corbie

[corbie]

Words I Have Enjoyed, 2018

Books

J.G. Ballard, The Day of Creation

Jodorowsky, The Incal

Charles Stross, Toast and Other Stories

Richard Feynman, QED: the strange theory of light and matter

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gentry’s Holistic Detective Agency

Iain M. Banks, The State of The Art

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Iain M. Banks, Excession

Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Frank Herbert, Dune

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Longer Reads

Assorted Alan Kay Emails

“After more than 50 years of doing edge of art research, my conclusion is that "it is delicate". An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while. What was wonderful about the big creative projects of the golden age was that they had to be conducted out in the open by lots of people, but the processes and pressures were such that the delicate parts were not done in.”

Are We Awake Under Anesthesia?

What happens to the mind and consciousness under anesthesia?

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

“A gene for…“, “Brain region X lights up”, “Chemical imbalance”, “Closure”, “Fetish”, and friends.

The Female Price Of Male Pleasure

“Once you've absorbed how horrifying this is, you might reasonably conclude that our "reckoning" over sexual assault and harassment has suffered because men and women have entirely different rating scales. An 8 on a man's Bad Sex scale is like a 1 on a woman's. This tendency for men and women to use the same term — bad sex — to describe experiences an objective observer would characterize as vastly different is the flip side of a known psychological phenomenon called "relative deprivation," by which disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers.”

DNA Through The Eyes Of A Coder

“DNA is not like C source but more like byte-compiled code for a virtual machine called 'the nucleus'. It is very doubtful that there is a source to this byte compilation - what you see is all you get.”

A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

“That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution.”

The Recurse Center User’s Manual

I wish every technical working group I’ve been on for the past fifteen years had something one-tenth as thoughtful as this.

The White Darkness: A Journey Across Antarctica

The trial of crossing the Southern continent on foot, alone.

Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks

“One interesting consequence of this process is that the competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized. The institutions of modern bureaucratic capitalism solve many of the traditional problems of social integration in an almost mechanical way. As a result, when considering the modern “hypercultures” – e.g. American, Japanese, European – there is little to choose from a functional point of view. None are particularly better or worse, from the standpoint of constructing a successful society. And so what is there left to compete on? All that is left are the memetic properties of the culture, which is to say, the pure capacity to reproduce itself.”

Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer

“I think one of the overarching goals of compute science is to make more programming like wizarding. We want our computers to be human-amplifiers.”

The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks

“Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” are themselves meaningless....In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.”

Computing is Everywhere: A conversation with Bret Victor, Creator of Dynamicland

“That was the plan, yeah. I had um I just built up a . . . a set of things I wanted to think about that could not be thought at Apple. It was kind of this — um I had a bulletin board in my room and had like all these little pieces of paper that I had stuck to that board. And so when I went on my trip, I kind of scooped all those papers into like three little plastic baggies, and then at some random public library somewhere in the middle of the country, I spread out those papers on a big desk and tried to figure out what — what is it? Like what — what is the abstraction here? What — what does all these little ideas add — What are the categories here? What does it add up to?”

Lessons from Optics, The Other Deep Learning

“If anything, I wanted to reply that maybe her engineers should be scared.”

How To Be A Systems Thinker: A Conversation With Mary Catherine Bateson

“The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.”

Deconstructing the Unix Philosophy

Lots of good bits here.

A Basic Lack of Understanding

“This article is about what AI is, but it’s also about why learning what AI is is important in the first place. It’s about how AI is marketed as a commodity today, and what impact that has on people whose work and social lives are touched and shaped by AI on a daily basis. And it’s about how the future of resistance against AI-backed exploitation may not just be technological in nature, but social and cultural.”

One day I'm going to do a survey of the early-21st century AI skepticist essay landscape.

Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power

“To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”

Carbon Ironies

“Most likely, you are a hard, angry person. . . . Beset by floods, droughts, diseases and insect plagues . . . fearing for your children in the face of multiplying perils, how can you feel anything better than impatient contempt for my daughter and me, who lived so wastefully for our own pleasure?”

Utopia and Work

“The utopianism of full employment is so entrenched, as a seemingly uncontested common sense, it’s difficult to imagine a different utopian horizon.”

Disposable America

“As it turns out, all three companies’ histories intersect with each other, as well as with structural changes to the American economy. But first, we have to talk about McDonald’s.”

What can a technologist do about climate change?

No clear answers, but thoughtful and insightful.

Survival of the Richest

Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern. Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

Bourdain Confidential

“As much as I look at houses sometimes and think wow, that would be really nice, if that were my house, I know that I would be miserable. It would be… cleaning out the… the gutters, and you know, what about the pipes freezing, and if you own a home it means you have to vacation in the same place every year. I’m a renter by nature. I like the freedom to change my mind about where I want to be in six months, or a year. Because I’ve also found you might have to make that decision… you can’t always make that decision for yourself, you know… shit happens.”

How to write a good software design document

“A design doc is the most useful tool for making sure the right work gets done.”

The Bullshit Web

“There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.”

On Production Minimalism

“Do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”

“Omakase”

Just read it.

See No Evil

“What if we take these companies at their word? What if it is truly impossible to get a handle on the entirety of a supply chain?”

Estrangement and Cognition

“SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.”

Layering

“This is good advice, and with a bit of adaptation it can apply to many things in life. Any sort of improvisation must arise from a basic technique. And just as important, the advice understands that there’s nothing more intimidating than a pristine kitchen, a blank canvas, an empty screen.”

