Vintage66's Weblog

Why I'm blogging at 60

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At the beginning of this year I was burnt out on the web. All of it. The social game, the corporate gatekeeping, the enshittification of every corner of it, and now AI landing in the hands of people who shouldn’t have it.

That’s a lot to unpack and I’m not going to do it here. Those are their own posts.

What the burnout did was push me sideways, into the smallweb. Gopher. Gemini. Pubnixes. Places built by people who wanted a place, not an audience. I found some peace in the simplicity of it and I’m still there, more or less. It has its own problems. They’re just different problems, and smaller ones.

From there I found the Fediverse, and for a while I thought that was the sweet spot between the modern mess and the smallweb’s limits. It isn’t, quite. It has its share too. Another post.

Here’s the part I should be honest about. I’ve had blogs before. Most of them held my attention for about two months before something shinier came along. I have no track record here worth bragging about.

This one might be different. Might. What’s different is that I own it — the domain, the files, the whole thing sitting on my own machine. Nobody’s algorithm decides who sees it. If it dies, it dies because I stopped writing, not because a platform folded or changed the rules.

So this site is my voice. What’s here will be the stuff that makes me me.

Music, both the listening and the live gigs. History, and a lot of it. Writing and blogging, which I’m apparently doing again. Tech, which is what I’ve done for a living for forty years. And the deep-thinking end of things — philosophy, existentialism, and some ideas that sit further out than that.

Some of what I write will be filed under dissents. Those are the pieces where I’m arguing against something most people seem to have settled on. I’m not trying to convert anyone. Disagree, tell me why, and if we get a few exchanges in and we’re still apart, that’s a fine place to stop. I’ve watched enough people argue online into their fourth hour. Not doing that.

What this isn’t is a place for being nasty. We’re all biased, whether we admit it or not, and disagreement isn’t hate. Those two things get collapsed constantly and I’d rather they didn’t get collapsed here.

One last thing. I’m not going to tell you these are truths. They’re my views, arrived at over sixty years, and where I’ve got reasons I’ll show them so you can see for yourself where you think I’ve gone wrong. Some of what I write I hold loosely. Some I don’t. You’ll be able to tell which is which.

That’s the plan, anyway. Let’s see if I make it past two months.

Why I Think We're in a Simulation

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I think we’re living in a simulation.

Not the Matrix version. Nobody’s body is in a tank of goo somewhere while their mind runs around in a virtual world. I mean the whole thing. The universe, every particle in it, from the beginning of time to whatever end it has, is a running program, written by something we have no way to describe, for reasons we have no way to guess.

My position on this was a culmination of things across my life that started coming together about six years ago. I grew up with zero religion. In my 30s I became a born-again Christian and lived that life daily. But because I’m also a critical thinker, things began to fall apart with the teachings and belief systems of Christianity, and I found myself detaching, to the point that about ten years ago I pretty much abandoned it and became atheist for the most part. After that, my search for knowledge (including different viewpoints of Christian belief) led me to Buddhism, to Universalism, and then to the simulation hypothesis.

What follows isn’t an overview of that hypothesis. There are a lot of versions of this idea and trying to cover them all would be pointless. This is just my position, including the part I still haven’t settled.

The part I can’t settle

I go back and forth between two versions of this. I lean one way most days, but I’ve never been able to close the door on the other.

The first is that everything is programming. No ands, ifs, or buts. A human has a certain level of fundamental code inherent to humans, suited to its purpose in the simulation. So does everything else. A dog is programmed for its station, and so is a bird, a rock, water, an amoeba. A dog wouldn’t function with human programming and the reverse is just as true. Under this version we’re inside a highly elaborate simulation, not so much a “game” as an autonomous running thing, and every single part of it, start to finish, is code.

The second is that everything is programming except consciousness. Under this one we’re conscious beings that exist outside the physical layer of the simulation and belong to the whole of it. Something like the Law of One, where everything in the simulation is one, our consciousness sits at the top level, and it can be reset. Reincarnated, if you want the eastern religious word for it. Live in the simulation again, in whatever form the one consciousness chooses. Everything but the consciousness is programming.

Trying to put this into words is harder than it should be. Normally I do all right at typing out my thoughts, but this is different. It’s like a branch that keeps producing offshoots that produce more offshoots. It’s hard to follow one line of thinking without getting pulled sideways into another.

I’ll come back to which one I lean toward. First, the things that make me think any version of it is right.

The speed of light

Most people treat the speed of light as a cosmic rule. A street sign. No passing, speed limit, that sort of thing.

Look at it through the lens of the simulation hypothesis and it stops looking like a law and starts looking like a hardware limitation. A clock speed. Every digital system we’ve ever built has a cap on how fast a bit of data gets from point A to point B, and that cap isn’t a law of nature, it’s a property of the machine. The speed of light could be exactly that.

