“computers”
68 posts under this tag.
Hans Moravec’s Mind Children is dated at parts but it is as lyric, visionary, and deep as anything I’ve read. Here 2 excerpts I particularly enjoyed: one on robot bushes (forget many-armed Vishnu, this will be the avatar of the gods), the other on artificial life, spontaneous and deliberate (a great story of a virus put deep inside Unix by Ken Thompson himself and a subtle but intriguing example of spontaneous alife).
I’m experimenting with taking quick page snaps and bundling them into PDFs, so these are rather crude. No matter, it’s early days and I’ll get better at it. PDF/CBR is the new MP3!
..she believed that houses were meant to be thought of as vehicles—physically fixed, but logically mobile..
Greg Egan, Permutation City
It’s been a while now since I read this Reason interview to Peter Thiel but I’m still moved by it. The purpose of life is life. How mindblowing a concept, huh?
Thiel: One of the things that’s very misleading about acceleration and exponential growth is that it’s slow at first and then it’s fast, and so the future happens more slowly than people expect and then it happens more quickly.
reason: There’s another popular narrative for the 21st century that says humanity is going to wreck the planet. Are the environmentalist doomsayers right?
Thiel: My sense is that they’re not right. I’m not an expert on it, but what I think is different from climate-change catastrophe vs. the Singularity is that climate seems like such a pedestrian thing to talk about. You talk about it every day. There’s a tendency to overdramatize the climate, and it’s something everybody can have opinions about. So I don’t think there’s a cognitive bias where people are incapable of imagining the world’s climate changing. That seems like a very easy thing for people to imagine, and maybe it’s also an easy thing for people to get hysterical about. On the other hand, computers running the world or this radical progress of technology —that’s something where I think there’s just no imagination at all.
reason: Do you consider yourself a transhumanist?
Thiel: The problem with the label is that it suggests that we should run away from being human. Take the question of aging. If you define that as the essence of being human, then transhumanists are anti-aging and therefore you try to transcend this human limitation. I don’t think that death and life are inextricably interconnected in some sort of Eastern mystical sense in which for everything white there’s something black and there’s always a yin/yang type of thing. Every myth on this planet tells us the purpose of life is death, and I don’t think that’s true. I think the purpose of life is life.
National unity? The whole point of America is that we’re the country where dissent is welcome. We’re a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and free speech people.
When out of dumb luck I found myself the owner of an advance-reading, not-for-sale copy of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Little Brother (Amazon, Facebook, Cory’s reading), due to be released this April the 29th, I knew I’d have to gulp it down in one rapt, sleepless night. Cory’s a writer worthy of that, but it was also, well, my first “scoop” ever.
It’s past 6am and I’ve done just that. And before crashing into bed I just want it out that it is Cory’s best novel yet. Science fiction about our present, with our current, unevenly distributed future only slightly jiggled. A novel about America after a terrorist attack bigger than 9/11 and the young hackers who rebel at the idiotic police state that ensues.
It made me feel I belonged to San Francisco, to California, more than ever. It was stomach churning and exhilarating and fun. Yeah, it can be a tad over-educational and preachy at times but just a tad and to its great merit it makes security topics accessible and immensely interesting. The teenage voice of the main characters is a gem (Cory has always shined in dialogue, the more technology mediated the better) and their sexual fumblings are so masterful and eerily accurate (to me, at least) that wistfulness tore me apart. It made me want to hack a new world.
An important book, sure to change many lives.
Believe.
Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)
Just think of the responsibility, the challenge, the opportunity. One third of the population is still young enough to be natural born digital citizens (see Classmate PC and the OLPC XO laptop), to easily master an international language (whichever one), to be taught about doubt (“Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt…”), to receive the best education we can give them…
Remember that character in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, catatonic at page 169 at discovering a quarter million Chinese girls thrust to his care? Well, look around and realize we’ve been given a ship of 1.8 billion souls. Just think of the opportunity.
(Statistic according to the U.S. Census Bureau, international)
I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.
After days of shopping around town (after which I can attest there is no point in shopping around, particularly not around downtown—limit yourself to your local warehouse clubs and you’ll be fine), my family finally bought a much needed treadmill.
Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,
how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?
The best makeshift base ended up being the old ironing board, which is long, surprisingly stable, and cushiony. It’s nothing short of amazing to read and browse on it and realize for yourself that it actually works, that there’s barely any tremor, and that the walking soon becomes unconscious. Slow though the walking may be, it’s strangely invigorating.
This was long coming. We will all be walking the web one day.
A math experiment was carried out recently when Alex Smith —an Electronic and Computer Engineering undergraduate with “a background in mathematics and esoteric programming languages”— proved that the Turing machine below is in fact universal, making it the simplest universal Turing machine possible. In other words, the cute graph below are the instructions for an abstract symbol-manipulating machine that can in principle do anything your computer (or any other computer for that matter) can do.
Stephen Wolfram, who made the conjecture and offered a $25k reward for proving it, reports:
We’ve come a long way since Alan Turing’s original 1936 universal Turing machine—taking four pages of dense notation to describe.
We did an experiment; and PCE [the Principle of Computational Equivalence] was validated.
But unlike some science experiments, it didn’t take a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator. It just took a 20-year-old undergraduate with a PC.
[It’s] a wonderful monument in the computational universe—a marker at the edge of universality for Turing machines.
It’s a very satisfying way to spend $25,000.
Now, ain’t this just breathtaking?
People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea.
Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid
Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.
Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.
Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.
The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.
|
RSS
email