The Heart of the Problem

“But consider this for a moment. Perhaps once we are adequately fed, diet becomes far less significant in determining how healthy we are. Maybe almost insignificant. Could it be that when our bodies have enough macro and micro nutrients available most of the time, other determinants of health kick in. The houses we live in. The stress we are under. The pressure of financial and social inequalities. Stigma, abuse and mental illness. Social isolation. And a million other factors with the capacity to make us sick.”

Mass Authentic

“Authenticity seems to stand for the truth behind the curtain, but it is really just the curtain. The presumption that only some feelings in some situations are real, and other feelings, though felt, are somehow false, is authenticity’s main ruse.”

Stickeen: The Story of a Dog

“However great his troubles he never asked help or made any complaint, as if, like a philosopher, he had learned that without hard work and suffering there could be no pleasure worth having.”

The Early History of Smalltalk

Far more here than I could find suitable excerpts for.

The Radical Implications of Luck in Human Life

“The less credit/responsibility you believe we are due, the more you believe our trajectories are shaped by forces outside our control (and sheer chance), the more compassionate you will be toward failure and the more you will expect back from the fortunate. When luck is recognized, softening its harsh effects becomes the basic moral project.”

It’s Harder Than It Looks To Write Clearly

“Everything we write is, in a sense, translated from another language, from the chatter we hear inside our head, translated from that interior babble (more or less comprehensible to us) into (what we hope will be) the clearer, more articulate language on the page. But during the process of that translation, basic clarity often suffers—sometimes fatally!—when, for whatever reason, we feel that we are translating our natural speech into a foreign language: in other words, when we are writing.”

It Isn’t About The Technology

“Yet the decentralized Web advocates persist in believing that the answer is new technologies, which suffer from the same economic problems as the existing decentralized technologies underlying the "centralized" Web we have. A decentralized technology infrastructure is necessary for a decentralized Web but it isn't sufficient. Absent an understanding of how the rest of the solution is going to work, designing the infrastructure is an academic exercise.”

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

“For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.”

If the Point of Capitalism is to Escape Capitalism, Then What’s the Point of Capitalism?

“Freedom from exploitation. Freedom from control and domination. Freedom to find, develop, and realize ourselves. The freedom to live lives which really sear us with meaning, purpose, and fulfillment — instead of being crushed with anxiety, bruised by competitiveness, and suffused with fear. So here is the real question. If these are things we are really after — why don’t we just give them to one another?”

The Lax Habits of the Free Imagination

“The lax habits of the free imagination exhibit an appealing open-door policy. But to counterbalance this extreme permissiveness, the celestial process had better employ some sort of disciplinarian, an enforcer, to maintain order. Where else does the famous restraint and brevity of the short story come from? In other words, there must be a plan, an outline. Mustn't there?“

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

“It's fun to think about, interesting, and completely inaccessible to experiment given our current technology. You can build crystal palaces of thought, working from first principles, then climb up inside them and pull the ladder up behind you. People who can reach preposterous conclusions from a long chain of abstract reasoning, and feel confident in their truth, are the wrong people to be running a culture.”

I’m Broke and Friendless and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life

“When you’re curious about your shame instead of afraid of it, you can see the true texture of the day and the richness of the moment, with all of its flaws. You can run your hands along your own self-defeating edges until you get a splinter, and you can pull the splinter out and stare at it and consider it.”

Mistakes About The Meaning Of Life

“Noting this close relationship between meaningfulness and value is important, since it allows us to draw many implications that can be helpful for people who consider their lives insufficiently meaningful.”

[corbie]

Words I Have Enjoyed, 2017

Books

Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons

I was tepid for the first half, but final the final act warmed my interest plenty. Reminded me of the experience reading Matter, and how I engaged with the story without realizing it.

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Maybe the most interesting essay on the emotional experience of faith I’ve ever read.

Alexander Pushkin, The Tales of Belkin

Why haven’t I read more Russian lit?

Samuel Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering

Strangely, it was the language of this book — florid and formal, but not without character — that sticks with me. It felt more like a long New Yorker piece than a book. It labors to make two points: that the engineer is not responsible for the original sins of civilization, and that the act of engineering is as soulful as any creative effort. I enjoyed the latter and could have done without the former.

Plato, Dialogues

I’m compelled to begin reading classical literature regularly after reading these.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Epictetus, the Enchiridion

Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Bhagvad Gita

These felt interrelated, three voices describing the same thing. They were much needed spiritual sustenance last summer.

Peter Watts, Echopraxia

Nice counterpart to Blindsight. Watt’s mind is fantastic, I always enjoy reading the codas of research notes in each of his books.

Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

I’m a sucker for intergenerational stories or narratives with interconnected protagonists, this has both. Shifting points of view reminded me of Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

I’d heard this described as a pessimistic view of capital-C culture, and was glad to discard another piece of received wisdom. This is a great introduction to Freud’s theories and writings, explaining his worldview with approachable language.

Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

The narrative was stretched a bit thin in the middle. Some interesting ideas — I could read another book about the pack-mind species — but I think the Culture novels and Charles Stross have spoilt me and I can’t engage with stories about spacefaring cultures that don't discuss their power structures or economics. A fun read.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

There is nothing I could say about this book that hasn't already been said a thousand times and much better than I could, but I am very glad that I read this. I expect to return to it many times.

Longer Reads

What Happens When You Stare At The Sun?

“The injunction not to look directly into the sun isn’t just medical — it’s always political.”

By the Waters of Babylon

“Then I raised my eyes and looked south. It was there, the Place of the Gods.”

