TODEPOND TIMES: 9999
Ok it's time for another weekly edition of the...
🐸🐸🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸🐸🐸
What's new this week?
Advancing
I've been working on an engine called Arroost (for the next video). And this week, I've been making it advance through time.
Ok, recap for a second. When I made my previous time-travel engine (TimePond), I did things in a slightly different order. First, I made a little physics engine (for some frogs to explore). And the physics engine constantly advances through time. Things happen! Frogs fall, jump, and bump into things.
Step 2 was to get the engine to "imagine" what would happen in the future, and use that to affect the present. The order of jobs was this:
1. advance through time
2. imagine the future
But step 2 was *really hard*. It involved lots of tying-things-together-with-string, and it was a real patchy job. I even left TimePond in a broken state! (maybe someone could look back in the repo's history to find a working version)
So with Arroost, I knew I had to do it in a different order:
1. imagine the future
2. advance through time
Step 1 is done! It was hard, but less hard than before. And step 2 is done! It was quite simple. Phew! The plan worked!
To advance into the future, we just *imagine* the future, and then replace the current reality with it.
Nines
What's going on?
This week, the youtube channel went past 9999 subscribers, and it's now above 14999! What's going on!?
The FLAPPY HEROES patreon tier has now reached 99 people, so we're currently *full*. What's going on!? (I'll open a new tier soon!)
Our discord server is getting loads of new joiners. And it's been going on for another 9 months now! (18 months total)
I was a guest on ThePrimeagen's livestream (whose highlights channel recently reached 99999 subscribers).
What's going on?!?
Hey, it was actually really nice being on Mr ThePrimeagen's stream. I went on to talk about DreamBerd, my joke programming language. (He's a fan of the language).
It was a surprisingly wholesome experience! The chat was very friendly and welcoming, and it was nice to share some of the background behind "how DreamBerd came to be". I reckon he'll upload the recording on his highlights channel at some point.
ThePrimeagen has been very kind to me in private messages too - asking permission to do stuff, and stuff. It's always funny comparing someone's on-screen personality to their off-screen personality.
Many people use a more abrasive personality on-screen. It's more engaging! I think it's a good idea. Personally, I'm the opposite. On-screen, I stay overly-polite and wholesome. In reality, I'm a complete a****-hole.
No, no, I'm just kidding :)
But to the parasocialites out there, I say:
You don't know me
Only part of me
Speaking of DreamBerd, I've started making a spin-off project called Airspace. It's a joke library for JavaScript. Go read it if you want some highly niche JavaScript humour.
That's it. Thank you so much for all your support. I can't express how much it means to me to be able to reach people with my stuff. I hope you enjoy these behind-the-scenes bits to help get through the current video drought. And wherever you are in the world, I hope you have a great week. 🐸
Days since tode fell asleep: 177
Days since bot went missing: 142
Comments (7)
Theory of Dreams starts at 18:39: https://youtu.be/DLCb1UV5bzU?t=1119
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLCb1UV5bzU Ed Fredkin Talks About John Cocke - 4 May 1990 Edward Fredkin has been a professor of computers and physics at Carnegie-Mellon, M.I.T., Caltech, and Boston University. In his youth he was an Air Force fighter pilot. This is an edited, full interview done for the video, "John Cocke: A Retrospective by Friends." In it, he discusses John Cocke's Theory of Dreams.
You might consider extending DreamBerd to support some of Bjorn Stroustrop's brilliant idea on whitespace overloading in his "Generalizing Overloading for C++2000" proposal. I'd love to see your take on that, and how it dovetails with all the other Syntactic Stevia and Semantic Luo Han Guo of DreamBerd! https://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf
Edward Fredkin recently passed away. RIP and PIR. He was deeply into time-reversible cellular automata, which you can run forwards and backwards! I wrote more about him and his digital philosophy here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36518694 [...] ON THE SOUL: Ed Fredkin, Unpublished Manuscript http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/on_the_soul.pdf >The John Cocke Theory of Dreams was told to me, on the phone, late one night back in the early 1960’s. John’s complete description was contained in a very short conversation approximately as follows: >“Hey Ed. You know about optimal encoding, right?” >“Yup.” >“Say the way we remember things is using a lossy optimal encoding scheme; you’d get efficient use of memory, huh?” >“Uh huh.” “Well the decoding could take into account recent memories and sensory inputs, like sounds being heard, right?” >“Sure!” >“Well, if when you’re asleep, the decoder is decoding random bits (digital noise) mixed in with a few sensory inputs and taking into account recent memories and stuff like that, the output of the decoder would be a dream; huh?” >I was stunned.
Marc Canter, founder of Macromedia, once revealed to me the secret that the Director score was just actually a BASIC program rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise, turning line numbers into time numbers! So you could rotate it 90 degrees clockwise to turn line numbers into reverse-time numbers, or 180 to turn line numbers into reverse-line numbers!
I loved the highlights video of primogen walking through your DreamBerd design! Can't find the video of you talking with him about it yet, but looking forward to seeing it when I can. Your ideas of writing and running a program backwards reminds me of a bizarre feature of DEC BASIC, which I wrote about on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17998940 Speaking of weird BASIC features, does anyone know why DECSYSTEM 20's BASIC had a "LISTREVERSE" command? Yes, it actually did exactly what it sounds like! Chalk one up for DEC and BASIC. What other programming languages support that feature, huh? https://imgur.com/a/Bt40M DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC User's Guide: LISTREVERSE command LISTREVERSE LISTNHREVERSE LISTREVERSE and LISTNHREVERSE print the contents of the user's memory area in order of descending line numbers. LISTREVERSE precedes the output with a heading, LISTNHREVERSE eliminates the heading. LISTREVERSE EQUIV 10:53 13-NOV-75 40 END 35 PRINT "THE EQUIVALENT CURRENT IS",I, " AMPERES" 25 I=E1/R 10 INPUT R 5 INPUT E1 READY DECSYSTEM BASIC User's Guide (page section-number 9-4, page index 80, in case you don't believe me): http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-20-LBMAA-A-D%20BASIC%20User's%20Guide.pdf
Tode is going to miss out on the summer while sleeping. Hopefully the dreams are good.