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Friday, March 6th, 2009
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11:55 pm - Pretty much done with this
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OK, Livejournal, it's been a good run. But there's a new kid in town. I've moved over to jaguilar.posterous.com. That site is a startup run by a guy I know, and it's already doing a pretty good job at out-competing Livejournal at giving me the features I care about.
I'll still be following all y'all with RSS feeds. My posterous posts directly to my Facebook profile, so you won't miss anything either. I love you kthx bye bye!
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| Friday, February 20th, 2009
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9:08 pm
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I enjoy watching anime now and then. With Sie Deen on business travel to Singapore, I find myself with extra time in the evening, especially on the rare days I feel unwell like I do tonight. But what is a guy to do when the broad community has . . . a different taste than he does. Specifically, this: Clannad (or it's second series, whatever) is one of the top rated shows on one of the most popular review sites in the "community." To me, watching five girls fall all over themselves for an unremarkable guy is not interesting. I think I'm supposed to find these girls desirable and empathize with the male lead. That's not happening. They are caricatures, annoying ones. Their motivations are inscrutable because they have no person-hood for me to latch on to. I think they appeal to the average viewer of these series, but if that's so, what does it say about their taste and its compatibility with mine? It takes some meaning out of reviews I see. I stopped watching that after the second episode. Bah. There's a difference between romance and the appearance of it. You can find a good depiction of the former in The Office, which is a comedy show! How is it that a comedy show gets it right and a drama gets it so, so wrong? Subtlety, is part of it at least. If your literary romance is not understated, you are doing it wrong. Male obliviousness (which may not even exist because if anything we overestimate our stature in the eyes of every woman we meet) is not subtlety. Many anime series are guilty of conflating the two. ---- I'm also reading a series of books by Paul Park about a princess from the alternate histo-fictional country of Roumania. It's good. The magic is mysterious and the politics even more so. There are lots of entities in competition, all with very human motivation. Except the psychopathic members of the cast, who have believable psychopathic motivations instead. Park does does one thing which really throws me for a loop some times. For example, the first few pages of the third book from the series. We learn that there has been a train derailment and with it a Radium spill near a town called Chiselet. So there's a detective there who's trying to find the cause of the derailment and why there was Radium on the train to begin with. Not knowing about radiation, he and the doctor he's inteviewing do not understand how people could be getting sick even though rain waters have diluted the spilled poison. When he leaves to return for Bucharest it says at the beginning of the last paragraph in the chapter: Even intelligent, rational persons, daydreaming and dreaming, sometimes at moments can achieve a kind of access to the secret world. If in his imaginations eye Luckacz had looked backward . . . he might have caught a glimpse of the disaster that still roiled the sky above Chiselet. He would have seen flashes of lightning burst inside the clouds, which were also lit from beneath by explosions and fires. Near the wreck along the train line there was a raw wound in the earth, a crater almost half a kilometer across. Fires burned in both the marshland and the town among the shattered buildings. What are you trying to do there Mr. Park? The first three times I read this paragraph, I thought that it was saying that somehow the Radium had caused a thermonuclear explosion. Just a couple of hours ago he left the town and it was fine except the poisoning. I'm still not positive, but I think you're supposed read this as the hidden world's being a reflection of the deeper truths in our world. (The hidden world is the source of magic in this series.) And the deeper truths are that if you spilled gallons of radium into the marshes around a town, the hidden effect would be like a bomb going off. Several transitions like these through the last two books have thrown me for a loop. I don't find Mr. Park's writing very accessible, but I do find it good. Now I shall cook myself some pasta. Also, the LJ rich text editor can jump off a cliff and die for all I care.
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| Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
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8:50 am - California Propositions 2008
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How I plan to vote for California's ballot propositions this year:- Yes on 4
- Yes on 11
- No on everything else
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| Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
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7:59 am - Paint.NET and Open Source Software
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Paint.NET is confirmation to me that the biggest practical problem facing Open Source software is in the tools. If you look at what Paint.NET and the GIMP have accomplished, then consider Paint.NET has been around for five years and the GIMP for twelve, it's clear that there's a serious productivity differential between the two. The biggest thing holding the GIMP back is GLib and GTK, which is ironic in that GTK was composed specifically for the GIMP. This could be part of the reason why free and open source software composed for Windows and Mac OS X sucks so much less than free software for Linux.
