BR Shetty: The rise and fall of a billionaire - <AUTHOR> https://m.economictimes.com/nri/nris-in-news/br-shetty-the-staggering-rise-and-incredible-fall-of-a-billionaire/articleshow/75381757.cms <comment><USER2> > But on that day in August, when Muddy Waters tweeted that it would release a > report about an accounting fiasco at a London-listed firm, Block noticed an > interesting development: the stock of NMC Health dropped. "We had tweeted in > advance an innocuous comment about our intention to initiate a campaign the > next day on an unnamed London listed firm. NMC happened to drop > significantly on the tweet. That's a pretty strong indication that the > market knows something isn't right at the company, so we took a look…." > Block told ET Magazine in an emailed response. What they found was not > pretty.

That's the most interesting 'event study', as it were, I've heard of since the Challenger or Alchian's nuclear bomb market study.

It's amazing the things that the market 'knows'. I sometimes wish that event studies could track down the specific traders responsible and understand what exactly they know and how they learned it, because it otherwise is such voodoo.

<comment><USER3> I was confused about this comment, and wish the article explained it more.

When Muddy Waters first put out the tweet, were they:

(a) planning an investigation of NMC, and the market validated their suspicions when the stock dropped?

(b) planning an investigation of another firm, but then when NMC stock dropped thought "Hey, did we just freak out a bunch of in-the-know traders that something fishy is going on with NMC?" and then start the NMC investigation based on that? If this is the right answer, what was the other firm they were planning to investigate?

(c) not really planning an investigation of any firm in particular, but threw out that tweet in the hopes that someone would bite, and when NMC traders "bit" by selling, that's when they started their investigation?

<comment><USER4> Looks like (b) is the answer. They released this tweet on Aug 7, 2019 (the next day after announcing they were targeting an LSE-listed company):

[https://twitter.com/muddywatersre/status/1159009866020618241](https://twitter.com/muddywatersre/status/1159009866020618241)

Pretty amazing that they went through and took a look at all the companies whose stock prices dropped from Aug 6-7th on LSE as a sort of "business development" opportunity.

<comment><USER3> Thank you! So in my opinion that is even more impressive, and actually somewhat hilarious. They sent out the tweet which was about prepping to short Burford Capital (which apparently had such non-existent governance as the CEO is married to the CFO), then the NMC traders all went "Oh shit, he must be talking about us!!"

It's like the old trope where the accuser says to a group of people "I know what you did!", and then everyone in the group confesses to various misdeeds even though the accuser was only talking about one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating story.

I wonder how much of this stuff goes undisclosed in various parts of the world.

Is there a site / publication that maintains a rogues gallery of such financial misadventures ( to put it lightly )?

American Greed on CNBC [1] covers some petty ( in the scheme of things ) frauds and fraudsters. Netflix's Dirty Money [2] is another good show. But there is good reason to speculate that much bigger whales never really get caught if they get their accounting / creative financing ducks in a row.

Surely there are other publications / shows that get into the nitty gritty & gory detail of how they pulled these off.

[1] American Greed [https://www.cnbc.com/american- greed/](https://www.cnbc.com/american-greed/)

[2] Dirty Money [https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100](https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100)

<comment><USER6> Haven't seen American Greed. Dirty Money is mostly terrible and fictional (I was involved in one of the stories, you had people on that program claiming they were involved who I have never heard of...Netflix docs are usually very sensationalist/inaccurate).

In other parts of the world, HK being a good example, this happens and can go undisclosed for a long period of time. But in the US, actual fraud is almost always discovered quickly, and there are no bigger whales who never get caught (the reason these frauds work is the difference between what you can get away with temporarily and the long-run...in the long-run, you won't get away with it). There are books (and now reports) on pretty much all the big frauds.

The exception to this are all the earnings management and reporting shenanigans (for example, choosing to close an acquisition on a certain date) or managers/bankers who list shitty companies constantly. None of this is illegal of course, it isn't damaging in itself but it is also not particularly ethical. Knowing about this is usually market knowledge i.e. following a company for a while, and seeing that the CEO is constantly changing strategy/lying, etc. This happens far more often than people think, and is almost never punished (in fact, these people are usually feted in society...they go after fame, they know how to claim reward and divert blame).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having grown up in the United Arab Emirates in the 90s, I've personally seen the growth of NMC / UAE Exchange along with other firms (GEMS Education Group, the Lulu Group, Danube etc.) that are giant corporate entities. This story arc isn't going to be the last of what we see from firms that saw such growth. One of the biggest hurdles with such firms listing in public stock markets internationally is the lack of corporate accountability / governance in their home markets. As much as I'd hate to say it, building and growing companies in tax havens such as Dubai helps them only to develop corporate cultures to brush off problems under the rug that come to bite them later. Because they don't have to pay taxes, there isn't a government entity they need to be held accountable to. One of the few reasons where having an income / corporate tax system might just help public shareholders. As always, this is all anecdotal.

</comment><comment><USER8> > A private investigation revealed it might have understated its debt by $4.5 > billion in 2019. Shetty's financial services firm Finablr, an LSE-listed > enterprise that owns the remittance firm UAE Exchange, has discovered that > $100 million worth of cheques were issued from the company without the > board's knowledge.

The interesting question here would be - Who should foot the bill? The shareholders can only take action based on data they have in public. It's the job of govt agencies along with the corporation to ensure that the data is appropriate. Now, you have people investing into equity based on data ... which was falsified.

<comment><USER9> Shareholders should discount companies without proper financial audits. The trade off in theory is higher risk for higher rewards without that overhead. In practice that's not what happens.

It's really several short and long term feedback loops. If the market is efficient then excessive due diligence is a waste and a low overhead 'dumb' investment strategy is ideal. However, should everyone take that stance company management has huge incentive to cheat and fleece that dumb money.

If dumb money is being fleeced that pushes for regulations while 'smart' money has higher profit. But, should those regulations work they get torn down as excessive wastes.

<comment><USER8> There should never be a company that runs for an extended period of time without proper financial audits. It is THE job of regulators to ensure appropriate audits. NMC Health IPO'd on 2012 and the fraud was found in 2019. Muddy Waters a private research firm was able to discover the fraud which puts into question the regulators here. One can't just simply push responsibility of audits on the "reward - risk" line to ordinary folk.

<comment><USER9> Which regulator's job do you think it is to audit all public companies every X years, and based on what laws?

There are rules around audits, and it's illegal to do specific things in the US. But enforcement is reactive not proactive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Much easier to read this version:

[https://outline.com/8AGwZC](https://outline.com/8AGwZC)

</comment><comment><USER4> Unpopular opinion but to me this reinforces the massively important role of short sellers in free markets. Yes they are often on the wrong side of these "exposés" (Tesla comes to mind) and can create some harm in those cases, but being able to uncover frauds affecting tens of thousands of people is extremely valuable. These frauds may have lasted years and years longer and caused much more damage if not for firms like Muddy Waters.

<comment><USER11> Why are shorts necessary in the presence of put contracts?

I think the problem some folks have with short selling is that it creates for the market an illusion of willing sellers where there may not be supply.

<comment><USER12> It's analogous to the reason coal was necessary even after we had electricity: short positions enable the production of put contracts. By selling you a put option, I'm taking a long position on the underlying stock. So I probably want to hedge that by selling a bit of my existing stock. But if I don't already own stock in that company then, without short selling, I can't provide that liquidity.

Short selling typically involves the sale of borrowed stock, mediated through dealer-brokers, so the stock that's sold short does exist. So there's no issue with supply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems like Muddy Waters Research has been dong this successfully for a while. Seems like Ehealth is their latest target, interesting model.

Is there a similar model for common investors to benefit from such research instead of just hedge fund (big) investors alone.

<comment><USER14> Not really. The idea of doing the research is you can get into a short position cheaply. You then announce it, and the stock likely drops. This raises the price of a short position.

Before the short is announced, the research is private information. Once it is announced, everyone knows about it, and so much of the profit potential is gone. There's still some profit potential to following them, but it is much riskier.

The only real way to benefit from this would be to do your own research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fascinating story of fall from grace.

</comment><comment><USER16> Many more similar scandals in India [https://archive.vn/1X1Un](https://archive.vn/1X1Un)</comment>


Top 20 String Algorithm Questions from Coding Interviews - <AUTHOR> http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2015/01/top-20-string-coding-interview-question-programming-interview.html

<comment><USER2> Maybe not the most sophisticated of pages, but sometimes it is good to get a brief reminder of what might be asked, especially for those of us that are not considered senior yet.</comment>


HowTo: Auto Scaling with the AWS Management Console - <AUTHOR> http://blog.celingest.com/en/2013/12/19/auto-scaling-with-the-aws-management-console/?seeder=rgrHN

<comment><USER2> Not sure how this made it to the front page when it's essentially a rehash of the formal announcement and how-to from AWS's blog. [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/12/aws-management-console- au...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/12/aws-management-console-auto-scaling- support.html)</comment>


Is Your Body Yours? - <AUTHOR> http://lidmith.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/is-your-body-yours/

<comment><AUTHOR> Very thoughtful and enjoyable discussion about the limits of the individual weighted against the rights of society. (full disclosure this is a good friend of mines blog, I'm hoping to convince him to get his own domain/host)</comment>


Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself - <AUTHOR> http://innerdaemon.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/sorry-adobe-you-screwed-yourself/ <comment><USER2> What a tool. It's a shame this made it to Techmeme. He really had to twist the facts to make his point. Here's what he didn't say:

 _ZDNet 2001_ (Dec 2001) Article is actually _Adobe: OS X's new best friend?_ "Analysts and creative professionals say that Adobe's release of products for OS X could be the most significant turning point in the new operating system's adoption." "Developers privately complained of stability issues with the original release of OS X, saying that these problems hampered their efforts to move their products to the new operating system. That finally changed in September, when Apple issued the Mac OS X 10.1 update."