Where Oil Rigs Go to Die

What happens to gigantic infrastructure when it’s retired?

Why Read Code?

Code Is Not Literature

Point and counterpoint.

How To Build Stable Systems

Pithy and opinionated, just my style.

Design Principles Behind Smalltalk

Reading the history of Smalltalk and Lisp is like digging through an attic so stuffed with treasures that its abandonment is unimaginable.

The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions

The impossibility of intelligence explosion

The Real Danger to Civilization isn’t AI

Dude, You Broke the Future!

Four of a kind. These ideas have been bubbling to the surface of my brain more than usual this year. Something’s coming out of this, not sure what yet.

Quantum Computing Explained

Best walkthrough I’ve yet read on the topic. Still not sure I understand it.

Consent of the Ungoverned

I want to blockquote the entire essay.

Against Productivity

I can’t say what kept me thinking about this one; that fact is interesting in itself.

Charles Dickens

Fantastic Orwell piece on literature, language, and class in Dickens.

[corbie]

☀ Forever.

Humans have problems because they believe in Forever.

We understand things in straight lines. When we see an object in motion, they assume it’s tajectory extends into the past and into the future. Things that existed before you are precieved to have existed forever before you were born. Things that exist after you do we see as existing forever after we die. And anything that does both appears eternal.

From a certain perspective, every person is eternal — in a dying man’s last moment, the living live forever. Those of whose death we never hear live forever in our memories. Each person we meet is a whole universe to themselves; each person we meet might be a universe in which we live forever.

We expect the people in our lives to keep moving in straight lines, too. We are jarred, stunned when something deviates from the path, or when its line stops abruptly. A friend changing can be uncomfortable. To lose a love is devastating. To lose a friend, or kin, is intolerable. When we first encounter a violation of the predictive line, as an infant, we as mesmirized; peek-a-boo seems to flaunt the laws of reality. The first time we lose someone, the stability of the entire universe is called into question.

Of course, the trouble with believeing in Forever is that Forever contradicts the behavior of the universe. Thinking in straight lines may be good enough to get us through the day, but it’s hardly a extensive model of reality. The only constant of the universe is change.

Building a concept of change is difficult — it goes against our every intuition about the world. Granted, we do come to swallow it in tiny bites. Waxing and waning, spring and autum, long and short hair, day and night, young and old: we see cycles. A cycle is a compromise, a mental construct that exhibits regular change but is itself eternal, immutable; with cycles we can accept change without losing Forever. But an idea of real change, of impermanence, is much more difficult to come by.

When you understand impermanence, you can see things you couldn’t because Forever was obscuring them. You know that no feeling continues forever, that no thought is fixed, that no loss is total nor victory complete, that no life is endless. When you know these things, you cannot be jarred or stunned. You cannot be pained, because you know that pain will not last. You cannot feel loss, because you know you never posssesed. You cannot feel regret, because there is no past. You cannot feel anxiety, because there is no future.

There simply just is.

[corbie]

Is Power

"I still don't understand what you're asking me about. A prime number is what we call an integer whose only factors are one and itself. That's what it is. There is no other answer. What do you want from me?"

"Please, do not become angry."

"It's a little difficult to be anything but angry when I'm being held against my will."

"You may leave at any time. But please, be aware, that premature abdication of the exam may result in an incomplete score, which would weigh unfavorably against the annexation evaluation currently in progress."

"And that, that! What do you mean by 'annexation'? What's being evaluated?"

"Confidence intervals for the model of your civilization's adaptability function phase space."

"Adaptability... What?"

"The boundaries of it's capacity to adapt to new realities. If we determine that this capacity is below a certain threashold, you civilization will be annexed into ours and all cognitive resources will be redistributed. Senescence functions will be delayed to maximize output."

"You're talking about enslaving my speices and artificially extending it's lifespan, all for new brains to run your software on."

"In a sense, yes."

"So what do you need me for?"

"If the evaluated civilization has an adapatability phase space which is as large or larger than the threashold value, then annexation would be an insufficiently beneficial resource redistribution. By mapping the extent of your civilization's knowledge, we can determine it's capacity for change and thereby choose an annexation candidate."

"But I'm just a university student! I can't possibly be a representation of the entire knowledge of my civiliation!"

"Measurement of diffusion across all social strata is a factor of the model."

"Figures that my laziness at studying is the defining factor in the decision to wipe out the human race.”

“Shall we continue?"

[corbie]

Lhasa

The monks had been gracious when I arrived that summer, but the general mood of the monastery was tense. The remote cloister was bowstring-taunt — but this was hardly a suprise. The preparations for the equinox ritual demanded full employment, down to the last neophyte. I'd been fortunate the Lama had granted my request to stay.

But the Lama was the origin of my first shock. The old Lama was gone, replaced by a strange man from the North. I should have known from our first meeting what was to come: there was madness in his eyes, and he looked at me as if from a great distance.

I spent two months mediating at a small shrine cut into the cliffs high above the monastery. It should have been tranquil, opening my mind as wide as the sky and looking down that austere alpine valley. Instead, I was haunted by dread. The prayer bells below sounded emptily, and the mountains often rang great crashes, like thunder, but without a cloud. Peace eluded me.

I returned below to find the character of the place greatly changed. The furrowed brows and hurrying feet were replaced by inhuman calm. Everywhere were mandalas of unsettlingly icons. Once-bright courtyards seemed dim, as if light could not fully penetrate the shadows there. When I asked to see the Lama I was told that he was readying himself for the Equinox, and would be with us soon.

