It’s hard to find out what’s going on right now with global stock markets but CNBC has a live feed from their Asia bureau HERE. It’s already a bit glitchy, not sure how long it’s going to last but it might improve once the east coasters pass out.
The following video documents the point at which things really started getting out of hand…
From PaulGraham.com
“The breakthrough, according to Trevor, was to dramatically improve the robot’s sense of where its center of gravity was. None of the commercial gyroscopes were good enough, he said, so he built his own. It also helped to make the feet lighter. The original feet, wearing heavy Doc Martins, were replaced by lighter ones outfitted with Vans. (I’m not joking.) “
And in case you were wondering who John Conner is, Wikipedia has the goods:
“In a possible post-apocalyptic future where machines run dominant, John Connor is the leader of the human rebel group Tech-Com that opposes them. Skynet, the supercomputer mainframe of the machines, decides that John Connor is the focal point of the rebellion and his termination would end the opposition. After repeated failures at terminating John during the war, Skynet decides to use a time dilation device to send terminators to various points in John Connor’s past in an attempt to terminate him before the war begins.”
Not many economists can tell you what Moore’s Law is or what it could mean for the economy but I think the brains at the Fed probably know exactly what the following report from the Cato Institute implies:
“Machines complement human labor when they become more
productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At first, expensive hardware and software does only the few jobs where computers have the strongest advantage over humans. Eventually, computers do most jobs. At first, complementary effects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do. An intelligence population explosion makes per-intelligence consumption fall this fast, while economic growth rates rise by an order of magnitude or more. These results are
robust to automating incrementally, and to distinguishing hardware, software, and human capital from other forms of capital.”
So my thinking goes like this:
The next two thoughts will probably end up as their own posts but for now have a gander.
KDE 4′s Sonnet will turbocharge language processing
There is a good chance that in 10 years Linux will replace Windows as the de-facto-standard desktop operating system. There’s also a good chance that KDE will become the most popular window manager for Linux. Some cell phones are already running versions of linux so the following excerpt from the above article could affect a lot of people some day.
With the Sonnet library for KDE 4, developer Jacob Rideout hopes to reinvigorate the field of desktop linguistics by adding automatic language detection and other innovative features. Sonnet is to be for KDE 4 what KSpell 2 is for the current version of the K Desktop Environment, providing spellchecking facilities to applications as diverse as the Konqueror Web browser, Kopete instant messenger, and KWord office software. Unlike KSpell, however, it will also provide grammar checking, multilingual tools, and perhaps even translation, dictionary, and thesaurus functionality across all of KDE.
And if you thought Apple’s OSX was the zenith of desktop computing I’d recommend watching the following video. I demoed Beryl at work for some interns and they were stupefied, and probably a little more interested in computers.
Interesting quote:
“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.”
Thomas Jefferson
I think my next post will be on the last idea.
Just a couple of housing related charts, nothing to see here, move along…
From Bloomberg via Calculated Risk….
“The BBB- rated portions of ABX contracts are “going to zero,” said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, a securities brokerage in Darien, Connecticut. “It’s a self- perpetuating spiral, where as subprime companies tighten lending standards they create even more defaults” by removing demand from the housing market and hurting home prices, he said.”
And from VoiceOfSanDiego.org
I’m not sure if it’s a character flaw, looking for big but simple ideas and hoping emergence will arrange them and spit out present or future reality. Maybe I have a thing for Occam’s Razor
“The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or “shaving off”, those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory.”
It’s one of those things I’ve noticed working back from my love of technology, people, and economics. Economics lead me to Hayek who said about governing
“…it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.“
Or Tolstoy on intuition
“Reasoning led him into doubt and kept him from seeing what he should and should not do. Yet when he did not think, but lived, he constantly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge who decided which of two possible actions was better and which was worse; and whenever he did not act as he should, he felt it at once.”
Or Po Brosnon on child rearing:
“When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.”
Or Edsger Wybe Dijkstra on Software
“The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.”
What’s more complicated – the brain, or a few hundred million of them operating in a democracy? Is it a matter of scale? Let’s assume communism fails but psychoanalysis works. So emergence only works on a societal level meaning our brains aren’t the result of emergent order. I have a hard time buying that. Which is probably why I’m not a big believer in therapy unless you’ve run out of people to talk to.
Photo Uploaded on April 16, 2006 by lukecanvin
Sometimes I like to take complicated ideas and find a good analogy so when I think about it again it takes a little less time to load into my head. The effect of liquidity on the pricing of risk comes to mind. My analogy goes like this.
The Fed’s creation of money would be akin to an iron getting hot.
Risk is a wrinkly shirt
The Fed turns up the heat and irons out the lumps, pushing them up towards the neck.
Unfortunately the growing bulge approaching the neck can’t simply be ironed out of an economy
Watching an interesting lecture on Intellectual Property in Law from Berkeley about software. The prof says “Uhhhhhmmm” a lot but it’s pretty informative. You’ll need RealPlayer.
I posted this on Buzzmachine a while back and stumbled upon it again. I agree with myself here and am a little disappointed that I’d forgotten my point. This is one of those stream of thoughts I enjoy because it’s a little bit bigger than just technology. It is about information, the technology you just have to know to speak the language.
# KirkH Says:
October 26th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
What value does del.icio.us add? They allow me to manage my bookmarks from any computer in the world, you call it portability. Well what if someone created an open source WordPress plugin that replicated those features? In a few years, (sure this sounds crazy) when mobile broadband is ubiquitous, everybody will have a server somewhere (probably LAMP). Personal servers will be like cellphones are now though hopefully easier to use.
That means we won’t need Flickr or Del.icio.us to store our content anymore. Google will still have the ads next to its search results but it’s entirely possible that tagging (Flock could make it ubiquitous) will out do Google’s spam succeptable web crawler system. In fact Google hires people to spot check data. If you apply something like Reddit.com’s up/down voting system to del.icio.us then spam might just cease to be a problem (imagine a button on a web browser that you could click to flag a spam site). Or think Hot or Not but for websites.
So in 10 years when IPV6 is out and everybody can have a handful of IP addresses(phone numbers for servers) for next to nothing, and everybody has their own server instead of using a federation of web based services with quazi-open APIs, we will be in control of our own information. Netflix-esque recommendations will work for websites, photos, ideas, etc. and search engines as we know them would become useless when enough people are tagging. I already use del.icio.us more than Google to find stuff. Same thing with Flickr and images instead of images.google.com.
Web 3.0 (I know I know, and assuming the gray goo doesn’t get us) might be the same as web 2.0 except instead of using large corporate web apps, we’ll just apt-get the latest greatest version of OpenSource-Flickr and run it on our personal servers. This will probably start with plugins but it might eventually evolve into a big, well integrated application that handles blogging, tagging, photos, an open version of skype to store voice/video mail, bittorrent, me-mail server, and all sorts of preferences. It’d be far more economical to do this with shared hosting and stream content to whatever odd little devices we’re using at that time.
The advantage of centralization is that it’s simple to create something like the “Flickr Interesting Photos from the last 24 hours” page. The only way to solve that problem would be with some sort of newfangled peer to peer system assuming they’re not outlawed by then. So corporations will no longer have a monopoly on centralization.
And that is why I think Flock is a big deal. It brings tagging to the masses. If Firefox and/or IE encourage a user to create an account somewhere before bookmarks work the search problem takes care of it self.
My point is that we can regain control by using open source alternatives to the current big web2.0 apps on our own servers. An open source search engine is only possible if it takes advantage of the wisdom of the crowds. That’ll be possible when everybody starts tagging.