Work

I have, in one sense or another, always been working. For me, I always try to understand how things work. Over the years, I feel as though I made compromises which have sacrificed parts of my original goals, and I don't feel like I'm doing what I want. In an ideal world, I could be paid to do Basic Research, of ideas which are not yet provable.

If I could live in any time, I would choose the 1960s at MIT, or the 1970s at Xerox PARC.

Since the society in which I live requires employment, I have taken other jobs. In order to understand the progression, it helps to know about me. After high school, I chose not to go to college (because it's indebting and a ripoff) and instead just pursue my interests solo. At that time, I was intensely interested in building progressive textbooks, and was starting to move on to understanding semiotics, and experimenting with computer programs that reason about meaning.

Those good times halted when my parents suddenly divorced and sold the house. I ended up living with a roommate in West Bend, doing freelance web design work. Slowly, I migrated closer towards urban Milwaukee. My work earned me a job with AuditPad and Misix, which eventually turned into work at Stack41, where I currently work.

In my free time, I still try to explore semiotics. I am writing test programs, all under the name "wiki80," that implement a different kind of object orientation where there is no computation, only an object graph that can answer complicated questions. In ways, it's most-similar to Prolog. Upon this, I hope to build a society of programs that make use of this common knowledge. I want to build a computer that can be introspective.

At this time, I am also playing around with my reMarkable tablet. It is my favorite tool and toy; I wish I had enough money to buy another, because I would like to write some cool two-screen programs. I also wish it ran a Smalltalk-like system (ideally "all the way down") so the user can make their own brushes, or write new programs, based around the pen-input e-ink display. Other such programs I'd like to see are graphing calculators and equation solvers, using natural handwriting input.