a tiger on a boat, fake shortcircuits and an instant message

idiosincratic rant and the idea birth for nim

I live near the Andes, almost over its slopes and bordering the vast patagonian desert. Sometime, two years ago, I was walking down a little river just around my college campus, a beautiful little path maintained by one hermit who diligently removes weeds and paints tree roots to help runners avoid falling and breaking their knees. More than 1 story finds shelf in this place.

A long time ago, even before my birth (I am not that old, 26 atm), there was a serious problem with horseflies, they abunded and from what old foke tell, they were a pain in the ass. If you are not acquainted with this type of bug, they are mosquito's neanderthals, fairly easy to kill in compairison, letargic creatures before they bite. But they are big, kind of nasty and if they manage to bite you it is really painful. Me and my cousins used to play with them, trying to remove their sting without removing their entire head, a true proess and heroic act of our childhood.

Something had to be done with this invasion, I bet that the fantasic lake + mountain views were stolen from enthusiastic hikers by the swarm of this little devils, it has to have been the case. Thats when humans inhabitants decided to delegate the eradication strategy to our little friends the german wasps aided with the help of vulgaris cousins

they basically eradicated the horseflies but disrupted the ecosystem in major ways, aiding the proliferation of normal mosquitos and killing a whole bunch of native insects. The usual trope about huamns shortcircuiting the normal timescale of events, and this implicating drastic and undesired changes. The story that has been told is that scientists took the initiative and brought this exotic species to satisfy the needs of the aforementioned hikers and locals alike, who diligently massacred the horsefly every day of their lives. At least this was the remembrance I had when I spotted one yellow bug in the distance. Apparently, the truth is that they came aboard boats something like a century ago.

So, after devising this yellow spot a couple of meters away, my mental state was pretty near to the embedding of the word shortcircuit and the formalization of the dynamics of the human aided wasp invation. I thought to myself

what would have happened if the invasion was slow
- what would account as slow?
- would I say that this event was disruptive?
- could this event be slow, given by the fact that this motherfuckers fly? I thought of tigers.
what timescale seems to be good enough? I imagined once again the invasion of tigers into this woods.
despite natural discontinous dynamics, my mental image of the dynamic systems involving insects animals, plants and whantot, in the natural setting was slower and acceptable than this event.
is this just washed naturalism wind blowing into my idea space?
I thought of tigers again

Then I stopped and tried to organize myself after chasing falling stars in my mind. Firstly I decided upon the idea that the reason why we call this disruptive it is strictly associated with our built in inutitions surrounding speed of effects. Naive and disinformed idea I suspected, because I lacked examples of natural invasions of exotic species, but nevertheless it proved to be useful. I did go back to tigers, imagining two scenarios

omg scenario: some rich guy brings a couple of baby tigers on a boat, they escape, procreate, proliferate and eat every single moving thing out there. OMG scenario indeed, disruptive, acts of human negligence and ignorance, disobeying the natural order.
the pachamama scenario: some tiger way up north alongside the Andes, starts to move downards, and fights for spreading its realm, or at least, moves it without expanding it southernly. The land it starts incursioning in, is plagued with challenges. Generations are needed to stretch their territory a couple hundred kilometers. They finally arrive at this river, after a slow generationwide process, and sensible pace. Locals see slight changes in their lifetime with regards to this, nobody calls this disruptive, everything is as it was, with subtle differences, spottable only by the eldest and wisest. And tigers are integrated into the representation of humans experiencing this woods, this river, with no hiccups.

What the fuck I said? Despite the non-necessity of an observer to conceptualize this events, this was clearly a case where truth seem to be extremely dependenig on us humans, and the timescale we inhabit. So I thought about the tigers that we, as a technological civilization, were able to invent. Almost instantly, instantaneous messaging apps crossed my mind. I was probably biased by the recent pandemic-effects-on-communication like thoughts.

It is, and it was cliché already to state pseudo truths that im apps had cons, despite the amazing benefits they brought to us. Mostly because it was/is common to state the damage that human-attention-hacking-technologies have. So in order to avoid this pitfall (and remembering when I used to send handwritten letters) I decided to abandon any temptation to """demonize""" this tech and fall into a false dilemma. After all, there is no need to implement just ONE way of communicating with each other. I also determined that the major problem that im technology brought upon on us, was the idea that we could not negotiate the timescale at which some conversations happen. This was exclusively based upon the experience of the informal communication protocol agreed between humans I've experienced. This may vary between """cultures""" (I use triple quotes when I feel cringe about a word I am using).

    
    0                   1                   2                   3
    0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |          Source Port          |       Destination Port        |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                        Sequence Number                        |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                    Acknowledgment Number                      |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |  Data |           |U|A|P|R|S|F|                               |
   | Offset| Reserved  |R|C|S|S|Y|I|            Window             |
   |       |           |G|K|H|T|N|N|                               |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |           Checksum            |         Urgent Pointer        |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                    Options                    |    Padding    |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                             data                              |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

The impression I have from my conversations is that

there is a proclivity to ACK messages some way or the other in a timespan of seconds
reduction in meaningfulness per message seems to be the norm
verbalization of written text abunds
- people recreate a golem out of their expectations of themselves when typing
- struggle for the ability of be read as them speaking out loud
start conversations without any consistent header
ends conversations without any particular tail-meaning-set

This is a generalization that I forced upon myself, to illustrate the point, and convince myself that the only thing that we are being deprived of, is the channel established for long message communication. How nice then, would it be to have a place where we would be able to establish a negotiated rate of communication.

I would like to
- talk to my distant friends on a 3 month basis (mostly the stuff that happens to me can be narrated and written in a live 2 hour conversation, or a 3000 words text give or take)
- send weekly letters to my wife. Even if she lives with me, I want to tell her things, and I would like to build this throughout the week
- send on a daily basis, messages to my friends who will help me develop this idea. Yes Johnny Blaze, I am talking about you.

So what better way to start by naming stuff up, and working from there, nim, not instant messages.

The idea is pretty simple, and is best described via its behavior, nim:

should be possible to negotiate between users the rate of the communication
domain of possible negotiated rates is: (n,tu) where n:int and tu: 'day' | 'month' | 'year'.
the negotiation should be a simple process
- both users should agree to the same number after some instant negotiation technique. Users agree on N days.
- from the moment of agreement, both users can send a message
- from the moment the message gets sent, your ability to send another message is prohibited until N days have passed, or until a new negotiation is made.
- a new negotiation can start once per day
the user should be able to
- send a first message to someone who does not own the app and that user should be able to respond to the message after creation, send via wpp, email, telegram or what have you
- that message should arrive over email, with a code, that grants the unregistered receiver to create an account and respond to the message.
- upon creation of the account users should be able to select very few settings
  - time of day at which they would like to read their nims
  - if their connections are visible to others
    - graph of connections is visible by others purposes mainly. This implies that someone who has you as a contact will be able to see af ully connected graph instead of a node centered one. This would serve only viz properties.