jeff using livejournal

Be wrong to be right

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 08:58:38 GMT

You can be right more often when you learn to admit you are wrong.

If you're actually wrong but persist that you're right, you just remain wrong. Whereas if you admit to being wrong, you become right. You also learn from being wrong and therefore are that much more likely to be right in the future.

It's perhaps counter-intuitive, but that's life. If you *really* care about being right, you'll admit to being wrong.

The latest from Wozniak

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:33:25 GMT

"My latest idea that I've been expressing is that there's no real value to humanity in creating technology like computers. What really matters and makes a difference is when you do something nice for someone else, like tying the shoe of a child. Or bringing smiles to any stranger."

On Knowledge

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:36:18 GMT

Despite conventional wisdom, knowledge is not just a collected body of facts. This is because that's exactly what information is, so knowledge must be something else. In fact, it's so much more.

First of all, I argue that knowledge must be validated to be knowledge. You might hear about wrong information, but rarely do you hear about wrong knowledge. In fact, you commonly hear knowledge associated with truth. This is because knowledge is acquired through experience, the validation of consistency against reality. As they say, you never know until you try.

I also argue that knowledge is not real until it is learned. In a sense, knowledge doesn't exist outside of a person. We talk about our collected body of knowledge, but we're really talking about people and the knowledge they have, or had when they were alive. Anything else is merely information, potential knowledge that has yet to be validated and internalized. Although we trust certain information to be validated "knowledge" since it was once acquired by someone else, it's only an assumption until you have learned it (experienced it) for yourself.

Whether you buy that or not, we all seem to agree that knowledge is power. This is revealing about knowledge when you consider that power is defined as the capacity to cause change. This implies that the nature of knowledge is biased towards the idea of how-to. Although we consider the declarative what-is-true knowledge of, say, mathematics, to be knowledge, it is only a shorthand for the proof behind it, and the process of deriving a proof is obviously a question of how-to.

The idea that knowledge is concerned with change and *how* things happen is important in contrast to why things happen. The fundamental difference between how and why is that how is concerned with structure and process, while why is concerned with function and meaning. The how of something can be determined without context through analysis. How does it work? Take it apart and find out! The why of something is highly dependent on context and synthesis. Why do we have xyz? You'll *never* know from taking xyz apart. Meaning comes from the outside. It accumulates not as knowledge, but as understanding.

A probably more significant implication of knowledge being about change and process, is its relation to computer science. Not computer science as in the specific field of study, but computer science as the essence of computation. Perhaps, philosophy of computation. What computation and programming are about is the notion of formalizing intuitions about . . . process.

Harold Abelson, co-developer of MIT's introductory computer science course, says computer science is not even so much about the computer. "When a field is just getting started, it's easy to confuse the essence of that field with the tools that you use." I think the big significance of computation is not computation at all . . . it's about a means to formally talk about knowledge itself.

We have general language as a formal expression of information and data, and we have basically programming and computers as a formal expression of knowledge and process. This leads me to wonder: what will we develop that allows us to formally express understanding and meaning? What kind of revolution will that be?

Unprecedented State of Busy

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:54:56 GMT

Both now and in general. 2009 is probably the most notable year I can recall. It must have something to do with how busy I've been. Too busy to write in my LiveJournal, that's for sure. And there's been growth and development on all fronts: intellectual, financial, personal, interpersonal, professional, physical, etc.

At the same time, there are daily issues to overcome, stress of many projects and upcoming deadlines, and the occasional bout of exhaustion. I still need to pull my finances into better order, get my semi-professional brand out there as an umbrella for all my projects, and figure out at what point will I retire from pure technology. Most of my major projects are so long-term and require a constant stream of smaller projects to support them, I'm not sure I'll know when I've succeeded.

It may be that what I'll ultimately end up doing is moving where there are more people doing what I really want to do. Living here means I'm completely surrounded by startups and technology, so I can't help but spend cycles thinking about that. It frames my thinking and inspiration.

We'll see.

Please date food

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:33:36 GMT

At the Dojo, somebody left a note on the fridge:

"Please date food."

Somebody crossed out date and wrote "marry."

Later, somebody crossed out marry and wrote, "cheat on."