This isn't the limit of the problem: there's still an attitude difference visible even in the licenses (MIT for Paint.NET and GPL for GIMP) where one of these programs is about the user and one is about the idea, and no amount of engineering productivity can overcome that.
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| Friday, October 17th, 2008
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10:02 am - The Problem with "The Gamers Bill of Rights"
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There's one big problem with this concept of a "Gamers' Bill of Rights". The true Bill of Rights was a set of rights that we guaranteed to ourselves when we were setting up the government of the United States. The Gamers' Bill of Rights is a set of demands that we are trying to force others to acquisce to, sometimes against their own best interest. Labeling his demands the way Brad has, he is claiming moral justification that does not exist and encouraging others to do the same.
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| Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
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7:49 pm - Overshare
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Over the past two days, everything I've wanted to write could probably be called "over-sharing." So, I am undersharing and not writing very much at all.
Puppies are cute.
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| Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
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12:10 am - John Barnes
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John Barnes (of The Sky So Big And Black, Kaleidescope Century, Finity, and most recently Mother of Storms): ten real characters in eighty pages is too many. Cut.
Also, you have an unhealthy fascination with rape. Why is it in almost every book you write? Get help.
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| Monday, October 13th, 2008
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9:25 am - Don Juan Di Marco
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Watched Don Juan Di Marco with Sie Deen this weekend. It's my second time seeing it. She liked the movie very well -- how could she not? There's something very attractive about the Don Juan's ability to see "through" the surface of things to the beauty underneath. But how do you get there without giving up so much by your intentional blindness?
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| Thursday, August 21st, 2008
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12:23 am - Mozilla Creates Internet Explorer Plugin to Increase IE Standards Compliance
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Mozilla are apparently creating a plugin that will replace some of the Internet Explorer rendering logic to bring it better into conformance with web standards. I think this is a great idea because people who can't be troubled to install Firefox will of course wish to install an IE plugin to fix compliance with a standard no one is using yet.
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| Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
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11:56 pm - Wage Discrimination
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Illegal immigration is a bad thing right? It takes jobs away from American workers, it leads to abuse of poor immigrants, weakens our national security . . . how many of us believe this? Across the nation, it's frightening. Surely some of my friends as well. I know I have seen writing like that in my RSS feeds occasionally.
What is the biggest source of wage discrimination in the world today? And I don't just mean, "On average, men earn N% more than women in the U.S." I'm talking about a much more serious standard, something more like, "Men earn N% more than women with the same educational background, same racial makeup, and in the same location."
Is it racist whites taking advantage of blacks in the U.S.? Men getting paid more than women (in Pakistan)? Whites getting paid more than blacks in the U.S. in 1939? Any of those?
No, indeed it is not. The biggest differences is between people of the same education level and racial background living in the U.S. versus Nigeria. The same people in the U.S. make 8.5 times more than people who are essentially identical, but live in Nigeria.
What does this mean to you? To start off with, claiming to care about the poor but ignoring the poverty-ameliorating effects of immigration is bullshit. It is a type of caring that only cares about the poor who happen to live in the same nation -- a quality unearned except for in accident of birth, much like skin color. That's right: nationalistic populism is a lot like racism. It's just more socially acceptable . . . for now. But what was socially acceptable in 1800 has passed, and this will too, but not before many more have suffered.
Which increases a Bolivian person's yearly wage more: an additional year in school, or working in the United States? The latter, by about five times. Which is better: the lifetime benefits Indonesian workers achieved through the anti-sweatshop movement, or the financial benefits of a single chance at working thirty weeks in the U.S.? The latter.
What does this mean? Widening the conduits through which individuals of all stripes -- poor, rich, and everything in between -- may flow into the U.S. promises a greater benefit than almost any charity we can give to, and a raging majority of that benefit goes to the poorest. It is time that we started living up to our national ideals of freedom and listening to what the French chiseled on the Statue of Liberty.
You see, those poor people don't really give a shit if we wish them well. They only care if we do them well. If we're not willing to drop our ideology to do well to those who need it most, how much is that ideology worth?
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/127718.html
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| Friday, July 4th, 2008
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4:42 pm - Would You Let a Post Human AI Out of a Box?
