Modernism Re-enactors

The Amish are (sort of) re-enacting a previous era of technological development. It seems to be hard work.

Imagine that the people who idealize the 1950s were to build re-enactment towns where they would have picnics on gingham and hand-wash red Thunderbirds. Or that postmodernism re-enactors would rebuild historical Xerox machines for period-accurate zines in a reconstructed Olympia, Washington.

Two challenges to living in a world that is technological and yet far from the leading edge of technology: 1) finding replacement parts is a challenge, 2) everything is more expensive because of the lack of economies of scale. Both of these seem surmountable in a post-scarcity economy, where dexterous robots can craft one-off replacements parts for old Thunderbirds or Xerox machines.

Ramadan Mubarak

Ramadan Mubarak, y'all!

I have the app "Pillars" on my phone. Which today presented this (to me) bewildering offer to automate my Laylatul Qadr.

Here's all the different religious apps on my phone right now:

• Echo: a (Christian I think?) prayer app.
• Pillars: a Muslim prayer app (with cool features like a compass that points you to the Qibala).
• Hallow: a Catholic prayer app.
• Sefaria: a Jewish holy text reader.
• Quran: a Koran reader, with a mode where Mishray Al-Afasy will sing the verses to you.
• Bible: unfortunately doesn't sing aloud, but has a mode for making inspirational-poster style images with a verse on a stock photo background.

Firmware Liberation Party

 At the playground this evening, I saw a mom who looked marginally cooler than me, but she was wearing a t-shirt that said "Austin, Texas". Which is uncool, right? Wearing the band's t-shirt to their show.

As I was considering berating myself for not doing my part to keep Austin weird, I wondered what t-shirt I ought to be wearing. What would be cool? And my brain provided: "firmware". Lower-case, cryptic. As a band name, cool. Like "Floating Points". But somebody might think it's a startup. Uncool. So maybe make it punk? Firmware Liberation Now!

2025 in Preview

 I love that Blogspot is still here. Assuming that I find the time / motivation / focus, here's a list of things I'd like to write about in 2025.

• LLMs broadly, but particularly:
• tool use,
• chain-of-thought / inference-time-compute,
• organizational and business structures that include LLM agents,
• Tyler Cowen's "writing for the LLM" idea.
• AGI + society, as in:
• unemployment,
• decoupling of labor and capital,
• meaning and purpose,
• acceleration of robotics,
• what percentage of Americans will be a streamer or influencer in 30 years.
• Optimism
• the era of flash mobs, what was that all about,
• lucid dreams and Linklater,
• children's books,
• bespoke detritus,
• ceramic tiles,
• lifestyle prototyping,
• spaghetti noodles for throples
• water tower passport stamps,
• etc.

Diana says it's time to go to sleep.

Diana says: "Are you blogging again?"

As soon as a press this button I am!

Blogging Again?

Given that the last post on this blog was made in 2008, you might think I had forgotten about it entirely. I haven't forgotten. I want to write again.

Diana told me about 750words.com, and I gave it a try. I've typed out 750+ words every morning for that last 12 days. My joint pains and mental fog have decreased each day! I'm breaking through into a new realm of consciousness! Just kidding, but it has been nice.

I like the name of this blog, and I like the banner image that I made for it (seven years ago!). The name "shiftpop" sounds like a musical micro-genre, and also like an instruction in a stack-based programming language. In 2008 when I started this blog, I was at the apex of my cellular automata (the banner image) and non-mainstream programming languages (the blog name) phase.

I'm a bit nostalgic for that era, but I don't expect to write about either of those topics now. I do intend to write about technical issues, but I'm more likely to write about computer graphics and hardware verification.

PHP's strtotime

I generally think of PHP as the buck-toothed high-school drop-out sibling of Perl (itself the unbathed cousin of Python and Ruby). But today I discovered the library function strtotime, which is a very flexible parser for text expressing a date/time. One cool example is a snippet that calculates the current year's Thanksgiving day.

The closest Python equivalent to strtotime seems to be dateutil.parser.parse, though it's much less flexible from a cursory glance. Of course, if a person is only trying to compute "common moveable Christian feasts that can be deduced from the date of Easter Sunday" they need look no further than the mx.DateTime.Feasts library (which includes translations into German and French). Weird. And awesome.