Welcome, Eli writes here.
See also Imagery and his other projects.

Future

98 posts under this tag.

There's *always* room for a good compsci quote... 2
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6
 Aug
14

...and this is one of the best.

In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a widespread belief that computing science as such has been all but completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a theoretical topic for the scientists to a practical issue for the engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs..

I would therefore like to posit that computing’s central challenge, ”How not to make a mess of it,” has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed.

For us scientists it is very tempting to blame the lack of education of the average engineer, the shortsightedness of the managers, and the malice of the entrepreneurs for this sorry state of affairs, but that won’t do. You see, while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.

To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be talking about.. The moral is that whether computing science is finished will primarily depend on our courage and our imagination.

Edsger W. DijkstraWP, Communications of the ACM, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3
tagged aphorisms, code, computers, future, inspiration, interesting people, interface design, programming, quote collages, quotes, software, wisdom

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Road Map 2
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6
 Jul
29

I’ll be the first to admit I’m lousy keeping my public commitments. The thing is, they really help me clear my head and get some focus, and most of the time, even if I don’t finish on schedule, public shame makes me finish all I originally intended eventually (though usually pretty late). So I’m still a big fan of public commitments but this time I’ll add a novel feature to my schedule: incentives for me to finish on time.

Some background is in order: As I was saying yesterday, there is a big project (the biggest yet!) on the horizon, but before I can tackle it I need to give Imagery the much-promised revamping I’ve been talking about for 49 days now (!). I’ve several things to blame, of course, but by and large it’s the same lack as always: focus.

Anyway, many ideas have come to me in the meanwhile. To begin with, I definitely want Imagery to have a memorable, easy-to-pronounce dotcom name and after much brain-racking my creative-assistant-cum-sis, Chef, came up with domburi.comWHOIS, which I loved and was surprisingly available. DomburiWP (usually spelled donburi) is an extremely popular, delicious, and simple japanese dish that has been my top food for three weeks now (when it toppled Pad ThaiWP). The name’s short, memorable, easy to pronounce, and cool. It’ll be Imagery’s new identity. The next step now is to clone Imagery to Domburi and experiment there so that I don’t disturb Imagery searchers (how oh-so-cool to have a user base!). Imagery was always meant as an alpha application and has far outstretched itself already. A major polish is in order (not a rewrite from scratch, mind you!) and you’ll be able to track it from domburi.com (though the page will of course be unstable).

The other important idea was to create something of a brand house for Imagery Domburi and all the related interface projects that are to come. My first candidate for a name was the Interface Institute, which was dotcom available and seemed like fun (considering it’s a one-man enterprise), but I wanted something more risky, more challenging, and that’s how I ended up with .net—after, of course, that famous quote from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,

I don’t want reality, I want magic.

seen under the light of this other quote—that might as well be the new company’s mission statement—from Steven Johnson’s indispensable Interface Culture,

The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they’re not tied to the old, analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world of course, but they’re also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-world equivalent whatsoever. People who get hooked on computers get hooked for this reason. They don’t become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they’re junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.

I’m tremendously excited about . Once, not long ago, I somewhat secretly decided that I’d someday work at virtual reality, the possibilities of which seem truly mind-boggling (some of you might remember my incoherent ramblings on the subject). To my mind, this seems like a weird early step in that direction—in virtual reality, everything is interface.

But that’s enough intro, here, finally, is my road map:

Start of Project Domburi!—29 July (Chef’s bday!)

Main Goal: Make Domburi IE and Opera compatible.
Punctuality Premium: If I do finish with the above task, I get to buy Getting Real, the book.

End of 1st Week—5 August

Main Goal: Add Yahoo! & Flickr to the list of Domburi engines and do interesting things like split screens and such with them.

End of 2nd Week—12 August

Main Goal: Implement Bento & Disjoint (Cool Domburi surprise features—you’ll see!). Begin writing copy (presentation, FAQ, help, requirements).

End of 3rd Week—19 August

Main Goal: Polishing, beta-testing, polishing. Rinse and repeat. Special attention to things like responsiveness, interaction, smoothness, design, performance, stability. Finish writing copy.

End of 4th Week—23 August

Main Goal: Publicity, more polishing, and more publicity. The hope here is a mention from TechCrunch.

Tentative Finish—29 August

Project Domburi would be successfully finished now if the website had attained 10 thousand visitors per day, for more than 3 days (not necessarily in a row). If the challenge’s met I earn the Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep promoting and polishing the website fulltime.

Punctuality Premium: Read Replay, Machinery of Freedom, Artful Sentences and the week’s Economist—all told, my idea of nirvana.

End of 1st Cushion Week—2 September

The same review of the previous week: Domburi should have had 3 days with a 10-thousand-visitors-traffic by now. If it does, I earn a (big) Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep at it.

Punctuality Premium: Read Peter Watson’s massive Ideas: a history of thought and invention—with 750 pages (and big sheets at that, with the smallest of margins) it promises to be even more absorbing and challenging (and fun!) than The Modern Mind. Implement quick versions of 3 simple projects: a textviewer, a timetool, and an interface to RAE.

