watching the world turn.

I’ve recently bought a MacBook Pro 13″ for work and because I thought it’d make the music process much easier. Windows and Linux are fun for hacking/games, but sound stuff usually results in spending time on configuration rather than things just working. Anyhow, I’ve had a couple of weeks, and although the Macbook Pro is a nice machine, I have some gripes about the OS:

• No consistent method for a keyboard shortcut to beginning of line or end of line. Seriously guys, what’s up with that? There are ways to go to start and end of lines, but some apps interpret these actions as start/end of buffer, others ignore them. Even Apple software isn’t consistent with this behaviour. Same goes for page-up and page-down short-cuts.
• Control and command keys. Given that their names are almost synonyms, the extra key is kind of annoying because it’s often used in place of where Control would be used in any other OS. Difference for the sake of difference does not make you a beautiful and unique snowflake. And yet, Apple goes to all this trouble to simplify and allow the interface to be controlled with one mouse button, or to remove apparently superfluous home/end/pg-up/pg-down keys.
• No consistent policy for click-through (what is click through? See a anti-click-through person here. As far as I can tell it seems to be about making the computer nanny you, for me… the general lack of click-through (except in rare cases) means I have to click an extra 200 or so times a day. I could get used to that… eventually. But some (Apple) apps don’t follow this policy. So it just ends up as a confusing mess. It’s even less productive than having direct mouse focus.
• I thought Apple just couldn’t program multi-threaded applications on Windows. iTunes would stall frequently… turns out that’s normal. Clicking the help menu in most app also causes the menu to lock up (And not just the first time… everytime you click it seems to be regenerating an index or something. This leads to clicking elsewhere while waiting and then having to wait AGAIN. Exasperate the user looking for help? Not exactly a smart user relations design!)
• A money grubbing $50 for a miniplug to DVI adaptor. Another $50 for VGA adaptor because they don’t give you a DVI-I with your DVI adaptor. Also the miniplug doesn’t support audio if you get the DVI to HDMI cable. My 1.5 year old Dell has HDMI out with audio and VGA (the only difference between HDMI to DVI is the plug and HDMI also supporting audio, so a basic HDMI to DVI cable is all that’s needed). For $50 an adaptor, I’d at least expect the adaptor to match the style of the Macbook Pro’s aluminium case, instead of being plastic white thing that clashes.
• Try to move a file using finder without having to drag things. You can’t, cut and paste commands are disabled. In fact, why even have a cut item under the edit menu? It’s always greyed out as far as I’ve seen, as if to taunt anyone that’s used a decent file browser! Instead it’s “NO, YOU ARBITRARILY CAN’T DO THAT.” Thanks Apple, I love you too.

Maybe my expectations were too high, and maybe I’ll get used to the quirks of Apple software, but I currently miss Ubuntu. If anybody can point me somewhere that solves these issues though, then I’d be most appreciative.

Having said all that… things I like: multi-screen support done right, dock is pretty cool, the Macbook feels nice.

I’m not old, a mere 27 years in fact, but there are a few things I’ve come to discover. Things that it’d be nice to have been taught in school, but that instead I’ve discovered haphazardly:

