Jesse Bollinger – Jesse Bollinger

I’ve decided to link to my new (much more active) site after all. Enjoy! 😎

Hello again to all my readers and visitors, and an especially warm welcome to all the science and math lovers out there who are passionate about intellectual honesty and committed to it and are curious about what is possible and about the nature of reality and how to express it in all its myriad forms! I really appreciate your time and support, as always.

Anyway, contrary to my most recent post I made only just approximately ~2 months ago (which is rather recent at the pace that this website (JesseBollinger.com) has updated in recent years) I have decided to link to my newer much more active website here after all, so that those who wish to explore my random thoughts and creative work may benefit from doing so. As always, I hope to make a positive and constructive difference in the lives of all my readers and in humanity’s future as a whole, however I can.

My new site is a much more artsy and conventionally creative site, at least currently, but it is very active:

WraithGlade.com

Yet, now that I have at last decided to link to it from my older site here, I will likely eventually expand out the new site to also have more overlap with this one over time for some parts of the site, such as probably publishing non-Amazon ebook versions of my published books over there at WraithGlade.com once I get around to it.

Anyway though, if you are looking for a bit of mild entertainment, I do already have a sampling of some of my art visible on the new site. As perhaps my favorite example, there’s a ghostly hand graphic on the main index page which I digitally sculpted and then converted to pixel art myself. You can also listen to some of my music compositions on the site too. I also have some random useful documents and links on there too. 📚😁

In other news, and perhaps most significantly (at least for me personally), I still am suffering through continued poverty ever since writing and publishing my Unified Logic book. I have never been able to discern any clear reason as to why, but perhaps it is because taking 4-5 years off to independently write you own book isn’t treated kindly by Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and is treated as a massive gap or something like that, or perhaps it has just placed me in a situation where I no longer fit cleanly into anyone’s preconceived categories of skills and thus perhaps I have got zero consideration for that “reason”. There are many other possible “explanations” too. I don’t know what the real reason is, honestly. It is quite frustrating, especially despite my earnest efforts.

Whatever the case may be though, my (already very small) savings are rapidly dwindling as of late and so I’m pushing lately for trying to establish some kind of independent income. It has been quite strange that even though I graduated near the top of my class in computer science I have never seen a dime of money from my CS degree that didn’t end up being spent on tuition debt, even to this day. The long-suffering poverty of living as a person of principles hardly seems fair, frankly, but it has never been much of a choice for me. Intellectual honesty and authenticity is just how I’m built and so I need to make it work reasonably well somehow. Along those lines (meaning for trying to find some independent income to at least be able to survive), I’ve set up a basic donation system (via Ko-fi) and linked to it on WraithGlade.com and will be expanding other related things too going forward.

My published books in contrast actually make net negative income in most months because the advertising costs of reaching mathematicians and other technical people is so high and the audience is so small relative to the small sales that it is very hard to even be profitable. Yet, I still advertise anyway, because I care about getting the ideas out there for the sake of benefiting other people and the future.

I could really use more support though! Anything at all would be a big help. The current trajectory of my finances is very unsustainable and it will only be a matter of months before my savings drop to zero, even despite exerting much effort to the contrary and with me buying almost nothing now in recent months.

Linking to any of my pages or posts that you found interesting would also be greatly appreciated. That helps more people become aware of my work. I also list several means of contacting me over there on WraithGlade.com and I also appreciate hearing from other people (as long as they behave wholesomely and ethically).

In any case, whatever the outcome, there’s a bunch of fun and/or useful and/or interesting random things over there on my newer site that you can explore. I also have a ton of outgoing links on the site which make it easy to branch off to other topics to explore as well. I hope to see some of you there!

Here’s the link again, for convenience and expediency: WraithGlade.com

As always, thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day/night! 🌄🌃👋

I mostly use a different (undisclosed) anonymous/pseudonymous website now.

Hello everyone!

