hugothefrog

I’m just in the middle of re-reading Simon Wardley’s collected blog posts on Wardley Mapping (via the soft cover book).

My recency bias aside, its uncanny how much his concepts infuse this Economist article.

Almost every paragraph echoes a concept from Wardley’s writings; diffusion versus evolution, inertia, co-evolution of practices and capabilities, capital flows, initial innovation versus refinement of an idea, and with hindsight, eventual ubiquity.

I greatly enjoyed the serendipity of this article appearing alongside my holiday reading.

One point missing from the article is the increased speed of diffusion via communication, and the relatively evolved states of compute, and other required underlying infrastructure for AI.

One could map the user needs of farms and farmers and todays knowledge enterprises, alongside the underlying infrastructure required to deploy tractors and AI, and draw some conclusions.

That's an avenue I'm pursuing - have joined the waiting list and am waiting for someone to get back to me after a brief email interaction over the weekend.

Secured by work was a reference to one possible suggestion of using Alpine or similar, which requires app-specific passwords. And yes, it seems it is possible to block that!

Hijacking this comment, but it seems likely to attract the right sort of crowd..

Can anyone recommend a Mac/web Gmail UI with exceptionally fast hotkey interactions? The Gmail web interface has slowed to the point of un-usability for me now.

Command line (Alpine, etc) would be fine, but my Gmail account is secured by work and has the required access control settings disabled.

I'm keen to understand exactly what parts of a 'messaging stack' you guys have built. Feel free to drop me an email (details in my profile).

I'm a developer working in London - I've been here for the last five years. Immigrants seem disproportionately represented in the software dev industry (but not IT in general).

Quite a few from the EU, but a lot from Commonwealth countries (NZ, Aus, SA).

I've always found the mix very strange.

WhatsApp is a near approximation of BBM on the iPhone (and other devices, I believe).

Their reliability isn't great, however.

Well spotted.

This may have been pointed out elsewhere, but it seems to have something in common with the if-by-whisky style of argument.

All that's missing is the "if by 'cult' what I mean is a slavish adherence to laws and dictates laid down without recourse to reasoned argument.., then I disagree."

I just returned from Berlin a couple of nights ago, and met an English guy (I'm a New Zealander living in London) who'd worked there for a few years. He is an aerospace engineer working for a very famous English engineering firm in their German office.

He was of the opinion that German productivity, at least when compared with other European countries, was a myth. He told exactly the same anecdotes about German individuality as this article mentions, but gave it quite a negative spin.

When handing out bits of work to fellow engineers, the Germans would tend to put their heads down and start work immediately, instead of consulting with colleagues about previous solutions to the same problem, etc. Basically he said they did quite a lot of very efficient, very correct, very over-engineered re-inventing of the wheel.

Particularly he pointed out that to a German engineer, every part of the solution was equally important, where as to an English engineer, it was obvious some parts where more important than others. Focusing on those gave a better quality end-result when faced with a limited budget, but a German with a unlimited budget would give you an absolutely fantastic end-result.

So, that's a pretty cool story. The feedback loop on these sorts of things is insane. Does anyone have any anecdotes of this sort of thing that don't result in #1 on reddit (or something similar!).

Also - does anyone know of a program that does this for Windows?

Wait -- what? You don't get those emails?

I'm a heavy user of Amazon in the UK (Prime membership and all), and I get regular emails asking me to review products I've previously purchased.

..I've never written a review, though.

Would love to make it, too, but am wrapping up at my current client's and will be late this evening.

Have a good evening - looks like it'll be a lovely warm night for it!

I was trying to think of a good reason why FIFA continues to refuse to introduce any form of video replay/video referee, and the reason Ed outlines are just what I concluded.

The game is supposed to be exactly the same when played at World Cup level as it is when played at Saturday morning club level, and even below that - the streets of Brazil, etc.

Fifa has got its eye on the global market for playing football, which is what (possibly) makes it the world's most popular sport. It doesn't have its eye on the global market for watching football.

I'm totally lost - what is the vendetta against her about? Any idea what caused it?

Thanks for the comparison :)

I can't say I've watched Momento more than once. I guess that says something in itself.

I'll definitely be getting a copy of Primer now!

Another movie similar to this (I think, having not seen the movie, but from reading the discussions) is Momento: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_%28film%29

IMO it stays with you a long time after you've watched it..

For reference, since I had to google for it: http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays

Hah - I didn't intend to end 3/4 of my post with question marks. Or did I? ..ahem.

My comment was really a rhetorical question about the moral (not necessarily commercial - I'm not arguing that) appropriateness of taking (as you described) an alienating path.

I've read quite a few descriptions of marketing as being successful by causing unknown wants and needs. None of those descriptions really talk about 'us and them' as a concept.

[edit-minor typo]

Instinctively, I disagree with you. But you might be right. I may even agree with you, intellectually.

What evidence do you have to support your hypothesis?

Alienation is a very powerful emotional force, used by all sorts of parties to all sorts of ends. Are there 'positive' forms of alienation?

Is there not a middle path that can be taken that doesn't alienate, but also doesn't bore?

I'd just like to echo others comments about C being a really good idea. I live in London, and have recently moved into an apartment with large windows that are just screaming out for planter boxers.

My partner and I are trying to figure out what to plant, etc, but all we really want to do is have someone deliver two planter boxes, the right amount of dirt and fertilizer, and some flowers and herbs that we can plant now, as well as in a few months time.

We would pay quite a bit for this privilege - even more so if the planter boxes showed up with the dirt already in them. Doing any sort of work like this in an apartment is an exercise in frustration - there's just not enough room, and dirt goes everywhere.

We can't find anything that sells what we want..

Presumably, to a first approximation, you could track the weather at your customers' location, and know what is going on with their plants. This would allow you to tailor your emails - and your product suggestions - over time.

Thanks. I picked it up via curl, but it was crashing Firefox.

It's up at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2169086/Market%20Crash.mp3 for a while, now.

Not a pleasant experience listening to that. Perhaps that's the way the world will end - not with a roar, or a whimper, but pure panic.

Don't suppose anyone grabbed a copy of the audio while it was still up?

Thanks for the pointer. I was looking for something just like this.

It seems to install and work just fine on Win Server 2008 64bit, for reference :)

Sounds like this guy wants exactly what the Mine Project is trying to deliver: http://themineproject.org/

My partner and I just had a ten year anniversary in Thailand, and we're in the process of sharing our entire groups' photos via Divvyshot. If you had a less wedding-oriented skin/store-front on that website, we'd love to use your service..

I've not heard the phrase 'host-proof' before, but I wrote my thesis on trusted computing platforms (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~cthombor/Students/mbarrett/mba...). Some of the work I review in it was related to proving a remote host to be trust worthy, which seems to be of some relevance here.

I also informally discussed a number of features that a community would require so people could trust numerous hashes of compiled software.

Everything, it seems, ends up as a web app these days :)

I definitely would be. Any techniques you've developed for switching contexts would be greatly appreciated..

I'd not seen this - thanks for the pointer.

Has anyone seen a tetris implementation from the other first-person perspective? As in, you're the block, looking downwards?

Probably far too hard to play, but that is what I was expecting when I hit the link..

I thought microwave ovens that didn't have rotating plates tended to be of the commercial type.

And that to compensate for the lack of rotation, they used magnetic fields (presumably created by electromagnets) to shift the microwave radiation peaks around the oven itself.