Curt Doolittle

Category: AI, Computation, and Technology

  • SPREAD OF TECHNOLOGY AND INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE IS NOT JUST CAUSING UNEMPLOYMEN

    http://bloom.bg/1bGSoKjTHE SPREAD OF TECHNOLOGY AND INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE IS NOT JUST CAUSING UNEMPLOYMENT FOR PARKING LOT ATTENDANTS – BUT FOR LAWYERS TOO.

    We can never have the 50’s again. We’re in the new normal. Immigration is BAD for this reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 09:02:00 UTC

  • Can Computers Write Creative Programs That Solve Problems?

    ANSWERING YOUR QUESTION IN THE CONTEXT THAT YOU MEAN IT.

    In the context that I think you mean, creativity refers to the application of one pattern of relations to a different circumstance thereby solving a previouslly unsolved problem, and a problem whose solution is not already present in the domain of solutions expressed by the program code.  This set of associations is what produces ‘aha’ moments in humans: when ‘clouds’ of related ideas are connected.

    In this sense, I think the consensus is, that there is no reason we can’t build computers that can do this.  The problem is currently size, expense, and the structure of symbols’memories’ that we put into computers.  So, like interstellar flight, we are really just trying to find an affordable way to do it.  We CAN send someone to mars, or something to another star. It’s just absurdly expensive compared to what we THINK we can do with some innovation. So we’re waiting until its cheaper.

    I don’t have a lot of time right now to be thorough and the information is available elsewhere.  But the simple version is, that if you have a biological organism and start with basic stimuli (a subset of light, sound, vibration, touch, time and memory) that the structure of the physical universe, evolution and experience form a fairly accurate but simplified set of categories in our memories and therefore minds.  We build a set of symbols (patterns) from seemingly disparate stimuli, the same way we ‘see movement’ in the static figures of a flip-book.

    Computers we use today do not start with this atomic level of representation, they start with symbols. And we are just beginning to understand how to symbolically represent  physical reality in commensurable terms, and any computational system requires commensurable terms. Humans have senses,  instincts and preferences which largely form our commensurable terms; all language being an allegory to experience, and all systems of measurement producing allegories to experience.

    For example, money renders all things commensurable by price.  But without prices and money you couldn’t form a division of labor – a market. and we’d still be hunter gatherers or small family farmers.   Likewise  we can’t quite yet design software that symbolically represents reality. (ALthough this project has been underway for more than a century in philosophy, its largely been fruitless.)

    Since language (the written word) is an allegory to experience, that language should (in theory) represent symbols that are commensurable (subject to comparison and evaluation) even if only on ordinal (ordered), not cardinal (numbered) grounds – because humans operate ordinally not cardinally.

    The closest we have to that body of symbolic information that is broad enough in scope to represent enough of the physical world that the errors produced by sybmolic assocation are Turing-testable, is the Google search index.  (And google is fully aware of that). 

    But the computational power to use that data given that its index is not commensurable with other domains, (we think) is approximately equal to the total computing power present on the planet today. And even then, we suppose the mechanical process ‘thinking’ would be very slow.

    (I worked with a group of very bright people on the possibility of raising venture money for solving this problem, given that we are pretty sure how to a) create the programming tool set, b) use existing hardware technology, and c) represent the data in sets of mathematical manifolds, but it is far too early and far too costly to produce this scope of work. And to the venture community it is indistinguishable from snake oil.  So I’m not unfamiliar with the problem set, or the possible technical solutions. And I was willing to put my own money in. So I”m pretty confident.)

    Most solutions today are attempts to model the human brain with digital systems. The general idea is that it’s cheaper to do this with existing hardware than it is with to build dedicated hardware for the purpose.  And even with that technique, most recent estimates I’ve seen are in the billion dollar range.

    But it’s not that it’s not possible for computers to be ‘creative’.  Its that the minimum threshold for ‘creative association’ is a higher than the intelligence of a domestic dog, and we are still programming in symbols, not patterns, because those symbols incorporate our existing knowledge. And we’re doing that, it looks like, because it’s metaphorically the equivalent of a trip to the stars, and no one is ready to pay for that yet. 

    I think that in this short space, that’s the most accurate statement we can render.  It is a matter of money, not logical possibility either by the symbolic route, or the neural route, or the dedicated hardware neural route.