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Suppose you're a programmer working on a strong computer. The computer is really large and has lots of programs, all of which are interacting with each other, changing each other, basically, evolving. At some point it becomes clear that a trans-human AI has emerged from the noise. (By trans-human, I mean of cognitive complexity and depth at least ten times as great as a human's.)
One night, you are alone in the lab working on another system and a terminal window opens on your computer. This is, by coincidence, the only computer the AI is connected to. Its only connection is a text pipe that allows chat-style communication. Now here's the question: do you talk to it?
At first, this may seem like a simple question. But remember that this AI is ten or a hundred times as intelligent as you are. Also, you don't understand its internal workings. You don't know if it likes you or hates you. You don't know what, if anything, it wants.
In fact, there is a good deal of thought going into questions like these. The foundational principle on which this question may be answered is the Friendliness Problem. To be short, it is impossible to prove that such an entity is friendly without letting it out of its box. And if you talk to it, because if its enormous intelligence, it will probably be able to convince you to let it out. So you shouldn't talk to it.
Or should you? I'm pondering this problem myself. My recent thought on the issue is this: If we've created a trans-human AI once, it's likely we'll create one again. Someday, someone is going to let it out of the box. Although, since that may result in a holocaust that no human will survive, perhaps it is best to just hope that the next one is not created for a long time. However, given the pace of technological advance, I think this hope is likely foolish; therefore, it may be equally good to let the first one out, because the following AIs are no more likely to be friendly.
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| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
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5:42 pm - What Is A Right?
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Americans really love to talk about rights. What is a right? We don't often bother to define it. A lot of people define "right" as things they want for themselves. I have a right to food, water, shelter, property, education, healthcare, privacy. But what do you actually have a right to?
In the end, your "rights" are only those privileges which you can defend for yourself or mobilize other people to defend for you. That's part of the reason that wealthier societies define more privileges as rights: others need to spend less time getting sustenance and can thus spend more defending the privileges they've granted others.
But what are the most important rights? Those which are "inalienable" and should never be taken away? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the ones our Declaration of Independence define. The Constitution enumerates a few more in the Bill of Rights. But what defines these rights that we can all agree on?
Inalienable rights, in my opinion, are simply those which no reasonable person would want taken away by force. Therefore privacy is not an inalienable right: it's something that many can't agree on in scope or in principle. (For example, I do not believe in a right to privacy, especially because that right is often defined as a right to control somebody else's property or means of production.) But life is an inalienable right: some reasonable people would voluntarily cede their right to life, but none would want it taken by force. The same with property: many reasonable people give to charity, and some even support higher taxes, but no one wants their property taken by force without their agreement. The right to make contracts is an inalienable right. Therefore the most important rights are the ones we all agree on for ourselves.
How do you define a "right"?
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| Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
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12:02 am - Naomi Klein is My Anti-Girl
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I really don't like Naomi Klein. In fact, because I am a flawed person, if you tell me you like Naomi Klein, I'll probably start having trouble liking you! Just kidding. Ok, a little maybe.
Here's a video talking about her duplicity:
Seriously. The woman is crazy. Do not listen to her.
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I'm always shocked when I hear otherwise intelligent people say things like, "Well, we know Communism didn't work. And we can see that when you go half-way, to the socialist democracies of modern Europe, things quickly start breaking down. Or, for example, the effects of nationalization in Venezuela, which are already being felt today. But maybe if we only go half as far as that, it will be better than our already mildly socialist system." (I literally had someone make this claim to me barely a month ago.)
And I wonder to myself, "What, aside from an emotional and anti-scientific, anti-evidentiary view of history and the facts could possibly lead you to make that conclusion?" I conclude, because I like to continue to think highly of my fellow human beings, that they just aren't really thinking about the problems in this domain. They make prognostications on the topic the same way I might make a judgment about whether to pass or run the ball at a certain point in a football game, with only the barest understanding of the effects one move or the other might have.
Certainly there is room for some nuance in opinions on this topic. The whole book has not been written. But when the opinion is contrary to the prevailing trend, it had better be supported by evidence. For example: "We know that in the past many studies have shown higher minimum wages to drive up unemployment, but this is OK because study X shows that the poor are better off regardless." Something of that nature.
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Why are childcare prices in California so high? Hint: the problem isn't with the free market or big corporations.
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| Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
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11:42 pm - Milton Friedman is My Guy
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Naomi Klein is my anti-gal.