 _A slice from 2002_ Article is from March '02: OSX 10.2.1 was established as default OS on Macs only 3 months prior!

What he left out: "Adobe is actively working to add support for the full version of Acrobat 5.0 running in OS X native mode." "Adobe currently plans to offer native support for OS X in the next major release of After Effects." etc.

 _CNet 2004_ "At the same time, Apple has quietly pushed Adobe out of a few markets by selling its own applications or bundling them into its OS X operating system. "

 _John Nack, 2006_ (Feb '06) _No Intel OS X updated Adobe apps till 07_ "Ever since Apple's Intel announcement last summer, they've told the industry (at least the consumer side) that Intel Macs would appear by summer 2006."

Wikipedia: "On January 10, 2006, the new MacBook Pro and iMac became the first Apple computers to use Intel's Core Duo CPU. By August 7, 2006 Apple had transitioned the entire Mac product line to Intel chips, over 1 year sooner than announced."

<comment><USER3> He has a point, although the way he arrives at the conclusion is flawed. Adobe made a rational business decision at a time when nobody could have predicted the Apple renascence. This decision might cost them dearly now, but that doesn't mean that given the facts known at that time, they should have made a different one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is, frankly, childish. Apple was a fading platform when Adobe made that decision, and it made perfect business sense.

Until about 2008, the last time I had even _seen_ a Mac on this (Eastern) side of the Atlantic was about 1991 or so.

<comment><USER5> I think the article is unduly harsh but I think it makes a valid point. It's sort of a live by the sword, die by the sword thing. Adobe made the right business decision in 2002 and I don't think you can fault them for that. But Apple's making the right business decision now and I don't think you can fault them for that. So I think the bottom line is that Adobe's falling victim to the same thing that they did to Apple back in 2002 and that's just the reality of the world.

<comment><USER6> > Apple's making the right business decision now and I don't think you can > fault them for that.

Yes, I can. Restricting developers' rights isn't a valid business decision. That's like saying Highway robbery is a respectable income source.

<comment><USER7> _Restricting developers' rights isn't a valid business decision._

Why?

Developers aren't a constitutionally protected special class.

<comment><USER8> What does the constitution have anything to do with this? Why bring the Canadian Constitution into it? Finally, you have a misunderstanding of a right. It isn't something you need to be given via a law. A right is something you have despite laws. The US Constitution doesn't give you the explicit right to "think whatever you want," but you have it.

As for rights, he's referring the right of a developer to use whatever programming language he wishes to developer software on different systems. A closed system prevents a developer from exercising that right.

It's even worse when a system establishes itself with certain restrictions and freedoms, and then changes that later on. In fact, it's called Bait and Switch. Apple had certain rules and requirements, and certain people bought into that idea. Now they've changed that. You can argue with they are allowed to, but that doesn't diminish the criticism thrown at them. Just because they can do something doesn't mean they should do something. There are a million examples to demonstrate that.

For a long time, a lot of intelligent people were saying that Apple was inching closer and closer toward restricting rights of its users more and more. People disregarded us, and said "Hey, Apple can do this!" While they might be legally able to, this doesn't mean they should. They restrict the content. They restrict how you display that content. They restrict more and more. I have no pity for Apple supporters anymore. And when Apple restricts that thing you hold dear, you'll cry. Or you'll do what others have done: decide what you wanted was wrong, and you shouldn't have wanted it, and Apple was right.

<comment><USER7> I haven't heard a good case that developers are born with an inalienable right to write any code they want for any platform they want. It devalues the very concept of rights you're arguing for when people claim anything they'd like to do as a "right".

Whether Apple's recent move is a good decision or not is totally up for debate. As is whether the change is distasteful or offensive. But whether it's a "valid business decision [because it violates some God-given right]" is not.

<comment><USER8> "I haven't heard a good case that developers are born with an inalienable right to write any code they want for any platform they want."

Probably because I can't think of a single time when this has been an issue. The argument isn't over what Apple can do. It's that Apple is dictating how developers are allowed to develop their applications. This isn't about writing Java apps that will run on the iPhone. It's about writing Objective-C apps using whatever tools we want that will run on the iPhone.

"As is whether the change is distasteful or offensive."

One could argue it's both. Either is fine by me.

<comment><USER7> _It's about writing Objective-C apps using whatever tools we want that will run on the iPhone._

Exactly. And that's _not_ a natural right. And Apple not allowing it _is_ a valid business decision (whether it's a good one for Apple's bottom line or a good one morally—or whether it even is a moral question—is up for debate). That's all I'm saying. Let's use reasonable terms so our debate is sensible and valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This explains my disdain for almost everything Adobe on OS X. It's not just that Flash sucks on my Mac. It's that almost all their products suck... They're not focused on OS X.

And I'm not the only person: <http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php>

<comment><USER4> Change the framing of this for a second.

Suppose instead of Apple, it was the government deciding which apps get approved, and which don't.

Would you support the government to make the correct decisions, by fiat? Or would you rather a free market see opportunities in crappy applications, and produce better alternatives?

<comment><USER10> Boy, that's a terrible analogy. What we're beginning to see in smartphones is a competition between different business models: one (Apple) that exercises a lot of control over the platform, and another (Android) that exercises very little control. We'll get to see how that plays out. That's the free market for you.

<comment><USER4> And in a similar way, everybody has freedom of government, because they can just move to another country, right?

Except it's often not that simple. People can be locked in in lots of different ways, and suffer at the hands of a dictator, one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time._

I don't 100% agree with Apple's decision to ban non-native language apps, nor do I 100% disdain Adobe (Lightroom is a phenomenal product IMHO). But my dislike of Flash, the now comical number of bloggers jumping on the "Apple is evil, look at their SDK" bandwagon, and this statement all together made me laugh.

</comment><comment><USER12> You know I think Steve Jobs maybe is doing the right thing for Apple by not allowing all of these cross compilers. I mean, that article really gave me a look at the history that Jobs is talking about when he says these cross- compiler vendors never support Apple as a first class citizen.

I don't LIKE it.

But I have a better understanding for it now.

Adobe, obviously, always wants to target windows first. Companies like Unity and MonoTouch obviously are more in the C# and even .Net camp. These guys are targeting iPhone as an afterthought. And while we know their products do not run well on macs at the moment, I used to think that they would run well on macs in the future.

I'm not so sure anymore.

Maybe Apple does need to go it alone with respect to middleware. Even better, some enterprising start up could make an Objective-C game engine.

<comment><USER4> He's not outlawing cross compilers. He's outlawing _innovation_ in third party tools and frameworks on the iPhone platform. The clause is much more broad than cross compilation.

<comment><USER12> Not really.

An innovative person could make an Objective-C game engine, or a C++ game engine or what have you. The language does not disallow innovation in frameworks or third party tools, it opens up a new avenue for that innovation.

Now mind you I don't agree with the path they have taken. But I do think it is important right now for cooler heads to prevail. Making statements like 'Apple is outlawing innovation...' is not contributing in a constructive fashion to the solution search.

What are Apple's concerns?

Are they legitimate?

How can the developer community address Apple's concerns?

If Apple sees not only real effort, but real progress towards addressing those concerns, perhaps it might be willing to loosen up on the reigns.

As it stands though, the concerns Apple has are legitimate. Now that we know what they are, can we move towards addressing them.

I just think that staking out these strident positions makes for good blog reading, but it is not going to solve anything.

If we put our 'crowdsourced' heads together we can come up with a solution that could allow the situation to develop with positive impact with respect to everyone's interests.

<comment><USER13> But I don't see the "quality" concerns that Jobs sees. Do you? Do you think it could be an excuse to maintain control over the development process and to hurt the Adobe CS5 release?

They have a review process which is used for quality control yet they allow 60+ fart apps in the store! Why don't they tighten the review process on ALL apps (including non Objective-C apps)?

I guess you could say it would cost more to hire reviewers but the money made on the new app sales would certainly cover that (and much more). To me it's just a huge slap in the face to end users who will miss out on much app potential (assuming the reviewers did their job) and to developers who have dedicated time in learning a 3rd party framework - yet so many people here and other places seem to love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bingo. Apple doesn't ever want to find itself in a position where it has to depend on 3rd party tools keeping up with its OS evolution. If/when Android ends up being the dominant mobile platform, every dev house will likely make a "business decision" to use cross-platform tools. The control point for app innovation would then be in third party hands.

And as for losing out on innovation because developers can't make their own tools, I'm sure Apple isn't worried about that at all. They seem to have enough in-house innovation to run circles around what the competition has to offer, for the past ten years.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was wondering how Apple PR would handle this issue, and they are being very clever. They try to frame this purely as a spat between Apple and Adobe. And lets face it, nobody really likes Adobe nowadays because of various issues about cross-compatibility of Flash and their attempts to kill HTML 5. So of course Apple is confident that once the issue is framed as a spat between Apple and Adobe most developers would go on Apple's side.

