urn:uuid:7bb52f40-568a-4bdf-a83b-a3eca48ee4d7alice maz personal updates2024-02-29T00:00:00Zalice mazurn:uuid:bb45d964-cb41-42ac-913b-805a6ea71631new year 20242024-02-29T00:00:00Z
I've written several new substack posts since I last updated this feed, the best of which I think are: from paris with love (https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/from-paris-with-love), about turn of the (20th) century lesbian culture and the love between two of my literary and romantic icons, renée vivien and natalie clifford barney. commentary on xunzi's "discourse on heaven (https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/commentary-on-xunzis-discourse-on">, a close reading of one of my favorite chapters of xunzi. and governance ideology (https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/governance-ideology), a meditation on civic virtue and republican principles framed around the ai-mediated quasi-democracy of to the stars
happy new year! 2023 was a big year for me, with many new adventures and changes. the biggest being that I moved to bangkok and fell in love. not in that order. also I started smoking again, oops
2022 was the first year in my life I really had both the money and relational freedom to leave the united states, and visiting europe for the first time was really enjoyable, even if it's not a place I could ever happily live. in 2023 I don't think I was in the same country for more than a month and a half at all. it was a really interesting lifestyle change and I ended up doing and seeing a lot
in 2023, my main travel goal was to see southeast asia, a place I've wanted to visit for years. part of it was reading about the region after being adopted into an indonesian guild in a game I played during covid. part of it was a sense of bustle and opportunity, disenchanted with america and feeling like maybe it would be a place with more activity and optimism. looking through my old tweets, I said in july of 2021, after my life in austin had fallen apart and one month before I was due to leave, "tentative life plan is a gap year in an american city I haven't lived in before. then move to southeast asia, start a new work project to devote my all to." I don't have my project yet, but it's nice knowing that is what I ended up doing
I'll always be a new yorker in my blood. whether I was made for it or just adapted to it, I lived in that city for the better part of a decade, and it became a part of me. the density, the speed, the feeling like anything is possible and everything is at arm's reach. after a year of scrappy freelancing after first learning to program, I started looking for my first real tech job, and felt like I had a certain duty to leave. I thought that I was too comfortable, that I liked being there too much. that if I didn't leave now, I'd be there for the rest of my life, and now that my horizons had opened up, it was necessary to go. so I landed a job on the other side of the country, packed up, and moved to sf
coming to bangkok last year was a revelation. I'd almost forgotten what a real city could feel like. sf, austin, and seattle are ghost towns compared to new york and bangkok, and I had gotten so familiar with new york that I just glided through it effortlessly, going to the same places and doing the same things whenever I went back to visit. I stayed in bangkok for a month and loved every minute of it
my favorite thing about bangkok is the energy. it feels so busy and so alive. and, actually unlike new york, it also feels relaxed at the same time. a thing I said, trying to articulate the difference, "new york feels like human suffering is being harvested to build grand cathedrals, bangkok feels like sugar-water is seeping up from the earth and we're all a mass of little ants busily rushing around making the most of it"
when I glide through asok station, everyone weaving through each other's paths like a scifi depiction of a signal-free self-driving intersection, I feel at one with the human organism. when I take a motortaxi down sukhumvit and the driver splits lanes with inches of space to spare between cars, guns the engine when unobstructed, always looking to shave seconds any way he can, I feel the spirit of efficiency. walking up a side street in yaowarat, surrounded by the lights sounds and smells, people cooking on the street, cars angling to squeeze through the crowds, people drinking and chatting, pitching and bartering, I said to my lover, "I never want to go back." she said, "then don't"
I've never as mobile as I was last year, and by the end I'd gotten a bit tired of it. in terms of stamina, I could still keep traveling like that for years. I love the novelty, don't mind the placelessness. it's hard to be socially understimulated knowing at any time you could check into a hostel and have a readymade group of a dozen temporary friends. rather, what I tired of by the end was the pointlessness and distraction. travel started to feel like an exercise in consumption, and I've never been much of a glutton. and also it's impossible to build anything or commit to anything when you don't know what country you'll even be in in a week or two. after I arrived back in bangkok, for the third time, at the end of december, I found the thing I was most excited for was being in the same apartment for longer than a month
