2017 tweets

Jan 1, 2017

Amit's five year mission @redblobgames: simblob.blogspot.com/2016/12/five-y…

Jan 5, 2017

It needs to be on. c-span.org/video/?67583-1… (8:10)

Robert Walker: I think what we'll do is begin with Professor Papert. We would welcome your testimony.
Seymour Papert: Thank you. I see in front of me where there is no vision ...
Robert Walker: Would you turn on the mic? I think that the mic ...
Seymour Papert: It needs to be on. I see in front of me where there is no vision, the people perish. There is no vision in the education establishment about where education is going.

By request, I put the climate change essay on github.
github.com/worrydream/ClimateChange

Jan 7, 2017

[ref]

(Sorry, no revision history. The revision process didn't happen inside a tiny rectangle.)

Jan 7, 2017

GOOD TIMES

REWRITE
SHOW?
REDRAW
MOCKUP
SHOW EXAMPLE
THROW OUT & REWRITE
GIVE UP?

Jan 14, 2017

twitter.com/hypotext/statu…
Welp, looks like it's time to start studying up on non-information theory.

Jan 14, 2017

[ref]

Oh Claude Shannon, my sweet summer child

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

Jan 13, 2017

[ref]

It's easier to be a hero than to create conditions such that heroism will not be needed.

Jan 23, 2017

[ref]

Carver Mead: I always had to-especially in the early days-explain that [Moore's Law] is not a law of physics. This is a law [of] the way that humans are. In order for anything to evolve like our semiconductor technology has evolved, it takes an enormous amount of creative effort by a large number of smart people. They have to believe that effort is going to result in a successful thing or they won't put the effort in. That belief that it's possible to do this thing is what causes the thing to happen.
The Moore's Law thing is really about people's belief in the future and their willingness to put energy into causing that thing to come about. It's a marvelous statement about humanity.

Jan 23, 2017

To clarify: Mead already proved scaling *could* happen physically. Moore's Law was that scaling *would* happen, in industry, at a given rate

Feb 7, 2017

[ref]

In honor of the death of Hans Rosling (too soon), watch his video on eradicating global poverty. gapminder.org/videos/dont-pa…

Feb 9, 2017

worrydream.com/refs/Kay…

Yet if we look back over the last 400 years to ponder what ideas have caused the greatest changes in human society and have ushered in our modern era of democracy, science, technology and health care, it should be a bit of a shock to realize that none of these is in story form! Newton's treatise on the laws of motion, the force of gravity, and the behavior of the planets is set up as a sequence of arguments that imitate Euclid's books on geometry. All scientific papers since then are likewise given as special kinds of arguments, not stories. Tom Paine's Common Sense is a forty page argument about why monarchies are not a good form of government and why a democracy is likely to be better.

Feb 27, 2017

Wry fatalism is the worst kind of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Mar 3, 2017

I looked up a mathematics term on my internet communications device.
worrydream.com/oatmeal/linear_function_of_a_vector.jpg

Mar 19, 2017

[ref]

Christina Engelbart @ChristinaDEI and I made a video digest of the Mother of All Demos. dougengelbart.org/firsts/1968-de…

INTRODUCTION
Preface
“A Research Center for Augmenting the Human Intellect” - where and how this presentation is produced.
Opening Remarks
Doug welcomes the audience to this “unusual setting.”
NLS Editing & View Control
Doug shows basic interactive editing and jumping, employing optional views taking advantage of the hierarchical structure, using a verb-noun command language.
NLS Hypermedia
Doug flips between text and graphical views, easily traversing the information.
Putting it to Work
Shifting from illustrative material, to the real working stuff. We use this system to do our daily work. More on this later.

