The Datacenter of Babel

Stephen Wolfram has a model of the universe, the Ruliad, in which every set of possible rules for the laws of physics is operating in parallel. His motivating hypothesis is the Principle of Computational Equivalence, which states that no matter how a computer is built, whether it be a regular computer like a Macbook or an implicit computer running via cellular automaton, it is capable of computing the same things.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote an excellent short story called The Library of Babel. It describes an infinite library, containing all possible 410-page books. The vast majority are completely worthless nonsense, but somewhere within its corridors, every possible coherent book exists.

Perhaps these ideas can be combined. Consider the Datacenter of Babel. Room after room is full of racks of computers. Every possible codebase is running somewhere on one of its servers. Somewhere there lies a Minecraft server where all the cows are modded to look blue. Somewhere there lies a Bitcoin miner containing Satoshi’s private keys. Somewhere, perhaps, there lies a computer slowly emulating a perfect model of our own universe.

Is the world a simulation? Is the Datacenter of Babel real? In some sense, if the universe can be modeled by a computer at all, then the Datacenter of Babel must be an accurate model of the universe.

Is this a useful model? Imagine strolling through the Datacenter of Babel, connecting your laptop at random to various servers. The vast majority, of course, are running nonsensical code, full of syntax errors, crashing the very moment the machine was turned on. Without a map, you could hike for years without ever encountering a functional server.

Indeed, we have no real map to the space of all possible programs. Wolfram theorizes that it should be possible to search the space of short programs to find interesting ones. To me, it seems like we can create a number of neat-looking pictures, but we have never found anything useful by searching programs. Once you realize that the Datacenter of Babel is not a useful model, you also realize that the Ruliad is not a useful model.

The underlying problem with the Principle of Computational Equivalence is ignoring the efficiency of programs. There is a long history of this - the traditional theoretical definition of “computable” functions ignores how long it takes to compute them - but in practice, something that takes 10^100 time might as well be impossible. The Datacenter of Babel might be a correct model, but it is an inefficient model, in terms of how efficient it is to even locate ourselves within the model, much less make any conclusion from it.

I am entertained by the concept, though, of an infinite datacenter. I wonder how one would set up the routers….

Interstellar Cold War

Most science fiction prefers to ignore the speed of light when thinking about space colonization. Star Trek has warp speed, The Expanse has wormholes, Three Body Problem has instantaneous interstellar communication. If you could travel faster than light, a civilization that stretches across multiple star systems might feel just like a civilization that covered multiple continents on Earth, in the days before jet travel.

In reality, we’re pretty sure that you can’t go faster than the speed of light. What does this mean for the politics of an interstellar civilization?

Imagine humanity spread across just two planets, that are 20 light years apart from each other. You can communicate, but it’ll take at least 20 years for a message to cross. You can travel yourself, but it’ll take at least 20 years for a ship to cross.

Can a single country span the two planets? It doesn’t really make sense - a ruler or a legislative body in one place would take 40 years to handle any issue that arose. 20 years to learn about the problem, 20 years to inform the locals of the solution.

How would war between the planets work? Imagine you lived on one planet, and you heard that the space Nazis had taken over the government of the other planet. They hate your planet, they haven’t declared war, but they have enough nuclear weapons to destroy your planet. Any moment now, a swarm of nukes could drop down from space. Maybe they launched 19 years ago and they’re already on their way.

Mutually assured destruction works when one side can’t wipe out the other, and both sides share a planet that they don’t want to destroy. If one side has superior technology, so that they could win with a first strike, the logic of mutually assured destruction doesn’t apply any more. But with distant enemies, you don’t know how much their technology has advanced in 20 years.

You also can’t understand the mentality of your enemies, if they live 20 light years away from you. You don’t even know the names of the decisionmakers. You can’t pick up the red phone to Moscow in case of emergency to talk people down from the cliff.

You can easily imagine a world government learning that bad guys were about to take over a distant planet, and deciding that a preemptive war might be necessary. Of course, if both sides are thinking this way, that just makes war even more likely.

It seems quite dangerous to settle planets in other star systems before we have figured out a way to stop having wars. Fortunately, it looks like it’s going to take us a while to spread out of the solar system. Hopefully we can figure out this “peace on Earth” thing first.

Books of One Beautiful, Negative Note

Sometimes the characters in a book are happy, excited, engaged in their lives, having adventures, and when you read the book you get fired up thinking about doing things like they’re doing. And sometimes a character is suffering. Some negative emotion is overwhelming them, and the book isn’t immediately viscerally pleasurable to read, but the description is so vivid and rich you can’t stop reading, you feel like you are learning of the depths of human experience, although in some sense the book makes you unhappy.

