## The 64 Laws - Model for the book: I didn't originally think of it like this, but this book is essentially the 48 Laws of Power for Computing. It's as broad in its coverage of Computing as 48 Laws is in its. It's similar in that it takes virtually all of its wisdom from "the greats," and cites them heavily. Put Joost Elffers on the list of publishers to contact. We'll also very likely need to commit to being published in color at least in a minimal way, like Robert Greene's books. Greene was 39 when the 48 Laws was published. I'll be 39 next year. It was his first book. I've published a book before with Basic Books, and it was translated into 6 languages. I'd propose that it's not unrealistic for us to achieve similar levels of acclaim for technical writing that Greene's books have for human nature. - Robert Greene's 48 Laws are on average 42 characters long. That's a good length. We may be able to get to 32. Update: We're currently at 27.2. Keep this up! ## The 64 Bits - The 64 Principles. The 32 Values. (May be only 16 or even 8. Determine empirically.) - If you shoot for exactly 64 principles, you can use single 64 but ints as vectors to encode the relevance of arbitrary pieces of content to every single section of the book. We're absolutely doing this. - NOTE: If we do "32 Principles, 32 Values" or "32 Principles, 16 Values, 16 Anti-Values" then we can get WAY more representational power out of each 64 bit int. - The entire book should be representable as 64 bits\*64 ints of information, aka 512 bytes. In other words, this book can literally be dd'ed to a boot sector. - STRETCH GOAL: Make it fucking bootable. Should be possible (maybe) by reordering things, but probably not on x86 without some domas magic, and then it wouldn't be the book, but still, do things like this whenever possible. ## The Three Books - The paper book will be statically linked, without a single url pointing outside of it. It will reference the outside world, but have no concrete pointers to it. Everything will be "in-housed" or "vendored." Links to webpages will be transformed into screenshots and placed in the archaeology section at the back. Videos will be turned into printed quotes (which requires us to limit ourselves to videos that are essentially pointers to human speech, not complicated visual scenes or songs.) This ensures a complete and self contained book. This is the correct approach when the outside world is maximally unstable. - The digital book will be dynamically linked. Namely, it will reference the outside world using the universal mechanism of our age: the hyperlink, a reference to this universal human blob we call the web. This version will be subject to all the problems that come with it. - The (new world / old world) book will be a video, sense data, audio and video, sights and sounds, instead of the intermediate age technology of the printed word used by the others. It will consist of exactly the same content as the book. Links to videos will be inlined and played so the original speaker's voice and emotional tone is available in ways the other two formats fail to show. - The (n女ν|Ωld)ω||ld book is a separate and very large Easter Egg with different content. It is possible to "get root" on the book, and in doing so to gain access to kernel space where the gods (the real authors / the Nameless) speak freely in ways that aren't visible in the standard (user space) book. ## The Two Rings - The book has two models: Kernel Space and User Space. Kernel Space is rarely seen, but it's where the real creators (the Nameless) speak in an interleaved stream of voices without attribution, bible style. User Space is the vast majority of the book. It consists of a linear narrative, in the form of dialogues between two characters: 0 and 1. The book is designed to be two opposite extremes at once, along several dimensions. For example, it intends to be extremely experimental, multi genre, multi site, multi platform, jumping from the obsidian page through to github into videos and then back into the book. Any book that aims to be structured like this is doomed to failure unless it also has a much more conventional way of experiencing the same thing. So it aims to do the latter first, as a constraint on the former. The entire book and all its content must be representable linearly on the page, in printed word, in the form of a conventional book. That same content without additions or deletions will also be represented in more modern media: hypertext, video, source control, pages with a burdensomely large number of external reference links, all optional. We do this not in an attempt to be "modern," but in an attempt to ask what it means to make something truly timeless that represents our age of history, when the media we store our life's work in is now infinitely more fragile than text in physical pages. Data may be easier to copy now by many orders of magnitude. But if a book links to a well-known website or meme and the destination url changes later or the website stops existing, we now no longer have anything left, except maybe archive.org if we're lucky. The "less efficient" medium of physical paper had a benefit we learned to take for granted: that when you burn a book, you do not burn all its copies. This remains true for files people download physically and share over p2p protocols like bittorrent, or even just by reuploading the same content to youtube after its been taken down. The same robustness does not exist for the web. We can no longer stably reference the primary storage medium where most members of our species store the majority of their life's work. The conscious choice for this book to represent precisely the same content, no additions or deletions, in multiple formats, each with the inherent virtues and vices of that format, is part of a theme throughout the book of what it means to be timeless in an age where nothing is. ## The 0o10 Years - Historically: LD led to Radicalize led to We led to the eclipse and life collapse. Then the slow rebuilding through jobs and the book was put aside. Collapse led to Gyana led to AV and stability for five years, led to Aicadium led to teetering on the edge of oblivion and then finally to LD (the company) after two broken hands. This led to the first passion project in a while: On the Lamb, which was almost too much to share even with anyone who wasn't directly involved in making it. You have to choose to enter that Rabbit Hole when you're ready, it can't be forced. Then On The Lamb led to a calm after finally getting We out of my brain and into something semi permanent. That led to a revisitation of mathematics and education, and after a month, to the decision to focus on the social side of the business. This led to several months of intense focus on the details of how to open physical locations, renting corporate real estate, looking at fifty available sites in person, and and hiring a commercial real estate negotiator for literally $6000 and then doing precisely nothing with him once we realized he's useless and (independently) there are actually too many laws in California to even open something small and everyone cautions against it. This led to the decision to take a weekend trip to Austin and explore the possibility of living somewhere that might be better all around for business, for tech, for raising kids, and for anything we might end up doing. It had to be a Pareto improvement, not just better by some loss function that makes tradeoffs. This led to several months of packing up the old house and deciding to rent it out, becoming landlords, and moving to north Austin, where we now live. This book is about who we are, as developers, about our shared history and culture, about the data structures we call bibles and how our culture is desperately in need of one. A serious one, which is to say an infinite recursive joke that's also dense with timeless truth. It might therefore be surprising that this book has been in progress since before my first job in tech. It's not the same thing it was then, but all the essential elements are the same. Quitting school. Quitting work. Saying Fukkot. A group called LD. Bibles. Legal Latin. Information Theoretic Prose. Comet. The Nth Stair. Cult of the Minor Error. Getting Root. 根2. Gentoo. Root 2. Dudethey'reontome. The News. Genesis: The Middle. Fiddler. A χld named K. Terrorists who don't actually do any terror. When academia dies, where do we go? How all technical writing sucks but it's the one thing the best content still can't replace. The optimal genre as 99% BMC and 1% the ability to slap the reader in real life, and how that final 1% changes the other 99. CDB. ABC. char \*quotations. That of which one cannot speak and yet does. Dynamic Linker as the brain, as a bible, as the only way to make something timeless in an era when all is elsewhere on a fleeting and forever changing web. The Dynamic Read Writable Free Encyclopedic Repository of the Modern State of Human Knowledge. ## The N Chapters - Final chapter is obviously called "When theres nothing left to take away." - I don't know why. I can't justify it. But it feels so unquestionably right.