qwzybug

Ha, fail. That was supposed to be a reply to another reply. Wups!

Entrenched in what? What's the compelling reason not to just walk away from your Facebook account? The scrabble game you're right in the middle of? Photo metadata? Messages about important parties?

Try just quitting Facebook cold-turkey. You'd be surprised how easy it is, and you just might like it.

Yes, and that's why it's dumb to call articles about exercise and nutrition "hacks". When all of human endeavor falls under the rubric of the "hack" the word ceases to mean anything.

Hack your commute, take public transit! Hack your next dinner party with parlour games. Delightfully clever key hack keeps all your keys on the same ring. Hack Mexican food with a "burrito" sized tortilla! Hack your brain with REM sleep. Hack the sun with a straw hat. Hack hygiene with silver oxide "deodorant". Hack girls with compliments. Hack your windowsill with a pot of wheatgrass, and hack the sky with the goddamn moon.

It's stupid. Take a walk.

Amorphous, highly elastic materials (glass comes to mind) are often not great for long-wearing designs like bicycles. At least to present, amorphous metals wear more like glass or carbon fibre than steel: invisible structural damage leads to quick catastrophic failure. Rather than dings you get severed seat tubes and exploding wheels. For the time being, no one's invented anything better than cro-moly steel for the good old bicycle.

It does sound like an utterly fascinating material, however. The slow, glass-like viscosity curve would be an amazing property to play with.

Interesting article, and some really nifty graphs, but stay away from the comments section.

More seriously, could someone with a bit of experience in this sort of thing speak to the actual import of these patterns? It's not entirely obvious whether or not there are shenanigans at work.

blink blink

Walter Benjamin? Is that you? Your aura looks pink today.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/g...

Sure, but that's not to discount the main point, which is that singularitarians arbitrarily privilege the importance of computational advancement over the real world. This is probably because computers are the easiest to draw the exponential advancement graph for (and because singularitarians hardly ever leave the basement).

Vernor Vinge predicted the singularity not before 2005 and not after 2030. Will we have crazysauce computers by then? Definitely. Will anything else in the world have caught up with the pace at which we apply transistors to wafers? Probably not.

One of Sterling's points is that the singularity is like dot-com startups in the 1990s: it doesn't have a business model. I think it would be right to say that it doesn't scale, either; there are too many other bottlenecks in the system where we wave our hands and say something about just throwing more metal at it.

Seriously, though, check out the talk, it's quite good.

Anyone who thinks the technological singularity is a viable idea ought to listen to Bruce Sterling's Long Now talk, "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole".

http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-you...

The whole notion is really dreadfully implausible and poorly thought-through. A few computer-centric technologists take their hobby to be the most important thing in the world, as if the exponential growth of transistors on a chip or bits on the web are more important than the (stagnant) power grid, energy and food production, global war and peace, etc.

Admittedly, that's not an uncommon phenomenon in these parts.

The recent rewording of the interpreted languages clause of the App Store agreement ought to allow CouchDB to run embedded in an application.

I hacked on it a bit at Open-Source Bridge last month; didn't even finish getting Erlang compiled. It's all gravy until you get to the bootstrapping step, which may in fact require a jailbreak, or much more Erlang-fu than I have.

And unless every app uses its own couch, you could argue that it's of marginal utility to run CouchDB on the iPhone because of its limited support for "real" multitasking. (You can't use your phone as the couch in your pocket for all your desktop apps, or something like that.) However, CouchDB's focus on replication and the offline use case make it useful as a dead-easy cloud cache and service.

I was totally agreeing with your description of the end of the video, and then I actually got to the end of the video. Absolutely mind-boggling.

SA also wields the banhammer with wild abandon. For people who don't toe the line, the $10 turns into a subscription. The army of mods needed to keep the revolving door going is large, but I think they like their jobs.

Unfortunately the last several years of SA have revealed that this model doesn't really scale either, at least with regards to maintaining a vibrant community and avoiding the Digg effect. I think they should have started raising the rates about 2004.

I can't help but feel that this would be a really beneficial innovation in the way content is provided on the Internet. Every other video distribution site (except Netflix, whose online business model I still can't comprehend) has gone back to ads. Hulu+ is essentially Cable: the Revenge, but with more commercials than on-demand.

Being able to "subscribe" to a favorite show for $4 a month, in HD, without commercials, would be fantastic. I hope there's something to this rumor.

By and large an excellent rundown, though I had a few issues with the details in places—e.g., totalistic CAs aren't anything special, they're just a restriction of the generalized rules, and happen to be used more often in many-state/many-dimension CAs because the rule enumerations just get too damn big. A niggle.

Seriously, though, some really fantastic stuff. My undergrad thesis used a lot of CAs, and some of the examples still floored me. A working prime generator with integrated LCD display? Um... what?

