“promises”

.., one of the world’s largest and most influential private-equity^WP firms, is planning an IPO of a minority stake, “perhaps 10%.” Appraisals of the company’s total value range “from $20 billion to double that.”

It has some 750 employees.

Talk about leverage.

Maybe the insolent goal is possible after all.

Edgar, far right. Late high school.

Early Saturday morning he was driving back home when he crashed with a light post and a tree. His body almost unscathed (so much so he was a perfect organ donor candidate), his head suffered massive trauma. Yesterday he died. So fragile, so stupid a death.

We knew each other since middle school, when we hung out often. We often did projects together and were at each other houses several times. He was frankly a weird guy, always strangely bothering girls, always quirkily, somewhat affectedly hyperactive. But underneath that you could talk to him and he would listen. And he was always smiling. They started calling him “Tope” (speedbump) back then, I don’t exactly remember why, but I always thought the later “Bamm bamm”^WP, which never quite caught on, was much more fitting. I always called him Edgar, for me “Tope” was the bumbling school persona, Edgar—Edgar Quirarte Munguía—was the keen, sensitive friend I glimpsed occasionally.

We then went to the same high school, where he stayed afterwards and majored in Computer Engineering last December. We met less often in the bigger high school and only rarely at college. Last time I got hold of him he was in the Netherlands but he arranged for her mother to give me the photo CD (that he had compiled for our graduation) with which I started this Flickr high school pool.

So he became for me one of those background people you ask for at parties or hear from mothers or expect to casually meet one day or perhaps, sadly but unconsciously, expect never to hear again. And yet, happily and just as unconsciously, you also expect them to live out lives, to love, to be happy—and you’re happy just to take them for granted, to have them glowing from afar.

Didn’t know what to do at his wake. Postponed the whole thing as long as I could. Angry, that such a stupid thing still happened. That we are still so fragile. That he was just starting to live, just majored. He liked doing websites, we might have worked together. He was always doing some strange business or other, we might have ended up doing something together. He liked hanging out with teachers, they adopted him. He was a good man, the youngest son, impossibly tall, childishly handsome. He may have been DUI that morning, so what? It’s still so stupid. Still so senseless.

I know now what I’m going to do. In Eliezer Yudkowsky’s spirit^ELZR, I’m donating a 100 dollars to the Singularity Institute, a fledgling organization to confront both the opportunity and the risk of a(n A.I.) singularity. They’re currently in the midst of a Matching challenge and a group of donors will match your contributions dollar for dollar until July 6th.

I remember my astonishment when I chanced on Marvin Minsky’s queer idea that there was nothing special about the 21st century for it to be the birth of a singularity—we could have been there by, say, 300 CE; centuries ago at any rate. We should have been.

So I’ll donate a 100 dollars today. And the next stupid time someone close to me dies I’ll donate 200. And 300 the next time. And so on. Till it’s over.

Ayn Rand’s^{WP, ELZR} Atlas Shrugged^AM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on.

The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.

Excuse’s user testing went so well I decided to improve it. The original strip had color but it was somehow so distracting that black and white looked better. Then I found about the burn tool in a Photoshop tutorial I chanced on. What a difference it made! There’s a lot more focus! Much better outlines. (No doubt about it, learning Photoshop would be one of the best investments of my time…)

I think the changes are for the better. And so, it’s time for phase 2 of the plan: the metacomic. Print the comic on hard paper and carry it in your pocket, tote, whatever. Next time you’re bored in the subway, bus, wherever, show it to your right-hand neighbor (in the absence of a right-hand neighbor, feel free to substitute your left-hand one). Let it be your excuse. Report on what happened. :)

The problem with abandoning a blog is not the lost posts but the lost sequence. I’ve learned so much these last weeks and yet written so little that what I’ll now post may or may not make sense but will undoubtedly feel broken and out of place. Alas, I have lost the path that took me here and while I’ll try to mention it tangentially it will only be a pale sketch of what it really was. The emotions have cooled and forgotten are most of the shameful and silly detours, dead-ends, and retracings that led me to today. Which is a shame, because they were so much anguished fun.

So I apologize. But this blog is back on track. On steroids and with several weeks of bulging backlog. Après cet post-ci, le deluge.