Somebody else wrote along the side "+1 for marrying food."

Page One

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:21:57 GMT

Hacker Dojo == Hacker Heaven

Also, the city of Mountain View sent us their congratulations. They say the Major wants to meet us.

Combat Tanks

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:45:41 GMT

I'm bringing back the game developer within. I will now develop a series of awesome, simple, but increasingly scoped networked multiplayer games in Flash using Flixel. First on the list is Combat Tanks. Play the alpha preview!

Mostly developed in the 3 days of TIGJam, it's a remake of a favorite Windows 3.1 game. There are still bugs and major features missing, but it will be awesome and it will take the Internet by storm.

Johnny 5

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:02:48 GMT

See it in action.

This is how normal people talk, yeah?

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:45:18 GMT

Me: LIKE ME
Her: OK
Her: i mean NO

Head Asplode

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:50:27 GMT

Busy busy busy. I reformatted my laptop, which required a lot of backup work. I also installed Windows and Boot Camp for some game stuff (making more than playing, but whatev). Over the weekend my net was down while I waited for Comcast to come back and reinstall service (Catherine had to cancel it when she left), but that happened today, so I'm back. Today/last night while doing reformatting stuffs, I also set up my new projector and audio system. I've also been cleaning and retooling the place since Catherine left in preparation for Kevin's move-in.

I still have more housekeeping items to take care of, like my broken Rock Band guitar and adapter needed for my Xbox to connect to the new projector. I'm looking forward to having some Rock Band or movie night parties soon while I have the room.

Now that most of that stuff is taken care of, I can get back to other work. I've been working on a new web service called Scriptlets, which is meant to be a part of the web hooks ecosystem. I've been getting behind writing about web hooks, as well as retooling my presentation for ... shit, next week. I've gotten a lot of useful feedback, which I think will help a lot in making this massive talk less unwieldy and more comprehensible.

The talk is at Pivotal Labs, which should be recorded, so that's a big deal. It's also practice for my talk at a conference next month in Denver called Glue. After Denver, I'll be visiting Montreal as my first time in Canada. That should be fun.

But I've been spending a lot of money and not working on much paid work. And I think I owe more than I thought on taxes, so there goes my savings I had finally gotten growing. I wish I had more time to work. I've been playing with doing other contract work, more short-term stuff that has more urgency and less massive complexity. We'll see how that goes.

There's a lot of other stuff pending that I need to take care of, but I just can't right now. Although I should make room to finish shipping some stuff on TIGdb I started a couple weeks ago. Especially since we have Christpher Lobay with us now working on it.

Anyway, I'm sure there's more (like the game I've started talking to some people about, or Get Achievements, or ongoing SHDH and Hacker Dojo stuff, or the music I want to record, or the indie games BarCamp I've somewhat committed to make happen, etc). I wish I didn't care so much about so much. :\

*head asplode*

Quote from Clint Hocking's Duct Tape Award acceptance rant

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:23:02 GMT

"I thought we were going to learn something from the people who were making these independent games that were challenging the way we thought about games. A year later I think they've learned way more from us than we've learned from them, and they're kicking our asses. So if you like making triple-A games, it's not a fucking joke. You better fucking learn from these guys because they're going to decimate us. Badly. And you won't be making triple-A games anymore because you'll be out of business."

Video here.

The meaning of life

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:06:10 GMT

I decided early on that the meaning of life is to find or make your own meaning. Simple enough, but self-referential. For a while I was asking, what is the meaning of meaning? The significance of significance? I didn't come to a good answer. But again, self-referential. Autopoietic. This was a clue to something, but I didn't realize it.

A self-referential meaning of life doesn't seem satisfying, despite being able to agree with it. Perhaps there is more? Why is it self-referential? What does that mean? Again, I didn't realize even these were clues.

Then I went down a path: Meaning gives purpose. Purpose drives action. Action is change. To change is to exist. The meaning of life is to exist. Self-referential. But wait. If life is an infinite existence, then process is all you have. The means becomes the end.

All of a sudden, "the meaning of life is to find your own meaning" becomes not about an end goal, but an infinite process. It's not about "your own meaning" so much at all. It's about the simple imperative "to find." Which can be further resolved as "to question about." I've been doing this all along and didn't realize. Okay, but now what? Where do we go from here? Easy...