but in the in-between time, I visited so many places, and it was nice to see so much and feel so loose and unencumbered. with a backpack and a carry-on, booking one-way tickets rarely more than a few days in advance, I could end up anywhere on a whim or a calling. I had a couple friends crisscrossing the world at the same time, so it was easy to plan to be in the same new city together. it was easy to follow desire, curiosity, or chance, end up in osaka or istanbul, taipei or manila, just to see what happens there, what the texture of the place is like
it was chance that brought me to singapore. chance and mundane logistical preference. I was in chiang mai at the time, trying to get to manila, but every flight out connects through bangkok, and I hate layovers. there were, however, direct flights to singapore. I figured why not fly there, spend a week in a capsule hotel, and see what it was about before heading to my real next destination
I turned out to like singapore more than I expected, and I like it more each time I go. I think at first I found it kind of quiet and kind of quirky. I expected it to feel sterile and confining, based on the popular stereotypes, but actually it's quite warm and cozy, and staying in chinatown this year during spring festival I found it can actually be just as bustling as anywhere. it's a pleasant and charming city with a lot of variety, unique in the world
but what turned out to be much more important, and much more unexpected, was I met a girl there, and fell in love
thinking of her rosetta stone, I'm drawn to think of the coincidences. my irrational bias against connecting flights. a chance encounter on, of all places, bluesky, during the short weeks when it captured the zeitgeist. the circumstances of our lives that drew us to each other in an improbable moment
we spent a heady three days together in the city, and I left for manila wondering if I would ever see her again. she joined me a few days later. spring turned to summer, and I was back in america, disposing of my apartment and closing out my old life for good. through joy and pain, we parted ways a few months later, into our respective uncertain futures. but then we were brought back into each other's lives by the most improbable coincidence of all
now it's 2024, and the future is still uncertain. but I'm excited to go into it. I'm beginning to settle into my new life in bangkok. I haven't decided if I'll stay in thailand long term yet, it depends on where seems best to work. I want to visit vietnam and malaysia this year, and I'd like to see cambodia and indonesia too. I've been learning chinese, and I'm at an hsk3 level after two and half months. I imagine writing a post about my insights into language learning once I'm conversational enough to back it up, but honestly 80% of it is probably just that I'm actually putting in the hours
most importantly, I want to build things. I made my first arduino project, a secret wifi library for my lover, and a v2 may be in order to address myriad unmet user needs and provide comprehensive customer value. I hope to make my first drone soon. if I rent a house here that gives me space for larger projects, I might start with an ebike conversion and see if I can work up to a moped. I'll have to find someone to teach me to weld
overall, things have been really good, and I only expect them to get better. 2023 was such an important year for me. I've grown and changed in ways I never thought possible. I feel comfortable, optimistic, and determined. and I am in love
新年快乐 爱心永恒
urn:uuid:a597fd03-a8cb-4d82-b451-ef33f237f4ddone with the machine2023-04-08T18:15:00Z
new substack post (this time _not_ on an airplane), one with the machine: https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/one-with-the-machine. I read "as you may think" by vannever bush and "man-computer symbiosis" by jcr licklider and wrote about them in the context of intelligence augmentation, transhumanism, and the promise of ai
this one was really fun to work on, and pretty important I think too. my central thesis here is that these men inspired much of the internet and the desktop computing revolution, and are largely remembered in those terms. but the truth, when you go back and read them, is that we've only gotten through phase one. they didn't just want better tools for us to use in the manner we do, like fancy teletypes or complicated graphics terminals. they wanted us to install these tools into out consciousness, work with them directly, to be something more than mere man
I'm a skeptical person by nature, so I'm not saying ai can get us there soon. but the advancements that openai has made, plus the reading I've done in the historical literature, has moved me from "idk it's cool but what is it good for" to "oh, shit, I need to use this stuff and see how it fits into my life." the very next thing after I hit publish (and slept, since it was 6am, and ate, since I kinda forgot to) was read the openai docs. it's been a little bit since I've had the drive to code for fun, so I'm excited to find out for myself how to use these tools, with an open mind and humble heart
there was definitely a point, a few weeks ago, when playing with chatgpt and getting hallucinations, that I wanted to scoff and declare it too early to be useful. but that's a craftsman's pride talking, the same as the men who hand-wrote assembly and scoffed at compilers. it's the disease of the old: once you get really _good_ at things, you want to believe you can keep doing them "your way" forever. and once I recognized that, I cleared away all my preconceptions so I can approach from an angle of play. I'd been trying to force the tool to bend to me, but I'd like to see how I can bend with the tool
I've always been a huge believer in the computer as a means of individual empowerment. technology-as-lever. so I'm excited to try this one out and see what I can do with it