End of 2nd Cushion Week and Definitive Finish of Project Domburi—9 September

Domburi really should have had at least five 10,000-visitors days by now, but if it doesn’t I’ll move (shamefully) to the next project…

Start of Project Maki!—10 September

As always, any help keeping me on track (a simple message or comment or email) would be very very very appreciated. Being a human-timer is easy and fast, and yet rewards with lavish praise. ;)

tagged announces, domburi, favorites, future, meaty posts, personal, promises, schemes for selfcontrol, web, webapps, what could be, whimsicist | 2 Comments

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How to make $50,000 per month 2
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6
 Jul
27

This is one of the many things I ended up pasting on my wall last week. Since it’s something of an important breakthrough for me, let me try to explain what I mean with it.

I have always marveled at rich people, particularly at how one could get rich, and it always seemed impossible to the verge of immoral how a single person could earn on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per month. There were very few things I could think of for me to do in an hour that would be worth the hundreds of dollars I would need.

That is completely the wrong way to go about it. There really are few such one-hour isolated things that will get you a couple hundred dollars and most of them involve decades of poorly paid specialization. There is a better, more productive way to think of the problem, and that’s what the equation above serves as a reminder of: If you get one thousand people to give you fifty dollars per month, you’ll make fifty thousand dollars per month.

Yes, I know it’s mind-numbingly stupid, but it’s true. And fifty dollars aren’t really that much money, and a month is quite a big chunk of time, and a thousand people doesn’t seem as much to me now as it used to—that’s about the daily traffic of Imagery a couple of weeks ago (and yes, I know the comparison is worth squat, but it still was a landmark in my life to realize how easily I could interest and benefit and touch thousands of people).

Of course that getting-people-to-give-you-money part is not at all about mind-washing or extortion, it’s about creating more than fifty dollars of wealth in a month for over a thousand people. And doesn’t it seem exciting and achievable put this way? At any rate, it has my mind reeling, because a couple of days ago I finally crystallized an idea of a website that could do just that and much more (codename: maki). And it promises to be a lot of work, and to be the greatest challenge I’ve yet undertaken, and it will take me out to the real world every day, and I’d meet thousands of people, and it’d get me walking, and… well, time’ll tell, won’t it?

tagged capitalism, epiphanies, essays, favorites, future, graphs, ideas, inspiration, meaty posts, money, original content, personal, philosophy, wealth, web

Today's Reading: At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust 2
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6
 Jul
10

The “boy crisis” is becoming something of a news bubble lately, today’s long sunday article on the New York Times is only its latest instance.

”The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys,” Ms. [Sara] Mead [author of a recent educational report] said.

Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum—students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.

What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.

Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college. The disengagement of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures. Japan, over the last decade, has seen the emergence of “hikikomori” — young men withdrawing to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.

At Dickinson [a U.S. College], some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills. Each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.

Tamar Lewin, At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust

Don’t forget to check out the excellent Wikipedia article on Japan’s Hikikomoris—it seems they (or should I say we?) are a pretty introspective crowd.

tagged education, future, gender, japan, media breakdown, memes, quote collages, readings, wikipedia

Media Immersion 2
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6
 Jul
09

Oh! In Tokyo, the New Trend Is ‘Media Immersion Pods’, a New York Times article from a while ago on Tokyo’s media youth, is important, very important. This is me, this is my generation.

And, really, what’s so wrong with getting lost on the Internet; watching soccer or baseball on satellite television; devouring Us Weekly or Time Asia; and organizing solo marathons of Tim Burton or Kurosawa movies? The craving for media sprees runs deep, and, like so many Internet-era developments, Gran Cyber Cafés seem to answer an almost carnal need for uninterrupted access to pixels and screens and Web sites and instant-messaging and iTunes. And when that need is satisfied, you can always return to life in the city, at least for a while.

Virginia Heffernan, In Tokyo, the New Trend Is ‘Media Immersion Pods’

And this is it. Screw Chinese, screw German or French (both of which I already studied for a year), I’m off to learn Japanese.

tagged aphorisms, future, future shock, japan, language learning, languages, media, media breakdown, promises, readings

We have met the enemy, and it is us 2
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6
 Jul
02



[Vernor Vinge] added a third [future] trend: “The great conspiracy against human freedom.” As novelist Doris Lessing has observed, barons on opposite sides of the river don’t need to be in cahoots if their interests coincide. In our case, defence, homeland security, financial crime enforcement, police, tax collectors and intellectual property rights holders offer reasons to want to control the hardware we use. Then there are geeks, who can be tempted to forget the consequences if the technology is cool enough. Vinge quotes the most famous line from the comic strip Pogo: ”We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Vinge’s technology to satisfy these groups’ dreams is the Secure Hardware Environment (She), which dedicates some bandwidth and a small portion of every semiconductor for regulatory use. Deployment is progressive, as standards are implemented. Built into new chips, She will spread inevitably through its predecessors’ obsolescence.

