The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

the best I can do

“you will live and die on this farm, and you will never go hungry. but your kids are going to the stars.”

five verses on training the mind

I gave ten years
to sharpening the axe
and weaving the noose

I learned to wait with patience
while the cogs of life
spun to my desired settings

You must treat the mind
as a body to be cultured
before climbing into space

the delicate coordination
of extraordinary
and mundane

is the key
to opening
life as heaven

=========================

I don’t write much about meditation. I should. It’s foundational. For people who think for a living it’s probably the single greatest investment that can be made in career, in productivity, in serenity, and most especially, in effectiveness.

Progressive Building Solutions site now live

The commercial hexayurt will live here.

Surprising

Founder of the Hare Krishnas - surprisingly clear and lucid and direct. No mention (so far) of chanting Gournanga and being Happy. I’d never seen any of his material directly, only filtered by the organization, and he’s more impressive than they make him look.

Woohoo - Ambidextrous Magazine #9 is up, with our article!

http://ambidextrousmag.org/issues/09/ is the magazine link, and you can read our piece here (pdf):

I’m very pleased with this piece. It really encapsulated a lot of what we wanted to say at a fairly minimalist length.

Smari is podcasting on digital fabrication and freedom

http://smari.yaxic.org/blag/2008/05/18/podcast-digital-freedom-as-a-catalyst-for-freedom/

Good stuff. I might do a bit of podcasting or vlogging later this year. It’s an important medium.

Smari being brilliant again

on the fact that cyberpunk is back

potted truth

it is not enough to be correct, one also has to win.

new gear - zoom H2

I finally picked up a field recorder: the Zoom H2.

Unexpected bonuses

* extremely aggressive automatic gain control on “voice mode”
* 24/96 recording
* incredibly light but not chintzy
* features like automatic gain control work even when it’s in USB mic mode - ideal for skype etc.

quirks

* UI is a bit fiddley, but not horrific
* Showed up as a USB audio device fine the first time, then not again. Probably means I need to reboot.

Overall… I’d rather have bought it at American than european prices, and it’s a good enough device to open up a good deal of new ground. Good kit.

The tragedy of computer science.

Faster computers do not make writing programs easier, any more than printing presses made it easier to write poetry.

Vinay Gupta

I’ve been trying to find a way of saying that for a while. Now, of course, conversely

Computers which are too slow or too small for the problem at hand make programming harder because you must write code to solve the problem and make your computers act as if they are faster and bigger than they really are. These are two separate problems, and the second one is often very hard indeed.

What happened is that people saw faster computers make programming easier in the early days because it was simply dealing with the second problem - machines that were too slow and too small.

The fascinating problem is this: can you turn excess computing power into more code that solves the problem?

Answer? NO!

That’s AI. Expecting faster computers to make programs easier to write is AI-complete. There might be a few “hacks” which are equivalent to teaching computers to play chess. For example, Python is fairly widely acknowledged to make many programmers feel far, far more productive. And it is pretty slow. So a problem solved in Python might be solved a little more easily than solving it in assembler, but the improvement is perhaps log(n) of the difference in speed between the computer which can solve the problem in assembler, and the computer which can solve it in Python.

Maybe every 10x improvement in computing power doubles the speed with which programs can be written.

But the reason for that is that, at the end of the day, we’re sending a computer to do a person’s job. The conversion of computer cycles into intelligence is very, very inefficient in deeply non-linear ways as we know from fields like chess and, say, natural language processing in areas like machine translation.

What’s the answer? Frankly, almost no work has been done on programming as a human activity. If we trained programmers the same way we trained athletes - monitored performance, charted data across large groups, experimented with training regimes… if we had coaches who’s job it was to get the most out of teams - not managers but honest-to-god coaches…

A good programmer can make a company tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over a career. The investment of companies in optimizing the performance of their programmers seldom goes further than a decent office environment. We’ve been barking up the wrong tree for a long time, trying to make computers into better programmers, rather than focussing all that research into how to make programmers better at programming.