Let's assume as a byproduct of questioning and exploration, we learn/develop. Development defined as "increasing one's ability and desire to satisfy one's own needs and legitimate desires, and those of others." If that's what happens as time goes on, we see an asymptotic path to omnipotence. However, as time goes on "the distance between it and the asymptote eventually becomes smaller than any distance that one may specify." This means that as far as never fully achieving omnipotence, at some point we'll be so increasingly close we might as well be.

In my path to learning more about life, my question then becomes, What would a universe full with omnipotent living systems be like? But I can imagine this questioning going on forever. And we'll never have an answer. But it doesn't matter at all. At least it shouldn't anyway. Not by my reasoning here. As long as we keep questioning and keep exploring, which, by the way, is inevitable, so it also doesn't even matter. BUT: it is all we have (process, means), so we might as well enjoy the self-referential ride.

Believing you should and actually can have an absolute answer to the meaning of life, to me, is a lot like people caught up in predicting and trends, trying to define Web 3.0 before it happens. They're doing it wrong.

Vague memories

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:39:07 GMT

I just remembered eating at a place with a girl I might have had feelings for, but I can't remember who/where it was. I think it was in LA, but I'm not sure. Very weird. Just a couple of vague memories. I hate not remembering things I have stored in my index.

THIS FILE HAS EXPIRED, BUT HERE ARE SOME PIECES OF METADATA... MAYBE.

Moments like this make me wonder if there are whole sections of my life at risk of being forgotten completely.

A secret project

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:39:07 GMT

THIS IS MY BLOG POST FOR TODAY.

Timothy: are you going to tell me about your project?
me: NO WAI
Timothy: :(
me: S#KR!TZ
Timothy: are we bffs or am I just another guy?
me: i can pick up guys like you any night
i just need to cruise down University playing chiptunes while ranting about systems
Timothy: oh god
you're getting me hot

SHDH Photos

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:02:19 GMT

So many photos! Especially awesome are Lynn's photos.

Here are some of my little retrospective. The audience was even bigger because it played my slides and audio in all the conference rooms (I think). It went well. Steve said I spoke very calm and conversationally.

I'm pretty sure a girl IM'd me in this last one, so I started talking to her.

Epic DevHouse 30

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:04:37 GMT

SHDH 30 was quite epic. I didn't just predict it being epic, I helped make it epic. Remember that, kids, predictions alone are for suckers. Anyway, 400+ attendees? That's double the biggest we've had before. It was so epic, my belt broke upon walking in. True story!

One guy gave me a hug for starting DevHouse. So much love! A couple friends came that never have before and were "blown away" at how "crazy" it was. I also got a lot of kudos for my retrospective talk, which apparently went much better than I thought it would.

I also hear somebody commented about how trendy I've become, in a good way. Right? Artsy glasses. Slim straight jeans. Smaller, better fitting shirts. Shorter hair. New shoes. I guess so! Not sure what else it could be. The gym? A growing sense of self-worth? A fancy new iPhone?!

Just thinking with web hooks

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:04:39 GMT

If LiveJournal had web hooks for posting, one could easily write a handler to grab current music from Last.fm and include it in the post automatically. I suppose the same thing could be done with Greasemonkey, though.

I very much appreciate Russian New Years

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:52:47 GMT

Jeff seduces you

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 06:07:09 GMT

Kyle Gabler's Paper Man

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 11:29:48 GMT

Every time I'm with Kyle, he does something clever or creative with whatever paper-like material is around. Here he made a little paper man that was very enjoyable to play with while he tries to pull off some Matrix cinematography.

Too Epic

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:40:50 GMT

"He has ideas that are TOO EPIC for the fragile minds of the likes of me and Steve"

An idealist fate: how love is the best strategy

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:47:28 GMT

I'm not one to make a hard decision on [ahem, anything...] whether I believe in something so elusive and controversial as fate. However, I do believe that the fate most people think about is an over simplified version, like most ideas involving a system as complex as say... the universe.