1. The first step to doing anything is believing you can – One thing that I’ve noticed, is that some people sabotage themselves before they even try. They just believe that they can’t do something, or it’s too hard. Some people have told me I’m smart, whereas mostly I think I’m pretty average. What I do however, is have an absence of restriction. If I want to do something, the only restriction is time. This is important when you’re doing something like working on a thinking machine.
2. You can’t do everything – You’ll notice the caveat above about time being the only restriction. When I was a kid, I wanted to read the entirety of Encyclopaedia Britannica… I got to about “Aardvark” before I realised it was mostly dull (no offense to the long-nosed beasts!). I’m still struggling with this one, I have so many things I’d like to do, that I frequently wonder if I’m overcommitted and if the more optimal path would be to obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only… but then I realised that if I tried that I’d get bored. I’m too curious and have grown up in the age of variegated knowledge at our finger tips.
3. Emotions are cues – they give you an indication of something going on internally. Something that might not be able to be immediately expressed verbally, and if it’s a negative emotion it probably indicates something isn’t right. And by “isn’t right” I don’t mean it’s necessarily to do with the external world, it could be an indication that there’s something inside that hasn’t been resolved. However, don’t make them the focus.. since everyone likes analogies, and I’m particularly good at straining my analogies: think of emotions like the gauges on your car for temperature, fuel, etc. They are important, so that the engine doesn’t explode, or so that you don’t run out of fuel, but if you spend the whole time focusing on the gauges, you’ll miss the scenary. Anger specifically, I feel can be boiled down to “when something or someone doesn’t act the way you expect/want them to” – every time I’ve been angry, it’s because my expectations don’t match reality… so mostly it’s about having a world view that doesn’t quite match reality (or the consensus of reality, as described below).
4. Nothing is objective – you can argue whatever view you like, but most of us reach consensus about a specific interpretation of physical reality because of shared modalities and the wet-ware for interpreting them. That doesn’t mean you’re right if you subscribe to the current scientific consensus. Humanity collectively believed silly things like the world being flat, or the Earth being the centre of the universe. Knowledge and truth are dynamic, and they’ll continue to be so. Keep an open mind. And because I like loops, link back to point 1 about believing you can… since nothing is objective, you can believe you can do anything you like[1].

I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that came to me just now. What do you wish they’d mentioned to you when in school?

[1] If you believe you can fly, you can (buy a plane ticket, or go sky-diving). But jumping off a building is just dumb, so don’t do that ok?

One of the very last sessions for the GSoC Mentor Summit was about Media players. There were lead devs from Amarok and XMMS2, and it was cool to speak with them in person. One frequent issue that Amarok (I can’t remember if it was also an issue for XMMS2) was that lyric sites keep going down and changing their format, sometimes adding ads in the middle of the lyrics. Another was that Amazon no longer let’s them use the album cover art, and the substitute of last.fm has very small cover art images.

My suggestion for both, but which would need to be implemented in somewhat different ways, would be to use a variety of lyrics sites, then use text similarity matching to work out what the actual lyrics part of the page was. For images, you could use google image search, and then return the image that was most frequent, as well as having some heuristic for preference of square images. I think that, although not perfect, this would make the the system a lot more robust against further changes.

Text similarity and overlaps is well understood as a computer science problem. It’s used by the shotgun sequencing approach for DNA sequencing… as well as variety of search and indexing problems. Hopefully I’ll release a usable library for it over the summer – I’ll call it libshotgun-lyrics

Someone I know is quite vehement about the obsolescence of copyright, or that it at least needs to be radically reworked to be tenable in today’s environment. The environment of (almost) zero cost duplication for many copyrighted products. When it comes down to it, writing is data, music is data, and potentially, even physical objects will easily be duplicated. I’m close to that camp, but I don’t believe all data should automatically be free.

On creating something, I think you should be able to profit from your labour, but attempting to control unofficial spread of something is usually futile [1] – the big music industry would be well advised to learn something from that, except I’m sure they’ll opt to go down kicking and screaming.

Continue reading →

Following on from other’s recent discussions of crime and punishment, I offer these completely unhelpful transhumanist thoughts:

• A mind from the past can become completely different from the one that committed the crime. So is it fair to punish someone in the present, when their current mind state bears as much similarity to the mind that committed the crime in the past is it does to a completely separate person?
• A body replaces most of it’s cells over the course of many years. So it’s not really someone’s body we convict, but their structure. What happens when people can upload? Supposing we can represent that structure digitally or otherwise (but in a form of easily copy-able data) what happens to the replicates of that individual? Are they convicted as well? Does it become illegal for other people to harbour that sequence of data, even if it’s in stasis and getting no processor time? (which is essentially the same as dead, but with the difference of being revivable at a moments notice)
• Continuing from the assumption that it’s the structure of a criminal we want to punish/remove from society: Since a baby is essentially derived from the fair proportion of the parent’s structure, if the parent commits a crime, then shouldn’t the child also be considered a criminal? Even though the child takes some of it’s structure from the other, hopefully non-criminal, parent, the first point seems to imply that exact similarity isn’t required.

