WHYcast transcript episode 22
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Transcript 22
Nancy: Hi and welcome to the WHYcast episode 22. I’m Nancy. Ad: I’m Ad. Nancy: And we are the hosts of the only podcast about a hacker camp in the universe. This volunteer-run event will take place this year in the Netherlands, approximately 42 kilometers north of Amsterdam from August 8 to 12, 2025.
Ad: So Ad, what are we talking about today? Well, first off, are we changing the script now? Is it now north of Amsterdam?
Nancy: Well, the thing is, we have a listener who has listened to all the podcasts from the first episode, which is amazing. He said, “No, it’s not above Amsterdam. It’s north of Amsterdam, because above Amsterdam is in the air.” I was like, okay, Koen, fair—you tell us this now, after almost 21 weeks of episodes. You have my phone number, you have my email address, you have everything to reach out to me and tell me this.
Nancy: Yes, so now finally at Hacker Hotel he told me. So thanks, Koen, for finally letting us know.
Ad: So yes, I changed the opening script now. Okay. Fair, fair. Yep, yep, yep, yep. But what are we talking about today?
Ad: News. We’ll talk a bit about what we did at Hacker Hotel, but there’s more where to hack—because tomorrow we’ll be together again with the whole group, we have a very cool interview, something viral in there, we have the vacancy of the week, messages from listeners. But first, I think we should look at the news.
Nancy: Yes. So how cool was it at Hacker Hotel? We have the banana—awesome.
Ad: Yes.
Nancy: The banana badge. Pew, pew, pew, pew.
Ad: Yeah. This side looks like a banana. This side looks like electronics. And together, it’s the banana badge.
Nancy: It’s the banana badge. Yeah, it was very cool. It came in the fruit packaging, and you could shoot each other with it.
Unknown: That was awesome.
Nancy: I think there aren’t enough words to describe what went on there. Best thing is go to the website, go to media.ccc.de to see it all around. There you can find…
Ad: Sorry, my German friends.
Ad: I think they will forgive us. I hope they will forgive us, because they did an amazing job. Pretty much all talks are already live.
Nancy: Yeah, except for the TLP Reds, of course, and the things that happen in the OTR room. But there are loads of cool presentations and things going on. I had a blast seeing all the new friends. We had a special WHY room where we had a full wall of—well, like Kanban style—tiny task lists, and stuff got done there.
Nancy: We had addresses checked, we had WHY placed on the numerous event sites that are all over the interwebs. I don’t even recall everything that happened because it went on all day. Also, we will put the leftover tiny tasks in the show notes for now; we will probably transfer them to the wiki as well. That’s not done yet, but that is also a cool tiny task to do during our live organ meet—coming Saturday, which is tomorrow when this comes out.
Ad: Exactly. And even though there were 400 of us at the event, there were still people buying tickets. So we are now at less than 1,400 tickets left.
Nancy: Yes. It’s still steady—growing the amount of people that are coming, which is amazing. We haven’t officially reached out yet to all the hackerspaces around Europe and the world. Also, we still have some ideas to attract more youth and more students by reaching out to universities and other schools that do cybersecurity, privacy things.
Nancy: So we’re still at a steady pace. It’s amazing to see that so many people are anscastic to come to the events.
Ad: And I want to mention that from the day this comes out, there is one week at the current price left.
Nancy: Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, the last day is the 28th of February. After that, the ticket price will go up 20 euros. So if you want to buy your tickets on a lower price than the final price, now’s the time—definitely.
Unknown: Something that is also very, very cool that I really, really enjoy is that, of course, we are on a different terrain than last event MCH 2022. At MCH 2022 we had a supermarket and this was regarded by many of the Athens and Angels and people—“Oh my goodness, it’s so awesome that we have a supermarket on the terrain. It was so convenient, and they had a actually pretty decent assortment of everything.”
Nancy: Well, Netsmurf reached out to them—“Is it possible to relocate your camping supermarket to the WHY 2025 terrain?” And lo and behold, they said yes. We will have a supermarket at WHY 2025, and I’m really happy about that.
