Taking Things Apart

Photo

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 06:40:58 -0600

Factoring

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:48:04 -0500

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

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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.

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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.

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:46:31 -0500

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.

Smartness

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 10:37:21 -0500

Smartness:

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

"Next time I will try harder"

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:12:01 -0500

"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.

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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.

Oppression perspectives

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:55:30 -0500

Oppression perspectives:

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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.

Skepticism & Relativism

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:07:01 -0500

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.

Respecting the Bus Drivers

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:28:41 -0500

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.

Real Invention vs "Automating the Pleistocene"

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:46:49 -0600

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

That's Called Design

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 01:08:50 -0600

That's Called Design:

Where is the evidence that Apple’s control-freak/perfectionist nature has hurt Apple in the market — for phones, for iPods, or for computers? “We’re going to make these decisions for you and offer a limited number of choices” is indeed the company’s philosophy. That’s called design.

Nothing fundamentally wrong here, just bring me a couple of rock stars

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:33:46 -0600

Nothing fundamentally wrong here, just bring me a couple of rock stars:

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple shipped a cheap iPhone. And there’s nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers, testing the hypothesis that these things are central to Apple’s success.

Isn’t google the king of spending millions to test a hypothesis? If all it takes is a few Rock Stars of industrial-design and user-experience then surely that’s cheap enough for Google to test.

I’m pretty sure it is something fundamental but even if that’s not the case I just can’t see how anyone can think it’s as easy for Google (or a 3rd party) to develop and sell a high-priced handset with good industrial-design and user-experience as it is for Apple to get the costs down on one of their handsets that is already well designed and provides an excellent user-experience.

The Most Wrong Anyone Has Ever Been

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:33:17 -0600

The Most Wrong Anyone Has Ever Been:

Note that someone just gave a confidence level of 10^4478296 to one and was wrong. This is the sort of thing that should never ever happen. This is possibly the most wrong anyone has ever been.

Obviously the author has never worked in internet advertising

Die XML. Die

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:08:22 -0600

Die XML. Die:

Disagree with author that “how to make HTML5 play more nicely with XML” is something a modern web developer should more than a second thinking about but I wholy agree with this statement:

In particular, JSON shines as a programming language-independent representation of typical programming language data structures. This is an incredibly important use case and it would be hard to overstate how appallingly bad XML is for this.

This is my favorite thing about JSON. I think it’s something Crockford has a rare skill for. When most programmers look at something, their first thought is often “What should I add to make this thing more powerful?” Doug took the JavaScript language and extracted out of it a thing that is arguably as useful as the language itself.

Group problem solving

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 23:09:17 -0600

Group problem solving:

Norman R. F. Maier noted that when a group faces a problem, the natural tendency of its members is to propose possible solutions as they begin to discuss the problem. Consequently, the group interaction focuses on the merits and problems of the proposed solutions, people become emotionally attached to the ones they have suggested, and superior solutions are not suggested. Maier enacted an edict to enhance group problem solving: “Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.”

The Node Package Manager, as described by the author, probably after a couple of drinks

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 19:00:17 -0600

The Node Package Manager, as described by the author, probably after a couple of drinks:

JavaScript is at its heart an anarchic language, forged in the great battles of Browsers, lit by the flicker of a thousand animated gifs depicting construction workers.

Reality

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 14:38:00 -0600

Reality:

I pause. “Well…” I say slowly. “Frankly, I’m not entirely sure myself where this ‘reality’ business comes from. I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”

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”- I said that ‘truth’ is an excuse used by some cultures to enforce their beliefs on others. So when you say something is ‘true’, you mean only that it would be advantageous to your own social group to have it believed.”

“And this that you have said,” I say, “is it true?”

“Absolutely, positively true!” says Mark emphatically. “People create their own realities.”

Freedom is kind of a hobby with me

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:35:15 -0600

Freedom is kind of a hobby with me:

Penn Jillette back in ‘02 on the TSA

She said, “Well, you know a LOT about this.” I said, “Well, it’s not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I’ll spend to find out how to get people more of it.”

Here’s hoping he’s doing what he can to help the TSA “meet resistance” with their new procedures.

“Is this an episode of the twilight zone?”

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:28:20 -0600

“Is this an episode of the twilight zone?”

Creativity & Mistakes

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 01:17:00 -0600

Creativity & Mistakes:

If you do creative work, there’s a sense that inspiration is this fairy dust that gets dropped on you, when in fact you can just manufacture inspiration through sheer brute force. You can simply produce enough material that the thing will arrive that seems inspired.

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Last year or the year before, two stories of ours won awards at the Third Coast International Audio Festival, and both of them were stories that I thought we shouldn’t do. I was adamant about it. My senior producer was totally for these stories and totally saw the potential in them, and I was like, “Look, sure, go ahead, but there’s no way. These aren’t even interesting to me.” And they turned out to be really great stories. I was totally wrong. That happens a lot.

Hoodoos, Hedge Funds, and Alibis

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:36:00 -0600

Hoodoos, Hedge Funds, and Alibis:

I like Soros’s proverb that you should never marry a woman you wouldn’t want to divorce.