Social Architecture 2: freedom of expression

Part of the reason of USSR failure was going against human nature. The ruling party tried to standardize everything: how people speak, what they wear, sometimes even what they think. That contradicted with human desire to create something new, to differentiate from others, to find oneself style and identity. People were jealously looking at the West, scrambling whatever bits they can get from there (jeans, VHS players, gums anyone?). This was a huge contributing factor to the crash of the empire: people wanted to be liberated.

Capitalists, on the other hand, played upon human psychology instead of fighting it: they understood the basic human needs and they pushed them above the initial meaning. Capitalists created *new* needs, and this is still how our market evolves (take any Apple product as an example). Remember what they say in business "If you are competing, you've already lost"? Now think about it again, now within the context of consumerism culture.

Now, back to USSR. The reason soviets unified everything was not only the need to control the crowd. It was also the most efficient way to manage available resources (manufacturing, materials, work force, etc). In a sense, this was a real *economy*, while capitalists were not concerned about it on the global scale. The interesting bit here that I found is that Communism in general does not require unification, it was just a technical limitation in this particular implementation.

Imagine a city of the future again (say, the Venus Project). People share everything they can (outside of their rooms). There is freedom of thought, because there of no need to control everyone: people are self-organized, and most decisions are made by a smart computer program. There is freedom of style and expression, because everyone can design their own appearance, or a commodity, and 3d-print it, thus making the design instantly available to anyone else. What happens is the advanced computing and manufacturing technologies allow us to express ourselves while still preserving the earth resources.

Concluding, it just wasn't the right time for Communism to be adopted. We needed to transit from the industrial to informational era. We needed the Internet, computing power, 3d printing, and other key technologies to be developed in order to build the new order. *Now* can be the right time. Delay half a century longer - and there will be nothing to save: our irresponsible treatment of Earth will change the atmosphere and the biosphere to the point of no return. We need to stop consuming and start thinking: about how we live, where we live, and what we can do to sustain ourselves.

Social Architecture

Human civilization has reached unbelievable power. We process petabytes of information, our eyes reach the furthest corners of the universe, while our minds dissect the finest structure of matter and energy. We are incredible species, but we really don't know how to live side by side on this planet and cooperate efficiently.

Some long time ago, our ancestors figured the concept of money. It's an artificial value used to exchange everything else with. Many of our needs can be achieved by having enough money, and we work hard to get them. Then we group into corporations - these giant money-hungry monsters with resources and power. They produce spaceship parts, they grow our food, they even teach our kids. The problem here is that they don't care about result quality, environmental concerns, and morality of their actions (think mercenaries) as long as they get the most money of it.

On the other hand, we are supposed to consume more and more for the economy to develop. Being a target of aggressive advertising and manipulation, today's adult needs a big house, 2 cars, a mobile phone, a tablet, a laptop, and 120 fashion ties in his wardrobe. If you provide these commodities to everyone, you'd realize it requires more resources than our Earth has.

In essence, money divide us. We can't efficiently work together, because money is the strongest link we have. We have organized ourselves in an unsustainable, inefficient way of life. Both present and future pose many challenges to this system:

Robotization. Modern factories are mostly self-operated. More and more human activities become outdated with the development of robotics and expert systems. Self-driving cars, for example, already on the roads, hence all the taxi/truck industry is on a timer. Eventually, humans will only be needed to operate the robots and serve each other. There will be a shortage of jobs on the market and an ever-increasing demand. Money will concentrate in the golden 1% of the society, which controls the robots and other people, thus making the rest to be slaves.

Natural resources. Our industrial revolution was made possible by the abundance of fossil fuels. We've advanced a lot, but still haven't figured out how to live in a sustainable way: fossils are limited, and the amount of energy needed to dig them goes closer to the energy it produces. We need a focused effort to develop alternative energy sources and migrate our infrastructure to be independent of the fossils. I don't see this happening at the moment, either from the governments initiatives or the corporations.

