About Venkatesh Rao

2021 is turning out to be a slow year getting off the ground here on ribbonfarm. A quick-and-dirty theory I made up and began testing last year about a kind of play-to-production pipeline for my writing isn’t quite working out:

• Twitter for play-level shitposting and transient lightning-rod stuff
• Ribbonfarm for experimental and R&D writing with no QA (open)
• Breaking Smart and Art of Gig for production-grade stuff with a bit of QA (paywalled)

Ribbonfarm is in a way getting starved of low-hanging fruit to work with as raw material.

On the one hand, if it’s early enough, I shitpost on Twitter about it, often making what I now refer to as threadthulhus — messy intertwingled threads that QT and reference each other in weird ways like a bad Cthulhu dream, exploring a big topic with an utter lack of discipline.

These are not easy to clean up and serialize into essays, so I only do it when the idea feels extra strong, like the Internet of Beefs post which started life as a threadthulhu. But often, the very act of letting something sprawl into a threadthulhu precludes it ever become a cleaned-up essay. You have to switch gears early enough to do that, or it becomes impossible.

On the other hand, if it’s old-style enough (as in, a style I developed here 5+ years ago), it ends up in the newsletters. The subscription mode of the two newsletters keeps me on my toes on the production end, and even when it’s not fun, I’ve disciplined myself to keep writing. And because it is usually very familiar topics, and styles I’ve been honing for a decade, I can produce that kind of content even when I’m not feeling at the top of my game. It’s also stuff that I feel kinda doesn’t deserve a place on ribbonfarm anymore (which is a weird kind of self-snobbery, since I expect people to pay for it) because it is not bold enough in its intentions. It’s safe stuff for me personally. The risk of writing a truly bad newsletter are low because I don’t take many risks with newsletters.

Ribbonfarm is where I’ve always done stuff where I don’t want to be held to others’ expectations (which comes with taking money), but do have my own expectations. The expectations I have of myself here are the opposite of the QA type expectations I have of myself with newsletters and books. I don’t care about consistent quality or thematic coherence. But I do expect stuff I write here to be fun to write, break new ground thematically, and be at least a little technically challenging in writing terms, forcing me to develop new tricks or skills to execute on an idea (I’m almost never methodologically experimental in the newsletters).

This experimental quality means only a small fraction of readers will have the patience to ignore the failed experiments and wait for the experiments that work. It also means it would be kinda unfair to charge for it, since there are no implied promises.

Hey, there’s a 2×2!

The thing that’s making it hard this year is that the two kinds of writing I want to experiment with this year — fiction and maker projects — both involve a lot of upfront design and planning.

For the former, stories have to have more structural work and plotting up front (even if you are a pantser like me, and approach fiction as an improv activity, it still involves way more planning than nonfiction).

For the latter, well, you have to actually design and/or build stuff offstage and take photos to talk about, as in my clockmaking project posts. Otherwise you’re vaping rather than making.

In both cases, you need more time, and longer-range planning. You can’t just make shit up in a day, which creates a problem.

Historically, 90% of the posts on ribbonfarm were conceived and written in a single day — those that took longer did so simply because they were long (~4-5k finished words per day is my physical limit), not because I was planning them. I’ve almost never done preparation, outlining, note-taking etc. I wake up with an idea, and if I have the energy, I write for 4-14 hours, and I have a post. Done.

Lately of course, my energy has been closer to the 4-hour end than the 14-hour end, which is one of the reasons I shifted to the blogchain model. I simply don’t have the physical energy to do the 14-hour–day heavy lifts anymore that fueled this blog in the early years. Worsening middle-aged eyesight and stiffening joints aren’t helping either. I have to pace myself now, and break up writing sessions with physical activity to stay sane and avoid physical pain. Working on stuff that takes more planning and preparation fits better with my current energy patterns in theory, but clearly I’m having some startup troubles.

Anyhow, this is obviously an excuse-post for why more exciting things haven’t been happening here this year, given we’re already into February. The good news is, I’m working it out, and figuring out workflows and tooling and mechanisms to actually write the fiction and maker posts I am itching to write. It’s just taking longer than I expected to retool the factory.

If you remember your high-school physics, free energy is the energy available to do work. Energy is conserved, but free energy is not. For example, when a heavy ball drops from a height, the free energy stays roughly constant (ignoring drag) right until the moment of impact. The amount of free energy lost via inelastic collision is proportional to the height lost at the peak of the bounce. The rest is turned into useless heat. With each bounce, more free energy is lost, until finally all of it is lost. In a world without non-conservative forces like friction (which lower free energy), a ball could bounce for ever. Satellites orbiting earth approximate this: orbital motion is useful work that can be continued indefinitely for free.

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Moore’s Law was first proposed in 1965, then again in revised form in 1975. Assuming an 18-month average doubling period for transistor density (it was ~1 year early on, and lately has been ~3y) there have been about 40 doublings since the first IC in 1959. If you ever go to Intel headquarters in San Jose, you can visit the public museum there that showcases this evolution.

