Tero Miettunen .com

Here’s the part 1 which contains the introduction.

In addition, Belize was now reviewed extensively enough to find a ’small big thing’, 1mbps/512k (best) ADSL costs $500 USD per month there because the company has a monopoly position. Satellite broadband connections/modems are too bad for anything but web browsing IMO.

That first header I made for this site looked amazingly bad. Now I finally decided to go for a safer, more professional route when designing the header and the result looks good, at least in my opinion. If you’ve visited the site before, you might need to press Ctrl + R (refresh) to see the new header.

Perhaps I’ll try turning on comments soon. I’m just afraid of comment spam.

I’ll soon write a post about Brain Reboot. That’s something to look forward to if you don’t know the concept.

I’m at the moment so busy with work that I can barely get myself to write one post a month but I’ll try to write more from now on.

Finding a Paradise country part 2 got postponed a bit because of that but I promise to make it this month. ^^

The following world’s concept would be possible only for way different and more intelligent beings and it is intented to be on a planet other than earth where they are in control.
However that doesn’t mean that you version 2.0 can’t someday be in such a world. (For example as a robot with human mind uploaded or as a genetically super human who is programmable (preferably self-programmable).)
This also assumes that there’s a wireless communication technique between all such beings in the world.

Legislature:

• The world would have one language/communication code and everyone would be bound by the same laws.
• All current laws would be thought to all new born. No lawyers needed.
• Whenever a law changes, it is uploaded to everyone’s brain.
• Laws would be changed if necessary in a matter of seconds, not months/years.
• True democracy could apply as everyone could quickly vote. Each voter could either be equal or have a voting power variable, based on its wisdom, intelligence etc.
• There would be no need for non-digital law documents (assuming robots) and all agreements would be binding. Because of moral, ethics and built-in laws.
• There would be no criminals because of great sense of oneness with each other and the world as a whole. Thus no court.

Misc:

• Everything that doesn’t matter to them, such as looks, street image and ego would not exist in their mind.
• There only needs to be an inner ID code accessible by all and a small outer mark to make everyone look unique. Having them this way would improve their defense against aliens.

While this is all fiction at this point, who knows if such a world already exists or will. It is also one of my currently planned future specific goals to try to help in creating such a world after smarter beings.

I hope you found this interesting. There’s much more to come about this subject.

I’ve decided early this year that I’m going to move to another country from Finland as soon as possible. Not that I’m really in a hurry, or that I hate this country so much, but this simply is not even close to the best country possible overall.

I’m going to present to you a list of countries which I’ve researched and figured out everything that’s important to me.

I spent an average of three hours researching each country (if you don’t count the following four countries), mostly on the internet. Panama, Costa Rica, Finland and U.S were researched much more though, and some I just stopped researching after encountering an unbearable fact.

Some of my main requirements are: Low taxes, I need to be able become a citizen of that country and I need to be able to speak the language some day.

In part two, you are going to see the excel data sheet which contains my country ratings. There’s overall points, cost of living comparison, points for how low the significant taxes are, language points (for people who speak english well), environment points, safety points etc.
I need to clean up the excel file before it can be released to the public.

Overall, Panama is at the top of my list while Costa Rica comes in second. The U.S is according to my research the second best country for rich people who like to become richer, and the third for others.

I’m probably going to Panama in 2007, so I’ll truely see what the country is like.

You can find the part 2 here.

Do note that game development, while I still enjoy it very much, is no longer my main interest. But because I’ve been and still am among other things a game developer until I have enough money for a bigger business, I thought to write about it for those who are interested.