    Cheers
    Curt

    https://www.quora.com/Can-computers-write-creative-programs-that-solve-problems

  • WINDOWS V7 or V8 IN ENGLISH IN KIEV? I need an English copy of Windows in Kiev.

    WINDOWS V7 or V8 IN ENGLISH IN KIEV?

    I need an English copy of Windows in Kiev. I can only find the Russian/Ukrainian versions. And, yes I’d like to to be legit….

    I know. I know. I’m the only person in a hundred miles that wants a legit copy. 🙂

    thx

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-30 12:21:00 UTC

  • HUMILITY AND USER INTERFACE DESIGN I don’t feel humbled very often. Certainly no

    HUMILITY AND USER INTERFACE DESIGN

    I don’t feel humbled very often. Certainly not in business. Mostly, when my daughter tells me she loves me, or when friends and acquaintances demonstrate their love.

    But damn. Denis is so freaking good at UI design it’s … humbling. I mean, it’s almost irritating how easy it is for him.

    We scored. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-27 11:17:00 UTC

  • CODING TO PERFORMANCE: MENTAL TORTURE FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS I’m messing with t

    CODING TO PERFORMANCE: MENTAL TORTURE FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS

    I’m messing with the team lately:

    “Speed is a design pattern too.”

    “So, I don’t care if its easy to program – I just care if its fast.”

    “Yes it’s painful. But I pay you once for pain. The user feels pain every time he loads a page. In the pain-economy, you’re pain is just a better investment.”

    🙂

    A good complier in most languages will compensate for the overhead of writing ‘good clear code’. But we are increasingly using languages that aren’t put through ‘good compilers’, and as such, we can’t afford the high cost of that overhead.

    We coded our product for performance. And the price for that lack of overhead is readability. That means that the code is a bit hard to read for a new employee – it’s hard for me at least.

    But, in exchange, I’ve been very happy with our performance. One competitor I’m very familiar with generates about 50MB of peak ram on the server. Our same feature generates just over 4MB of peak memory on the server. We only load what we need for any given request. I think we’ll get to 5MB a request before we’re done. Between the various tactics we use (rarely reloading the page, if ever) only loading sections of any page dynamically (like FB does) , and fetching the data from the client side after the page is presented – all of which are pretty standard fare these days – we have an amazingly fast application both statistically and perceptibly. So coding to speed worked for us.

    The truth is though, that clear code is easier to debug, and easier to maintain. And it’s harder for bugs or un-executed code to creep into the source. But in exchange, adding devs to the product team is difficult. And programming to performance is in itself, slow for these reasons. And our application isn’t small by any means.

    It is, really, much more dense and full of features than the previous generation of ERP/PSA systems that run on desktops. (They look ‘child-like’ to us at this point. Really.) So we have to be very conscious of performance, and conscious of the fact that browsers tend to bleed memory like crazy.

    At present we’re testing out switching ORM’s (the software that maps the program to the database so that developers don’t have to write much SQL) to see if we can make the code easier to write without much of a penalty. But we can’t seem to find a script solution for the browser side that is mature enough for our needs, and is as fast as the way we do it today. It’s better than it has been, but it’s not there yet.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 08:42:00 UTC

  • DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has r

    DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT

    In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has replaced mechanical computers because, after their ‘singularity’ event, computers became as dangerous as the clones in star wars or the hordes of zombies that are the current narrative equivalent. Or for us libertarians, the organs of the bureaucratic state.

    Working in my chapter on solutions to institutional problems in calculative fields (the politics of investment in the commons and the distribution of proceeds, the common law, the organization of jurisprudence, accounting and banking), and reading a bit of English and Roman law, it seems to me that we have already passed through our first singularity (scientism, socialism, positivism, postmodernism, statistics, dynamic stochastic equilibria, legislative law, and the concentration of banking made possible by computers and the hubris of statistical risk measurement. ) Most of this calculative bureaucracy made possible by the computerization of recordkeeping, accounting, actuarial and statistical data.

    The fact that numbers, in the form of priced and promises, cannot represent the values we attribute to them once ownership of the priced instrument changed, is overshadowed by the ability of nation states and their fiat money to act as an insurer of all this accumulated disinformation.

