It was really instructive for me, to watch the process unfold: 1. People started proclaiming that they had UFO and anti-grav technology. 2. The scientific community said, "No, you don't." 3. People started posting videos of their "lifters." 4. People were scratching their heads. Many people said, "These must be photoshopped." 5. After a time, scientific community started researching what these things are. 6. Scientific community responds with, "OK, we've looked at this, and: It's ionic breeze."
I saw this as an interesting interaction between the public (eager to have anti-grav tech, or something from UFOs, or whatever,) and the scientific community (eager to fight against the forces of ignorance and superstition.)
Lessons I took from it are: * The scientific community gets it right, eventually, and provides what it knows after some study. (It's trustworthy.) * Sometimes the public has something interesting, even if the scientific community initially says "no." (It's sometimes worth paying attention to the public, but not at face value if the public is on some crazy interpretation.)
If we covered the entire surface of the USA with trees, it'd hide away just 10% of all the CO2 we put into the atmosphere......for ONE year. How are we going to cover the entire surface of the USA with trees ten times over, -- per year?
Tree decomposition times: 15 years for fine roots, 100 years for bark, 120 years for branches, 500 years for 2' diameter trunks. Forest fires can cause it all to go up immediately. (source)
So trees aren't a viable answer. They can only be PART of a solution -- and likely a small part as well.
...as code piled on code creates "a universe no one fully understands."
Are we talking about a program,......or the legal system?
I swear -- I read this, and I can't help but think about the legal matrix we live in.
"In some ways we've lost agency.
For sure!
When programs pass into code and code passes into algorithms and then algorithms start to create new algorithms, it gets farther and farther from human agency. Software is released into a code universe which no one can fully understand."
That's exactly what I think about our legal system. Who understands how the city works? It's a byzantine maze of interests, legislators, boards, bureaus,... I think I could easily spend 8 years trying to understand How Seattle Works, and by the time I was done, it'd already have moved.
The author dubs these man-made monsters "franken-algos," since "After a time in the wild, we no longer know what they are: they have the potential to become erratic."
Can I just call them "cities?"
Self-learning algorithms are already part of the "new all-machine phase" of Wall Street trading, leading to what science historian George Dyson believes are rules "where nobody knows what the rules are: the algorithms create their own rules -- you let them evolve the same way nature evolves organisms."
Self-learning algorithms......= people?
Where does it end? There's already a robotic sharpshooter policing the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, and "swarms of coordinated, weaponized drones" already being developed by three different countries.
I don't see how that's all that different from, say, having the US military. What's the US military up to right now? I wouldn't be surprised if we're involved in some war or another war right now, and it just doesn't hit the headline news.
The article suggests re-thinking our legal system to assign blame for any badly malfunctioning algorithms, noting that the Association for Computing Machinery recently updated its code of ethics "along the lines of medicine's Hippocratic oath, to instruct computing professionals to do no harm and consider the wider impacts of their work....
Now there's irony. "This horribly confused not-understandable block of code, shall be made accountable to this other confused not-understandable block of code." The ACM will putt to... whatever legal associations exist. I suppose that they'll putt to the Constitution or something. And the Constitution will putt to God, or something.
Solutions exist or can be found for most of the problems described here, but not without incentivizing big tech to place the health of society on a par with their bottom lines.
Good luck with that...
"More serious in the long term is growing conjecture that current programming methods are no longer fit for purpose given the size, complexity and interdependency of the algorithmic systems we increasingly rely on." Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, even says "We will eventually give up writing algorithms altogether... "because the machines will be able to do it far better than we ever could. Software engineering is in that sense perhaps a dying profession."
"We will eventually give up on self-governance, because the government machine is able to do it far better than we ever could."
I don't know if this is good or bad for software engineering.