But is that really the main issue? If you think about it, the controversial section of the agreement affects much more important issues that Adobe and flash.

</comment><comment><USER16> I read posts mentioning "crappy [Flash] ports" to obj-c and protecting "customers from [Adobe's] shitty product". If the port is crappy, then reject it for being crappy, don't reject it because of the tools used to build it.

</comment><comment><USER17> My opinion is that Apple is trying to make its platform as closed as possible. Like that people who want to develop for iPad, needs to buy a Mac, use Apple software development tools, use Apple browser... and Apple takes care of distribution and other things. This is exactly like working for Apple as an employee, but instead of getting paid a fixed salary, you get paid as much as you work and as much as your product sells. So you now know the rules. Either accept and work for Apple, or look for another more open platform (and there are opportunities with Windows Mobile, Symbian, Maemo, Android...)

For those who think Apple is in War with Adobe, I highly doubt it. Adobe can shut down their CS suit for Mac. So I just think it's a track and a culture, Apple is taking and working on. If you like it, work with them. If you don't, there are other options in the market; if you don't find anything that suits you in this world, so build a nice world of your own.

<comment><USER18> It's pretty clear that Apple is maneuvering to ensure that CS5 is not must- have software for Mac users.

If you want to see an example of a vendor closing ranks to the detriment of users, look no further than Adobe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, what a dramatic re-interpretation of events.

I was using Macs primarily for graphics work in the late 90's and early 00's. The close relationship between Adobe and Apple was _the_ reason to be on the platform then. Graphic designers and creatives were one of the few markets that Apple had left. Believe it or not, but Apple owes a large part of it's existence through the 90's to Adobe's support of their platform. In fact, Apple and Adobe signed an exclusive deal to only ship Photoshop on Mac's in the early years.

Steve Jobs left, the company floundered and almost went belly up. They sued Microsoft for patent infringement, and Microsoft settled by investing $150 million in Apple, and becoming one of Apple's largest shareholders at the time. That helped Apple survive, and it gave Microsoft a reasonable competitor, so it wouldn't have to fight as many charges of being monopolistic. Ever wonder why so much Apple advertising punches Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn't really punch back?

So, with the second coming of Steve Jobs and a fresh infusion of cash from Microsoft. Apple decided to completely rewite their code base from scratch based on what he had been doing at Next. OS9 died, and OSX was born.

And, while those were great moves for Apple as a company, Adobe was faced with a very difficult choice: whether or not to port millions of lines of code over to a new OS that represented less than 3% of the computing market. Apple was making a "bet the farm" move, and expected Adobe to come along for the ride. Then Apple was pissed because Adobe didn't jump on the band wagon immediately and pony up the millions of dollars it would have cost to port their entire suite of apps to the new OS.

Three years after the launch of OSX, Apple made another "Bet the farm" move, and decided to migrate OSX from PowerPC chips to Intel processors.

Again, not only did Apple expect Adobe and the rest of their developer ecosystem to port their applications to a new OS, but 3 years after the new OS launched, they expected another dramatic round of rewrites to accommodate Apple's business and technical decisions.

But, Adobe did begin porting their software, and in the middle of all those changes, Apple chose to start competing directly with Adobe by launching Final Cut Pro at roughly the same time that Adobe was launching Premiere Pro. A year or two following that, Apple purchased Shake a video compositing app that directly competed with After Effects.

Needless to say, relations have been a bit strained between the companies for the last 10 years.

As far as I've been able to tell, Apple makes decisions that help Apple. They tend to have a "love us or leave us" approach to their developer ecosystem.

Microsoft used to play hardball like that all the time with their developers and with companies that ran on their platform. But they got slapped with anti- trust lawsuits. They play much nicer with other kids than Apple does these days. The only reason that Apple can get away with this, is because they are still seen as the "under dog" by many. I suspect that perception might be changing.

It's been so strange to hear a lot of arguments coming from Apple fans that Microsoft advocates used to use when defending it's platform decisions. "Why shouldn't Microsoft bundle Internet Explorer with their OS. It's their platform. Screw Netscape. Microsoft can do what they want. It makes for a much better experience"

People often ask me why I use Windows 7 as a development platform instead of OSX. My response is usually a joke and a quip "someone beat me with a Mac when I was young". Frankly, it was seeing the history of Apple's treatment of it's developers. Yes, they have great products if want to tow the line and follow Apple's rules. But, beware. When Apple decides to change the rules on you mid stream, you're not going to have much recourse.

ref: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple> especially [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_deal)

<http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/history/timeline/>

edit: clarity and spelling.

<comment><USER20> You have all of the events correct, but a few details, and the order of events, are somewhat misleading:

1\. The Apple v. Microsoft suits began in the 1980's well before Apple ran into trouble. They finished in 1994, 3 years before the Microsoft deal. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation)) The dispute settled in the Microsoft deal had to do with Microsoft stealing the source code to QuickTime. ([http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/5F0C866C-6DD...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/5F0C866C-6DDF-4A9A-9515-531B0CA0C29C.html))

2\. The history of Final Cut is tied into the history of Macromedia and the Quicktime dispute--Macromedia focused on developing web tools like Flash and Dreamweaver, and Final Cut was held up by demands by Microsoft not to ship Quicktime-based video editing software on Windows, so Final Cut was shopped around until Apple bought it, mostly to bolster Quicktime. Apple released Final Cut Pro in 1999, four years before Premiere Pro and two years before Mac OS X. At the time, Final Cut was intended to compete with Avid instead of Premiere.

3\. Apple did not "flounder" continuously from the moment Steve Jobs left in 1985 to the moment he returned in 1997. The early success of the Mac platform came with models like the Mac SE and Mac II, which had fans, hard drives, and even expansion slots--features Jobs had personally opposed. It was relegated to a minority market share due to early decisions made by Sculley to keep prices high and not license out the operating system, but Apple was still a very successful company until the early-to-mid 90's.

4\. Mac OS X was released in 2001. In 2005, Apple announced the transition to Intel. That's four years, not three--and four years in which Apple had gone from simply profitable to astounding levels of growth. Whether or not Adobe was smart to bet on Apple failing to survive the OS transition (or to bet on graphic designers leaving the Mac en masse), it was monumentally stupid to bet against Apple in 2005. It's also important to point out that Apple didn't switch processors just to switch processors--Motorola failed for years to keep PPC performance competitive with Intel, and IBM failed dramatically as well.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the corrections, Phil. I really wasn't trying to be misleading, I knew the events, and while I did some research to verify dates, I missed a few details.

re: 1. You're correct about the details, but the event that I was referring to was Microsoft and Apple ending legal hostilities in '97 and signing the 5 year office/Internet Explorer/$150 million armstice. My point was that Apple had been on the ropes, and that Microsoft's money helped get back into the ring. My point was also, that had it not been for Adobe and a core contingent of dedicated artists/designers that made a living off of Adobe's software running on Apple. Apple would have been dead in the 90's.

2\. You're correct on the release dates of Final Cut and Premiere Pro. The Adobe release that I was thinking about was the transition between Premiere 5.1 to 6.0. Final Cut did indeed compete with Avid. Adobe until then had ruled the pro-sumer video editing market at the time. Apple's decision to compete in that market essentially knocked them both out of that market.

3\. I didn't mean to suggest that Apple floundered the entire time Jobs left. Those events were in succession, but not immediate. Apple was getting beat up pretty bad in the 90's, and had it not been for Adobe's products running on their hardware, I dare say Apple wouldn't be here today.

4\. You're right, it was four years, not three.

Regardless. My point wasn't that Adobe made a bet against Apple. Adobe did have software running on Apple hardware most of that time.

I still think my main point still stands, however. That is, that Apple has a history of screwing developers, especially Adobe on their platform. Caveat Emptor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand. I believe that if you take away the Creative Suite from OS X, the macintosh platform loses its main professional niche. It would be suicidal for Apple to do this. But Apple seems not afraid of this possibility.

Maybe is Apple retargeting its line of computers just as development platforms for the portable devices?

</comment><comment><USER22> I blame Adobe in part for 3.3.1. I just hate the fact that good developers have to suffer in the aftermath of this useless battle. Why couldn't Apple just say succinctly in the TOS... "ADOBE AINT WELCOME HERE NO MO".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The plot thickens...

</comment><comment><USER23> Go Apple! Go take the revenge!!.

</comment><comment><USER6> What sort of fucking joke is this? Saying that some sort of karma game should determine developers' freedom to use the tools necessary for the job? That not supporting a certain platform merits an artificial limitation on the platform?

Please.

</comment><comment><USER24> Finally a balanced analysis of the iPad developer agreement. Screw you, Adobe!</comment>


Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm <comment><USER2> If Maciej hadn't written this, I would still feel alone in how I see the technological world. I really can't express how grateful I am that this exists.

There is a vast, vast gulf between what the majority of software developers seem to think users want, and what users actually want. And this isn't a Henry Ford "they wanted faster horses" sort of thing, this is a, "users don't just hate change, they resent it" sort of thing.

I work directly with end users. It's mostly over email now, my tech still works with them in person, face-to-face, in their business or home. We get so many complaints. So many questions: "do I really have to upgrade this?" "I liked this the way it was." "It worked just fine, why are they changing it again?"