"See I think there's been one underlying basic fallacy in this whole set of social security and welfare measures, and that is the fallacy -- this is at the bottom of it -- the fallacy that it is feasible and possible to do good with other people's money. Now that view has two flaws. If I'm going to do good with other people's money, I first have to take it away from them. That means that the welfare state philosophy of doing good with other people's money at its very bottom is a philosophy of violence and coersion. It's against freedom. Because I have to use force to get the money. In the second place, very few people spend other people's money as carefully as they spend their own."
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| Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
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10:40 pm - Review: Alan Selvaggi Photography
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In response to Alan Selvaggi's request, I am removing a lot of the detail from this post. The goal is that my review would have less of an impact on his business.
I think bad reviews should have a statute of limitations, or a half life. Just because someone makes a foolish decision once does not mean they should forever be marked by that stain, unless it is truly deep. And deep though the hurt Alan Selvaggi caused us was, it was not that deep.
I'm not going to remove everything. For example, I'll say to any of you coming here while searching for a wedding photographer that Sie Deen and I had a really horrible experience with Alan Selvaggi. Among other things, he lost a large portion of the photos he took on our wedding day. I talked to him about data storage when he asked me to remove this review and his current practices sound acceptable (whereas what he was doing before was an invitation to catastrophe). I will also tell you that his customer service toward us in the months following the loss of our photos would only have won awards in a contest to see who was worst.
That said, I still think the reasons we picked him were valid. He did take some beautiful photos of other people's weddings. If you're considering him for yours, I advise you give him a chance at least. Talk to his more recent customers to see their opinion of his work, or feel free to write me or call for details. Investigate, beware, but don't write him off entirely on the basis of this one bad review.
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| Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
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8:06 pm - Natural Life Expectancy
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Here's one for the folks who support socialized health-care.
You've heard that the United States has a lower life expectancy than many other developed countries, right? Michael Moore and many leftists take the position that socialized health-care in other countries gets better results than here.
However, the prevailing health-care numbers do not take into account accidents and homicides, so when we're talking about health-care, we should take those types of death out. This blog post runs those numbers and finds the United States to have one of the highest natural life expectancies of the developed work (for the period 1980-1999).
Now, for where you want to live, this does not change the life expectancy number meaning. But I think that this pretty well does away with the idea that socialized health-care somehow helps us all live longer.
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| Thursday, June 12th, 2008
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4:08 pm - Minds Not Just Closed, But Dead-Bolted, Booby-Trapped, Locked In A Safe And Sunk To The Sea's Bottom
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I was at the doctor's office the other day to get my blood testing and an x-ray for my shoulder. I met a man who told me about a festival in San Francisco where he and his wife had been the day before. He mentioned how in San Francisco the young people sometimes like to get a little naked in the streets. I said I didn't know how I felt about it and he said there was no harm, and starting talking about the seventies and freedom. Before I knew what was happening, I was in a Political Conversation. Eventually we came to the inevitable Conversation about Who You Support.
He said he doesn't really support anyone. I brought up Obama, who would remedy at least some of the political freedom issues that my convesation partner was concerned about. (Not, I might add, that I want Obama to win. But I haven't made up my mind which is going to cost more, his pseudo-socialism or McCain's hawkishness. Another trillion dollar war can be every bit as expensive or more than bad economic policy.) He said, "Maybe, but I just don't think now's the right time." This got me intrigued. I asked him why.
"Well, with all the terrorism and the war in Iraq and him being a Muslim, I just don't think it's the right time." What? Obama, a Muslim!?
This is not the first time I've heard this rumor, but it's the first time I encountered someone in real life who believes it. And this man believed it hard. After he said that, I said, "Obama is not a Muslim. This is a smear tactic being used by a lot of conservative commentators, but it's absolutely not true." We went back and forth on this a little while, me citing the whole internet and everyone, him citing 650 AM, which I should, "Listen to, around 4 [PM]." (Google determines that right wing crackpot and stain on the name of Christians everywhere, Michael Savage, has that air time.) When he left, I exhorted him once more to get the facts on this issue, and he replied that Obama's Muslim affiliation was established fact. And that was it.