Recently, unintentionally, I have found myself reading several of this second type of book. These books are very good, and I recommend you read any of them that strike your fancy. They ring a bell in my head, it sounds a beautiful note, but it is a negative feeling, a bad one, and I don’t to eject it per se, but I want to crystallize it and set it aside to be known rather than felt. So I am encasing my thoughts about these books in this blog post, to exorcise them, and perhaps share them with you, o blog reader.

Let’s begin.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

There are a number of different Tolstoy story collections; this collection is the one I read.

No surprise - the best story here is the title story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and its emotion is the fear of death. There are so many portrayals of death in modern culture, but almost always as a quick, violent death, happening to somebody else. Ivan suffers slowly, with doctors trying to help but achieving nothing. His family members are both constantly near him, and not really close to him, growing emotionally further away as he comes closer to death and they remain alive. Is it possible to understand how you will feel when close to death? Do we want to understand that?

Another great story in this collection is The Kreutzer Sonata. Its emotion is jealousy. It’s a real song, and it fits the story perfectly. It’s a sonata for violin and piano, played by two people. The main character’s wife plays this sonata with another man, and the emotional bond it forms between them drives the main character insane, sending him into a jealous, violent rage.

I think you should read this story and simultaneously listen to the sonata. I lack the words to describe music well, but in the “presto” part the violin and piano are handing the melody back and forth, slowly building its intensity higher, and it just perfectly matches the main character’s rising insanity. Start it when you get to the part where the main character starts talking about the Kreutzer Sonata.

Try listening to this version on Spotify. Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich are great musicians, but also, they have become my mental image of the characters. Look at them:

Doesn’t Martha Argerich look like she could be the beautiful woman around which the love interests revolve in a Tolstoy story, and Gidon Kremer, with that mildly goofy grin, look like he could be the sort of guy who at first seems like an innocent nerd and then sneakily charms someone’s wife?

Anyway. Great stories.

Some critics, like Harold Bloom, think Hadji Murat, also in this collection, is one of the greatest short stories of all time. I was surprised to see that after I read it. My initial impression of the main character (Hadji Murat) was that he is a naive and corrupt loser. He expects to be able to convince the Russian empire to change its military strategy, while being ignorant of its bureaucracy. He’s bitter that he has been fired by his side’s leader. And what he wants is to be installed as a local ruler, as the guy who betrays his own side in the war. Indeed, he ends up failing to accomplish anything, dying pointlessly, basically getting what he deserves. So, a decent story, but nothing special. Reminds me of a bunch of real world stories from Afghanistan.

But apparently many readers see Hadji Murat as a hero, a noble warrior who represents bravery and ambition? I still liked the story as a collection of vignettes about this eternal empire-vs-a-foreign-culture war. I feel like there is this core assumption that it’s noble to kill a lot of people while achieving nothing because of the glory of war, and people who like the Hadji Murat character must agree with that assumption, and I don’t. It’s odd to me because War and Peace, which Tolstoy wrote before writing this story, seemed like it was strongly in opposition to that view.

The Luminous Novel

The Luminous Novel is about procrastination. The author is a semi-famous writer who gets a big grant to finish his masterpiece. He starts recording a diary of everything he does, during his “year of finishing the masterpiece”. And it’s just chock full of complete wastes of time. Like, hex editing shareware to get around copy protection, when he is “supposed” to be working.

Is it an interesting diary? It reminds me of Knausgaard in some ways - just much more realistic than you would expect, and that aspect of it makes up for a lack of narrative or point. About halfway through the book, I decided it was pointless, but somehow curious, and I evaluated the book as “not that great” but figured I’d keep reading anyway because, well, I was stuck in Tahoe and the I-80 was closed so I was going to be reading something and I just wanted to great it.

And then maybe 85% of the way through the book, he’s like, okay. So I couldn’t do it. I failed. Instead of my masterpiece, I have this diary. I have a little bit of other stuff but it just didn’t come together. Then the last 15% of the book is what he has of the masterpiece, and it’s amazing. Gripping, realistic, vivid, each page is everything you want of a great novel. It just doesn’t fit together. There’s no real overall plot, no consistent set of characters, only this dream of sharing this luminous feeling at the heart of his life and love.

So did he do it? I feel like he successfully got 15% of the way there. He died shortly after the period recorded, and this novel will forever be a partially great novel.