in other news, I wrote this the day that elon decided to ban substack from twitter lol, so getting it out there has been an amusing task. first he blocked likes/retweets/replies on any tweet with a substack link, so I got the bright idea to 301 through my own domain, but then he had them label anything that redirects to substack as spam/malicious... honestly very disappointing. between the censorship and the dev-hostility, this is honestly the worst leadership the site has ever had. I hope this ends up being our yahoo tumblr moment, and it survives to see the hands of new management. it is by far the most special place online to me, and I would be crestfallen if he actually managed to kill it
and, I guess somewhat related, I'm also on bluesky now as maz.bsky.social. it's a cute quaint little place so far. plenty of what I've been calling "just had lunch!"-type posting. my friend mentioned the fediverse had a similar period. so maybe that's the embryonic stage of any new social network, before it differentiates into its adult form
urn:uuid:c49a094b-a36f-4897-b30d-9f566592bc36you can just do stuff2023-03-22T16:30:00Z
new substack post, you can just do stuff: https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/you-can-just-do-stuff. I summarize lessons from arpa and xerox parc that inform how we aspiring technology cultists might think about putting together new ambitious orgs for science and engineering work that aren't just venture-backed startups. also I write about franny and zooey, stoicism, and a few little anecdotes about kids learning how to affect the world. several people called it heartwarming, which makes me happy
I am now 2/2 for writing articles on airplanes. the first (12 hour) leg of my flight to bangkok had no wifi, and the only thing I put on my new kindle was a free (as in libre) chemistry textbook, major sections of which were free (as in lacking) of images. so when I got tired of trying to imagine space-filling models of molecules based on alt text, I looked through my computer for pdfs to read, and found this one by dominic cummings, and then wrote basically the entire post before touchdown. so if you want me to write more, maybe the solution is more flights
also I'm in bangkok! and planning on going to chiang mai and manila at least as well. I love it here already, it's so fresh and alive and busy and free in a way that no cities in america or europe are. well, maybe easy to say with american money, but yknow. it's also interesting how this place feels like "neutral territory" between the chinese and american empires. like anyone can just show up as they please. it's nice. one of the things I hope comes out of a multipolar world is more liminal space, it'll be interesting. really interested in asean in particular for this, and have loved the vibe of southeast asia from afar for a long time, so it's great to finally be here experiencing it
urn:uuid:de775c45-db77-4241-b28b-2d0b776abb50into the void2023-03-07T01:00:00Z
I wrote my first substack post, into the void: https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/into-the-void. I used the science fiction novels/serials void star, a memory called empire, and to the stars as a jumping off point to talk about different visions of the future and the desire every fighty autist girl has to spend her life in battle. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, especially since I wrote nearly the entire thing in a single plane ride, after a weekend of drinking and fencing
urn:uuid:f879d06d-3181-4b1c-946b-79091354a9afI made a substack! and travel rambling2022-12-05T00:48:00Z
I made a substack the other week: https://alicemaz.substack.com. I haven't posted anything to it yet, but I expect to eventually. partly because the twitter algorithm makes it impossible to ensure people who explicitly want to see certain posts will ever actually see them, and partly because I hope it will encourage me to write smaller, lower effort things more frequently
I generally write one giant post every year or two, but not because I don't want to write more. usually what ends up happening is something like... I'm inspired to write something but need to do more research, the longer I research the more I link its core concepts to everything else in my knowledge graph, eventually the original topic seems too quaint to bother with, but the broader thing is too heavy to be tractable. what I'd like to do is write things earlier in this process, when I can dash off ideas before they're sodden with meaning. putting things on my website always feels like a Statement, but maybe putting them somewhere else (ie your inbox) will make me feel less like I need to live up to such a lofty standard. and eventually the refinement will result in a body of work of greater scope than I would be able to tackle as individual doorstoppers anyway
2022 has been good to me! this is a refreshing change from 2021, which was without a doubt the most painful and miserable year of my life. 2022 was possibly the best. I've mostly been taking it easy, relaxing and healing I guess. not doing a whole lot
I went to europe for the first time this summer! it was really special, I had a lot of great times with internet friends and people from hostels, and felt a lot of really valuable feelings
