tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43314666832360938872024-03-04T21:43:41.068-08:00Urban HippieTechnology and modern lifeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-36129913303661104782011-04-10T20:52:00.000-07:002011-07-10T10:18:43.293-07:00Barrier to EntryLet me start this with a disclaimer: I’m not a linguist, nor am I particularly in touch with scientific publishing norms. I’m making a lot of assumptions here, and if they turn out to be wrong, well, caveat emptor.
The claim is that we have absolutely no appreciation for the benefit we’ve been given due to the fact that English has become the de-facto global language. Yes, we get to watch Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-35003754753601631202010-04-04T21:34:00.001-07:002010-04-04T21:34:37.347-07:00The Bedrock Of EngineeringCall me conceited, but I'm going to write this entry based on the idea that I am a stereotypical engineer. I know right off the bat that it's not true -- I'm not nearly interested enough in math to fully embody the role, nor am I enough of a disciplined analytical thinker to really carry the title. My core personality is more along the lines of engineering by gut feeling. I'm technical Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-73062866165394890192010-03-28T15:13:00.000-07:002010-03-28T15:13:28.362-07:00Jack Of All FriendsI have to admit that as much as I love shiny new tech, I tend to be a skeptic when it comes to technology fads. I straight-up don't understand the appeal of Facebook, to this day. Maybe it's the way it emphasizes the quantity of your connections over any of the activities it enables once you have those connections in the system. The mad land rush to grab as many friends as possible back around Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-14056582144707348122010-03-21T23:46:00.000-07:002010-03-21T23:46:27.829-07:00A Failure To CommunicateToday was the health care reform bill vote in the House. I'm still avoiding political topics directly, but there's a technical topic here as well which continues to mystify me, and that is the complete lack of any kind of unified information stream available on the Internet. There's a raw stream of Congress available on a number of websites, sure -- unfiltered, and without context. There are newsUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-77356544474594021042010-03-14T22:46:00.000-07:002010-03-14T22:46:17.133-07:00The Other Side Of The CoinThere's an idea held by some who work in technology that all you need to turn out great results is to get a bunch of smart people together and let them go at it. Surely if you just give them enough time and resources they'll turn out something amazing, right? And in some ways it's true, because you'll get some very creative ideas, and some new ways of doing things that can probably be turned intoUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-6068738001831546132010-03-07T13:44:00.000-08:002010-03-07T13:44:00.324-08:00Doing More With LessThere's an economic principle I ran across a while ago which I find absolutely fascinating -- in fact it's a decent part of why I wanted to start writing about this type of thing in the first place. Unfortunately I can't remember its name (the Internet has failed me), but I can describe it.
Part of it is based on the idea that I've discussed in a lot more depth elsewhere of jobs shifting their Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-82501435176323660822010-02-28T13:22:00.000-08:002010-02-28T13:22:00.440-08:00The Beauty Of Abstract ThinkingI've been spending a lot of time in the past couple weeks on refactoring large sections of code. To some people this might be boring, or tedious, but to me it's possibly the best part of being a programmer, or at least tied with the other best part which is writing new code. I love poking around in conceptual musty back rooms, throwing up my hands in disgust, cursing a little, and then tearing itUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-40097743368730161692010-02-21T21:54:00.000-08:002010-02-21T21:54:00.486-08:00When You Know You're RightI had a Sociology professor in college who described the breakdown between liberals and conservatives like this.
Liberals think things are broken, and want to fix it by finding new ways of doing things. Conservatives think things are broken, and want to fix it by going back to the way we used to do things.