    But like any problem of measurement under high causal density, its what we choose not to measure, what we cannot measure, what we cannot anticipate that we need to measure, and the inability of contrarians to insulate themselves from the accumulate risk, that creates fragility in the entire system.

    Norms, in particular are an asset that can only be measured by aggregate comparison to those with different norms.

    Trust can be priced. It can. And it makes health care look trivial by comparison. It is an absurdly expensive norm.

    My analysis, which is supported by what we are finally seeing in the data, is that we have already hit one singularity. And the way to correct it is not more computing, which by the process of aggregation launders all future-value information from any price or promise, but by more professionalization of calculative fields alpng the responsibilities of lawyers, doctors, and cpa’s. (albeit privately insured rather than certified.) And the weakening of limited liability protections.

    While i agree that government concentration of capital can create certain institutions, all such institutions can be privatized once economically viable.

    But taxes, laws, our current primitive accounting methods, banking, credit and dent instruments sll launder causal relations.

    This not only creates disinformation but prohibits the population from learning.

    The keynesian might argue that the good that results in the short term is more important than the harm in the long term. And that we can fix those problems when we get there. ( That is, in fact, their argument. )

    The truth is that the problem is approaching more rapidly, and we are nearly powerless to fix it by incremental means. Conversely, we could achieve all the same ends, and prosper even more so, by using known solutions to institutional problems of cooperation, and adapt to guture circumstances.

    But that program of action would require that the progressive program acknowledge that its postmodern failure is as great as its socialist failure was.

    And that cannot happen. Not the least of which is because it is tied too closely now with feminism. And numerically, policy change isn’t possible for that reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 16:20:00 UTC

  • Nerd Humor “Java is the COBOL of the 21st century. It’s verbose, heavyweight, it

    Nerd Humor

    “Java is the COBOL of the 21st century. It’s verbose, heavyweight, it’s an industrial language … takes many lines of code where other languages require only five…Managers like it because they think they’re getting a lot of work when they see a lot of lines of code.” – Larry Wall

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-18 13:44:00 UTC

  • LIKE I SAID IN 2002

    LIKE I SAID IN 2002:

    http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/06/why-coding-is-the-blue-collar-job-of-the-21st-century/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+aei-ideas%2Feconomics+%28AEIdeas+»+Economics%29#mbl

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-05 20:49:00 UTC

  • INTERNET ISN’T AN INDIVIDUAL PURSUIT, IT’S SOMETHING WE DO WITH EACH OTHER” A ye

    http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online-after-a-year-without-the-internet”THE INTERNET ISN’T AN INDIVIDUAL PURSUIT, IT’S SOMETHING WE DO WITH EACH OTHER”

    A year without the internet.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-11 10:32:00 UTC

  • PROBLEM WITH ‘PROGRAMMERS’ I wholly agree with the sentiment expressed here. The

    http://programming-motherfucker.com/THE PROBLEM WITH ‘PROGRAMMERS’

    I wholly agree with the sentiment expressed here. The problem is that the members of the set of software developers who are capable of programming as responsible craftsmen is significantly smaller, if not, marginally insignificant, compared to the number of day laborers, and union workers who use the same moniker.

    And while ‘programmers’ of the craftsman ethic, can identify one another, it is impossible for those of us who are responsible for other people’s money to tell who is indeed an artist, who is a craftsman, who is a union worker, and who is a day laborer.

    And I realize that it sucks. But the truth is that everyone has the incentive to lie, because programming skill is a scarce good and is therefore valuable.

    So the problem, is (a) programmers do not self-police the industry the way doctors do, and (b) no one provides ‘programmer insurance’ which is what certifications are supposedly for, but are again a perverse incentive that is exploited by union workers and day laborers (c) consulting companies profit by the fact that while they may have one or two craftsmen, they they are loss leaders, and they largely employ and make money on day laborers (d) customers can’t hire craftsmen because of bureaucracy and tedious work, so they have no other economy.

    If you’re a programming mohterfucker, with a cause, take some money and create an insurance company that insures programmers are competent, and charge them fees for certification and maintaining it. If someone is insurable then when they are hired, the company pays the insurance company part of the programmer’s fee. But the motivation of the programmer is to capture that revenue, not pay the insurance company. And so the programmer is again at fault.

    The problem is incentives. 🙂

    http://www.programming-motherfucker.com/

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-11 05:11:00 UTC