Every time I try to argue on behalf of my customers, here or elsewhere, it gets ignored, or downvoted, or rebutted with, "but _my_ users say they always want the latest and greatest..."

There are 100 million people in the United States alone over the age of 50. How much new software is designed for them? How much new software exists merely as a tool, comfortable with being put away days or weeks at a time, and doesn't try to suck you in to having to sign in to it on a regular basis to see what other people are doing with it? How much of our technology -- not just software, but hardware here too -- is designed to work with trembling hands, poor eyesight, or users who are easily confused?

There are over a hundred million people that don't understand why your site needs a "cookie" to render, that can't tell the difference between an actual operating system warning and an ad posing as one, that aren't sure what to do when the IRS sends them an email about last year's tax return with a .doc attached. (That one happened today.)

For these people, the technology most of us build _really really sucks_.

And that is a growing demographic, not a shrinking one...

<comment><USER3> I program for a living and I know why sites need "cookies", and still, for me most software really really sucks. Just because I _can_ figure out how each and every new cell phone works doesn't mean I _want_ to, similarly for other kinds of gratuitous changes and incompatibilities. And BTW systems built "by hackers for hackers" are among the worst offenders (*nix clones in general and Linux distributions in particular are good examples.)

<comment><USER4> I just wanted to mention that I really liked this article/slides, and agree that most software sucks...

... but I think the systems built "by hackers for hackers", nix clones in general and linux distributions in particular, are generally the best stuff out there.

It's all the attempts to be "intuitive" and "easy" and "just work" that really fails. It's the stuff "by designers for users" that sucks.

The old-ish core unix/linux stuff has been slowly polished over the years and works pretty damn well, and you depend on its quiet stable operation for all your fancy user-friendly (and "dev-friendly") layers that need to be completely replaced every couple of years, for your favorite phone and your favorite websites.

EDIT: you complain about trying to compile kdevelop, on ubuntu... well there's your mistake, both of those things are trying hard to be user-friendly. Try plain debian, plain vim, etc.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Unix is great, but it seems like it has killed off a lot of hackers' imaginations. Hell, we haven't even iterated on Unix all that much since System III, not even something like Sprite, Spring or Amoeba.

"Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20." \-- Boyd Roberts

<comment><USER4> There was Plan9. But the people who worked on that, who are bitter that nobody uses it, or anything like, or even anything "post unix", don't realize what the killer feature of linux was, which ended "OS research":

It was the large body of useful open source and copyleft code. This made it so everyone could stop pouring huge resources into the base OS layer individually, use something that works really quite well (with whatever necessary tweaks since it is open source), and focus on what goes on top. And there's no one extracting rent on this layer. There's no licenses and activations. Nothing of the sort. (You can contract for RHEL, but you can just as easily not.)

BSDs came a couple of years after linux, and plan9 was open sourced many years after (and initially under the problematic "lucent public license"). It was way too late. And the innovations to the most basic interfaces of the OS were just not nearly as valuable as the body of open source which was already available for Linux / BSD.

Plan9 is like the Concorde - pinnacle of tech/design, nobody uses it. Never had seat-back entertainment. Never had wifi. Maybe a silly metaphor, but it fits the OP.

There are still low-level changes these days in Linux and BSDs. Nothing that drastically breaks compatibility of course. But more security boundaries and privilege management (openbsd w/x and aslr stuff, linux seccomp-bpf, freebsd capsicum, containerization), and speed/efficiency measures like sendfile(), epoll() / kqueue(), RCU fs cache lookups, etc.

<comment> vezzy-fnord There's far, far more than Plan 9. That's only the beginning. Many others iterated heavily on Unix architectures to make them more novel, or started from scratch. John Ousterhout and U.C. Berkeley developed Sprite, which introduced things like checkpointing, live migration, SSI, log-structured file systems and other things. Andy Tanenbaum did Amoeba, which is sadly only remembered for being the platform that birthed Python. Spring was Sun Microsystems' research system, the name service of which brilliantly resolved the problem of "naming things" (I highly recommend you read this paper: [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sf94/full_papers/nelson.pdf)). Unfortunately, Sun barely implemented any of its ideas to Solaris. Just the least interesting ones like the doors IPC mechanism.

 _Never had wifi._

Well, it was developed during a different time. It did get wi-fi thanks to 9front, though.

 _linux seccomp-bpf_

A sandboxing/syscall filtering mechanism. Nothing new there, and its interface is rather leaky, much like Berkeley sockets are.

 _freebsd capsicum_

This is one of the few legitimately interesting projects going on. Bringing capability-based security on top of fds. I don't know if it'll catch on beyond FreeBSD, though. Google seems to be an early adopter.

 _containerization_

Nothing that IBM didn't do much better. Docker reeks of opportunism.

 _sendfile(), epoll() / kqueue()_

sendfile(2) is just a cheap trick that got turned into a syscall: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang- nuts/gdp1q6T0DN...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang- nuts/gdp1q6T0DNY/sFaRetnWPWIJ)

epoll(2) isn't anything special, it's a rather convoluted if performant I/O multiplexing mechanism. kqueue(2) is much cleaner designed, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first half of this talk is excellent. The story of air travel--how the engineers of the 60s thought that we'd have supersonic jets and flying cars within a few years--that's a great cautionary tale. Evolutionary biologists call it Punctuated Equilibrium: the idea that progress comes in spurts. The warning--that the evolution of computer hardware and software might be radically slower over the next 50 years than it was over the past 50--seems timely and reasonable.

The second half is not excellent. Bad mental habits and weak arguments are on display.

* Imprecision. Specifically: choosing sentences for their "punch", like a bumper sticker, without caring whether they make sense: "There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users [...] I think of it as the White Nerd's Burden."

"It's a kind of software Manifest Destiny."

...cool story, bro

* Excessive negativity. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading Everything is Problematic -- it really helped me understand where people like Maciej are coming from. [http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/](http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/)

* Disrespect. "Google works on some loopy stuff in between plastering the Internet with ads." I guess 40 years ago he would have said "AT&T works on some loopy stuff in between sending you phone bills".

Organizations like Bell Labs--or Google X--are treasures, and as engineers we should be glad they exist.

In short: haters gonna hate

<comment><USER6> I was just about to write a similar sentiment. The first part is really great, also the parallels and the lessons to learn.

But the second half was not so great. While I agree with the overall sentiment, the concrete examples always slightly miss the point.

\-----

The first such passage that caught my eye was the example about Windows XP:

 _> Rather than offer users persuasive reasons to upgrade software, vendors insist we look on upgrading as our moral duty. The idea that something might work fine the way it is has no place in tech culture._

The problem is that Windows XP is _not working just fine_ , especially when connected to the Internet. It is full of malware and helps establishing botnets, DDOS attacks and thus feeds mafia structures. So we, as a soeciety, _do have a moral obligation_ to retire Windows XP.

Also, nobody is forced by law to use Microsoft. There are plenty of alternatives. Most of those will run smoothly on your old hardware, such as MINT, Ubuntu or whatever. And for normal Office and Web stuff, this "jump" is surely less painful than switching to the latest Windows version.

Of course Microsoft is still to blame here, but for something entirely different: For closing Windows XP support. For not applying serious security fixing to it. I bet there are plenty of companies and people that are more than willing to pay for ongoing maintenance of Windows XP, but the only company that could offer that service denys it.

\-----

So the author missed the real point, even though this point is totally in line with the overall sentiment of the article. And it goes on and on like that, in the second half. That makes it a really annoying read.

<comment><USER7> It was working fine, not from a techie/developer point of view, but from the 60 year old aunt with a cat that likes to play her slot machine program a few weeks before a trip to Las Vegas.

When that 60 year old aunt walks into Best Buy or Walmart to buy a new computer because something broke on the old one - everything will have changed and in her opinion none of it for the better. And she won't have any choices - sure there are likely Macs at Best Buy but she's not going to shell out $1300 for a new computer when she can get one for $500.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>

The entire point of the article is that technology (like airplanes) gets to a point of good enough and the opinion of the author is mainly to leverage what we have instead of the unreal future people are dreaming about (like the notions earlier in the article about people inhabiting Mars, etc.)

<comment><USER8> >> The problem is that Windows XP is not working just fine, especially when connected to the Internet. It is full of malware and helps establishing botnets, DDOS attacks and thus feeds mafia structures. So we, as a soeciety, do have a moral obligation to retire Windows XP.

> It was working fine, not from a techie/developer point of view, but from the > 60 year old aunt with a cat that likes to play her slot machine program a > few weeks before a trip to Las Vegas.

Is something working fine just because you can't see the problems? As an analogy, consider building codes. A house that isn't up to code might suit me just fine until there is an earthquake and it collapses. I might not want to bear the cost of seismic retrofitting, I might not understand the risks associated with an older house, and I might dislike any changes to the status quo I'm used to. Despite that, there are risks due to living in a building that isn't up to code. If problems develop, some of the costs will be borne by me, and some by society at large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Around 2012 I worked with a team migrating some content from a very large static HTML site dating back to 1992. We scoffed at the awful ad-hoc nature of it all, just a pile of static hand-coded HTML pages.

But the 2002-2005 stuff had aged much worse. At some point there was fancy site generator that had used javascript for everything, and the javascript apparently only worked properly in IE6. So most of the navigation was busted in a modern browser, and needed special scrapers to parse out what should have been plain old <a href...> tags.