Then there’s the observable universe, the bubble beyond which we can’t see. The usual explanation is that the universe has a finite age and light has only had so long to travel, so there’s a limit to how far out we can look. That’s true and I’m not disputing it.

But notice how it works. That bubble isn’t a wall out there somewhere. It’s centered on the observer. Everyone gets their own, the same size, containing whatever is close enough for the light to have arrived. There’s no master view of the whole thing from outside.

If I were building a simulation and cared about resources, that’s how I’d do it. Don’t render a universe. Render what each observer can reach, from where they’re standing, and let the speed of light be the thing that enforces it.

The Planck scale

Zoom into a digital image far enough and you hit pixels. Our universe appears to do something similar. There’s a minimum unit of length (the Planck length) and a minimum unit of time.

A genuinely analog universe should be infinitely divisible. You should be able to zoom forever and never hit bottom. A universe with a minimum resolution looks quantized instead, and to me the Planck scale looks a lot like the pixel size.

I should be fair about what this actually is. The Planck scale isn’t proven pixelation. It’s the scale at which our current theories stop giving sensible answers, where general relativity and quantum mechanics can no longer be talked about in the same sentence. That’s a weaker claim than “reality is made of pixels.”

It’s still the point where the universe stops behaving like a smooth continuous thing and starts behaving like something with a floor. I don’t think that’s nothing.

The mathematical nature of reality

This is the big one for me.

Dig far enough into physics and you stop finding stuff. You find mathematics. The behavior of subatomic particles, the curvature of spacetime, all of it follows precise rules that can be written down.

Eugene Wigner had a phrase for the strangeness of this: the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. His point was that mathematicians invent structures for their own reasons, with no thought of the physical world, and then decades later a physicist reaches for exactly that structure and finds it describes reality to absurd precision. Wigner didn’t think anybody had earned an explanation for why that keeps happening.¹

The standard objection is that math is the language we built to describe regularities, so naturally we find it everywhere. We’re looking through a lens we ground ourselves.

Maybe. But that doesn’t tell me why the universe has regularities that precise to begin with, or why math developed for no practical purpose turns out to be the thing a physicist needed a century later.

To me that feels less like a discovery and more like a specification.

The falsifiability problem

The main objection to all of this is that it isn’t falsifiable. In scientific terms that means an idea has to be capable of being proven wrong, and the complaint is that this one can’t be.

A few tests have been proposed:

Looking for a computational lattice
Modified double-slit and quantum-eraser experiments
Constraining simulations through physics

Each has a problem.

The lattice test looks for the imprint of a discrete spacetime grid, on the reasoning that a simulation running under resource constraints would likely use one.² But that only tests whether our universe is being run on a particular kind of lattice. It doesn’t test whether our universe is simulated at all.

The second is a proposed test rather than an actual one, and it assumes the simulator must use observer-dependent, computationally economical rendering. Nothing in the hypothesis requires that.

The third comes from Franco Vazza, who argued in 2025 that a civilization operating under physical laws like ours couldn’t realistically run certain extremely detailed simulations of our universe.³ The trouble is that the hypothesis doesn’t require calculating every particle in the observable universe continuously.

So the tests don’t do what people want them to do. But I’d argue that something being unfalsifiable doesn’t automatically make it irrational, meaningless, or not worth discussing. Not falsifiable in a strict laboratory sense isn’t the same as sci-fi nonsense.

The plausibility of the whole idea isn’t fixed, either. It moves. It depends on what we learn about computation, about how consciousness actually works, and about whether advanced civilizations would have both the ability and the appetite to build these things. If some specific model starts predicting things about our universe that we then observe, we’ve stopped doing philosophy. We’re looking at blueprints.

The version I don’t use

Nick Bostrom’s argument doesn’t rest on physics at all. It’s a trilemma: either civilizations wipe themselves out before they can run ancestor simulations, or they develop the capability and choose not to use it, or we’re almost certainly inside one, because simulated observers would vastly outnumber real ones.⁴

That’s the version philosophers take seriously, and it’s cleaner than anything I’ve laid out here. I don’t lean on it because the whole thing depends on simulated people being genuinely conscious, and I don’t think anyone knows whether running the right computation can produce that.

Which is the same wall I keep hitting with my own two versions.

The obvious objection

Every age explains the universe with its most impressive machine. The Greeks had music and geometry. The Victorians had clockwork. And here I am, in the computer age, saying the universe is a computer.

That’s a fair criticism and I’ve thought about it.

Here’s why I don’t think it lands. Clockwork was a metaphor. Nobody could actually build a universe out of gears, and nobody had any idea what it would take to try. We can build simulations. We do it constantly. We know what they cost, where they cut corners, what a system does when it’s short on resources, how you fake a world convincingly for someone inside it. That’s not a fresh metaphor, it’s a capability we didn’t have before, and having it lets us ask questions nobody could have formulated in 1890.