This part is terribly plausible. It sounds much like the Trusted Computing Platform, implemented in Intel chips and built into machines from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and others. Most people don’t realise their new computer contains a chip designed to block the operation of any software not certified by the group. Now enhance that and build it into RFID chips, networked embedded systems, shrink and distribute as “smart dust”. All are current trends or works in progress.

Geeks are willing to fight Trusted Computing on the grounds that it could be used to block open-source software or to enforce draconian digital rights management. But what if accepting it meant less visible security, less bureaucracy, even slight profit? She automatically sends taxes, enables much less noticeable surveillance and gets you through security checkpoints with no waiting. There’s less crime, because legislative reality can be enforced on physical reality. Fewer false convictions. Make regulation automatic, and it seems to go away. New laws can be downloaded as a regulatory upgrade.
Wendy Grossman, Big Brother takes a controlling interest in chips   (The Guardian)
tagged code, computers, copyright, future, future shock, geekery, liberty, quote collages, software, technology, technolyricism

Yehuda Spacified 2
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6
 Jun
24

Some things take time to sink in, time for time (and memory) to do its culling and for us to look at them with fresh eyes. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s email to his deceased brother was one of those things. I’ve been rereading it about once every week, for one reason or another, since I discovered it 52 days ago, and each time it has resonated ever more deeply inside me. Its call to action is ever more urgent. Its wisdom ever more piercing. Its optimism ever more evident—there’s some brutally naive optimism in this letter, one that stares at us in the face, but one that we refuse to see… because it’s so damn hard to simply entertain the thought, because the moment we accept we might be able to do something about death itself, the 150,000 human deaths every day become 150,000 murders that could be prevented.

I don’t want to forget it. I’ll paste it in my wall and create new remixes of the content, and in this spirit I spacified the whole thing into a 30k PDF. Opinions on both the text itself and the utility (or lack thereof) of the spacifying will be most appreciated.

tagged atheism, death, eliezer yudkowsky, ethics, future, ideas, information design, interface design, letters, original content, philosophy, readings, remixes, the singularity, touching, transhumanism | 2 Comments

Bizarrerie 2
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6
 Jun
22

There is now such a thing as a teen buzz repeller that doubles up as an adult-proof ringtone. What a droll world to live in. I’m happy today.

(via The Timeless Art of Seduction)

tagged contraptions, droll, future, present shock, science | 1 Comment

College 2
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6
 Jun
22

Lorelai: Come on!

Rory: Wait. Come on where?

L: Inside.

R: We can’t go inside.

L: Why? Is there a force field or something around the place?

R: This is Harvard.

L: I know.

R: This. Is. Haaarvard.

L: I. Knooow.

R: You can’t just go inside. You need a guide.

L: I’ll be your guide.

R: What do you know about Harvard?

L: I know this: Look. There is Harvard.

R: Mooom…

L: Hey, don’t you want to see it? Huh? The place where you be living and studying and developing very naive but pretentious worldviews that will come crashing down the minute you graduate.

R: Yeah, I do…

Gilmore Girls, The Road Trip to Harvard

Out of college but still smack in the very-naive-but-pretentious-worldviews phase.

tagged college, education, future, learning, media, personal, quote collages, quotes, reminiscing, tv, venting

Art Singularity 2
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6
 Jun
21

Regalo Abuelo 84 años: Mosaico

Through the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable… soon..

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come true.

Vernor Vinge, The Singularity

My grandfather, Luis, is going to be 84 tomorrow (today, actually) and the whole family is hectic preparing him a humongous birthday. We, my sisters and I, are in charge of the digital accouterments and since I’d been wanting to create a photo mosaic for a while, I decided to give it a try today. What ensued baffled me.

I googled photo mosaic and went to the very first result, a 2004 engadget tutorial. The tutorial was very clear and to the point, and I donwloaded the freeware featured in it: AndreaMosaic. The thing was simple, unpretentious and surprisingly intuitive. Some minutes later I was off churning mosaics away and trying the different configurations.

It still took me the better part of the day to finish (with zam distractions) and get the thing 1.27×140m printed but, come on, I even feel ashamed of how little work I actually did. I’m going to be the one with the most impressive, flashy thing in the party and all the time I’ll just be thinking how disproportionate was my effort to the result.

Think about it for a second, a clueless guy in the middle of Mexico is able to churn out in a couple of hours (for something like 50 bucks) a graphical confection that would have floored anyone 50 years ago, that would have been nigh priceless a 100 years ago, and that would have gotten him burned at the stake earlier than that.

I’m unsettled and, frankly, the fact that it isn’t unsettling to anyone else is all the more disturbing to me (because that only hints at how fast this thing I did has already become obsolete). We’re smack in the middle of an art singularity of sorts.

tagged abuelo luis, art, chef, chepe, criticism, epiphanies, experiments, family, future, future shock, images, local, original content, surprises, technology, technolyricism, the singularity, web