v.. To move a tall, flat bottomed object (such as a bookshelf) by swiveling it alternatively on its corners in a "walking" fashion. [After the book by Thor Heyerdahl theorizing the statues of Easter Island were moved in this fashion.] source: LangMaker.com. Aku Aku also has another meaning: a spiritual guide.
There's a little dive pub (turns out actually not a dive anymore) I'd been meaning to go to for years, and finally stopped by a couple of weeks back. I love checking out the old San Francisco spots that persist through the decades and ha...
One of my favorite jobs was a consulting gig I did between when my co-founder and I realized we were running low on cash and were not going to be able to raise the funds we needed to grow our two person startup Meexo (most investors didn't believe people would use smart phones for dating in 2011), and when my co-founder got us acqui-hired by Live Nation (for enough money to pay back our investors' convertible note and pocket a little for ourselves, he's really good). Anyhow, the main reason I liked that gig was the people. They were just a great bunch to hang out with, and their product was visionary and interesting as well. I was only there for ~6 months before I ended up at Live Nation, and soon after they also got acquired by Yahoo.
Their product was an iPhone app that functioned as kind of an expert system personal assistant. It could hook into your calendar, your contacts, use location services to help you get to your next meeting, that kind of thing. The CEO was a highly thought of designer (and not just pixels, but UX chops too) so the product was beautiful and a joy to interact with. The small founding product/engineering team was also bunch of accomplished talented people. Notably several were from the early Netscape days. These people helped make history already, so I was pretty happy to be rubbing elbows with them. Every single one was a particular joy to spend time with in their own way.
One of my first tasks was to help overhaul the bespoke windowing system one of these founding engineers had created. At the time, Apple had an official SDK for creating iPhone apps including a windowing system called UIKit. Rather than learn this new system, he had taken an old windowing system he had previously created on a different operating system in a different language, and ported it to the iPhone's operating system in Objective-C. The problem with this non-standard approach (I think it was called something-Box, let's call it DBox) was that he was the only person who really knew how DBox worked. If they were going to grow and hire more iOS engineers, either they would all have to learn DBox or the app would need to be refactored to use the Apple's standard UIKit system. Switching to the standard system not only would make the new engineers more productive, but comes with all the other benefits of using a broadly used and official approach: easier to hire experts at it, continued improvements by Apple, etc.
So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work figuring out how to convert to UIKit. At this point the app was already quite built out with many screens filed with text, buttons, images, animations ... and all of it was some component of DBox. It took a few days of studying the system but I started to get an idea of how DBox worked. It wasn't easy because compared to UIKit which was built by a team at Apple and battle tested across thousands of apps, DBox was limited, bare bones and a bit more difficult in general.
One day at our morning standup, where the team gathered to update each other about the things we were working on, rather than jump into technical details I said something along these lines:
Back in the early 80s I subscribed to Dragon Magazine, a monthly periodical for Dungeons & Dragons nerds. It was mostly filled with game-specific articles but it also often featured a short fiction story. One in particular that always stuck with me was about a person who entered a massive dark evil forest for reasons unknown.
If you want to read this very short story for yourself first, issue #54 is available on the Internet Archive (here). It's on page 49. Scroll down past this image of the cover to continue with my recollection of the story.
This was a gnarled woods that few dared to enter, and none had came back out. Everywhere and everything in this forest was corrupt and trying to kill the person from animals and poison plants to treacherous passages, but they trudged deeper and deeper until they reached the very heart of the forest. When they reached the very center, exhausted and bruised, they opened a pouch and drew from it a single seed. This person was a druid, a wizard of the natural living world. They planted that seed in this deepest depth of this forlorn forest and began to chant spells of growth and protection causing that seed to grow into a massive and powerful conduit of Good in the center of the Evil wood, and as they continued the Good spread outward relieving the surrounding flora and fauna of their malevolent enchantment until the whole forest was free and wonderful. Yesterday, I concluded, I replaced a DBox button in our main screen with a UIButton.
LOLz. This morning I woke up thinking about that story again, probably because I am once again working for someone from that team and decided to try to see if it was online. I did some searching on DuckDuckGo but nothing was really turning up. There is a comprehensive list of all the short fiction ever published in Dragon Magazine, but none of the titles rang a bell. The indefatigable Internet Archive of course has every issue of Dragon Magazine available for download as PDF (other than the one featuring the lone George R.R. Martin story of course :eyeroll:). I knew the story had to be from the late 70s / early 80s so I started poking around to figure out where that started and decided to download issues 40-99 and search through them. I downloaded a couple through the IA web interface, noted that the URL of the PDF was standardized, so I wrote a quick ruby script:
(40..99).each do |i| puts i `wget https://archive.org/download/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonMagazine0#{i}.pdf` sleep 0.25 # just a good habit end
Then I converted all the PDFs to easily searchable text:
find . -name "*.pdf" -exec pdftotext {} \;
And finally, grepped the .txt files for something I could remember from the story. "Druid" turned out to be too many hits, but "seed" was only 20 or so, and it was quickly obvious that the usage in issue #54 was from a story. It took about 20 minutes from waking up thinking about this story to being able to find it and read it again for the first time in ~40 years. That's a great way to start the day! The story is as powerful as I remembered, although I had forgotten important bits, particularly that it is told from the point of view of the wilderness itself. Also that the druid was a half-elf, which was always my choice of character to play in AD&D since I was a half-Asian half-Caucasian myself.