in portugal, I went to sintra on a misty day, and hiked from the town up to the moorish castle (which everyone thought I was insane to do, as apparently they all take the bus! I want to hike to cabo da roca next time.) it was pouring rain by time I was done for the day, and instead of following the road back, I cut through the forest, on deserted footpaths that cut through dense trees and occasionally followed the old outer walls. it was one of the most beautiful experiences I've had, the sense of isolation and connection with nature and just joy of being out in the rain
in finland, I met someone from online, and dragged him to a performance of shakespeare's "as you like it" inside an old swedish fortress on an island in the bay. I'd randomly seen an ad for it on a train the day before, but couldn't remember the spelling of the theater to find it online, so I just waited a half hour as trains passed until I saw another one with the same ad to take a picture. I managed to convince him it would likely be in english, half-believing it myself, but I was wrong. he didn't stay long (sorry!) but I pulled up the english script and used proper nouns and character turn-taking to make sure I was in the right place to the finnish. it was fun, and some older ladies were amused at my willingness to do all this just to keep up. on the ferry back, I had an incredible experience where the gold of the midnight sun danced on the deep blue water, and I found I could stop seeing it as light on water and simply see it as color. that, and the forest, made me think of being on acid a bit, although I was completely sober. the experience of being able to turn off the pattern-recognizing machinery in the brain and see things as they actually are, rather than what the represent
in estonia, I met a twitter friend and hung out with hers, spending all night at this cute neighborhood bar that had an impressive selection of beers while also seeming to be run out of a house. the bartenders took turns coming outside to smoke and chat with friends, and the sign announced "if the gate is open, we're open." we went and sat on the castle walls and when I walked by again at 6am back to my hostel, the sign sure was still out. we also did a day trip out to the coast, and to a park with a waterfall, and then went back to town for a pre-midsummer cookout. I was granted honorary estonian status for my unfeigned enthusiasm for baby herring in oil and an incredibly spicy mustard called sinep that I've been unable to order anywhere in america
and then in latvia, was midsummer. I went out to the festival in town with like 20 people from our hostel, and it was incredible. I've been thinking of myself as something of a pagan (at least a "pagan spirit," in the fashion of rene vivien and natalie barney), and seeing an unbroken pagan tradition alive was truly amazing. so much joy and revelry! the bonfire, the music... the park had an amphitheater where music was played on stage all night, with chants and rituals punctuating, and we danced nonstop from 10pm to 4am, with members of our party gradually leaving as the night went on. few locals could speak with us, but they treated us like their own, showing us how to do some of the dances we weren't familiar with. I had to leave before the end, with a flight to catch the next day, but those who stayed said it ended after 5 with chanting to the sun
I also got to experience sauna, in finland and latvia, for the first time. the sauna in helsinki was nice, a traditional smoke sauna (an explanation of the technical and qualitative differences from a wood sauna has been added as an alice dialogue tree) and access to the ocean, but the one in riga was really special. another friend brought me to it, out on an island separate from the city proper, in an area that looks like it's been largely abandoned since the retreat of the soviets. there's a rusted metal and crumbling concrete bridge you have to cross, with gates to prevent people from using it, but bars punched out so people can access it anyway. I wasn't sure I had the right place until I saw a man in a business suit duck through the gap. and then through a field that google calls a road, to a junkyard that hosts an anarchist event space, complete with its own sauna house. mixed-sex, nude, and with a section of the canal lined with sand to be able to cool off right after. after several hours of that, we sat up til late, grilling on the solstice in front of a fire
I think I loved lisbon most of all, though, just as a city. it's too slow and calm for my blood, but a nice place to relax and decompress. when I walk through the twisty streets and steep staircases of alfama or bairro alto, I think of how badly I want to spend a month there with a girl, with nothing but romance on our minds. it is an unbelieveably gorgeous city, the most beautiful I've seen
I've settled in seattle for now, and have more friends here than I ever did in sf or austin. I'll probably pack up and travel for a couple years next, but I expect to be back. seattle has a nice mix of urban and nature that makes it a good home base, I think. and it certainly seems to be the schelling point for weird queers such as myself. I'm thinking I'll go to southeast asia next, which has been a dream of mine for awhile. and more of europe, and south america
sometimes I think about the first half of my 20s, living la boheme, with nothing but precarity and revelry and threat, day-in, day-out. sometimes I feel like, jesus, if only I'd spent that time productively, working and studying, where would I be now? but it's a silly thought. the times I had then made me who I am now, and I would surely be much more cloistered and cautious if I hadn't learned to dare and live. but I also think, more than that maybe, that it was good to run it through my system, because it let me focus on work later without ever wondering what I missed out on. I think of travel in a similar way, now. I need to do it all in a burst, see what actually is out there, so when, or maybe if, I come back, I have no regrets on what I never did