Government. We may have a vote on who is in charge, but since the government is a part of our socio-economical system, it becomes corrupted by money. Big corporations are actively (even openly) lobbying their interests, supporting candidates, and pushing their interests by any means possible. At the end of the day, the government becomes a middle-man between consumers and corporations, the goals shift, and the status quo prevails.


Beautiful Earth. Why should a corporation care about the global warming? Or that weird species of birds that can be found only in New Zealand? Or about preserving the rain forests in South America? But it's not the corporations fault, nor of its people, it's how our system works. This planet will not be able to bear with us for much longer. We pollute air, throw radioactive wastes into water, killing the living ecosystem that was established long before us.

War. War never ends. We fight for resources, for influence, sometimes just because we produce too many weapons. For some groups, war is a profitable activity, and igniting a conflict becomes their natural goal.

Health care. Imagine a cure that is accessible all over the world, costs nothing, and is able to treat all known illnesses. If such a cure is ever found, there are two possible scenarios: 1) it becomes destroyed with all the evidence, because it is not profitable; or 2) it's starts being sold to selected people only with sky-rocketed price. Health corporations are not interested in healing you quickly and efficiently (it may be a side goal, or it may be not), they are interested to suck more and more of you while you are sick. Their best interest is to charge you a ton of money, keep you for long in the hospital, and prescribe you the pills that would never help, if not make it worse.

Education. Surprisingly, the best teachers that we remember from our school days are the ones we never liked while being there. They were harsh, unforgiving, and caring only about you getting important skills and knowledge. Private education institutes are doing the opposite: they want you to like being there, they advertise heavily, and they try to convince you that the money were worth spent. Actually teaching you becomes a side effect. As a result, we get generations of worth-less over-confident individuals, who do not contribute much into our society.

Unstable economy. The flow of money does not exactly self-regulates. The free market is controlled by the laws of supply and demand. There is a lot of intermediate entities between producers and consumers. It's venture capital firms, mutual funds, stocks, global importers and local retailers, to say the least. On one hand, they naturally occur in the system of free market. On the other hand, their only job is to eventually connect consumers with producers. Naturally, they become parasiting on the system, resulting in the most powerful and rich people being them, who controls the money flow.

Better organization 

An alternative organization model is described in the Zeitgeist movies. Basically, we need to change the established value system in order to live more efficiently. We need to throw away money, strip ourselves of power, and integrate all layers of the society in a centralized manner.

Venus project is a good example. It's a self-sustainable city with no private sector, where everything belongs to the citizens. It is controlled by a computer program, which can be developed and maintained in a collaborative way. The program can efficiently distribute resources and energy, schedule manufacturing and farming throughout the whole city.

The biggest challenge is to change the motivation of people: instead of working for money, they need to work for contributing into the society, or because they simply like doing something. With todays technology, we can have most non-interesting and monotonic jobs being completely automated. Surprisingly, small communities organized in a similar manner can already be found all over the world. People are happy there, because they see apparent positive effect from their activity instead of just a pile of money as a measure of their contribution.

The change is difficult for a single person, but not so much for the whole society, because it can be achieved in an iterative manner. A group of people may unite, behaving in the "old" world of free market as a single entity. More people may join the club, build facilities, expand the farms, thus eventually unwrapping into a city. Cities may connect with each other and be sustainable without a direct intervention from the outside world (think: global warming or a world war). Of course, the ultimate benefit of this organization would only come when the whole world converts.

One can find a similarity to communism with all the possible negative associations. As an idea, communism didn't fail in XXth century. It's the implementation that failed, and this should be expected from the first rough attempt to change the social organization. The technologies weren't ready yet, and forcing people into the new system caused a lot of backslash. All in all, USSR was a world-scale experiment, which had it's moments of great glory, even though it broke eventually.

Concluding, I may have not convinced you to drop all your belongings and move into the nearest community village... But I hope my words raised your interest in the alternative socio-economical systems. I hope you'll start wondering about the laws around you that were invisible just because we are so used to them from the birth. Perhaps, you'll start seeing bad things of our world to be a little less inevitable. You may see the light of actually fixing our society at some point.

