“san francisco”
22 posts under this tag.
This was a couple of weeks ago but I had to write about it because I was so happy through it: Steve Omohundro’ s wonderful talk, AI and Transhuman Morality, organized by the Sillicon Valley transhumanist meetup. I brought Mauro with me and I was very nervous because I didn’t know what to expect. A couple of days ago I had gone to an AI meetup in the same room (in the wonderful TechShop) and it had been confusing and somewhat disappointing: we watched an overly long video, had some haphazard if interesting discussion, and it all ended up abruptly without me being able to make up my mind of the strange event (where these people quacks? mad geniuses? autists? were all meetings this awkward?).
Anyway, we went and I’m happy we did because I enjoyed Steve’s wonderful two-hour presentation so much I was smiling like an idiot the whole time (at one point, I even clutched Mauro to tell him simply, “I am happy”—and it was true). As I said, it was more than two hours long but I honestly didn’t want the presentation to end, particularly when so many of the interventions where, wonder of wonders, relevant and interesting of themselves.
The presentation was divided in 2 halves. The 1st for reviewing what we know of human morality, the 2nd for contemplating what AI morality will be like. Both were fascinating and chock full of surprising, cutting-edge ideas (and book recommendations!), but it was the 2nd where I was truly overjoyed, for, you see, it was when Steve plunged into how an AI’s morality might be structured.
I was struck by how the utility function ethics he considered for AIs were exactly the kind of ethics I had chanced on one day, not long ago, when in my desire to clarify how and for what I wanted to live, I thought, wrote, and rewrote about ethics with the most honesty and rigor I could muster. Heck, we even used the same examples! You have no idea how good it felt to finally find a fellow freak who not only understood and care about my conclusions but who had arrived to them through entirely different paths (conclusions like how ethics hinge entirely on purposes or goals and how we’re in for an ethical ride when these become much more varied and malleable than they’ve ever been before). Back in Guadalajara I talked about this all the time but no one ever really got it (or much cared).
Ah, this kind of stuff was why I came to the bay area! (Mauro liked it a lot too, saying afterwards he had felt as one should feel after going to mass—full of awe and excitement.)
I went to Adaptive Path’s 7th birthday party last week and was completely at a loss at what to do. What does one do at a crowded party when the music’s too loud to talk and you don’t know anyone? How do you approach people? I’m new at this being social stuff and this was definitely above level—I couldn’t even start one conversation. Anyway, there were free tacos and the paintings in the gallery where quite cool—I loved the one above (which reminds me a lot of Permutation City).
I live in Foster City, in a two-bedroom apartment that I share with Mauro, a friend from high school who moved here a month before me, and Felipe, a Peruvian personal chef. Mauro and I rent from Felipe, whose wife and kid just left to Peru. We got this place just a week after I came and we’ve liked it a lot. It’s right next to a beautiful lake, it has a balcony, a gym, a laundry, a pool (though it’s way too cold), tennis and volleyball courts, and lots of grass all around (with ducks!).
Foster city is also one of the nice, affluent parts of the bay so we definitely got lucky. Best of all, we’re very well located on a micro and macro level. Micro, the library, the beach, Safeway, Costco, and all sorts of malls (ethnic, fancy, and bland) are no more than 5-7 minutes away. Macro, we live close to the center of the Bay Area: Stanford & Palo Alto are very close, San Francisco is a half hour away, and even San Jose is some 45 minutes away. Parking is not a problem nor is it security.
On the negative side, though it’s worth it, it is somewhat expensive (we each pay nigh 600 dollars per month, utilities included) and so we’re moving the next 15th to a new place that’s very close but for which I’ll pay 500 dollars per month and I get to have my own room (while Mauro will get to live in the living room and enjoy the cheapskate life he craves :). Virginia Woolf famously talked about the importance of a room of one’s own for female writers but it applies just as well to programmers (as Joel Spolsky once argued to my then disbelief).
So things will be even better (and cheaper). The one thing I wonder is whether I shouldn’t be rather living inside the throbbing, bustling City itself instead of the bland yet convenient and charming suburbia. My chief concerns are cost and how to have a car in the parking-less city (I don’t want to end up isolated in San Francisco itself, many interesting things happen outside it). Any suggestions? Should I take the plunge into the overpriced, rough city or enjoy my cheap, gentle suburban life?
Ah, I’m happy. As I ride the CalTrain from San Jose, I realize that after less than a week I feel more at home here, more at ease, than I’ve ever felt in Mexico. Tuesday I went to a Long Now talk by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and got to glimpse such legendary people as Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. Yesterday night I went to Google (!) to an Android talk after having spent the morning in the Asian museum and the afternoon studying in the library. Today I just finished the first half of a wonderful (free!) 2-day course on AIR from Adobe. The plan is to cap the day with some Permutation City at the public library. Ah, this is how I want to live!