I do not know what the monks awoke in their mountain temple, because there is no name for something that feeds on sanity itself. It's ten days to Lhasa, if the pass wasn't already closed by the heavy storms September brought with it. Ten days, and most above twenty thousand feet.

Ten days, if it didn't kill me first.

[corbie]

App.

Biorythm time-sequence data processed by unsupervised feed-forward multilayer perceptron in a feedback loop, presented real-time, as audiovisual stimuli to the subject produce profound feelings of harmony and ego death. The affects of artifically-induced satori are significant and long-lasting, with overwhelmingly positive side effects: reduction in compulsive behavior and depressive episodes, lower blood pressure, improved cognitive testing scores. Rare occurances of an irresitable impluse to expose other people to the treatment.

Next phase of research will approach re-engineering the treatment apparatus into smartphone software for field activity.

[corbie]

Thought Box

The Thought Box is carried all the time — in the beginning merely as often as possible, but gradually one comes to think of it as indispensible — and absorbs all of the projected psychic energy from the individual it is imprinted to. Every musing, keen observation, half-remembered joke, clever comeback, profound synthesis, each emphemeral impression or conceit, every fantasy and mind-structure, daydream and fleeting reverie, any excasty or revelation is permanently recorded with the greatest fidelity, at the highest possible sampling rate, and stored in Planc-scale quantum holographic media embraced by a durable, shock-resistent, tamper-proof enclosure crafted with zenlike care by preturnaturally-tasteful industrial designers. Following the carrier's expiration, the Thought Box may be placed in archival storage for a nominal annual service fee, where its invaluable and inimitable contents may rest undisturbed, ready for review by friends, loved ones, or agents of the State.

[corbie]

☀ How To Make a Story

You have no problem creating a narrative about an event that happened to you, but it's hard for you to create a convincing ficition from the worlds and images in your head. This is the start of the trouble: we see all parts of a mental picture at once but a story, like you, has a limited persepctive. Perspective, that of one or more characters, is what gives a story substance. Just as a film director creates a frame of reference by choosing where to place and point the camera, so a story is created by choosing where to look at it from.

Stories are perspectives to a serires of events. Point of view is essential to differentiating an impersonal journal or history of events from a narrative. Stories are collections of things happening, filtered through a human.

Because of this, it is very difficult to create a fiction without first creating characters. This could just be a narrator initially, but the framing of the tale will rest upon a set of eyes to see it through. The depiction of the characters, in its detail and convincingness, is the very quality of the story itself; without solid characters, there is a lack of a definite perspective to see the events of the story from.

Characters are the foundation of all stories. Stories cannot exist without them.

Characters are images of people: collections of details that circumscribe and intimate an interior. Convincing characters are those with drives and impulses. Our lives are peopled with walking, talking drives, embodied in flesh, and any belivable depiction of a person much live up to our experiences with the genuine article. Real people want things, and so their images must want them as well.

It is these drives, bursting forth from our created people, which form the elemental forces of this manufactured cosmos. A story is also a model of the world, a model that we can subject, at our will, to forces not present in the real thing. These forces are represented as the drives of the characters. Their motions describe lines of force: that is, the arcs of events are the buttresses supporting the vaulted world of the story. The motions are what keeps the universe from collapsing inward to an inert, flat image.

Think about how the forces of your world move, and then show us through the drives of the characters. Our characters are the mouths through which the gods speak. And when gods speak, they create worlds.

[corbie]

Inward.

I have an uncomfortable feeling about my capacity to contribute to the world at large. I am afraid that I am at the present incapable of producing anything that any other person would be interested in. This, I feel, is because I am not yet mature enough to be wholly interested in the people around me and therefore have no idea of what commands their attention. My own attention seems to always turn inward, always trying to sort out some internal conflict or chase some attractive new idea. I still don't understand humans because I'm too self-centered to know that I am one. I still feel disconnected from everyone because I don't concentrate on anything other than myself.

It is possible that a person, without really grasping the universal fears and desires of human beings, can produce from their efforts works which attract and improve other minds. Perhaps these are accidents, coincidences. Perhaps instead it requires a truly inuitive sense of those forces, knowing intimately all the wordless things which push and pull at the mind, shaping every day of of every life. Some people seem to have this awareness from their beginning, being ever aware of what it means to be a human being in the timeless sense that cave paintings and epic fiction evoke. Everyone else must strive to accquire it, and the most direct way to do so is to learn everything possible about human beings — and the easiest way to do that is to pay a lot of attention to them.

[corbie]

How much will Amazon Prime Air cost Amazon?

I was having a conversation with my brother about Amazon Prime Air last night and he brought up the question of how much it might practically cost to implement. Some back of the envelope calculations follow.

Population density of Los Angeles people/mi^2 = 8092

Top speed for a powerful RC quadcopter with small payload (camera pod, in this case) = ~30mph, based on some RC forums

30 minute delivery means a 15mi radius circle, or 706.9mi^2

Population in range of a single drone depot = 5.7MM

Now that’s assuming the depot is in the center of LA, which is unlikely. Let’s half that population density figure, making 2.35MM people. Let’s also say that on a given day, only 10% of them order from Amazon (probably a high number). Of those, we could say 30% subscribe to Amazon Prime. That’s 70.5K potential drone customers per depot per day.

But not every order can be fulfilled by drone: let’s say they max out at 2lbs (it would be interesting to imagine Predator-sized quadcopters delivering TVs, furniture…). Amazon specializes in carrying everything, so their long tail is full of small items: books, DVDs, specialty parts and components, cables, tools, clothing, possibly food. Assume a full half of these orders are fulfillable by drone — 35.25K.