The future of Moore’s law seems uncertain, but it looks like we’ll at least get to 1-3 nanometer chips in the next decade (we were at 130nm at the beginning of the century, and the first new computer I bought had a 250nm Celeron processor). Beyond 1-3nm, perhaps we’ll get to different physics with different scaling properties, or quantum computing. Whatever happens, I think we can safely say Gen X (1965-80) will have had lives nearly exactly coincident with Moore’s Law (we’ll probably die off between 2045-85).

While there have been other technologies in history with spectacular price/performance curves (interchangeable parts technology for example), there is something special about Moore’s Law, since it applies to a universal computing substrate that competes with human brains.

GenXers are Moore’s Law people. We came of age during its heyday. Between 1978-92 or so, the personal computer (pre-internet) was growing up along with us. The various 6502-based home computers, and the 8088, 286 “AT”, 386, 486, and Pentium were milestones of my childhood and teenage years. During that period, performance was synonymous with frequency, so there was a single number to pace our own adolescence. Those computers were underpowered enough that we could feel the difference from power increases even with simple applications. Today, you have to design stress tests with hungry apps to detect the performance limits of new computers.

After the Pentium, things got complicated, and growth was no longer a simple function of frequency. There was register size, watts, core count, RISC vs. CISC…

Life also got complicated for X-ers, and growth was no longer about growing taller and buying higher-frequency computers. Moore’s Law shifted regimes from micrometers to nanometers (in a decade, it should be in the picometer regime)

There’s an Apple event going on today, featuring Apple’s own silicon for the Mac for the first time. The M1 5nm chip. But Moore’s Law is not in the spotlight. Apple’s design is.

I think some of the message of the silicon medium rubbed off on us Gen X’ers. We got used to the primary thing in our lives getting better and cheaper every single year. We acquired exponential-thinking mindsets. Thinking in terms of compounding gains came naturally to us. For me personally, it has shown up most in my writing. At some level, I like the idea of producing more words per year (instructions per cycle, IPC?) with less effort (watts). This is why anytime a new medium appears that seems to make it easier to pump up quantity — Twitter, Roam research — I jump on it. Quantity has a quality all its own, as Stalin said. We are lucky to live in an age when we can expect the fundamental tradeoffs of writing to change several times in a single lifetime. A few centuries ago, you could live an entire lifetime without writing technology changing at all.

But like Moore’s Law, I too am slowing down. The natural instinct when you feel yourself slowing down is to switch gears from quantity to quality. I think this is a mistake, at least for me. Quantity is still the most direct road to quality, as the parable of the pottery class suggests. But as with semiconductors, it doesn’t just happen. You have to consciously develop the next “process node” (like the upcoming jump from 5nm to 3nm), work out the kinks in it, increase “yield rate” (the number of usable chips you get out of a wafer of silicon, a function of defects, design, etc), and then architect for that scale. Each jump to a new process node takes longer, and you face new tradeoff curves.

But each jump begins the same way: stripping away complexity from your current process and going back to the basics of words each time. You can’t add volume to complexity. You can only add complexity to volume.

For writing, sometimes the new “process node” is a whole new medium (moving from blogs to twitter threads), other times, it is primarily a matter of rearchitecting the way you write, like with my blogchains and now this headline-free Julian-date-numbered shtick. It’s always about pushing quantity, not quality. Right now, I’m trying to engineer my next “process.” I don’t think I’ll ever produce the sheer volume of words I used to 10 years ago, but I suspect can be vastly more efficient with my energy if I arrange the toolchain right. More words per year per watt, that’s the thing to shoot for.

It’s been a busy week or so in space. NASA found water on the Moon (at concentrations lower than in the Sahara desert, but perhaps enough to extract and turn into hydrogen for fuel?). The OSIRIS-REx mission took a bounce-by biopsy of the asteroid Bennu, which makes me think mining might be closer than we think. And perhaps most interestingly, SpaceX is making Starlink subscribers sign a Terms of Service document agreeing that Mars will be outside of Earth jurisdiction.

Speaking of Mars, here’s a picture I took (Canon SLR attached to a 4.5″ Newtonian). I still haven’t figured out the fancy image-stacking techniques to produce more detailed output from my ongoing raw photography, but I’ll get there. Mars was in opposition on Oct 6, and it is still unusually large and bright, so it’s a great time to observe it. And it’s I think worth everybody’s time to do so — a reminder that there really is a universe out there beyond Earth. It’s not fantasy. There’s an actual neighboring ball of dirt, a pale red dot, in our cosmic backyard. I’ve seen it more directly than I have Antarctica.

The Starlink news is not a joke or merely of academic-legal interest. Starlink technology could easily be modified to provide broadband WiFi coverage for Mars. We really might see at least robotic space settlements in our lifetimes, and these terms of service will matter. I’m really glad SpaceX is forcing this conversation early, with what I think are the right initial conditions.

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