Besides the hapa-based identification with the hero why has this story stuck with me all these years? The month this issue came out, I turned 14 years old. I was a poor-not-white-enough-trash kid growing up deep in the actual woods of North Carolina. My home life with my retired Marine Corps alcoholic adoptive father was physically and emotionally abusive. I was bullied at school by racists (both white and black). We lived pretty far from other houses, surrounded mostly by a forest owned by the local paper mill and I spent a lot of time alone by myself venturing into the woods with my dogs, playing adventurer. I didn't feel powerful though, and was troubled with my own burdens of anger. I didn't feel I could change things although I desperately wanted to.
At 14 1/2 I started working as a dishwasher, and made enough to buy a Commodore 64. Coding became the new forest to explore. Christmas of 1982 my mother bought me a 300 baud modem and I've been online ever since; it took the rest of the world almost two decades to catch up. Somewhere along the line in this digital online world I started to live, as the short story ends, "for life and not hate, free to have good with my evil and calm with my violence."
When Brussel Sprouts suddenly popped up on every menu in San Francisco many years ago, I was both delighted and curious. Like many others I went from being barely aware of the food to enjoying it on a regular basis.
I'd often remark to people that there had to have been some development in agriculture or supply chain support that caused this, but no one ever agreed with me. Like seriously not a single person ever said "yeah, I wonder what it was". Everyone thought it was just a trend. Those who were more of the foodie type insisted it was some famous chef who had kicked it off. I would say sure maybe that was the spark but there had to be something else. This sort of phenomenon is not like a friction-less meme on the Internet, nor like a fashion trend which comes from an industry with supply chains tuned to support to rapid re-specialization.
Well, finally the answer to this puzzle has arrived (via Marginal Revolution). In the 1960s Big Ag dominated the market with a strain of Brussel Sprouts that had great yields for mechanized production, but were more bitter, causing a drop in popularity for a good generation or two, and then:
A study published in 1999 by scientists from the seed and chemical company Novartis managed to pinpoint the specific compounds that gave Brussel sprouts their undesired bitterness: two glucosinolates called sinigrin and progoitrin.
This helped to prompt a number of seed companies to sift through gene banks to look for old varieties of vegetables that happened to have low levels of the bitter chemicals, according to NPR. These less bitter varieties were then cross-pollinated with modern high-yielding ones, aiming to get the best of both worlds: a better-tasting product that could be cultivated on an industrial scale. After years of patience, they eventually produced a crop that was both tasty and economically viable.
And just like that, the former glory of Brussels sprouts was restored, shifting this vegetable from a culinary pariah to a prized side dish.
Click through on the photo below for a Brussel Sprouts Salad recipe I got from a friend:
A friend who was looking for a new job texted me "how does one become a demonstrably better engineer?"
Given what I knew of their context, I assumed they were looking for something actionable that would ratchet them up a notch in interviews (perceived more senior). The question stumped me. I just didn't have a good answer. Given the longstanding situation where companies interview in a manner optimized for the software engineering challenges of last century, there are only two ways I really know of that typically manner: be recruited directly by ex-colleagues who know your skills well, or excel at those wrongly optimized tech interview shenanigans. Sometimes the timing is off for the former to work.The problem with the latter is that the longer you spend actually doing typical 21st century engineering work, the less you remember how to pass those useless puzzles that rarely come up in real work (and when they do, are more quickly and reliably solved by doing a litle research rather than trying to implement something from 30 minutes at a white board).
It stumped me so much, I didn't reply for a few days while I mulled it over. Then I went on vacation for a couple of weeks, feeling guiltier every time I remembered I still didn't have an answer.
Procrastination is like a credit card: it's a lot of fun until you get the bill. - Christopher Parker
I've spent a couple of decades hiring engineers off and on. Most of that time I've conducted the exact same pair programming interview, but that would be a whole other post and not likely to be relative to my friend's interviews. I considered how I would start to believe someone was a senior level engineer in the absence of my usual rubric.
I still don't have a great answer but I do have a couple of thoughts.
1) I believe that the best software engineers are like blacksmiths.
Both blacksmiths and software engineers make their own tools. The tools they use on the job are made of the same stuff they produce, so a master of the craft should be comfortable doing this. Making your own tools demonstrates not only that you understand how to do basic tasks for your job, but you probably also understand which tasks are the most important to the overall goals, and have creative thoughts about how the approach to those tasks could be improved. So one way to demonstrate your skills are to be able to talk about the tools you have made and how they helped you and/or your colleagues reach team goals better.
Maybe you automated a tedious task that used to waste time and/or allow human error to creep in.
Maybe you extracted data on your processes and built a report to show where bottlenecks lie.
Maybe you built a tool to visualize your app logs in a richer way, allowing issues to be found quicker.
Maybe you extracted code to a sharable package so that it could be shared by system components.
