"Who" Rides the Mountain Bike?

In northeast Ohio our fall weather this year has been spectacular. I've been taking advantage of that with several mountain bike rides per week. I've been chasing after a new personal best time around the big creek park trail loop because the overall conditions are prime for that.

Riding fast on the MTB is an entirely different experience than riding fast on the road since the trail is rough, has many twists and turns and many rapid ups and downs. Also many of the obstacles, like trees or rocks are inches or just a couple of feet away on the trail, while the road is built for cars and trees and other obstruction are several feet away so you don't even have to be aware of them. Riding 20 miles per hour on the MTB feels like warp speed, on the road that is just cruising along speed.

One of the "weird" elements of riding the MTB fast is "you" have to look where "you" are going to engage whatever neural/muscular system actually pilots the mountain bike. That is "you", your verbal and symbolic mode of consciousness really isn't driving. In fact, if "you" start thinking words and concepts, they are distractions that disrupt the actual pilot.

That kind of split in consciousness can happen in a car as well. Many times when people commute to an office by car, the "driver" of the car allows the verbal/symbolic mode of consciousness to flit away into a fantasy realm so the miles pass almost unnoticed. The I "ends up" at work as if the drive was passed in slumber. The opposite of that might happen when some emergency situation happens, like if a tree limb suddenly fell on the road, or in winter, the car loses control on a patch of ice.

The question is, "who is the pilot"? Is the pilot of the MTB the same thing as "me"?

No. The MTB scenario gives me a very clear answer on this question. One of the "tasks" for the verbal/symbolic consciousness during the MTB ride is to remember to keep looking down the trail because the eyes "steer" the bike. The verbal mode of consciousness routinely fucks this up. One well known example is "object fixation", while sweeping the eyes through a turn, the verbal consciousness, that is the "I", will go into worry mode and riders can stare at a tree, a rock, debris on the trail or whatever, which inexorably makes the actual "pilot" of the bike aim right for that obstacle. This happens to car drivers, motorcyclists, and the term originated with airplane pilots in one of the mass killing spree "world wars" where the pilot would unintentionally kamikaze right into the target they tried to bomb.

This reminds me of post about the futility of "Expert How-To Videos". The "communication" between the "I" and the pilot is not symbolic or verbal, it's really "by feel". Now that I spent hundreds of hours on the MTB, little glimpses of "feel" come through to the "I". I'll "feel" the tire and ground interface with my feet, but that chain of communication for me is weak and inconsistent. For some people who are super experts it's constant and solid.

Really "the pilot" is like an animal companion with respect to the verbal and symbolic mode of consciousness. This is why it's very good for people to be around lots of different types of animals through their life and not turn into an urban housecat type. The urban housecat human tends to think the whole world is verbal, when hardly any of it is. The mode of communication with the pilot mode of consciousness is in its terms not in words.

Debt Money and Who "Owns"?

I wrote a few posts about the absurd claims of ownership of the so called "new world" by governments (really the mafiosi ruling clique) of countries like France, Spain, England, or the Netherlands back in the age of sail. The french claimed ownership via rituals and claims backed by the fucking pope, as if that somehow added validity to the nonsense. The Netherlands and then the young USA took a contractual/legalistic approach for their nonsense which is why there are a bunch of treaties with "Indians" and the US.

The thing that really set the "ownership" claims of the US in stone was the mass of US citizens settling various areas and their collective consent to the rules of the game of land and property ownership. That game appeared to be based on fairly common-sense rules, for example: when you mix your labor with some naturally free thing, you get some entitlement to "own" said thing.

That sequence of historical examples is pretty interesting to ponder with respect to the current corporate/financial landscape in the US. The debt-based money creates a model of ownership that's more like the spain/france model of new world claims than the work-mingled model of the US. Like, who "owns" a corporation when the money to purchase it came from loans aka printed money? There's no "risk" by the purchasers, even though corporate types run their pie-holes about their "risk taking" all the time. Many "investors" are shuffling debt money around in a similar way. They're not risking their actual personal money into some corporate deal.