Ever since I was like 6 - 8 I’ve been playing all kinds of games. Someday as a teen I decided to make a game design document just for fun. Then I got excited about it and went ahead and tried to contact via e-mail some big name game development companies if they’d like to have the design document which of course was responded to with “No”. That didn’t stop me as I just liked to design games whether they got implemented or not. Later on I started designing a simpler game than a MMORPG, yet it was very ambitious for someone who didn’t know how to program. That game was Battles of Norghan. I don’t remember if I had the intention to make it happen when I started designing it but at some point I started trying to get a team for it although I didn’t expect to find one and I thought I’d develop the game myself if I have to. Failing to find active programmers but succeeding to find a few volunteers (of which all but Scott Buckles became too inactive), I started self-educating myself programming and I chose C++ as my first programming language which I haven’t regretted. I made a few small games and other applications myself before I started programming Battles of Norghan. Soon it was confirmed that the game is going to be of commercial quality and so instead of using volunteers, I started hiring freelancers to do tasks which I’m not a master of, like art and sounds and I started focusing on the business side more. One of the mistakes I made early on the development is that I decided to roll my own game engine instead of using an existing, well tested and more robust one. While it didn’t take me way too long and turned out to be a good learning experience, the fact that it is a simple DirectX 9.0c wrapper one is now deeply rooted to Battles of Norghan and to change it to use a cross-platform and lower DirectX version game engine will require much work.

Later on with several years of extremely active programming experience, I became confident that I could greatly improve what is by many successful independent game developers considered to be the best publicly available 2D Windows game engine out there. The main problems of the original game engine are however that it isn’t cross-platform (for example Mac sales often amount to 50% of independent downloadable games’ direct sales) and it is much more difficult to use than SDL or almost pure DirectX wrappers which makes developing with it harder and take more time. The best side of it is that programs developed with it work in virtually every machine, even “ancient” ones. I was going to license it to other game developers so I could make it practically perfect instead of just doing whatever Mitorah Games will need in a timely manner. To read more about the greatly improved cross-platform version of that engine, the Mitorah Games Engine, go to http://www.mitorahgames.com/Mitorah-Games-Engine.html.

My purpose in life:

General purpose:

• Help to discover the meaning of life or become a smart enough being to define the meaning of life.
• After you’ve discovered it, live accordingly and let others know about it.

Current specific purpose:

• Help the best you can in the creation of smarter than human beings and making the lives of those beings as significant and great as possible.
• Make as much money as possible to help you in your journey and use it the best way you can.
• Become a smarter than human being.
• Live to best serve your purpose.
• If you fail, the least you can do is raise a son and pass this journey to him.

Your purpose in life:

Here’s a few of the other best things one could do with their lives for the universe (in my opinion):

• A significant politician who works for the best of the world as a whole. I am yet to see one.
• A donator who focuses in acquiring money and putting it to good use.
• Become someone like Steve Pavlina, a person who helps us grow mentally by writing, giving speaches etc. He’s the person who inspired me to create this blog, but I don’t and neither should you follow his every advice.
• Scientist who works either in the field of saving the world (from global warming etc.) or on a radical, world improving technology such as nanotechnology.

Also keep in mind that other occupations such as a policeman, fireman, farmer, factory worker etc. are much more important than being a typical office worker.
Finally, you may want to listen to Steve Pavlina’s podcast about defining your purpose.

Based on my own programming knowledge and what I’ve read about other related fields, it is possible for us to be able to actually become androids while keeping our knowledge (and nothing else) sometime in the relatively near future, like this century. Smarter than human androids will come first of course.To keep our knowledge, the contents of our brain would have to be examined (this will involve advanced nanotechnology for one), translated to a machine readable form, and then the bits would simply be copied to the memory of the android.

Personally I would never tolerate making smarter than human androids to be the slaves of men. That includes hard programming any of the “three laws”. In place of the three laws there should just be emotions and moral, so that androids would not harm another being unless necessary (defending itself, etc.).
The major positive sides of becoming an android are that you’d be able to re-program yourself, choose what emotions affect you and how and when, live longer, You’d be able to make physics calculations etc. up to so quickly that you’d be unbeatable by humans in physical activities, such as sports, do what’s most important and have the most fun while doing it, and live without sleeping, eating, etc. You’d also be able to live in currently inhabitable places, such as Jupiter, which enables Androids to live as their own society in peace with the humans.
The major negative sides are that you’d no longer be a natural being, which might have some unknown effects along with initially having to trust in humans’ programming instead of that of evolution and natural beings might be better at finding the meaning of life and living accordingly. Getting energy for your batteries might not always be easy. Certain components of a human are more efficient than their artificial versions, at least now and in the near future. The feeling of touch is extremely complicated to program also, so my guess is that it will take a long time before robots will be able to feel every material differently when touching it.