Nancy: With that—last weekend I heard from an international guest at Hacker Hotel that he was a bit sad because his credit card wasn’t accepted last time, but they ensured us that this time they will have all cards accepted, or at least the major ones. They have fresh-baked stuff every morning, and it’s awesome. So I’m very happy that they’re going to be able to do that—and they’re back. I think a lot of people will agree with me on that—definitely, definitely, yeah.
Nancy: And also, the first permits are out of the door. We’re still working on it, but we have some work to do with Team:Permits. It’s going the right way because we have numerous different permits that we have to arrange. So I think it’s a good idea to do that, and I think it’s a good idea to do that, and I think it’s a good idea to do that, and I think it’s a good idea to do that, and I think it’s a good idea to do that.
Nancy: So yeah, it looks like we’re on the right track. We just need to fix the little parking thing.
Ad: But that’s all. You already mentioned tomorrow—haha—so tomorrow, where will we hack?
Nancy: Each week we share where you can find white-minded people. Tomorrow we will be at Hack42 in Arnhem for another in-person organization.
Nancy: I mean, we’re gonna see all our friends again—yay—because it’s been a week already, so we need to see them again, right? We still have cookies, we still have buttons—there are five different types of white buttons now—so please make sure that you find me and get some, because—you can. Yeah, what other excuse do you need?
Ad: Other than…
Nancy: Because you can. Yeah. Also, we are rapidly running out of WHY tiaras. It’s a tiara—we want more tiaras, especially the regular ones, which I am holding right now for the YouTube viewers. I have one on my head, but there are cat-themed white tiaras that you can download and print yourself.
Ad: When printing the cat ear tiara, please check if the build plate is properly covered or that the cat ears are one layer up from the build plate, which could ruin your print. Top tip of the day.
Nancy: Cool, because I saw your better half walking around with the cat ear tiara—so yeah, that was print number two, because the first one was right.
Unknown: Therefore yes.
Nancy: So tomorrow, be there or be square, and come and join us at the WHY organ meets live organ meets in Arnhem. It’s very good to see a hackerspace in real life. But if you can’t get enough of that, then two weeks later there is a party at Amersfoort—Bit Layer is opening and having a birthday party on March 8th with a barbecue. There is an entry on their wiki—and the same goes for the Hack42 organ meet: if you’re coming by, we’d love you to register on the wiki so we can make sure there is enough stuff for you and also to keep the fire department happy, because there is a maximum amount.
Unknown: A lot of cool stuff going on the coming couple of weeks. Actually, yes—the Bit Layer barbecue is now full. Is it a Dimí thing? So you can stand outside and wave and drop your birthday presents for Bit Layer. If you signed up on the wiki and you can’t make it, please be a good sport and remove yourself so there’s place for someone else.
Ad: Let’s go to our Viral Nerds now.
Ad: It’s not an illness, it’s a viral video—viral video nerds. Luke had a talk at MCH about non-Euclidean Doom, and that video got spread around a lot. It has the most views of any video on the combined channel, because it’s WHY, it’s MCH, it’s CCC videos all in one channel, and this one just blew up. We wondered why it got so many views—1.4 million as we record—so here with us today is Luke. It would be great if you can give a short introduction on who you are, what you’re doing, and what you did at MCH.
Luke: Great—yeah, so my name is Luke. I run a company where we help airlines reduce the amount of fuel they burn, so very good to be in sustainability. I have primarily an engineering background. One thing I remember seeing a while back was when John Carmack posted that he accidentally used the wrong value of pi in a game from memory, and it didn’t seem to affect things too much. Of course, pi is such a fundamental constant that it should have affected things—and it did in a way that wasn’t visible. I thought, OK, what if we make it worse? That was the start of this.
Ad: This is the video “Non-Euclidean Doom: What happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159… etc.,” because we hadn’t mentioned that yet. We’re talking about Doom, the classic game—1993, if I’m correct. Why did we invite Luke? His video has a whopping 1.4 million views, by far the most viewed video on the channel. There are even more views on media.ccc.de—views, reactions, 1,400 comments. So we were curious: what’s this viral video, what’s this talk, and who is this brilliant guy?