happy thanksgiving, and merry christmas! I'm excited about what 2023 has in store for us all
urn:uuid:9e1f35df-f4e5-4b99-a153-dcf773b1e2cehow I think when I think about programming2022-02-18T01:09:00Z
I wrote a tour through the general principles of programming, as something of an art and something of a bucket of hammers. I muse on learning styles, knowledge graphs, the contingency and interplay of systems, and the future of the "software engineer": https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/program.html. I also give a working idea of abstraction, debugging, and coin the term "jenga pagoda" for the layers of systems we build to hide other systems
urn:uuid:04435c39-be6a-4cc3-b0e7-9ad0abae5600two years life updates2022-02-15T23:45:00Z
it's been awhile! crazy couple years, huh? things have been pretty turbulent for for me, but I'm doing my best
2020 was really exciting! everything had a sheen of change and newness. going out in the world, it felt like everything was on the brink of becoming something completely different and unexpected, every day. I don't know if I'll ever have that same feeling of wonder and excitement as I did in march, when the world caught up with what we knew online. biking in deserted streets, exploring abandoned places, waiting for something to happen. it really was kind of magical
besides that, I was working like crazy the whole year. I was reorganizing my git repos the other week, and (at least based on a naive wc) I wrote more code in 2020 than the entire rest of my career combined. and that's including several months devoted exclusively to research. I learned more in 2020 than I ever did before too... despite how it ended, that feeling of having to hit the ground running, having to do everything and handle anything... it taught me so much, not just the things I did, but what I'm capable of
unfortunately things took a turn the next year, and for a variety of reasons, I had to resign from sylph in early 2021. within a few months I also ended my relationships, and with no reason not to, decided I may as well leave austin too. the first half of 2021 was by far the darkest period in my life, and honestly I'm still sifting through the emotional wreckage
but, I'm optimistic. I moved to seattle in the second half of 2021, and like it quite a bit. I've been doing just enough freelancing to pay the bills and no more. I've been calling myself "virtuously unemployed." it's the first time I've been single in half a decade, which affords me a certain degree of freedom that I've missed a lot. I've been traveling more than I ever have, and expect to a lot more. I've been reading a lot. I'm not working on anything exciting, and I won't have the spirit for "real work" back in me for awhile, but I'm looking forward to what the future holds
anyway! last week I finally wrote a thing I've been meaning to for awhile. a sort of willy wonka tour through what I consider to be the fundamentals of programming, aimed at providing context and background to new-ish coders familiar mostly with the rote mechanics, but who haven't built up their feel for the lay of the land. the way I think about things may well be too idiosyncratic and personal for other people to find much utility in. but, we'll see!
aside from that, I started reserializing a thing I wrote over a decade ago, a europa universalis narrative after-action report titled pine bamboo and plum (https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/song.html). starting with the red turban rebellion, and ending about 150 years later, I basically try to set up a stable "concert of china," with the restriction that there is no "westernization," and instead the crucible of competition and conflict leads to a china that never "falls behind" europe at all, ushering in a bipolar geopolitics from the dawn of the sage of exploration
it ends abruptly, albeit on a high note, before I could put my plans into full effect. and I likewise had to stop reserializing it when my life abruptly exploded last year. but I would like to finish that, probably all at once, with an epilogue to tie things off
oh, I also went to hereticon in january! it was easily the best trip I've taken, maybe ever. a veritable paradise for an extroverted nerd. I feel like I ran into 50 friends I hadn't expected to see, and made like 100 more. I talked myself speechless (voiceless?) every day and night, then drank tea with honey and lemon all morning every morning to scrape together enough voice to do it all over again. I might write more about it at some point, it was just so so so good. I need more of that energy in my life, being around people with weird interests who can share them at length, who don't need tons of context to keep up with my insane ramblings about my own pet topics, and who are just super fun and super optimistic about what we are capable of doing
it also inspired me to dust off some other things I've wanted to write, things I felt I couldn't do proper justice to while devoting all my best brain cycles to the startup. I want to write about classical chinese philosophy and its applicability to the present, about narratives that drive society, all my big historical ideas I'm so fond of
2021 was hell but I'm doing a lot better now, and excited to see where things go now. everything feels so full of light
I'll post the programming thing in a couple days. let's work hard and have a great year!
