This weekend we had the Brussels Jazz Marathon.
I love it when there’s a music festival – it’s like a hot breath flowing through the city, resonating in all nooks and crannies of dark Brussels cafés. Just walking through the streets and keeping your ears open is entertainment enough.
And good news: the city gets a collective blog, thanks to eMich, just like the Gent people. Yours truly will be participating.
I was browsing the Ruby on Rails talk Google group, when i noticed the AdSense part.
I had to laugh – natural language processing still has some way to go. The AdSense parser can’t make any sense (appropriate) of the Rails terminology (model ? ferret ? intermittent problems ?)
The people at Google themselves are not necessarily bad, or even hypocrites: in fact, the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ quote is a sign they’re trying to bring something good to the world. Which is nice.
But: here’s the fundamental flaw in our economic system. When i was younger, i often wondered: why do large companies sometimes endorse/encourage ethically unacceptable actions ?
The answer is simple. As soon as you get big, you’re probably going to go public. Which means you’ve got shareholders. Maybe you can keep control, but often, as you grow, you can’t.
Shareholders want return on investment. That’s the way it is: often shareholders have shareholders themselves, and so on. Companies owned by shareholders are going for profit, period.
If the CEO and his boardroom chummies don’t want to get chucked out by the shareholder’s meeting, and lose their mind-boggling bonuses, they shut up and get on with it. This is why, however nice they are, i wouldn’t bank on Google.
Some count on consumer power (read No Logo) to balance this situation. If consumers are made aware of what’s going on, they might act on it. Which means an effect on the bottom line of the company, hence the need for them to build an ethically clean image. I don’t know if this is going to be enough.
Then, there’s alternatives to shareholder’s capitalism. I recently heard about Triodos. Triodos is a bank that invests mostly in sustainable development. Why am i relatively optimistic ? Because they’re not stock quoted. You can buy a ‘depository receipt’, but:
The rights attached to the Depository Receipts include those related to the dividends made payable on the Depository Receipts, and the right to attend a general meeting of 8 shareholders of the Bank (a ‘General Meeting’) and to speak at such meeting.
However, Depository Receipts do not give the right to vote at a General Meeting. The voting rights attached to the Shares belong to the shareholder, i.e. the Issuer. The Bank seeks to protect its own identity and working method with this structure.
Of course, things still depend on the bank itself, which is made of humans, liable to err. And it also depends on the will of people to buy the receipts. Still, it’s nice to know that alternative models are possible.
Disclaimer: my basic needs, my internet connection, my mortgage are all paid by a quoted company. The supermarket i go to is probably quoted, and most of the products are buy are from quoted companies. I may be a closet idealist, the alternative being to go and raise goats in the mountains.
I’ve been critical of Google. Still am. They pandered to dictators. They’re the largest advertisement company in the world, and the sneakiest. They’re too powerful.
However, these days i find myself using more and more Google products. Google Notebook, Google Calendar, of course Gmail, i’m working calls to Google API (well, XML) into my pet projects.
Work was rather quiet last week, so i found myself personalizing my iGoogle page, bringing different (Google and other) tools into one convenient start page. iGoogle has themes now, which change in function of the time of day. Very cute.
I see myself as a rather principled person, but apparently i’m easily corruptible. Give me good design, ease of use, and an attractive interface, and i’ll go against my higher ideals. And i’ll hand Google much of my personal data. Oh well.
I’m curious about the future of this trend.
the first: Mac
Novell: Hi, I’m Linux – from Bart De Waele’s post:
Hi, I’m Rails – from Werner Ramaeker’s posts
(mmh – i like Rails, but these guys are so über-dorky it makes my teeth ache)
Computer system impersonation – probably a thing those actors never thought they would be doing. Imagine all the work needed to get into the character too: how does a PC feel ? What are its childhood influences ? Does it like strawberry jam ?
That’s technological progress for you.
REST (Representational State Transfer – difficult to remember, let’s just call it REST) is one of those things – you never heard of it until a month ago and suddenly it’s everywhere you look.
I’ve been working with web services for a little while now. SOAP seems to be the industry standard, though you hear mentions of XML-RPC.
REST is different. The seminal work for REST is not, strangely, a W3C or IETF document – it’s a dissertation for a PhD in philosophy (philosophy in information and computer science, granted).
All sources insist heavily on the fact that it’s not a set standard, but rather, well, a grouping of ground rules/architectural style:
Here’s the REST wiki. REST and Rails are often heard together, and since i’m dabbling in Rails more and more, i might give it a shot.
The simplicity of the ‘architectural style’ is attractive – but i need to read more because some bits are still missing.
What about security ? Is this really going to work for any situation ? Will it make it to a standard ? The SOA ideal is to have something that any application/technology can integrate, so acceptance all over is necessary.
