come on over, i've got love to give you
tom coates of plasticbag offers his reasoning why the internet is not shit. he initially states that most people think that the internet is shit because "there's not enough of 'precisely the right kind of information' to finish their term-papers," and that that is a backwards way to look at the internet, one that is doomed to lead to distrust. he says it's power point is the ability to connect people in need who are not close to each other in space or timezone, pointing at various support groups that have sprung up and helped ease the pain of the citizens of the net. well done dude.#
mark watson says that "sometimes it's the platform, not the language" that is important. recalling a discussion of ruby vs. python he says while ruby is nice it's not a full platform like python. curiously i was looking at the openbsd ports collection today and this is ruby's description in it: "Ruby looks like a promising interpreted language. It shamelessly borrows from perl. Even though there are differences, perl users will find it easy to learn." heh. i don't like either because i'm a perl nazi.#
kevin is stressed over his "rise to in traffic" from announcing his company's new product. very authentically "inside the mind."#
mark watson has a sensible campaign platform for his presidency. the general problem with "fixing" the problems of the current government is that as an extension to "today's empires, tomorrow's ashes" it is true that "tomorrow's empires, next wednesday's ashes" and that the only thing constant is change so if you enter into the field thinking that your great ideas will last and always make sense you will be sorely mistaken. that said, such a plan that was constantly identifying what was wrong with itself and accepting it's impermanence so that it could constantly evolve and get better. i'm such an asshole huh, stupid kid thinks he knows anything about government. bah!#
peter merholz has come to think about how people make decisions. drawing from his experience in 'e-store' websites and hypertext theory he thinks that people are not breadth first searchers and not exactly depth first either, although closer to it. they go straight towards something concrete to think about and then consider whether it's best for them, rather than building a small kernel of what will be best and then looking for what concrete thing is closest to it. chances are there's much more to it than that, he admits, but he is having a hard time at finding something concise to read because there's so much on the topic of decision making. i think that by understanding how humans make decisions we can not only create better tools for humans to use but also create better autonomous searchers by basing them on what is 'known' to be 'successful'#
double dose of information hubs. Krzysztof Kowalczyk writes that chandler will be the ultimate rss aggregator because it will be more than just that, it will a central hub of information, one that would be a great source for a 'remembrance agent' like doug miller talks about. doug is very clever in identifying the principle difference from RAs and other software - while other software helps us do things faster (including make mistakes) RAs actually help us do it better, it makes us smarter. augmentation versus acceleration. now if only they worked in such a way that i could play with it.#
an article at kuro5hin about what's REALLY bad in foods that we eat. the interesting thing about why to switch... is that it has nothing to do with helping people to be healthy, it's completely to avoid litigation. and that's why i'm proud to be a money grubbing american.#
at the bottom of the latest japandemonium alex wollenschlaeger says that EGM's q-mann says "the PSP, Sony's handhand, will launch with a sequel to little game you might have of named Final Fantasy VII." and add that it "Seems too good to be true, but it would definitely spell success for the console if it were. Happy speculating!" - that would be some shit.#
tony pierce wonders why the sins of the flesh are so bad, a thought he was driven to think because as he says, "last night i was at a bar and several of the ladies were laughing about how long its been since theyve gotten any and i was thinking how can i make this all work out for everyone. but alas, life isnt the porno that we wish it was. maybe one day. maybe one day," the world is a cruel place where we are constantly tempted at are ingrained, i mean better, judgement. #
tony's awesome photo essays take a lot of work, but that's what makes us love them tony.#
ted leung sees that maybe human multitasking isn't such a good idea. like the man, joel says twice.#
nat is sooo emo, the poor thing. #
and a cool article in the boston globe about detecting the gender of writers just from the text of their writing. "It may be unnerving to think that your gender is so obvious, and so dominates your behavior, that others can discover it by doing a simple word-count. But Koppel says the results actually make a sort of intuitive sense. As he points out, if women use personal pronouns more than men, it may be because of the old sociological saw: Women talk about people, men talk about things. Many scholars of gender and language have argued this for years." and there's interesting further questions at the bottom, is gender a binary state? (via gene expression)#
Jack Repenning on the subversion-dev list replies to Greg Hudson question about why must revisions be stored as diffs from the head, explaining why it is that way: "Well, CVS does that because RCS does that. And RCS does that because Tichy published a paper showing that it was faster for retrieving the HEAD revision on files of around 200 lines (with a "lemma" survey showing that this was the average or typical file size at the time). On that basis, he implemented RCS that way, and it got a lot of academic macho points and took over. A few years later, people noticed that 200 lines was no longer typical (on my project, the 50th percentile is at 29682 lines!), and that "the RCS advantage" was illusory at such sizes. Commercial developers also have much less allegiance to HEAD, being into things like supporting older versions, patching patches, and working on isolation branches (which really kills the RCS assumptions)." - good to know!#
steven is going to read walk in the woods - i'm glad i can point out good books to people. bill bryson's new book looks good too, there was a good interview about it a while back but it's stuck inside the new scientist archives :(#