Mar 22, 2017

[ref]

this seemed like a good idea at the time but it just ended up depressing
twitter.com/graduatebot

"web browser"

(from amazon.com/dp/0226422674 )

Even with these well-placed cautions and caveats, I find tacit knowledge helpful as a phenomenological description of how Feynman diagrams spread. Exceedingly few physicists picked up the diagrams and applied them in re- search based only on reading articles about the new techniques. In almost every case, some form of informal personal communication- usually of an explicitly pedagogical kind, such as an adviser mentoring graduate students, or postdocs working closely together—can be traced behind the scenes of physi- cists' uses of Feynman diagrams. Looking at the work that physicists performed before and after they interacted with members of the growing diagram-using network quickly reveals a stark pattern: even years after the diagrams had been described at length in print, individuals—and even whole departments-that were not in personal contact with members of the diagrammatic network did not make any use of the diagrams, whereas those people who interacted regularly with other diagram users made frequent use of the diagrams.

help i've forgotten what computers are for

HELLO we're symbolics. it's 1982, we just made the greatest personal mind-amplifier that the world will know. here's what you can use can use it for
Symbolics, Inc. designs, manufactures, sells, and supports advanced state-of-the-art, high-performance, single-user computer systems that feature a highly interactive man/machine interface. These systems were designed in response to the growing demand for increasing the productivity of highly skilled professional staff in various high technology disciplines. Present applications include the design of very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits, symbolic mathematical analysis, genetic engineering, seismic studies for oil and mineral exploration, training simulation, software production, and artificial intelligence research and development. The system design objective, achieved to an extent never before offered commercially, has been to greatly enhance programmer and user productivity.
making more computers
burning the earth to power computers
computers
creepy shit
killin' dudes
dehumanization of society

May 13, 2017

[ref]

1632 Galileo pretends to complain about people complaining about political suppression of earth science & scientifically-illiterate advisors

Several years ago there was published in Rome a salutary edict which, in order to obviate the dangerous tendencies of our present age, imposed a seasonable silence upon the Pythagorean opinion that the earth moves. There were those who impudently asserted that this decree had its origin not in judicious inquiry, but in passion none too well informed. Complaints were to be heard that advisers who were totally unskilled at astronomical observations ought not to clip the wings of reflective intellects by means of rash prohibitions.
Upon hearing such carping insolence, my zeal could not be contained. Being thoroughly informed about that prudent determination, I decided to appear openly in the theater of the world as a witness of the sober truth.

May 20, 2017

To the student in search of knowledge. May he use it in the service of humanity.

May 21, 2017

Austin's mom is so proud

Austin's Clean Rooms of the World
Case Book of 200 Clean Rooms

May 21, 2017

Appendix II folds out

May 21, 2017

[ref]

Analysis of Nonlinear Control Systems in 1964, transmitting a desperate message to machine learning engineers in 2017

The main task of the engineering analyst is not merely to obtain “solutions” but is rather to understand the dynamic behavior of the system in such a way that the secrets of the mechanism are revealed, and that if it is built it will have no surprises left for him. Other than exhaustive physical experimentation, this is the only sound basis for engineering design, and disregard of this cardinal principle has not infrequently led to disaster.

May 27, 2017

I wish I knew Faraday. Not personally. I don't want to talk with him. I want to be able to picture his world in my mind. To know who he knew, to hear how he talked. To understand his words as *he* meant them, not as I interpret them from 2016. I feel such a weak hold on the past. I can describe it and sound like I know it, but I don't feel a deep understanding of anything. So much is lost. How can I build on the great work of the past if I can't *be* in it?

Jun 4, 2017

[ref]

Eric Betzig, recipient of 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, pictured here with Windows Task Manager because PowerPoint stopped playing video.

Jun 17, 2017

[ref]

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of attention which it can use for something else

Jun 17, 2017

@fnedrik: Is @ESYudkowsky's quote so famous that people know that you're paraphrasing?

Jun 17, 2017

@fnedrik I think writing on the internet just means assuming that for any given reference, lots of people will get it and lots of people won't.

Jun 23, 2017

[ref]

minimum viable cathedral

Jun 25, 2017

[1] [2]

I thought that phrase sounded familiar!

David Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics
or justification of his new methods, Feynman chose to show off his diagrammatic tools with a series of worked examples. Yet no one seemed to be able to follow what Feynman was doing, or how his new doodles fitted in with the more established principles of quantum physics. Citing Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, for example, Niels Bohr raised repeated objections to the very notion that spacetime diagrams could be of any help for studying what Bohr insisted were inherently unvisualizable quantum phenomena.
Fred Brooks — No Silver Bullet
Invisibility. Software is invisible and unvisualizable. Geometric abstractions are powerful tools. The floor plan of a building helps both architect and client evaluate spaces, traffic flows, and views. Contradictions become obvious, omissions can be caught. Scale drawings of mechanical parts and stick-figure models of molecules, although abstractions, serve the same purpose. A geometric reality is captured in a geometric abstraction.
The reality of software is not inherently embeded in space. Hence it has no ready geometric representation in the way that land has maps, silicon chips have diagrams,
In spite of progress in restricting and simplifying the structures of software, they remain inherently unvisualizable, thus depriving the mind of some of its most powerfulconceptual tools. This lack not only impedes the process of design within one mind,

Jun 30, 2017

[ref]

Jun 30, 2017

@assovertkettle Holy cow, are you serious? That never occurred to me, but that must be it.

Jul 15, 2017

HYPERCARD! WHAT IS IT? IT'S NOT HYPER, IT'S NOT EVEN A CARD
youtube.com/watch?v=kZcEZD…

Jul 19, 2017

[ref]

postcalc.usps.com/Calculator/Lar…

USPS.COM Postage Price Calculator
Large Envelope Properties
Select the one that most represents your mail piece.
None of the following
is Rigid - does not bend easily
is NOT Rectangular or Square
contains items that cause more than 1/4 inch variation in thickness
belongs to the Emperor
suckling pigs
included in the present classification
innumerable

Jul 21, 2017

[ref]

1959 Engelbart's first funding for “augmenting human intellect”
1962 “Conceptual Framework” vision / research agenda / manifesto
1964 experimentation with computers, input devices, interfaces
1968 NLS first used for daily work by researchers; big public demo
1970 mail/journal system and other major innovations
1974 “peak activity” in research group

1968 Kay publishes thesis on “Flex Machine”
1970 Xerox PARC founded
1971 experimentation with bitmap displays
1972 first prototype Smalltalk system
1973 first experiments with children
1976 first Smalltalk with graphical user interface and object-oriented programming recognizable today
1980 first Smalltalk suitable for public use outside of PARC

Aug 4, 2017

bandwagon, or bandwagOFF

Aug 2, 2017

@noahlt: Everyone tries to defend their life choices by trying to convince you to make the same choices

Aug 4, 2017

@noahlt I once went to a "how to start a nonprofit" workshop where every nonprofit founder started off their session with "Don't start a nonprofit".

This is a good book. drawdown.org

Drawdown:
The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. Edited by Paul Hawken.

Sep 6, 2017

This is also a pretty good book. withouthotair.com

Sep 6, 2017

This isn't as good as those, but maybe more actionable. worrydream.com/ClimateChange

What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change? (A Personal View)

rug @Dynamicland1

walked into @Dynamicland1 this morning, found a cellular automata that @qwzybug and @siglesias left on the kitchen counter last night

Sep 21, 2017

not gonna lie, we have a pretty nice kitchen counter

Sep 22, 2017

[ref]

@Glench has made many wonderful things, but Laser Socks is certainly the sweatiest. glench.com/LaserSocks

Sep 22, 2017

[ref]

When people ask what Laser Socks has to do with thinking the unthinkable, I say "Laser Socks is our Spacewar". wheels.org/spacewar/stone…

Yet Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:
1. It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.
2. It encouraged new programming by the user.
3. It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.
4. It served primarily as a communication device between humans.
5. It was a game.
6. It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user equipment).
7. It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)
8. It was delightful.

Sep 25, 2017

forces on phantoms @Dynamicland1

Sep 27, 2017

[ref]

@GalaxyKate: Sounds like y'all gotta do a visit to @Dynamicland1. I programmed a desk, a wall, a lazy susan, and a tin of paperclips.