It would be safe to assume the drone delivery system will be running 24 hours a day, but most of the orders will likely be daylight and evening hours, when people are normally awake and right after they get home from work (demographically, I’m assuming Amazon Prime subscribers are urban/suburban with office jobs and expendable income). The bulk of the orders will take place in a 12 hour window — just under 3000 per hour if they are spaced evenly, and they almost certainly won’t. Peak times could see 5,000 drone-deliverable orders per hour, though different parts of the hour will be heavier. 5K an hour is 83.33 a minute, but a burst of 500 orders doesn’t seem unlikely.

The maximum round trip for a drone would be 1hr (30 minute delivery maximum), but I doubt the batteries on a drone will be good for more than a single trip. Amazon is very efficient at logistics, we could imagine they develop an automated rotating pool of battery chargers. A drone returns from a delivery, has its spent battery swapped for a fresh one, and is ready to pick up the next order — we’ll add a 15 minute pit-stop between orders.

So: a drone depot will need to be able to fulfill 500 orders per minute. This means that at a given minute, there should be 500 drones ready to deliver. Since the previous minute might see 500 drones leaving, we’ll need another 500 in the fleet ready plus another 125 having their batteries changed (to keep a steady flow of 500 per minute every hour, there will need to be an additional 25% ready to make up for the quarter hour lost to post-delivery battery service). Let’s be proactive and keep an extra 25% worth of spare drones for emergencies and extended servicing. This means about 1,400 drones per depot.

Amazon can leverage some huge economies of scale. I’ve looked around for quadcopter kits and they seem to be about $2K on the outside, but Amazon can almost certainly source the parts for less if they’re buying bulk: $1.5K. We’ll double the component cost — after all, we’re quite generously assuming that these drones are fully autonomous, plus made of durable components — and estimate $3,000 per drone, or $4.2MM for a full depot fleet.

Amazon will probably roll this out in 10 major cities to start, or $42MM worth of drones. This doesn't include the costs of integrating the drones with the extant logistics systems in Amazon's distribution centers, operator training, software development, FAA and FCC licensing, insurance bonding, etc., but with the above number in mind, $150-200MM for an autonomous drone delivery network doesn't seem outlandish. Based on Amazon's 2012 annual report, they had almost $400MM in free cash flow — and 2012 was an exceptionally lean year, with almost $2B extra spent in aquisitions and internal reinvestment year over year. So I think that they could swing $200MM.

I still have no idea how Amazon intends to handle some of the practical aspects of autonomous drone couriers. Off the top of my head:

Inclement weather: can the drones fly in sleet, snow, and gale-force winds?

Liability: what happens if a drone causes a car wreck or flies into a window?

Apartment dwellers: landing in a back yard seems doable, but how about a fourth-floor walk up?

Privacy: will the drone's sensor data be recorded — particularly cameras?

It's possible that most of the money will be spent in legal fees, rather than R&D.

[corbie]

Eqillibrium.

There is no luck, justice or karma. The universe doesn't let you save up your tickets for a big prize at the end of the day. Our lives are governed by the same laws that bind the stars together. People only ever get what they want through chasing it with intensity and presence of mind, or through the altruism of others (usually a combination of both). So, you want something? Go out there and get it. Already got it? Give of yourself and help someone else out. But don't sit by the mailbox waiting for your check from the universe for being such a good person, because you're likely to be waiting a very long time.

[corbie]

☀ Empathy, Part One

(Note: This is the first of a three-part series I've been working on. Come back for the next two installments!)

The brain has been on my mind a lot lately. Not in the least because of all the possible ways there are for it to become broken or fall short, but that will be a topic for another day. I'm mostly interested right now in of the most complicated things a brain can do: pretending to be another brain.

How is it even possible to feel what other people feel? Mirror neurons have been suggested as a probable starting point: neural connections which are conditioned to sympathically fire when we observe something happening to someone else. We see someone smash their hand accidentally in a door, the thinking goes, and clumps of neurons in our own heads will give us a dose of the pain. Smile at an infant and her mirror neurons will kick in, involuntarily mimicing the arrangement of your face.

But what happens when I need to understand how you might react to something I've not experienced myself? How could I understand the complicated set of feelings you might experience when you get a piece of bad news? Or if I'm the one who telling you, how might I know how you will react? What about unsympathetic uses — coersion, manipulation? Empathy isn't just the ability to feel what another person is feeling, it allows us to understand how another person thinks. It lets us contextualize another person's actions into a useable model of their thoughts. Empathy, then, is a byproduct of the brain's ability to simulate the outside world.

Models and Simulacra

With enough information about how a system — an interconnected set of discrete elements — has changed over time, you can build a model of it. If you can know that for values A, B, and C, B and C change whenever A changes, then it's probable that there's a connection between A, B, and C. This is statistical inference, and it's a hugely useful tool for understanding future events.

What's interesting is that this process of model-making can be done algorithmically — through a series of repeatable steps without rationality or complex decision-making. It's a processes that artificial neural networks are fairly proficient at. Not just that, but automatic model-making systems display the same patterns for learning and adapting that humans do: an inital difficult period of uptake, followed by minor adjustments and mastery. It's not a stretch to imagine that the brain assimilates the endless deluge of sensory information by sorting it into models: when this happens, then that is likely to happen next, but it's more/less likely if the other happened too.