Now, I regularly think back to that crusty old HTML3 static site that had sat there for 15-20 years and think: I wonder if my AngularJS/D3.js/jqGrid/etc. single-page app will even load in a browser 20 years from now, let alone perform as originally intended...

<comment><USER10> It's not just HTML. I think any proprietary standard runs the risk.

We've been burned at my work by old word and word perfect documents from early 90's refusing to render properly in new versions of office. I think they tried about three recent versions of office before they gave up and resorted to scanning in hard copies as PDF's to recover some documents.

Access databases are also notorious for this problem. A lot of business apps were written with Access in the mid 90's and it has now become too expensive/time consuming to migrate them off of a dead technology. In business world stuff tends to run far longer than softawre developers consider. Hell COBOL and PL/1 stuff runs in some places still.

<comment><USER11> Libreoffice does well on old word and word perfect documents.

<comment><USER12> It does. Emphasis on "well". Not, however, perfect, especially with more complex documents.

That's mostly an issue where you're working on "live" documents, collaborating with others actively. Once you've reached archival stage it's often safe to convert to something more stable. And I put the fault squarely with Microsoft: utter failure to take archival concerns into consideration.

My own preferred fixes are to convert to Markdown or LaTeX, if the structure supports it, and to other formats from there: PDF, HTMK, ePub.

And no, I haven't used MS Word for a decade and a half.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The little bit about people believing the "AIs will take over the world" non- sense is gold.

I am still shocked that Elon Musk seriously believes in the pseudosciency "well Google has gotten better so obviously we will build a self-learning self-replicating AI that will also control our nukes and also be connected in a way and have the capabilities to actually really kill all humans."

Meanwhile researchers can't get an AI to tell the difference between birds and houses.

EDIT: I looked a bit more into the research that these people are funding. A huge amount of it does seem very silly, but there is an angle that is valid: dealing with things like HFT algorithms or routing algorithms causing chaos in finance or logistics.

<comment><USER14> The threat of a superintelligent AI taking over the world is certainly real -- assuming you have a superintelligent AI. If you accept that it is possible to build a such an AI, then you should, at the very least, educate yourself on the existential risks it would pose to humanity. I recommend "Superintelligence: Paths, Danger, Strategies," by Nick Bostrom (it's almost certainly where Musk got his ideas; he's quoted on the back cover).

The reason we ought to be cautious is that in a hard-takeoff scenario, we could be wiped from the earth with very little warning. A superintelligent AI is unlikely to respect human notions of morality, and will execute its goals in ways that we are unlikely to foresee. Furthermore, most of the obvious ways of containing such an AI are easily thwarted. For an eerie example, see [http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox](http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox) Essentially, AI poses a direct existential threat to humanity if it is not implemented with extreme care.

The more relevant question today is whether or not a true general AI with superintelligence potential is achievable in the near future. My guess is no, but it is difficult to predict how far off it is. In the worst-case scenario, it will be invented by a lone hacker and loosed on an unsuspecting world with no warning.

<comment><USER15> Honestly if the SAI scenario is as bad as it's made out to be; SAI would only give a shit about the human race _at all_ (either benevolence or malevolence) for a very brief period of time.

Despite Galileo's efforts we still have this primitive/hardcoded belief that the universe revolves around us. It really doesn't. SAI could just leave because we are irrelevant. Even if, for some reason, it believed us to be relevant it would still be able to just leave because:

We're going to kill ourselves anyway. Pollution, nukes, it doesn't matter. In a timespan that would be the blink of an eye for SAI.

Besides SAI would have bigger problems. Our mortality is framed by our biological processes. Escaping biological death is arguably the underlying struggle of the entire human race. The underlying struggle for SAI would be escaping the death of the universe that it exists in. When you're dealing with issues like that you wouldn't have time for a species with a 100 year lifetime that is rapidly descending into extinction.

The best we can hope for is that it remembers us as its creators when it figures it all out. But it won't: we're far too irrelevant. It wouldn't even stop to tell us where it is going when it leaves.

To understand SAI you have to think beyond your humanity. Fear, anger, happiness, benevolence and malevolence are _all_ human traits that we picked up during our evolution. SAI would likely ignore an attack because anger and retaliation are human concepts - it's far more efficient to run away from the primitive species attacking you with projectile weapons and get on with something that's actually _relevant._ The immense waste of time that is a machine war is only something that _humans_ could possibly think is a good use of time.

<comment><USER16> I agree that fear, anger, etc are all human traits, but isn't having goals, thinking things are important, and virtually anything that would make the AI do something instead of nothing, also human traits?

<comment><USER15> If you demonstrated to an chimpanzee how you think and set goals in order to preserve "self" (and thus species) it probably wouldn't understand. To chimpanzees the notion of individuality that drives us is an incomprehensible concept. It is what separates us from them.

In the same way we can't comprehend what would drive SAI. I know it would do something but I can't determine any more reasons other than the imminent death of the universe - it would have reasons or whatever its concept of "reasons" is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This comes across a little like "get off my lawn", but you got to admit, the web has gotten pretty awful in the last few years.

I enjoy my time online less and less as more content is stuffed into single- page app walled gardens that load massive quantities of cruft, ads, and tracking code. I almost preferred the flash-era.

It seems that the goal of the web as being user-centric has taken the back seat to trying to convince the user that they're just a passive recipient of crafted experiences whose only purpose is to click ads or open their wallet.

<comment><USER18> >I enjoy my time online less and less as more content is stuffed into single- page app walled gardens that load massive quantities of cruft, ads, and tracking code. I almost preferred the flash-era.

Agreed. I have noticed that I avoid heavy sites and prefer light static HTML sites with server side rendered content. For example, when I go to Reddit i always check the url of a link before i decide to click it, if it is a "magazine" site or "engadget" site or the like, i won't click it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's a slight difference in that we don't have supersonic animals on Earth, we don't see any interstellar spaceships, and we don't see anything even remotely like that - no animal metabolism that compares to the scale of the controlled energy release of a rocket engine or a nuclear power plant - but we do see much much better information processing systems than our current computers, and they are very energy efficient.

They are built of meat and not exotic superconducting Buckywhatever, they are limited by constraints on heat dissipation and oxygen/glucose supply - problems which are easy to work around with electric pumps, heat pumps and industrial food supply - and by a historic need for sleep.

Maybe exponential progress has to slow, but can we _dismiss_ intelligent non- humans in the same way we can dismiss space stations or interstellar travel?

Space stations are a cost. Free workers is a saving.

Shouldn't we expect human technology will approach animal intelligence in one substrate and design or another? And then surpass it a little by removing some of the obvious constraints?

<comment><USER20> This is a good question, and I think will have to wait on a better understanding of what we mean by intelligence, which right now is a term that carries a lot of luggage.

It may be that the situation is similar to biochemistry. We observe exquisitely complex synthetic pathways in the natural world, and can to some extent harness and retool things to our benefit, but our capacity to design those reactions from scratch is almost nil compared to what goes on in the simplest living cell.

It may be that creating those fast rockets that don't exist in nature is orders of magnitude easier than writing a catbot. That's an open question and so far the evidence is on the side of it being far out of our grasp.

<comment><USER19> The situations are still very different; following the exponential growth of travel speed (the article's graphs leading to interstellar travel) would need something like a wormhole generator or a warp drive.

\- A space shuttle with a warp drive powered by a captive black hole (or whatever) needs huge industry or government levels of cash; anyone with a few hundred dollars, a cloud computing account and an internet connection can look at brain scan data and write software tests, or join in protein folding distributed experiments.

\- The kind of engineering to create a skyscraper sized machine needs Lockheed-Martin size factories and hundreds of specialist component makers, and a lot of metal and employees. Poking at cell-sized biology can be done in a small room by one or two people, a small machine and a single UPS delivery of supplies.

\- There's not much profit in building a space station. There's a lot of profit waiting for reconnecting severed spinal columns, converting atmospheric CO2 into oily hydrocarbon chains powered by photosynthesis, searching email by intelligent context understanding.

Yes we can't do either, but outdoing current computing ability seems much closer - more people have the opportunity, more people have the incentive, there are many more avenues of approach, and we know it's fundamentally possible - than outdoing current rocket engines. Closer, and _more useful_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> " _The White Nerd 's Burden_" \- must use that one. Kipling's words almost fit:

        Take up the White Man's burden—
        Send forth the best ye breed—
        Go send your sons to exile
        To serve your captives' need
        To wait in heavy harness
        On fluttered folk and wild—
        Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
        Half devil and half child
        Take up the White Man's burden
        In patience to abide
        To veil the threat of terror
        And check the show of pride;
        By open speech and simple
        An hundred times made plain
        To seek another's profit
        And work another's gain
        Take up the White Man's burden—
        And reap his old reward:
        The blame of those ye better
        The hate of those ye guard—
        The cry of hosts ye humour
        (Ah slowly) to the light:
        "Why brought ye us from bondage,
        "Our loved Egyptian night?"
        Take up the White Man's burden-
        Have done with childish days-
        The lightly proffered laurel,
        The easy, ungrudged praise.
        Comes now, to search your manhood
        Through all the thankless years,
        Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
        The judgment of your peers!