We are mid-2017, and on January 1st, Schedule 1 employers with >500 employees and w/o providing medical benefits, now have a minimum wage of $15.00/hr, up from $13.00/hr (in the period that the UW study most recently concluded on.) Schedule 2 employers (w/ $13.00/hr. So by looking at the data for the next few years, we should get a clearer picture on the effects, since whatever effects there may have been, if they were systematic and attributable to the minimum wage increase, they should deepen and be more visible.
I started programming when I was about 6 or 7 years old. It was fun then, and it's still fun today. I don't notice an enormous qualitative difference, in terms of interest and challenge and ah-hah moments today, since then. The game has gotten much more complex, but the basic inner experience is in many ways essentially the same.
It feels similar, to me, like playing a complex board game. I actually enjoy the experience. I don't know that manic attention to detail is really helpful. I agree that attention to detail is helpful, provided they are the right details, but I also find that a certain openness and ease is helpful as well.
When I tell people that I think programming is fun, I'm not trying to trick them. I'm also not a particularly disciplined person.
When I was a younger programmer, I thought, "Features are great! Always add a feature, if it could help someone!" I overestimated the value of the feature, and didn't think at all about the costs of the feature. "I mean, how long does it take to implement this? 10 minutes? A couple days? What's that matter, vs. the utility that this would provide?"
What I didn't realize at the time was that every feature basically adds an exponential cost, and has an impact on everything else going on in the codebase. Features introduce new possibilities, and new possibilities create new state combinations, and new state combinations create new bugs and new need-to-test circumstances. New features usually have a user interface impact, several new features have a dramatic user interface impact. New features need to be supported by new or future-self programmers, who have to understand and navigate around the code. If the product is ported, the feature needs to be ported as well. New features also require additional documentation, and if the product is localized the new documentation requires new localizations.
I've heard that "the skilled Go player is reluctant to make a move." I think it's similar for the application developer, and for much the same reason.
It talks as if photographs and content are deleted forever, but it's carefully carved out the language in a way such that they never directly say that: * "The Instagram community has shown us that it can be fun to share things that disappear after a day, so in the main Facebook app we’re also introducing Facebook Stories,..." * "Your friends can view photos or videos your story for 24 hours, and stories won’t appear..." *...We’ve also added Direct, an option that’s designed for sharing individual photos and videos with specific friends for a limited time." * "When you send a photo or video via Direct, your friends will be able to view it once and replay it or write a reply. Once the conversation on the photo or video ends, the content is no longer visible in Direct."
"view... for 24 hours," "...a limited time," "...view it once..," "...no longer visible..."
OK, but nowhere does it ever actually say DELETED.
Given that there is likely going to be sexual and personally sensitive (black-mail?) content here, isn't this a big deal?
"People desperately need a universal solution which is secure, decentralized, fault tolerant, not attached to your phone number, protects your privacy, supports video and audio chats and sending of files, works behind NATs and other firewalls and has the ability to send offline messages."
I don't see the sense in that. There's so much evidence to the contrary.
May as well say people desperately need a universal language. May I interest you in Esperanto?
We want command based (imperative) languages that can be run in a REPL for fun. BASIC basically fits this.
Take Python as a contemporary example. Now look at how many basic features of interactivity are NOT enabled in an easy way in Python by default: LOCATE, INKEY, SOUND, PLAY, SCREEN, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, PGET.
Just these. You can't do ANY of these things in Python with a basic install. "Yes," if you have tkinter in your install, you kind of can. But it's hairy and complex. It's not anywhere near as simple or accessible as BASIC. Pygmy makes some of these things possible, but those are further steps of installation away, and the interactivity feels further away.
Line numbers are incredibly simple (read: understandable) as a flow control model. "Why Johnny Can't Code" outlined the problem with mandatory complex abstract control structures.
I think there are basic fundamental missing pieces in the contemporary programming environment, and that the industry is worse for it.
...that by offering you new titles so early they are going to lose on all the overpriced cold drinks, and snacks they sell you at the theatre.
This is incorrect. Movie theaters make ZERO money on ticket sales for the first few weeks, then a small portion of the ticket sale, and then eventually a good portion. Pretty much ALL ticket money goes to the makers of the movie.