Ad: When it first was uploaded like the other talks, it just got normal views. Then something happened—someone, I don’t know who, posted or reposted the video on Hacker News and other places online. That made the inflection point in the view count. Other people reposted it, and then people who saw it in their feed watched it. That unknown person started it, and from there it went viral.
Nancy: I’m sharing my screen now—application with no Google Chrome. There we go. Not a lot happens, and then on May 14 it just exploded somehow. We’re now nearly 1.5 million views—it’s crazy cool.
Luke: I’ve done other presentations, but this is my most widely viewed. My second best has around a hundred thousand views.
Unknown: Did it bring you something as well?
Luke: A few people connected with me on LinkedIn saying, “Hey, I just saw your video—that’s really cool,” so that was good. Very recently I saw someone took some of the things I did in the video and made pi dynamic—so as you take damage in the game, the value of pi changes dynamically.
Ad: Wow—the game initially plays normally, then as you take damage it becomes more non-Euclidean. Could you quickly describe first who Euclid was and what Euclidean means?
Luke: Sure—Euclid was a Greek mathematician who wrote Elements, describing our fundamental system of Euclidean geometry: straight lines, how you describe a circle, what angles are equal. We take these axioms for granted because we tend to exist in a Euclidean world. One of the things this relies on is pi, which has a known value. When you break pi, you break the axioms of geometry as we understand them. Straight lines no longer act straight, and everything shifts in space—three-dimensional space. That’s it in a nutshell.
Ad: So basically if you have non-Euclidean geometry, a straight line isn’t necessarily straight, and lines that should be equal might not be.
Luke: That’s right.
Ad: So it could be bigger on the inside.
Unknown: That’s right.
Ad: Is the TARDIS non-Euclidean?
Luke: I think that’s more about space travel. But yeah, something like that, at least.
Ad: In your video you experimented with breaking math—geometry. Is it something that has a serious use, or is it basically for fun?
Luke: I think it’s mostly for fun. I don’t know of applications where non-Euclidean gives you an advantage, because you break so many things that reflect our three-dimensional world. But I’ll do some research after this to see if there are other applications beyond fun.
Nancy: We can also ask listeners if they can come up with something—reply in the comments or let us know.
Unknown: I do know there is a game that leans on this—Superliminal—I think it makes use of bending realities a bit.
Ad: Where objects appear bigger or smaller based on the angle, and Code Parade made a non-Euclidean world’s engine where you walk into a tunnel that seems to taper off, but at the end you’re either bigger or smaller, wrong way around.
Nancy: So maybe for our team, with the installations it’s also useful. I mean, we all remember the Asher ideas of the bigger-and-smaller room and things like that.
Luke: Actually, I just remembered one thing where we have a non-Euclidean application—Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Space is not Euclidean—Euclidean space is only an approximation of our reality. The strength of a gravitational field actually changes it. So general relativity, weirdly, is non-Euclidean.
Nancy: Cool. I actually have company stickers of my serious gaming company with a quote of Einstein: “Play is the highest form of research.” I guess by playing around with stuff like this, we can actually learn from it as well.
Ad: What else do you remember from MCH when you did the talk—did you have fun?
Luke: Yes, I’ve been to other camps in the past, but this was probably the most fun and interesting event category-wise. Last time we did “Whiskey Leaks,” which was a whiskey tasting. We started with a few bottles, left, and came back to find way more bottles and a huge crowd drinking. It was funny to plant the seed, leave, and come back.
Nancy: Millie Ways is planning this again, so it will be there this edition as well. Cool. Any nice conversations you had after your talk?
Luke: I liked the musical acts—the Symphony of Fire was very memorable.
Unknown: That was also very memorable.
Ad: Are you joining us next time?
Luke: I’m still looking at how my year is scheduled with work, but I would love to. I know tickets are being sold, so I’ll try.
