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id: 3QTHsaJ78QEA602gM7Zg5 title: '#dentropyDaemon 003 Practice dictating the vision' desc: '' updated: 1660111340849 created: 1628474425347 description: null published: true date: '2021-06-10T13:14:48.220Z' editor: markdown dateCreated: '2021-06-02T03:24:20.634Z'

dentropyDaemon 003 Practice dictating the vision

By: Paul Mullins Date: 2021-06-02

Hello world, this is Paul Mullins and I am coming at you once again. Today I am going to practice dictating my vision for the #dentropyDaemon in order to get some critical feedback. Entropy and my understanding of it What is entropy: Entropy is how systems of high order and complexity break down into systems of chaos and randomness. Entropy works by taking fast moving hot stuff and mixing it with slow moving colder stuff, producing stuff that moves at a speed and temperature in the middle. Examples of Entropy in daily life: An example of entropy is breaking an egg and scrambling it, the opposite of entropy would be taking the scrambled eggs and turning it back into an egg.

To you and me entropy is not a big problem, sure one’s room may get messy but one can always clean it up, a broken down house can be torn down and replaced by a new one. The problem with entropy is that the entire universe is becoming a big batch of scrambled eggs and those eggs will all turn into dust eventually leaving a universe void of life. The universe becoming void of life due to entropy is also referred to as the ‘heat death’ of the universe.

Daemons and my understanding of it Let's start with a quick history of Daemons. The ancient Greeks had a concept of a personal daemon which functioned as a sort of guardian angel. The great philosopher Socraties had a daemon he described as an oracle always listening in that background would emerge to forbid him from doing certain things yet never commanded anything. In the 1800's a man named James Clerk Maxwell came up with the equations to describe the electromagnetic field known as Maxwell's Equations, he also came up with a fantastic thought experiment known as Maxwell's Daemon. The thought experiment known as Maxwell's Daemon postulated that information used under the right conditions can reverse the second law of thermodynamics, reversing entropy. The experiment places two boxes of gas at different temperatures next to one another and places a mystical daemon in control of a magic door between the two boxes of air. The Daemon opens the door to let slow moving particles (cold) into one of the boxes and fast moving particles (hot) into the other box. The symbolism of Maxwell's Daemon and the Greek conception of daemon's was integrated into the concept of daemon's used in computing. Within the world of computing Daemon's are background processes running on your computer. Computing daemons act just like Socraties and Maxwell's Demon, listening in the background until they are called upon for action. Examples of computing daemons include a program on your printer listening for print jobs, network daemons that keep your laptop and phone connected to the internet, or the daemon that listens for push notifications from different apps on your phone. I came up with the term dentropy to describe my two greatest fears, death and entropy, the heat death of the universe. I later realized that the term, "dent" was in dentropy which really resonates with the following quote, "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?". Realizing I am a dent in the universe really helped me deal with my existential dread. Dentropy can also be thought of as de-dentropy, the opposite of entropy. After dealing with my existential dread I realized that there is a daemon running on all computers called a entropy daemon. The entropy daemon allows your computer to generate randomness which may not sound important but is actually used ALL the time. It is very difficult for computers to generate randomness so there exists a special program running in the background, a daemon, that collects all sorts of randomness within a computer's environment to produce randomness that any other program on your computer can use. The #dentropyDaemon is the opposite of the entropy daemon, it is a process running on your computer with the goal to bring order to one's life rather than randomness.

But how is a background program, daemon, going to help bring order to one's life? Before I can answer that let's explore what exactly our relationship with our computers is. The fact is we are all already cyborgs using computers as part of our brain. It is one thing to use a computer as a calculator or phone book, but a device that can connect you to anyone on the planet from just about anywhere in seconds with real time communication or allow you to query billions of digital documents in fractions of a second with a search engine that is someone else. A person with a smartphone is different from a person without a smartphone, they may both be the same body and brain but they behave, act, and think differently. We are all cyborgs using computers and software to augment our thinking. In fact I would even go as far to argue that our computers and software even function as a digital second brain.

