James Ross • Flying Robots
Seattle, WA • E-Mail • LinkedIn • Calendly
We usually treat computation as a tool we apply to reality.
CΩMPUTER starts from the opposite claim: computation is what reality is made of.
Modern computing is built on mid‑20th‑century abstractions. They work, but they flatten and hide the real structure of computation. We’ve been staring at their shadows instead of the thing itself. This book turns you toward the source and develops a precise mathematical picture of the world those abstractions are only hinting at.
CΩMPUTER gives you a way to see the full, multi‑dimensional structure of computation. It introduces mathematics that can explain why restructuring an aging codebase is so difficult, why it’s graphs all the way down, and how to think in rulial space—the landscape of computational possibility. In confronting computation’s “original sin” of mutable state, the book offers a blueprint for turning opaque black‑box systems into transparent glass‑box architectures.
Once you learn to see computation in these terms, older procedural paradigms start to feel flat. The experience is like stepping outside Plato’s cave: the familiar shadows of computation give way to a richer world of structures, laws, and histories that were always there, waiting to be explored.
I build developer tools that eliminate entire categories of complexity.
The most powerful abstractions feel inevitable once you see them. That's what these projects do. They take genuinely complex problems (deployment provenance, schema drift, autonomous planning) and collapse them into primitives so simple they become invisible.
The most elegant solutions don't always involve inventing new tools. They're found in clever new ways of using the tools we already have. My benchmark isn't just the absence of the original problem, it's when things feel obvious, and entire categories of complexity have been eliminated. That's how you unlock a team's potential: make tools and workflows deliberately boring and out of the way.
Fifteen years ago I was on lunch break, sitting outside in Seattle after walking through Pike Place Market...
I'd just seen Romanesco broccoli for the first time. That fractal vegetable where each floret is a miniature copy of the whole.
I realized: nature had been doing recursive graphs for millions of years. We were just late to the party.
That insight led to Recursive Metagraphs a data structure where nodes are graphs, edges are graphs, infinitely recursive. Graphs all the way down. The mathematical properties turn out to be universal: this structure can model computation itself.
Git is a specialized recursive metagraph. So is the internet. So is thought.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
ECHO – The Impossible Game Engine
"Things are only impossible until they're not." — Jean-Luc Picard
Echo is an ambitious, mind-bending, radically different computational model for interactive simulations, built on the Recursive Meta-Graph (RMG). In this model, everything is a graph—nodes, edges, and even rewrite rules are all, recursively, graphs. It’s Graphs. All. The. Way. Down.
Where traditional engines like Unity and Unreal are built on mutable, object-oriented state machines, Echo is fundamentally built different. It replaces mutable objects with a declarative system where the engine rewrites the entire graph using deterministic, typed transformation rules.
The result is a game engine with properties previously considered impossible: perfect confluent determinism.
This powerful, category-theory-backed math eliminates network desyncs forever and makes your world rewindable, forkable, and perfectly mergable. It delivers time-travel debugging, flawless replays, and the capability to build a true multiverse.
Echo is the future of simulation. Buckle up, because things are gonna get weird.
I believe technology should serve humanity, not harm it.
Principles for coexistence between biological, artificial, and hybrid intelligences. Post-anthropocentric ethics for a world where we're not the only minds in the room.
Status: v1.0.0
An ethical software license that forbids harmful uses—military weapons, surveillance, killer robots—while allowing personal, commercial, and ethical AI applications.
No weapons. No killer robots. No evil AI.
Status: v1.0
GitScrolls – The Mythic Developer's Journey
A 16-part epic teaching Git through one developer's tragic force-push. Because the best way to learn version control is through narrative tragedy and redemption.
What happens when you git push --force your ego directly to production?
For Tuxicles, a brilliant but arrogant programmer, the answer is a disaster of epic proportions: 2.3 million broken user sessions, a betrayed community, and a one-way ticket to the Nine Circles of Developer Hell.
Now, he must navigate a hilarious and terrifying underworld where the demons are merge conflicts and the damned are trapped in infinite loops of their own bad habits. Forget everything you know about epic fantasy. To escape, Tuxicles must face the one bug he never thought to fix: himself.
Status: Story Edit in Progress
Building tools that make complexity invisible, one graph at a time.