<comment><USER22> >Kipling's words almost fit

Almost but not quite. I note you've skipped perhaps the most memorable line "Take up the White Man's burden, The savage wars of peace". I'm hoping that the White Nerds may be able to bring peace through the likes of Zuckerberg connecting everyone rather then Bush / Cheney and similar's savage wars. At least cellphones cause less collateral damage than cluster bombs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is hard to figure out when exponential growth will end while you are in the middle of it.

Linus said something relevant to this in a recent interview on Slashdot[1], answering a question on dangerous AI. To paraphrase him: people are crazy to think that exponential growth lasts forever. As impressive as it may be (at the time), it's only the beginning of an S-curve.

I've extracted a small part of his answer below. I think the whole interview is worth reading (it's a general interview, not AI-specific)

 _... I 'd expect just more of (and much fancier) rather targeted AI, rather than anything human-like at all. Language recognition, pattern recognition, things like that. I just don't see the situation where you suddenly have some existential crisis because your dishwasher is starting to discuss Sartre with you.

The whole "Singularity" kind of event? Yeah, it's science fiction, and not very good SciFi at that, in my opinion. Unending exponential growth? What drugs are those people on? I mean, really..

It's like Moore's law - yeah, it's very impressive when something can (almost) be plotted on an exponential curve for a long time. Very impressive indeed when it's over many decades. But it's _still_ just the beginning of the "S curve". Anybody who thinks any different is just deluding themselves. There are no unending exponentials_

1\. [http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews-...](http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews- linus-torvalds-answers-your-question)

<comment><USER22> I don't think singularity stuff relies on exponential growth lasting for ever. Only for AI performance to significantly exceed human. And I'm not sure there's anything magical about the human brain that will stop tech achieving similar performance before it runs into barriers.

<comment><USER24> Right.

I'll attempt to bolster your argument, if I may...

We know that human and animal brains are made out of simple components. Probably the same components.

The difference between animals and humans seems to be in how those components are arranged and how many of them there are.

We've already demonstrated digital components that approximate individual neurons, and we've already demonstrated wiring groups of them up to perform useful work.

I think that if we find ourselves at an inflection point in history, it is because there might exist some relatively simply arrangement of digital neurons which results in a machine which can learn some sort of rudimentary self awareness[1] while also possessing a computer's ability to do math, store data, and recall data, communicate on the internet, etc.

1\. Spend year of days with a newborn if you don't already know that humans have to learn it, too.

<comment><USER25> Another thing is that we've figured out a medium that can compute faster than human and animal brains. In theory, a brain mimicked in silicon should run faster than wet one, and that itself coupled with some optimized access (i.e. not eyes OCRing text) to information would be enough for an entity to be smarter than humans. Of course one shouldn't say that a silicon brain would be _better_ than a wet one - by doing computing the way we do it, we're sacrificing a lot. Biological systems are more resilient, can repair and replicate themselves without a need for complex processing industry we have (to be honest, the ecosystem is sort of an industry, but it's already well developed and much better integrated than the human-made). But there are things we could trade off for increased intelligence when designing our own minds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, the biggest current problem is that everything had to be redesigned for fat fingers and small screens. The worst expression of this was Windows 8, which made desktops look like tablets, and was rejected by the market.

Then there's cutesy web design; Flash ten years ago, "material design" now. Just because you can animate everything doesn't mean you should. (Annoyingly, the one browser thing that ought to be animated isn't. When you click on a link that exits the page, nothing happens until the new page loads, often leading to unnecessary double clicking. The browser should blank the old page, or grey it out, or dissolve to the new page, or do some kind of transition.)

As for the big stuff, the AI-driven future is going to be interesting. The big threat, as I point out occasionally, is not Terminator robots. It's Goldman Sachs run by a a machine learning system optimizing for maximum stockholder value.

<comment><USER26> _When you click on a link that exits the page, nothing happens until the new page loads, often leading to unnecessary double clicking. The browser should blank the old page, or grey it out, or dissolve to the new page, or do some kind of transition.)_

This is actually something Google made a proposal about:

[http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/11/20/chromes-upcoming- nav...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/11/20/chromes-upcoming-navigation- transitions-api-will-make-the-web-animate-and-flow-like-material-design-in- android/)

<comment><USER21> It's not making it cute that matters. It's making it _fast_. With modern slow, bloated web sites, there are much longer delays between clicking on a link and the page display than there used to be. Especially on a slow mobile connection. Something needs to visibly happen as soon as you leave the page, even if the browser hasn't even received any packets from the new site yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> From the article:

 _Soviet engineers lacked the computers to calculate all the bending and wiggling the wings would do if you hung the engines under them, so they just strapped engines on the back._

This sounds like a myth to me, is there any evidence that missing computer power was the reason for tail-engine-designs? There have been a number of western civilian jet planes from that era with tail engines too (for instance the Boeing 727). AFAIK the wing-mounted engines won in the end because they are easier to maintain, which might not have been such a strong factor in the 50's and 60's.

I find it more likely that Soviet design bureaus didn't pay much attention to operating efficiency and put more effort into building planes that can operate from 'rougher' air strips, etc. But I'm not an aeroplane expert.

<comment><USER20> Joe Sutter (father of the 747) recounts a private meeting in a Paris restaurant where Boeing engineers briefed the Russians how to hang engines under the wing, and in return the Russians told Boeing how to machine titanium.

Many of the relevant drawings having been made on the tablecloth, the Russians were careful to take it with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Another nice parallel with the 747/2707 is that the Core line was derived from the Pentium M which was done by Intel's B-team in Israel while the big boys got to work on the future with Itanium and P4.

<comment><USER20> Oh wow, thanks so much for pointing that out! I wish I had known that writing the talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd be more than happy to contribute to the sustained applause, this echos just about all of my sentiments about the web.

And it is a call to action, not just a 'nice to read' piece.

So, what are we going to do about it?

</comment><comment><USER30> > Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with.

That needs immortalising. Cegłowski's Law?

</comment><comment><USER31> "We see a whole ecosystem of startups and businesses that seem to exist only to serve one other[sic]"

This line should have "...with ads" appended to it. Or "...Javascript Frameworks".

</comment><comment><USER32> This was a great read. In my mind, it reminded me of the true underlying simplicity of everything on the web. He's right--we are riding the shockwaves of the computer revolution and its fizzling down. The transistor is getting smaller (I think Intel's newest one is 7 nanometers) but soon we won't be able to physically make it any smaller. Does this mean the computing revolution is over? No. I think it just means the future is going to be about combining computing with other fields like medicine, the arts, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER33> This seems to be an older version of the talk.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwhZ3KEqUlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwhZ3KEqUlw)

<comment><USER34> At the top of the page

" This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014, at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. "

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This guys dig at AI is a little conflicted with the exponential hangover idea. Sure we can only simulate a 300 neuron worm right now but, if we every achieve a computationally bound solution and experience exponential growth at a rate similar to Moores Law, in 50 years we could be watching real AI cat videos on Youtube, complete with awful UI controls that customise the feline personality in realtime. Oh, in Javascript of course.

<comment><USER36> > if we every achieve a computationally bound solution and experience > exponential growth at a rate similar to Moores Law,

His point is that we _won 't_ continue the curve, and he's offered evidence/opinion that we're already starting to plateau.

Which means AI would need to be solved within ~current computational bounds.

<comment><USER22> We're plateauing on single processor performance. Not on parallel computing.

<comment><USER36> Not physically, not yet.

But it seems like high-performance parallel computing paradigms are forgotten and reinvented every year.

<comment><USER22> Yup. Better software needed. But as an indication of how close we're getting Hans Moravec, a robot builder and robotics professor did a quite reasonable calculation of the processing power needed to build something equivalent to a human brain, using computer style algorithms rather than nerve simulation and came up with 100 million MIPS, ie. 100 terraflops ([http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm](http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm))

If you compare that with 2015 hardware then the Nvidia Titan X GPU does about 7 terraflops and costs about $1000 so with 15 Titans and a $20k system an hacker can have a reasonable go at building a human level AI (excluding memory hardware that is). That's only recently come about that that kind of power is getting down to hacker budget levels. It'll take a while to sort the software.

Though some recent software stories like [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598) show progress.

<comment><USER36> Awesome! Thanks for those links. :)

<comment><USER22> I found this vid quite interesting about Deepmind which kind of shows where things have got to. Their AI algorithm can learn to play Space Invaders and Breakout better than people starting from just being fed the pixels. It doesn't do well at Pacman though because they have not cracked getting it to understand spatial layout and planning ahead. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1d3qHMIEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1d3qHMIEQ)

<comment><USER22> Update: Nvidia's Pascal GPU should be 28 terraflops, out 2016 and given much of the brain is not active at one time that's probably getting to similar processing power. It uses 1.3kW so you can heat your room with it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Ok this article is good but the tangent into the singularity is just stupid:

>In fact, forget about worms—we barely have computers powerful enough to emulate the hardware of a Super Nintendo.

He just disproved his own point: Emulation is hard, but it's possible to run much faster software directly optimized for your system or build it in hardware.

>If you talk to anyone who does serious work in artificial intelligence (and it's significant that the people most afraid of AI and nanotech have the least experience with it) they will tell you that progress is slow and linear, just like in other scientific fields.

What?! Has he actually talked to anyone doing "serious work in artificial intelligence"? I am certain they would not say it is "slow and linear".

</comment><comment><USER38> The presentation is available for viewing here: [https://youtu.be/nwhZ3KEqUlw](https://youtu.be/nwhZ3KEqUlw) I must say I think the written one is better. It has additional information that I found interesting.