THE REASON why you have those overpriced drinks and such, is because it's the only source of income for the movie theater itself.
I'm 39, I've been programming since I was 6. I relate to this completely.
I observe, as Alan Kay has observed, that the industry is fad-driven and youth-focused. I remember when Node.js was exploding out, and asking myself, "What's the big deal here?" People were getting insanely excited about......call-backs. As if it were this bold new paradigm in programming.
I think what happens is that young people get into programming, discover some idea, and then hype the fuck out of it. Other new programmers hear this idea, their brain explodes, and they start tapping the shoulders of all the other young programmers. Next thing you know, they all want to learn this programming language and it's the best thing in 4ever.
I have a very hard time getting excited about most "new" technologies; I have a very hard time getting excited about most "new" **ideas.** Reason being: I see very little that is new in them, a lot that is very old, and I see terrible implementations behind them most of the time.
I often find myself asking: * "Why not just use TCP sockets, cron, and a couple hundred LOC, rather than importing this entire massive technology stack?" * "I hate to be a jerk, but do you know it should only require about 12 bytes of data to store each entry here?" * "Have you thought about using shared memory here?"
I see far more work going into sorting out and arguing for technology stack X vs. Y, rather than in what the problem actually is, and what would be the simplest and most direct way of solving it. Then our energy is lost in upgrade hell, attack vectors, and work-arounds for simple things that are very basic but didn't happen to be included in the stack.
I have seen more code written in work-arounds and patches and side-solutions and configuration systems, then it would take to simply just write our own solution -- with total control, all versatility required, easier flow, and far fewer places for bugs and attack vectors to arise.
So, I don't care about New Language X, or New Technology Y. I can learn the pieces of it as needed, but I just can't work up the exuberance for it.
It's hard to imagine the Bernie Sanders campaign growing like it did, without people posting on Facebook about him and his ideas. #1 point of exposure for me -- was seeing things my friends posted on FB.
I'd be interested in seeing a paper that estimates the maximum lifetime of a technological civilization, on the basis that : (A) the estimates given are right about the number of stars, how many habitable planets are in the goldilocks zone, etc.,., (B) we are not atypical, and then (C) that we have not encountered signals from any radio emitting civilizations.
We might find that there would be so many technological civilizations, that technological civilizations should only exist for a few dozen years. Or we may find that they are so rare, that it's extremely uncommon that they overlap, and they may well last for several millennium.
I have developed, in 30 years of programming, to a much more radical position. Technical debt and mounting complexity are major problems, and I want to see a splinter movement within programming that defies the contemporary orthodoxy on how to solve these problems.
Object Oriented Programming is not a solution.
Refactoring is a failure as a solution. INSTEAD: We need to say "NO," from the get-go, to unnecessary technologies. Yes, refactoring is needed, but we've been talking about refactoring for decades now, and we still have so many problems. We need to say "NO" to new technologies, wholesale; To be much more skeptical and dubious of technologies. Don't import a whole system, when you're only really using only 1% of the technology in it. I see so many technologies in use in workplaces, where only 1% of the functionality is needed. (I'm looking at you, Celery.) These massive systems have security flaws, bugs, and inflexibilities, that require custom patching and regular necessary upgrading and updating. They are built on top of other massive systems that have security flaws, bugs, and also require patching and updating. Yet because of "We don't want to implement something that someone else has already implemented better, and actively maintains for us," I see decisions made to get the huge big massive honking thing that ** isn't actually needed. **
When you have 10,000s of lines of glue code, to glue your systems together, and you're actively maintaining them against one another,... and the alternative was to write a 500 line program that would do EXACTLY what you want, and is easy to modify and understand,...... something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
When you're sending massive REST calls in series, with HTTP headers and payloads and everythings,......when a single maintained TCP stream would do just fine, sending 4-byte packets back and forth,...... something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
I said above that Object Oriented programming is not the solution. I maintain that. I think we need to seriously re-evaluate what the heck we're doing. I propose that we look at the notations we are using in writing programs. Forth has a radically different notation. APL has a radically different notation. There is great expressive power in these systems. They are compact and powerful. I have come to see that smallness is a great virtue -- not baroqueness.
