Ducklings

• 2011-12-25

  

  (via curvedwhite)

  Source: popchartlab

• 2011-11-01

  Factoring

  A number of people have lately taken to introducing me as “the designer of UDP”, or worse “the inventor of UDP.”

  …

  Actually, UDP was “un-designed” by me and others. By this I mean that UDP was the final expression of a process that today we would call “factoring” an overcomplex design.

  …

  UDP was actually “designed” in 30 minutes on a blackboard when we decided pull the original TCP protocol apart into TCP and IP, and created UDP on top of IP as an alternative for multiplexing and demultiplexing IP datagrams inside a host among the various host processes or tasks. But it was a placeholder that enabled all the non-virtual-circuit protocols since then to be invented, including encapsulation, RTP, DNS, …, without having to negotiate for permission either to define a new protocol or to extend TCP by adding “features”.

  What a hero.

  One project where my friend and officemate Steven T. Kent (now chief scientist and vice president at BBN, and a chief advisor to NSA) and I lost was our strong argument to put mandatory end-to-end encryption into TCP (and adaptations of the ideas to UDP-based protocols, such as RTP, which I worked out but abandoned). Steve’s design was rejected, not because it was unsound, but because NSA did not want to see ANY encryption work going on in the public domain ARPA project, some say because they did not want to see the world be “too secure” by default.

  What pricks.

  I often think about how lucky we all got that people like David P. Reed had influence while the internet was being designed. It seems like modern software developers are more like low-rent executives than engineers capable of this kind of work. We use language adapted from economics like cost/benefit, ROI, diminishing returns etc to justify spending as much time as possible comparison shopping for components and libraries in a market with very weak signals (no prices, no warranties) but would never spend those same weeks focusing on understanding the problem by splitting it up into it’s simpler components. It’s too easy to label that kind of work “reinventing the wheel” and then just go back to duct taping the latest “best practice patterns”, frameworks and datastores into an “MVP”.

  David’s right when he says it doesn’t make sense to call him the “inventor” or “designer” of UDP. Perhaps the problem is that we don’t have a word for what he did. Boy am I glad he did it though.

• 2011-10-19

  Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

  On building our own tools:

  Perhaps someday this will change. Perhaps IDE makers will focus on dynamic exploration instead of static analysis, rich visualization instead of line debugging. Perhaps language theorists will stop messing around with arrows and dependent types, and start inventing languages suitable for interactive development and discovery.

  Until that glorious day, it is our sad but unavoidable responsibility as system designers to build our own tools.

  The entire essay/explanation/program is incredible.

  Bret Victor is a wizard in a world full of hobbits.

• 2011-10-08

  Smartness

  Smartness is that quality which makes it impossible to write a story about a character smarter than you are.

• 2011-10-05

  "Next time I will try harder"

  Great piece

  If resisting the cake is obviously the correct action to take in the future, it is natural to expect oneself to be capable of making that correct choice.

  …

  When you are planning ahead, you are not quite the same person as you are in front of cake. You are wrong to assume that you would make the same decisions in front of the cake that you had planned to make before encountering it.

• 2011-10-04

  Oppression perspectives

  …

  Forager cultures solved this problem by having everybody raise all the children. We still see this in cultures that were forced to be nomadic far longer than most farmer cultures (jews, romani are the prominent examples). Farmer cultures dealt with it in a variety of ways, most of which are now deemed oppressive. Lots of systems that are designed to protect older women will look oppressive to young women.

• 2011-09-19

  Skepticism & Relativism

  The error here is similar to one I see all the time in beginning philosophy students: when confronted with reasons to be skeptics, they instead become relativists. That is, where the rational conclusion is to suspend judgment about an issue, all too many people instead conclude that any judgment is as plausible as any other.

• 2011-09-12

  Respecting the Bus Drivers

  The ”ecological” view isn’t confined to the organic world. Along with it comes a new understanding of how intelligence itself comes into being. The classical picture saw Great Men with Great Ideas…but now we tend to think more in terms of fertile circumstances where uncountable numbers of minds contribute to a river of innovation. It doesn’t mean we cease to admire the most conspicuous of these — but that we understand them as effects as much as causes. This has ramifications for the way we think about societal design, about crime and conflict, education, culture and science.

  That in turn leads to a re-evaluation of the various actors in the human drama. When we realise that the cleaners and the bus drivers and the primary school teachers are as much a part of the story as the professors and the celebrities, we will start to accord them the respect they deserve.

• 2011-05-18

  Desirism

  A system of ethics that those who are skeptical of the buddhist claim that “desire can be completely eliminated” may find appealing.

  [updated] reworded

• 2011-02-22

  Real Invention vs “Automating the Pleistocene”

  I have no idea why the Future Of New Computing mailing list is “private” (you just have to enter your email to view the archives) but seeing as it’s one of the few places on the internet where Alan Kay (yeah, seriously, that Alan Kay) writes it’s a damn shame that you can’t easily link to a thread.

  Recently, Casey Ransberger writes:

  It got me thinking about an interview I saw on the tubes that Alan did on collective cognition, where he mentioned a list of human motivators that anthropologists had identified. …

  To which Alan responds:

  It is indeed a reference to “human universals”. These are traits and “drives” found in every culture, and originally were identified in the 3000 or so traditional cultures studied by Anthropologists.

  For example, every culture examined has a language, stories, kinship, status and power, a “culture” (a tradition for living and survival), religion, magic, revenge, fantasizing, games and sports, music and dance, etc., about 300 identified so far, many of the most important ones are genetic.

  In computer terms these can be thought of as “spreadsheet cells actively looking to the environment for concrete things to fulfill the traits and drives. This gives rise to a fundamental idea in Anthropology: a child at birth can be taken anywhere in the world and they will grow up as a member of the receiving culture, not the one they were born into.

  These drives operate to some extent even after most of them have been filled. Live in another culture for more than a few weeks and quite a bit of deep normalization starts to happen.

  So these are deeper than “motivations” but form some of the context for them. One branch of the science of traits and drives is Neuroethology. And there are several others.

  Once this idea is taken up, it is interesting to make a list of “non-universals” — for example: reading & writing, empirical model based science, deductive abstract mathematics, equal rights, etc.

  And to realize that these were inventions — and not easy to come by, and quite recent given that female mitochondrial DNA suggests that we’ve been on the planet for about 200,000 years.

  Then we can note that a lot of money can be made by making amplifiers and environments for the built-in traits, and we can also reflect that the reason these sell so well is that we are essentially “automating the Pleistocene”.

  It is a much harder sell to both the funders and the public to make amplifiers and environments that embody the non-universals, even though much of what we thing of as “civilization” comes from our inventions not our genes.

  Cheers,

  Alan