The acronym is certainly nice – and also liable to generate a lot of semi-funny geek puns. I’ll refrain from ending with one.
Once upon a time, Turing threw humanity a challenge. Make a computer that can fool me into thinking it’s a human. At least talks like a human.
That article, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, was the official beginning of what we know as AI.
What follows is less glorious. It appeared that it was nowhere as easy as hoped. Cognitive scientists and geeks sloughed away until the mid-seventies, but nobody was very convinced at the results. The problem was that nobody really understood what made us intelligent, learning creatures. What you don’t understand, you can’t reproduce. There were as many theories as there were scientists.
Computer scientists more or less gave up on what they called GOFAI, and focused on more limited problems. The result is the immensely varied bag of tricks we now call AI (genetic algorithms, neural networks, pattern recognition, support vector machines, multi-agents and many others…).
Today’s AI is good at solving limited problems, with carefully prepared input. Think of the speech or character recognition software, industrial robotics, almost autonomous vehicles, translation software, stock price prognostics, social media trawling and nice japanese robot dogs.
But it seems now that Good Old-Fashioned AI might be back in fashion. I read this article by Jeff Hawkins, one of the co-founders of Palm. I’d heard the guy was passionate about AI last year – and meant to read his book On Intelligence. I figured that it would be interesting to hear what a smart embedded computer guy has to say about our own embedded computer.
It seems he decided to have a go, and make software that is able to learn by itself, much like (he claims) the neocortex. It’s called NuPIC, and uses something called HTM, Hierarchical Temporal Memory. He open-sourced part of the code, and invites scientists and developers to play with it, which is cool (though it would have been even cooler if he open-sourced it all – old habits die hard, i guess).
The thing is, whether NuPIC is good or not, i’m reasonably optimistic about the whole problem. Not only do we have loads and loads more processing power at our disposal, neurologists are chipping away at the mysteries of the brain. Functional MRI allows us to map which areas of our brain is active at any one time. Reasonably efficient machine-brain interfaces are being developed all the time. Biogenetics allow us an insight at a molecular level.
So we might just get it right in our lifetime. So the question I, and a whole lot of people, now ask themselves is: OK, but what next ?
How do you make a nice, honest, trustworthy machine ?
I’m usually a bit wary of management/coaching/self-help gurus. I figure that at best they offer a bag of common-sense tricks, at worst a stack of buzz words packaged in expensive training courses.
However, lately, i’ve found myself in a stressful situation. I’d been lucky so far: i got given clear goals, reasonable deadlines, room for initiative. I did a good job, sometimes, i think, even exceeded expectation, or got the job done in half the time.
Then i landed on this project. Clearly understaffed. I’m usually quite confident and cheerful, but 6 concurrent tasks, interrupted by urgent (of course) request are a bit much, even for me.
At some point you realize that it’s time to sit down and think – take back some throttle, regroup, think strategically. Just to keep it enjoyable, and refrain from developing digestive problems.
Well, i just took a week off – read some zen philosophy, walked large expanses of empty beach in France. And i bought following book: ‘Getting things done’, which seems to be quite the rage in silicon valley. I especially like the subtitle ‘The Art of Stress-Free Productivity’ (probably a better read than ‘The Art of Assembly Language’, too).
So i’m willing to set aside my scepticism, and see what array of tools are on offer here. For the short term. For the long term, well, we’ll see … life is short, and the options are many.
What is it with those high-profile movies ? You know it’s probably not worth it, you have read bad reviews, and still you can’t help giving in.
I made the mistake to go and see Spiderman 3.
Comics usually rub me slightly wrong, because the female role model is to hang from high metal structures, scream, look cute, and wait for the local superhero to save you (Cat Woman being a possible exception, but Cat Woman was also stark raving mad).
Fortunately i’m able to switch off my inner feminist and enjoy a superhero yarn, especially when there’s some breathtaking action and really evil master plans.
I can tell you right now, and maybe save you the price of a cinema ticket: Spiderman III has none of those.
Jumbled storyline, uninspired dialog, and truckloads of cheese. The 50 word vocabulary of previous Spidermans got reduced to half that. Even the evil characters were not even close to intriguing. As for the special effects: once again, all the CGI in the world couldn’t save a really, really bad script.
In fact, we left before the end, and that’s saying something, I’ve sat out some pretty bad movies. Well, you’ve been warned.
Been getting a good read out of Paul Graham’s texts:
Paul Graham is annoyingly sure of himself, as only a guy who made it can be. But he does have interesting things to say. There’s more where that came from, so i’ll have a further look at it later.
Meanwhile, we’re off to France for 4 or 5 days. I’m in need of a good refill of sky, sea, and quaint coastal villages. Stone cold turkey from computers and the ‘net, and i’m actually looking forward to it. Shame on me 
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