From Assembly Intelligence to Artificial Intelligence My world view as a teenager was binary in at least 10 intertwined ways: all the code, obviously, and the fact that you were either elite or a “lamer”. I’d hazard a guess that this view was true for practically every demoscener at the time (mid-80s through early 90s). We conditioned each other and ourselves to wrap up all of our worth in one simple metric: how much impossible shit can you squeeze out of the machine? ...
I Like Being Autistic Recently, US Eugenicist in Chief and conspiracy theory trafficker RFK Jr. held an unsurprising, yet somehow still shocking, news conference in which he reduced humanity’s existence to economic utility and normative behavior. RFK has promised to find the cause of the “autism epidemic” - which doesn’t exist - by September, and has added David Geier, a hack previously fined for practicing medicine without a license, to the clown convention in D.C. RFK stated that autistic people will “never pay taxes”, “never hold a job”, “never play baseball”, “never write a poem” and “never go out on a date”. Speaking only for myself, the IRS and git would disagree with the first couple of quotes, and while I’ve never played baseball, I enjoyed being a soccer keep back in the day. And I play a mean game of Rocket League these days. Holy cow! ...
The piss molecules were inside my skin. There was a cloud of urine with a 200 foot radius emanating from the drunk passed out on the sidewalk and I was already in it. I knew this was going to happen but I rolled the dice because it wasn’t supposed to happen. It was never supposed to happen. The city was supposed to be clean and there weren’t supposed to be massive pee traps to randomly stumble into. It was the same thing at least twice a week. Critical failure. Same drunk, same part of town. How many breaths of air poisoned with his bladder mist had I taken over the months? ...
As a user, Consider Offshoring Your Data and Services Privacy is a human right. Privacy requires data protection. I want America to do better. I want American tech companies to do better. I think that will take a long time, and while we work on it, we are where we are because we allowed it all to happen. At this point, there’s a good argument for considering all Big Tech, prominent US-hosted services, some US-made software and, since long, the entire US network essentially compromised, at minimum as far as privacy goes. The tech oligarchs are seemingly submitting to the current regime, and some are directly involved with what’s likely the most significant personal data breach in history. The eventual result of all this could make Snowden-era PRISM, Boundless Informant, MUSCULAR and XKeyscore surveillance mechanisms look like baby monitors. ...
Autism and Fascism Have Crossed Paths Before—but Not How You Think “Information wants to be free”, observed Stewart Brand during a discussion with Steve Wozniak at the 1984 Hackers Conference. In hindsight, it was a simple, almost cute mantra for us. Perhaps it should’ve been obvious that it would hold doubly true for mis- and disinformation. I think we just naively assumed that everyone sought to share the truth in accordance with science and reason. We were just trying to figure the machines out, no fear. ...
Short-circuit evaluations of logical expressions can cause problematic behavior, and so can short-circuit expressions in human communications. In stressful times such as looming deadlines or other project troubles, it’s easy to slip and start taking shortcuts in our communication and overall behavior. The closer we live to survival mode, real or perceived, the less we act like who we strive to be. Ask anyone on their first night of Minecraft. Holes are dug, dirt is flung and friends are blamed when a creeper blows up their obviously inadequate mud hut. ...
A lone engineer stands at the city gate. She built a subway station here three years ago on a sunny day. On this dark, foggy night, she wishes her flashlight shone brighter, her map was up to date and that the neon signs of Ginza weren’t powered by a frozen yogurt stand ten miles away. If you’re in production, product or some other non-tech discipline, you’ve probably found yourself face-to-face with a supposedly smart and experienced engineer saying they’re unable to tell you how long it’ll take to build your next feature. Maybe they asked for a day or five to think about it. Perhaps they even said they wouldn’t be able to provide a responsible estimate until work is already underway, essentially leaving you with a dice roll and hoping for a triple natural 20. ...
When I kick the bucket drum, I’ll leave behind three creations: my spawn and 10 buckets of bits. One bucket full of code and another brimming with notes. /* No, not these kinds of notes. */ Perhaps the artifact in this Game Over scene will instead be more akin to a single, large, loud volume where .exe and .wav files have gone to fade out their filename extensions and merge with abandon. In the game loop of my biocomputer, this is the degree to which for-loops and 16-bar loops play off each other and engage in a constant, consonant, interdisciplinary dance of call and response. I am reflecting not on some shallow, semantic version of symbols and cymbals in symbiosis but a real, requisite reciprocity recursing deep into namespace SubBass. ...
At some point, your co-worker (peer or otherwise), or even an entire team, will massively screw up. Or you will. Perhaps you already have. If the latter is true, congratulations – you’re in a great place to make a positive difference. I’m going to assume, perhaps barring certain egregious transgressions, that you already manage failure from a place of empathy and growth, not through shaming or punitive means. If that’s not the case, you’ll first have to look elsewhere for help to make that change. ...
Stravinsky talked about the concept of creative limitation in music being useful in order to reach new and different results. There have been TED talks on limitations as an upside. (LaaU?) Publications like Harvard Business Review and Forbes have written about constraints breeding creativity. Since the concept became somewhat popular, it can sometimes feel like way too much lemonade-making and not enough being pelted with a dozen lemons in the face with your eyes open. ...
While my perception of my own knowledge path has been something like “I know nothing” -> “I know everything” -> “I know nothing”, engineers at any level can become overly convinced that their own approach is the correct one. A junior engineer straight out of school may be overly biased toward approaches taught there, which may or may not be effective in, for instance, a heavily product- and market-driven environment. Someone with a few years of experience may, due to their own definition of what success looks like, believe they have arrived and there’s not much more to learn. (This was me during the dot-com bubble.) A senior engineer with a decade or more of either going deep or wide can become too set in their ways and reluctant to incorporate different thinking, like single-brain groupthink. The rock star engineer, if you subscribe to such a thing, may well have developed an ego matching the size and approach attributes of a tropical island dictatorship. ...