A model doesn't just give you one future, it gives you a multiplicity of them. Change one of the variables and watch the rest shift in cascading causality. And since the hardware that does all this magic is the very stuff that the brain itself is made of, it can produce a perfect image. The sensory output of the model feeds right into our own senses, making them as real as the outside world. Simulation mediates our realities.

This is the limitless power of human imagination: with accurate enough models of everything, we can see sideways into possible futures instead of just straight ahead to the next moment.

But what about possible future states of another brain? In terms of complex systems — those composed of lots and lots of interconnected elements — human brains rank pretty high on the list of anything a brain might encounter. Plus, we're talking about a brain simulating itself, a pretty tall order, even for our Unlimted Dream Simulation Engine. Fortunately, we can take some shortcuts.

Shared hardware, shared behaviors

Like an old-growth rainforest, the brain is an asymmetric mess — tangled strata of systems overlapping and merging with each other, sometimes symbiotically, and sometimes in competition. Old systems aren't pruned away but live on, watching, overgrown with layers of young branching tendrils. The parts of the brain which contribute to our ability to live and work in groups are amoung these legacies, and behaviors involved in the most rudimentary of social interactions (hierarcy, bonding, resource pooling, territorial displays, alliances, choosing a mate) are shared with almost every member of our spieces.

This commonality gives some of our more complex behaviors (social interactions and group dynamics) an almost mathematical reproduceability: expose two different brains to the same social stimuli and the ancient parts will light up with notable similarity. This makes our models easier to build — we don't have to simulate the whole brain because the primate-social systems are similar enough across brains to give the same responses to an event, regardless of the individual. If I want to know how you might feel things like upsetting group pecking order or another person getting too close to your significant other, all my brain has to do is run those stimuli through its own hardware, because our responses will probably* be the same.

*(Of course, there are degreees of _probably_: for all their commonalities, brains vary tremendously even when developed within the same circumstances, as anyone with siblings can testify to. And that doesn't even take into account the autism spectrum or environmental factors. The ability to predict another brain doesn't have to work perfect, it just has to work _well enough, most of the time_. The rest of the brain is flexible enough to compensate for the particulars of a situation. We're talking about aggregate forces, after all.)

So, this gives us half of our simulated brain. If we're purely talking about social intelligence, you might even say that combining this with non-verbal communication gives you everything you could really want to know about another person, but that would leave out the rest of the expressive space of human experience. You can simulate how a person might feel in a given social situation on the most primative level using just your own ancient social faculties, but they won't help you if you want to project what will happen if they'll like a particular movie, get along with a certain person, how they'll handle a flat tire or a fourty-hour airport layover. For that you'll need a more detailed model.

Templates

A fully articulated simulation of the brain will need to model more than social reflexes. There are emotional drives, psychological impulses — attraction, repulsion, acceptance and validation, envy, love, loneliness, contentment, agnony, ennui, awe, loyalty, moral jugement. We need a starting point, a framework to place observed responses into to make some sense out of them. Why not use what we have at hand? Our own experiences are a rich map of value-relationships in our menagere of drives. The quickest way to build a model of another brain, then, is to use ourselves as a template.

Of course, the model will quickly diverge from the original form as observations accumulate from experience, and the longer we're around someone, the better we are at predicting what they will think or feel. Before long our model is useful enough to add to the permanent collection as a template itself — a stereotype is created, and the process repeats. The more people we encounter, the more accurate our initial models become. But this system does have its shortcomings, as we'll see later.

[corbie]

☀ How to Read

I wanted to describe briefly my process of discovering new books. This method was found through curiosity and the sheer love of literature. I make no claim of originality, I am not the first or the last to be guided by this map. This essay is both an exercise in the art of description and my attempt to articulate an old habit so to better understand it. Further, it is my belief that anyone who follows these directions will find an endless source of enjoyable reading better than any personal recommendations or critical praise could provide.

First, choose a book. Any one will do. It doesn't matter how you choose; an interesting title or a passing familiarity with the author are enough. I'll avoid telling you that next you must read it, but I will add this rule: you do not have to finish the book. If you hate the author's tone, or find yourself unable to care about the characters, or simply cannot read another page of that tedious, tasteless bullshit — stop, put the book down, and return to step one.

If you enjoyed the book at all, excellent. If you were engaged and transfixed, however, it is time to push out into the frontier. You're looking for the unknown, after all. I find that books rarely exist by themselves; although a well-written story is usually a self-contained entity, books tend to be only a part of a much larger conversation. This conversation is ancient, filled with people from every part of the world and every station of life, and to find it you don't have to look very far.

Look next at other books by the author you've just read. A book is a window into a mind, and by reading the works of a single author you can feel what it is like to be them — what sort of person they are, what they think is interesting or strange about the world, what they feel about talking to strangers or their closest friends, what made their stomach turn or their heart overflow. Those who write, especially those who write a great deal, are typically trying say something that they can't quite say in any other way and are always struggling to express it. It is up to you as the reader to judge if what they said was worth saying — and remember, if you can't finish it, don't.

Once you've gotten to know the author through their words, it's time to understand what shaped their thoughts. Find what books influenced them (because it is impossible to write well if you do not read well, there will surely be more than one), what writers they looked up to. Look also at their contemporaries, find out whose work they admired and whose they despised. Google and Wikipedia biographies are great places to start, but you should have no trouble getting the information directly from the source, as there is no greater temptation to a writer than to write about writing — both others' and their own (magazines, both literary and otherwise, are where that sort of writing will usually end up).

One more rule. As you read, make note of the following things:

Words you don't know the meaning of. Look them up, they will add to the experience in a way that guessing by context cannot and you will be able to use them later.

