 The T-2 Tile project is building an indefinitely scalable computational stack. Follow our progress here on T-Tuesday Updates. Welcome back to T-Tuesday Updates. It's been over a month, so in November the U.S. elections were held, and by November 7th, Biden and Harris were declared the winner, and basically every day since then as well. We'll see how that comes out. Also, a year ago, November, I did National Novel Writing Month nano-remo, and I worked on this novel called Best Effort that folks who've been around the channel long enough will maybe remember. This year in November, this was part of the reason why there have been no updates in November, was to work on the novel. So this was last year, 2019. I went from zero, this stops at 27 or something like that, but I think I ended up at, you know, between 30 and 35,000 words, which I was supposed to make 50,000, I didn't. It was really hard, but I produced a lot of stuff, and some stuff that I liked quite a bit. So my idea for this time was to take a chunk of it that I kind of liked, that was perhaps arguably more or less standalone, and try to cut it down to make a short story that I could get actually out into the world, either just, you know, send it out to fans or put it up on the web, or maybe even submit it to places where science fiction-y fiction might get published. So I was looking around for that. I found places like The Strange Horizon. There's lots of places that will buy, I guess, some of this stuff. I mean, who knows if they'd be interested at all. The key point for me was up to 10,000 words, but under 5,000 preferred. So that meant, you know, my, this is my nano-remo for November 2020, which is starting from over 30,000 words and going for 5,000. So that's the dotted line down there on the bottom. I got to 10,000. So from one point of view, I could just immediately say, hey, I'm done and ship it off, but it doesn't work the way it's currently constructed. It doesn't work standalone. And it's got a lot of stuff that needs to go out. And so now my nano-remo or the latter part of it, because I was doing other things, is not about trying to create more words. It's trying to get rid of words. And I am so much more comfortable getting rid of words than I am generating words. So now my, my fit line is going down. My goal is to get to 5,000 words or thereabouts if it's 6,000 or something. Okay, but it needs to move right along. And the current stuff doesn't, because I was trying to say everything that I could think of to say. Now it's time to gather the riches and hone it down to something that might actually shine. So this, I feel like, even though I really only spent a couple of days on it at the end here, I feel like this is the sort of thing that I could spend an hour or two on a day or several hours a week over multiple times where, you know, or after my brain's pickled from trying to write code or whatever it is, I could go boil some words out of this thing. We'll see. It probably won't be that simple, but that's the way it's feeling now. So I'm hoping, I'm not going to put a specific date on it, but I'm hoping that it can actually boil this down to something that we could send off to Strange Horizons. They don't even take submissions again until the end of January or something like that. So, you know, we shall see. That's the nano short story moe or the Nash short moe, whatever. You get the idea. So that was that aspect of it. In addition, seven years ago almost, I made this video called The Computer Universe, the introduction to classical hyperspace, just to try to get a bunch of the ideas out about how it seems to me the computational and the relationship between computing things and living things could be useful as far as a way for people, not just super nerds, not just people that are actually keyboard masters of digital computers, but people who are just interacting with other people and trying to get through the world and as best they can. And so did that first round of it, used a bunch of chili peppers as an example and so forth, and ended up at this idea of a high dimensional bit vector group of zeros and ones that represents a coordinate, a fix in hyperspace. That was not supposed to be the end of the introduction to classical hyperspace. That was just part one. There was supposed to be part two about hypersubspaces and force fields, wormholes, all kinds of things. And it never happened. So this nano-remo, actually what I spent most of the time on was working on the visualization software and something like a script for lecture two. And so this is just a little teaser of the visualization. Now we've taken a hyperspace fix and we've turned it into black and white squares. We don't know which is zero and which is one, because it doesn't even really matter the way this is developing. It's just an arbitrary distinction rather than any kind of actual numerical value. But we can put around it, if we use the vertical axis to represent goodness, equality, or something like that, then we can say, if we flip just this one guy, where would we go, up or down? Flip this guy up or down. And we can build this whole hyperspace landscape, the neighborhood, around a given point. And that's the basis of the visualizations that I want to do in lecture two of the introduction to classical hyperspace. So we'll see how that develops. Like I did seven years ago, I made a little teaser, which we saw at the tail end of the previous one, something like that. I don't know if there's time left. I'll stick the new trailer on the end here, or it's easy to find if not. And so here it is, seven years later, introduction to classical hyperspace two. One of the things I especially liked about it was that this time we have original music that one of my oldest friends, Peter Neuse, who plays the drums, kindly did the percussion for this thing. It was all very quick and rushed and so forth. But it was a lot of fun to be able to do that. And I pushed it out. It came out Sunday midday. And it's done by the standards of the Dave Ackley channel. It's done OK. It's gotten a few hundred views over the first couple of days. And OK. Now as of this morning, we were at 262 views. That's good for the Dave Ackley channel. I'll take it. And an additional point, the top video, so what is our superpower? That's the name of the teaser. But HSA 101.1, the computer universe, has now broken into the top three, since that's so I say, since that's one of the prerequisites for the second lecture that's coming up. In addition, this time, never done before for me, I also tweeted not just a link to the YouTube video, but I actually uploaded a variant of the video straight to Twitter so that people could see it and made a little snarky, whatever. I mean, my problem with these things is I always make them too esoteric. I always make them too complicated. I always think, oh, yeah, people will get the joke. Very few people get the joke. Some people are willing to play along. Some people get it. I'll figure it out. I'll get the thing titrated. I'll get the complexity, the mysteriousness appropriate somehow, someday. Let's hope. But my point of mentioning this is in the same amount of time, actually, a few hours less. According to Twitter's analytics, we're doing twice as many views on the Twitter upload