So, I debated whether I should even post this, but basically for a long while now I’ve actually been very frequently adding content to a website but it is just not this one and the other site is intentionally an anonymous (or perhaps “pseudonymous”) website, unlike this one.

The other site is focused on my creative work, which I am trying to re-establish and build out more. My studies in mathematics and logic have (for many years) largely been foremost motivated by a desire to explore a wide range of “possible worlds” and what interesting emergent qualities of things might exist and such, such as in game development and simulation especially, in theory at least. This is true even of my investigations into formal logic, though I do also simply love uncovering insights into myriad matters concerning the essence of things and clarifying and expanding my frame of knowledge and so on.

For a while now since I published Unified Logic, I have had somewhat of a mental block on several of my longstanding ambitions and that is in large part probably honestly due to how exasperated I was with dealing with the harassment and disingenuity of a certain small but vocal subset of people who reacted to my book and tried to blatantly and shamelessly misrepresent it (indeed, even though you could literally find exact quotes from the book that provably embodied entirely different claims than what the detractors claimed I said… they clearly predominantly weren’t even actually reading it frankly).

Given that almost any information given to my harassers has historically consistently only ever been blindly used against me (regardless of what I say and how wholesomely and benevolently and earnestly I approach things) to expand the surface area of attack against me (with often no real attempt to engage honestly or ethically with any of it at all), it has been much more pleasant for my peace of mind to simply work on the other site instead of this one and to just leave this one in stasis/hiatus.

That’s also why I haven’t even been disclosing what or where the other site is!

There may yet come a day when I stop being anonymous on the other site in some partial and deliberately not prominent way, but it will not be for a long while even then (i.e. years perhaps). I am quite happy with the other site and it is being updated very often and is growing at a nice steady pace (unlike this site).

I’ve also increasingly been abandoning platforms that put much of anything significant outside of my control at all, especially in light of recent immoral encroachments on our basic human freedoms and human rights by tech companies (such as “AI” plagiarism and copyright-laundering systems especially). Even some supposedly “open” platforms where things are nonetheless outside my control (such as WordPress, which this site here uses) have been grating on me.

A small number of platforms (and also tech companies) have far too much power right now. History has shown that too much centralized power and/or inter-dependent system design (regardless of its form or its designers’ supposed intentions) is a virtually guaranteed recipe for lots of harm and degradation of the best parts of what used to be a much more vibrant and healthy internet and computing industry.

As a society, we need to return as much as possible to fully independent and naturally resilient and predominantly private (perhaps even offline) computing. Computing also needs to be made as low-energy as possible before we ruin the ecosystem of the Earth. I do not like these recent increasingly out-of-control environments riddled seemingly almost everywhere with spyware in disguise, which can break at any moment whenever someone decides (often very falsely) they think they “know better” (such as when WordPress updates against my will and breaks things randomly intermittently… but which I cannot avoid due to security reasons, even though this site amounts to little more than a plain text system with how I use it).

This WordPress site (like all WordPress sites basically) is also obscenely wasteful of data and energy compared to what it actually is and does. With how dire the environmental situation is for Earth in recent years, it is ever increasingly difficult to justify any kind of wastefulness ethically, even for something as simple as this! I am (as always, for those who know me) very firm and stringent on matters of ethics!

I have even considered letting this site go dark one day, though I do want to keep my real-name domain name surely. However, if that ever happens at all, it won’t be for a good while probably. Yet, with tech’s recent climate, I have been highly incentivized to avoid this site and focus more attention elsewhere, where dependencies on brittle over-engineered energy-wasteful systems (like WordPress) and other forms of bad “tech” and/or bad attention (e.g. of disingenuous and/or exploitive people) can be minimized.

People who routinely try to suffocate any form of dissent or fresh thoughts are truly causing a great deal of harm to humanity’s future in recent years especially. Some people could benefit greatly from “touching grass” as the saying goes!

There’s more wealth in one square mile of forest than in any person’s wallet. It doesn’t take much to be happy in life in reality, if one is at all of genuinely sane mind. It never ceases to amaze me how much suffering some people are willing to inflict on others just for the sake of short-sighted and philosophically childish greed.

