// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

@TechCrunch: “How Many Silicon Valley Startup Executives Are Hopped Up On Provigil?” even though “PROVIGIL’s only approved use in the U.S. is to treat narcolepsy“. Duh, shouldn’t they be on Ritalin for the improved goal-directed activity? I mean, in principle, Ritalin should be the drug of choice to turn a nerd into an executive. Pick the right illegally used legal drug, for the sake of the widow’s son!

But really, get off my lawn, kids. When I look at the backlog of antidepressants banned because of their recreative abuse, I fear for the meds I actually need for a condition (ADHD) that might not be recognized as a valid illness by the relevant pharmaceutical control authorities.

I’m assuming a lot of implicit context here about the Jargon File and its place in internet lore. The relevant context is that the ESR curatorial intervention has been deemed reckless and sometimes plain delusional, most infamously with the invention of Aunt Tillie. A significant subset of geeks and hackers have come to resent ESR’s self-indulgent pretense of representing hacker culture adding significant content not backed by external input and even inventing a much-maligned “Hacker Emblem” vaguely similar to a table with dots. There’s an ongoing complaint about misuse of the Jargon File’s influence, thinly covered by the addition of early-hackerdom cartoons to random places of the glossary.

First of all, it’s worth mentioning each edition’s definition of “hacker”:

1996 New Hacker’s Dictionary:

[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker’, `network hacker’. The correct term for this sense is cracker. The term `hacker’ also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net (see network, the and Internet address). It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic (see hacker ethic). It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you’ll quickly be labeled bogus). See also wannabee.

The ESR-curated Jargon File 4.4.7 changes the “membership in the global community to the following:

First of all, civil disobedience implies in its very name that it’s about not obeying something. “Civil” is defined by some dictionaries as “having to do with people and government, as opposed to the military or religion”. So well, so far — but fixing “civil disobedience” as “not obeying the government” begs the question of why should one obey “the government” in first place.

When you invoke the phrase “civil disobedience”, the matter of the source of a government’s power is immediately dragged into debate. The classical political scientists have explained it in the form of a founding myth, which makes government power particularly easy to deconstruct, but modern political philosophers like Bob Nozick have taken the hobbesian/lockeian approach to its logical limits, thus exposing the naked structure of a founding myth argument. A founding myth argument, it appears clearly, is about reasoning about a world without government and its undesirable characteristics, thus demonstrating the need for government by a reduction to absurdity.

The “social need” for a government can be taken at face value, flat out refused (as anarchists will) or further analyzed. We were previously discussing the act of disobeying a government, which is an interaction between two singular entities — the disobeying person and the government. But somehow, by accounting the existence of government as a social need, the concept of “society” sneaks in. Now, we’re not even discussing whether governmental power derives from “the people” — we’ve just said that “society” is worse off in the lack of such a power.

Herein lies one grave problem about the idea of “social needs” and therefore government. Common language sneaks in “society” as a singular entity with whom governments and individuals relate.  The rub is that “society” cannot have volition in the same sense individuals do — not only because of the deep heterogeneity present in most modern societies, but because of cold (even if nontrivial) logic: the simple input to volition that is an ordering on possible choices can’t have simple trivial properties expected from an ordering preserved when individual orderings are aggregated into a virtual societal will — unless the will of one single individual, a dictator, is the only one taken into account.

A máquina acima é uma impressora em 3D que pode fabricar objetos de plástico, cerâmica ou metal conforme comandada por um computador. Várias pessoas já construiram uma Darwin (a versão atual da RepRap). Em breve, a máquina poderá fabricar a si mesma — a previsão é 2008.

And then everything we know goes out the window.

A única coisa que eu sei é que a economia pós-escassez será o teste definitivo da controvérsia Malthus-Ricardo e dos princípios da demanda efetiva/lei de Say.

RepRap will make plastic, ceramic, or metal parts, and is itself made from plastic parts, so it will be able to make copies of itself. It is a three-axis robot that moves several material extruders. These extruders produce fine filaments of their working material with a paste-like consistency. If RepRap were making a plastic cone, it would use its plastic extruder to lay down a quickly-hardening 0.5mm filament of molten plastic, drawing a filled-in disc. It would then raise the plastic extrusion head and draw the next layer (a smaller filled disc) on top of the first, repeating the process until it completed the cone. To make an inverted cone it would also lay down a support material under the overhanging parts. The support would be removed when the cone was complete. Conductors can be intermixed with the plastic to form electronic circuits - in 3D even! This process is called fused deposition modeling; machines that do this are called 3D printers, rapid prototypers, or fabbers. They are very useful. Unfortunately they are also very expensive - $20,000 US or more - and existing models don’t self-replicate. The RepRap build cost will be less than $400 US for the bought-in materials, all of which have been selected to be as widely available everywhere in the world as possible. Also, the RepRap software will work on all computer platforms for free. Complete open-source instructions and plans are published on this website for zero cost and available to everyone so, if you want to make one yourself, you can. We hope to announce self-replication in 2008.