Claus.dahl

In news reverberating with synthesizer lovers and keyboardists everywhere, Keith Emerson died last night in his home in Santa Monica at age 71.

Mr. Emerson’s impact on the world of keyboards and synthesizers is hard to overstate. And that impact may be wider now than ever before. If the musical idiom in which he worked was distinctive attached to its particular era, the role of the synthesizer he helped establish is one that now reaches around the world to artists across genres.

His role in that history is unique in announcing electronic instruments as virtuoso instruments, as devices of radical expression on big stages. If “Lucky Man” is the cliche, go-to hit, it’s for a reason: while Wendy Carlos topped the classical charts, “Lucky Man” was the first time many audiences heard the synthesizer in the context of a rock song – not sound effect, not incidental music, but something as iconic as the guitar.

All of this might have gone done as a edge case, an eccentric diversion in musical history, had that history not lapped itself. So it’s telling that the “monster Moog” covered in spaghetti cabling saw a reissue, and that now, even non-rockstars on a budget can and do tote jumbles of wires onstage.

Instruments need virtuosos to reach their full potential. The Stradivari violin is inseparable from Niccolò Paganini. And it’s not, I think, hyperbolic to draw the connection to Moog and Emerson. They need both the compositional and physical force of realization of what’s possible.

Bob and Keith.

So this week, we lost one of those figures. But we got to witness that history – Emerson and Moog – and now we see where it goes next. On a personal note, I am hugely grateful to Moogfest for the chance to sit in my audience and watch Emerson play “Lucky Man” alongside my Dad. The estoeric world of synthesizers doesn’t so often cross directly into something we can share directly across generations, but then, it did. And as I am entirely in the debt of my parents for supporting my own journey into music and music technology, that was a moment that made me feel like a pretty lucky man.

In remembrance:

Mark Vail’s diagram of his “monster” modular rig:

Gino Robair writes the obituary for Keyboard Magazine (a magazine that’s hard to imagine in a world without Keith Emerson):

KEITH NOEL EMERSON (1944-2016)

Lots of links there to the Keyboard archives, but perhaps the most interesting is a 2010 piece that involved the readers:

Keith Emerson, interviewed by you

I was going to paste some excerpt, but it’s really all engaging and humble.

I covered the (re-)creation of the new Emerson modular here, as I got to feature the event both for CDM and Keyboard:
Moog Really Is Recreating Keith Emerson’s Modular, in Biggest Analog Relaunch Ever

Just Do It: Moog Engineer Explains Why They Remade Keith Emerson’s Modular [Videos, Audio]

There’s video of Emerson – and Herb Deutsch – unveiling that modular and reminiscing about the significance of the instrument.

It’s a shaky video, but here’s a look at the regular spiel Emerson did explaining the modular to audiences.

And lastly, here’s a pretty extraordinary meeting of the two people – Bob Moog and Keith Emerson – at Moogfest in New York.

But let’s not forget what happened to the violin. There are now countless young people who can play a Paginini etude, and the instrument is in the hands of a stunning population around the planet. My guess is that Emerson’s legacy will very much live on.

More:

Keith Emerson, ’70s Rock Showman With a Taste for Spectacle, Dies at 71 [New York Times]

Remembering Keith Emerson (1944-2016) [Moog Music]

The post Remembering Keith Emerson and his titanic synth legacy appeared first on cdm createdigitalmusic.

The VAX platform is no more, end of an OpenBSD era.

Copperhead is a Game of Life c/10 orthogonal spaceship discovered by ‘zdr’ on March 5, 2016. More.

Dirty Hands, a cheating scandal in the world of professional bridge. By David Owen.

proselint, a linter for prose.

jo, easily generate JSON output from a shell.

Blitz Chess: Rybka (computer) vs Hikara Nakamura - 2008, best bot trolling ever?

Vivaldi saniert, Berthold Seliger schreibt in konkret über die Klassikbranche.

Congratulations are in order for the folks at Google Deepmind who have mastered Go.

However, some of the discussion around this seems like giddy overstatement. Wired says Machines have conquered the last games and Slashdot says We know now that we don’t need any big new breakthroughs to get to true AI. The truth is nowhere close.