Anyway though, as for the great majority of wholesome and good-natured readers who have treated my work for what it is and always has been (i.e. as simply an honest, earnest, pragmatic, and fun exploration and mathematical research project into many interesting thoughts and theories in the foundations of logic and mathematics and so on: I have nothing but love for you all and I appreciate you reading my work and gracing me with your presence in my life! I also apologize for my routinely long and unpredictably intermittent delays in answering emails from you all. I tend to avoid my public email associated with this site for very long spans of time, especially since I am always spreading myself thin, sometimes even to the point of rendering many months futile in the sense of being intangible in outcomes. I’m working on getting better at that though.

Anyway, it will likely be a fair while before you hear from me again on this site, but know that my web presence is actually far more active than ever before (especially in the last year or two) and things are going well for me in that regard.

Indeed, it is a big relief to be able to express my creativity more freely there and without as much pressure, which is more authentic and more healthy for all involved. I also feel like the time I invest is much more stable and timeless outside the context of a locked-in and over-engineered dependency-riddled system such as WordPress.

I’m not sure if I’m ready to share the domain of the other site yet, though I may yet eventually. I am still thinking it over. Anonymity helps guard against various kinds of wasted time, energy, and interpersonal risks, to an extent. There are pros and cons, but the current tech culture is lately not as creator-friendly and intellectually savory as it once was.

There are only two true sources of authority that exist in this world: (1) concrete evidence and (2) logical proof. All other “authorities” are false authorities. This is what a true person of science adheres to, plus also ethics and benevolence. Intellectual honesty makes all the difference in the world and we need as much as possible of that now more than ever.

Anyway, that’s my post! I’m feel happy to have a more anonymous and unimpeded site that almost all of my website-allocated time and energy now goes to!

Here’s to a brighter future! Thank you for reading, supporting me, and being here!

New posts to this site will be slow for a while, but all is well.

Hello everyone!

I am currently busy working on various intellectual and/or creative things of interest to me and to my personal life too and so that is why updates have been so slow and will continue to be like that for a good while further still.

This year has a been a good year for my book (Unified Logic: How to Divide by Zero, Solve the Liar’s Paradox, and Understand the Nature of Truth) though and sales of the book have been increasing gradually on average again. There were a few sleepy years in there, but it appears that interest in the ideas has spiked again.

There are many fun and interesting ideas to explore in that book and I continue to be very proud to have had the joy of writing it! It was a wild ride and yielded such a diverse range of fun and nuanced unconventional ways of looking at things!

I love to explore interesting ideas and creative mediums of many different types and tend to get sucked down many tangential paths of exploration, only a small number of which end up as full fledged published material. Time also always seems to move too fast for me.

Anyway though, thank you very much for stopping by my site and for reading (as always)! Until next time, I wish you all the very best in the meantime!

I look forward to the coming springtime and to pleasant breezes and many daily walks in nature again!

Have an awesome day/night/week/etc!

Too much fixation on fence-post issues inhibits creativity.

For a long while now I’ve noticed a very common recurring problem that seems to predominant as a frequent cause of both inhibited creativity and poor outcomes. Specifically, I am referring to the widespread tendency in many fields of study (but especially in computer programming and other technical fields) to focus so much on trying to ensure that every slightest fence-post issue is fully handled in all conceivable cases that it greatly impedes one’s creative and intellectual flow and in effect gives oneself tunnel vision. Such circumstances also often seem to tend to suck the fun out of projects and contribute to burn out as well.

I think this is actually also connected in some way to the moderately common prevalence of a certain kind of dismissiveness towards simple user interface problems that are easy to improve but nonetheless unfortunately neglected. All too often there will be some trivial aspect of how a piece of software (or other interface to something) works which if improved or corrected would yield a great improvement in value, and this could often actually clearly be done easily, but the developers or engineers responsible (or other members of the surrounding community) are dismissive of such things being problems at all.

