indescions_2018

A Visit To Camelot, Diana Trilling

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/06/02/a-visit-to-cam...

It's inevitable you will have multiple languages / platforms comprising your stack. Bash scripts for admin. Golang to write servers. Data science in Python. JS / D3 on the frontend. C# / Unity 3D modelling and scripting. Even low level C / Assembly if you need performance optimizations.

I think mastery of cloud development and deployment is crucial going forward. Start experimenting locally right on your laptop with minikube, microk8s, snaps, prometheus. And get a sense of designing scalable systems.

You should have the ability to immediately estimate project costs. So you can give potential stakeholders a ballpark figure to open negotiations. Billion item recommendation system running on spark that serves 100K+ requests per second deployed to 1000 node cluster. Will it cost under $100 per hour? Or do we jump to tensorflow and a few large gpu instances for half that. Once you gain sufficient mastery. It will become second nature. And you can concentrate on design and building.

Best of luck :)

Great suggestions so far. This is really an untapped genre in science fiction. Post-Internet Literature. Examples that come most readily to mind are things like Flatland, The Machine Stops, The Last Question, Arrival, and The Three Body Problem. Perhaps some of the more obscure "recursive" and "ergodic" fictions such as House of Leaves. But I dare say the great "coding" novel has yet to be written ;)

Love this. But am irked by how incomplete these models seem. "First Principles", "Probabilistic Thinking". Both seek to formalize causality in events.

Would speculate Buffet, Munger, et al don't actually bother much with cause and effect when entering large positions. They look at trends, price-action, cash flow and other mathematical micro-economic indicators. As well as a bias on the long term survivability of betting on America as a macro whole.

Michael Abrash, now Oculus Chief Scientist, has this great definition of "Zen Optimizations" in his famous graphics programming black books. There is the way a thing is advertised to work. There is the way you believe it to work. And then there is the way it actually works!

AIGA publishes a lot of info on this topic

https://www.aiga.org/how-to-hire-a-designer

The irony is that you may find the real titans of UX have little creative or artistic talent at all! They understand tech, strategy, human nature, deadlines, etc.

Gamification. Pure and simple. Even the kids liken it to "getting paid to find rare Pokemon Go". One could even go so far as to find linear optimizations for max network paths ;)

What sweetens the incentive is the "instant" cash transfer within 5 hours or so of drop-off. Mobile micro-work at scale is not only tenable. But may be the preferred operandus of labor market participants.

Oculus Research just rebranded itself as FB Reality Lab. And the Oculus Go stand-alone headset looks like a winner with 100K sales already, 2M+ estimated by years end.

Distributing VR / AR content seems the next big challenge to me. VRChat can handle on order of 10 per room. But we are talking serious grid compute / bandwidth beyond that. Especially for "multiplayer" narrative 360 video ;)

YC did a recent podcast with former Artforum editor Michelle Kuo on Experiments in Art and Technology

https://blog.ycombinator.com/experiments-in-art-and-technolo...

And then there's Mondo 2000. Defining periodical of "cyberculture". Remains deeply influential even today

https://archive.org/details/mondohistory

I'd also recommend the documentary "We Live In Public" as a cautionary tale regarding networked utopias ;)

Really excited to see YC Bio longevity startups when they launch.

Found this great Marc Andreessen keynote from the Netscape Developer Conference in 1996. Netscape wanted to be everything simultaneously. Youtube, Slack, Gmail, Amazon, AWS, Dropbox and about a dozen other businesses. Wonder if they just focused on one product. Say "groupware for Fortune 500 intranets". They would have increased chance of survivability. Even considering Win98 bundling its competing offering in their OS ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wdc9qkkV4

Stuxnet changed history. Any "game of chicken" style equilibria is broken if the probability a nuclear actor's command and control drops below 100%. If there is even a 1% chance that when a Big Red Button is pushed the missiles fail to launch the game becomes unwinnable. Simulations of imperfect information in dynamic brinkmanship where both players are known to have advanced cyber capabilities results in a single dreaded endgame: general nuclear exchange.