A great **design** can make a dramatically smaller technology footprint. We're so focused on agile methods, that we don't see that a design can have a dramatic minimizing power. It's not about waterfall. Designs can be iterated after all. If the design has a small footprint, modification is quick and easy. The entire program can be rewritten in a reasonable time, if the design is little.
I am not writing this to convince anybody. Rather, I am writing this so that fellow programmers who resonate with what I'm saying are encouraged. These ideas are very much in the minority, and are drowned out by the mainstream orthodoxy of programming. But I believe that serious programmers who have been looking at what is going on can recognize what I'm saying here. I would like to see more expression of challenge to the orthodoxy here.
My Pointers for more information, for the interested: * http://suckless.org/philosophy * deep study of Chuck Moore's ideas on programming * http://www.colorforth.com/1per... * Alan Kay's ideas on programming * the design of the TempleOS, which is extraordinary and powerful while minimal * "Software Survivalism" and "Neo-Retro Computing" (Sam Falvo)
I'm eagerly anticipating affordable electric motorcycles.
I think Brammo and Zeros are rated at ~ 200-500 MPG equivalent?
That's way better mileage than even a fully loaded (everybody standing) bus gets in peak hours.
The problem with the electric motorcycles today is the price tag. The prices have dropped recently (from, say, $19,000 to $14,000, with ~$12,000 for very low end bikes that can't go very far,) but they need to go down further and increase in range.
That'll have to be a pretty sophisticated VR system. It'd have to be one that taps into your nervous system, can make you feel like you're actually exercising your muscles as you walk, and one that has a hell of a force feedback mechanism, so that you not only can't walk through walls, but can actually feel them with your hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Satellite Internet should help with this, surely? Our boy Elon Musk has us covered.
"Lifters." First thought that came to my head!
It was really instructive for me, to watch the process unfold:
1. People started proclaiming that they had UFO and anti-grav technology.
2. The scientific community said, "No, you don't."
3. People started posting videos of their "lifters."
4. People were scratching their heads. Many people said, "These must be photoshopped."
5. After a time, scientific community started researching what these things are.
6. Scientific community responds with, "OK, we've looked at this, and: It's ionic breeze."
I saw this as an interesting interaction between the public (eager to have anti-grav tech, or something from UFOs, or whatever,) and the scientific community (eager to fight against the forces of ignorance and superstition.)
Lessons I took from it are:
* The scientific community gets it right, eventually, and provides what it knows after some study. (It's trustworthy.)
* Sometimes the public has something interesting, even if the scientific community initially says "no." (It's sometimes worth paying attention to the public, but not at face value if the public is on some crazy interpretation.)
If we covered the entire surface of the USA with trees, it'd hide away just 10% of all the CO2 we put into the atmosphere... ...for ONE year. How are we going to cover the entire surface of the USA with trees ten times over, -- per year?
Tree decomposition times: 15 years for fine roots, 100 years for bark, 120 years for branches, 500 years for 2' diameter trunks. Forest fires can cause it all to go up immediately. (source)
So trees aren't a viable answer. They can only be PART of a solution -- and likely a small part as well.
I think he wants to talk about RDF triples again.
Are we talking about a program, ... ...or the legal system?
I swear -- I read this, and I can't help but think about the legal matrix we live in.
For sure!
That's exactly what I think about our legal system. Who understands how the city works? It's a byzantine maze of interests, legislators, boards, bureaus, ... I think I could easily spend 8 years trying to understand How Seattle Works, and by the time I was done, it'd already have moved.
Can I just call them "cities?"
Self-learning algorithms... ...= people?
I don't see how that's all that different from, say, having the US military. What's the US military up to right now? I wouldn't be surprised if we're involved in some war or another war right now, and it just doesn't hit the headline news.