It's all some elaborate ritual of paper shuffling. The "original" owner of some company might have owned it in the common sense way, but the new owner certainly does not. This is especially of interest to employees, who for whatever reason decided to accept this new pile of shit system over the past 50 years, mainly because they don't realize it happened.

This is especially apparent at tech companies where the engineers literally "own" the intellectual property of the company, as it is/was in their brains. They, however, agree to play the game imposed on them by some corporate twats and dutifully sign over ownership claims on patents, for example.

Anyway, the people with the money printer really claim ownership over everything in a really specific/peculiar way--mainly on a per transaction basis. That is, any ownership claim is settled using their digits.

A fairly interesting and subtle shift is happening to this overall model, though. It's cheaper and easier than ever to "do" anything, that is make any product... For me, personally, I wonder daily why I am still "working for" somebody else as an engineer. It's probably a question millions of employees have, well at least the people who actually make stuff or do stuff have.

LLMs = 3D Printing

A few years ago, a startup company started to "3D print houses". Really, they just splooged out concrete walls onto a slab with a gantry concrete thing. Lots of shitheads thought it was "disruptive". There were many breathless videos on youtube about how it would change everything, but those were videos made by shitheads for shitheads. Since youtube has a comments section, you could see what people in the home construction business thought about it: not much. The construction industry stats say only about 15% of the cost and time for home construction go into stick framing.

The 3D printed walls concept was a follow on to the massive hype wave of 3D printing in manufacturing and how it would "change everything" too. It's not clear why that particular technology got so much hype. Nobody cared similarly about pattern cutting machines, or lathes, or CNC controlled machine tools, or whatever: many of those things have been around since the 1950s. 3D printing turned out to be another tool in an already enormous toolbox. AFAIK, the 3D printed walls concept fizzled out entirely in home construction.

To me, LLMs look a whole lot like 3D printing with respect to the massive hype wave and speculative stock market spaz out. I finally got around to setting up a small home system to get some hands on understanding of these things. I'm currently using one of the smaller demo-ish models available from Meta's open source models because I don't want to spend $10,000 on e-junk GPUs to use one of the large models.

Initially, even the small LLM is mind-blowing. It's wild to type in a question like: who are all the Cleveland Browns quarterbacks since Tim Couch? And get an answer that's probably 99% correct. You can ask similarly obscure questions about many topics and get an answer. The whole Internet, or at least most of the wikipedia is compressed into a database of weights that's only around 4-5 GB. However, it becomes apparent quickly that the LLM has severe limits and is often "buggy". In fact, in some scenarios it will spout endless nonsense in response to some prompt.

Some engineers I know are riding the wave of agentic "coding", which is actually a really complicated version of human coding. It's another type of programming, where instead of directly writing code in "C" or System Verilog or whatever, an engineer writes up an elaborate prompt, which is then iteratively modeled and tested, ideally all by the agents.

The killer problem with all this stuff is it appears to 99% work as long as there is a bunch of prior art and public code it can model... Even though it's limited, it is amazing to see in practice. Also it only "works" for people who are already experts. It does not work at all for people who aren't--in fact for them it's like a slow acting poison or "rabbit starvation" scenario. The junior engineer people who adopt the agentic coding approach will never be experts.

I think this current approach will end up dominating several specific real-world use cases. For example, it's a significantly "better manual" than most manuals, or a better how-to book than most how to books. For example, say you have a specific farm tractor and want to change the oil and filters, it's a PITA to find that type of info in a PDF manual, for example, so it would be good to ask in natural language "what's the part number of the oil filter?" and get the correct answer. Companies will probably start to publish their info in some manner that's very friendly to LLMs.

The key factor with LLM as "manual" is there's little to no impact from an incorrect answer to a question, like if you order the wrong filter because the LLM produced nonsense, the typical impact would be it doesn't fit correctly. The same type of error could happen with the traditional methods of looking up a part number or even ordering the correct part number but getting the wrong thing delivered. All of that is already "imperfect".