Thermonuclear Cyberwar

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2836208

We have moved into uncharted domains. And herein lie demons. Past Rules of Engagement universally agreed upon regarding the use of kinetic weapons no longer apply. For wiser heads to prevail in the current global climate, the voice for peace must become the loudest one.

Rules of engagement for cyberspace operations: a view from the USA

https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/doi/10.1093/c...

Docs: https://swiftshader.googlesource.com/SwiftShader/+/HEAD/docs...

Slides: https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/20...

Google Is Working On Vulcan Over CPUs With SwiftShader

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

Absolutely. NASA's TESS telescope just completed its first lunar flyby this morning on its way to its final orbital path. ESA PLATO mission launches next year. As well as JWST. All with open calls for citizen scientists!

Mikulski Archive For Space Telescopes

https://archive.stsci.edu/tess/

A review on Asteroseismology

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.07604.pdf

Physicists make first 3D measurements of proton’s internal structure

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05186-x

In short, this is a new type of "electron microscopy" for 3D imaging of sub-atomic particles. Very exciting!

Getting a palpable Summer Wars vibe from that giant floating whale island ;)

https://www.worldsadrift.com/island-creator/

One possible usage is peer net broker for WebRTC. But really I'd like to setup my own private AWS C9. Secure access to a dedicated instance. From any computer / browser. With offline caching. And a rich browser terminal ;)

Congrats! Any game you can play as Darwin or Lovelace is already a winner in my book ;)

Anyone searching for startup ideas, packaging HTML5 as native binary apps remains a pain point. Mostly in making sure things like full screen layout, mouse pointer lock, networking, etc all work as intended on hosts. Apart from simultaneous testing on multiple machines, emulating via virtual box isn't sufficient for game performance. Electron and NW could vastly be simplified for humans ;)

https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/application-distributio...

http://docs.nwjs.io/en/latest/For%20Users/Package%20and%20Di...

Thanks for posting. Well before my time. But powered some legendary video game consoles such as SNK Neo-Geo and Sega 16.

http://www.sega-16.com/

RIP. Feels like the end of an era for New Yorkers. A certain longform vigor. Jimmy Breslin on JFK's assassination. Peter Maas and Serpico. Norman Mailer running for mayor of the "51st State"

In addition to all the excellent suggestions on this page. Also check out The Painted Word (1975).

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Tom Wolfe and The Painted Word

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5NBoe5qHRE

Art of Fiction Interview with George Plimpton

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/15/tom-wolfe-193...

You're in luck! Syntopia generative art blog just published a nice intro

Building 4D Polytopes With WebGL

https://syntopia.github.io/Polytopia/polytopes.html

Personally, I like computational probability. Theoretically I believe it falls under the more formal rubric of "measure theory". With stochastic processes remaining a very active field. Particularly around nascent quantum computing algorithms, quantum walks, etc.

Probabilistic Models of Cognition

https://probmods.org/

Obviously Boston is massive. And I believe it's the top calibre medical schools that set it apart. Strong interdisciplinary research and clinical programs creating a feedback loop. Fed by a legion of hungry and talented MD / PhDs inventing the future in all areas from gene therapy to robotic surgery. And ready access to Route 128 venture capital.

Check out Boston Bio 2018 to appreciate the shear scope

http://convention.bio.org/

But the up and coming contender may be Miami - Ft. Lauderdale. Doctors have always been attracted to South Florida as an ideal practice and convention location. And state incentives are driving pharma manufacturers to open factories in the region. With the added value of proximity to Latin American markets.

There are a number of incubators currently accepting startup applications in the area. Best of luck!

http://www.bioflorida.com/

See also: The Aggregate Magic Algorithms page

http://aggregate.org/MAGIC/

For example, Population Count instructions exist. But may actually be microcoded to count one bit per cycle.