Sep 27, 2017

not gonna lie, we have some pretty nice paperclip tins

Sep 27, 2017

face-to-face (from amazon.com/dp/0521567459)

Conversation as Basic Setting
Not all settings are equal. As Charles Fillmore (1981) put it, “the language of face-to-face conversation is the basic and primary use of language, all others being best described in terms of their manner of deviation from that base” (p. 152).
What, then, makes other settings not basic? Let us start with the features of face-to-face conversation listed here (Clark and Brennan, 1991):
1. Copresence: The participants share the same physical environment.
2. Visibility: The participants can see each other.
3. Audibility: The participants can hear each other.
4. Instantaneity: The participants perceive each other's actions at no perceptible delay.
5. Evanescence: The medium is evanescent - it fades quickly.
6. Recordlessness: The participants' actions leave no record or artifact.
7. Simultaneity: The participants can produce and receive at once and simultaneously.
8. Extemporaneity: The participants formulate and execute their actions extemporaneously, in real time.
9. Self-determination: The participants determine for themselves what actions to take when.
10. Self-expression: The participants take actions as themselves.

Sep 28, 2017

[ref]

@michael_nielsen: Visiting @Dynamicland1 is like nothing else. It will become, if fully realized, a wonder of the world. A way of living in a possible future

Sep 28, 2017

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OL' WONDER OF THE WORLD

Sep 30, 2017

I think about this passage in @doougle's thesis a lot. doougle.net/phd/Designing_…

First and foremost, systems-centric theories tend to conflate computer games with software, and interactivity with computation. Crawford, for instance, specifies that the task of the game designer is “to automate interactivity, to replace one of the participants in the conversation with a machine” (p.77, emphasis mine). Adams and Rollings make a similar point, explaining that it is the computer that enforces the rules of videogames: “In most video games, the computer sets the boundary of the magic circle because player actions are meaningful in the game only if the machine can detect them with its input devices” (p.18). It's not so surprising, then, that design thinkers like Crawford, Adams and Rollings, and Humble dismiss the notion of radically open-ended computer games. Their skepticism is that the science of artificial intelligence is simply not advanced enough to improvise new rules or author custom-tailored content for us. Adams and Rollings, for example, write: “No computer can create absolutely unconstrained play; software can offer the player only the actions that the designer chooses to implement, and the program will always be limited by the amount of memory available” (p.138). Note that in this view, the task of “creating” gameplay is largely framed as a technical challenge - one delegated to the machine.
Bogost, likewise, shortchanges the “procedural” capabilities of human beings. He writes: “Because procedurality is intrinsic and fundamental to computers, and because computers are much more flexible as an inscription medium than human agents, they are particular suited to procedural expression” (2007, p.10). Human beings, as Bogost sees it, are less reliable: “It is difficult to coerce even a small group of people to execute a particular process again and again, without rest and without incentive” (p.10). Bogost's particular framing here betrays a subtle but problematic assumption. In evoking the metaphor of “inscription” and the image of executing a “particular” process “again and again,” Bogost depicts videogame rulesets as necessarily coherent and stable. This assumption is perhaps most apparent in his claim that “the gestures, experiences, and interactions a game's rules allow (and disallow) make up the game's significance” (2008b, p.121). Here, as in Crawford's and Adams and Rollings' work, it is the rules themselves that “allow” interaction. Authority is ceded to the machine. Bogost (2006) emphasizes our ability to interpret, reflect on, and respond to game systems, but he fails to adequately account for how authored rules - even computational ones - are inevitably repurposed and destabilized by human actors who fuse them together with their own personal, social, and cultural practices.
A critical shortcoming of these perspectives is that they forget that human beings, too, are good at “interactivity.” When we focus so intently on computation, we risk overlooking alternative views on interaction design. Games like B.U.T.T.O.N. and J.S. Joust foreground how we might conceptualize the computer not as a singular authority tasked with orchestrating interactivity on our behalf, but rather as a material - one that can be shaped by both designers and players. The problem with systems-centric theories is that they so frequently neglect (even if they do so unintentionally) these alternative design possibilities, almost as if they didn't even exist.

Sep 30, 2017

Consider a computer which is not an "authority", synthesizing some virtual world and enforcing its rules, but rather

Sep 30, 2017

a "material", in the real world, which we use and shape in a physical and human context that the computer is only minimally aware of.