Now there's irony. "This horribly confused not-understandable block of code, shall be made accountable to this other confused not-understandable block of code." The ACM will putt to ... whatever legal associations exist. I suppose that they'll putt to the Constitution or something. And the Constitution will putt to God, or something.
Good luck with that...
"We will eventually give up on self-governance, because the government machine is able to do it far better than we ever could."
I don't know if this is good or bad for software engineering.
My first thought was Lisa Su. She's an engineering nerd turned CEO, and I think she's doing good for AMD.
The New York Times, "How a Rising Minimum Wage Affects Jobs in Seattle": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Washington Post, "Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working just fine": https://www.washingtonpost.com...
EPI.org, "The “high road” Seattle labor market and the effects of the minimum wage increase": http://www.epi.org/publication...
Seattle Minimum Wage Policy: http://murray.seattle.gov/mini...
We are mid-2017, and on January 1st, Schedule 1 employers with >500 employees and w/o providing medical benefits, now have a minimum wage of $15.00/hr, up from $13.00/hr (in the period that the UW study most recently concluded on.) Schedule 2 employers (w/ $13.00/hr. So by looking at the data for the next few years, we should get a clearer picture on the effects, since whatever effects there may have been, if they were systematic and attributable to the minimum wage increase, they should deepen and be more visible.
Time will tell.
I started programming when I was about 6 or 7 years old. It was fun then, and it's still fun today. I don't notice an enormous qualitative difference, in terms of interest and challenge and ah-hah moments today, since then. The game has gotten much more complex, but the basic inner experience is in many ways essentially the same.
It feels similar, to me, like playing a complex board game. I actually enjoy the experience. I don't know that manic attention to detail is really helpful. I agree that attention to detail is helpful, provided they are the right details, but I also find that a certain openness and ease is helpful as well.
When I tell people that I think programming is fun, I'm not trying to trick them. I'm also not a particularly disciplined person.
When I was a younger programmer, I thought, "Features are great! Always add a feature, if it could help someone!" I overestimated the value of the feature, and didn't think at all about the costs of the feature. "I mean, how long does it take to implement this? 10 minutes? A couple days? What's that matter, vs. the utility that this would provide?"
What I didn't realize at the time was that every feature basically adds an exponential cost, and has an impact on everything else going on in the codebase. Features introduce new possibilities, and new possibilities create new state combinations, and new state combinations create new bugs and new need-to-test circumstances. New features usually have a user interface impact, several new features have a dramatic user interface impact. New features need to be supported by new or future-self programmers, who have to understand and navigate around the code. If the product is ported, the feature needs to be ported as well. New features also require additional documentation, and if the product is localized the new documentation requires new localizations.
I've heard that "the skilled Go player is reluctant to make a move." I think it's similar for the application developer, and for much the same reason.
There's something bothering me about the article and Facebook's announcement --
It talks as if photographs and content are deleted forever, but it's carefully carved out the language in a way such that they never directly say that: ..." ...We’ve also added Direct, an option that’s designed for sharing individual photos and videos with specific friends for a limited time."
* "The Instagram community has shown us that it can be fun to share things that disappear after a day, so in the main Facebook app we’re also introducing Facebook Stories,
* "Your friends can view photos or videos your story for 24 hours, and stories won’t appear..."
*
* "When you send a photo or video via Direct, your friends will be able to view it once and replay it or write a reply. Once the conversation on the photo or video ends, the content is no longer visible in Direct."
"view ... for 24 hours," "...a limited time," "...view it once..," "...no longer visible..."
OK, but nowhere does it ever actually say DELETED.
Given that there is likely going to be sexual and personally sensitive (black-mail?) content here, isn't this a big deal?
"People desperately need a universal solution which is secure, decentralized, fault tolerant, not attached to your phone number, protects your privacy, supports video and audio chats and sending of files, works behind NATs and other firewalls and has the ability to send offline messages."
I don't see the sense in that. There's so much evidence to the contrary.