Maybe you developed an IDE plugin that improved support for a custom part of your system.
I believe conversation about tools you've built reveal a lot about how an engineer thinks and can highlight the skills with which you feel comfortable. It can also be interesting to discuss the tools you didn't build and why.
2) Have a portfolio
One of the major problems with demonstrating your skill at interviews, is that probably all that great code you've written for past employers is closed source and unavailable to show. One solution to this is to have contributed to open source projects. Not everyone has time to start and maintain their own meaningful Open Source Software project, or even to make significant contributions to one, but just like the professional artists' need to maintain a public portfolio, there is a benefit to having something on Github you can point to and talk about.
I don't plan on ever being a hiring manager again, but if I were I would consider the following as an addition to my usual pair programming exercise: ask the interviewee to be prepared to talk about a few contributions they made to OSS projects. It could be simply finding open Issues in an existing project and submitting a PR for it. Some things that might be interesting to discuss:
Why did they choose the project?
How did they communicate with existing contributors? (if the communication was public on Github, walk me through it)
Why do they think the Issue had not already been resolved?
What approaches did they consider in implementation? Why did they decide on the one that they did?
What tests did they add to ensure their implementation was correct?
How did they handle PR feedback?
There are similar opportunities to have something in the OSS ecosystem without even contributing shipping code:
They could pick a project with a lot of open PRs and in a technology they know well and simply code review them. In fact, given modern prevalence of code reviews, I think this would be a great thing to demonstrate to an interviewer.
They could contribute tests to low code coverage projects. It's an even better story if these tests exposed previously unknown bugs!
They could contribute failing tests that highlight an open Issue.
Obviously the interviewee could cherry pick their best OSS contribution narratives to demonstrate, but as an interviewer I would value recency so even if you have a great story to tell and show from years back, I would still put a little time into having one or two recent examples as well.
Since the early 90s I've been keeping a list of various ideas I've had for software products. It's not an exhaustive list, just the ones that I took seriously for some period of time. There are many others that never made it past the "wouldn't it be cool" concept phase and thus never made the list. Many of these listed below didn't make it much further than a couple of weeks of design and/or proof of concept coding, but some were actually pretty fully realized. Some were collaborations but the bulk were solo efforts. A lot of these read as kind of "so what" now, but at the time I was working on them, they were novel ideas that didn't really exist yet! For instance the genealogy one was a couple of years before Ancestry.com and the like appeared. I recall my beta version of that mapped out the Simpsons family tree since that was one most people knew well at the time.
I would use this list for the common "Prior Invention Disclosure" you provide when taking a new job. I'm starting a new job this morning, and it could well be the job I end up retiring from. I figured I'd retire this list as well, but posting it here for posterity. I might come back later make longer posts for some of these.
VR app for decorating and sharing 360 media
VR team sport game that mimics rules of rugby and can include players not in VR.
VR training app for rugby wisdom
AR app that allows creating puzzle mazes overlaid in the real world that can be navigated by players.
AR app that visualizes a heliocentric stable grid of nodes through Earth’s orbit.
Tool to create & interact with quizzes based on importing a spreadsheet.
Periodic True/False/Confidence quiz and social system.
Warehouse Management Tool for creating/processing picklists, and purchasing/printing shipping labels.
Professional rugby 7s production with specialized pitch allowing multi camera option for viewers.
Rugby club app for tracking game stats in real time
Rugby 7s fan site for tracking players/staff across social media, collecting and visualizing data and tournament info
BideAndSeek tool that takes text input (usually from paste buffer) and uses known patterns to match it to a particular URL.
FamilyBank, an Alexa skill that allows a family to manage child allowance balances in Spending/Savings/Charity accounts.
Tadima/Okaeri mobile app and server system utilizing BT beacons to do tasks when the device nears the beacon.
Mobile phone based dating app with reverse social graph and in-app economy features. (with Romain David)
ExqCor system for audience-collaborative real time script writing and on stage site-reading.
Handheld locative devices and support system.
Group notification system with web and voice drive components.
Online retail management system with general shopping cart and browsing features.
Online invitation management system.
Online retailer aggregation system for gift registries.
Ephemr: way to send ephemeral photos not subject to screenshot capture using biological vision technique.
EyesOn: system for geolocation photos of a stationary object and aggregating into a fly-through visualization experience.
Skedu: easy to use conference schedule creation and sharing tool with mobile app.
iBurn: app for burning man attendees
Real estate locative software for tracking home sales via user defined neighborhoods.
Collaborative system for creating, distributing and reviewing instructional audio content.
Genealogical collaborative online software.
Personal contact organizational system for “social hubs” (with Joi Ito).
Collaboration studies interdisciplinary mapping system (in conjunction with The Institute for the Future).
Travel planning site that aggregates travel fares and lodging rates from a given destination.
Adult social network with Flash-based interactive creative facilities.
Sailors social network with educational, trip planning and historical reference facilities.
Video blogging tools with special integration with programming interpreters.
System for displaying synchronized videos on mobile devices for multidimensional storytelling or informational purposes.
iNag reminder system with custom text and voice delivery (in conjunction with Todd Siegel)
Taste Profile Builder multiplayer game (in conjunction with Todd Siegel)
Internet loan system that facilitates offering and managing of loans.
