creating a new Movie Genre
Not many people realize this but Nicolas Cage is slowly but surely carving out and defining a whole new genre of trippy and artistic horror movies. Is he doing this intentionally or acidentally? One word to describe it? Purple. ...
Pi Cloud
With services like `Herkou`, `AWS`, `Azure` and `Google Cloud`, creating and managing your own cloud architecture may be a dying art. Some might accuse me of showing my age, like professors of old who swore that their students must learn `C` and...
The Shortest, Framework Free, TODO App
@import url("/blog-assets/todo-mvc/base.css"); @import url("/blog-assets/todo-mvc/todo.css"); **A TodoMVC App in ~200 lines of plain JavaScript and 0 dependencies.** Source: ```js const tempEl = document.createElement('div'); const ...
Reactive Markdown
@import url("/blog-assets/reactive-markdown/main.css"); Many of my blog posts contain interactive demos or content that is generated via `JavaScript`. The prose of my posts, however, is written in `Markdown`. Shuttling data back and forth f...
Volatility isn't Risk
@import url("/blog-assets/volatility-is-not-risk/style.css"); The biggest lie in investing is that volatiliy = risk. This is bogus. It misses the point of risk. Risk is about the chance of losing your principal in an investment. Volatility...
Regression to the Mean & the Gambler's Fallacy - Simulated
@import url("/blog-assets/regression-mean-vs-gambler.css"); Jump to the simulation There are two seemingly contradictory findings in statistics which apply to independent events: 1. Regression to the Mean 2. The Gambler's Fallacy **Regre...
Understanding False Positive Rate
@import url("/blog-assets/false-positive-rate.css"); Jump to the simulation Throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the most distressing thing has been the cherry picking of statistics. Things have gotten better. Cases, deaths, and hospita...
Filter, Map, etc. vs For Each & While
I've run into the occasional programmer that finds the functional way of transforming collections (`map`, `filter`, `reduce`, `zip`, `pull`, etc.) harder to understand than the imperative style of `for`, `while` and `for-each` loops. I.e., ```...
All Things are Permitted
Its been said that _"if there is no God then all things are permitted."_ Well, that's why we have laws. Precisely because all things _are_ permitted (by nature). Murder, adultery, theft, war, etc. All of these things happen and are able to happ...
Non Conceptual Definitions
Philopsophers often question what is "art" or "love" or other words for humanity has never had a solid definition. The quest to finding a general principle which can define these words is always admirable and bears much fruit (e.g., reading Hei...
These are not types
Is an **int** a type? A **float**? A **double**? These are **storage** types, not **application level** types. For many software projects, `int`, `float`, `double`, `string`, etc. exist at the wrong level of abstraction to be conidered proper ...
I am. You are?
When we describe how we're feeling we say "I am angry", "I am upset", "I am X" But you aren't _angry_ nor _upset_. You are feeling angry or upset. Describing emotions the way we currently do is incorrect in that it equates and identifies our sta...
Dangerous. Ideas.
"A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" How do yo interpret that? * Does that mean knowledge is power and even with a little bit one can become a dangerous advesary? * Or does it mean if you only know a little, rather than a lot, you a...
Typed Literals ARE Constants!
``` (option 1) display.setLayout(Layouts.FIXED); (option 2) display.setLayout('FIXED'); ``` # **Are both lines of code above using constants?** I keep getting push-back that the first line is better practice than the second line. When reviewer...
Practical Laziness in Programming
When I first heard about lazy evaluation I thought it was cool but not of much practical use. That is until I thought about it a bit harder. Laziness improves API design. I’ll illustrate with a program I wrote to convert Javadoc comments to JS...
The Almighty Function
> Objects are a poor man’s closures. Closures are a poor man’s objects. Some people say everything is an object. I used to too but these days I think everything is actually a function. 1. A map? Isn’t that just a function that maps from one va...
Oh Lisp
If you ever tell someone you like Lisp and that Lisp is a more suitable language for the work you are doing most of the time you’ll get weird looks and comments like: > “Isn’t that… old?” > > “All I know is that it has parenthesis everywhere.” ...
Inheritance, Aggregation, and Pipelines
How does one write software that can be extended? I think many developer’s first instinct is to set up some form of inheritance hierarchy. Inheritance is a step in the right direction but it is very restrictive. The problem with inheritance is...
Services and Coupling
Lines of code like: > PositionCalculator calc = new MercatorPositionCalculator(); (where **_PositionCalculator_** is an interface and **_MercatorPositionCalculator_** the implementation) have always bugged me and probably any other astute prog...