Talk Proposal: Turing Synesthesia

amark commented 10 years ago

In my quest to build better and faster programming tools, I have descended deeper and further into a world where the lines and boundaries between software, cognitive science, and quantum mechanics blur. This tale takes us along the story of a once incompetent web designer, whom frustrated with HTML and CSS dived into creating a JavaScript tool to simplify it. But instead of solving his problem, he discovered he was writing utility belts to manage the language. And so down the rabbit hole this philosopher went, slowly being transformed into a programmer.

It will give hope and inspiration to newcomers that they are not alone in the terribly complex and confusing microverse of bits and divs, and it will make advanced developers question the assumptions that their beloved frameworks use. We will compile this all into the thing that matters the most in building apps for people - their data. How the very act of storing people's memories leads to the difficulties and challenges of making it scalable and accessible. Now, when you are contemplating the CAP theorem and optimizing for concurrent database queries, you are far beyond the rabbit hole. You are in Dante's Inferno.

Thus our journey has once again shifted, our once aspiring computer engineer is now a wannabe physicist. Probing at how the speed of light is the demise of our fancy little human made volatile infrastructure. And so we decentralize, ripping our system apart to build it with reality in mind, calculating the fault tolerance of every packet of data. But what does this mean? How can we decentralize memories? If a mesh of computers hooked together by photons traveling through some fiber optic cables can do it, could the neural network of the brain also be doing it? Could a partition in the synapses of a person result in divergent behaviors?

Nothing is sacred, everything is decentralized, and fractals are Turing complete. Databases are neural networks, and the quantum universe inside the particle of lasers makes us Copenhagen about the meaning of existence itself. Here is to the crazy ones, where synesthesia collides and we discover the grandeur of a life where all these ideas converge. And just perhaps, maybe some of these memes will coalesce into answers that are even more interesting to explore.