The whole time he’s waking up at 3 pm, going to sleep at 8 am, and trying a slew of weird herbal remedies. He mentions right at the end of the book that he stopped drinking coffee and this seems to have magically fixed his terrible sleep problems and made him healthier in other ways too.

I found this book to be inspirational, honestly. He could have produced a truly great novel. He succeeded at a lesser goal - making a good, but fairly weird novel. I think the secret is a really mundane one - he just should have wasted less time and improved his health by taking the standard actions that everyone recommends to do these things.

Crime and Punishment

I finally succeeded in reading this book on my third attempt. Sometimes a difficult book is like a difficult hiking trail - if you’re in shape, and you have the right gear, you can enjoy a beautiful hike, when somebody out of shape wearing flip flops finds it to be a painful slog. Perhaps recently I have been getting into better “reading shape”.

Most “antihero” characters have a fixed sort of badness, but they are likeable, so you root for them as the story goes on, and they just stay how they are. It’s like the reader agrees to suspend their disbelief and pretend the character is good, and just pay attention to the exciting actions and hope they turn out well for the antihero. Sometimes the antihero is only a little bad, like an art thief who steals art and never hurts anyone, and you just permanently accept that this sort of little bit of badness is okay. Or perhaps they die in the end to achieve moral balance, so that you can be left feeling that things worked out appropriately.

Raskolnikov is different. He commits murder, sort of because he needs money, but also because he sort of has a philosophical view that he’s special and the regular rules of morality don’t apply to him. His thinking just isn’t very clear at the time. And then it is impossible for the reader to consistently root for Raskolnikov, because he doesn’t even consistently root for himself. His guilt becomes stronger and stronger, eventually crushing him. He isn’t like the crooks in a heist movie who cleverly try to evade the law - he’s distracted by his own obsession about what he has done, slowly becoming less and less able to even try to evade the police.

Which Raskolnikov is the more sympathetic one? The cool and calm protagonist we see at the start who thinks he can get away with murder, or the emotional wreck unable to face his family as he drags himself to the police station to talk to the investigator, unsure whether he should admit to the murder? Are we rooting for Raskolnikov to get away with it, or are we rooting for him to do the right thing, and confess?

The Trial

The Metamorphosis is supposed to be Kafka’s masterpiece, but I think I liked this one better. (I read this translation.) The Trial is about that frustration and dread you feel when interacting with a huge bureaucracy.

Of all these books, The Trial was the most painful to read. It’s a good thing it is relatively short. I would read a bit, pause, and just feel miserable. Sometimes it was hard to say why I kept reading. But, at the same time I strongly recommend this book.

There’s a difference between how it feels in the moment to read a book, and how it feels to have read a book. It’s like a weekend afternoon where the kids are causing all sorts of trouble, and it’s so frustrating, but for a fifteen minute period everyone is behaving so nicely, and you snap a picture of mom and the kids baking muffins where everyone looks so happy, and it’s a great picture so you look back at it later and have great memories, so you keep coming back to the Good Muffin Recipe, and in the end a great tradition is formed.

Except, instead of eating delicious muffins, the payoff here is… a deeper understanding of the emotional nature of being frustrated by impersonal forces? Hmm. Well, it’s a great payoff, trust me.

Josef K is arrested. He asks what he’s being arrested for. Nobody knows. It’s not that they won’t tell him - they’re happy to tell him what he’s being arrested for. But that happens at a later stage in the process. What is the process? Well, it’s not as simple as just explaining what the process is. The best way to handle it is to find a good lawyer, or at least not one of the many lawyers who will mislead you about the process more than they clarify. Of course, that isn’t straightforward. But good luck. Don’t miss your first hearing. When is the first hearing? Well, it isn’t precisely a “hearing”, it’s more like a discussion that gradually merges into a hearing.

And so on. It’s like the nightmare where you forgot to turn in your homework, plus the nightmare of being late to an important event, plus the feeling of getting a notification from the IRS that you filed your taxes wrong, all expanded out into a novel. There is nothing else quite like it.

Kafka himself was essentially a middle manager in a large insurance company. He was considered “tireless and ambitious”.

Conclusion

This is enough. These books are great, but this is all the negative novel I can handle, for now. Next I am going to try to read something full of joy and delight.

Looking For Aliens

Recently I’ve been helping the Berkeley SETI project with their data processing pipeline and learning a lot about SETI and radio astronomy in the process. I thought I’d write about how it works because I think it’s really interesting. This blog post will assume you don’t know anything about astronomy so apologies if you are such a savvy astronomer that this bores you.