Update-1. Found this wonderful post highly correlating with my position. Must read, if only you can get through the blue background ;)

Vision

Vision. I often heard this term, read about it, though I knew what this is. I thought, when there is a person in charge, who is a highly skilled engineer, he can see what others can not just because of his engineering capabilities and the fact he goes thinking deeply about the problems (not only existing ones, he is also in a constant search for the new ones). Apparently, it's not that simple.

It turned out, vision is not a consequence of engineering skills but something very different. It's an extraordinary ability to see the future, a hypothetical future of a product evolution. By seeing this, a revisionary can drive product development in leaps, thus making it a revolutionary progression.

It is important to realize this is not "just" about development time (or, the availability of shortcuts). Evaluation is all around us. We evaluate everything we are doing in order to learn from it and adapt. Others evaluate our work in order to figure out if they want to invest in it. Thus, being able to leap forward gives you an instant advantage in terms of evaluation outcome, which transforms the benefit of having a vision from quantity (of time) to quality.

I faced the vision problem when tried to design a large system, in collaboration within a team. I realized (for the first time) that it's not the engineering skills that we lack, but rather a clear vision over where we are going. It doesn't even matter if you are an architect, lead developer, or the god himself. If you got the vision, you'll be heard.

Aside from being mysterious, vision is still a human skill. I wonder if it can be trained, like any other human skill we have. What kind of activity would that be? I don't believe that by just thinking and brainstorming we get any better in visioning in general, we merely dig harder at a specific problem instead. There must be something more generic. Perhaps, playing the music?..

My Internet

I've been accustomed to the Internet as we know it: fire up a browser, read email, feeds, visit FB/G+/Twitter, buy something on Amazon with a Visa card. It is indeed convenient, especially if you don't care to look under the hood, or explore the limits of your freedom. And the fact is: there are big companies there (providers of "free" services) that gather all information about you.

One of the ways to use that information is to chose the advertising that you'll see. Honestly, I don't care about ads too much. Most of the time I block them anyway, and when I see them - I'll appreciate a featured anime figure more than some silly pills. But ads are just the tip of the iceberg, the only part of it we actually see. The real problem is the power you give them, the power that limits your potential, because no one cares about your weird habits until you become big.

In an ideal society, everyone can know everything about everyone. But we, as a species, are not ideal, thus making it a matter of protection to choose what information to share, and what to hide. Once your information can be bought, you never know who and when may turn it against you. Imagine a robber aware of your vacation schedule. The security question stands right near the privacy one. Your information is stored in a centralized manner: it could be denied of service, or it could be stolen - it's vulnerabile.

Now, how do we work around that, while still keeping it simple and convenient? There are several solutions for different sub-issues:

DNS. Generally provided by your ISP, thus may have some areas blocked (i.e. Wikileaks). They know wherever you go, and also redirect the "address not found" queries.
Solution: OpenNIC, any neutral DNS like Google DNS

File sharing. Exchanging music, books, and movies is prosecuted by RIAA & MPAA, even if you give it to your friend and delete it locally. They want you to rent things for an undefined period instead of owning them.
Solution: Torrent, private hosting if you can afford it.

Social network. This is where you expose the most of yourself. You need to preserve the rights to the content you create, and to share it only with those you care.
Solution: Disapora*.

Money transfer. Your Visa/AMEX/Mastercard knows everything you buy, everywhere you travel, and steals around 3% for each transaction. Also, you never know when your government decides to print more money, making whatever you have less valuable instantly.
Solution: Bitcoin.

Those solutions will only become valid once they gain a critical mass of users. I hope that my post aids this goal a little, making Internet a better place in the nearest future.

What I know about Computer Graphics

I've been working closely with CG both professionally and as a hobby for the past 5-6 years. I've been making games and developing engine architectures. Latest developments can be tracked on Claymore Dev blog. I've seen different techniques, tried many others, even written articles about them in big books (GpuPro-3, OpenGL Insights). And the funny point is: I still don't know how to build engines... All I know is how bunch of known techniques may help or screw you up, based on personal experience.