urn:uuid:049ea8d5-aabf-40b3-b865-d2e90b34c705sylph strategy2020-02-27T23:20:00Z
I wrote a bit about sylph's business strategy: https://sylph.io/blog/strategy.html. forgot to post it here when I wrote it aha. been busy lately! we got first money in so I'm on break from actively fundraising for now. the plan is to spend as much time as I can programming until we get to launch, taking a few more safes as needed or offered (so, not "actively" raising, but still raising lol), then once we launch shift most of my time to sales, marketing, and just building connections in the bio space
this post was fun! something clicked while I was working on it that I can't be a programmer handling business concerns on the side, like I was kind of sheepishly presenting myself as. trap of the technical that assumes the nontechnical stuff just falls into place on its own. now I see my role as the business guy who also can program. it's a really fun change of perspective, and I've been learning a ton as I come up to speed on that whole... half of doing a startup! right now I'm heads-down working on the sylph backend, but once we get to launch, I'm going to be doing the whole gamut of sales, marketing, recruiting, strategy. with viv on product and bio, sig on math, and all of us sort of fractional eng, it ends up being a really balanced (albeit unconventional!) team
one thing I had to cut from the post, which I want to elaborate on soon, is hiring. our way of working is strange, grounded in mathematical formalisms that will probably be seen as cutting edge a decade from now, but are virtually unheard of among software types presently. our way of thinking is stranger, and the perspectives and ambitions and values we share make communication inside our bubble easy, but outside of it quite difficult. our early hiring, at least on the technical side, will depend on a willingness to stew in our methodologies and perspectives to an extent that will never wash off
this has its pluses and minuses. the risk is how hard it makes hiring. we can't just recruit, we need to indoctrinate. we don't want to just have a company, we want an ecosystem surrounding it, a culture. we expect our first recruits to be interested in us in particular, seeing the kind of thing that we are and wanting to become like us. we offer a different way of looking at and interacting with the world, a new practice of engineering that gives those who use it absurdly disproportionate leverage. some who join us will work directly with us long-term. others will start their own organizations after some time, or float between affiliated groups. but we'll stay together, in some form or another
I suspect that our best early recruits will be young people, probably with a history of not fitting into institutions, frustrated with the shape of society, ambitious at heart but adrift. some people we know already, some people we don't know yet but who know us. people we can give the tools to inscribe their passions on the world
all rather grandiose I admit! of course every startup wants to say these kinds of things. unique team, mission, learning opportunities, blah blah. everyone thinks they're different. we, and I believe this with my whole heart, actually are. time will tell whether that's true
urn:uuid:215c69ff-bb4c-43d0-ba0e-393a5acb770dthe math behind sylph2019-12-11T07:50:00Z
sig wrote a post about the mathematical challenges facing systems biology and the techniques sylph is using to solve them: https://sylph.io/blog/math.html
urn:uuid:50e2e24c-ed62-4091-a14e-420452e2af28announcing sylph!2019-12-01T05:50:00Z
this week we announced sylph! it's the systems biology startup I'm cofounding with viv. you can read our full announcement here: https://sylph.io/blog/announce.html
basically, systems biologists model the behavior of biological systems as differential equations, we're making an optimized solver for those equations and providing a public web api plus specialized client software for using it. we've been working hard on this for a while, so it's really exciting to start putting it out into the world! we're in the process of raising seed funding now, expecting to release a v1 early next year. sig and viv will have their own posts soon about the math and the longterm vision, so keep an eye out for those
so, the core mathematics system is all haskell, but we're writing most of the web programming/business logic in scheme. I'd never written a lisp before, but I'm a devotee now. scheme is by far the best language for nonspecialized tasks I've used so far, assuming you're working with a small team you can trust. (in a large org, I'd probably prescribe ocaml for things that are complex in concept and golang for things that are complex in implementation.) at the very least it's now the language I want to use when I can use whatever I want
this does however put us in the position of having to write a lot of our own tooling. and by us I mostly mean me. this is the price I pay for taking "infrastructure" as my title! I literally started in scheme by cramming sicp in a day and a half and then immediately writing a haskell-style build system for it. that I'll release that once I clean it up some! plus a bunch of other things, mostly highly opinionated tools intended to make working between scheme and haskell as seamless as possible. we know what we like at least