I can see it replacing GUIs for complex systems, like large networks with lots of different hardware boxes, but a very specific system has to be constructed for that to really function the way people imagine it should: that is flawlessly. The model would have to be able to iteratively experiment and prove the network configuration with a high-fidelity simulator before applying the configuration to a real system. That scenario is a bit like the 3D printed walls scenario.

Anyway, the LLM technology really is cool and interesting, however the 4chan maxim "nothing ever happens" is a good one to keep in mind when something is hyped to the skies. The trope "this changes everything" is so common, yet so often wrong. 

Ideal of Optimization vs Way of the Raccoon

I notice many people "hunt" for the ideal parking place. This simple scenario shows how difficult it is to "optimize" even basic stuff. "Difficult" is not the word, it's impossible. 

One reason it's impossible is the boundaries of the problem, and the variables being optimized are arbitrary. A person might elect to optimize time, or energy, or whatever and follow a simple scheme meant to do that when parking. In every case, the model will omit potentially important factors, or will operate over arbitrary time spans, or whatever, and will be simply incorrect. Then the overall costs in time and energy of parking lots, or roads, or cars, yada yada end up being treated as fixed constant values rather than another even more complicated set of variables to consider. Aspects of the problem won't even have a mathematical representation--like the value of functional health... like almost everyone would be better off walking a certain distance every day, so the "optimal" parking spot might be 1 mile away from a store.

Since it's impossible to develop a useful model, individuals, then masses of people follow a monkey-see-monkey-do strategy. They learn an overall pattern for the parking algorithm from their parents, friends, and watching others. This mass behavior becomes "the system".

Once there's a system, bureaucrats and dweebs try to optimize elements of it, like tweaking road building methods, adding "start/stop" systems to cars and the like. Those attempts at optimization are similarly fraught. Often they're the outcome of academic research that's akin to research seen in dietary advice, or exercise advice, which flip-flops every few years. For example, a few years ago all the running and cycling experts were heavily promoting "zone 2 training"--meaning the best way to train was lots of easy miles. Previously, they strongly advocated "high intensity training", and now they returned to that after touting zone 2 training.

The raccoon lives in the negative spaces of the human world. I think this is good advice for the humans that can take it. Let's go back to the "weight training" idea from the previous post. The masses go to the gym. The gym has formalized equipment that's part of "the system". Instead, get a bag of sand and walk up and down an irregular hill while holding it in different positions. There's your raccoon workout. Or instead of a bag of sand carry a log, or a bundle of chains, a boulder or whatever.

One of the weird side-effects of the way of the raccoon is it is inherently "cheaper"--like a log is free and a boulder is free. While all the life-scripts and solutions of "the system" come with a fee or other expenses because the masses buy them, like a weight set is expensive, which is really strange if you think about it.

The Way of the Raccoon

From Here

"Bodybuilding" is a great example of idealism run amok; it shows ideal concepts are often, maybe always, arbitrary and bizarre. The bodybuilder emulates a beef cow and 'roid maxxes and eats a lot to pack on muscle mass. In a surprisingly large number of cases, the 'roid doses can lead to the body's systems failing so even the most basic functions like breathing and immune response can be severely compromised--not exactly "ideal".

I remember a handful of backyard football games when I was around 17 or 18 years old where guys who were in the "bodybuilder" hobby would show up. They were uniformly ineffectual as athletes in spite of "looking" muscular. Lifting weights and gaining muscle mass is a very specific activity that doesn't lead to all round athleticism. Looking back on those days, I'd say in general, it was difficult to guess how effective someone would be at a sport by their physique.

Many examples of idealism have a similar flavor. They're "image" dominated and dumb: devoid of real world information. Weirdly, adults tend to encourage idealistic views of the world among children and actively shield kids from real world information. Jobs and careers are idealized, politicians are idealized, the military is idealized, romance and sex are idealized, etc... As a consequence, teenage boys and girls often have an idealized image of love and romance that actually torments them as their relationships fail to compare to a thing they haven't thought through at all, nor experienced first hand.

