Autobiography

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The basics

That interested in me, huh? Well, I’m a single gay man in his 40s, a coder in constant pursuit of deep hack mode, a Linux fan (and former zealot), and a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area since 2008 (born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, US).

Here is my Geek Code. If you don’t know what it is, visit the Wayback Machine archive of geekcode.com for a detailed explanation.

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d-- s+:+ a C++(++++) UL++++$ P+++ L+++ E- W+++ N(+)
o? K? w---(++) !O M- !V PS+++ PE-@ Y+ PGP+ t++@ 5++ X+@
R+@ !tv b++ DI++ D++ G++ e*>++ h+ r>% y++*
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Due to the march of time, many of these codes are no longer relevant. In particular: “P”, “N”, “M” (specific to MacOS 9 and earlier), “DI”, “D”, and “G”. I have left them in their original states for posterity.

P+++: After Perl 6 turned into a slow-motion disaster, I went through a Python phase and am now trying to find excuses to write new projects in Go. As I write more multi-line scripts in awk than Perl these days, I guess I’m a “P-” now.

N(+): Man, what happened there?

M-: OS X has a character prompt, which is an improvement, but it’s still not my favorite *nix by a long shot.

X+: This rating applies to X-Files S1 through S6 and the first movie, “Fight the Future”. S6 was weak but still had some good one-off episodes. However, S7 through S10 don’t exist as far as I’m concerned. (Actually, the mytharc got tedious way back in S4/S5 — I was just too busy checking out Alex Krycek to care at the time. But by S6, even the monster-of-the-week episodes were heading downhill.)

DI++: Was Scott Adams always kind of an asshole and we just didn’t notice?

D++: I suppose I should have realized sooner that iD was an engine company, not a game company. (Says an owner of Quake 3 Arena, retail Linux edition.)

G++: For those about to geek, we salute you.

My handle

In case you’re curious about what “Chronos Tachyon” means, TL;DR is that it refers to my childhood fascination with time travel, black holes, and General Relativity. My three formative early-childhood movies were “Back to the Future”, “Little Shop of Horrors”, and “Short Circuit”. Time travel, causality, chaos, AI, and ethics have been on my mind since before I started primary school.

Long version: I chose it because it doesn’t mean anything even though it sounds like it should. Sort of like “Transmeta”. (Remember that, fellow Linux geeks?) Chronos (Χρονος – leading chi) is Greek for “time”, although many people confuse it with the Greek god Cronus/Kronos (Κρονος – leading kappa), the King of the Titans who was overthrown by his son Zeus. The confusion is understandable given that the pronunciations drifted together over time — in later eras, even the Greeks themselves were confusing the two when re-reading their earlier stories. Tachyon is also Greek, literally meaning “swift one”, but more notably referring to a hypothetical particle that travels faster than light/backwards in time (same thing, really).

To be perfectly honest, the fact that my online handle has a fictitious last name is a dead giveaway that I coined it as a teenager.

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Linux

With regards to computers, I’m 100% Linux geek these days.

I started off in 1999-ish with Slackware, hand-compiling everything not in the base distro and manually upgrading through three GCC C++ ABIs and two glibc major revisions. Ugh, screw that.

These days I use Debian and its derivatives 100% of the time. Usually but not always Ubuntu. Debian is Linux with dependencies done right.

I still keep Windows around — I have multiple serial numbers for Windows 10 that I paid full price for — but it's mostly for gaming in VMWare.

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Gay

With regards to sexual orientation, I’m gay and I figured it out a long time ago. Around age 12 I started to notice that I was interested in sex, just not sex with women. At first I assumed interest in women would come later, but after a few months of confusion I put two and two together. It wasn’t so much a brilliant flash as it was a quiet “oh, this does explain a few things”.

I came out to my mom a month before my 16th birthday, and to the rest of my family (somewhat involuntarily) later that year. I came out to close friends in high school and college, but I never did work up the guts to, for instance, tell my college roommates. It wasn’t until I’d been working my post-college blue-collar job for a year that I actually came out to someone who wasn’t a friend. (It came up in conversation, so I told the guy. He was also a gossip hub, which saved me a lot of work.)

My first serious relationship was fairly late. He was a co-worker at my post-college blue-collar job. We got together right around my 25th birthday and it lasted about two and a half years. It’s kind of hard to pin down a specific date when things were clearly doomed, but we did part on good terms when I moved away from Kansas. I consider it a valuable learning experience: things I could’ve done better on my part, things I should’ve been watching out for… and things I should’ve run away screaming from. I don't blame him, and we're still close friends to this day — our neuroses were just not compatible.

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Atheist

With regards to religion, I’m a straight-up atheist these days, but it’s been a journey.

Back in high school, the one-word summary of my beliefs was “Deism”, the belief that there is a higher power that created the Universe, but rarely interferes: “God the Watchmaker”, or “God who Got it Right the First Time and Didn’t Have to Muck About with Miracles and Prophets and Virgin Births to Fix His Screw-Ups”. It had its heyday in the Enlightenment of the 1700s; many of the American founders were Deists, as were many of their intellectual inspirations back in England. When I read about it as a teenager, it clicked with me in a way that Christianity never had.

Gradually, though, it became increasingly apparent to me that Deism was still one God more than I felt I could honestly believe in. By the time I entered college, I considered myself an “soft” agnostic — “Don’t ask me, man, I didn’t do it!”. In the end, I found myself leaning more and more toward a “soft” atheist position — “Well, I suppose a God could be hiding somewhere, if He/She/It really enjoys a good game of Hide-and-Seek, but who are we really kidding here?”