For Go itself, it’s been well-known for a decade that Monte Carlo tree search (i.e. valuation by assuming randomized playout) is unusually effective in Go. Given this, it’s unclear that the AlphaGo algorithm extends to other board games where MCTS does not work so well. Maybe? It will be interesting to see.

Delving into existing computer games, the Atari results (see figure 3) are very fun but obviously unimpressive on about ¼ of the games. My hypothesis for why is that their solution does only local (epsilon-greedy style) exploration rather than global exploration so they can only learn policies addressing either very short credit assignment problems or with greedily accessible polices. Global exploration strategies are known to result in exponentially more efficient strategies in general for deterministic decision process(1993), Markov Decision Processes (1998), and for MDPs without modeling (2006).

The reason these strategies are not used is because they are based on tabular learning rather than function fitting. That’s why I shifted to Contextual Bandit research after the 2006 paper. We’ve learned quite a bit there, enough to start tackling a Contextual Deterministic Decision Process, but that solution is still far from practical. Addressing global exploration effectively is only one of the significant challenges between what is well known now and what needs to be addressed for what I would consider a real AI.

This is generally understood by people working on these techniques but seems to be getting lost in translation to public news reports. That’s dangerous because it leads to disappointment. The field will be better off without an overpromise/bust cycle so I would encourage people to keep and inform a balanced view of successes and their extent. Mastering Go is a great accomplishment, but it is quite far from everything.

Edit: Further discussion here, CACM, here, and KDNuggets.

I have been following with fascination the match between Google's Go-playing AI AlphaGo and top-tier player Lee Sedol and with even more fascination the human reaction to AlphaGo's success. Many humans seem unnerved not only by AlphaGo's early lead in the best-of-five match but especially by how the machine is playing in those games.

Then, with its 19th move, AlphaGo made an even more surprising and forceful play, dropping a black piece into some empty space on the right-hand side of the board. Lee Sedol seemed just as surprised as anyone else. He promptly left the match table, taking an (allowed) break as his game clock continued to run. "It's a creative move," Redmond said of AlphaGo's sudden change in tack. "It's something that I don't think I've seen in a top player's game."

When Lee Sedol returned to the match table, he took an usually long time to respond, his game clock running down to an hour and 19 minutes, a full twenty minutes less than the time left on AlphaGo's clock. "He's having trouble dealing with a move he has never seen before," Redmond said. But he also suspected that the Korean grandmaster was feeling a certain "pleasure" after the machine's big move. "It's something new and unique he has to think about," Redmond explained. "This is a reason people become pros."

"A creative move." Let's think about that...a machine that is thinking creatively. Whaaaaaa... In fact, AlphaGo's first strong human opponent, Fan Hui, has credited the machine for making him a better player, a more beautiful player:

As he played match after match with AlphaGo over the past five months, he watched the machine improve. But he also watched himself improve. The experience has, quite literally, changed the way he views the game. When he first played the Google machine, he was ranked 633rd in the world. Now, he is up into the 300s. In the months since October, AlphaGo has taught him, a human, to be a better player. He sees things he didn't see before. And that makes him happy. "So beautiful," he says. "So beautiful."

"Although we have programmed this machine to play, we have no idea what moves it will come up with," Graepel said. "Its moves are an emergent phenomenon from the training. We just create the data sets and the training algorithms. But the moves it then comes up with are out of our hands -- and much better than we, as Go players, could come up with."

Generally speaking,¹ until recently machines were predictable and more or less easily understood. That's central to the definition of a machine, you might say. You build them to do X, Y, & Z and that's what they do. A car built to do 0-60 in 4.2 seconds isn't suddenly going to do it in 3.6 seconds under the same conditions.

Now machines are starting to be built to think for themselves, creatively and unpredictably. Some emergent, non-linear shit is going on. And humans are having a hard time figuring out not only what the machine is up to but how it's even thinking about it, which strikes me as a relatively new development in our relationship. It is not all that hard to imagine, in time, an even smarter AlphaGo that can do more things -- paint a picture, write a poem, prove a difficult mathematical conjecture, negotiate peace -- and do those things creatively and better than people.

Unpredictable machines. Machines that act more like the weather than Newtonian gravity. That's going to take some getting used to. For one thing, we might have to stop shoving them around with hockey sticks. (thx, twitter folks)

Update: AlphaGo beat Lee in the third game of the match, in perhaps the most dominant fashion yet. The human disquiet persists...this time, it's David Ormerod:

Move after move was exchanged and it became apparent that Lee wasn't gaining enough profit from his attack.