The problem with the design of our computers and software today is that they fracture our digital brain into dozens of pieces. The goal of #dentropyDaemon is to consolidate all these pieces that make up our digital second brain so we can use them to make more intelligent decisions. But first let me give you a couple examples of what these pieces are...

  • We message and call the same people via texting, social media, email, using other digital means.
  • Our text messages, social media, and eamil are all seperate peices of our digital second brain.
  • We consume media all over the place, spotify, your favorite podcast app, and then there is all the places people watch movies and TV shows.
  • Each place we consume media is a seperate piece of our digital second brain.
  • Every web browser seperately tracks our web browsing history separately.
    • Each browser one uses acts as a seperate piece of ones second brain.
  • We use reccomendation algorithms generated from traffic we generate on different platforms such as youtube, amazon, netflix, twitter, and reddit.
    • Each platform is a seperate piece containing a seperate reflection of our preferences.
  • Our phones are tracking our location all the time.
    • Ones location over the last couple years by itself may not be that useful by itself but integrated with other pieces may be useful in making intelligent decisions.
  • We buy stuff all over the place, using different back accounts, online stores, and even crypto currency.
  • Each transaction we make is a memory we store in our second brain.

Consolidating all this information into a single system, or API, would allow for the creation of a unified digital second brain. From this system one would be able see a reflection of their past behaviors, preferences, and thoughts. I like to call this type of reflection an algorithmic reflection. An algorithmic reflection can be used by an individual to make intelligent decisions. Generating ones algorithmic reflection is just one component of the #dentropyDaemon one also needs to be able to iterate on their algorithmic reflection by interacting with their digital second brain.

Let's take a quick detour here and talk about privacy. The consolidation of all digital information a person generates would not only be valuable to the individual but hackers and companies that make money from data. One can download all this information to their phone or laptop via an app but that is not easily accessible across devices , may take up a LOT of storage, and is not backed up. Some people may sign up to a platform they trust to consolidate all their information but many people won't trust such a system. People need to be able to run their own #dentropyDaemon on their own devices. One's #dentropyDaemon can be a website or app available on one's phone or laptop connecting to encrypted object storage in the cloud. One can run their own #dentropyDaemon they can access from any web browser. Then there is new technology known as Secure Enclave which allows people to run programs on servers other people own in a way where the people who own the server don't know what program their server is running. The technology to securely generate one's algorithmic reflection and run a digital second brain exists and just needs to be implemented properly. Now let's talk a look at what things would be possible with one's #dentropyDaeon. Rather than browsing reddit, hacker news, twitter, and RSS one can run their own meta recommendation algorithm across all those platforms that can be tuned to one's desires. Rather than logging into netflix, youtube, or Hulu to see what they recommend you can have a meta recommendation algorithm you can tune to find the exact type of video, TV Show, or movie you want to watch. Here's a thought, if you run your own recommendation algorithm you can have different versions tuned different ways and share them with other people. Finding something to watch with a group of friends would never be easier when everyone's watch history can be combined into a single recommendation algorithm.

If one's #dentropyDaemon is able to read one's data why can't it write data as well. Rather than using a different interface to message people and via email, facebook, keybase, telegram, and discord we can have an API that bridges to all these platforms allowing developers to create apps that can message people and groups on a selection of those platforms. I would use a feature like this to upload and publish videos to youtube, odyssey, and peertube all in one go. Since #dentropyDaemon will be able to read and write to multiple platforms and protocols one will be able to tell their #dentropyDaemon to migrate their existing tweets on twitter to another platform or protocol. One would eventually share their biases, preferences, interests, attributes, skills, thoughts, relationships, questions, heuristics with their #dentropyDaemon. One's #dentropyDaeon would be able to create ontology and folksonomy of every concept a person has come across in their life keeping track of what we have and haven't learned. At the end of the day one's #dentropyDaemon will be able to interact with others #dentropyDaemon allowing us all to more effectively communicate. A person with a #dentropyDaemon will be much more equipped to head in the direction of self actualization. Next time on the #dentropicPortal I will showcase my plan on how to integrate #dentropyDaemon with the future.

#dentropyDaemon 003 Practice dictating the vision