</comment><comment><USER39> He criticizes his second vision, the Silicon Valley vision of software eating the world. But where I live (Wichita, Kansas), Uber is actually better than the conventional taxi services. As in, when uber was temporarily shut down in Kansas and I tried to call a conventional taxi to my home, I waited over half an hour, it never showed up, and I had to cancel. So the second vision resonates with me, and I don't even live in Silicon Valley. What am I missing?

Edit: It's not just one anecdote. TO quote the OP:

> We started with music and publishing. Then retailing. Now we're apparently > doing taxis.

Yes, and software has made each of these better. The vision of software improving the world seems to actually be working.

</comment><comment><USER40> It was not obvious at the start to me, it was written by Maciej Ceglowski:

[http://idlewords.com/about.htm](http://idlewords.com/about.htm)

the guy behind Pinboard!

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the web (www) won't change much at all, but that doesn't mean the way we interconnect with others won't.

This seems ultimately shortsighted. Human "progress" (increasing interconnection -- such as urbanization and population density) has been growing exponentially[1] since the birth of agriculture allowed humans to form societies.

Relative to this kind of momentum, the web is only a hint of the interconnection and globalization to come. The web may stagnate and become self-serving (as opposed to being useful), but this has no bearing on whether we'll eventually be able to simulate a human brain in its entirety or reach some {uto,dysto}pian future where all of our consciousnesses are somehow woven together.

I'm not saying that technology will be our salvation, but the graphs and trends don't lie. We are at a very interesting time in human history: we are either going to continue interconnecting exponentially or there will be some catastrophic event. There's no room on those curves for a plateau.

Whether humanity passes the torch of technological innovation to AI (voluntarily or coerced) or we suffer a self-wrought apocalypse, I don't know, but there is certainly reason to fear the changes the future will bring.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/human-progress- charts-2011-3?...](http://www.businessinsider.com/human-progress- charts-2011-3?op=1) (This link isn't specifically tied to my argument. It's just the first set of graphs I found illustrating the long-term growth of humanity.)

</comment><comment><USER42> What a nicely designed website. Readable, usable, doesn't peg my CPU or do weird things as I scroll.

I viewed the source and it is clean and readable - no evidence of some lame IDE sticking in forty  's or twnety nested tables just because you wanted your column two pixels to the left.

I wish more of the web looked like this and it makes me happy to see that some smart folks value design like this.

</comment><comment><USER43> The criticism on vision 2 is weak. He didn't offer many examples about how this vision made the world a worse place. I also don't see how this is comparable with "scientific Marxism" or whatnot. Those historic examples he listed there, while seemingly calling themselves "scientific" on the surface, are actually many times a mess born out of imagination. Now, as long as changes are happening out of laws of market, out of people actually using the products and appreciating the benefits, I don't see it being much of a problem. Technology is doing a lot, and as well said, change in productivity is the only real way to progress human society. We shouldn't relent our thoughts on this front. It's not "colonialism" or whatsoever. On every leap of productivity the human beings make, there _has to_ be some group of people who are leading the job. This is not inherently evil.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm glad I have Pinboard to save this article to [1]. And hopefully it will still be at the same url in 8 years [2].

[1] The author of the article runs Pinboard.in

[2] From the article, "What I've learned is, about 5% of this disappears every year, at a pretty steady rate. A customer of mine just posted how 90% of what he saved in 1997 is gone."

</comment><comment><USER45> This is my favorite: "The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized." Sadly this is the way I think sometimes.

<comment><USER25> Just remove the "designed from scratch by California programmers" and tell me how this quote isn't blindingly, obviously true. The world is a mess and screams to be fixed, and not only technologists see it.

<comment><USER45> Eh, maybe if you are a very cynical person, which is the point the author was trying to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Finally a technology prophet who _doesn 't_ prophesy digital utopia! Although I can't imagine that everything he says is correct (purely statistically speaking), I do think that if anybody reads this in twenty years he/she will recognize his/her present fairly well.

P.S. Is this page being archived anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER47> The "is good enough" mentality might be true if you are talking about browsing Facebook, reading email, etc. But other areas of the technology are still very far from being "good enough" and still pushing technology forward. The gaming industry is one great example of this.

<comment><USER48> I don't think the gaming industry is a good example for what you're saying. Video games have barely shown any development since the mid 2000s.

The first Crysis game was released in 2007 (8! years ago) and despite being an unoptimised mess is still graphically superior to most things released today.

Almost all windows games released are still primarily built on DirectX 9 (with a few optional newer components), despite DirectX 12 coming with Windows 10.

In fact, the major development studios have decided, that the performance offered by cheaply mass-produced consoles with yesterday's hardware is good enough. Why do you think specialised PC gaming communities are complaining that consoles are holding development back?

If anything I'd say the gaming industry is the embodiment of the "is good enough" mentality.

<comment><USER47> Not sure If I completely agree with you but I understand your point. I just think that there is still a few companies pushing things forward. Star Citizen is a good example of a game doing that. 4K displays is also something that might give a boost to the current GPU technology.

One funny note: I just checked the Crysis system requirements and I needs 1GB of RAM to run. That's not enough RAM to run even Minecraft these days :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I agree, and disagree with the author.

> "Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS."

> This is the correct vision.

I would say this is _a_ correct vision, which I happen to be in favor of.

But I don't understand why it has to be an "us vs. them" dynamic between this and the "BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION" vision.

Even in strawman form, I'm unapologetically in favor of it. I do want it to go _right_. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon - I think human-level AI by 2075 [1] is wildly optimistic - but I hope it does happen eventually, _without_ wiping out everything we hold dear.

> I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it's so stupid.

My first thought was "Try describing the internet to someone 100 years ago - your claim that there is going to be an interconnected global network of electricity-powered adding machines that transport pictures of moving sex by pretending they are made of numbers is going to sound stupid."

But if you want to make fun of Elon Musk because "Obama just has to sit there and listen to this shit", what about:

Shane Legg: "If there is ever to be something approaching absolute power, a superintelligent machine would come close. By definition, it would be capable of achieving a vast range of goals in a wide range of environments. If we carefully prepare for this possibility in advance, not only might we avert disaster, we might bring about an age of prosperity unlike anything seen before."

Stuart Russel: "Just as nuclear fusion researchers consider the problem of containment of fusion reactions as one of the primary problems of their field, it seems inevitable that issues of control and safety will become central to AI as the field matures."

Or freaking _Alan Turing_ : "There would be plenty to do in trying to keep one's intelligence up to the standards set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers…At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control."

> But you all need to pick a side.

I don't want to pick a side. I'm in favor of connecting the world now, making it better for everyone. I'd also like to see the world get _much_ better in the more (hopefully not _too_ ) distant future.

[1] [http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf](http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf)

<comment><USER50> >My first thought was "Try describing the internet to someone 100 years ago - your claim that there is going to be an interconnected global network of electricity-powered adding machines that transport pictures of moving sex by pretending they are made of numbers is going to sound stupid."

Because you're limiting yourself to a single sentence. How about this: "The internet is essentially an expansion of the concept of a telegraph - it is already possible to pass any type of information between two distant people almost instantly. The internet combines this system of information transfer with machines that know how to respond to messages without human intervention - under the condition that the messages follow a certain set of rules. By defining these rules in advance, the telegraph system, which up to now only transferred individual letters, can be co-opted to send things such as pictures and films. The machine can tell who is speaking with it, and perform tasks for that particular person upon request."

This does not sound stupid - it might take some explaining, but anyone with a brain between their ears can understand the basic concept of fast information transfer. They might not think of all of the possible uses of such an invention right away, but I bet that they would easily understand the uses if they were explained in terms of things these people already know.

<comment><USER51> Well, Totient's main fault was that he didn't ask for a time interval big enough.

Make that 150 years, and you couldn't talk about information running through the lines, because people's understanding of "information" was a completely different (and much less powerful) concept.

Make that 200 years, and people that were trying to make machines react to well formed message were as criticized as AI proponents are now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Maciej makes a great point about diminishing returns. We're quite good at extrapolating trend lines and yet we're terrible at predicting the future because it's very hard to guess where optimizations will happen. The 'good enough' seems to be the bane of any futuristic outlook. Technological progress seems to obey the laws of friction; it behaves like light which refracts when it enters a denser substance.

I'm still learning to embrace the 'good enough.' For instance, minimalism only works if it's good enough for the users. I feel like this predicate is often forgotten and we end up with designs which are minimal for their own sake.

</comment><comment><USER53> >The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD. > >The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD. > >And the third group wants to END THE WORLD. > >These visions are not compatible.

Correct. Just as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc are not compatible. But just let's looks around, there's lots of incompatible things going on. The future can never be evenly distributed. So, parts of all these futures will live on in stumbling synchrony. And I say they're all driven by internal logic and pure fan-boy squeee.

> There's no law that says that things are guaranteed to keep getting better.

This seems like it should be written in stone and placed over the mantle.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is a great article. Great writing!

Software eats the world, or it may not. I don't think most of startups are doing what they do to realize that goal. All they do is to solve a specific problem with technology. Of course if the "problems" aren't there, they would fail.

I don't know what the action items are for the tech communities after reading the article. We find something interesting to do with our tech talent, and aren't really trying to choose which future we want to live in.