For college and a little while afterward, despite my growing atheism I convinced myself I was a Secular Buddhist… until I realized that, while there’s such a thing as too much attachment to the materialist world, there’s also such a thing as too little. Plus, after visiting museums with Buddhist iconography and religious art, I’ve decided that “The Eightfold Path” has about as much to do with real-world Buddhism as “Turn the other cheek” has to do with real-world Christianity, and it’s actually all about rituals and regimented superstitions. Big turn-off.

As a “soft” atheist, I don’t deny the possibility of a higher power. However, I don’t find it particularly likely, and if a higher power does exist, He/She/It obviously doesn’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not we worship Him/Her/It and has no obvious intention to hand out advice about meaning-of-life stuff. And I outright disbelieve in miracles or intervention of any sort — if I saw evidence that suggested a miracle, I would question my own senses and/or my own understanding of nature than to suppose that nature’s laws really did just check out and go on vacation.

I find it striking that, for all the self-professed “humility” of believers, most believe that their own understanding is itself infallible. Also, very few seem to actually come to grips with the moral problems posed by their beliefs. For instance, very few Christians actually bite the bullet that “original sin” implies “all babies should be set on fire and kept alive forever in that state so that they can experience their proper and well-deserved quantity of suffering, because of something their great-great-greatⁿ-grandparents did before they were ever born”, and very few Buddhists seem to care that “karma” means “blame the victim, nothing is an accident, every civilian maimed by a landmine totally deserved to lose that limb”. I'm mostly down with more animist or polytheist beliefs, though, especially Shintō. I think such beliefs are factually wrong, but sometimes they have good metaphors for thinking about life.

Enough on what I don’t believe. Philosophically, I’m a Secular Humanist, a materialist, a reductionist, and a consequentialist. I used to consider myself a Utilitarian, but no longer. I was once a Less Wrong lurker who followed The Cult That Shall Not Be Named, but I finally broke out of it around 2014-2015 near the tail end of the HPMOR era. Hermione's death was… uh… yeah.

Less seriously, I’m also a Discordian. Hail Eris. My full Holy Name is “Saint Chronos Tachyon, Guardian of Eristic Paraphernalia and Gatekeeper of the Region of Thud”. (Although I suppose I’m now “Gatekeeper Emeritus of the Region of Thud” since I’ve moved away from Kansas.) My favorite Discordian parable is “A SERMON ON ETHICS AND LOVE”:

Mal-2: I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.

Eris: WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?

Mal-2: But nobody Wants it! Everybody hates it.

Eris: OH. WELL, THEN STOP.

At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.

I’m also a card-carrying legally ordained minister via the Universal Life Church. Absolve your sins, only $5! (And, yes, the irony of being a legally ordained atheist minister is precisely as delightful as it sounds.)

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Sky Bingo

Astrology

Growing up, I was always told that I was a Taurus. After all, I was born on May 20th, and the horoscopes always say "Apr 20 - May 20". But the people who take sky bingo seriously say I technically land on Gemini, when you take into account such things as latitude, longitude, and time of day for my birth.

Shrug.

I still think of myself as a Taurus. I'm stubborn like that. If you want to see my full chart, I've made it available on its own page.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®

In a similar category, Myers-Briggs tests currently claim that I'm an INFJ or INFP, depending on my mood when I take the quiz. I've always straddled J/P pretty hard, although I lean more J than P these days, and at some point around age 30 I crossed the T/F line as well. Both of those are supposed to be impossible, according to The Myers & Briggs Foundation, owners of the trademark on the vaunted Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®.

Isabel Briggs Myers, creator of the test, also did a racism or two:

When a female office worker advocated for human equality across all races and ethnicities, Isabel declared her to be immature and typologically under-developed. “The very warm evidence on the colored woman to whom one could talk exactly as to equals is another case in point,” she wrote. “Members of a dark and supposedly inferior race are standard symbol for the suppressed and considered-inferior part of one’s own psyche.”

— Edward N. Hay, management consultant who corresponded with Myers

Astrology is better, if only because its greatest legacy isn't a big bucket of racism and hiring discrimination.

Big Five personality traits

Big Five is better, too. Unlike MBTI, there's some actual science behind it — it's not just warmed-over Jungian bullshit passed off as "scientific". However, like all forms of sky bingo, it's not terribly useful. There are, like, some weak correlations with certain personality disorders, but it's not The Secret Key To Understanding People or anything, like MBTI sells itself as. And it doesn't sort people into boxes, so it's less fun than other forms of sky bingo.

Homestuck

I'm also partial to Homestuck, which delights in sorting people into boxes, hundreds and hundreds of boxes, and even invites you to make your own boxes if you like. I see myself as an Heir of Heart.

An Heir of Heart is defined as one who "invites change in Heart, or change through Heart, as if by the will of the Aspect itself", where the Heart Aspect represents personal identity, feelings, and convictions, and the Heir Class is the class of passive change in others, generally for their own benefit rather than the benefit of the Heir. Heart is the opposite/complement of Mind, where the Mind Aspect governs the choices that we make and the public face that we show to the world. Mind's philosophy holds that we should focus on the Big Picture and let the Little Pictures fall into place naturally, whereas Heart's philosophy holds that the Big Picture is made of Little Pictures and thus we should focus on the tiny ways that we affect each other's lives to build a world worth living in.

In short, my instinctual way of interacting with the world is to change other people's Hearts, convincing them to adopt compassion for others so that they feel their own potential to do good in the world.