But I do grant him the enthusiasm of the forever hacker. I read the article and it came through as someone that had a breakthrough and just wants to talk about it.
Yeah, it did. It also reminded me of one of my own "Moments of Absolute Clarity" that tend to unravel considerably when met with the hard test of execution in the real world.
There's something about the vagueness of the promise that makes it so reminiscent. Sometimes you can get the sense of being on the verge of something big--but the gnarly difficulty lies in bringing it down from the abstraction.
0. internal stresses exist = mutter "look at all these contradictions and warts"; start rethinking assumptions
1. raise temperature = get creative and start brainstorming; new possibilities and combinations present themselves
2. decrease in free energy = do a bunch of prototyping; some radical simplifications or changes of perspective present themselves
3. lower temperature = realize some details are still messy, some ideas were bad; get more conservative and start weeding out stuff
4. repeat until you have to ship
Damn I hate it when that happens! (Especially if I've published the "moment of clarity") :)