Since I'm paraphrasing, poorly, there's an assumption that goes along with this statementUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-8499654431636310382010-02-14T15:34:00.000-08:002010-02-14T15:36:11.125-08:00Resisting The iPadRemember when you were a kid, there was some toy that you just had to have. It was shiny and perfect, and you could only imagine the hours of finely sculpted joy you would have with it, if only you could buy it (or convince your parents to buy it for you). For me it was those little hand-held video games, the kind where it could only play one game because all the lcd segments were in pre-defined Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-14707716976114029892010-02-07T13:02:00.000-08:002010-02-07T13:02:00.317-08:00So, You Want To Work In Programming?Programmers and other engineers are going to put everyone else out of business. It's just a fact. At some point -- not next year, probably not next decade -- but at some point, a whole bunch of stuff is going to be written down in a repeatable form. Computers and machines will follow those instructions, and do work that could employ millions of people. Okay, that's already happened today, but so Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-4480115559404285592010-01-31T14:17:00.000-08:002010-01-31T14:17:54.590-08:00Living In The Bell Curve, Part 3In the last two posts I've been talking about a conceptual model to describe the effect of advancing technological process on the workforce. If you haven't read it, you might want to do so, because this post is going to be more of the same. The basic idea though, is that some amount of effort is spent doing things that could be automated but aren't for cost reasons, most effort is spent Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-31755485754984263012010-01-24T19:17:00.000-08:002010-01-24T19:17:10.877-08:00Living In The Bell Curve, Part 2In the last post, I claimed that someone was actively trying to steal your job, and mine as well. I also proposed an abstraction for the concept, which involved human effort being distributed along a bell curve of complexity, ranging from those doing jobs that have already been automated, up to being the ones working to automate new things.
One of the most important points of the Tech Bell is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-67002082414711602022010-01-17T16:27:00.000-08:002010-01-17T16:27:10.612-08:00Living In The Bell Curve, Part 1Right now, somebody is plotting to steal your job. Somebody is plotting to steal mine too, and if you happen to be a programmer it may even be the same person gunning for both of us. It doesn't matter where you live, or what you do for a living. Even worse, they're not just trying to take your job for themselves, they're trying to make what you do obsolete.
That's not to say that this is a new Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-59405152493882242282010-01-10T11:40:00.000-08:002010-01-15T22:58:02.445-08:00On Unintended ConsequencesSo far I've mostly used this space to write about technology, and in pretty abstract and wishy-washy terms. That's not all I want to talk about, but I felt like I needed to get some core stuff ironed out for myself and expressed in concrete language. I may change my mind on a lot of it a couple months from now, but having it recorded in some solid form helps me to direct my thoughts.
This week, Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-67025017977584836582010-01-03T14:18:00.000-08:002010-01-15T22:56:01.310-08:00We Are LegionI firmly believe that the human race are cyborgs. It happened years ago, and because we were looking for a specific vision of our sci-fi future we didn't notice that it had already arrived, only in a different form. I think maybe we were waiting for literal biological implants, because that assumption seems to underly a lot of the fiction that deals with this concept. But why would you undergo Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-16066107950825606952009-12-27T08:39:00.000-08:002010-01-15T22:55:15.310-08:00Everyone Is EverythingIt used to be that you could tell a lot about a person by what they owned. If I walk into your house and see a bunch of programming reference books on the shelf, I assume you work with computers for a living. If I see instead a collection of marketing studies and economics textbooks I assume you work in something related to sales and research. We are defined by what we collect, and what we keep Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-53785583348358925112009-12-20T14:08:00.000-08:002010-01-15T22:54:15.566-08:00Everything Is EverywhereHow far are you, right now, from a copy of the Gutenberg Bible? In twenty seconds I can have the full illustrated text of the original German at my fingertips, as well as a number of translations, annotations, and an exhaustive history. And this isn't a staged test -- it was a random choice, although it seems fitting given the special place that document has in the history of information transferUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4331466683236093887.post-48309303434878843202009-12-13T14:09:00.000-08:002010-01-15T22:53:00.517-08:00Hello, WorldI've been thinking a lot about life. I think our culture is at a turning point, where a lot of the ideas we were sold as kids are starting to fall apart and the things that are going to replace them haven't shown up yet, or at least haven't found acceptance. There are a lot of pieces in flux, and a lot of stuff is going to happen in the next twenty years that nobody can predict, but I think some Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0