Types Of Telescope

The normal sort of telescope, the sort you might look through to see the Moon, that is an optical telescope. Optical telescopes make it easier to see distant light. This is an optical telescope that you can buy for $100 at Amazon:

And this is an optical telescope that cost $10 billion or so:

Well, maybe it isn’t precisely correct to call the James Webb Space Telescope an optical telescope. It’s like a D&D elf, it can see regular light and also infrared. But infrared is right next to regular light, so it’s at least very close to an optical telescope. The Hubble saw visible light but also some ultraviolet and infrared. In general these space telescopes are doing similar things to your backyard telescope, they are just much better at it.

There is also a totally different sort of telescope called a radio telescope. A radio telescope is what James Bond fought on top of in GoldenEye. This is a radio telescope:

In particular this is the Green Bank Telescope, known to its friends as the GBT. It’s in the middle of nowhere in the Allegheny mountains in West Virginia. It doesn’t sense light, it senses radio waves. In general these radio telescopes are doing similar things to the radio receiver in your car radio, they are just much better at it.

For physics reasons, optical telescopes get a lot of interference from the sky and the atmosphere. So when you want an optical telescope to analyze space really well, you get it up into space. Radio telescopes, on the other hand, get a lot of interference from radio waves. So the area around the Green Bank Telescope is blocked off as the National Radio Quiet Zone. They restrict radio stations and they try to get people to not run microwaves within 20 miles of the telescope.

I’ve mostly been dealing with data from the Green Bank Telescope, so I’ll focus on the data it provides in this post. (Green Bank is a single dish telescope, which means it has one big dish. You can do weirder things like beamforming with the arrays of lots of smaller dishes.)

The Output of a Radio Telescope

You can think of a normal video feed as containing four-dimensional data. The x dimension, the y dimension, the time dimension, and the color dimension, and you get a “brightness” for each point defined in those four dimensions. Most image processing you just think of the color as one entity, and you happen to store that as an RGB triplet, but you can also think of it as your camera just happens to only provide three pixels of resolution in the color dimension because most human eyes can’t distinguish finer detail in that dimension anyway.

So what sort of data do you get from a radio telescope? The GBT typically is using a “single pixel” detector. That means you don’t get an x dimension or a y dimension. It’s just looking at one single spot in the sky. But you get a ton of resolution in the time dimension and the color dimension. When it’s a radio wave, we don’t call it “color”, we call it “frequency”, but it’s the same underlying physical thing. So the data is two-dimensional, time and frequency.

There is a set of people based in West Virginia who operate the telescope, and then different research groups from around the world rent it for blocks of time. There’s a relatively small datacenter on-site and the different research groups run their own computer systems in that datacenter. The GBT is a pretty good telescope so it outputs a lot of data. The precise details depend on the configuration, but the typical raw output of a day’s session might be on the order of hundreds of terabytes. So with one of the larger data consumers like the Berkeley SETI program you have nontrivial issues just around the amount of data you are processing.

Doppler Drift

The fundamental idea behind this sort of SETI is, maybe aliens are emitting radio signals, so let’s look for radio signals coming from somewhere outside our solar system.

It’s harder than you might expect to tell where a radio signal is coming from. In particular you need to distinguish a radio signal that’s coming from aliens in outer space, and a radio signal that’s coming from radio interference on Earth.

One way you can tell if a signal is coming from outer space is to move the antenna around. Point at star A for a while, then point at star B for a while, then point back at A for a while, et cetera. A signal that shows up when you are pointed both at star A and at star B is probably just interference.

Another way is to use the Doppler effect. You probably learned about this in a physics class. The Doppler effect is when a fire truck is driving toward you, its siren sounds different than when a fire truck is driving away from you. The pitch of a sound is different when its source is moving relative to you. For a radio wave, it doesn’t have a pitch, it has a frequency. The frequency of a radio wave is different when a source is moving relative to you.

By itself, that doesn’t tell us anything. If you only hear a one-second recording of a fire truck, you can’t tell whether it was moving toward you or away from you, because you don’t know what the “natural pitch” of that fire truck is.

However, if a source is accelerating relative to you, you can detect that without knowing the natural frequency. When a source is accelerating, the frequency will seem to change steadily over time. This is called “Doppler drift”.

Fortunately, basically everything in outer space is accelerating relative to you, because as the Earth rotates, you’re accelerating towards the center of the Earth. So for a source in outer space, you should see some Doppler drift. The magnitude of the drift depends on whether the object is just cruising along, or whether it’s on the surface of its own planet, or orbiting around something.