Blank White Server technology that allows user-driven server process customization.
Systems that assist in strategy and real-time game history analysis for online poker players.
3-D anaglyphic (red/cyan) rendering and visualization software.
Peer to peer social darknet that allows encrypted peer to peer communications via a user relative authentication and authorization system.
Captcha software.
Distributed (telecommuting) software engineering, consulting and management processes with a focus on “follow the sun” development.
Virtual world/real world interface via RPC and audio/visual transmission.
Online chess game analysis system.
Photographic virtual tour software assembled from still photos..
Social network and group messaging system mediated via mobile device and the internet.
Flash mob coordination system via web network and mobile devices.
Collaborative educational software that allows creation, sharing and engaging in “pop quizzes” tied into browser and OS activities.
OpenCinema software that facilitates collaborative script writing, storyboarding, casting, shoot production management, marketing and distribution of cinematic works. Animation/graphical design and display software for decorative LED displays.
Electronic Lab Notebook for chemists with fast molecular substructure search capabilities.
Point of Sale retail management system for DOS systems.
I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on.
In no particular order:
Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits.
15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have completely missed. "How old is Alexandra? Well she can never remember what a gerund is, she must be 27-28."
It'll be seen as the inflection point for polyamory going mainstream when the released masses just can't get enough of each other 😂.
2021: long hair on dudes is back in fashion.
The artist live stream phenomenon is too beloved to simply disappear, but outdoor live music venues are going to see a boom. There might even be a combination of the two.
The Singularity Summit is an annual event put on by the Singularity Institute ("bring[ing] rational analysis and rational strategy to the challenges facing humanity as we develop cognitive technologies that will exceed the current upper bounds on human intelligence"). In a nutshell, it can be rationally conceived that in humanity's near future artificial intelligence will be created that is smarter than us, and after that, all bets are off, hence the "singularity". You might say to yourself, just like surely there are some scientists making sure we don't get hit by a giant asteroid or that some bioweapon doesn't decimate the planet, surely there are some scientists or policy thinkers out there who are considering that and preparing for it, just in case, to make sure we don't end up in some Terminator-esque dystopia. These are those scientists and thinkers.
I should note upfront that this sort of serious exercise in long term thinking with a bent toward fantastic extreme technological possibilities attracts a certain kind of sci-fi nut type, and just like the naked people at burning man, they seem disproportionately represented in the image outsiders have of the group. So yeah, there is some of that, at all levels of the community really, but in general there is good rational thought going on.
The following is my brief recap of the event. I didn't actually take notes the first day, so my recollections can be a bit sparse there. Apparently the videos will be online later, I'll update with links then. I tried to spell check this but the system failed to work, so I apologize in advance.
Ray Kurzweil “From Eliza to Watson to Passing the Turing Test”
If the Singularity has a poster child, it is Kurzweil. He wrote the book on it and, I think, founded the Singularity Institute. I've seen him talk several times (I was even on his diet for awhile). His intro was fresh compared to often rehashed slides and points, but honestly I don't remember much of it. The basic message was that things are on track with recent events holding to earlier projections. He still puts 2029 as the target date for the Singularity. The thing I overheard people recounting from his talk most often was the concept that as one advancing paradigm of technology runs out, another seems to take its place. As in when vaccuuum tubes hit a physical laws wall, the transistor was forced to appear, as flat transistors reach the end of their run, we'll have 3D circuits (already 30% of memory chips are 3D (I think, this is from memory, heh)). This is a convenient concept for hand waving purposes, but convenience doesn't mean it's wrong, so ok I buy it.
Stephen Badylak: “Regenerative Medicine: Possibilities and Potential”
This was a remarkable presentation on the recent advancements in regenerative medicine. He demonstrates how new trials on humans have successfully regrown parts of humans that previously medicine had no way of repairing. The technique consists of grafting on an "extracellular matrix" (from a pig) onto wounded human meat. The matrix attracts endogenous stem cells from the patient to the wound site, which starts an amazing repair process. He showed this technique successfully being used on a soldier with massive loss of thigh muscle from a roadside bomb and a man with throat cancer.
Peter Thiel: “Back to the Future”
Thiel is an impressive guy, part of the impressive PayPal Mafia. His talk had lots of little pithy quotes, some of them are at Gubatron.com. Here's one more (paraphrased) the less privacy we have as a society, the more tolerance we need. I'm willing to trade off privacy for social tolerance.
Sonia Arrison: “100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith”
Arrison, recently on TechCrunch TV, is pitching her new book where she muses not so much on how we are going to increase life expectancy in the US from 80 to 150 years, but what the implications are when we do it. It seems to be a light treatment of the subject, but an interesting starting point. And since it's inherently speculative, how deep can it reasonably go? The Thiel Foundation was giving them out for free so I got a copy.