This would also not be a “would I rather be an android or a human” type of decision, instead you could be both at the same time. Note that only millionaires, governments and organizations would be able to afford such a transition.

I will in the near future, when I have amassed significant amounts of money (which is what I do), help greatly in the development of this field and I hope you will too.

For more information, I recommend visiting a closely related non-profit organization’s website at www.singinst.org.

Do not neglect the importance of good sleep. If you live alone, the optimal way of sleeping is not to have any alarm clocks at all and sleep whenever you are tired. This would probably lead you to a bi-phasic sleeping pattern without caffeine. So you’d sleep two times a day, like the Spanish. Bi-phasic sleeping pattern has been scientifically studied to be more suitable for the brains of humans than the most common, monophasic one. Sleeping cycles are very near to exactly 1.5 hours each, which means that the most optimal amounts of actual sleep are 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6 and 7.5 hours. Between each cycle there is a time when you don’t sleep and that is the best time to wake up at. I understand that it is real hard if not impossible to sleep the optimal amounts at optimal times when you don’t live alone but then you just have to try what fits your status the best. Never, ever intentionally try to sleep exactly 1.5 * X hours if you don’t easily fall into sleep quickly because it will just make your body think that there’s some threat which causes you to want to get some sleep so quickly and you’ll have a much harder time getting sleep. Thinking too much about optimal sleep can be worse than not thinking about it at all for those of us who often have a hard time falling asleep.If you wake up while you are on REM sleep (dreaming), you will often not feel groggy but probably some data transfer in your brain was interrupted. It is much worse if you wake up while you are on non-REM sleep (not dreaming) because you will probably wake up feeling groggy and drowsy and that can ruin the start of your day especially without caffeine.

It is also a good idea to become an early riser because people are meant to rise early in the morning and thus our sleeping habits are more natural then. Some other modern benefits of doing so are that there’s often less noise and less heat. I’m talking about 6-7 AM, any sooner than that is often not optimal.

If it takes you longer than 20 minutes to sleep after you’ve gone to bed, avoid caffeine during the last 6 hours of your awaking time because caffeine affects for about 6 hours after consumption.
Sports (except those that put your body on adrenaline, like the gym), food and sex also help with getting sleep faster.

The following applies the best to those of you who work at home, but this is useful to be read by anyone with a job that requires some thought. (Only the motivational things apply to mostly physical jobs here.)I tend to start my working days with an energy drink or a mug of coffee and get some more caffeine 5 hours+ later if necessary. I drink energy drinks because they are more effective than coffee for me and taste better in my opinion. The energy drink itself motivates me to start working because for some reason, it is something I look forward to.
To have a real, good purpose in your file is the best motivation there is to do work that relates to the purpose and with just about only that, I can work 55+ hours a week efficiently without a boss other than myself. I’ll talk about the purpose of individuals in life later.

An essential part of this post is to read a Steve’s article.

The main thing I disagree with the above article is that you’d want to cultivate your enthusiasm by listening to motivational tapes etc. daily because it just makes you think about staying motivated so much that it will reduce your motivation instead.

You should definitely spend you first hours after awaking on work because that is when your brain functions the best and you can get four hours of work done in two hours or less! It is better not to brush your teeth, eat or browse the net etc. on the first hour. After the first hour you should probably go eat your breakfast though but you should eat lightly in the mornings or you’ll get more or less drowsy. No bacon, fries, cheese or something like that is light. Cereals/bread and fruits are an optimal basic breakfast.