Uber-shaders
Problems: Difficult to maintain due to bad granularity and monolithic approach. Unable to extend from the game side.
Alternative: Shader compositing. In OpenGL you can extend the functionality by either linking with different shader objects, swapping the subroutines, or by directly modifying the source code.

Deferred shading
Problems: Very limited BRDF support. High fill-rate and GPU memory bandwidth load. Difficult to properly support MSAA.
Alternative: Tiled lighting. You can work around the DX11 hardware requirements by separating lights into layers (to be described).

Matrices
Problems: Difficult to decompose into position/rotation/scale. Take at least 3 vectors to pass to GPU. Obligation to support non-uniform scale (e.g. no longer skipping invert-transpose on a 3x3 matrix to get a normal matrix).
Alternative: Quaternions and dual-quaternions. Both take 2 vectors to pass.

Context states
Problems: Bug-hunting is difficult because of bad problem locality. Assumptions over the context are easy to make, but if you decide to check it with assertions, why not just pass the whole state instead?
Alternative: Provide the whole state with each draw call. Let the caching work for you.

C++
Problems: Memory management and safety. Compiler-generated copy operators/constructors. Pain dealing with headers and optimizing the compile time. Many many lines of code.
Alternative: Rust. Other "safe" languages (.Net family, Java, Python) are not as low-level and often trade performance for safety (i.e. global GC phase causes an unacceptable frame rate interruption).

All I actually know is that there is a thousand and one difficult architectural issues of the graphics engine, and there is no silver bullet to most of them. For the most common solutions I listed possible alternatives, but they are no near being flawless. I hope that one day the amount of experience I get will magically transfer into the quality of my decisions, and I will finally know the right answers.

KriWeb project future

Introduction

KriWeb is my hobby 3D engine, the 4-th incarnation of KRI technology. I've been working on it for the last half a year in my spare time. Recently, I finished implementing the heart of the concept - shader composing pipeline.

Technology

In short, shader compositor was designed to decouple rendering technique code from the material and mesh modifiers. The material provides a set of functions to the pixel shader, which are used by the technique shader code. The technique knows how to apply an arbitrary stack of geometry modifiers (e.g. skeletal animation, morphing, displacement). without knowing anything about the actual modifiers used by the entity. The shader compositor assembles all these parts together in a linked shader program, that is associated with the entity.

As an example, we can imagine a material that provides a pure BRDF function. A technique knows about scene lights, and uses this BRDF to evaluate lights contribution to a surface point. An underlying mesh gets modified by, to say, a skeletal animation. These pieces of functionality will be glued together automatically to display a shiny animated object for you. While the Demo already shows it working, a better one could be made to harness the full power of shader compositing.

Future

Now it is time for me to evaluate the path I made, and to figure out the vector of progression for the nearest future. With all KRI incarnations (as with most of existing hobby engines), there was always a big issue chasing me - the lack of application. I was dodging it as I could, but in the end the engine dies without an application. I don't want to see KriWeb old and weak after several years of development. If it is to die, let it die young, and remember its technology shining brighter than the sun.

In other words, I don't want to continue the development of KriWeb until the real application is found. It may be either my own new project, or a cooperation with someone, but it has to be something good. It's not like I have a lot of free time now - working at Rockstar is pretty close to a dream job, and my skills are needed there in full while making the next big thing. Cheers!

A long way to OS X

One beautiful morning I decided to try out Mac OS X on my laptop (MSI EX625). There were several reasons:

1. Apple hardware is too expensive.
2. The OS quality is outstanding, while the price is just 40$.
3. Need to try developing for Apple's mobile devices.

First facts I discovered was: "it is possible" and "there is TonyMac boot loader". Alright, I ordered a disk from eBay for 30$, starting to prepare myself mentally for a change.When the disk arrived, I was eager to try out tony's boot loader. Chameleon appeared on the screen, inviting me to start the installation. The first try failed - it couldn't reach the installer window, hanging half the way through.