That's just while Congress is physically in session (another use for the filibuster...?). Search "Larry Craig" or "Luis Gutierrez" for some recent arrests of American representatives.

Bucky Fuller would disagree. Money stands for something—the real wealth of technology and information. As we continue to create and improve quality of life the real amount of capital in the world increases.

I always liked to imagine that, ideally, an inflating currency would proxy for this real wealth-generation, but that doesn't quite seem to be the case.

Anyway, the important thing is that we're not (simply) printing money. The world gets richer.

Not quite. Apple's HIG recommends allotting 44pts for hit targets (about 90px on the new screen) for usability's sake, but you can hit much smaller targets if you're careful about it.

That's the thing, though, it really depends. $9.99 is a good price for a display adapter, a pretty spendy price for a wine key, and an absoludicrous price for a crappy Japanese hand fan. Among iPad apps, $9.99 is top-shelf.

Sure, that's true as far as it goes, but it gets a little strained when you see the similarly-priced competition. Pricing isn't a function of absolute utility and value, it's also a function of economic environment.

Take Apple display adapter dongles. Do I get a ton of use out of them? Do they make my MacBook better? Sure, but $30 is still a cruel fucking joke.

My wine key feels great in my hand, never breaks, and has given me loads of value and joy over the last decade but I would still be a fool to pay more than $5 for it.

I've carried a plastic Japanese fan in my bag for more than ten years that has saved my sweaty ass in many social circumstances, and is indispensable for my personal well-being between July and September; it's covered in ads and I got it for zero yen and I wouldn't have paid much more than that for it.

All that said, the correct price of a thing is whatever people will pay for it, and 37signals has certainly demonstrated an uncanny ability to find their market.

Have you used Adobe Ideas? Its featureset is much closer to Draft than MSPaint. Your "features" scarequotes make it sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.

It has two more colors and you can change the marker size. Oh, and you can pinch-zoom, which really shouldn't need a user guide on the iPad. Some of the buttons on the drawing screen in Draft are on the documents screen in Ideas.

Ideas' simplicity rocks, and Draft looks good too, though I'm not in love with the white-on-black scheme.

One thing I would like to know: if 37 signals only makes apps they use to get their work done, and the only work they get done is to make their apps... have we discovered a perpetual motion machine?

He was also one of the first to articulate the notion of the computable world. Wolfram and crew owe Zuse an intellectual debt (though as far as I know he doesn't appear in the footnotes to A New Kind of Science, big surprise).

Zuse should be a folk hero for anyone interested in the notion of a discrete, computable physics.

It's unusual for web drag-drop stuff to work well on mobile Safari. It takes care to do it right. E.g., worldoftext is unusable on an iPad (weep!) for drag related reasons.

I heard a rumor that there's going to be cake in Portal 2.

Wait—but items 2-4 are also implied by item 1. "Tweet" is just a jargon-word for "Twitter message" or "Twitter post", conveying no extra significance or connotation, and the Times standards editor is correct that journalists should avoid argot and jargon whenever possible.

At my school, they said "one-to-one" and "onto" for "injective" and "surjective". But then, the linear professor started teaching the subject in 1952, so he was quirky.

This is why apple exhorts devs not use UUIDs in public-facing services. Too bad they didn't let AT&T in on the secret...

Not quite what the article is talking about, but one of my greatest "aha!" moments in math/code was when I realized how handy the seemingly redundant atan2 function is.

I don't find the iPad speaker is quite loud enough to be heard over my shower. I have to crank the volume on Maddow in VLC to get my morning news.

Which netbooks have better battery life? I have trouble getting 2 hours out of my Eee. I guess you can lug around a 9-cell battery, but damn.

Bruce Sterling evangelizes the multitool in his Last Viridian Note: http://www.viridiandesign.org/2008_11_01_archive.html

"I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

"That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.

"A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

"As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.

"Do not lug around an enormous toolchest or a full set of post-earthquake gear unless you are Stewart Brand..."

(the whole thing is well worth a read)

I think his reasons for carrying one a very similar to the reasons you might want a general-purpose, high-performance, relatively popular, high level and concise programming language in your back pocket. For those odd times when you need to consume an API, or decompose a high-dimensional matrix, or simulate traffic flow. You know, at a bar or something.

And of course, "do not lug around an enormous library of hand-rolled lisp macros unless you are Paul Graham." 

I tend to agree that the recent focus on web technology has retarded the pace of actual innovation in the last decade. The smart people who should be building the jetpacks and curing cancer are making pets.com, or, no offense, founding YC startups to make a webapp to market your new webapp to other people's webapps on the web.

Cf. Warren Ellis: "a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future." http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/05/start/...