The notion there's a "perfection" dominates countless obsessive behaviors of men and women: makeup, hairstyle, dentistry, eyesight, eye color, skin color and complexion, and on and on. People get plastic surgery because their nose doesn't conform to some notion of an abstract perfect shape or size, or think their head is the wrong shape and get wildly invasive plastic surgery to match some completely phony image of a celebrity who's all made-up and only photographed from specific angles with specific lighting.

Quite weirdly, the "ideals" dominate the reals. Those who pursue and "believe" in the ideals are thought of as the good ones. Those who are realistic are cynics at best or the archetypal "losers". The loser archetype is the ultimate bogeyman, especially for the middle class people who work their whole life mainly to avoid falling into that category.

An antidote to this trap is "the way of the raccoon". A raccoon is an omnivore, is curious and adaptable, and is a survivor and doesn't participate in fruitless activities and goes into a torpor over the winter. Adaptability goes hand in hand with a realistic appraisal of the world, while "idealism" exists in an world of perpetual psychosis.

Wrench Set versus Symbols and Algorithms

There is a lot of information in a set of wrenches you might find in a toolbox. For example, the length of a wrench and the size of the nut it's meant to turn are proportional. The history of use of the wrenches is probably related to scratches on the opening and on the handle. Maybe there is oxidation and discoloring, except where the user's hand left a light coating of oils, and on and on. The size of the wrench also implies various things about the range of forces a human hand and arm can apply, etc... The most likely to be missing wrench is, ironically the most used one: which is the basis of the missing 10 mm wrench joke. There might be paint overspray on the wrenches since steel rusts, and if the person who owned the wrenches worked with older crusty equipment it's pretty common to carelessly blast it with spray paint for rust protection. The wrenches are a sub-unit of many larger wholes all linked together in a big multi-dimensional web. The natural world is all like that, but the web is much larger and tied together at myriad scales.

The real world analog information web is distinct from information that's encoded in symbols and algorithms... One very interesting point to ponder about symbols is they represent algorithmic states at least in a machine like a computer and don't have "independent" existence. The hardware of the computer implements a finite and systemic representation of those states.

In the natural world, the wrench information web is not encoded it just is. 

"Your Consciousness"

There's a Sci-Fi phrase which is shows the crux of the problem of the Ego and the information dimension. That phrase is "your consciousness" as in "your consciousness can be transplanted into a computer" or another body or whatever. This is a trope that's explored in many Sci-Fi series like various Star Treks, or in The 100 where there's a "city of light" which is a reference to the jewish mythology of a "New Jerusalem" where the main characters go live as consciousness transplanted to a computer simulation "body".

The phrase is patterned after many other possessive phrases, like "your luggage" or "your teeth" or "your hair" where "you" and the item that's owned are separate entities. However, obviously in the "your consciousness" scenario, there's no separation. "You" are "your consciousness". "You" seems to exist in the information dimension and have an analogous relationship to your brain as a running computer program has to its CPU, RAM, busses and peripherals. The running computer program actually isn't "in the computer" either, but if you shut the computer off its information dimension vanishes.

The concept of transplanting your consciousness is ostensibly akin to transplanting the total state of the computer program to another computer--something that's 100% possible to do, and in fact is a common strategy for redundant backup systems.

However, the "state" of the underlying biological "hardware" of a human can't be represented symbolically, so it's not possible to "read it out". Where the computer is a contrived symbol processor and is based on state information that can be 100% translated to symbols, the analog nature of the 3D reality world does not seem amenable to symbolization. One version of that problem is a human's physicality is not even neatly divvied up into computer-like or machine-like parts. The boundaries of what affects consciousness are extremely fuzzy--for example gut bacteria signal the brain. Who knows what else does?

At best, a replica-model of "you" could exist in some type of computer model. This is the essence of the Star Trek transporter horror--the super powerful ship's computer and sensors analyze the totality of the crew-member, which actually isn't even possible if concepts from quantum mechanics are correct, which apparently converts the crew-member to a stream of energy/information, then reverses the process in the ship and replicates a copy of the crew member.

My guess is there are always more "bits" or any type of definite symbol required to represent 3D reality world state information than can be "read out".