I searched forums and started trying different boot options. Nothing actually helped. There were several errors on the screen, what confused me a lot, especially because an actual error causing the hang was not mentioned... I tried all possible ATI versions of iBoot (4+) and even PcEfi with no result. I've posted on the forums, waited, searched, but hadn't gotten any replies...

After heavy surfing I found out the actual reason - ATI Radeon Mobility video-cards are not supported! There was a chance that drivers could be released soon, but I couldn't wait, especially an undefined amount of time. I decided to exchange laptops with my wife, leaving old hard-drives. She didn't stop me, so I started to disassemble both laptops immediately, with a help of a small screwdriver. My new laptop was ASUS M51SN, with ultra-compatible GeForce 9500M on board.

Both Linuxes survived this change with honor: my Arch required to change the video driver, while Dina's Ubuntu worked perfectly like nothing changed (though, she updated the driver later). Mac OS X still didn't run out of the box, but required the following options: '-x' for safe mode, 'cpus=1' for proper cpu cores detection. That was sufficient, but I patched the BIOS using a custom version to enable proper CPU detection (the BIOS built-in update utility is awesome!).

Hello, the freaking installer! It wasn't easy at all to get you on the screen! I was happy for a short moment - the installer didn't like my MBR disk at all... Apple supports only GUID & Apple partition tables, intentionally ignoring MBR. There was a solution - to use the external USB disk/flash: to install on it first, and copy the partition to the hard drive directly. My 4Gb flash wasn't enough, and the official website states 5Gb requirements. Borrowing a 8gb USB flash was not enough as well, because the minimum installed configuration took 8.2Gb, what a surprise!

That was a time to sacrifice my precious 1Tb external USB drive. There was no space to backup to, so I decided to trick the installer a bit. I moved the actual data partition +20Gb from the start of the disk, leaving the empty space for the Mac OS image. I backed up the MBR together with first 100Mb of the FAT32, just to make sure the file system structure is saved. In the installer, I re-partitioned the drive into GUID 2 partitions : first 20G for Mac OS and all the rest. The installation went successful, yaw!

I copied the partition to the hard drive and was even able to boot from it: in a safe mode, using the same cd loader. Moreover, putting the old MBR back on the external HDD recovered it instantly, leaving me with a feeling of the epic win :) However, the OS X file system became corrupted each time I booted, forcing me to rewrite it from the image and look forums for an answer...  Posting again and asking for help in the OSX-86 IRC didn't help, leaving me in frustration again...

The sorting of my MBR seemed to be a good idea, if not for the corruption problem, but at least to make the boot loader work on the HDD. Fdisk did the job, but MBR was somehow damaged after that. I looked for a rescue and accidentally issued 'dd' command on the saved 100Mb file from my external drive backup... That was a bi-i-ig mistake, and it seemed to be the worst situation ever: the partition table together with my ext4 file systems were destroyed, so I had no OS to boot and no data to operate!

That's where smart hackers come into play. Asking again on the IRC, I attracted the attention of 'aschar', who listened to my problems and described the way out, in detail. The solution was to use a much less known Nawcom boot loader, that recently gained MBR support. In a day I managed to rebuild the partition table, entering some numbers by hand and using a couple of hack tools (look at testdisk!).

Using the PartedMagic liveCD I prepared the case-sensitive HFS+ partition and started Nawcom's boot loader. From now on, everything was smooth. The boot loader didn't require the safe mode, allowing me to install OS X right into the MBR partition I provided. After reboot, the OS loaded correctly, allowed me to update it to 10.6.4 and install MyHack tools from the same CD. No file system corruption, good driver support (though, sound & wifi are in progress) - and now I'm a happy owner of the Mac OS X laptop!

The end of story. The moral is:

• Always look for alternatives! What is more popular is not always of better quality.
• Always backup, at least MBR! Be careful with 'dd' and 'sudo' in general. Think, then do.
• Don't give up!