Examples

To me, this makes more sense when I look at the data. Here’s a recording that shows no Doppler drift, so it’s probably some sort of terrestrial interference:

And here’s a recording that shows Doppler drift. I don’t know what it is - probably still some sort of interference rather than aliens - but it’s coming from some source that’s accelerating relative to the receiver, which filters out the vast majority of interference.

This data is heavily compressed from the original form that the telescope receives. The vertical axes on these plots represent about five minutes of recording. The horizontal axes are frequency at a very fine resolution - each pixel represents a fractional change in the frequency of about 3e-10. So imagine if your normal radio could pick up 10 million different radio stations between 101.1 and 101.3.

Conclusion

So the SETI data pipeline is basically, collect lots of data pointing at different things. Find cases where you see a diagonal line when you point at a particular target, and no diagonal line when you point away from that target. When you see something, notify the humans to check it out.

I have theories about how well this is working, the parts that could be improved, why we should build a moon base, all sorts of ideas. But this post is getting long so I think I’ll call it here. Let me know if you have any questions - I think the process of explaining it helps me understand things better myself.

r/antiwork and The Gap

Recently the Antiwork subreddit has gotten really popular. I was interested by Sriram’s analysis:

and the subsequent response on r/antiwork.

I feel like “bad managers and broken processes” isn’t quite what’s going on here. That does come up a lot in the top stories. Someone gets fired for offending one ridiculous customer, someone gets a $40 tip and then their boss takes it away, managers do mean things to try to convince people to stay at their job after they quit. The absolute worst stories, those often have bad managers and broken processes. But the core problem is that many jobs are just fundamentally miserable, too miserable for good managers or good processes to fix.

After I graduated college and before I started grad school, I spent the summer in Boston living with a friend, and I was looking for a summer job just to have something to do. It was harder than I expected to find something; I couldn’t find a job that was happy to take someone for just a few months. I ended up lying on my resume and saying I was an artist who dropped out of college. Finally I got a job at The Gap.

Working at The Gap, the processes seemed fine, and the managers were very kind and helpful people. It’s not a hard job. You basically just stand around, fold clothes all day, and watch the other employees to make sure nobody steals anything. But, I think if I worked there my entire life I would hate capitalism and become a huge antiwork supporter.

The Gap is not great

There are three main problems with the job. One problem is that it was extremely boring. Another problem is you made about $7 an hour. At 40 hours a week that’s somewhat over poverty level. But the third problem is that you can’t even get 40 hours a week. There’s no commitment to how many hours a week of work you can get. I think this was fundamental to the nature of the business - the management had these projections of expected foot traffic based on seasonal projections, past holiday performance, new promotions, and it varied a lot. I don’t really think better processes would change this. As long as The Gap is allowed to hire part timers with shifts chosen at a moment’s notice, they will choose to do so.

There were two types of worker at The Gap. The “transients”, like me, were just working a minimum wage job for a little while and not too concerned about making the maximum amount of money we could. The “lifers” were older and had responsibilities and tended to grab as many shifts as they could. You couldn’t survive as a lifer unless you had a second job. But the stress of two part time jobs spreads out far beyond your work hours. Every weekday, every weekend day, you’re hoping for one of the two to come through, and if you really need the money, you can’t plan anything in advance.

Can good managers or good processes do anything here? The job just sucks and it always will suck. At least nowadays if you do gig economy work for Uber or DoorDash you can choose when your part-time work is. That seems way better for second jobs than trying to get compatible shifts from two bosses.

Learning things

That summer I learned so much about folding clothes. I was really, really good at folding clothes, just one second and it’s snapped into a crisp rectangle, and then a year later I forgot all my skills and nowadays the quality of my folding is quite unimpressive. More importantantly it showed me how terrible some jobs are and about how grateful I should be to not be stuck there.

The antiwork movement makes a lot of sense for people who are stuck in a bad job. It isn’t “solution-based” like people advocating communism or a universal basic income. But, maybe that’s a good thing, because neither communism nor a universal basic income is a great solution. The antiwork community is a place for sharing how unhappy people are with their jobs. It’s growing, waiting for a better solution to arise.

At the end of the summer I went to pick up my last paycheck on the way to the airport. I couldn’t just say, hey I had a grad school fellowship lined up in California this whole time, bye! So I made up a story about how my cousin got me a job working at a casino so I was moving to Vegas, and as I left a coworker ran after me and was like… “Can your cousin get me a job too? Please, help, you have to at least try!”

I said I would try and then never got back to him. I hope he found something better.