The depth of ignorance you need to believe that Obama is a Muslim is profound. You must listen only to lying, duplicitous, evil people whose motivations are inscrutably dark and unwholesome. If any of my fair readers believe Obama is and or at any time was a Muslim, I encourage them to get out from under their rocks and get informed, and I hope they are offended enough to do so. If you listen to right wing or Christian political radio, you should probably stop. Lately I've heard nothing but evil from the mouths of those men and women and I don't think you should give them your credence or your time. Increasingly it is clear that the real problem with political discourse in this country is the right wing radio host, blogger, pundit, who shrink from lying as rarely as the sun fails to rise.
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| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
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7:11 pm - Ride
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Took a sweet ride up Page Mill road today, almost to Skyline. I turned back about five minutes before I would have hit Skyline because I was really tired and I had no idea how much further I had to go.
Here's a map. That's a 2000 ft. ascent, 23 miles of riding, in just over two and a half hours. Yeah! *pumped*.
Here are some pictures from the ride:
National bike to work day is May 16th. If you don't have a bike, now might be a good time to get one.
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| Thursday, May 1st, 2008
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9:32 am - Bike to Work
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Bike to work week is coming up, and during that week there is a day, one beautiful day, called bike to work day. May 15th, 2008. Whether you live close or far, whether the ride is fifteen minutes or one and a half hours . . .
"Get off your good intentions and onto your bike!"
Be epic.
Bike to work.
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| Monday, April 21st, 2008
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6:42 pm - How to Evaluate a Business Partnership
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If you are likeable or competent, you will probably at some point in your life receive a proposal for some form of business partnership. Most often these come in the form of employment, wherin a company gives you money in exchange for time and effort on your part. But various other types of partnership may happen across your path.
Like most other decisions you could make, whether to partner with another individual or a company will hinge mostly on a cost-benefit analysis. Here are a couple of tools to help you decide whether a partnership is right for you.
Capital
Think of capital as raw materials or pre-existing goods. In an employment relationship, the capital you bring to the table is yourself and your education. The company brings the company, which is almost certainly worth more than you are. They bring the wisdom and experience of thousands of other employees, built into an effective network for accomplishing the company's business.
Capital multiplies effort. When entering into a partnership where you will work on a commission or own a portion of a company or other legal entity, it's important to consider how your partner candidate's capital multiplies your own capital and effort. Suppose for example that someone proposes you a partnership making widgets. They bring with them widget-making capital, perhaps in the form of a factory. But suppose that you are only good at making doodads. If you will be paid on commission, then no matter how much widget-making capital your partner brings to the table, this partnership is a bad deal for you.
Compensation
If you are going to be compensated for your work, you have to consider two things. First is how much the compensation worth to you. Normally it's convenient to think of this in dollars, since most often the compensation is in dollars. Second is how much it will cost to join with your potential partner. In an employment relationship, this is the dollar-value of your time and effort plus the cost of dealing with your work environment, in addition to any forgone opportunities you will lose because of being employed. In a partnership where you bring capital to the table, it is the value of the capital plus the costs associated with having it tied up in a given partnership.
Growth
A final consideration is the potential for growth. The two tests above are sufficient for a static partnership, but few are. Startups, for example, would never be founded if the above criteria were the only ones people used for deciding to form a venture together. However, the potential for growth is an important aspect, especially in partnerships where your companion does not bring much capital to the table.
When thinking about growth, you must consider both how well you can help the venture to grow and how well your partner will. If you cannot be an effective grower of a partnership, it's often best to let it pass you by. This is especially true in the case of startups where you do not believe in the product and/or the people. Especially if you are invited to be a founder, your commitment to and inspiration by the project is a key component to the value of the venture to you and others.
Probability of success over a timeframe is also important. Risk costs something, and you must estimate that into the growth equation. Even though a one in a thousand chance at a billion dollars over a year is a great deal on paper, you only have one life to live. With those odds, if you tried sixty times you probably would not attain greatness. Of course, probability is a curve too. It's possible that the chances of a billion dollars are one in a thousand, but the chances of a million might be more like one in ten.
One easy way to sum things up is thinking about how well your talents align with what the partnership is trying to accomplish. As you become more specialized, this thinking becomes more important.
I don't claim this as a sufficient or organized writing -- it would be flattering to even use the E-word. It's more of a thinking-aloud chance for me to process some options that are appearing to my left and right. It's hard to imagine that any of these offers will be tempting enough to make me bite because Google is such a great employer. The compensation or growth potential would have to be extreme to make me want to leave.
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