more personally... as we approach the end of the year, it's natural to reflect. this was without a doubt the most difficult year of my life, but also the best year of my life. it's impossible to explain to anyone outside our circle, but the three of us were tested, and the bond we share is permanent now. I'm so optimistic for the future, more than I've ever been. we're going to do so much together, we're going to light up the world. I love you. I love you. here's to 2020
urn:uuid:995367c8-1ec1-43c4-a870-0e698ed70d63alice update 2019-10-232019-10-23T15:40:00Z
I wrote about artificial intelligence, early germanic law codes, distaste for school and cops, my perspective on history, and some personal stories: https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/alien.html
urn:uuid:30d078cc-3dff-4128-a550-8626c6340e08alice update 2019-10-182019-10-18T12:00:00Z
my first site at this domain I made when I was still doing twines, and shortly after I started freelance webdev. the background was black festooned with dark gray mojibake. the text was white and yellow and sat in bright pink boxes with rounded corners that floated into different configurations based on the screen dimensions. there was a page with embedded tweets talking about the semiotics of the fav that had buttons to let you fav them. I wrote the whole thing in a ratking of angular and didn't even respect the platform, using various means to break its abstractions for my own convenience. I was very pleased with myself
my second site at this domain I made after I had gotten fed up with the web ecosystem and become enamored with the image of the unix graybeard. I was getting into erlang and c, I switched off debian for freebsd, I had developed philosophical objections to javascript. I wrote a static site generator as a gigantic makefile that performed a three-stage compile using sed and m4 to replace text in blocks and stitch blocks into pages. I used monospaced fonts because computer and had a horrible three-column flexbox layout that was too wide on normal monitors and too narrow on phones. the makefile built a sitemap and atom feed, and a page where it displayed itself, which required contortions to write regex patterns that would not match their own definitions. I was very pleased with myself
this is my third site at this domain. I use arch because it's good enough. I'm switching to void soon so I don't have to depend on gnu and switching to genode later so I don't have to depend on linux. my primary programming languages lately are scheme and email. I generate the site out of templates with a hundred lines of scheme. my stylesheet is seventy lines because most browser defaults are fine. I use generic sans-serif because that's fine. I don't use javascript because why. I make everything one column because I can have a small margin on phones and big margin on not-phones and never have to even think about layout. I use hrs as dividers and don't even style them. I have one page where I need to put two things next to each other and I use a table. my only extravagances are fleurons and em dashes. I am very pleased with myself
I will try to keep this updated this time! but I know my track record is not the best. lots going on lately, very excited. posting something nice in a few days!
(special rss note: I updated my site! I don't know if anyone follows this feed anymore, but I don't link it on my main page at the moment, so it's kind of a secret club. I wrote a huge thing about artificial intelligence and germanic law codes and a bunch of other stuff I'm going to post in a few days, look forward to it!)
urn:uuid:e752380b-2709-47ee-9579-6d2de48d00d3Alice Update 2016-01-082016-01-08T12:00:00Z
big doings in aliceland. as usual I'm pulled in fifty bajillion directions by this and that, but things are starting to come together in a good way.
soo stockfighter launched! this is something I've been looking forward to for awhile, neat quasi-ctf game by the matasano crypto challenge folks. (gah! I keep forgetting to get back to this, still only halfway through.) so I made a REST client for it, then started on a websocket-based trading dashboard...
...aaand decided after a year of writing server code I really wasn't that pumped to play a game about writing a bunch of server code. ah well. their other game, hacking away in C and AVR assembly, should be debuting shortly, and that one I'm absolutely dying to dig into.
I did about half of an advent calendar of programming challenges in rust, t'was fun and interesting, though in pure alice style the goal of "one problem a day for twenty-five days" turned into "bang out twelve problems in three days and then get distracted by something shinier".
the something shinier this time was a simple operating system, also in rust. nothing of note since the code is mostly just from following a guide, but getting my hands dirty in x86 asm for the first time was lovely, and I was actually kind of surprised at how sense-making it all is. I have a habit of being like "omg this thing I never did, it must be so out there and impossible to grok and" *does some of it* "oh this is straightforward" and then feeling silly for thinking it would somehow magically be harder than any other random thing I've done.