James McLurkin: “The Future of Robotics is Swarms: Why a Thousand Robots are Better Than One”
This was very cool. Autonomous swarm robots, what's not to like? Robots swarming earthquake rubble, oil spills and and other planets ...the usual stuff. His main point seemed to be the research his team has done into how to do command and control of such artificial organisms. The idea is to have some of the bots take a internal scaffolding/skeletal role, others to understand that they are the edge role and workers in between. Also he was pimping his new affordable robot he wants to disseminate all over the world.
Michael Shermer: “Social Singularity: Transitioning from Civilization 1.0 to 2.0”
Shermer is an impressive thinker, an editor of Reason magazine and frequent talking head in debates on theological issues. He gave homage to one of my favorite books, Robin Wright's Nonzero, and basically takes his thesis (as I remember it from lack of notes) from there, which is that civilization will continue it's path toward becoming one big love fest because the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice (paraphrase of Theodore Parker).
If you get time, you might want to watch this 80 minute talk Shermer gave in NY recently on the subject of "The Believing Brain", his recent book.
Jason Silva: “'The Undivided Mind' — Science and Imagination”
Silva thinks that the those of us concerned with the singularity should adopt more sexy, populist modes of communication in order to instigate public awareness and debate on the subject. Either that or he wants us to tune in, turn on and drop acid. Look, I'm all for psychedelic-induced thought experiments as a way to broaden the mind of the individual, and by safe proxy, humanity. Hey it worked for Francis Crick when he came up with the breakthrough idea of perhaps the most important discovery of the 20th century. However the message on the benefits of mind expansion is better delivered by John Perry Barlow than this guy, who comes off as a tripped-out name-dropping trust-fund jet-setting raver-kid. I completely agree with his premise to an extent, but he takes it way too far. Frankly he reminds me of friends of mine, I'm sure I'd enjoy hanging out with him. But I wouldn't want any of these friends being the creative director behind Singularity awareness either. Check this out:
Less of that, please. It's like what David Brin talks about later. If you're trying to get a message through to people who are skeptical, you need to be very careful in how you explain your positions. You need to speak their language, not yours. This sort of message is just going to scare away the people we most need to convince.
This is a problem that goes all the way to the "top" for that matter. The recent documentary-slash-narrative film on the singularity starring Ray Kurzweil's beautiful female virtual avatar Ramona in the narrative role was also not the right way to convince people to take this stuff seriously. It was an interesting thought exercise for those who are already predisposed for this stuff, but it's not the way to recruit rational but unconvinced people. Oh, huh. Maybe that's what I'm not getting. Maybe they don't care about recruiting rational thinkers at this point?
Incidentally it's the same problem with the Occupy Wall Street movement. As long as the people representing the movement are the type most of America consider to be slackers, the movement is constrained.
Stephen Wolfram: “Computation and the Future of Mankind”
I am terribly embarrassed to admit this, but it was right after lunch and I haven't been getting enough sleep lately. I fell asleep through half of this. But the latter portion I was awake for was quite good. I'm looking forward to the video being posted so I can catch up with it. He was going over his New Kind of Science material and his WolframAlpha work. It was interesting but being groggy and not taking notes I'm hard pressed to relate it now. What I grokked for the first time was that his impetus for starting down the path of a New Kind of Science was the thought that if it seems possible that the entire universe can be reduced down to a simple computation then we ought to have a few scientists looking for that computation. Just like we have a few looking for the big asteroids or the origins of the universe. It's not a practical thing in a day to day sense really, but heck someone should be looking for it. He started looking.
Between my sleepiness, his accent, the bizarre material and him losing his notes for a couple of minutes, I got up and went looking for caffeine. It had something to do with sexbots I think. Check it out here (actual URL): http://2045.com/(cool/
Christof Koch: “The Neurobiology and Mathematics of Consciousness”
But made it back in time for a wonderfully nerdy talk on consciousness. Koch and colleagues have worked out an equation that can be used to (possibly, it's still being tested) determine whether or not someone is conscious. It is founded on two observations.
Consciousness is a highly differentiated state
Consciousness is highly integrated
Using this basis, they developed a technique to calculate a value phi, Φ, that quantitatively measures consciousness. You can read all the details at Scientific American or download this pdf.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: “Open Problems in Friendly Artificial Intelligence”
Oh this was soooo awesome. I only grasped probably 1/3 of it, if that much. But I think it was all accessible with a little more time to process it. I'm probably going to rewatch this video several times.
Yudkowsky explains the logical problems with depending on self-modifying artifical intelligence to check itself such that it's modifications never violate previous rules it held. In other words how to keep friendly AI's friendly. There was a lot of logical notation, Godel and Bayes mixed in there. I'm not going to try to recap this because I didn't grok enough of it. But I found a paper that he wrote on friendly AI's.
I'm pretty sure I saw him speak at the Singularity Summit 2007 as well, here's a video from that talk:
Max Tegmark: “The Future of Life: a Cosmic Perspective”
This was a nice way to end the day. The bulk of the talk centers around his argument that we ARE alone in the universe, or we better hope we are. Using what looked like an awesome application called Deep Space Explorer he puts our place in the universe into perspective. Check it out below. It's a long video but in the talk for about 20 seconds he used the app to zoom out from earth to the solar system to the sub galaxy neighborhood to the whole galaxy, etc. All 3D and rotatable. The point is we might as well be a pebble in the ocean.
