Musings

I've worked in software a long time and I've thought a lot about how I'm paid, where the money comes from and how to do it on my own.

The physics of the situation is there are two factors:

• The cost of hardware, maintainence, and power

Which is fairly fixed and predicatable— the platform for software to run on.

From there, the equation is build versus buy:

• can you get a solution to a current problem off the shelf for the less than the hourly rate for research and development of a custom solution.

Hi, I'm the guy that charges hourly rates for research and development of custom solutions.

I've been working for myself now for 14 months doing freelance research and development for earth, but I need to pivot into getting paid to feed my family.

If I were to run for president, I'd use my tax returns and publicly auditable source code, but I know nothing of this earth's politics other than they seem utterly disconnected from the subsystems they run on.

One dollar per gigabyte per month.

If that sounds like a lot of money, how about one cent for ten megabytes?

For this price, I'll host your secure files, whether documents or video game saves.

How did I get these numbers?

Well, I bought a data center.

I made a video a few years back and I think the people that viewed the video got the wrong impression.

At the time, I was working as a client-side software engineer and I was demonstrating the difference between platfoms.

An M1 MacBook Pro is prohibitively expensive for most daily active users of the internet, which would be the client they would use to consume any content from books, to audio, to video, to games.

I was demonstrating then, that a Raspberry Pi could serve as not only a client of content, but also a server. And not just a server, but a creative environment. And not just a creative environment, but built on the one that inspired the literal Jurassic Park. And not just the literal Jurassic Park, but the metaphorical one that inspired it: Genentech.

I digress— a unix system. If you're a child that can save the adults, you know this.

However, it is not actually a unix system. Well mine is, but the one I'm going to ship across platform is the successor to the successful elements of it: 9p.

If this is too technical, I'm done. I just needed to drop a line of knowledge so that anyone that knows their operating systems history and future, knows that I know that Microsoft and Google are both underpinned by this tech.

Anyways, I bought a data center.

I don't particularly care for the AI, but depending on my customers, we can include any number of characters for you to inquire. That's not the point.

The point is we're talking tokens now.

Sixty United States Dollars will be 600 tokens at todays exchange rate. I am also open to alternative currencies. Think of this like an arcade.

1 token is ten megabytes. This is fixed, once we enter the digital reality, because I bought a data center. It is best to visualize this data center as an arcade.

When you come in, you can play games anonymously and train in stealth mode before unleashing your skills on the open market. Or, once you reach your first 600 tokens can acquire the player card to log onto the leaderboard.

The entire cross-over idea of me getting into performance was to have a Steve Jobs style tech demo where I pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket and proclaimed it to be a computer. After running that idea a few times, the feedback was it was a terrible dues ex for a tech demo, but an excellent premise for an interactive universe, like Pixar.

Truth be told, I would rather be an animator than an engineer, but there was never any money in that.

You would always be at the whim of the software capable of being delivered by Adobe and Apple, no rivalry comment.

Well, I just got the light. I do believe this paper is the computer. The entire computer exists within this paper, the way it exists in that phone, that keyboard, that cyberdeck, and this guitar. Four players in a new age rock band, but where do they keep the books, audio, video, and games they made of their misadventures?

In my data center.

Unveiling to you for the first time, the BackPackPro. I've been talking about the free version of my backpack in the arctic code vault for quite some time now, but this is built on the Apple M-Series Platform, the MacBookPro is just the one I modded to run on and in my backpack at boot.

Thanks for coming, scan the paper computer and jump into my backpack, let's get out of here!