The first rule is you don't chase it. Just sit still for an hour or two. The deer will bed down in nearby trees and bleed out.

The problem is that scientists think their knowledge is truth because it comes from "the scientific method." They fail to internalize that the whole point of that method is that no knowledge is sacred and everything should be doubted to the degree at which evidence exists to the contrary.

A crackpot conspiracy theory with a single anecdotal source of data is sufficient to create doubt in the soundest of theories. Just not much.

They paid me to design an eventually consistent, self-healing data store with a cache layer / write ahead log, with peers determined by paxos consensus, transfers metered by finops and govered with kademlia, and a storage layer capable of byzantine fault tolerance, which we implemented via signature chains.

See, they had this crazy idea that they'd make a cryptocurrency that they could sell to western digital, who could offer hard drives that "filled themselves up" with other people's data when idle. WD would obv make a buck and maybe sell these drives for much cheaper than the component cost. I'm not exactly sure of the economics. I think the idea was to have half the drives be "receivers" and half be "senders" and actually sell the "senders" for way more than component cost, but provide trivial effort file backup.

I think they're still building it. I dunno if it'll be a scam or not. I had fun though.

When I want "this will compile forever," I write it in ANSI C.

When I want "this will live forever," I write it Python 2.7 and make it the backbone of the entire org's infra templating. Bonus points if it's a custom Ansible module.

Not that much has changed. Sometimes I put on a bathrobe for Zoom calls now.

Including myself. That's sort of my point. It's always fun reminding the Junior Engineers that, unlike whatever flavor of the month library the blogosphere calls The Next Big Thing, the majority of the stuff that comes preinstalled into their multiarch container image is older than they are.

I'm not a dinosaur, I'm a native.

And I took a _lot_ of shrooms.

Unfortunately, I majored in Philosophy. So, I'll never find the right answer to life's great mysteries. I did get fairly good at pointing out the wrong ones, though.

Consistency is the key. What we have now is only locally consistent. You can break it into pieces with set theory, geometry, etc. You're never going to find a unifying equation in a version of mathematics where geometry and algebra don't mesh.

Mathematics would have me believe "the sum of all positive integers" is a negative number. They can provide glorious proofs of that fact. When you insert the result into the physics equations, the equations work.

But the idea is, on its face, stupid. Any child would tell you as much. The equations only "work" on that premise because they're almost right.

But that's not a problem with infinity, it's a problem with something we're assuming when we go to write the proof in the first place. And whatever that problem is... it's almost certainly the thing stopping us from solving the Riemann hypothesis.

The problem is the absurdity of the idea that `t` could ever cease to be a linear value. Causality is a fundamental truth. To lose the idea of "before" and "after" is to lose causality.

If your fundamental theorem of the universe requires you to forego causality, you should consider looking elsewhere.

That's the one that's correct?

Okay, good luck with that.