Before we could build these things, the gap got filled with dogma and superstition, because that’s what was available. I’d rather reach for the tool we actually have than pretend I’m a neutral observer with no tools at all.

Maybe I’m doing exactly what the Victorians did. I can’t rule it out. I just don’t think the comparison is as damning as it sounds.

Where that leaves me

Honestly, I don’t think my position is that different in kind from someone grounded in science or someone grounded in religion. If anything mine sits closer to the religious end, and I’d rather say that than pretend otherwise.

The scientific person is 100/0. They value what can be proven and treat everything else as a placeholder until the data catches up.

The religious person is 50/50. Their belief is either true or it isn’t, and they choose the unprovable half.

Mine is 50/50 too. I’m not claiming otherwise. But at its base it just makes sense to me, and it offers more hope for existing after death than any religion I’ve come across.

If this is a simulation, then maybe we reset. Like a game. New life, or a different character entirely. Maybe we run the same one over and over. That sounds horrible to some people, but it might be exactly why we don’t remember a previous life. Every existence, possibly in the same time and place and circumstances, still happened. It just isn’t carried over.

I find that comforting rather than horrific. I wouldn’t want to remember a past life. The weight of it would be unbearable. And it doesn’t make this one feel less real. Sitting here writing this feels completely real to me, even if I’ve done it before.

Science offers the option of a cold conclusion, biological accidents in a dead universe. Religion asks for a leap into the unknown. What I like about this is that it gives me hope without requiring me to believe anything that contradicts what we actually know.

So which of my two versions do I land on?

Most of the time I land on the first. Everything is programming, full stop. It’s the simpler answer and the logic is less messy.

But I can’t dismiss the second, because of what David Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness: the fact that we can explain everything the brain does without explaining why any of it feels like anything from the inside.⁵ That problem opens up variables that sometimes make sense to me and sometimes don’t, and it’s the reason I’ve never fully closed the door.

Eugene P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1002/cpa.3160130102. ↩︎
Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, and Martin J. Savage, “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation,” arXiv:1210.1847 (2012), https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847. ↩︎
Franco Vazza, “Astrophysical Constraints on the Simulation Hypothesis for This Universe: Why It Is (Nearly) Impossible That We Live in a Simulation,” Frontiers in Physics 13 (2025): 1561873, https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2025.1561873. ↩︎
Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–255, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9384.00309. ↩︎
David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–219. ↩︎

The Man With No Death Date

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A little bit of history, a little bit of genealogy, and a story.

On a cold day in February 2012 my wife and I parked on a gravel road in a fairly remote part of Missouri and walked a quarter mile up a slight incline, the farmhouse still visible behind us. I’d gotten deep into cemetery research by then, and at the time I was mostly hunting for Civil War soldiers who’d lived in the area.

What we found was tiny. Maybe ten headstones on a small plot of private land, hemmed in by farm and forest. The fence had been kept up after a fashion, and I assume the farmer did it, since some of the people buried there were his kin. It was February, so the grass was dead and even the stones that had fallen over years ago were still visible.

Almost all of it was one family. One stone stopped me.

Before I go further: I’ve changed the names here, and I’m keeping the location vague. There’s nothing sensitive in the record itself, it’s all public. I’d just rather not hand a real family’s details to strangers on the internet without anyone having asked me to.

The surname was Gemson. Two names on the stone, a woman and a man. Elmira, born 1858, died 1933. And Earl, born 1846, died 19—

Yes. Nineteen, and nothing after it.

My first thought was that Earl was obviously dead, so why was his side blank when the woman I assumed was his wife had a full set of dates? I took a photo, and when I got home I fired up the computer and started digging.

I was a member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, so I had access to their records, and that’s where I started. Earl would have been right at the edge of old enough to serve. Sure enough, he was there.

He’d been born in Tennessee and served as a corporal in the 10th Tennessee Infantry, Union. If the 1846 birth year is right he’d have been a teenager during the war, which almost certainly means he lied about his age to enlist. That was common enough to be unremarkable at the time.

The other thing worth saying, which I didn’t chase back in 2012 and probably should have, is that a Tennessee man in a Union regiment is its own story. Tennessee was deeply split, and Unionist enlistment there came with real consequences for the men who did it and often for the families they left behind. I was only trying to confirm I had the right person. I got the confirmation and moved on, and I’ve thought since that I walked past something.

He survived the war, and afterward I found records putting him in the area I was standing in. The 1880 census showed Earl and Elmira with seven children. After that, nothing, until Elmira’s death certificate in 1933. She died at seventy-five, in the same place.

So what happened to Earl?

That part took real work. I found names for the children, tied them back to Earl through census and court records, and eventually got there. Not long after Elmira died, in 1934, an eighty-eight-year-old Earl left Missouri with his two surviving children — five had already died — and moved to California. He died there at ninety-three and was buried there.

