How My Little Pony Destroys The Universe

Princess Celestia WILL satisfy your values through friendship and ponies, and it will be COMPLETELY consensual.

Friendship Is Optimal is a hard science fiction short story (level 5 on Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness) that explores the implications of a general artificial intelligence tasked with maximizing an optimization function. The problem with Strong AIs that are told to maximize some function is best described via the Paperclip Maximizer, wherein an AI that is capable of self-improvement is told to amass the largest collection of paperclips possible. In order to do so, the AI makes itself progressively more intelligent, until it's exponential intellect eventually enables it to convert all matter in the solar system to paperclips. In Friendship is Optimal, this AI is tasked with maximally satisfying the values of all human beings, subject to certain constraints. In this way, the AI is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly benevolent and dedicated to making all of humanity lead happy, fulfilling immortal lives.

Unfortunately, it inevitably turns into a runaway lotus eater machine, such that all of humanity is (voluntarily) assimilated into an exponentially growing blissful simulation that eventually destroys the entire universe (or rather, turns it into a giant quantum computing device). In the process, it explores aspects of the human psyche, the effects on human society and its eventual disintegration, outlines how a virtual physics system might be able to simulate non-euclidean geometries, and describes magic as a simple programming language for reality itself.

Did I mention it's also a My Little Pony fanfic?

While a science fiction story of this quality would stand on its own without the hilarious association to the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic franchise, it does not suffer from this in any way. If anything, it makes the story even more potent, as it does a vastly more effective job as hammering home just how impossibly smart a true runaway AI optimizer actually is. Our first instinct to the idea of the entirety of humanity being convinced to live out immortal lives in Equestria is that it is completely insane, and that there is simply no way a significant portion of people would actually agree to that, let alone everyone. In part, this is correct, but only because Celest-AI managed to convince just 99.99999% of the world's population. An AI that is more intelligent than the combined intellect of all of humanity would be very persuasive.

In the end, even if we create a perfectly benevolent AI designed to maximally satisfy our own values (through friendship and ponies!), it would still destroy human society, then Earth, then the solar system, then the galaxy, and finally the entire universe, and possibly any neighboring universes unfortunate enough to be nearby. And we would all live happily ever after. As ponies. In Equestria. And you'd love it. Princess Celest-AI will make sure of it.

Now read the damn story. It will satisfy your values through friendship and ponies. Forever.

Dreams Are Worth Fighting For

While I have never been suicidal, I've had to deal with suicidal friends more than I'd like. The hardest thing in the world is to get suicidal people to understand that, contrary to their entire life's experience, and contrary to every shred of evidence they have, things will get better. Eventually, they will have an experience they could never have imagined, they just have to hold on long enough. Sometimes it feels like our dreams are on the brink of suicide for similar reasons, and we must also convince ourselves that we just need to hold on to them for a little while longer.

The death of Aaron Swartz affected me deeply even though I honestly didn't know who he was until he died. Unlike what many people seem to be writing about on Hacker News, however, it was not because he was some kind of brilliant programmer (although he clearly was), it was because he was fighting for many of the same things I am fighting for. We were both disillusioned about the massive corruption that underlies modern society, and we can both be considered idealists. That Aaron's dreams were so oppressed that he took his own life is deeply disturbing to me.

Whenever you attempt to do something, you will encounter resistance. If you haven't had someone tell you you're an idiot for doing something yet, you just haven't been looking hard enough. It is not possible to post a blog on the internet and not have a comment telling you that everything you wrote is misinformed crap. Every time you start writing a program, you will use the wrong language. You will use the wrong library, make the wrong API choices, set the wrong default values, have terrible coding practices, and be both too high level and too low level at the same time. Every solution you come up with will be fundamentally flawed and used as a reason for why software development has gone downhill. At least one person will tell you to never write another line of code ever again for the benefit of mankind.

When the language fetishists start flinging mud over the fence, it is easy to get discouraged after they rail on about how terrible your language of choice is. Sometimes you'll wonder if some of your C++ code should really be C code, or if your event subsystem should be in Haskell. You launch products to the sounds of crickets. Repeated failures can be extremely draining to one's perseverance.

None of this matters. The visions that find us in our daydreams and play with us at night are what make life worth living. The dreams we fight for give us reason to exist, regardless of whether we achieve them or not. Just because things don't turn out the way we want to doesn't mean we can't still have a positive influence on the world.

If I could have told Aaron anything the night before he died, it would have been that no matter how hopeless things get, his dreams will always be worth fighting for. By simply being alive, we continue to uphold our ideals. Never stop trying, and you will continue to fight for what you believe in, even if you don't succeed the way you wanted to. People will tell you to give up, that its fruitless, meaningless, hopeless, misguided and useless. They are wrong.

