 Hey folks, it's T Tuesday Update 3121. This were the goals for this time. How did we deliver overdue paper intro? This is a paper I've been owing the folks at the Santa Fe Institute to press since like April. And yes, yes, I've finally, finally shipped a draft. Life and computation from statistical physics to emergent physics. This is an introduction to a paper that was written by a friend, Mitchell et al. In 1993, I mean, I read the paper at the time and it was very exciting and so on. So I felt obligated when I was invited to review this thing to not review it, to write an introduction for it and put it in context, explain why it's foundational and so forth, but man, it was hard, really, really hard. I'm not entirely sure why this kind of voice is so difficult for me. It feels like I'm making judgments about other scientists, other academics and so forth that normally I try not to do. I have my own little car bat stuff that I'm focusing on that I will defend as being interesting and important, whatever, but finally, finally I managed to ship this off. I still have to do a little bit more about it, but this actually took up the single biggest chunk of time, single biggest chunk of work time since the last update. So yes, next, select next SQW rejection opportunity for those who folks just joining us. SQW is this little science fiction story that I wrote based on chapter two of a novel that I tried to write like three years ago for a nano-remo national novel writing month. Decided to boil it down to a short story. I've been honing it and trying to make it more accessible. I've got some new responses from a new reader and they kind of liked it, so that was good, but between the lines, maybe it's a little hard to follow in spots and so on, but I did look into what would be the next possible opportunity and the idea of this whole process was to try to sell a science fiction story, like the official self science fiction story so that I could become a member for not exactly why reason, for I guess getting blessed by the guild, a member of the science fiction writers of America, science fiction and fantasy writers of America. And so I had read about the rules for this sort of thing. They had a list of qualifying markets that you could go to and for associate membership you needed to sell one thing, for full membership you needed to sell three things. So I went back to double check the list to see where maybe I wanted to go next and this has all changed since last I looked. It changed apparently in March. And now the idea of having to have one sold publication, that's gone. Now it's my eligible for associate membership if paid work in science fiction was $100. And full membership, which I'm not after, is the same thing but $1,000 and proof of earnings will be guaranteed by affidavit. Okay, so what does this actually mean? So qualifying markets, they said they're changing it around to try to make a matrix, because I guess they're trying to balance off between supporting the writers and getting rid of the scam publishers but not getting rid of all of the publishers. So in long story short, they took away the qualifying list of short story markets which is what I was looking for. But they said science fiction writers in America monthly market reports which I didn't know existed. So I went to them, I looked at the monthly market report for May, 2022 and it looked really fresh. They have this big long list of places that are currently taking submissions. And that was something that I ran into when I was looking at the previous list. They would have a thing, I would click on it, it would say, oh, our acceptance period ends in November. Runs from September to November or something like that. So these are actually all open. I clicked on a couple of them, like beneath ceaseless skies and they give you a nice little blur, online magazine, the literature, fantasy, post-hocene and so on and so forth. So the first thing that I learned by clicking around this stuff a little bit was that, except for the ones that I'd already known about, asthma, the analog, the stuff that I had previously tried. Rejection number one, rejection number two. I didn't do analog. A lot of these things are very niche, like this sort of thing, or even more specific. And it wasn't really clear that SQW, Search, Quiet, Wake, the science fiction story that I've got, really fit in very many of those niches, so unclear. But the other valuable point about this monthly market report is that they have data fed back by the SFWA members. So for this particular one, ceaseless skies accepted. 2.3%, 2.2% and it took them an average of 126 days. Two accepted, it's very nice that they have separate time period for rejection and only took 22 days for the 94% that get rejected. And that fits perfectly with my own experience, but since I only have two rejections, I can only say something more like 30%, but clearly. So in the fact for this, what would qualify as proof I was paid for myself? Whether you're a independent author, include your statement from a publisher, or here it is, if you're an independent author, provide proof of earnings on your titles through a third party platform, such as Amazon or Kobo, that details the minimum 1,000 for full or 100 for associate has been met. So it seems like I could self publish on Amazon say, and if I sold $100 worth of copies of Search Quiet Wake, the short story, I could then provide proof of earnings, whatever that means, and submit that to the science fiction writers of America. I mean, I'm confident to say that Search Quiet Wake would count as a science fiction story, and I don't think they would argue with that. So if it was a science fiction story and it produced $100 in earnings, it seems like I would be there. Now, this seems like something that could be kind of easy to game, and I'm not sure exactly that you just get sock puppets to like apparently all political books are all campaign is secretly buying all the copies to make it be a bestseller. So not clear how this actually avoids a similar trap, but that's the story on that. So I failed to select next and last SQW rejection opportunity, but I think I'm gonna, we'll see about that, I'll circle back around to the end. All right, research, soft sell nucleus and self model. So yeah, for the last couple of updates, I've been focusing on trying to make these things used to be called gas clouds, now they're called soft sells. The idea is that they wanna be really loose, really mushy, really just continually rebuilding themselves. So it's all about robustness. So if something goes wrong, it doesn't matter. The thing is rebuilding itself all the time anyway. The challenge for doing it that way is that now when you actually wanna do some kind of computation, some kind of control on top of this, it's gonna be that much harder because you still have all this variability and uncertainty and rebuilding going on underneath you. So, the traditional approach is that you make deterministic hardware which completely gets rid of the variability at the cost of most of the robustness and then everything is fine. So the whole idea of indefinite scalability and robust first computation is to say, no, no, let's let