(Note, most of these thoughts are me just musing on a theoretical level that is not at all pragmatic. I don’t actually believe children of criminals are also guilty)

I just finished reading Global Brain. There were lots of parts deserving of comment, but I wouldn’t really be adding anything to the discussion except saying “Look, THIS” and pointing at quotes. Suffice to say, I think it’s worth reading (and if anybody wants to borrow it, they are welcome to – it’s actually quite short, since the book is essentially half references and notes).

Anyhow, there was one part that resonated with me that was related to my attempt to be open and honest about certain aspects of my life, which is unfortunately in conflict with what the law deems to be true. This particular piece is discussing a Baptist town in New York State which is fervently against this “era’s godless sins”, and how the reality was that most individuals indulged in those same sins to their holy shame, assuming that they were the only transgressors:

“How completely the annointed had commandeered collective perception became apparent when Schanck asked the closet dissenters how other people in the community felt about face cards, liquor, a smoke, and levity. Hoodwinked by suppression, each knew without a doubt that he was the sole transgressor in a saintly sea. He and he alone could not control his demons of depravity. None had the faintest inkling that he was part of a silenced near-majority.

Here was an arch lesson in the games subcultures play. reality is a mass halucination. We gauge what’s real according to what others say. And others, like us, rein in their words, caving in to timidity. Thanks to conformity enforcement and to cowardice, a little power goes a long, long way.”

Obviously that’s an extreme version of the issue I’m obtusely referring to, since within our personal groups there is openness about these things. But to go beyond that, and announce it to your work colleagues is to risk job loss. However, without facing that risk, we are buying in to the validity of those laws. I don’t suggest anyone do so, but it’s a difficult catch 22 situation to be in.

I’ve recently been rereading Howard Bloom’s Global Brain. A book I originally read in my second year of university. The first time, I found it incredibly interesting and it became a running joke with my girlfriend at the time about me saying “Global brain this! Global brain that!”. Anyhow, suffice to say, I felt it was influential to my intellectual life and wanted to revisit it with the wisdom of 8 more years (the other two major books that influenced me being Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace and his later book Visions, which I may reread and possibly summarise here).

One serendipidous clash of ideas that occurred recently was me stumbling across the triangle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For those that haven’t come across this pyramid before, it’s a frequently mentioned model for representing the psychology of human motivation. What it purports to show is that the higher level desires only really manifest once the lower needs are met. So at the very lower level we have physiological needs like breathing, water and food, and at the level above that we have the need for safety, and then social needs. In other words, it’s very hard to be concerned about whether you’ve got a date this weekend if you can’t breath right now! If you’re interested in more detail about what falls in each level, check out Wikipedia as I’m going to move on and connect this to something Bloom talks about in Global Brain…

Basically, Bloom talks about the rise of systems with ever more complexity and the sharing of information. From self-assembling molecules that pre-dated life, all the way to the internet. Bloom points to 5 or 6 characteristics of these complex adaptive systems that lead to them evolving and proliferating. Two of these characteristics are conformity enforcers and diversity generators.

Conformity enforcers are things that ensure the system maintains coherence. It’s why all our cells work together and why we kill off foreign bodies (since they don’t conform to the antigen mould expected by cells of the ’self’) and why conservative society frowns on errant behaviour.

Diversity generators allow a system to try out new ideas, and often a certain amount of diversity is needed for a system to actually properly manifest itself. Since after all, despite our cells having essentially identical DNA, they differentiate into physiologically different forms. Likewise, in human society, we all specialise… even in the most conservative of cultures.

My hypothesis is, that the ratio of diversity to conformity in human society is related to the fulfilment of individual’s hierarchy of needs. A bias towards lower levels will lead to a pressure for conformity, whereas a large number of society’s members reaching the level of self-actualization leads to individuals following more independent and unique paths.

However, that’s all well and good, but since adaptive systems need conformity to retain coherence, many societies enforce or promote a deficiency in one of these needs, in effect inhibiting self-actualization.

