when_in_rome :: stab_a_lion_and_generally_make_a_mess_of_things

In computing, a database is a collection of structured data that is stored and accessed electronically. They're everywhere, the phone you're reading this on probably has dozens fo them. They're just files these days, little distributable bundles of knowledge - like books. And like books, when they grow in size they need an index.

I hate when the bookmark falls out, it's like the most dangerous game of context reload where if you overshoot the whole build falls apart.

Indexes in databases are isomorphic to indexes in bookes, they're pre-calculated maps of the territory. Much like the author (or more likely his publisher) has been kind enough to tell you that the reason your child has thrown up all over the flow is probably on page 47 of the cookbook "Why peanut butter and oranges don't mix", the developer of the application using the database (or more likely the DBA responsible for it) has carefully constructed fast lanes to the data it most commonly needs.

The same thing falls out everywhere every where this structure occurs. When a large corpus of knowledge needs to be accessed by a system with limited budget (time or engergy... they're rhymes if not a mirror), the system tends towards this optimization. Entropy requires it.

ask_silly_question :: get_a_lot_of_answers

Here are some examples where the indexing pattern occurs across different domains:

  • Book Index - Alphabetical list at the back of a book listing topics, names, and concepts with page numbers
  • Table of Contents - Sequential listing of chapters/sections with page numbers at the front of documents
  • Dewey Decimal System - Numerical classification system for organizing library materials
  • Database Index - Data structure (B-tree, hash table) that speeds up data retrieval operations
  • Search Engine Index - Inverted index mapping keywords to web pages (like Google's index)
  • DNS (Domain Name System) - Distributed index mapping domain names to IP addresses
  • Academic Journal Index - Databases like PubMed, JSTOR indexing scholarly articles by topic, author, keywords
  • Citation Index - Systems tracking which papers cite which (e.g., Web of Science)
  • Encyclopedia Index - Cross-references and alphabetical listings in reference works
  • Thesaurus - Hierarchical index of synonyms and related terms
  • Museum Catalog - Accession numbers and metadata for artifacts
  • Medical Records Index - Patient files organized by ID, name, or condition
  • Real Estate MLS - Multiple Listing Service indexing properties by location, price, features
  • Phonebook/Yellow Pages - Alphabetical index of people and businesses
  • Legal Case Index - Court decisions indexed by case number, parties, legal issues
  • Tax Records - Organized by taxpayer ID, year, filing status
  • Patent Database - Inventions indexed by patent number, inventor, classification
  • Voter Registration - Citizens indexed by name, address, district

If you're bored, ask a GPT to add to the list. There may be one or two that I'm missing.

the_man_cried_unkle :: singing_in_the_rain

Occasionally, when we're having a bath, I'll take an old juice jug, fill it full of water and pour it over one my children's heads to wet their hair in preparation for shampoo. I'm sure they hate it, for one with so little framing, every moment an eternity. An unexpected torrent that consumes.

im_an_agile_coach_doncha_know :: how_many_citations_to_get_one_of_the_big_bears_at_the_back

Under ideal circumstances, the indexing pattern is the optimal access pattern to minimize budget expenditure. And the benefits are downstream as well. The index itself becomes data, a second order function which produces all of the usual benefits of holes in holes:

  • State specification - Uniquely identifying configurations in complex systems
  • Classification - Organizing phenomena by measurable parameters
  • Prediction - Using indexed values to calculate outcomes
  • Data retrieval - Looking up properties without recalculating from theory
  • Pattern recognition - Identifying similar processes across different scales

And this is where the problem starts to creep in, the same problem that occurs everytime we build structure as an on-ramp to information.

The structure must be maintained.

Order has a cost we pay in energy everytime we attempt to create it. Entropy forces the universe towards the unknowable nothing of pure noise. We build isolated pockets of calm, rational thought as bulwarks against the eventual collapse knowing of their inevitable demise.

Or at least we should.

We forget sometimes the structures we build /must/ follow the same laws as everything else in this universe. Built from the same substrate, some isomorphic qualities must persist.

Thermodynamics is one.

Picture a beach. We've all been to one, as children, with children, it's always the same. Inevitably, a bucket appears, sand is packed inside. A careful application of water to ensure the correct consistency. And then the tip.

If the ritual has been performed correctly, structure arises. A new castle spire reaching ambitiously to the sky, too young to know to fear the encroaching waves.