This is, I think, a pretty good glimpse of one of the roles I want to play the next decade—don’t give up on me! :)

Ah, the ever-recurring techno-myth: a dirt-cheap educational contraption to revolutionize third world children’s education. I can’t even remember when I heard about it first. I was thrilled though, enthused. But then with the undelivering years went my excitement. For one thing, the deployment plan is based almost entirely on governments, which is a nonstarter. More importantly, there might be better options. Cellphones are already a phenomenal worldwide success, even in the poorest countries, and that’s because they’re tangibly, immediately useful. A recent Economist article, Splitting the Digital Divide, mentions other less obvious but intriguing options.

And yet, reading yesterday’s New York Times article, For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate (yup, there’s been some price adjustment), made me think again of the amazing possibilities that can unfold from a personal mobile computer in the hands of a child. Blame it on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age^AM with its amazing book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer —every self-learner’s wet dream.

At any rate, it seems to me that (save actual existence and deployment) the crucial factor for success will be software and so, for what it’s worth, here’s a promise: If and when Negroponte’s brainchild ever sees daylight, I shall stop whatever I’m doing, for three months, to develop mindblowing educational software for it. There, I said it.

I believe that an interface that is both modeless and, insofar as possible, monotonous—all other design features being of at least normal quality for a modern interface—would be extraordinarily pleasant to use. A user would be able to develop an unusually high degree of trust in his habits. The interface would, from these two properties alone, tend to fade from the user’s consciousness, allowing him to give his full attention to the task at hand. The psychological effects of totally (or near totally) modeless and monotonous systems is an area of interface design ripe for experimental study.

If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monotony would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product. Its users would find moving to a competitor’s product psychologically difficult. Unlike selling illicit drugs, marketing an addictive interface is legal, and the product is beneficial to its users; in another way, it is just like selling illicit drugs: extremely profitable.

Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface^AM, p68

With modeless he means that “a given user gesture has one and only one result: Gesture g always results in action a.” With monotonous, that “any desired result has only one means by which it may be invoked: Action a is invoked by gesture g and in no other way.”

(It’s surprising how all this can be expressed by saying that we want the relationship between gestures and actions to be a function^WP, and an injective^WP and surjective^WP one at that. In other words, a good interface is a bijective^WP interface. I remember how hard those words were to me my first semester studying Math. Never thought I’d find them again studying interfaces!)

And regarding the quote itself, it’s a tough sell, because it goes against many of my computing prejudices. But Raskin just might be right—in a truly revolutionary way. We’ll find out at Domburi. ;)

This (anonymous) feedback on Imagery just came on Saturday.

Some sort of auto-citation of images is a fantastic idea (as anyone who uses EverNote or Google Notebook will know firsthand) and my gratitude goes to whoever sent it to me, I’d never have thought of it myself. And yet, for a while I almost decided to willfully not implement it:

I strongly disagree with the way citations are usually handled within “education-land”: little more than curtsies one must mindlessly perform to pay respect to others’ property (and it is against such moralistic establishment that I am one of those kids who believes he owns the internet). Citation styles are taught and required simply as one more formal hoop for students to jump.

But citations can be much more than that! They allow readers to recover and rewalk the path the writer followed, and in that they perform an invaluable service to readers, but they can also be immensely profitable for writers too, starting with forcing them to walk paths in the first place (one is so loathe to do the slightest of researches when in the thrall (or duty) of writing, so very prone to simply rearrange one’s prejudices and call it even). Citations make for more rigorous reading and writing—that’s why we should encourage them (not simply because they make, arguably, good fences).

So yes, I thought I saw some of that ownership-based, rote teaching of citations (copyright-instruction) in that email—in a scared flash of exaggeration I glimpsed a DRM image-search engine—and my recoil reaction was so surprisingly strong I thought of deliberately not implementing any sort of auto-quotation. Lawrence Lessig has talked already on the power technology’s architecture has to regulate conduct and the weight of such responsibility was suddenly overwhelming.

Careful thought has shown me the error of my ways. My overreaction to such friendly (and helpful) feedback was not called for. An auto-citation feature in Domburi would be very helpful indeed and will be implemented. But it’ll be tinged with my prejudices and that means it will be open-ended.

William W. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity (PDF and HTML versions available), a summary of his same-titled book^AM, has only grown on me since I read it a month ago. It’s main thesis, that wealth hinges on productivity, has come to resonate inside me like few things have of late.

It was, for instance, what lead me to finally accept the possibilities of technology and, shortly thereafter, to naively proclaim I’d one day have a massively profitable company with less people than my then-age. The whimsical limit, I believe, will force such a company to be always awake, always flexible, always smart, always doing technological judo. It would force it to value people in a way we’ve barely explored at all.