Author Archives: Robert Marsanyi

Alan Kay

Just watched the talk “The Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet”, from OOPSLA last century (!). I’d heard of this talk, but not watched it. Really good, biting critique of how we think about and work with complexity.

Check out the video here.

The guy really is a genius. I’m off to find more on YouTube.

Update: Another one from 2015. Interesting how many of the ideas, and the metaphors, haven’t changed, even though it’s 20 years later and for a completely different audience of corporate leaders instead of tech academics.

In talking about the Intergalactic Network, Kay says someone asked why it was so-named, and the answer was: engineers always give you the minimum, so the choice was intentional to make them think about the potential. This is so right-on. The accepted practice is: there’s a set of requirements that dictate a series of constraints that circumscribe the design of what you’re working on. They end up describing what’s inside and what’s outside your design, like a cell wall.

One of Kay’s points is that these designs at any given point in time, given a context (how much money do we have? How much memory can we use? How about CPU?) should be the building blocks of the next thing, the machine language of the next thing, with the ability to continuously evolve built in, even at the lowest level, because the context is continually evolving, and because we need to be able to play with these things in order to understand what to do next.

So don’t think about building something and scaling it up. Think about building something huge and impractical, and scale it down.

More on the should-I-buy-this app

Thinking some more about my app idea. In effect, the app (or rather the data driving it) addresses the idea of market failure due to costs that aren’t accounted for in pricing. In a simplistic model, producers communicate with consumers through prices. But it’s clear that when costs like environmental degradation aren’t incorporated into the price, the model breaks down. The app would provide a way to surface costs like this directly to consumers.

‘A gamechanger for musicians’: app offers library of interactive sheet music | Music | The Guardian

Exclusive: German startup Enote working on complex task of digitalising musical notation
— Read on www.theguardian.com/music/2020/nov/20/a-gamechanger-for-musicians-app-offers-library-of-interactive-sheet-music

A few years ago, I thought about adding a foot switch input to an iPad to allow page turning. Boy, I haven’t kept up … of course, the damn tablet can keep track for me better than I can and flip the page itself at the right time.

Ambulation

Ambulation – Extended Soundwalking with Bela https://blog.bela.io/2020/11/18/ambulation-tim-shaw-soundscape/

Kinda like this. Calls out some interesting gear, too: a device that demodulates radio to audio without a tuner, which led to a tin box with a contact piezo and some springs, …

I like the walk as compositional structure idea, too. The processing in PD sounds routine, but it’d be good to experience this.

Time for a midlife crisis

K, time to start planning. Extended adventure trip. Douglas, Martin. Overland by … ? Bike? Motorbike? (No). Jeep? Land Rover/Cruiser? Go for a walk? Neither one likes sailing, so …

At least a month or two away, in places we wouldn’t otherwise go. South America? Silk Road? South East Asia?

I’ve got the time, and they do too. And we aren’t getting any younger. Time to realize the cliché.

Vinay Gupta

Interesting insight, from the last few slides of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go: a major problem with poverty is precarity, the inability to manage the ups and downs of having money one day and not the next. Stressful, hard to plan.

UBI manages the income side, but doesn’t limit the swings of the things you spend money on. One day, your cat gets sick and you have to pay a vet bill. The way we normally handle this is insurance, to smooth out the dips for a (small) cost, say 1-2% of income.

So, UBI + micro-insurance becomes a way to make poverty basically very stable and boring, instead of unstable and stressful. And you can go beyond UBI + micro-insurance to the next level, where risk increases, stress increases, and so does reward.

Interesting guy. His business is Mattereum, the application of Ethereum blockchain to things, in service of a vision of efficiency of consumption that in eliminating waste also supports economic justice (!) Check out https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/engineering-consumption-ac3bd74b1a21