By move 32, it was unclear who was attacking whom, and by 48 Lee was desperately fending off White's powerful counter-attack.

I can only speak for myself here, but as I watched the game unfold and the realization of what was happening dawned on me, I felt physically unwell.

Generally I avoid this sort of personal commentary, but this game was just so disquieting. I say this as someone who is quite interested in AI and who has been looking forward to the match since it was announced.

One of the game's greatest virtuosos of the middle game had just been upstaged in black and white clarity.

AlphaGo's strength was simply remarkable and it was hard not to feel Lee's pain.

1. Let's get the caveats out of the way here. Machines and their outputs aren't completely deterministic. Also, with AlphaGo, we are talking about a machine with a very limited capacity. It just plays one game. It can't make a better omelette than Jacques Pepin or flow like Nicki. But not only beating a top human player while showing creativity in a game like Go, which was considered to be uncrackable not that long ago, seems rather remarkable.↩

We all know peak venture capital, peak unicorn, peak mega-deal was around the third quarter of last year.

We all know this quarter has been one of the worst for IPOs since the dot com bust.

We all know that mutual funds-- one of many sources of late stage capital in recent years-- have marked down many of their investments...

Johannes Brahms – Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98, 1885 | Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsorchester München, Carlos Ludwig Kleiber, 21.X.1996.

Movements:
00:00 I Allegro non troppo
13:44 II Andante moderato
25:29 III Allegro giocoso – Poco meno presto
31:51 IV Allegro energico e passionato – Più allegro

That Brahms initially approached the Symphonic form with trepidation is fairly evident from the chronology of his works. It wasn’t until the age of 43 that he completed his First Symphony. Indeed, the composer’s output to that point suggests a conscious process of self-education. A number of smaller-scale orchestral works, including the Variations on a Theme of Haydn and the proto-symphonic Piano Concerto No. 1, suggest preparation for what Brahms clearly saw as the elusive of compositional enterprises. He was to meet the challenge with a skill and individual spirit, one of Classicism refracted through the prism of high Romanticism, that led many to pronounce him heir to Beethoven.

Brahms’ Fourth Symphony (1885), his last, provides with its serious tone, striking complexities, and inspired construction a fitting valedictory to his work in this genre. That its impact was immediate if initially puzzling is clear from the account by the biographer Max Kalbeck of its first run-through (at two pianos) for a small and distinguished audience: “After the wonderful Allegro… I expected that one of those present would break out in a loud ‘Bravo.’ Into his blond beard [conductor Hans] Richter murmured something that from afar would be taken as an expression of approval…. The others remained persistently quiet…. Finally Brahms grumbled, “So, let’s go on!” and gave a sign to continue; whereupon [eminent critic Eduard] Hanslick heaved a sigh and quickly exploded, as if he had to relieve his mind and yet feared speaking up too late: ‘For this whole movement I had the feeling that I was being given a beating by two incredibly intelligent people….'”

Each of the movements bears the distinct stamp of the composer’s personality. The first begins with a theme in E minor based upon the interval of a third, which also provides a structural and motivic foundation for the remainder of the work. There is a notable sense of unrest from beginning to end, and the tragic, even fatalistic atmosphere is further and stunningly underlined by the final, minor-key plagal (IV-I) cadence. The second movement, which opens with a brief, melancholy sort of fanfare, gives way to the quietly accompanied winds in perhaps one of the loveliest of any of the composer’s themes, granted particular plangency through the use of the flat sixth and seventh scale degrees borrowed from the minor mode. This material is gradually developed into soaring, tutti lyricism that fades into ethereal quiet. The third movement, a lusty, stomping, duple dance, proved so popular in Brahms’ lifetime that audiences constantly demanded that it be repeated. The last movement is perhaps most notable of all, cast as it is in the “archaic” Baroque form of a chaconne — variations over a ground bass. The chaconne’s subject is in fact a slight modification of that used by Bach in his Cantata No. 150; though deceptively simple — essentially an ascending minor scale segment from the tonic note to the dominant, then a leap back to the tonic – Brahms uses this skeleton as the basis for an increasingly elaborate and thematic harmonic framework. From its first presentation, which is not as a bass line, but as a theme in the winds, Brahms gradually weaves some 34 variations that steadily build in intensity, as though in defiance to the oppressive, insistent rotation of the ground. The final variations lead directly into an ending which reconfirms the weight of tragedy and pathos borne by the first movement.