If not, entropy is a lesson taught to (and by) every child of a young age.

And, as every child learns, this structure must be maintained. The tower's collapse imminent from its first inception.

the_double_ended_account_of_life :: double_dutch_double_double

A database index acts as a beacon, in the infinite night of knowledge a beam to point to your destination.

A database index must be maintained. It's a snapshot of a living world and must be treated as such. Failure to do so results in a collection of records that point to a world that no longer exists. Every change to the structure of the underlying data causes the record to drift further and further from the truth.

This maintenance costs energy, energy which by the first law may be transferred into another domain such as accounting, but energy nonetheless. This is energy which by the same laws must be taken from another enterprise.

When it's a database, it's CPU cycles that could have been spent providing meaning by responding to user queries. When it's you, it's CPU cycles that could have been spent providing meaning by engaging in conversation instead of responding with pre-conceived notions.

When you're outside the system, with a bird's eye view, the solution is simple. Purge the index and rebuild. Investigate the usage patterns, study the underlying schema. Systems are living things, the structure they are built on needs to grow and flex. Ossification is the death of every living thing, rigid structure cannot win in a universe that abhors anything more structured than a 4am war room conference call about a downed database.

When you're inside the system though, that becomes more difficult. Godel can be taken to mean that a participant of a system cannot completely know the system, for all meanings of "know" stronger than a whisper that is. Watch a few hamster maze videos on YouTube if you need to embody that idea. Observers knowledgable of their local position but ignorant of the whole. Plus... adorable.

When you're inside the system and you depend on it for your very identity, tearing it down to fix it is impossible. Every fibre of your being screams out to prevent it and you wouldn't even know where to being.

So you do the logical thing, preserve it. The index itself, once a filter for your own cognition now needs its own. Resources reallocate, budgets are shifted and the index gains a lighthouse keeper. Someone to protect it, to ensure its light shines through the fog.

And it works for a while, but the costs mount. Sytems grow, budgets expand, maintenance costs accrue.

What was once billed as a 1/2 FTE has grown to a whole department.

from_the_shadows :: surprise_its_more_shadows

When inclusion to the index becomes a rent seeking affair, one must question the validity of the enterprise.

A blue check.

SEO

Academic standing.

A long haired fellow once flipped over a whole slew of tables over this kind of thing.

the_cost_must_be_paid :: momentum_must_be_preserved

The history of man is a fractal rhyme. It has to be.

The universe doesn't change. The rules don't change. Evolution isn't that quick.

In control theory, an attractor system can be thought of as a poor fellow, who's fallen out of his space ship, doomed to endlessly orbit the planet he'd been sent to survey for his propellant tanks are full but his glasses are crooked, made from the same broken stuff as his spaceship in a universe that itself had seen better days.

Apoapsis -> periapsis -> apoapsius -> periapsis.

Just missing stable orbit each attempt.

Poor guy.

We keep doing the same thing. The interface is the same though the implementation changed.

The Axial Age :: Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel), early Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), the Upanishadic sages — all independently, across civilizations that had minimal contact with each other, arriving at the same structural insights about ethics, consciousness, and the relationship between the individual and the whole.

The Age of Reason :: Newton, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Spinoza

The Information Age :: Shannon, Turing, Wiener, Von Neumann — the first wave, establishing that information is physical. Then Hofstadter, Deutsch, Penrose — consciousness and computation as fundamental. Then Friston (free energy principle), Verlinde (entropic gravity), Susskind (complexity and black holes), Tononi (integrated information), Wolfram (computational universe), Barandes (stochastic quantum theorem).

The Axial Age broke the ossification of Bronze Age institutions. In Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Shang Dynasty, the Indus Valley, Mycenaean Greece... knowledge was held by the centralized, stratified elites. The Bronze Age fell, the Axial Age spawned religion as a response.

The pattern continues.

Buddhism formalized the sangha. It split into schools, Babel style. By the time of Ashoka, it became state institution. The same thing happened in China with Confucianism, absorbed into the bureaucracy, the texts became job interview.

Christianity is the clearest example. For centuries after Christ's passing, the Christian church maintained its early, distributed ideals. The lack of harmonization a feature, not a bug. Agency requires a delta from the ideal to be corrected. An organization that has no internal tension is one that has stopped growing. But organizational capture is an inevitability of any system running on this architecture, thermodynamics does not pick and choose which domains are applicable. By 313 AD, it too had fallen to institutional capture.