I don't quite have the theoretical grounding to actually build an os on my own yet though so, backburner while I do my required reading. seeing this though felt pretty rad, a culmination of where I was at 12, fascinated by C because the idea I could learn to understand on a fundamental level the magic box I lived on my whole life was just the most amazing thing ever:
besides all that, a few friends and I have started a groupblog: status 451. In the words of one of our cobloggers:
"Topics will be an eclectic mix of math, politics, architecture (maybe buildings if I'm the one writing the post, maybe software if it's Meredith), tax policy, and so forth. The guiding principles of the blog, to the extent that it has any, are that no topics are beyond the pale, and we aim to discuss things at a systems level instead of object level."
my first post went live the other day, about communication between what I've dubbed "emotional harmonizers" and "information sharers". normals and weirdos, basically. it turned out well, quite pleased with the response it's gotten so far. very happy to have a nice place with friends to put words (and their words are very nice).
and on a personal note... after eight years in new york, I'll be moving this month for a new opportunity in the bay area. it's a big change, and I'm beyond excited for it.
happy new year, friends.
urn:uuid:d9a5e742-df43-407d-b778-454932b12b4bAlice Update 2015-12-082015-12-08T12:00:00Z
so I started writing rust a week ago. very enjoyable thus far. functional goodness and I get to fiddle with pointers?? best of both worlds. the ecosystem is also really fresh, it's so exciting to look around and see all this work that needs to be done! look forward to doing some of it.
part of my "learn the language" first project, I wrote code to do oauth 1.0a request signing. incidentally a great starter project, forces you to touch a lot of disparate parts of a new language--string manip, timestamps, crypto, http, data structures--just briefly, so you get a good overview of how everything fits together. I got annoyed I had to depend on an entire [de]serialization lib just to do base64, so I wrote a tiny thing that does base64. it's called base64. also on crates.io. nothing fancy, but it was a fun diversion.
besides that I finally got fed up enough with web twitter to start on my long-planned custom interface. with the fun name subtwitter.
the core idea is a multi-column layout where, presently, the left column is the unfiltered timeline, right is mentions and direct messages, center is what I've been calling "the feed". the feed is meant to be a fluid thing, with simple controls to quickly combine and exclude lists of accounts, so you see just what you want and can swap things in and out on a whim. I've recently been made aware (as I probably should have guessed) that I'm replicating a lot of functionality from the old usenet readers. so that's encouraging, a sign I am aiming in the right direction.
after that (and all the core twitter features of course), I plan on messing around with neural nets trained on my interactions with the service. lots of data, have lots of ideas. there's some unhinged rambling in the readme where I hash out my goals.
but, philosophically... rather than unaccountable moderation or opaque algorithms, I would like to see services that act as dumb pipe, where endpoints do all the filtering, and users have the freedom to apply or reject whatever rules they see fit. twitter is less than an ideal platform obviously, but the concepts can be applied to arbitrary networks. with all the old institutional filters collapsing, we become more discerning, and with the volume of data we process increasing and increasing, we need tools to help sort through it. this is my initial stab at building an understanding of how to accomplish all that.
also, twistor, ha ha, did I say a week or two? I get distracted by the shinies easily, everything is so interesting. soon.
urn:uuid:27a738a2-063e-4be5-a8f0-ab49f603f002Alice Update 2015-11-222015-11-22T12:00:00Z
this site now supports tls. yay! shoutout to the folks at letsencrypt, truly they are doing the work of the goddess.
note that presently git only works over http. alas, nothing I can do until my subdomains are whitelisted. for now I've just set https to git to 403, but if you happen upon a scary browser warning, that is why.
ideally I will have a 1.0 of twistor up and running in a week or two. I migrated this site to a new host yesterday, and setting this server up takes care of most of what I'd need to do for that project.
urn:uuid:cb48a81a-2a24-4a79-a3d3-9b40849ab753Alice Update 2015-11-072015-11-07T12:00:00Z
current project: twistor, a site that archives and makes publicly viewable deleted tweets from politicians, and a small set of programs that enables others to do likewise with arbitrary twitter feeds.