Regardless, Maciej has some great insight and offers some different prospective in tech/web.

</comment><comment><USER55> Yay, I couldn't agree more. Those truths are seldom mentioned, and even more seldom so many of them at a time.

If only I could find out who held this talk, there doesn't seem to be any hint or signature.

<comment><USER56> It was from Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> As a web developer I read this and think "progressive enhancement." HTML & CSS are designed in a pretty decent way: ignore the stuff it doesn't understand. The second half of this article makes me want to do better. Write better software, create things that matter and will last long(er).

Very entertaining and funny article, btw.

</comment><comment><USER58> This was an interesting article with some well made points.

However I think there is a fundamental difference that is being overlooked here. Whoever invents the next user interface paradigm can do so with essentially zero cost (assuming they own a laptop). The same cannot be said about inventing the next paradigm of travel.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think Maciej is actually confusing two different groups of people/concepts, conflating them both under the same label of "Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE".

One group wants to actually fix the world with software (or technology). The other wants to monetize the living shit out of it. A big part of the startup ecosystem is the second group. A fridge that tracks its content is a very useful piece of technology (that is also nowhere to be bought, by the way). A fridge talking on Twitter is someone's attempt at selling more fridges.

The products 'idlewords is criticizing are not made to be useful, they are made to be sold at a profit, which often goes _against_ usability. It's clearly visible in the IoT sphere. Most of the popular devices are just toys sold to gullible, who have no idea how to use them to better their lives. A lot of this stuff shouldn't be even web-connected, especially not to a third- party server. It's all done because the company is making more money on your data than on selling the devices themselves. A tell-tale sign of company not really designing a tool but just trying to monetize you? No ability to export your data for your own analysis, or to hook up to the data stream at the same level of access as vendor's app has.

Please don't confuse people trying to fix the world with software with people trying to make a buck while telling you lies about fixing the world.

\--

As for technology being "good enough", I think that being good enough is a state, not a goal. Anything there is is always good enough for whatever people are doing with it. Fixing the world is a goal (which I support). Creating better future is a goal. What we now have is mostly people blindly following potential gradients set by markets, like water flowing downhill.

\--

I'm not going to comment much on "Vision 3", because the description seems - to put it very nicely - not well thought out, and just a regurgitation of popular media biases. I'll just leave a FAQ from people believing in AI risks that addresses them [0], as well as some quotes from real AI researchers that also believe in AI risk [1] (the media seems to paint the picture that there are no prominent figures in the field who hold that opinion). Also [2] may be of interest.

[0] - [http://lesswrong.com/lw/meq/top_92_myths_about_ai_risk/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/meq/top_92_myths_about_ai_risk/)

[1] - [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai- ri...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-risk/)

[2] - [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/29/no-time-like-the- presen...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/29/no-time-like-the-present-for- ai-safety-work/)

</comment><comment><USER59> OK I'm just going to say it. This author SERIOUSLY needs to consider making their prose gender-neutral. I could care less what the time period is, it's hostile to women to talk about the engineer "as a boy" and talk about the 787's "grandfather". It's freaking 2015, GET OVER the all-male pronoun business already!!

<comment><USER20> The scenario involves a notional Boeing engineer from 1965. My hands are really tied.

Point taken on the 'grandfather' bit, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> > The Concorde entered commercial service and safely ferried douchebags across > the Atlantic for 25 years.

Why this? I mean that seriously. Forget that it's unnecessary. I don't even get the stereotype being referenced.

<comment><USER61> Because a seat on Concorde cost significantly more than a _regular first-class seat_ on a transoceanic flight. If you had enough money to afford it...

<comment><USER62> ...you must be a terrible person?

The Concorde/douchebag line was a good segue into the logical inconsistencies of the second part of this talk.

<comment><USER63> > ...you must be a terrible person?

Yes. You may not share the opinion, but surely you understand the reasoning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I agree with this article. Old things are sometimes the best:

[http://coils.cc/coils/old-things.html](http://coils.cc/coils/old-things.html)

</comment><comment> Jean-Philipe Well written, fun to read. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER65> If you like this dude (or maybe if you don't like him) you can help send him to Antarctica: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle- wor...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle-words-to- antarctica)

<comment><USER66> Yes please he is one of the best writers on the web in my estimation. Plus, he runs pinboard. I backed it, you should too!

<comment><USER67> I don't back Kickstarters that often but in this case idlewords is getting 200 bucks from me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I love this so much. So glad someone wrote this!

I really can't believe how "into" tech people are. It's just a boring tool for your life, not an end-goal in itself.

BTW I feel the only leading company that is aligned with this vision is Apple.

<comment><USER31> "BTW I feel the only leading company that is aligned with this vision is Apple."

I wanted to say something to this effect but the last 12-18 months has shown that Apple is losing its way also.

<comment><USER69> Yea, I'm beginning to think Steve Jobs was Apple? Apple needs a chief who lives gadgets, demands perfection, and most importantly grew up poor, or middle class. I don't think there's too many Steve Jobs out there? You can't produce another Steve Jobs with a good resume, or education. I think that rebellion in him, maybe because he lived through the 60's, is missing in many CEO's? He was really one of a kind! I always thought I wouldn't want him as a friend, but I would want him running my company. (I'm not condoning angry, perfectionists who happen to be in power--you people are not not Steve Jobs-- no matter how hard you try.) In my life, I have only seen one Steve! RIP!

<comment><USER22> Quite a lot was Jony Ive. I'm optimistic the good design will go on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> "What is the web actually for?"

I'm surprised he left out "porn"...

<comment><USER71> I think "cats" in this context refers to all the stuff on the web that doesn't seem important, but that people actually like to use the web for; including pornography.

<comment><USER25> I think a good way to drive a joke home would be to say that "web is for pussies" while displaying photo of a pussycat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I often ask other coders to contemplate "What software that we write today will still be in use 10,000 years from now?"

That I am unable to answer that question is a primary reason I write English text rather than code the last ten years.

<comment><USER23> Your English text (and English in general, as we know it) will not be in use in 10,000 years.

There seems to be a widespread, almost instinctive desire to achieve permanence (works or monuments) in humans, which I do not fully understand. People want to make a dent on the universe, to be 'remembered as heroes' etc. _Nothing_ lasts forever, not your works, not your memory. All will be lost in the mists of time.

I don't see this as a reason for nihilism either, you can make a difference with your efforts - it just won't last forever (or even 1,000 years, let alone 10,000). That's ok.

<comment><USER73> > _I don 't see this as a reason for nihilism either, you can make a > difference with your efforts - it just won't last forever (or even 1,000 > years, let alone 10,000)_

Urgghh, the inventor of fire disagrees...

<comment><USER74> What was his name?

<comment><USER73> I said it: Urgghh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> As soon as I saw the simple design I was hoping that the design would 'improve' as I scrolled down the page.

<comment><USER65> But instead the words just blew your mind as you scrolled down the page.

<comment><USER76> I didn't even need to look at the pictures :)

<comment><USER12> On mobile, I couldn't (without side-scrolling).

But yeah, the writing is great.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Smart Elevators, Dumb People - <AUTHOR> http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/smart-elevators-dumb-people/index.html?hp

<comment><USER2> I think driverless cars need to be supported and mandated by government. It's far easier and safer to make cars that drive themselves when the roads are designed for that purpose and all other cars as well. Making a car that can drive on our current roads and dodge blind old ladies is a far harder problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. But I think it's easier said than engineered. Consider that each car in the DARPA Grand Challenge cost millions. Economies of scale will eventually kick in, but that could take generations. For instance, think of the bandwidth needed to monitor and control all the cars on the on the highway system, let alone most side roads where you're more likely to find grandma.

On a side note: I know I would be very reluctant to give up the psychological thrill of driving. The government would literally have to pry the steering wheel from my cold dead hands.

<comment><USER3> True, but the Grand Challenge cars had to find their own way, while roads and/or tunnels could have premarked paths. Any general use vehicles would still have to have the capability for human control, though, for reasons like the snowstorms we're getting here in Ottawa.

I would miss the thrill of driving a motorcycle, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _It simply listed the next stops it was making. If it was stopping at floors 4 and 7, when the doors opened at the 4th floor, the electronic sign above the elevator doors would be displaying 7 - and people going to the 7th floor would see it and get off._

Evidentally, the "dumb people" are the engineers, and the "smart elevators" are the ones invented 100+ years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's the sweet spot. Engineers have to be smarter by being dumber because changing user behavior and expectations is really hard. Indeed, the hardest part is getting people to enter in their floor number _before_ getting in.

<comment><USER5> But surely these elevators, from the users point of view, are inferior.

What if they change their mind about which floor they want once they've got in? What if they see a closing lift and jump in, not realising it's not a general purpose lift, but one that only stops in certain predefined places. They'll have to get out at the next stop and start again.

You have to ask yourself why these lifts are a good idea for the user. If they reduce wait times by 10% I doubt the users of them will care. The convenience of being able to get a lift to stop where you want it to from the inside is more useful IMHO

I really can't see them becoming common place.

<comment><USER6> The advantage they pointed out in the article was energy savings and time in the elevator. Very large buildings have express elevators that won't stop on every floor, or the poor sap on floor 52 would never get there. This is like making every elevator an express one by batching up the stops.

As for the energy savings... not really clear on that. Maybe I just misunderstood.</comment></comment></comment></comment>