Atlas · The Universe · 3 entries
A Programmer's View of the Universe
An in-progress five-part series, framing how I think about the universe as a systems programmer. I published three essays from 2008-2009, the last one being proper fiction. And then I started on part 4: a series of novels. For the past 15 years I've been world-building, with hundreds of pages of notes. I plan to write and publish them in the next decade. Part 5 will come after that.
I've been calling it the PVOTU — short for "A Programmer's View of the Universe" — for a long time. I'm using the acronym myself in the comment thread under Part 3 back in 2009 ("I started this PVOTU series because of some incredible vitriol I was experiencing from some extremists on reddit"), where readers already toss it back at me as if it needed no introduction. It still turns up casually three years later in The Borderlands Gun Collector's Club in March 2012. Possibly earlier still.
- ★ Essentials
- 👍 Good read
- 💩 Not worth it
- 🤓 Language nerd
- 😄 Humor
- 📚 Story / fiction
- 🕹️ Gaming
- 🔮 Called it
- 🤡 Whiffed it
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2008
A Programmer's View of the Universe, Part 1: The Fish
Steve's pet betta noticed something other fish never did: there was an invisible wall around its world. The essay takes that story and runs with it — the fish's view of the universe as a model for the programmer's view of any system too large to hold in one head.
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2008
A Programmer's View of the Universe, Part 2: Mario Kart
Mario Kart's invisible track boundary as the cleanest example of what Steve calls the One-Way Wall — the kind of boundary that lets you see across it, but not reason past it. The essay's claim is that this is the most important concept in embedded-systems thinking and we have no name for it.
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2009
The Death of Richard Dawkins
The Universe series has been expanding on each iteration. The Fish was short, Mario Kart was quite detailed, and this short story is the most ambitious piece of fiction I've ever written. I have re-read it many times over the years and I still enjoy the story immensely.
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in progress
Part 4: The Novels
Part 4 is in progress. I started world-building in 2009 for a set of novels, and after 17 years, I have hundreds of pages of notes. I have not yet started writing the novels, but I intend to publish them within the next 10 years.