Nancy: I hope you can make it—that would be awesome to meet in person. One of the things we’re promoting is proposals for the future of the camp—workshops, maybe the future viral video of WHY. If someone is hesitant about proposing a talk, what would you say to them?
Luke: Hesitancy is natural—you’re putting something together to be evaluated, you fear no one will attend. But you have to stop that hesitancy. There isn’t really harm in submitting something and working on it. Practice if you need to. I encourage people on the fence to submit, because it’s worthwhile and there’s an audience. My talk got scheduled at 10 p.m., and I thought, “Who’s going to attend then?” It was a pretty full room.
Unknown: Imposter syndrome.
Nancy: Yes—imposter syndrome affects many of us. You’re not alone. It’s not helpful to let imposters prevail, so try to get rid of it or silence it. Getting on stage to talk about something you’re passionate about is enriching.
Luke: Also nice is that talks at camp tend to be non-commercial. We’re not selling something or marketing—that’s what makes camp talks great. They’re just sharing for the sake of sharing.
Nancy: There’s an audience for everything and everyone. You said MCH wasn’t your first camp—have you been on prior Chaos camps?
Unknown: I’ve been to prior Chaos camps—German, American. They seem to grow every year. I’d love to go to other country camps as well.
Luke: Categorical enjoyment—definitely going in the future.
Nancy: Any other last thoughts?
Unknown: I would encourage people to share, go out there, do something interesting. It doesn’t have to have the biggest impact—it can just be cool to share. And camp isn’t just about talks—there are workshops and other interactive events.
Ad: I’ve been gathering the links—I found the video by NeoZeed on dynamic sign tables for Doom based on damage. I’ll add that in the show notes, along with all the links we touched on. We will also link your viral video in this episode on YouTube.
Nancy: Thank you so much for making time to talk to us. It felt a little like having a celebrity here. We wish you all the best and hope you can visit us in August this year.
Luke: Thank you for having me—I’ll definitely try to make it, and it’ll be great.
Nancy: It’s good that we mentioned the CFP again: Team:Content tells me there are 47 proposals in now, which is not enough—so please send in your CFPs. Go to cfp.WHY2025.org and send your proposal before Towel Day, May 25th. We love deadlines and the swooshy sound they make when they go by, but please be kind to the volunteers who want to make a great program.
Ad: We love deadlines, we love the swooshy sound, but please make sure your CFP is sent before the wooshy sound comes by.
Ad: Let’s park that for now and look at the vacancy of the program. We’re still looking for a Team Lead Parking—preferably a Dutch citizen and Dutch-speaking. We promise you will have the best support from Konmei and Jeroen / NetSmurf—they know a lot and will help you.
Nancy: Thanks. If I didn’t have a team already, I’d do it myself, but I’m not sure I could manage everything at once.
Ad: You’re making a podcast every week—I think you’re wasting enough time on this project already, but it’s fun making the podcast with you.
Nancy: Who also likes making the podcast with us? That brings us to messages from our listeners.
Nancy: Florian, aka SIM, is part of Team:Family Zone because he always brings his kid. At Hacker Hotel, he ran around with chaos post and made taped tape duckies—not duct tape, but lots of tape duckies.
Ad: Robert actually interviewed him, and afterward SIM sent us an email with extra stories from former camps dating back to ’97 at HIP. We will interview him again about those stories—because after the camera’s off, you always think, “I should have said this or that.”
Nancy: SIM, don’t worry—we’ll reach out for more interview time, and we’ll probably see you at Arnhem or another event or online.
Nancy: We also got a personal message from our listeners that it should be “north of Amsterdam,” not “above Amsterdam.” So we fixed it. I’ll go do your Team Waste thing…
Ad: If you have more feedback for us, you know where to find us—you can put it down in the doobly-doos on YouTube. Of course you can press like and subscribe, and turn on the bell icon so you never miss another episode. Nancy is holding up the WHY buttons, which you can get in person if you come to Arnhem.
Ad: If you want to send us an email, you can at whycast@y2024.org. Thank you so much for listening and staying with us for all these episodes, and with that we’ll hope to see you next Friday—WHYday.