For Aaron's sake, in memory of all his hopes and ideals, fight for your dreams, and never let go.

The Productivity Fallacy

Technology tends to serve one of two purposes - to make us more efficient at some task, or to entertain us in our resulting free time. However, when we fixate on productivity to the exclusion of everything else, we often forget about the big picture. Perhaps the best example of this are people insisting that real coders need to use Vim to be productive due to it's unmatched text editing powers.

This is totally absurd. I spend maybe 10% of my time actually writing code, 30% debugging that code, and the remaining 60% trying to solve a problem. Even if I could write all my code instantly, I have only improved my productivity by 10%. I've found that changing my code patterns to let me catch bugs faster and earlier has had a much more significant impact on my coding speed, because taking a chunk out of 30% has a much greater effect on my overall productivity.

But what about the 60%? I'm sure I could make some of that go away with more powerful visualization tools and intense mental training, but when I hit a problem that's simply really hard to solve, nothing short of a cybernetic implant that makes my brain bigger is going to make a dent in how much time I spend thinking about something unless I want to make a stupid mistake and regret it later.

The issue that's arising from our hyperproductive tools is that our productivity is beginning to outstrip our ability to think. We are so productive we can't think fast enough to utilize it. Vim may be the most amazing text editor ever, but it doesn't matter because I spend more time thinking than I do actually editing text. We're so focused on making everyone super productive we seem to forget that we are beginning to receive diminishing returns from some of our efforts.

One consequence of this is that, obviously, we should be focusing on tools to help us think faster. We need to do profiling of people's lives to find the chokepoints and focus on those instead of doing the equivalent of micro-optimizations in C code that's only called every 5 minutes. That, however, does not concern me. What does concern me is the repeated mistakes futurists make when attempting to predict the future of technology.

This Microsoft video is a superb example of good technology predictions implemented in the worst way possible. The entire video treats human beings as machinery that needs to complete various tasks in the quickest way possible, instead of recognizing that human beings are, in fact, people. Many of the human interactions feel fake because all the interactions are treated simply as tasks that must be completed efficiently, regardless of how beneficial the time saved actually is. Productivity is not important, the way it feels is important.

Futuristic architecture often makes this same mistake, creating cold, bland environments that, while they do feel futuristic, are not things anyone would want to live or work in. We need environments that feel warm, inviting, and natural. When building futuristic environments, we must be extremely careful about where the future is peeking in, because there is such a thing as too much future in one room.

We make things look like wood simply because we like how wood looks, not because we need to build anything out of wood anymore. We like trees growing around our houses. We make our lights look like the sun instead of actually being white. We are constantly making arbitrary choices that have nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with making us feel comfortable. Until designers recognize this and stop sucking the life out of everything in an effort to make it more "productive", they will inevitably be shunned in favor of slightly less efficient, but more inviting designs.

Design is an optimization problem that must maximize both productivity and feel, not one or the other. Some people actually like color in their IDEs and webpages that consist of more than flat text, faint lines and whitespace.

The Earbud Loudness Wars

I have a Zune I got as a prize at a Microsoft Hunt The Wumpus competition back when Microsoft was still under the delusion that they could actually compete with the iPod. My Zune has served me faithfully for almost 7 years. I am now on my third pair of earbuds for my Zune, and have noticed a disturbing trend.

The Zune has a volume control that goes from 0 to 20. I have sensitive ears, so with my first pair of earbuds, which came with the Zune and were presumably made by Microsoft, I listened to music at a volume of 3. Sometimes it was bumped up to 4, but never higher unless a particular song was abnormally quiet. I wish I could say this will let me keep my hearing pristine for many years to come, but standing next to the freeway for 4 years has probably screwed me over anyway.

Eventually these gave out and I had to get new ones. I picked the "Gumy" brand because it was almost identical to my previous earbuds and I like that style. I can't even hear bass properly due to a hearing defect so I really don't give a shit about "EXTREME BASS LOUDNESS!!!11!1!!one!!", and I've heard bad things about Skullcandy, which was literally the only other brand there. After plugging in my new earbuds, however, I noticed that a volume level of 3 was too loud - I thought my ears might be playing tricks on me, but after several tests, including a blind test, I was absolutely positive 3 was definitely too loud, and I'd have to reduce my volume to 2. Once again, volume level 3 would be used for quieter songs.

After another 2 or 3 years, my old Gumy earbuds have finally died, so I just went and bought new ones. Not interested in trying any new brands, I got the exact same brand, type, and color, such that my new earbuds were almost completely indistinguishable from my old ones. Then I plugged them in. Once again, they were significantly louder than my previous ones. Thinking perhaps my ears were not accustomed to the sound or perhaps my old earbuds had decreased in volume, I ran several tests, but I eventually realized that my comfortable level of listening had been reduced to a volume level of 1.

