it got alot of cool stuff posted on it but what is it?

##Today, 1 Million Redditors call themselves Futurists.

This has profound implications on the way society considers the consequences of its actions. Turning everyone on the planet into a futurist is the only way society can be truly self aware, we're getting closer! To help put this into perspective, I've wrote a short piece of science-fiction inspired prose to define how Future-minded thinking describes the way I've come to see the world. Enjoy!

###An Effort in Storytelling

As I make my way through the streets of the Emerald City, a thin fog rolls through the hills. Pillars of concrete and steel pop in and out of the haze as if their bootsequences were being compiled half-way and then terminated again. People everywhere have their eyes transfixed to tiny screens, trying to self-optimize their internal emotional states. Glued to a thousand ideas for fleeting seconds, they expand their intelligence networks and autonomously filter their own consumption channels.

Traveling south I pass by towering monuments of wealth, colonial hives filled the buzz of a hundred thousand different task-minded drones. Beyond that I enter the slums surrounding the district court, the impoverished and disabled skirt along the sidewalk, yearning to have purpose or at least a days meal. Some simply are drawn out, waiting for their supplier to inject some biological malware upon which their user experience models have become dependent.

At last I reach the stretch called the International District, crossing the rode I see city buses, yellow cabs and pink mustached cars all vying their way into the lanes towards the waterfront. Each one, such a massive waste of time, energy and resources. If we're going to have serialized transportaion, we might as well have it be self optimizing, and possibly constructed from less material or using less fuel.

Then, I traverse past the skeletal remains of what was once the location of the world's top internet retailer. Now the global power rules from the north end of the city, where they've established their own massive command center. This former hive is now full of entrepeneurial scavengers, each trying to glean as much carrion from the consumer so that they might be co-opted into either the local tech leviathans or the monsters of the Bay Area.

Parallel to the corporate husks, exists an alternate reality from across the Pacific. A Chinese archway marks passage into the district. Neon lights dot the roadway, lighting up the streets in these early morning hours. The Japanese market hasn't opened yet, but already I can smell a thousand collescent fragrances, both fresh and decaying as I pass by their waste bay. Perhaps one day food waste will have diminished significantly, or in-situ recycling may even obsolete the standard waste process. At the very least, smaller autonomous vehicles could remove waste on demand rather than having it pile up in the underbellies of every soverign city block.

Finally, I arrive at my destination. A building once used to deport immigrants is now used to facilitate culture and the arts. With a magnetic card I enter the building, and find my way into the collaborative hacker-space I call home. As I walk in, a row of animatronic cats wave at me and a disembodied voice welcomes me by name. I walk past rows of robots, arduino libraries, and shop tools.

At last I sit down to my dedicated work terminal, my goal today being to build a better educational simulation of human colonization in the asteroid belt. Since most modern corporations are forceably focused on gutting the purses of consumers, it's up to me and my cohort to scrape off the bottom with marginally survival income and find a way to evangelize mankind's forray into space. I don't mind being a bottom-feeder, I've been through the leviathans' proverbial meat grinder enough times to know that creative forces can't often take route in small containers.

Since our team doesn't have anywhere near the resources to launch missions into space, we do the next best thing, we simulate it and gamify the simulation! Maybe it will take off if we can hijack the social media feed long enough to get people off of their personality quizes and other dopamine faucets.

###Facing the Future as a Community

Redditors, as any good citizens of the internet, thirst for a glimpse at what our true future might be like. Futurism, or Futurology is more than just a topic like most other sub-reddits. Futurology embodies a way of thinking, a way of predicting and measuring phenomenon. This definition is inseparable from the definition of an ideology, and all ideologies at some stage become political. Which is why Futurology is more than just a stage for discussing the how and when, but also it becomes a platform to debate the why. Our favorite response to this is often "why not?"

The futurist narrative doesn't fit into the typical neoliberal left-right dichomty. Like many other sensative subjects in society, Futurological thinking seeks to "transcend" the situation by offering novel, often technological solutions to systemic problems. If there is any spectral dichotomy in Futurology, it falls into a narrative between free-market libertarianism and compassionate social equitibility through redistribution. Both approaches are reactionary schools of thought in the face of the massive media explosion we are currently living through.

Additionally, the spectre of more general purpose intelligent software and robotics stand to disrupt the traditional employment model which has steadily evolved from its origins at the dawn of the industrial era. Looking above to space, an endless bounty of resources sits waiting to be plucked. Once a single water heavy asteroid is captured, returned to orbit, and refined in space, we will have the opportunity to bootstrap society into a much grander theatre of existance.

What's more astounding to consider is the interplay between different branches of technologies. Its hard to forsee what will work best together, but those combinatorial results are going to be what define a next generation paradigm shift. Consider self-driving cars, small autonomous quad-copter drones, along with virtual reality headsets and EEG mind reading machines like emotiv.

An instantaneous global sensory network open to everyone, controlled directly by the brain is just one possibility. The potential state space for reality and the human condition is going to expand drastically. Once the definition of what a human is begins to blur, our ethical compass need to continue to function in a way that is not purely transhumanist, but at its core, compassionate and humanist.

The best way to predict the future is to bring it into action! Get out there, build, make, share! Start challenging the status quo, create robots, architect politics as software, design algorithms as economics, make software that provides deeper interactions between the physical world and the internet!

####Find a way to set yourself free and make the world a better place, then you will truly be a futurist in practice! Thanks for making our digital community what it is today!

Hi, I started working on a draft 2 for the MetaSim API.

One of the big unresolved and potential problems was how could clients efficiently receive simulation updates. In draft 1, the only option was to poll, and hope that the server implemented some for of caching or ETags or If-Modified-Since. That didn't seem like the best solution so I've added the ability to subscribe to changes through WebSockets.

I've updated the API document with a means to receive notifications using WebSockets. This solves a few problems:

1. How can the server detect that the simulation is being viewed so that it can only iterate when the simulation is being viewed? (It's costly if someone were to create a simulation then leave when it is running in the background and chewing up resources indefinitely.)

2. How can the client receive simulation updates (images especially)? Polling is inefficient and is a source of latency.

3. How can engines receive simulation updates from other engines. An engine may want to wait to iterate until all of the engines it depends on for data have iterated. Polling, once again, is too inefficient for this and an even bigger source of latency.

Right now only the Body resource supports notifications, this assumes that bodies (planets, stars, etc.) are not created or destroyed for the lifetime of the simulation. We haven't really come to a decision about the scope of MetaSim simulations in terms of time, so I'm guessing that geologic timescales are ok, but universal timescales are too big for right now.

As always, I'm interested in feedback. The link to the MetaSim 1.0 Draft 2 is https://docs.google.com/document/d/16i6js1x-AFMwsWKfl1aKphYR2p8puRb3ldp8kXH9Z8Q/edit?usp=sharing The Notification resource is new and the Body resource has been updated.