He then goes on to explain the problem with Drake's Equation which famously computes the probablity of there being non-Earth life in the universe. He believes the issue is with the terms that represent the fraction of planets that can support life, do support life and eventually support intelligent life. Those probablities can be incredibly low. There could be some step in the process in becoming a extra-planetary intelligence that is very difficult to complete. And we better hope that the difficult step is before the stage we have reached (so we have already passed it) rather than after it. Otherwise we still have a big hurdle to clear.
Alexander Wissner-Gross "Planetary Scale Intelligence"
How could a globe-spanning AI come about? Well, who is most incentivized to create it?
Quantitative Finance, which has a goal of modeling human group behavior in the markets in order to efficiently allocation capital.
Quantitative Advertising which is concerned with modelling the human mind to engineer better ways to sell to them.
He believes Quantitative Finance is most advanced and most economically coupled to humans so this is most likley what will drive it.
Right now stock exchanges are being rebuilt around low latency, causing incredible new networks to be built. Finance is driving us to the limits set by special relativity for passing information around the planet.
He believes that the logical physical placement of the distributed AI nodes can be determined by plotting the midpoints between the the worlds stock markets. He even shows the map of this, where most nodes are going to be in the middle of the oceans. Coordination will drive the AI.
The red dots are the stock markets, the blue points the midpoints:
He closes with why he believes Quantitative Finance is a blueprint for management of the singularity, where he lists how existing mechanisms will map to the ones needed for humans to control globe spanning super intellgent AIs.
pre-trade algorithm testing -> source and binary audits
Dark pools -> Vinge's "zones of thought"
"Large trader" rule -> detailed registry of AIs with government, including human org charts
Market circuit breakers -> Centralized ability to cut off AIs from outside world.
Swap data repos (black box recording) -> Centralized AI activity recording
Short term cap gains tax -> Tax or throttle AI bandwidth to outside physical and digital world
I emailed him these two questions, but no answer yet:
The chart at the end nicely shows how existing systems can lead to appropriate AGI mechanisms. Are there any necessary AGI regulatory mechanisms that you don't see coming from existing Quantitative Finance systems?
I don't know much about Quantitive Finance, but as I see it seem to take over more and more of the volume of trading, won't the impetus change, at some point in time perhaps pre-AGI, from modeling human behavior to modeling other Quant Algorithm behaviors?
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne: “A History of Bayes' Theorem”
As a bit of a math history nerd, this was interesting for 15 minutes. But she started to lose me pretty quickly. Off the rails in the end when she was unable to articulate what the Bayes Theorem is. Nice lady, I'm sure, but poor choice of presenter for this summit. I'm sure half the audience understood more about Bayes Theorem than she did. She should have been upfront about not really understanding it, but having researched some interesting anecdotes related to its history and usage. Then the Q&A session would not have been so awfully painful.
David Brin: “So you want to make gods. Now why would that bother anybody?”
In this light humorous presentation, Brin proposes to teach Singularity thinkers how to talk to religious skeptics. Points out that the Great Silence (no ET communication) may be due to "the grouches always win." Or in other words, the science haters stop progress. Rational thought is under attack, we need to "consider Judo." Speak the language, use the bible to draw them toward the light.
I didn't jot down or retain too many of these, although I agree with his central thesis. Here's a couple:
"Naming things" in Genesis is the only part of the bible that talks about what God intended humans to do before they screwed up and were cast out of Eden. It is the only pure moment of the bible that is evidence of what we were for. God wanted us to name things, and what is naming things but science?
The "cut them off at the knees" argument: The story of Jonah shows that God can change his mind. This won't probably win any arguments but it definitiely is a left hook they won't be expecting you to know how to throw.
Cowen was very articulate and exhibited a rational thought process that I find refreshing. Here's my loose notes. He says we are approaching a time where over specialization is making it so regular people can't understand modern science. Because of financial incentives, a lot more human talent is going into ripping each other off rather than advancing humanity as a whole.
We couldn't build today's energy infrastructure from scratch with today's regulations.
He had a depressing slide on "Total Factor Productivity" which shows growth of national revenue based on novel ideas. It has totally leveled off over the past 30-40 years. We grow GDP through lots of tricky ways, but actual growth due to innovation has plateued.
Science is losing it's ability to attract popular opinion. It has ceased to tell a compelling story of the future.
In 2030 the US population demographics will resemble the current population of Florida.
The oil shock of the 70s caused the Stagnation, like the argument that leads to a romantic break up it's not the real reason for the collapse, but it brought all the real problems to bear.
The primary failing of financial innovation is the inability to monitor and gauge risk (as opposed to monetary policy like going off the gold standard).
You can hear him talk about it all in this 18 minute TED talk:
Tyler Cowen & Michael Vassar Debate The Great Stagnation
Vassar comes out looking like a Monty Python sendup of an intellectual. Sort of hilarious in his overdone sombre demeanor and attire, followed by an incomprehensible joke that "falls flat." He seems immediately outclassed. The debate, frankly, was better between Cowen and the audience. The only part I tuned into was when Cowen asks about the possibility of having an AI that can help you date, since that's pretty much what I'm building right now.