as we are on the YouTube one. So I'm happy to have them both out there. They can both be found by however it is. And that's where we're at on the teaser. Oh, and the teaser, by the way, says the full lecture, HSA 101.2, hyper subspaces, will be out in January of 2021. So feel free to make that January 31st of 2021, but that's just in the next two months. So that's what's going on there. All right, in addition, community news. We've got a new nerd, Abhinav, I think is his name. Thank you for joining us. And that now ends the 2,300 series of LCF nerd numbers. We're now into the 2,420 series. Like that. And that's good. We also got a substantial one-off donation from a longtime supporter, which is really great. Enough that with all of these little bits and pieces put together, we may actually be developing a little bit of room to think about doing something, whether that means buying a bunch of cameras to try to figure out how to record this thing, assuming the grid ever comes together or perhaps organizing some kind of virtual workshop in 2021 for folks who are interested in this stuff. I don't know. Do you have any ideas? It's not a ton of money, but it's more than nothing. So that's all very exciting. We also have monthly supporters. You guys are fantastic. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much. All right, in addition, Luke dropped this link to a YouTube video in the Gitter in our chat room for the T2 tile. That says it has a porn after diagram, similar spot. I took a look at it and it was very cool. It was this thing called Color Code by this guy, Marillo Polizzi. I don't know how to say it. I'm sorry. That was very cool. It was very much like Splat. Where the idea was was that you would take, it was this little screen. It looked kind of like a little, one of those, I don't even know the names of these video game console things that people use. They're all after my time, but I recognize the Flynn from Adventure Time there. And you write rules that just match colors to colors. If you see this color pattern, you can replace it with that color pattern and so forth, and it was very cool. And I mentioned, I made a comment. It's like Beemo, that's a guy from Adventure Time, meets Bitpicked, which is this system for graphical rewrites for diagrammatic reasoning by George Furness that goes way back. That was 1998. He was writing papers and doing work about it for 10 years, if not more. And you'd have stuff like this that just looks like direct pictures and then using rewrite rules, you could have things happen, like they would fall down and they would stand up perfectly because there was no noise in the Bitpicked universe unless you put it in yourself. And also George Furness, in addition to being a super genius, he's a great friend of mine, so that was nice too. All right, and just after Luke, we left comments in there, Murillo showed up in the chat and he's been interacting with Andrew and Luke and everybody over the last couple of days and it's really been great. And for me, finding another person, finding another kindred spirit out there, everybody talks about how the internet lets you find your audience no matter what it is, but when it comes, it's not just a flood, it doesn't have to go viral to have each person that finds it feel like, wow, this is really cool, I'm really happy that Murillo sort of found our little rebel alliance, our little community and has been contributing stuff and implementing stuff like from Bitpicked in his color code variations like that, it's all very cool. So, and there's his webpage like that, so Murillo, welcome. And that's it. So, conspicuously missing from this summary is where is the code on the tiles, where's the grid at and so forth. I really took a month off as far as all of my deepest fears sort of hanging over me the whole time and I'm gonna label them all specifically to take their power away or try to. So there's intertile events, we've been looking at this for months and there's bugs in the intertile events system, I don't know how deep they go as far as is this just an easy little thing that once it's found, it's gonna be a two-byte or a two-line fix or is it gonna be a whole redesign? I don't know. But there's bugs at the MFM level, the upper level where we have atoms moving around and doing all these events. There's also bugs at the Linux kernel module level, those scare me even more because when they kernel panics, I lose my log files. So far, I have had very little success localizing what's going on when those bugs hit. There's just the things of Zeno's debugging, that every time you solve one bug, there's still another bug but it takes twice as long to find it and you find that one. So the prospect of actually reaching correct gets further and further away. Now this starts to come home to me that I actually understand that at some level, best effort is it's also includes bugs. It's not just hardware problems and it could be that we're gonna say, no, you gotta live with these things. You need to write your atom code, your molecule code, so that a hunk could get punched out of the middle, like a whole tile's worth might reboot and your computation, any given piece of it might get torn up but your whole larger computation, something that's much bigger than a single tile, needs to survive. And I think that's probably an important transition to get to that. When I think about things like the swap lines and all the stuff that I've been talking about that I talked about in the a-life lightning talk a couple of months ago, that is still working at the sort of deterministic level. Every single event counting on it, if it looks like this beforehand, it's gonna look like that after and there aren't any other changes coming in and if things can get torn up, if a piece of tile can go out, then you have to have more complicated stuff or you have to have stuff that makes weaker assumptions to begin with where you just have like clouds of particles that don't even really have a specific one-to-one relation to their neighbors, they just count them up and say, have we got a good density here? And let that ride out a certain level of failures and then carry that same thing higher and higher when you start using clouds to make cloud membranes, then you have cells that might get a piece punched out and they need to be able to clean up and so forth. We've known this, I just didn't realize that it might happen because my lower level was buggy. Maybe it doesn't, maybe it doesn't, I don't know. What I do know is that for the next video, two weeks, shortly before Christmas, my job is to re-engage at the MFM intertile event bug stage to do what I need, use the tools that we saw, the SRF to move files around the grid and so forth, capture some of these bugs that we can look at in the weaver and try to get some insight about what's going on. That is the mission, that is the only mission. Thank you so much, everybody, for continuing to come and check these videos out. We're a very small group, but the point for me is that it's a big enough group that I actually feel an obligation to try to have some things to say, to try to actually make progress and so I thank you all for continuing to stop by and take a look. Stay safe, stay the right amount of sane. We'll see you in two weeks.