20 Oct – 27 Oct

What did you do this past week?

Me and my partner fixed that bug in our code, which let us pass all the HackerRank tests. Then we did all of the other stuff that we’re supposed to do for projects.

What’s in your way?

Not a thing. The next project hasn’t been announced.

What will you do next week?

Not the project that hasn’t been announced, that’s for sure.

What was your experience of the allocator project?

I have some small criticisms, but in general I thought it was an average quality project.

At the beginning of the project, there was a little confusion over what exactly the methods and iterators were supposed to do. What does valid() do? Does the iterator iterate through bytes or blocks or what? These questions were later answered, but I think it would have been helpful to have that in the given documentation, just so we know what the classes and methods we’re implementing are supposed to do.

Also, I’m not sure why we needed to implement the iterator classes. I think we were supposed to use them for our allocate and deallocate methods, but those needed to set both the start and end sentinels, and accessing the end sentinel via the iterator was a little clunky. Using the [] operator on the allocator object seemed like the cleaner option. Also, I didn’t like how end() gave an iterator that pointed to the end of the array, since iterators are supposed to point at the start sentinels, not end sentinels. As a result, we only used the iterator for a small portion of our read method, and not much else, so the class just seems extraneous.

But overall, it was an average project.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Here’s a video for attaching a macro keyboard. Currently it’s a sad state of affairs for keyboard aficionados. Might make that a project, since the luaMacro and autoHotKey code is opensource. I’m sure automation maniacs across the realm would be pleased.

I haven’t reached the word limit yet, so I’m gonna ramble about collective consciousness.

OK, so you know how the left and right hemispheres of the brain can send each other information via the corpus collosum? So, we have a real world example of moving thoughts from one entity to another (if you wouldn’t consider the right and left brain two separate entities, check out split-brain syndrome).

So imagine Alice, Bob and Chuck. Now imagine that Chuck is able to read the minds of Alice and Bob (like I said, we have a real world example of moving thoughts from one entity to another). Like a normal person, Alice thinks and feels like she is herself and only herself, and not Bob or Chuck. The same applies to Bob. But Chuck can experience the thoughts of both Alice and Bob, and thus has the feeling of being Alice and not Bob, and being Bob and not Alice, simultaneously.

So, taking this reasoning further, what if we are all one single conscious entity that simultaneously feels like me and only me, you and only you, Benedict Cumberbatch and only Cumberbatch, etc., and any transference of information between brains is like the transfer of information within a brain?

It might seem like a stretch, but it does solve the whole locality of consciousness problem (why I feel the things in my brain, but not anything even a millimeter outside of it). Oh wait, that might not might not seem like a problem unless you think of consciousness as a pattern and not as an instance, a view which I haven’t explained yet. Oh well, I’ll save that idea for another ramble. It’s a doozy, I have a whole thought experiment and everything.