And it’s not only the flashy things that have me captivated, it’s being alone again, having problems and solving them, meeting strangers every day, waking before dawn effortlessly because there’s so much to do… It’s being able to speak in the same language that I think and enjoying my tongue as it twists and rolls on its own better than I had ever seen it. It’s seeing Lynda.com ads on the bus stop. It’s noticing everyday a new, unexpected way that tasks are streamlined here, automated —small pieces of civilization, like the chord to request for a stop in buses, how their doors open by standing on the steps, or how their stops are automatically both announced by a pre-recorded voice and displayed in an electronic ticker. It’s learning new, cutting-edge technologies and having someone to talk them with (never had felt like a “developer” before until I realized I felt at ease among them). It’s finding a purdy gal everytime you look around (not just lust, the ratio of childfree 20/30-somethings is way up). It’s eating a different cuisine every day (recent finds: chicken tikka masala and thai pancakes). It’s that sense of mastery at turning the new into routine and rhythm.
Now I just have to find a way to hack the law and become a free agent (someone who can work and start a startup) or I’ll have to move sooner rather than later to Canada… any ideas?
I wasn’t expecting such beauty. It caught me off guard today. There was a time, just after midday, as I walked along Ocean Beach, when it all overwhelmed me—the slapping wind, the silly birds, the fellow walkers, the kiting surfers, the full sky, the white rocks, the nature right besides, the glistening, sparkling, glimmering, scintillating water.
[San Francisco] children are to be pitied, for, as the wife of publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday once said, “They will probably grow up thinking all cities are so wonderful.”
Oh, and I just bought an apple for 1.75 dollars.
Finally! I’m in San Francisco, for at least two weeks, in what should be my beachhead for a longterm stay!
No offense to the big apple, but San Francisco is just so much better. If New York is Mexico City, San Francisco is Guadalajara: prettier, classier, cleaner, ampler, prettier peopled…
I’m amazed by the huge number of Asians everywhere (Asian women never fail to transfix me…), by the opulence and beauty of the city, by the overwhelming wealth and retail saturation of America (one forgets it so easily in the 3rd world), by the beggars, by my cool hostel, by how it has rained all day long, by how the swankest part of town (Union Square) can be right next to the seediest one (Tenderloin), by how stereotypically rural Mexican where most of my flightmates (rarely does one get to see so many cowboy hats, boots, and rebozos), by how happy I am…
 After 3 years of searching for local soulmates in this middle-of-Mexico, beautiful-but-digitally-backward city of mine, as I’m packing for the states, I google idly on San Francisco and, behold, I find the incredible blog of a Guadalajara genius with the same web obsession, the same reading compulsion, the same format fiddly inclinations, the same penchant for writing only in overcrafted English, the same relocation (his some 2.5 years ago, to go work with Max Levchin ELZR, no less).
His name’s Sergio I. Villarreal Pou and following his commenters’ links I’ve found a tangle of worthy local websites (say, the multiple-personality disorder No Limit studio or the gorgeous Arathael) that opens up what is to me a wholly uncharted local sphere. Which I’ll probably be exploring some thousand miles away…
“Jalisco va a dominar el mundo,” says one of dad’s friends from Los Altos, a migrant region of Jalisco. “Estados Unidos va a dominar el mundo y los Jalisquillos van a dominar Estados Unidos.”
Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)
Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows EndWP, AM.
Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!
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! :)
Something else is going on here. To a large extent, value on the Internet is not being created by businesses, as much as they want all kinds of credit and money for creating this wonderful value. Inventors, folks who are coming up with new tools, are creating it. Some of them are well harnessed by businesses, but it turns out that businesses don’t have to exist for them to harness themselves with the Net and get these things out there. For example, the person who created Eudora is a University of Illinois fellow who did it basically for himself and people he knew. In terms of quality, Eudora is visibly beyond any other email program. It makes you wonder what’s wrong with companies, what prevents them from doing the right thing when a random person puts his exquisite tool out on the Net for free. This happened with Eudora, and later with Mosaic, which led to a commercial version, Netscape Navigator.
The inventors of these tools are not crazed codgers in basements. They are, by-and-large, young people with a sense of social and cultural responsibility who want things to be better for everybody. They are as valuable as our snazziest scientists, but are not accorded the respect or rewards of the snazzy scientists. They are taken for granted more than they should be. Something is wrong if we think inventors are a lower order of being than theoretical scientists.
Overall I don’t think it’s that good a presentation, but there’s one true (outrageous) gem worth repeating from Seth Godin’s recent talk at Google:
There is a belief among a lot of companies, especially in the valley, especially on this road, Amphiteater RoadWP, that technology wins.. I don’t think it does. I think what technology does is it gives you a shot at marketing.
..I believe that.. what made Google work were some brilliant—maybe not intentional—marketing decisions. And those decisions have allowed you the freedom to do some really cool technology.
Well, ok, here are two more highlights:
[To Googlers:] You guys have built something for the ages.
Hummer and the Mini. The Mini small enough to put in the trunk of the Hummer—but they had a lot in common. For four years they sold at full retail, for four years they made a profit, for four years they had a waiting list, because they were on the edges. General Motors loses money on every mid-sized car they sell, because if you want to buy a mid-sized car, just buy a Toyota or a Honda, the cheapest one. It’s at the edges that people wait in line; it’s at the edges that people will notice you.
(Oh and this is also the first online video with captions I’ve watched. They’re really cool, even if buggy.)
|
RSS
email