Breaking my silence on Unified Logic: Fighting back against spam, slander, and spite.

Hello everyone! Welcome back! I know it’s been a while since the last time I posted something on my blog. That’s just because I’ve been reading lots of books and thinking about a lot of random interesting things, as usual for me. I hope you’ve all been having a great year/month/week/day/etc, as always! Don’t let my busyness make you all forget that I care! I always seem to be biting off more than I can chew! 😄🍴🍛

Anyway though, as those of you who have been following me are well aware, the first book I ever published (Unified Logic) made a nice splash when it was released back in 2018 and became a #1 New Release in its category for a while. The majority of actual readers of the book have responded positively and constructively to it, especially the ones who took the time to really think about it carefully and to question their assumptions and who shared their thoughts with me by email. Thanks for that! I love hearing a diversity of opinions! The more people are willing to be honest (with both others and themselves) the better for all of us! 🌎🤝

Arrogance and humility are equally bad. One should view both others and oneself exactly in proportion to reality, without distortion.

This article is about something I’ve been thinking about on and off for years, which I finally decided to write about because the narrative surrounding the issue seems far too philosophically homogeneous.

Anybody who has followed my work has probably realized by now that I like to pose provocative thought experiments that question popular assumptions to see how important concepts and nuances are often overlooked. This will be another instance of that.

Most programmers know that “magic numbers” tend to degrade code quality, but are they aware that hard-coding types (i.e. “magic typing”) often does too?

It is almost ubiquitous knowledge among educated and/or experienced programmers that “magic numbers” (i.e. hard-coding specific numeric values in multiple different locations in code) is generally highly damaging to code quality, readability, and maintainability.

It is a lot harder to change code that uses a lot of magic numbers, because every time you need to change one of those numbers you not only have to remember (or find) all the places where that number is, you have to also make sure that each instance of that number that you do find is actually related to the other ones that you are changing and not merely coincidentally the same. This can quickly become nightmarishly tedious, error prone, time consuming, and inflexible. Thus, it is common to instead use named constants so that it is easy to change all the related number instances at once in a much more foolproof way.

Programming languages should provide at least two separate switch statement keywords, one for fall through and one for no fall through, instead of forcing one or the other.

Programming languages with switch control flow statements typically seem to either (1) make it so that switch statements have fall through behavior (which is often error prone, since it is the less common use case) or else (2) force switch statements to never fall through. Neither of these choices is the wisest choice though.

There is no actual reason why a programming language should be forced into being artificially handicapped by either of these variants’ weaknesses. Instead, the programming language could simply make two different keywords available for switch statements, in such a way as to clearly indicate which behavior will be the result.

The “single return” (aka “only return once”) style that many programmers use is almost always inferior to a “return early, return often” style.

There are many programming conventions and styles that are touted as being “best practices” by some but which are actually based on an incomplete or flawed mental model of how to maximize one’s ability to reason about code as effectively as possible. Following programming style conventions without really understanding them is often quite harmful. Truly good code style requires a basis in logical reasoning, not in mere imitation of what other people arbitrarily say to do.

The popular (but harmful) belief that some programmers have that there “should only be one return statement in each function” is one of the best examples of a “best practice” that is actually nearly always counterproductive rather than helpful. In this case, a “single return” policy would ironically be best described as a “worst practice” instead of as “best practice”, given that this particular style convention is truly one of the most consistently harmful styles to code readability and quality.

Igor’s C++ Grimoire: A hidden gem of C++ reference material that not enough people know about

There are several C++ reference and documentation pages for the C++ programming language and the standard library (std::) and STL that one inevitably ends up coming across during the course of studying C++ and trying to use/learn the built-in features and common extensions of C++ when programming.

Both C and C++ tend to not have the most memorable names for some functions and types and variables etc, and can also have some tricky special cases in terms of code behavior, so the use of reference pages for C++ coding is essentially unavoidable, even more so than usual for programming languages.