Vectorizing your tallies can yield log time speedups:

Faster Population Counts Using AVX2 Instructions

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.07612.pdf

Wonderful thread! There is most certainly a canon of "introspection" literature. Required for any one who pays heed to the wisdom of "knowing thyself". Gandhi's Experiments With Truth and St. Augustine's Confessions are perfect examples. Absolute honesty. With the single goal of providing future readers many years hence with some guide points in navigating the seas of life.

List of 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century

https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/book372.htm

And just a heads up. This June brings the arrival of another biography I am very much looking forward to. Matt Polly's definitive Bruce Lee: A Life. Perfect summer beach reading to provide the inspiration for a commitment to discipline!

https://www.amazon.com/Bruce-Lee-Life-Matthew-Polly/dp/15011...

For financial news, I like Capital Markets News Wire and MarketWatch's News Viewer.

http://www.cmwire.com/

https://www.marketwatch.com/newsviewer

Click / mouseover to generate summaries.

Another trend is the Bloomberg TicToc feed. Algorithmically generated video snippets with more of a human interest bent.

https://twitter.com/tictoc

I'd love to see one for all innovations and deals in the fintech space. Including crypto, digital payments. Particularly on a global scale. Lending equal time and weight to emerging markets ;)

FierceBiotech is also awesome in health / medtech

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/

In NYC, certainly seems like there is a fresh influx of former SF residents. Many around crypto / fintech as all large banks are here.

Refrain I often hear is that "street culture" is dead in SF. Tech workers just stay in and order Seamless and tinker on their respective inventions all night long. Although nowhere what it was at peak in 80s and 90s. NYC nightlife is still popping ;)

I'd also be interested to hear about life in the Peninsula. Hills above Palo Alto, San Mateo, even South SF. Family and friends seem to love it despite chilly nights in the summer...

>>> In the dual monitor config it only moves the left monitor across desktops

There is a fix for this in display settings.

I have personally gotten used to the vertical alignment and new key patterns. Still using 17.10 but performance seems improved from unity and looking to maybe get back into a bit of gtk development ;)

Reference to William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. The first meta-narrative to treat religious practise as social phenomenon:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/621/621-h/621-h.html

And it's easy to see the parallel the author makes. Every minute aspect of modern living has become "religion". And there is a very public jockeying amongst a high priest class of prognosticating pundits all vying for influence and attention.

But in the most fundamental matters of import beginning with the categorical assumption is essential. Namely, that there exists for any given problem, an optimal answer. It is simply a matter of collecting empirical evidence and making the appropriate analysis.

Steven Pinker argues in his most recent book that if there were "no Hitler, there would be no nukes!" It was only the pressing war that goaded formerly peacefully inclined nuclear physicists to construct such technologies. With the resultant problems we now face of non-proliferation, cyber command and control, etc.

And the logical extension would then take the form: well the Five Eyes nations or G-7 that represent our democratic allies need to develop the next generation of weaponry. To maintain the balance of power shifted in our favor. And so the policy of "mututally assured annihilation" continues ad infinitum until someone happens on a doomsday apparatus ;)

But it is far from optimal. An optimal solution would be something akin to peaceful equilibrium throughout the planet. With space based deterrents against alien attack. But barring an actual concrete threat in that regard. We lack the foresight and will to make it happen.

Obviously I believe part of the solution is electing more scientists and rational thinkers in positions of power. Which brings us back to square one. How to effectively communicate and "nudge" an outcome that foments optimal solutions.

Link to mobile browser demo game Emoji Scavenger Hunt

https://emojiscavengerhunt.withgoogle.com/

More details in XDA Developers interview with Kan Liu. Also suggesting GPU acceleration support later this year

https://www.xda-developers.com/chrome-os-linux-app-support-g...

My prediction: VS Code / Pixelbook becomes a formidable devenv for many in the coming months ;)

You can always try Neverware on a live usb to get a taste

https://www.neverware.com/freedownload

Rumored to be running Linux (AMD/Radeon). With open development, app store.