I’ve always been a sucker for clarity. I got to know how something works. As a kid, I was fascinated by how people made cartoons, so I tried to build a projector to play my own movies. That one was hard. I used cardboard for the box, a torch for a light source, the tube of plastic (or was it bog roll?) and tracing paper wrapped around it, as film. I hadn’t quite worked out the need for lenses yet but I found out soon enough. Alas, I never got the thing working properly but it was a valuable lesson in animation (and also in not taking things for granted).

It also taught me one other important lesson about myself. Once I had worked out how something works, by its broad principles, I lost total interest in it. I never did try and build a better projector.

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My interest has always been in working things out but once I know how it works, I have no interest in using it. This has been both a great boon and a crippling disadvantage. Cause in the final, I seem to know a lot but never get anything done.

There is no better example than in computing. I have always been fascinated by computers and software. It looks like magic, the graphics it can create, the 3D worlds, the games, the sound, the CNC machines, communications and so many more wonderful things.

It’s perhaps the greatest invention ever made by man.

For example, watch this video lecture by Lee Cronin. He’s a synthetic chemist and origins of life researcher. His team is leading the way into a new field called Digital Chemistry. While he’s at it, they’ve created a new theory and (measure) of complexity, called “Assembly Theory”. . It’s simply astounding:

حدث خطأ.

تعذّر تنفيذ JavaScript.

So I got a computer early in life. 1985 I believe. I was barely 6 and typing GWBasic into it. I didn’t know what I was typing, but crazy cool things were happening on the screen. I coded a whole game by typing (copying) it from a book. I had no idea how it worked. The fascination went on until I was in my late thirties.

I built websites, ran servers, was one of the early Bitcoin adopters (it’s bollocks if you ask me) but I never really understood what I was doing. I was primarily gluing other peoples code together.

And if you’ve done any real programming before, you know that you’re just really sitting on top of a API, the real work is being done by your compiler and system software.

When your write,

print(100)

You may as well be writing,

Launch.rocket(mars)

Elon and the boys at SpaceX have done all the real work. You’re just pretending. Userland business.

So I got down to the nitty gritty, started reading kernel source code. But I soon found that it’s also an abstraction sitting on top of many others.

So I studied the math behind it and got all the way down to transistors. Right at the boundary where it sits next to physics.

I finally understood the computer. And guess what? I lost complete interest in it. Duh.

Instead of Zuckerborg, I became Zuckerdud. (That maybe a good thing)

I found that at the heart of it computers are rather simple. What is hard is either purposefully made that way or due to history. Computing companies don’t like competition and so purposefully build systems that are hard for outsiders to comprehend. Think about how difficult it can be working out electrical cables when traveling and multiply by a few thousand or million. The think about history, imagine having to learn about all the Generals and which wars they fought on which day, using which machinery etc… the amount of knowledge you would have to cram in. That’s what being good at computers today requires. It’s a far step from logic. Most of it is cruft and it’s dull, dull as hell.

That was a good five years ago and these days I find it very hard to use a computer. I have at least a dozen, Windows, Mac’s and Linux’s of different flavors. I’ve run BSD and some rather more esoteric operating systems. They sit collecting dust.

I still read coding books. Cause I like to understand how Haskell works, or Idris, or Go or some other fancy shmansy language.

But to open the laptop. I find that very difficult.

Which brings us to our main topic.

Who has all the Pies?

I admit this one was quite a hard one to work out.

You have dig a lot of history. History that people are not keen on you finding. You have to go off reservation. You have to study the monetary system. Like what is money and how everyone can be simultaneously in debt. You got to start looking behind all the major institutions. You got to study all the sciences, math and logic. You got to look at religions, trade, economics, etc etc.

And there are many traps, goose chases that lead nowhere.

And when you finally get there… If I am correct and trust me, that’s one thing you can’t be sure of. You realize that it’s not something that can be easily communicated. Worse, it’s something most people don’t want to hear. You end up looking like a cross between Dr. Doolittle and Alex Jones. In many ways, you feel like it too. Ha ha.

It doesn’t actually matter who has the pies. The pies are a distraction and you lose all interest in them.

And that’s,

The Vikid Truth

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