For example, institutions such as religion instill a inferiority complex: e.g. you are born with original sin putting in a firm block at the ‘esteem’ level. Many others try to convince it’s practioners to refrain from sex except under particular conditions or circumstances, making it difficult to even go beyond the first physiological level without first meeting these conditions.

Sparta was one of the greatest conformity enforcing societies (see Global Brain for details) and was able to push it’s citizens to the very bottom of the triangle. They were deprived of food growing up and forced to steal (all part of the training). My hypothesis does fall down a bit (as does Maslow’s hierarchy) as the Spartans apparently did have some higher needs such as sociality and esteem met. They were essentially a big gang, and considered the people of the societies they ruled over as inferior.

Global Brain frequently compares Sparta and Athens as opposing ends of the conformity vs. diversity balance. One of the things that lead me to the hypothesis was that, in Athens – the diversity king, individuals had a wealth of choice. They could find the group they fit in best and there was plenty of potential to explore new ideas, both of which I’d consider major aspects of self-actualization.

Last night I had a wistful musing about starting a political party in New Zealand, due to my constant annoyance of my perception of everyone in parliament treading the line and being too paralysed/cynical/stupid to really change anything. Tatjna made the insightful comment that this is naturally what happens when people enter politics, entering with high ideals and wanting to change the world, but gradually having to compromise while working at small changes to the original goal ends up diluting that former grand goal.

When I was 19 I wanted to start a political party. Yeah, at the time, I mostly I thought it’d be a hoot. I wasn’t at all political (except for the general bafflement at politician’s idiocy at times), and I wasn’t one of those students that joined the clubs of other political parties. I did once run for student president at Canterbury University, except that was also a joke campaign: “1 of 5 New Zealanders have a mental illness, and I’m representing them”, “I will fight off pirates with my l33t ninja skillz”… a whole 100 people voted for me! Which surprised me, given that I didn’t even know 100 people and not everyone who was my friend was comfortable voting for my madness.

However, I still have those thoughts about starting a party. And then I also thought, “Hey! I also know a lot of intelligent and sometimes outspoken people who’ve got personal campaigns of things they want changed”. So maybe I will, after all. What would be my stance be on various topics? Well, I’d have to think about it some more, but generally, I will have a number of wild, outlandish ideas so that on the off chance I did get in, and even if politics diluted my idealism, one of those wild ideas might filter through…

Continue reading →

A friend of mine, JMM knew that I’ve been funded in the past by SIAI to work on OpenCog, so he asked the following question:

“The Singularity Institutes “main purpose” is meant to be to investigate whether a recursively improving intelligence can maintain “friendliness” towards human kind. “

Okay, but my standpoint is: Why does the recursively improving intelligence need to be non-human? It seems counter-intuitive to me to devolve this power to something outside of ourselves – and also a bit like we’re just trying vainly to become a kind of God, creating another type of being.

I think the main reason there is a focus on AI rather than improvement of human intelligence is because it’s so damn hard to do experiments on people’s brains. It’s ethically difficult to justify various experiments, and it only gets harder as things become more regulated (and rightfully so for the most case). I think they’ll definitely be continuing research into this stuff though. For myself, occasionally taking Modafinil enhances my productivity significantly (so long as I maintain focus on what I’m meant to be doing, it’s easy to get enthralled with something that interests me, but isn’t related to my work).

But there’s no exclusion of human intelligence amplification from the singularity concept. If we create smarter humans, then this begets even smarter humans. Again we can’t really predict what those enhanced “humans” would do, because they are a significant step smarter than us.

Continue reading →

An essay by Paul Graham on Why Nerds are Unpopular:

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

…

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Which, in my personal experience is completely true.

I’m a lot happier when the work and tasks I’m doing have a reason. Written problems bored me silly, and I got much more reward back from helping my friends with them. Scripted laboratory work was similar, although a little better.

Perhaps that’s why I liked computer science early on. It was possible to easily experiment with whatever you liked. You didn’t need the tutors to arrange the right chemicals or reagents beforehand (as in biochemistry or genetics).