Oct 5, 2017

[ref]

separated by 100 years, this is the sentence that struck me as most foreign, poignant

His formula was announced almost at once at a meeting of the Berlin Physical Society on October 19, 1900. Among those present was Heinrich Rubens, who had been working on black-body experiments. As soon as the meeting was over, Rubens went to his home and stayed up most of the night, comparing his measurements with Planck's formula. The agreement was excellent. Rubens appeared at Planck's home the next morning to tell him the good news.

zine @Dynamicland1

closeup

worrydream.com/why-2017-05-08

Oct 28, 2017

@qualmist: @Dynamicland1: You Can Put Stuff In Drawers™

Oct 28, 2017

not gonna lie, we have some pretty nice drawers

Oct 31, 2017

[1] [2]

the disruptor of all disruptors that don't disrupt themselves

Nov 14, 2017

[ref]

When the roads aren't paved yet, you actually do want the faster horse.

Nov 13, 2017

[ref]

"Authoring is always on." google.com/search?q=%22au…

Nov 15, 2017

ourworldindata.org/literacy

Our World In Data
Literate and illiterate world population
Population 15 years and older.

Nov 15, 2017

[ref]

Goal: 9 billion scientists by 2050.

Reading used to be reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses. Today, it's just what everyone does. Think about a society in which science is not reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses, but is just what everyone does.

Nov 15, 2017

("5 billion readers by 2017" would have sounded just as crazy 100 years ago.)

Nov 22, 2017

[ref]

@smdnano: Building (and re-imagining) molecular cloning tools with the @Dynamicland1 team + @AthenaUCSF @DamascenoPF @nathendel

Nov 22, 2017

[ref]

it's just Science all the time around here @Dynamicland1

Nov 24, 2017

[1] [2]

@rmozone you always come back to the classics @Dynamicland1

Dec 10, 2017

Lesson: expect your ideas to take hold in 100 years, and you'll never be disappointed! (from infosys.org/infosys-founda…)

Q. Your work goes back 50 years. How did your earlier vision of the future turn out? What surprised you?
At the start we had thought our ideas would take hold within a 10-year span. The demise of school as we knew it was predicted. Project-based, child-centered and child-driven learning would transform classrooms. We believed that every child would have a computer as well as every teacher. We imagined there would be more microworlds like turtle geometry.

I met the devil at the crossroads, and the devil gave me Linux, and I was like, come on man, I mean I get it, you're the *devil*, but seriously what is this

Dec 16, 2017

New @Dynamicland1 website coming in a few days. (I personally like the current site, but apparently it's not "responsive" on "mobile". dynamicland.org )

Dec 19, 2017

★ Dynamicland: incubating a humane dynamic medium dynamicland.org

Dec 19, 2017

Hey, remember this from six years ago? worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTh… This fire has been burning for a long time.

Dec 29, 2017

[ref]

a good mess @Dynamicland1

Dec 29, 2017

[ref]

making messy music @Dynamicland1

Dec 20, 2017

I don't know what bitcoins are, but if you've got some you'd like to donate to a non-profit, we'll happily use them to build the future! dynamicland.org

Dec 20, 2017

(tbh I'm also pretty shaky on what exactly US dollars are... but we take those too!)

Dec 20, 2017

[ref]

(I mean, I read the David Graeber book and everything, and that just left me even more confused.)

(Am I doing this fundraising thing right?)

Dec 30, 2017

@smdiehl: Who is the equivalent of Alan Kay of our generation of programmers? Someone who has the grand unifying vision for the domain of computing.

Dec 30, 2017

[ref]

As Kay himself has said so many times, this question is entirely about funding. With ARPA/IPTO-style funding, you get Kays (and Engelbarts, Minskys, McCarthys, Corbatós, etc) With VC and NSF, you don't.

Even Kay hasn't been able to "be Kay" since the 80s:
worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan

Dec 30, 2017

[ref]

@ciyer Alan's point is that that style of funding creates a research culture, and that culture is what's necessary. Self wasn't part of a larger movement in the way that personal computng, time-sharing, AI, and the internet were.