anakanemison's comments

Ten years ago (exactly, remarkably) Notch wrote about his father on his old blog.

I think it's a beautiful, sad, human piece of writing. It's hard to find online, now that his blog ("The Word of Notch") went away. Someone made a 500+ page PDF backup of his blog, here:

https://habrador.itch.io/the-word-of-notch

The post, titled "I love you, dad", is the second to last post.

Making beautiful things doesn't make up for saying horrible things. Still, every time I used to hear about the awful stuff Notch posted, I remembered how I felt about him when I read about him and his dad.

I just wish things didn't have to be so awful, for everyone.

Here is the video, fwiw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw

That's a thought-provoking perspective. It made me wonder whether BW has more to say, and what his plans are for how to say it.

A charitable hypothesis is that he thought that his existing work said what he considered to be most important in the clearest way, and that anything further he said would detract from it.

Another charitable possibility is that he knows what he has yet to say, but he thought "we" weren't ready to hear it yet for some reason (e.g. the marriage of the comic medium and its commercial dimensions made saying it too complicated or risky. Maybe other reasons.)

I think it's easy to assume that BW acted selfishly by doing nothing. Well, not easy in every way--your perspective isn't in the majority, and the pushback from other commenters demonstrates that, I think. What I mean by "easy" is just that I can see his behavior as being in-line with human frailties (easier to talk the talk than walk the walk). I know it would be hard for me to choose to labor, creating my art, when I'd already achieved success.

I'm hoping that you could forgive his failures as being just the ordinary human kind, or maybe even consider the possibility that he might not have failed at all, but was instead in a situation where it didn't make sense to produce more.

But I like your argument a lot, because it reminds me that we have a responsibility to more than our own welfare and success. If we can do something to help the world, we should, and those (like BW) with more opportunity have more responsibility.

Facebook has thousands of pictures of our faces under a variety of lighting conditions. It would be exciting (or scary, depending on your point of view) to see that data, combined with sensors on the headset itself, to generate realistic-looking face models in the virtual space.

Pushing pixels to a high resolution display, under tight latency constraints, is going to stress even today's high-end systems. If they succeed at appealing to the mass market, I bet there will be a significant effect on the rate of system upgrades.

The grammatical class of prepositions changes considerably more slowly than other classes.

We need new nouns and new verbs all the time, because what occupies and what occurs in our environment changes so fast. Interestingly, despite that rapid change, the set of prepositions, the set of conceptual relationships we've chosen to concisely express, stays pretty steady.

It's fascinating to read about a new preposition entering into common usage, because it makes me wonder what new pressures we're collectively facing in describing conceptual relationships. Certainly it could just be Twitter's character limits causing people to drop the "of" in "because of", but maybe other forces caused this construction to have utility now.

My bet would be on an increased expectation that our conversational partners share our context, and our models for understanding why things happen the way they do, because internet.

Sounds like having both is a good hedge against failures with either one.

This product (might someday) solve a real problem I have: one significant impediment to picking up a new web app is the need to learn yet another way of interfacing with the content I "own" on it.

If Collections can provide a compelling consistent interface on top of existing web apps, and an API for new web apps to target, then they might get to own some valuable conceptual real estate in user's minds: "I'm willing to try this new service because I already know how I'll be able to manage my content on it".

This also makes the world a better place by making it easier on the newcomers--it's unfair to them that established players occupy the "I know how to use this already" space in users' heads, that their service has to not just be better, but be that much better than the established players, to reach people.

Then they could use that conceptual real estate to promote those new web apps, and that promotion could yield revenue. Another option would be to wrap their own reference implementations of the services they're abstracting over in a premium layer. Another would be to work with web apps to provide value-added interfaces to the web apps' premium services and take a cut of whatever the web apps charge. Another would be to offer a premium corporate version that plugs into internal corporate datastores (in a way that, presumably, doesn't suck, distinguishing them from other products).

Collection's play for native integration (e.g. extending that consistent interface over all your local content) distinguishes them from Dropbox, which prefers to own that content.

A similar problem to this, that Collections isn't targeting (yet), is to provide an abstraction not over data but over operations. It's already far too complicated to juggle email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, G+, SMS, tumblr, etc. That means that I have to really think hard about letting a new web app into my routine.

An intermediary that presents a consistent interface to all those services, and opens itself up for use with new services, could try to win over valuable conceptual space with users and make the world a better place in exactly the same way.

News like this worries me because I've always imagined the world's improvements in mass market technology being driven by competition between major players like Intel and AMD.

In other words, I'm afraid that the loss of competition for Intel will slow the approach of the future.

The other sources of competition that Intel faces might be strong enough to motivate it, but I'm not as familiar with the influences that, say, ARM chips and Apple's own CPU development have had on Intel.

I agree that Java can be awkward if you're trying to write using functional idioms.

Still, in case you were interested, I commented on your gist with a potential solution.

Your webpage is nice. Thank you for sharing!

Your response is really exciting! I'm grateful--it's pointing at exactly what I was hoping to find. Deutsch seems to be talking about how to evaluate challenging arguments that come before evidence.

To contribute something, other than my thanks, here's a link to Deutsch talking about knowledge, evidence, and incredible cosmic relationships:

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_on_our_place_in_the_c...

I think it's more unfortunate than irrational. I'd like to think I'm open to changing them--my priors started out (a couple of decades ago) pretty terrible. The process of how to do it well in response to arguments without experimental results is the challenging part.

This kind of science has always been hard for me to integrate. Thinking as a Bayesian, these arguments seem to be meant to influence my "prior" over possible initial states or natures of the universe. I'm not accustomed to that.

I'm used to science presenting me with evidence meant to influence my "posterior". I can handle that.

Any chance you'd be willing to share that 36 point review email? That sounds fascinating.

John Koza is a name worth googling if you're interested in learning more about Genetic Programming.

The many trading companies in Chicago also offer software developers interesting problems to solve and attractive compensation.

There's certainly a lot of web work being done in Chicago too, but the trading companies offer developers the chance to focus on enterprise software systems and proprietary high-performance trading applications.

Mine is anakanemison.