................................................................................. it's 1040a eastern time i am presently a human being, but it's hard to admit it. i feel more like a tiny little bit of a human being, among other little bits, that together make up a human being technically. me, i think i'm the real the human, but i could be in conflict with other little bits that also think or say they are the real human. in reality, we are a human together. even if i think my memories -- ------------------ it's 1041a eastern time. when i was a kid, i wrote software programs a lot. i was the weirdo who had no friends, didn't understand how to say hello, and started programming in 2nd grade. my father was a writer for a technological magazine, and he would get sent products to motive their discussion in the magazine. often he would be using a computer in a study room rather than playing with me, and he was so often doing this that i asked him if he would teach me. i actually asked him if he would teach me to program them. this first computer i used was a "laser" branded apple IIe. i never used the uhhh more popular ancient computers, just this applebasic thing. i had a sheathe of 5.25 inch floppy disks my older brother had written applebasic computer programs on in college, and i had a book of example computer programs i could copy in to the computer and watch run. i don't remember well, but i think the computer games written by my older brother involved a little guy about two pixels high that you could direct to jump across platforms and avoid hazards, although i might be misremembering. sadly most of these programs have not been preserved well. i didn't know about digital forensics at the time. --- 1046a i had fun playing and copying the example programs, but eventually i wanted to make little stick person games like my brother's -- [moving a stick person with the joystick by trial and error, and then introduction to if statements and variables and for loops ... 1047a anyway i quickly got off the stick person games and began engaging these cool if statements and variables and for loops and such when ibm came around i got into quickbasic in msdos. i actually didn't find unix and linux until i was a freshman in high school. in quickbasic i made many fancy spaghetti codes involving lots of goto statements and subroutines. i often explored the idea of text adventure games. i had some pop books on neuroscience and AI and at one time i tried to make a little virtual brain with 10 digital neurons in it. it wasn't a 'neural network' i'd never heard of that, it was my own little thing. what i mostly made were graphics and physics simulations. from his job, my father had gotten a few books from the "waitte group" involving example code for