References to other authors or books, even just in name. This is part of learning about what influenced the author and to understand what they thought was interesting or important. Also it will give you a sense of the larger world of literature around you — as you travel through the unknown parts, these names will become distant features on the horizon to steer yourself with.

Turns of phrase, descriptions, expressions, or any collection of words that makes you feel something intensely. These are examples of good writing craft, and apart from being an interesting study of how they create feelings or images, they also tell you something about yourself. This is one of the best things about literature — that by being inside someone else's head, you will come to understand your own.

You will now have a whole list of authors and works to guide you, and the knowledge of how they relate to each other. Possessing the sight that context provides, you can begin to search for your next book. If it is good, push the borders of your map even further and take the steps of discovery again — listen the author, and then listen to who they listened to. With time you'll learn your own tastes, as well as what is easy for you. Always look for a challenge when you read — expanding your capacity for ideas and questioning your oldest assumptions allows you to see the invisible things right in front of you.

[corbie]

☀ Escape.

At the core of every story about hidden magical kingdoms, secret planes of reality, and other nearby worlds that overlap or connect only narrowly with our own is a desire to be in a place with a comfortable social language. These stories generally start with the protagonist acting out their life with a vague sense that the world they live in is not actually the true one, and that next door, or underneath it was the Real World, the one that they were meant to inhabit. When they step through the portal into the Real World, after some light feelings of disorientation, they soon find that everything there finally makes sense — that the rules of this world obey the ones in their mind.

This feeling of alienation, followed by recognition is precisely the same one that as when one encounters a social sphere they have no experience with. The culture, the social language is a foreign tongue — the motives and desires of everyone there are opaque, driven by some bizarre, inscrutable logic. Nothing makes sense, and we doubt our own sanity, all the while wanting to get back to a place where people follow the social rules that are most comfortable to us.

[corbie]

☀ Knowledge.

Once it was enough to loose myself in the way the world worked, memorizing and cataloging endlessly the mindless systems and connections that form the empty motion of my reality, taking each one apart in my mind over and over until I knew all their pieces by their secret names and all their stories by heart. But as I get older it seems that what I want more than perfect knowledge, the ability to predict the outcome of any situation, what I care more and more about is being able to have meaningful connections with the people that flow into and out of my life, and those that stay there, year after year. I want to them to want to be not forgotten as desperately as I now do.

[corbie]

☀ Ambition

Why is it I have never in my life suffered from a lack of ambition, yet none of my plans or desires has ever materialized? I have (in no particular order): - Dreamt up a database of all the worlds information to be stored in text documents and a standard namespace scheme for addressing them (stored on floppy disks, which I purchased dozens of for the purpose) (age 12) - Designed a graphical scripting language which I made no documentation of (age 15) - Designed an easy-to-use Linux OS for the desktop, complete with an iOS-style singletasking fullscreen UI (age 16) - Imagined and planned a half-dozen craft-based businesses (graphic t-shirts, tchotchkes, plastic and foam toy swords, etc) - Planned editing and selling an image-heavy magazine (to be distributed via CD-ROM, no less) (age 16) - Tried to design and build radar systems, ionized air levitators, particle beam weapons, a self-sustaining hydroelectricly-powered arcology and other high-technology gadgets for which I had no real understanding of the physics or engineering involved (ages 10 and up) - Half-imagined, half-wrote novels, short stories, comic books, film scripts/storyboards (animated and live-action), and video games that never saw completion (or even left the confinement of my skull) - Wrote lists and lists of topics for essays, articles, treatises - Attempted to create mass-produceable abstract drawings/paintings for offices and homes (age 10) - Started designing and quickly gave up on a BASIC program to predict the stock market, during the time I was imagining promoting myself as financial portfolio manager (age 11) - Tried composing ambient/IDM music - Half-baked or half-tried to create businesses out of computer products or services (web design, cloud-based managed hosting, custom PC hardware resale, generic IT service, RSS reader software for phones, VoIP IVR) - Thought about writing food criticism for Dallas - Imagined software for data-mining munipal budgets and community transparency projects - Tried (once) to create a literary journal on internet culture - Mused extensively on starting a coperative or employee-owned ISP or other internet hosting venture - Dreamt of writing an influential sociopolitical commentary blog And many, many other schemes I have mercifully been able to forget. Not a single one has changed our shared reality in any meaningful way, with the exception of reams of handwritten notes and doodles. Looking back at the earliest of these, I see someone who unhesitatingly acted on his curiosity. Most of the plans I made material progress on were early in my career as a dreamer. As the list of failures and false starts grew longer, I shrank in my desire to act without planning. Extensive preparation replaced the play of chasing a new idea, and eventually the dreams became small and rare, shrinking to almost nothing of late. Cruelly, the engine powering my ambition was also driving my fatalism and loss-avoidance: my innate belief in my fixed and exceptional intelligence, which allowed me to understand anything I sought to. Because I believed I was smart enough to do anything I tried everything — until I started running into the limits of my knowledge and skill. Since I thought failure meant I wasn't as smart as I thought I was, that I wasn't as special, I ran from it, and cleaved to those things in which my success would be assured. My intelligence was bound tightly to my identity, and I would suffer no attacks on it. I also felt the scope of my intelligence to be fixed; I assumed that if I couldn't make something work perfectly on my first try then I must not be capable of making it work at all — failure meant only the end. It is now clear to me that I was not particularly intelligent at all, as a genuinely smart person would have recognized the lessons of their failures and endured them, or looked for new knowledge in wreckage. Even as I write this, all my habits are screaming at me to avoid thinking about a genuine answer my first question because they know it would require honest examination of myself, something that must be too uncomfortable to bear because I've spent the past hour correcting grammar in old notes instead of trying to write this paragraph. But as scary as vivsecting myself is, it's nothing compared to the thought that if I don't change the failure-averse part of myself, the only thing in my life that will grow is the list above. Now, those were my failures. Here's another list: I have: - Quit smoking - Taught myself several programming languages, as well as information theory, packet-switched networking and network design, cryptography, theory of universal computation, operating system design, CPU architecture and a number of other computer science-related topics - Taught myself vipassana meditation - Taught myself to cook I wish it was longer, but it represents things I feel proud enough about to say that I've accomplished them (or rather, have accomplished something in them, as they are mostly practices I'll work at all my life). I think it's telling that those things which were not the products of ego-feeding ambitions are the ones I am able to count as successes. Or maybe the paralyzing fear of failing at something huge and public doesn't exist when I'm pursuing something purely for its own sake. Everything on the second list was grown through small steps over years, built on escalating challenges, and sought with the earnestness of natural curiosity, the kind that feels like play.