more of the robustness, therefore the uncertainty and the rebuilding and the churning cycle surface higher toward the software into the software. And that's what we're doing here. So last year it was about the plates, they were quite rigid, they healed up. They had a bunch of robustness mechanisms, but the soft sell is going much further than that. So what we saw in the opening demo was version 15 of the soft sell. And what I wanted to do was actually just take a look at it briefly in the simulator where we can actually look a little bit closer. So, okay, all right, so yeah. So originally this whole thing was called gas cloud, but I thought that was a little bit of an unfortunate name and some other folks thought it was too. So now it's soft sell. And it used to be that the soft sell was actually an element, which means it's a concrete, the atom that can be made and show up in the world. Now it has been lifted up to be a quark, which means it's a component of an atom because I want to have not just the cell body, what I'm now calling the protoplasm, I also want to have a cell nucleus that somehow sits in the center of it and will somehow control or be influenced back and forth by the larger protoplasm around it. Because that's the nature of how you actually get stuff done. You don't centralize everything, you don't serialize everything, you don't make everything deterministic, but you do it in stages. You pull stuff together to say, let's keep track of how big this thing is, this soft sell is. Let's try to make it a little bit longer this way and a little bit narrower that so maybe it could move or something, whatever it happens to be. We're still not there yet. So the new soft sell quark has a small number of methods, of things that we do that is to be customized. So when it's time to make a new element of the soft sell in the previous code, we would just deliberately make a soft sell element. Now we call the specific class and it gives us a nucleus or a protoplasm or whatever it is and so on. And in particular, the radius is now something that can be customized. And so in fact, if we go to protoplasm, so the radius of the protoplasm is 22, which is what the soft sell was last time. The radius of the nucleus is much smaller, it's seven. And so if we take a look at this, I've got it running here. All right, so hopefully the CPU fans won't go crazy on this from all this stuff running at once. Whoops, still doing that. All right, so I put down the seed, the seed bops around for a while and then wham. Okay, here we are. So if we look at the labels on them, new for nucleus, PP for protoplasm, and so let's see if we can find, so there's M hops down here. I'm not sure if you can see it. That's how far it is from the root. And so that's five, five, five, four, four, four, two, three. Oh, here it is, M hop zero. So that's the root of the nucleus, but the trick is, is that the protoplasm is supposed to be willing to see any nucleus as being an anchor that they can stay. As long as the protoplasm can see some bit of nucleus, they can then be a root of the protoplasm. So if we find a protoplasm here, here's one. He's hops two, hops two, hops three. Where is the guy? So what happens now is that the nucleus grows out to now distance seven and it's very sloppy. And I keep saying, oh, that's terrible, but no, no, no, it's a feature, it's a feature. That it's sloppy because then we have lots of degrees of freedom to work with. And then once the nucleus gets out to the limit, which is gonna be six hops because it's one less than the max. If it can't see any protoplasm, it goes ahead and spawns a protoplasm root. So as this thing goes along, it automatically starts to fill the world with the protoplasm around it. Now that means in particular that, all right, that means in particular that there's more than one protoplasm that's hop count zero, meaning it's the root of the protoplasm section. And that's the robustness by the pound idea that the Ringo approach with taking consensus of everybody upstream agrees, so I copy the upstream or everybody downstream agrees so I copy the downstream. That is not restricted to having a single root. It automatically waits for them all to come together. So we ought to be able to say that the protoplasm doesn't have a single root in the center. The nucleus has a single atom, the root in the center. The protoplasm can be anywhere that it gets near the nucleus. That should be countable as a root. And once they all agree on doing something that sort of loop, of course it's not a loop, it's this big mush because they're all put together. So that's what we saw in the opening demo. And there's still little bugs in it where some of the zeros, the protoplasm roots freak out and destroy themselves but then the nucleus creates more. So that's what causes that shrinking and then growing back as the nucleus recedes the thing. So lots more to do there. And I still feel good about it. I still feel like this is taking it in the other direction, taking it in the super sloppy direction rather than in the super relatively rigid direction of the plate. Let's see how far we can push it. So, oh, and I'm gonna run a little bit long, I'm sorry. So there's more folks showing up in the Discord which has got a whole new look with channels and different pages, I don't even know how to say it. But it's looking good and I'm really thrilled that people are finding it. There's folks that have possible interest in maybe using some kind of MFM maybe either code or maybe just more ideas to do things. I haven't spoken to them yet but we'll find out soon what that's about. Something to do with some kind of competition for NASA or Mars Society, I don't know. Also got a diff with some bugs to get the thing building to get MFM building on Ubuntu 2204 from Professor Emily Dolson, thank you so much. All kinds of great stuff happening. This sort of thing just absolutely warms my heart. So that's it, goals for next time. So I'm gonna learn about this whole independent author in the modern era, what does it actually take to put a book up on Amazon so that it can be read on Kindle or read or however they distribute e-books and if one wanted to bought as a paper copy. I would like to get the nucleus actually controlling the protoplasm somehow. My original goal was to have the nucleus somehow this side of the nucleus say we wanna be relatively squeezed in this part so we wanna be relatively elongated so the nucleus could control the shape. We'll see what happens. And then I am putting myself on the record for next time, release Oolong 5. I got blocked last time, I tried to do it because there was stuff I didn't understand about the whole build process to build packages, to build Ubuntu packages and the claim now is even if we can't build Ubuntu packages which I hopefully could figure it out, let's release in any way which means let's update master to get all of this stuff in particular there's a whole bunch of stuff in the standard libraries which I've been sort of carrying along in the back which feel like standard libraries to me but they're not there, let's get them up. That is it and have some fun. Thanks so much for stopping by this time. Hope to see you next time.