May as well say people desperately need a universal language. May I interest you in Esperanto?
Well how about this -- Assign users their passwords?
So you create an account, and then it says: "OK, your password is: u82r6bz5pe2kxwqqnrbh"
Forget compiled languages. That's not fun.
We want command based (imperative) languages that can be run in a REPL for fun. BASIC basically fits this.
Take Python as a contemporary example. Now look at how many basic features of interactivity are NOT enabled in an easy way in Python by default: LOCATE, INKEY, SOUND, PLAY, SCREEN, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, PGET.
Just these. You can't do ANY of these things in Python with a basic install. "Yes," if you have tkinter in your install, you kind of can. But it's hairy and complex. It's not anywhere near as simple or accessible as BASIC. Pygmy makes some of these things possible, but those are further steps of installation away, and the interactivity feels further away.
Line numbers are incredibly simple (read: understandable) as a flow control model. "Why Johnny Can't Code" outlined the problem with mandatory complex abstract control structures.
I think there are basic fundamental missing pieces in the contemporary programming environment, and that the industry is worse for it.
...that by offering you new titles so early they are going to lose on all the overpriced cold drinks, and snacks they sell you at the theatre.
This is incorrect. Movie theaters make ZERO money on ticket sales for the first few weeks, then a small portion of the ticket sale, and then eventually a good portion. Pretty much ALL ticket money goes to the makers of the movie.
THE REASON why you have those overpriced drinks and such, is because it's the only source of income for the movie theater itself.
I'm 39, I've been programming since I was 6. I relate to this completely.
I observe, as Alan Kay has observed, that the industry is fad-driven and youth-focused. I remember when Node.js was exploding out, and asking myself, "What's the big deal here?" People were getting insanely excited about... ...call-backs. As if it were this bold new paradigm in programming.
I think what happens is that young people get into programming, discover some idea, and then hype the fuck out of it. Other new programmers hear this idea, their brain explodes, and they start tapping the shoulders of all the other young programmers. Next thing you know, they all want to learn this programming language and it's the best thing in 4ever.
I have a very hard time getting excited about most "new" technologies; I have a very hard time getting excited about most "new" **ideas.** Reason being: I see very little that is new in them, a lot that is very old, and I see terrible implementations behind them most of the time.
I often find myself asking:
* "Why not just use TCP sockets, cron, and a couple hundred LOC, rather than importing this entire massive technology stack?"
* "I hate to be a jerk, but do you know it should only require about 12 bytes of data to store each entry here?"
* "Have you thought about using shared memory here?"
I see far more work going into sorting out and arguing for technology stack X vs. Y, rather than in what the problem actually is, and what would be the simplest and most direct way of solving it. Then our energy is lost in upgrade hell, attack vectors, and work-arounds for simple things that are very basic but didn't happen to be included in the stack.
I have seen more code written in work-arounds and patches and side-solutions and configuration systems, then it would take to simply just write our own solution -- with total control, all versatility required, easier flow, and far fewer places for bugs and attack vectors to arise.
So, I don't care about New Language X, or New Technology Y. I can learn the pieces of it as needed, but I just can't work up the exuberance for it.
It's hard to imagine the Bernie Sanders campaign growing like it did, without people posting on Facebook about him and his ideas.
#1 point of exposure for me -- was seeing things my friends posted on FB.
Vernor Vinge drew up some diagrams of what this would look like, whereabouts 2005: http://vrinimi.org/front9uns.j...
I'd be interested in seeing a paper that estimates the maximum lifetime of a technological civilization, on the basis that : (A) the estimates given are right about the number of stars, how many habitable planets are in the goldilocks zone, etc.,., (B) we are not atypical, and then (C) that we have not encountered signals from any radio emitting civilizations.
We might find that there would be so many technological civilizations, that technological civilizations should only exist for a few dozen years. Or we may find that they are so rare, that it's extremely uncommon that they overlap, and they may well last for several millennium.