John Mauldin: “The Endgame Meets The Millennium Wave — Why the Economic Crisis will be History as We Create the Future”
Cringe! OMG. A creepy infomercial guy has invaded the stage! WTF. Who let this guy in? Oh, he's in some adoption cult. It must have been some inter-cult loan system like Link+ for crackpots. My bullshit active-defense filter sprung up too quick for me to hear any of this talk. Honestly I may even agree with whatever he was selling, but his delivery was just as bad, in a different but even less palatable way, as Jason Silva's. I spent most of the talk watching the two camera operators at far ends of the stage use hand signals to coordinate their efforts.
I found a video of him doing what is likely the same talk. Clicking through it quickly, it seems like his delivery isn't nearly as "snake oil salesman / evangelical preacher" in this one, so maybe I'll make time to get through this one:
Riley Crane: “Rethinking Communication”
How can we use new communication tools to engage people in new ways and further a cause, like the cause of science? He takes his physics research on how large groups of electrons organize and uses it in understanding how human systems organize. He found a lot of regularity in how social media is disseminated through society. I believe he related it to the Poisson average. He showed how people have observed a statistical fingerprint that describes procrastination in a study of how long it took Einstein and Darwin to respond to letters. People have behavior patterns.
To get large groups of people to do thing you are fighting the economics of attention.
Wisdom of crowds is great. But not all problems can be solved by aggreagation. Some problems require coordination or collaboration.
For example, in winning the DARPA Balloon Challenge, they concocted a number of smart virality tricks to assemble a vast network, but there was some sabotouge. Data cleaning helped some, but additional tricks were required (which he didn't have time to go into). The primary lesson from this seemed to be: Incentives drive participation. Don't tell the rabid viral marketers, they don't need any more incentive to annoy us.
He talks about of a third type of tie (Strong Ties/Weak Ties) that is need to be understood: Temporary Ties based on temporary contexts.
Ultimately, shaping behavior is about Attention, Incentives, Communication.
Dileep George and Scott Brown: “From Planes to Brains: Building AI the Wright Way”
This was a tag-team from the folks at Vicarious Systems, a team that grew out of Numenta the company founded by Jef Hawkins and his theories outlined in On Intelligence.
The mammalian brain can do some amazing searches of possibility space in a short span of time. This ultimately indicates the neocortex has a lot of built-in assumptions via evolution. In working on AI, instead of "what are the algorithms" we should ask "what are the assumptions?" We can look at the neo-cortex for hierarchical structure that matches physical world hierarchies. This could indicate efficiency and re-use in data processing. Just as it is not necessary for an airplane to flap its wings to fly, it's not necessary to mimic the brain to be intelligent. So they use non-biologically-inspired logic in their AI system. They were able to (I think) in-line some non-bilogical logic and map it back to a biological circuit. He had some reasoning why they had to start with a vision system for his AI, but I didn't really get it. Something about connection to a Perception-Action system.
Jaan Tallinn: “Balancing the Trichotomy: Individual vs. Society vs. Universe”
Starts the talk with a story about Stanislav Petrov, the guy who literally saved the world in 1983 by not following protocol and launching a soviet nuclear counter-attack to a false alarm.
For a long time, society didn't change much and the recipes for dealing with challenges were firmly embedded in culture. Our environment is changing so fast that society is no longer as equipped to deal with challenges as are individuals. There was something else here about "Future Society" that I missed.
Evolution has played a trick on us that keeps us from doing long term thinking. the trick is the Social Status Reinforcement Cycle, a reward system we are addicted to. It causes us to focus on short term results, have scale insensitivity, and do things that are easy to understand. If we attempt otherwise, we likely are not going to get the social status reward we crave.
His thoughts (and financial freedom due to selling Skype) to pursue solutions to this problem led him to want to help solve problems in the existential domain, as in the existence of our species, which led him to wanting to help determine how to make an AGI "do what we want." To that end he has donated money, involved himself in the research, and use his "street cred" to evangalise the work.
He proposes long term thinkers brand themselves as the CL3 Generation where Level 3 denotes not thinking abou the self, the immediate society, but the future society. One interesting thing is a suggested fund, which he would like to call the Petrov Fund that pays out in hindsight to those who have donated meaningful effort to solving long term problems.
By the way, there is already a Petrov Fund run by a woman in San Francisco. It's a 501(c)3 non-profit that accepts donations on behalf of the real Petrov who was fired from his job and living near poverty level in Russia.
David Ferrucci: “Watson AI Perceptions”
I'm not even going to try to summarize this wave of information on how the built IBM's DeepQA Watson supercomputer beat the pants off of the top human challengers. The key point was that they generated a set of answers with confidence values and a minimum threshold to buzz in. It was awesome. Thick with operational details. Looking forward to re-watching thisone as well.
Here, watch the results of a practice round, note in the last half you can see the answer sets on the monitor:
Dan Cerutti: “Commercializing Watson”
How to determine what to do with Watson now? Start with what Watson can do:
It understands human language. That's a big deal.