[corbie]

☀ Good Artists, Great Artists, and Louis Vitton

I want to take a stab at talking about Steve Jobs and the implications of his infamous paraphrasing of Picasso's quip about the difference between good artists and great artists. There's a TED video making the rounds of Kirby Furgeson musing on this very topic. He starts out by talking about the early work of Bob Dylan, which heavily borrowed tunes and even lyrics from old folk songs. Then he moves on to Woodie Guthrie, who did the same but even more prolifically. I won't summarize the entire video here, and you should watch it if you have a chance because it's a very good TED talk, but Kirby then begins to bring his argument to a head by talking about Apple's victory in their recent suit against Samsung. Apple successfully argued that Samsung copied the appearance and designs of the iPhone and iPad, and Samsung was ordered to pay Apple $1 billion for damages and lost sales. He talks about how the young Apple in the early 1980's borrowed heavily from the software built at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in creating the original Macintosh. He then shows two things: a video of a young Steve Jobs in 1996 quoting Picasso in saying, "Good artists copy, great artists steal", followed by a quote 2010 quote from the man himself threatening to bury Android for copying Apple's work, from Walter Isaccson's biography of Jobs. The heavy implication of this juxtaposition is the hypocrisy between the two versions of this same man: the still-scrappy iconoclast and the selfish voice of the establishment. While the main point of the talk seems to be about the damaging and restraining impact of broad software patents on the development of new ideas, it seems to be hung from this point: that Apple, having built its success on inspiration from many other sources, is behaving hyprocritically in stifling and attacking those inspired by them. I first want to say that I'm a big fan of Kirby's video series, "Everything Is A Remix", which you should also watch because it's _very_ good. In the course of four videos, he lucidly and artfully shows how inspiration is crutial to the process of creative expression; without the acts of copying, changing, and recombining there would be no art. With examples from music, film, literature, painting, science, and commerce, he creates a strongly compelling argument for copying being the foundation of culture and innovation — that being influenced by something and restating that expression is the ultimate creative act, that the freedom to do so must be protected, and that those who shortsightedly stop this ceaseless and ancient process of recombination for their own selfish ends do so at the cost of human progress. The sticking point for me here is the conflation of these two — the suit between corporate competitors and the ubiquity of artistic inspiration. Copying is important to the genesis of new work, but no one would ever use the words "inspiration" or "homage" to describe plagiarism, which is what Apple v. Samsung is about. It's one thing to use someone else's work as a starting point for creating something new, it's a different thing to take another's work and pass it off as your own with only minor adjustments. Jobs was not giving license to use others work without attribution, but rather I believe his point was about inspirational discretion: knowing when to use something that already works instead of burdening yourself with recreating the universe from scratch. If you watch the whole quote from the interview that Kirby excerpts, it becomes clearer that he's talking about multidisciplinary inspiration, not ripping off other people for your own gain. Art is not like science; there are no ideal truths of design that everyone inevitably arrives at because they exist independently of the discoverers, otherwise all designs for a particular use or expression of a particular experience would look the same — the objective perfect design, the idealized expression. This is not the case, there can be as many variations to make or express an individual ideas as there are ideas themselves. Who these ideas belong to is an important question, and not one that can be easily described in the black and white terms of possession; but no one would be suprised by Louis Vitton suing a company which produced counterfeits of their distinctive bags. Consider the visual language of Louis Vitton's products: checkered brown and tan, the brass hardware, the distinctive shapes and proportions. All of these speak the symbol of the brand, and all the ideas associated with it. To sell a bag with all of these hallmarks and a different label is a euphemism for someone else's work and not an act of creative expression. In creating phones and tablets that strongly resembled Apple's, this is precisely what Samsung did. When you juxtapose two ideas, you make a very strong point: _this_ is like _that_. Two things placed next to each other can show contrast but they also invite the listener to make analogies about them. When you show one and then other in series, the arrangement takes on another mechanic: a narrative. Kirby is telling a very powerful story here, a cautionary tale about David and Goliath, and he's framing it in a way that is very effective at making his point but leaves out the details which make it a picture of the truth. Apple v. Samsung isn't about the entrenched and atrophying incumbent quashing the young innovator who's trying to change the game, it's about two similarly-endowed organisms competing for resources — a host and a parasite. Spinning a romantic yarn around it is disingenuous at best and outright manipulation at worst.