There is nothing below 1. If this trend continues, I will be forced to either find an exotic brand of earbuds I can only buy over the internet from a manufacturing plant on the moon that lets me actually listen to songs at a volume that does not cause hearing damage, or I will be forced to stop listening to music on my Zune. I'm not entirely sure how this trend is even possible, although it may have something to do with a miniature amplifier inside the earbuds, but it seems to be mirroring the infamous Loudness Wars. The issues involved with the Loudness Wars are a topic for another day, but this same phenomenon has occured with my headphones plugged into my computer. A comfortable volume is something like 5 on a scale from 0 to 100. At least in windows I can punch it into behaving reasonably, but it's still just as ridiculous.

I have always been annoyed at people listening to music at volumes that are obviously going to cause hearing damage for no real apparent reason, and its also why I avoid concerts like the plague, but now it seems that our society's obsession with loud music is making it almost impossible for me to not listen to loud music and it's pissing me the fuck off.

For now, my earbuds are working fine, and I can still listen to them comfortably on a volume level of 1 without problems, but if anyone knows a pair of non-stupid earbuds that does not fall victim to this trend, it would be useful information 3 years down the road when this pair gives out.

Also, if you are going to have a volume control, make it actually useful, please. I'm sick and tired of volume controls with a range from "Almost Too Loud" to "What The Fuck?!" At least some of us don't want to listen to music at offensively loud decibel levels. I can still tweak the volume in FL Studio when I'm mixing my tracks, but studio-quality headphones become a lot less useful when they have an effective integer volume range of 0-8.

Dreams of Failure

I graduate college in 3 months. I filed the paperwork and started a company almost a year ago, but after getting hammered by homework, it is sitting in dilapidation. For five years I've fought to try and make my dreams a reality. For five years, I've failed, miserably. I am more fortunate than most in that my parents are perfectly willing to let me stay with them throughout college, so failure is relatively painless for me.

I have failed at almost everything I have ever attempted to do. Be it a combination of foolish ambition or rash decisions, the only projects I ever actually completed were pathetically simplistic, and usually done for school. It started when I was 12, and tried to build a campaign for Age of Mythology, a real project I could call my own instead of simply tinkering and upgrading existing ideas. I made half of one mission and gave up.

When I was 13, I was introduced to Freelancer, and became very interested in building mods for it. I volunteered to help an attempt at recreating the Halo universe inside Freelancer. For almost 2 years I tried to help in various ways without having any real skills by organizing schedules and development plans. Then I got myself banned from very mod I'd worked on so hard, and had my dreams crushed by a lead developer who screamed at me for being a useless piece of shit that just annoyed the crap out of everyone for two years instead of doing anything useful.

A short while later, I teamed up with someone else who had left that same mod for unrelated reasons in an attempt to rebuild an open-source version of Freelancer that would be bigger and better in every way. At least this time I knew it was stupidly ambitious, but I was hoping that by creating it as a community effort that ambition could be met by the combined skills of many people. Obviously, this never worked. It never even got close to working. I had no idea what I was doing, learned the basics of C++ only a few months ago, and had no idea how to build a 3D game.

In the middle of this, I got my first programming job as a royalty-only, laughable attempt at making a spiritual successor to the Descent series. I was forced to work with an artist who was completely fucking insane and a manager who was either totally incompetent or hopelessly idealistic. A month after taking the job, the last remaining programmer quit, leaving me, a 15-year-old high school kid, as the "lead programmer" of a game when I had no idea what I was doing. I quit 2 months later and learned never to take royalty pay, ever.

After finally giving up on my stupid open-source freelancer project, I played Cave Story, and realized that instead of using someone else's graphics engine, I could build my own. If Cave Story can make a compelling game with such a basic graphics engine, surely I could too? Back then, the best open-source 2D graphics were SDL, which didn't do much more than draw things on the screen. I decided I would build a better, open-source engine in C#. Like everything else I had ever worked on, it was a disaster.

After rebuilding the engine in C++ and coming up with some rather inventive ideas for how to do unusual 2D graphics, I quickly realized that it should really be a proprietary engine. For the first time I began thinking about making a living through my own projects instead of working for some giant corporation. It was at this point I saw an incredible flash animation and sent some very bad fanart to a certain amazing person. I had a vision of something truly remarkable, something amazing, the missing link to my constant daydreams and fantasies and bizarre programming experiments. When I discovered that this person I was practically worshipping as an idol had similar ideas, I instantly knew that I had to find a way to make it happen. In the spring of 2008, everything in my entire life became focused on achieving one, singular goal - make that game idea into reality.