It can read near limitless content and never forget it
It returns quantitatively confidence based answers
Given training, it learns
and four orthogonal issues
It takes a long time for the tech to mature, so it's a serious choice to decide where to start
Need to find high value problems
Need to work on problems where solutions are generalizable or scales
Needs to be something that matters.
Suggestions:
Finanance companies want to know what stocks to buy. Dan quipped "I'm not sure I'd sell that technology"
Applications in legal analysis.
Things that made sense to the IBM team were defense applications and education, but they realized it is better for important, critical decisions that are made by human beings, many times per day, quickly, where there is a big gap between what is available and how quickly a human can digest it. They decided to focus on health care.
Hell yeah. Go Big Blue!
Ken Jennings: “The Human Brain in Jeopardy: Computers That 'Think'”
A crowd-pleasing closer where Jennings, the biggest winner in the history of Jeopardy, talks about his experience losing to a computer. Full of jokes about how Watson doesn't have to pee, and how it was like "an away game for humanity."
"This is what it looks like when the machines come for you"
My wrap up
All in all, a very good conference. There were two nude women slides and a cleavage shot during the presentations, no male sexuality exploited, so it scored mediocre on the sexist scale. It did better than mediocre on the no-crackpot scale, with maybe only 1 or 2 violators.
Next year it will be in San Francisco again so I will most likely return.
I do wish they had more structured opportunity to meet other attendees. One nightime activity would be nice. Some sort of official back channel (other than twitter) like tossing up an irc channel or setting up something on a mobile group app. An attendee wiki or forum even.
I don't always agree with Arrington, but I think he's dead-right here:
Product should be a dictatorship. Not consensus driven. There are casualties. Hurt feelings. Angry users. But all of those things are necessary if you’re going to create something unique.
If you really want to innovate, you need to establish an outpost in uncharted territory. Then you can start with the UX/optimization work to polish and refine your vision. Lots of people in this industry today start with a weak wishy-washy vision and depend on constant user/AB testing and/or funnel optimizations to build their product. This might result in a successful business, but it bores me to tears. I'd rather fail big and fast with an outlandish vision than plod along conservatively towards mediocre success.
You know those spontaneous flashbacks to moments of vacations in far away lands? You're busy working on something and then for some reason your mind jumps to a memory of walking down a road in Brazil, or sitting on a roof in Morocco, or a restaurant in Thailand, crossing a street in Vietnam, talking to a street poet in Spain, etc..
I usually have had these at a rate of about a couple a week for most of my adult life. Lately I realize I'm having them a dozen times a day. I think my brain is trying to tell me something.
Apparently scientists call these involuntary memories and were popular in Proust's writings. I've been thinking I should start making a list of them. It seems like something a Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon character would do, collecting clues to their mystery of life. I found someone online who started keeping track of his/her own.
A year and a half ago I posted about My Beating Heart, a heart shaped stuffed pillow with a computer controlled actuator that buzzes in a manner mimicking the gnarly rhythms of the human heart in a state of meditation. At the time I had not bought one, but I ordered one soon after. My uninitiated review was a bit snarky, so I'd like to set the record straight now: My Beating Heart is one of the best products I've ever purchased. It's saved me time and again over the last year, and last night it did it one more time.
Since Tesla was born, my most precious resource is sleep, a restless night is a curse. When you turn on My Beating Heart, it starts thump thumping and shuts off in 20 minutes. I have never once, in many dozens of times using it to get to sleep, made it awake 20 minutes. It's guaranteed peaceful repose. It is slumbering certainty. I think it may be the best sleep aid ever invented.
A month ago it stopped working. I put in a new battery and it still wouldn't work. I seriously panicked a bit, thinking I would have to send it back and beg them to fix it ASAP. It turned out the new battery wasn't so new though. Whew. I would have bought another one if I had to.
Today I was skimming the front page of The Wall Street Journal and I read this blurb:
Gates said there is evidence North Korea has begun work on another long-range missile, but a launch anytime soon remains unclear.
I realized the word 'unclear' strongly brought to mind the word 'nuclear', for obvious reasons. Then I started wondering if that word choice might be a deliberative one. I did a Google News search for the words "North Korea" and "unclear", then compared the results count to many synonyms for unclear that I found on an online thesaurus:
1,610 for north-korea unclear
13 for ambiguous,
80 for dim
26 for elusive
6 for fuzzy
4 for hazy
2 for imprecise
110 for shadowy
531 for uncertain
481 for unsettled
11 for unsure
47 for vague
I also threw in another word that I thought could likely be used instead.
342 for unknown
I don't suppose this answers the question on whether the word choice is deliberative or not (it could be a subconscious choice), but I don't think it is mere coincidence.
I was watching another excellent TED talk video, this one featuring ethno-mathematician Ron Eglash who got a fulbright grant to study why African villages were built in a fractal manner. In his Introduction to Fractals bit at the beginning he demonstrates how a line segment fractal develops:
Maybe I'm weird (ha, "maybe") but I couldn't help but notice the resemblance to the famous "chunky bacon" foxes from Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. Now my mind is full of an infinite fractal fox syncytium shouting "chunky bacon!"