I have developed, in 30 years of programming, to a much more radical position. Technical debt and mounting complexity are major problems, and I want to see a splinter movement within programming that defies the contemporary orthodoxy on how to solve these problems.
Object Oriented Programming is not a solution.
Refactoring is a failure as a solution. INSTEAD: We need to say "NO," from the get-go, to unnecessary technologies. Yes, refactoring is needed, but we've been talking about refactoring for decades now, and we still have so many problems. We need to say "NO" to new technologies, wholesale; To be much more skeptical and dubious of technologies. Don't import a whole system, when you're only really using only 1% of the technology in it. I see so many technologies in use in workplaces, where only 1% of the functionality is needed. (I'm looking at you, Celery.) These massive systems have security flaws, bugs, and inflexibilities, that require custom patching and regular necessary upgrading and updating. They are built on top of other massive systems that have security flaws, bugs, and also require patching and updating. Yet because of "We don't want to implement something that someone else has already implemented better, and actively maintains for us," I see decisions made to get the huge big massive honking thing that ** isn't actually needed. **
When you have 10,000s of lines of glue code, to glue your systems together, and you're actively maintaining them against one another, ... and the alternative was to write a 500 line program that would do EXACTLY what you want, and is easy to modify and understand, ... ... something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
When you're sending massive REST calls in series, with HTTP headers and payloads and everythings, ... ...when a single maintained TCP stream would do just fine, sending 4-byte packets back and forth, ... ... something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
I said above that Object Oriented programming is not the solution. I maintain that. I think we need to seriously re-evaluate what the heck we're doing. I propose that we look at the notations we are using in writing programs. Forth has a radically different notation. APL has a radically different notation. There is great expressive power in these systems. They are compact and powerful. I have come to see that smallness is a great virtue -- not baroqueness.
A great **design** can make a dramatically smaller technology footprint. We're so focused on agile methods, that we don't see that a design can have a dramatic minimizing power. It's not about waterfall. Designs can be iterated after all. If the design has a small footprint, modification is quick and easy. The entire program can be rewritten in a reasonable time, if the design is little.
I am not writing this to convince anybody. Rather, I am writing this so that fellow programmers who resonate with what I'm saying are encouraged. These ideas are very much in the minority, and are drowned out by the mainstream orthodoxy of programming. But I believe that serious programmers who have been looking at what is going on can recognize what I'm saying here. I would like to see more expression of challenge to the orthodoxy here.
My Pointers for more information, for the interested:
* http://suckless.org/philosophy
* deep study of Chuck Moore's ideas on programming
* http://www.colorforth.com/1per...
* Alan Kay's ideas on programming
* the design of the TempleOS, which is extraordinary and powerful while minimal
* "Software Survivalism" and "Neo-Retro Computing" (Sam Falvo)
I thought we already knew that. Grid Cells. I first learned about them in a 2007 Scientific American Mind issue.
I think the new thing in the article is this particular way of searching for their signature, or something.
Community living doesn't come naturally to people in contemporary society.
"To get to the point where you can't see pixels, I think some of the speculation is you need about 8K per eye in our current field of view [for the Rift]." -- Palmer Luckey, the founder and creator of the Oculus Rift
Is there a way I can learn about Whimsical? I can't find any references online.
I'm eagerly anticipating affordable electric motorcycles.
I think Brammo and Zeros are rated at ~ 200-500 MPG equivalent?
That's way better mileage than even a fully loaded (everybody standing) bus gets in peak hours.
The problem with the electric motorcycles today is the price tag. The prices have dropped recently (from, say, $19,000 to $14,000, with ~$12,000 for very low end bikes that can't go very far,) but they need to go down further and increase in range.
That'll have to be a pretty sophisticated VR system. It'd have to be one that taps into your nervous system, can make you feel like you're actually exercising your muscles as you walk, and one that has a hell of a force feedback mechanism, so that you not only can't walk through walls, but can actually feel them with your hands.
In case you missed it, check it out at: https://thevoid.com/ .