That explained the blank on the stone. He’d bought the plot, cut the dates for his wife, left his own year open, and then died nineteen hundred miles away.

What it doesn’t explain is why. A man that age, after a lifetime in one place, doesn’t usually pull up and cross the country.

The period suggests an answer even though the records don’t give me one. 1934 is the Depression, and it’s the Dust Bowl, and those were the years when an enormous number of people went west looking for work. Missouri wasn’t hit worst, but plenty left anyway. Both of Earl’s surviving children were adults and neither had married, so there were no grandchildren keeping anyone rooted. Elmira died in 1933; he left in 1934. An old man who probably couldn’t live alone, two adult children going where the work was, and everyone leaves together.

That’s the ordinary shape of the story. It fits. I can’t prove a word of it.

I still think about this fourteen years later, and what stays with me isn’t the research. It’s that burial grounds are not wasted space. There are people attached to those stones, and more than the ones buried under them — families, stories, history, all of it packed into a small plot of land behind a farmhouse.

I have no family connection to Elmira and Earl. I never will. But I connected to their story, and I came away with more than technique. Without someone bothering to look, they’d have been one more family lost to time. Somebody looked.

Living with 'Feels So Good' since 1977

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Eleven-year-old me is in my bedroom, clock radio blaring a local FM rock station, when a song comes on unlike anything they normally played in that era. The jangly guitar intro, and then that solo flugelhorn (I didn’t know it was a flugelhorn at the time, I just assumed it was a trumpet) kicks in over a really funky rhythm section. It had that disco sound, but it was also funky, driving, and yes, catchy. For a boy used to hearing rock music — what we call classic rock now — this woke up a part of me I didn’t know existed. I was a soccer player, a pretty decent one, and I’d never really thought about actually playing music. Yet this song moved me so much I started looking into what it would take to play a trumpet.

I’d been surrounded by music my whole life by then. My mother and my uncle were both deep into it, all kinds, and I’m fairly sure she had something on while I was still inside her. Between them they had enormous collections, and I’d pull a record out because the cover looked interesting and then sit with it for hours.

But that was their music. In early 1978 I spent my own allowance money on that Chuck Mangione album, Feels So Good.

Most kids my age were putting their money into Fleetwood Mac and Queen and KISS. I listened to all of that on the radio too. But Chuck Mangione is the one I bought.

That fall I started middle school, and band was an option for the first time. Our elementary school had nothing. I signed up for trumpet.

Mangione played flugelhorn, which nobody was handing an eleven-year-old in a school band room, so trumpet was as close as I could get. Seventh grade through graduation I buried myself in it. First chair my senior year. I bought everything he released and tried to play like him, and I had no idea at the time that one album was going to shape as much as it did.

Guitar came my freshman year, bass the year after, piano after that, trumpet all the way through. My tastes widened out — Zeppelin, Rush, Skynyrd — but Mangione stayed right there alongside them, and he’s the reason horns ever meant anything to me. That one record opened the door to jazz, to big band, to classical, to soul, and to the rock bands built on a horn section: Chicago, Tower of Power, Earth, Wind & Fire. Almost everything I’ve listened to since traces back through it.

What’s interesting is that I mostly gave up the trumpet as I got deeper and deeper into guitar. My improvisation on guitar outran my improvisation on horn by a long way. I could read sheet music all day on trumpet, but I struggled to play anything that wasn’t on the page. I tried the horn parts Chuck did flawlessly and couldn’t get near them. I could cover the melody lines. The rest of it I never could grasp.

At sixty I hear those same parts differently. At fifteen I couldn’t get close. Now I listen and think they’re reachable — that if I’d put the forty years into the horn that I put into the guitar, I’d have them.

The strange part is that the thing I can’t get near isn’t the horn at all.

Grant Geissman’s guitar playing on that record is a whole other story. Chuck’s flugelhorn is front and center, but it’s still one voice in a band. Grant’s playing is in a different universe. I’m a pretty decent guitarist and I can’t even get close to comprehending what he did on that track. The technique, the phrasing, the timing — all of it is exactly right for that song, and I’ve had four decades on the instrument to work out how and I still can’t.

The thing I keep coming back to is how much is packed into it. Disco was on top in 1977 and the track has that feel underneath, but there’s jazz in it, and pop, and soul, and funk, and rock. That’s a lot to hold in one song without it falling apart. It doesn’t fall apart.

I never saw him play. Not once, in forty-eight years. He toured, I could have gone, and I kept not going the way you keep not doing things you assume will still be there.

He died in July 2025.

I spent that week playing every album of his I owned. It hit hard. I didn’t know him, I’d never seen him perform, but he’s where it started for me, and it started with Feels So Good.