“process”
17 posts under this tag.
He just can. Many have said it before and I too had glimpsed at it from time to time at his Dilbert blog, but I just read (via 2centsworth) The Little Robot That Could post—a thought experiment against the idea of freewill—and have to say it again: he’s funny, he gets the message across, he’s unassumingly challenging, he’s imaginative, he risks, he’s enticingly (yet humbly) pretentious, he delivers, he’s faithfulELZR, he conveys, he makes you think—he can write.
Of all the controversial topics I’ve raised on this blog, free will is the one that seems to most grab people by the nuts and/or teats and twirl them around. I understand why. Belief in free will is the reboot button for civilization. Don’t read any further until you have saved your applications.
Today I offer a new approach to understanding why you don’t have free will. I call it The Little Robot That Could. I will show that a robot, designed with current technology, could exhibit everything you call free will. Once you accept that the robot has every bit of “choice” that you have in this world, your superstition about your own choices will begin to dissolve. That process will take about a month.
Good design is much more than just details—it’s details, details, details!
I love this description of the design process because that’s exactly how it is for me. (Via Kottke)
- Talk to everybody I possibly can about the problem.
- Read everything that would even be remotely related to what I’m doing. Hang charts, graphs, diagrams, and screenshots all over my office.
- Observe user research; recall past research.
- Stew in it all, panic as deadline approaches, stop sleeping, stop eating.
- Be struck with an epiphany. Instantly see the solution. Curse my tools for being too slow as I frantically get it all down in a document.
- Sleep for three days.
Second LifeWP, a 3d online community, recently hosted a live concert by Suzanne VegaWP and of course someone had to make her and her guitar’s avatars. Robbie Dingo did. And he made a video of the making (of the guitar avatar). Breathtaking. Go straight to the Quickitime video or see it embedded as a flash in Second Life’s website.
Remember those classic time-lapseWP videos of fluid cloudscapes and opening flowers? (Or, to be more uptodate, of girls taking a pic of themselves every three years?YT.) Well, this is something similar: Justin FrankelWP, ELZR, Winamp creator and one of this generation’s software virtuosos, spent the better part of a year creating an audio-editing program called Reaper, took pictures as the developement months went by and mashed them together into a webpage. Amazing. (via Justin’s blog: c[a,o]s[a,o][s] de justin)
Ellen J. Langer’s excellent Mindfulness talks a lot about how “a preoccupation with outcome [over process] can make us mindless”. But the opposite is just as true: an overpreoccupation with process over outcome can make us equally mindless.
[Jason Fried:] “Big business loves mediocrity: They put process first and product second. As long as you go through this process and all these objectives are met along the way, then what comes out at the end is considered successful, no matter what. It doesn’t up set anyone,but doesn’t make them happy, either. It’s safe. I can’t deal with that.”
Mindlessness lurks everywhere.
Jorge Wagensberg tiene un libro delgado y delicioso (119 paginas) que me fascina. Se llama Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? y consiste de alrededor de quinientos aforismos sobre la incertidumbre (y su definición de incertidumbre es una de las muchas joyas de este libro). Para mi, que tanto me gustan las definiciones y La Forma, este libro es un manjar. Vaya, le sale tan bien eso de hilvanar aforismos que hasta pareciera que se ha inventado un nuevo género literario.
Pienso transcribir el libro entero e irlo subiendo, poco a poco, en este post. Iba a empezar hoy con 20 frases pero me avorace y ya casi me echo medio libro.
Actualización 27/Octubre/2006: ¡Termine por fin de transcribir el libro!
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