Our ability to generalize, think in terms of abstractions, gives us enormous power — even if it’s a virtual sort of power. With it, we can write books in which we create and destroy universes, which transcends the objects we control. We’re not bound by the rules of those universes.
What makes computers different from humans is that computers cannot conceptualize, and so they cannot conceptualize a force that transcends the framework to which they are confined.
A friend of mine suggested that as the one question he likes asking people he interviews for any kind of technology job. I think it’s a great question because it gets at an important characteristic of someone I would like to work with — passion and the depth of thought. Having a favorite algorithm requires you not only to know a bunch of algorithms, but also to have thought about them and used them enough to have an opinion. Just like a favorite song, your favorite algorithm is probably not going to be the one that everyone learns in their first year of CS education, or one that everyone uses every day. And knowing why it’s a favorite algorithm reveals a lot about how someone thinks about computing.
What’s your favorite algorithm?
There are a couple of things I’ve always done my own way (mostly because I had the luxury of not having anyone tell me the standard way to do it) that ended up being a better way of doing things. My favorite example is how I arranged my car’s side view mirrors. I would turn them outwards as much as possible to minimize (or in most cases eliminate) the blind spot. That way as soon as the car disappeared from my periphery, it appeared in my side-view mirror. As soon as it disappeared from the mirror, it appeared in the rear view mirror. This was particularly useful in what I considered to be the primary purpose of the side view mirrors — to help you switch lanes.
Only a couple of years after I started driving my friends told me that people set their mirrors to show the side of the car to have a sense of perspective (a reference frame) and to make parking easier. I didn’t feel that I needed to see the side of my car in the side view mirror — parking is not a common use case and the frame isn’t necessary once you get used to the setting.
Apparently a couple of years ago the DOT began recommending the way to set up the side view mirrors the way I’ve been setting them all along. It felt good…
We assimilate information in varying degrees. I can identify four fundamental stages, from least to most permanent and effective. It’s important to be aware of this spectrum (and of the differences between the stages) because we often make incorrect assumptions about our understanding of something (and, consequently, our ability to use that understanding).
Most of us stop at understanding, which is dangerous because it provides a shallow form of assimilation. THe information they’ve understood is not readily available. It’s important to be aware of the distinction between understanding and internalization, and to know when understanding alone is simply not going to cut it.
I feel that software has a really bad reputation. I blame it on large companies (such as Microsoft and, recently, also Apple) that have, in the past ten years, set users’ expectations in a particular way.
We are all used to software breaking all the time. We rarely think about it. Defects cause us frustration, wasted time and money. We get angry but then we shrug it off. Such a thing would be unacceptable in any other field — imagine having a car spontaneously blow up!
Those large companies haven’t done a good job designing good software. In their pursuit of profit they preferred to set the expectations low. Somehow the entire industry followed suit, and I think the reason it’s been okay is because our human nature makes us crave new feature so much that we forgive everything else.
If a car was defective, it would be the company’s obligation to repair it. Why isn’t software the same? Why is every piece of software provided as-is? Don’t users deserve what they paid for?
An Introvert conceals feelings. An Extrovert confuses them.
Is what I’m experiencing now worth living or should I spend the time recording instead?
I’ve struggled with this a lot. Do I experience the moment, running the risk that my volatile memory will fail to maintain the experience, or do I record it, running the risk of not really experiencing it? And what value is the recall of the experience, anyway?
Taking photos while traveling is a great example. Most tourists love taking photos, as if somehow reproducing existing photographs but with a much lower quality camera and much less skill and aesthetic sense served any purpose whatsoever. They see the objects they are photographing through the lens of the viewfinder (or, even worse–I get chills–a 2.5″ LCD screen) which is no different than sitting in front of their computer at home and looking at images on Google. They don’t experience these objects; they don’t experience being in their presence.
I’ve traveled a bit and the best experiences I’ve had were those that I didn’t take pictures of.
Most people have this irrational romanticized idea of going through all the pictures they ever took when they are sixty-five, with their grandchildren on their lap. First of all, most of the pictures people take are crap; why on Earth other people, especially those two generations away from us would be interested in seeing them at all baffles me. We’ll likely never see them ourselves either; and again, if we do, we need many fewer to trigger those great memories.
Ultimately, I have settled for some 5-95% split between recording and experiencing. It’s useful to write down a few bullet points to maybe expand on the idea in the future: in fact, most of the posts on this blog came from short phrases I wrote down for my future self to discover and think about further. But the value of the experience, even if it is only a fleeting, present value, is immense. When I’m sixty-five, I’ll be happy remembering the fact that I’ve experienced so much, even if the individual experience have long been lost in the darkness of my fading memory.
I have gotten a lot of shit weird looks from my friends when I explain to them that I like the Nav in my car to have the map facing north (as opposed to facing the direction of travel). Apparently it’s common sense to do the latter.
I disagree. It has everything to do with one’s objectives. If all you care about is optimizing for the user experience understanding directions, then yes, having the map face the direction of travel is better. It’s clear when to turn left and right because the map reflects what ahead of you so you can mimic easily. But for me there is an important objective that I think people undervalue: I value knowing where I am. In other words, I value having a mental model of the area, which allows me to gain intuitive understanding of how far things are and how to get from one place to another without a navigation system (an incredibly useful skill if you don’t have your nav, or if you have the annoying ones that don’t let you the passenger key in directions while you’re driving). There is something really powerful in having a good understanding of your surroundings; it gives you a firm ground.
You simply can’t build that mental model if the map keeps rotating, because there is no invariant that your brain can stick to.
And for anyone who gets confused translating turns on a rotated map into car turns, here is a better paradigm that I use: instead of thinking of turns as “left” and “right”, get used to thinking of them as “clockwise” and “counterclockwise”. Those concepts are invariant under a rotating map so you’ll never get confused.
We’re so used to the current model of getting work done that we rarely think about what it used to be like. Nowadays, we spend most of our people at our desks, staring at computer screens, where we interact with the entire world. The computer is our window into everything.
We used to talk to people in person more, and we used to have more meetings. We used to write notes with our hands. We used to deal with paperwork more. Office supplies–which feel so obsolete these days–were king.
But what will it be in the future? I think it’ll be a combination of the two. We’ll interact with people more–with computers having automated a lot of the repetitive tasks, we can focus on where we, human beings, add the most value: in being human. But we’ll need to be connected in order to get the leverage we need. We need something that we’ll keep handy that will keep us connected and serve as a tool for seeing, hearing, and taking notes. The iPad is actually a great example of a device that fits in very well with that model. I can absolutely imagine all of us carrying one with us at all times, just like we used to carry our notepads.
The best movies, according to me:
Premise
Story
Acting
Visual / Construction
Overall
me
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