The Intellectual Wilderness

Ah... clickbait style video title glory... This is actually a straightforward video with no hype to it. But it is true: There is a real marketplace now where you can use crypto directly on chain as a payment method -- and the process is arguably smoother than Visa (and the site fees are only 2% compared with 13~20% for eBay/PayPal). Also, sorry about the audio -- sounds like I'm in a can! Aegora.jp is the first boringly ordinary person-to-person sales site that uses a #cryptocurrency (#Aeternity ticker #AE) governed through smart contracts, as its primary payment method rather than Visa/PayPal/etc. No NFTs, no "digital assets", no hype. All trades are completely on-chain, for real tangible items, and the negotiation is left up to the sellers and buyers. Mainnet site: https://aegora.jp Testnet site: https://testnet.aegora.jp Testnet faucet: https://faucet.aepps.com As for actually buying AE and getting them out of those creepy exchanges and onto the chain for real, so far we have had the best experience using Gate.io -- if something takes too long, open a support ticket and they will actually get to your issue right away (yes, actual support people doing support things -- what a wild concept). More tutorials, explainers, howtos, help articles, etc. are planned but as the site just went public on Thursday this is an early first look and can act as an English-language demo/howto for early adopters to understand how it works and discover where they can find the testnet version of it to play around and figure things out for themselves. The site will be changing rapidly over the next few weeks to improve discoverability, but the minimum feature set is fairly small and easy to comprehend after a few minutes poking around the testnet site. As a side note, the backend is implemented entirely in Erlang, and the backend libraries necessary to communicate with the chain (aka "Vanillae.erl") and the in-page code necessary to communicate with the wallet (aka "Sidekick") are open source, though not packaged nicely yet.

What use are peaceful protests if the "root of negotiation is the mutual capacity for violence"? This is a question I have been asked quite a lot over the last two years and has increasingly become a theme of its own ever since the Australian protests and last weekend's eruption of Europe-wide protests appeared to achieve nothing in terms of policy changes. In this video I explain what protests really are and in turn what they achieve in the context of negotiation and the mutual capacity for violence. This video is a long-ish first take and I allow myself to wander to peripherally related subjects a bit (but it doubles the length of the video). I'll be posting a shorter take next. Some people want me to digress endlessly, some want me to get to the point, so I'm trying both approaches to see what sticks. Reference "Geopol: Mutual capacity for violence is the root of negotiation": https://rumble.com/vei3dh

A 1978 video warning about Global Cooling and the inevitable global freeze that may spring on humanity at any moment. Archived for reference.

Previous video: https://rumble.com/vep2l3-geopol-us-nuclear-parity-with-china.html A follow up to the previous video about nuclear parity, this video discusses the way that the MAD policy necessarily leads to ideological conflict as it limits the utility of other forms of direct conflict. Very closely related: https://rumble.com/vbh6vf-yuri-bezmenov-ideological-subversion.html

Will CCP China achieve nuclear parity with the US soon? Well, it's complicated. In this video I talk through some of the factors that have to be taken into account when assessing nuclear parity and the balance of risks and utility involved with possessing nuclear weapons. Follow up: https://rumble.com/vep3vr-geopol-mad-mutual-assured-destruction-predicts-ideological-conflict.html

This video addresses violence as the root of negotiation, how that allows trust patterns to emerge, aggression signals convert to trust signals, and from there the foundations of civil society are laid.

A talk-through of a tutorial example of how classes and objects work by implementing them in a functional language (in this case Erlang, but it could be any other language just as well) and a discussion of why functional languages typically lack the keyword "class" entirely. Original blog post here: https://zxq9.com/archives/1838 GitLab snippet of the code in the video: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2018486 "Objects are a poor man's closures!" (OOPsy coders hate it when I say that...)

In this video I use the (in)famous FizzBuzz interview coding test as a platform for discussing the difference between traditional if/else if/else style imperative conditionals and Erlang's rather different concept of matching and guards to determine which way code should branch.

Repo: https://gitlab.com/zxq9/erltris Explanation of an Erlang implementation of the classic puzzle game Tetris as a client-side GUI application using wxWidgets and ZX. In this video I explain how the final gameplay rules and features are implemented, and briefly discuss how the game can be deployed using ZX, Zomp and Vapor.

Repo: https://gitlab.com/zxq9/erltris Blog post: https://zxq9.com/archives/1886 Explanation of an Erlang implementation of the classic puzzle game Tetris as a client-side GUI application using wxWidgets and ZX. In this video I explain how the gameplay mechanics are implemented for movement and rotation of a game piece, board locking, line clearing, board compacting and so on. (PS: I failed to mention something really important that I had intended to cover here -- how to handle input from the GUI! Whoops! I cover this in the blog post linked above and will touch on it in the next video. Like so much of programming, it's one of those things that isn't at all hard to do but if you don't know what is going on in wxErlang it can be a real mystery to figure out for yourself. Pretty important!)

Repo: https://gitlab.com/zxq9/erltris Blog post: https://zxq9.com/archives/1882 Explanation of an Erlang implementation of the classic puzzle game Tetris as a client-side GUI application using wxWidgets and ZX. In this video we discuss how I started the project initially, and walk through the first few commits where I establish the most important parts of the game data as abstract data types and demonstrate to myself that we can effectively render them to the screen in a way that isn't too terribly ugly.