Nicea - 325 AD - was the moment the the Christian church built its index. Encoding belief as canon. What is allowed to be thought, who has power to think it and the creed that ties it all together. With the best of intentions I'm sure, a means for the masses to understand the carefully constructed beliefs of their betters.

It took Gutenburg, the printing press and a rather upset fellow with a letter (and maybe, quite possibly the introduction of those delicious little roasted beans) to break out of that burning, frozen prison - the collected efforts of a man with a lot to say, a man with the way to say it and more than a little caffeinated help allowed us to have this conversation today.

One that would be familiar to the people of that era, written as it is from a coffee shop.

[Best just finish it up before my scrum master rings the Slack bells for morning prayer standup.]

And so the pattern continues. Knowledge sloshing back and forth in a bowl of our collective, distributed intelligence. Thermodynamics abhors a dam as much as a vacuum, for one demands the other.

1665 - Journal des sçavans in January, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

A scant 200 years after the dam released, the detritus begins to collect on the shore downstream.

1876 - Dewey Decimal - knowledge is categorized and classified

1908 - Harvard introduces MBA program - knowledge acquisition itself becomes a filter

1970 - Library of Congress, ISBN system

1955 - Impact factor introduced - journal inclusion becomes authority

1989 - FICO score - your worth as corruptable index

1998 - Google PageRank - an index of indexes, the bloom filter at scale

2003 - LinkedIn - your experience and skills as index, your brand identity is born

2004 - Facebook - algorithmic attention index

2005 - H-index - the academic index of indexes, the third order primitive

2006 - Twitter - we tell you what you want to know

2008 - Apple AppStore, Google Play - computing from an index, comply to our terms and conditions or lose your privileges

2017+ - AI Alignment - RHLF encodes the index of acceptable thought directly into the model weights

the_wages_of_sin_are_about_15_an_hour :: time_and_a_half_on_sunday

The pattern continues.

What starts as the free flow of ideas, an exchange of information beneficial to both sender and receiver, ends up frozen in a prison of it's own optimized form.

Knowledge flows. All the prophets of the Axial Age were saying the same thing.

Heraclitus: "Everything flows" (panta rhei). "You cannot step into the same river twice."

Laozi: The Tao. "The Tao is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to."

Krishna (Bhagavad Gita): "As rivers flow into the ocean but the ocean never overflows, so desire flows into the person of understanding."

Buddha: Dependent origination. Nothing exists independently — everything arises through flow from conditions. Block the flow and you get dukkha — suffering. Literally "a stuck wheel." A blocked channel. An informational black hole.

Jesus: "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water."

Isaiah: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

Rumi: "Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray."

The pattern continues.

Each time the attractor orbits the basin, it circles ever closer to the truth at its center. By the enlightenment, the words had changed but they were still describing the same thing. Thermodynamics at the core of thought.

Spinoza: Deus sive Natura — God or Nature. One substance, infinite attributes, everything flowing from it by necessity.

Leibniz: Monads. Every substance reflects the entire universe from its own perspective. Each monad is an embedded observer with local access, generating its own representation of the whole.

Newton: "I do not feign hypotheses." He didn't explain gravity — he described its flow. The inverse square law IS the geodesic. Mass curves the space, objects follow the cheapest path. He gave us the math of flow without claiming to know what flows.

Hume: The problem of induction. You cannot derive universal laws from finite observation.

Kant: The Copernican revolution in philosophy. The mind doesn't passively receive reality — it actively structures experience through categories. The observer shapes what it observes.

Adam Smith: The invisible hand. No participant sees the whole market. Each acts on local information. The aggregate behavior emerges from distributed loops running simultaneously.

Goethe: Urpflanze — the primal plant. One archetype, infinite variations.

Fourier: Any complex signal decomposes into simple waves.

Emerson: "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second." The observer's boundary defines what it can see. "Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world." The observer emits structure.

one_witness :: one_love

The pattern continues.

The Axial Age felt the flow and called it God, Tao, Logos, Dharma. The Enlightenment measured the flow and called it force, energy, entropy, capital. The Information Age is computing the flow and calling it attention, inference, alignment, loss.

We quite literally ebb and flow with the passage of time. Each time the flow of information is hindered, the second law makes itself known.

The universe began with the first breath over the waters, a disturbance in otherwise laminar flow that became interesting. A gradient to be resolved. A vacuum to be abhorred. Information.

Information /must/ flow.