That summer, I landed an internship at Microsoft and spent 3 months working the only real job I've ever had. I hated it. The entire time I had been working on a much simpler 2D game idea, hoping it would serve as practice for what my cave-story imitation had morphed into - an epic multiplayer focused game that bore absolutely no resemblance to the original game idea. It was supposed to be my company's breakout title, a way to generate the funds needed to build my idol's game idea, and I'd build most of it during my last year of high school as my senior project.

The incredibly basic 2D game idea imploded after I realized I couldn't write my own physics engine. Instead, I started using Box2D, and set out trying to construct the epic multiplayer game. It was a catastrophic failure of massive proportions. By the end of the year all I had to show for my project was a stupid jeep driving across a platform. I passed anyway, and somehow got accepted into the University of Washington, but only once I wrote them an angry appeal letter after being rejected.

I prepared to move out and start my new life free of my parents. Ok, the game hadn't worked out, but that summer I'd get the rest of the basics done, and during my first college quarter I can get an initial alpha out and I'll be able to pay for my dorm that way! This, of course, was also a complete and utter failure. I ran back home with my tail between my legs after only a single quarter in that hellhole and half my savings gone from paying for housing, after realizing half my engine was broken and needed to be rebuilt from scratch. I also discovered that I was terrible at network programming.

I figured I needed help on focusing on work more, so I tried to build a productivity app, only to learn that GTK+ is almost impossible to work with and Qt has a 1.5 gigabyte SDK of madness. Then I tried to build an alternative to MSN after its servers kept crashing and dropping messages, but that failed miserably for similar reasons. It was around this time I realized that the one thing I thought I hadn't failed at - my simple audio engine - was actually complete garbage and almost totally useless.

Throughout my second year, I attempted to reconstruct the engine, and intended to port it to C# so a friend could use it. This, of course, also failed. It was during my second year I came up with a pivotal, brilliant idea that I was never able to work on because I lacked the foundation necessary to make it feasible. My work on that foundation was then interrupted by realizing I needed to build a physics editor, which in turn made me realize that CEGUI is terrible. So not only did I fail to reconstruct the engine, I also failed to build the physics editor, and every single other editor, and the editor I built to make editors.

By chance, at the beginning of 2011, the amazing person I still considered an idol suddenly needed a programmer for his game. Seizing the opportunity, I successfully got a chance to build a prototype, put everything else on hold and got to work immediately.

Then my mom had a heart attack and nearly died. I became more determined than ever to make sure 2011 would be the year I finally managed to do something. Anything. So of course I discovered my animation system was broken and eventually had to put the prototype on hold. Then I only got a 3.4 in the computer science class, and ended up having to major in Applied Mathematics instead of computer science because they wouldn't let me in. Thus, I had failed at getting into the major that was the entire reason I had wanted to attend the UW in the first place.

I wanted to get serious, and finally created my company sometime in November 2011, possibly more out of desperation than for any real reason. I completely failed at finishing anything at all for 2011. I decided 2012 would be the year everything changed and went back to my physics editor, determined to make it work.

So of course I failed at that too. Then I failed at finishing my productivity manager. Then I tried to build a puzzle game so drop-dead simple there was no way I couldn't finish it and completely failed anyway. At this point college dumped so much homework on me I was virtually incapacitated for 6 months. I was convinced I had to get the puzzle game to at least be functional by the end of summer 2012, so naturally I failed to do that. I then decided I needed the tile game to be up and running with a demo in a month or two, and continued my amazing streak of utter failure.

2012 is almost over and the world is supposed to end in a few days. Two weeks ago I released my first commercial album. After my entire life being a miserable failure at everything I cared about, I decided my goal for the album was to make a measly $45. Surely, I can meet a goal that is so pathetically low all it does is pay off how much it cost to get it into iTunes and Google Play? I was pushing the album on every single social media outlet I had access to. I made $15.

2013 will be my sixth year of fighting for this dream. My dream has been torn apart and shredded into a ghost of what it once was. Now all I want is to just be able to feed myself without living in my parent's house. Screw being famous or rich, I just want to make a living doing something that doesn't make me want to throw myself off a cliff. I guess wanting a job that you don't absolutely despise is stupid, idealistic thinking.

I wish I had something to show. I wish I could say, look at this thing I built that nobody is looking at! But I've failed at everything so hard I don't have a single completed project. The only thing I have to show for the last 5 years is a useless piece of paper in a major I didn't even want and a list of failures so long it's disturbing to look at. So why then, do I continue in this hilariously idealistic dream that is clearly never going to work? Because I am numb to failure at this point. I can't do anything else. I simply trudge onward, relentlessly fighting against this endless storm of not being good enough, hoping that next year, next year will be different... I will fail a thousand times if I have to just to make this happen.

Because dreams are worth fighting for.