20240813
I've been feeling some ... hm. I've been feeling less connected to the part of me that explores and expresses through code. Not surprised by that, given how my exploration and expression has evolved as of late. Only so much Isaac to spread around, you know?
I've been using the written word as a kind of checkpoint system for myself. Journaling, I guess. That concept exists in database design, too: the "journal" a database keeps helps it recover after unexpected failure. If the database forgets what it was doing, it goes back to the journal, and picks up where it left off. Or, strictly speaking, it picks up where its past self last recorded a checkpoint.
I'm writing this down to establish, as a checkpoint, the idea that perhaps I can make progress code-wise if I write about it as I go. I don't feel like loading all of the context into my head over there, and I don't feel like making changes to what's there.
It appears to me that changes must be made.
What do I make of that? :)
Mechanic runs on one big postgres database. It's not that big, 4 terabytes, but still. The point, really, is that it shouldn't matter how big it gets. A fully-aligned Mechanic is able to ingest any amount of data at any time and be fine.
An alarm tripped this morning, and it was the "hey we're taking in more data than we're deleting and have been for a while" alarm.
To date, we expunge data 15 days after it's "complete", i.e. nothing needs it anymore. We ascertain this manually, by checking on each piece of data and all of its connections to make sure that literally everything about it is indeed "complete" before then deleting it.
I built that piece early on. Can't sign up to accrue data without specifying a way to let that data go.
Later, I built a piece that records a "completed_at" timestamp on each piece of data. (This was needed for other purposes which aren't relevant here.) Out of an abundance of caution, I didn't connect this new timestamp to the existing wait-15-days-assess-everything-and-delete-if-safe mechanism. I was playing it safe, lest deleting based that new "completed_at" timestamp end up deleting something it shouldn't have.
However, by making that choice, and giving the system two different paths for assessing completeness and then acting on it, and then only investing in one of those paths while the other continued to feed some other/older system, I let the system atrophy unevenly. And now we're at a place where the old manually-check-everything-before-deleting system is lagging behind everything else, resulting in an imbalance of data flow, because that piece was never afforded the opportunity to evolve.
So, it's time to evolve that piece: time for manually-check-everything-before-deleting to become delete-whatever-was-completed-15-days-ago. It'll be more efficient, a hell of a lot faster, and should get our data flow back into balance.
There. I've recorded a checkpoint. I think the next part is to sit down in front a terminal and just do the thing next.
Gosh I do not feel like coding. Apparently I would literally rather write about it than do it.
Huh.
He waited.
I'd just started So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, and had gotten as far as "this is her story", when a very sudden NOPE crossed my mind, and having no reason to suspect the provenance of this thought I put the book down.
Later that day I wrote 20240812, about the singularity of awareness, and how that zero-dimensional dot becomes a one-dimensional line of unbroken experience, and how it must necessarily link back up with itself, but how it does so is up for interpretation, and the manner in which we interpret it ends up looking like whatever we're looking at.
Today, I'm reading more, and I think that my experience mirrors that of the girl's. And every other character in the book, because that's what happens when reading a book where your model of a soul mirrors the author's model.
I paused reading. I looked away from the book. I spent some minutes tracing the lines on the iron dragon, painted gold, on the black marble plinth in our living room. I felt very strongly about that plinth. Happy that it should come with wheels. The dragon seems content there.
I continued reading, and the book introduced its first dragon.
> "I'm afraid I'm a bit of a one," she said, gazing off into the distance, "for sudden startling revelations."
Ah. She can fly. I'd forgotten.
> The truth of who and what I am runs deeper, does not have any need to respect the gravity of this place. My identity is weightless, and that does not mean it floats — it is not made of mass, and so the question of weight is absurd.
> COME ON UNIVERSE > YOU BIG MOSTLY EMPTY WUSS > GIMME ALL THE JUICE YOU GOT > > (Bender melts)
Shortly after that, Bender showed up on a mug in San Francisco.
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