Drivel

Another One

Author: Zavair

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We were going through some consensus algorithm tweaks earlier today at work, specifically for the testnet... I say tweaks but the official term being the goddang “byzantine general’s problem”. It’s a painfully accurate pseudo-algorithmic problem-view of reaching consensus between parties. Anyway… we have one of those little portable whiteboards in the office that barely gets used. It just has a bunch of rubbish written all over it. While discussing something earlier today, one of the devs, Jago, ended up using the whiteboard to illustrate a point he was trying to make. Now… granted that, he could have just as easily done without it… but to be fair to him, we all have that urge in us, sometimes. You know when we can’t help but write something - anything, on the whiteboard mainly when we’re trying to make a point and reiterate it by randomly selecting a word and highlighting it in big bold letters to hit home the supposed crux or… cruxes for that matter loll Not to mention, most nerds (including, yours truly) share a common toxic trait of lowkey wishing to be the “one” to propose “THE” solution to a problem by making it a competition in our own heads loll Whiteboards, I’d say… can thus be a useful tool in assisting one’s pursuit to acquire narrative hegemony in such situations lolll

The discussion for the problem at hand i.e the byzantine general’s problem, had somehowww steered itself into discussing the “uncertainty principle”. In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle states that we cannot simultaneously know... both the position and the momentum of a particle with perfect accuracy. Surprisingly this principle finds an analog in Algorithms and software development too. Basically all it means is that… when measuring the performance of a system, you can never measure the precise position of an operation and its performance at the same time. This is because the act of measuring time, ends up becoming a side effect of the operation itself. In other words… the act of measuring time changes the performance of the operation. The more accurate the measurement, the more it affects the operation. If you put the measurement on the very top level, you will measure the performance of the whole system, not the operation itself. I digress. But at the core of it all is a probability matrix which lies between two absolute outcomes completely opposite in spectrum. Jago, in his solution highlighted “0” as a reasonable derivation. Moments later, another dev, again… with the same tenacity to acquire narrative hegemony I suppose, got up and wrote another zero, conjoined to Jago’s zero, essentially turning it into an infinity ∞ sign, to counteract and highlight the probability variable. I’m going into pointless details here but… when we were done, and everyone was making their way back to the workstations, I noticed Jago picking up the marker again to scribble another infinity sign next to the existing one…. He then looked at the temp dev and said something like “My infinity is bigger than yours” loll

Jago smirked and left loll I can’t say I’m sure as to why he said it… I mean, sure… there’s always a mildly childish undertone to much of what we say (blame it on our social anxiety) loll … Add in the flavour of a self-realised competitive streak and not wanting to be seen as being outshined or something… could be anything… But the more I think about it… the more I can’t let go of it. There’s something exceptionally 'meta' in what he said. Mathematics teaches us that… there are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. (I think I’ve mentioned that before in one of my letters…. what they call imaginary numbers or i ) Essentially, there exists an unending and forever-long stream of numbers even between the most basic sequence of one-comes-after-another numbers. An unbounded set of infinite numbers between 0 and 1… or 1 and 2 or 2 and 3 and so on. Take the numbers 0 and 1 for example, there exists 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3. Decimals and fractions… Of course, similarly then there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Perfectly fair to thus say that… some infinities are INFACT bigger than other infinities. Bloody hell, Jago was soooo meta loll I’m going on about this for far too long but for valid reason though. After our conversation last night… you didn’t wait like you always do for me to hang up first. And you also didn’t hang around in Telegram afterwards - just like you always do. Got me thinking... and thinking anxiously… and my mind started to think of all possible scenarios thereafter. Sometimes, our minds - try as we might against it - go off on these wildly made up but equally jarring journeys of 'what-ifs'. What if she is so mad at me that she never talks to me again…. What if she thinks enough’s enough.. 'I don’t wanna talk to him anymore. I never will..' sheeeeshhhh Never been more mad at my my own mind before for thinking and making up an imagined scenario like so loll Cripplingly horrendous.

I started thinking more about it and wanted to see how I’d feel living in that imagined scenario. Painful as it was. What’s there to even think about it though, I’d thought. It would feel soooo very unfair. Thinking back at it, whatever I wrote above… a jokingly made remark at work… it made sense, even in made up worlds. Some infinities are without a shadow of a doubt, bigger than other infinities… And assuming the worst fate, in imagination, I’d have been bound to live through days, many of them resenting, the size of my unbounded set with you. I’d want more numbers than I was likely being presented to get to have lived with you in that imaginary scenario. Goddd, how I wished to have just wanted more numbers. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for you and I and US. Justttt as I managed to shun those thoughts, my mind then helped me come to an imagined self-realisation of sorts. I realised, that… even in that made up scenario of you deciding to never speak to me ever again… I don’t think I’d have it in me to remain resentful. See, in that moment, I can not tell you woman, how thankful I felt, for our little infinity. I just knew I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You do this thing, where you continue to give me little forevers within the numbered days, limited conversations and interactions we have. Never enough. And for that, even in the state of imagining it, I remain forever, grateful. To you. To infinity.

Infinitely yours.