Now I don't want to get into determinism vs free will, although they're obviously related. I don't want to go there because I don't think I have it figured out in those terms yet. The true answer usually lies in between (or perhaps, beyond) opposing views. But I did realize something tonight that might be useful nonetheless:

What should happen probably will.

To me, that's fate. It's not a strict, absolute rule. It's not saying it will certainly happen. It's just saying it's likely to eventually. Probabilism with a bias. But a bias towards what? How do we know what "should" happen?

This is where love comes in. I'm not sure I can communicate this without fully explaining my ideas about love. But how it ties is with fate, which I suppose is a sort of "nature of the universe," should explain the significance of love in the universe, right?

Let me back up.

I think we'd love it if passionate people with "good" values, integrity and intention (say, idealists) got their way. Then we could all be them and we'd all get our way and it would be ideal, yeah?

So why don't things always work out for people with good intentions and good hearts, even when there is nothing else in their way? Simple. Their good intentions came with a lack an understanding of the bigger picture OR they got in the way of what would have happened anyway. After all, the nature of the universe (as all complex systems) is often counter intuitive. These two explanations are roughly the same thing.

Put it another way: they were not fully in tune with what "should" happen, or they unknowingly sabotaged themselves by not letting happen what probably would happen.

Okay, maybe I skipped something. What "should" happen is what the universe wants to happen. Keep in mind you are part of the universe, not anything separate. It's like a democracy but with all forces of the universe. And what does the universe want to happen? Love. I think the fact we are all born wanting love supports this.

To better prove this, I'm going to get a bit systemsy, but nothing you shouldn't be able to follow. The universe is assumed to be a closed system. Although we used to think it was a mechanical system, we don't anymore, but it's also unlikely a purposeful system like humans, living things or societies of living things. It is the environment for these societies, hence an ecology.

Like mechanical systems, ecologies have no purpose of their own. Mechanical systems require purpose to come from the outside (like the user of a tool). However, ecological systems require purpose to come from within. That is to say, their parts that are purposeful. This is basically most living things.

Okay, so the universe's purpose becomes to serve its living inhabitants. (Ignore why that would be the case when life is seemingly so rare in the universe.) The common purpose of all living things is to survive. That is their prime directive and is even the basis for what we call morals. To have all things living in concert requires a certain mutually beneficial bonding quality... we'll call it, uhhh, love.

You can define things in two ways: what its internal structure of parts are, or what *role* it plays in the greater environment. We're used to the reductionist perspective of the former. We need more of the latter. I'll go ahead and define love by its role: a quality that brings unity to the universe.

What "should happen" is defined in terms of love. To be most in tune with this fate you should err on the side of love. Globally and locally ideal seeking. Then realize it will likely happen eventually. If you doubt that, and end up trying to force it to happen, you're likely (but not guaranteed) to get in the way because a) you probably don't know what you're doing, and b) you'll never be as effective as the collective.

The best strategy (my strategy) becomes: use your heart, grok as much as you can, pick your battles, collaborate and cooperate.

And as a slight addition to this, remember that you can't help others if you can't help yourself. Always take care of yourself because that is your means for taking care of others. Similarly, always take care of your environment because that is what helps take care of us all. Unity is balance.

Fate. Let it happen.

Cute moment in Sesame Street history

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:41:50 GMT

The ending is my favorite.

TIGdb is more popuar when TIGSource is down?

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:15:50 GMT

Recently TIGdb was featured on CrunchGear. I'm not sure I understand CrunchGear or why TIGdb was featured on it, but being part of the TechCrunch network, I guess that's pretty cool. This led to it being muchly favorited on delicious, enough for it to show up on the front page for the time being.

Funny thing is I haven't touched it for a while. I still get error emails from edge case exception scenarios. I think Derek's been adding games... it's nearing 500. But I don't know if it's a good thing, a bad thing, or even direct causation that TIGdb is getting a lot of attention while the main TIGSource blog is basically down for the count.

Unfortunately, I didn't get around to fixing the blog this weekend, so hopefully I can find some time this week. I've also talked with Tim about working on TIGdb with him on a near regular schedule. And two other sites have started talking to us about possibly working together, so that's interesting.

Proof Nicholette is cute and I'm just weird

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:25:31 GMT