[via Saori Kanemaki]

“The only people left in my hometown are women and old people who can’t leave. The men are all gone. It doesn’t seem like this will end. I don’t think Bashar al-Assad is going anywhere. It’s been four years, and he’s still there. I don’t care about Assad. He’s not a good man. But before this happened, Syria was beautiful. You, as a woman, could go across Syria in the day or the night and pass every checkpoint, and no one would bother you. That would never happen now. We have become Iraq. Saddam was not good, but he was better than what came after. And no one can bring Iraq back to what it was. The Syrian people said they wanted freedom. This is not freedom. This is chaos.”

Syrian kidnap victim, recounting life as an ISIS hostage.

Every time I read one of these stories, I think about what led to all this. One narrative is about the emergence of wahabism, but another narrative is really a series of actions starting with a botched US election 13 years ago. This chaos isn’t simply the chaos of things falling apart. It’s the chaos of bad incentives and bad faith.

things find their own uses for the street.

I’ve released Ruby2JS version 2.0.  Key new features:

• Line comment support.  More specifically, comments associated with statements are copied to the output.  Comments within statements are still omitted.
• Source Map support.  This enables debugging of generated JavaScript using the Ruby source.

The Whimsy Agenda rewrite-in-progress (previously based on Angular.js, now being rebased on React.js) can be used to explore both of these features.

If you have something to say now, whether you’re an intern or a billionaire, you don’t start a blog, you publish an essay on an existing network such as Medium. It’s a level playing field, but a bland one.

One of the joys of my age of music discovery was that we often learned loads about an artist before we ever heard a note of music. Their politics would be deconstructed in the NME, their styles and breakfast habits analysed in Smash Hits, well before their singles ever made it to Woolies in Derby.

Music, for me, has always been hard to separate from the musician.

So, as soon as I discovered the Composers' Rooms podcast I devoured the whole thing in one long binge. It's been an absolutely splendid introduction to a whole suite of contemporary composers, most of which were utterly new to me.

Most of their music, frankly, I didn't care for much. But that's contemporary classical music, not mostly, my cup of tea. But I liked almost every programme, lots of little snippets of interesting thought.

Things:

Despite the premise of the programme I don't think most of them are really that bothered about their room. They almost all said they could compose anywhere.

If anything it should have been called Composers' Stationery. They seemed much more concerned about that. Gavin Bryars, for instance, is down to his last few Aztek Scoremaster 101 pencils, now discontinued. And Liza Lim wears all her pencils down to tiny stubs before she moves onto the next one. Harrison Birtwistle seems very proud of his self-designed manuscript paper, he's had a lifetime's supply designed and is now down to just a one-metre pile.

I like the sound of Claudia Molitor's 'Desk Opera'.

And of the piece Errollyn Wallen did for the Tallis Scholars, but I can't find it to listen to.

And the simplicity and clarity of Emily Hall's music. (Spotify link) This track, Eternity, is especially lovely.

I love everything Jennifer Walshe does. Except the sound of much of her actual music. I'm such a philistine. Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde is especially brilliant and unlistenable. (I know.)

Larry Goves mentioned 'a day of noh theatre' but I misheard him and thought he said 'a day of no theatre'. Which would be brilliant. Like Bill Drummond's No Music Day, but world-wide, like Earth Day. What a dream.

"Cause for Alarm" by Eric Ambler is a very exciting engineering spy thriller. So worth reading if you like engineering + spies + thrills.

— Rachel Coldicutt (@rachelcoldicutt) March 11, 2015

Rachel is utterly right about Cause For Alarm. Very good in a Rogue Male stylee.

This line sums up the mood:

"It was not until I was soaking blissfully in the steaming water that it occurred to me to wonder why General Vagas thought it necessary to carry a swordstick."

And this is what someone gives as the list of things they import and sell (it's a cover):

"Moroccan perfumes, Czech jewellery, and French bicycles"

theverge:

This terrifying video was filmed with the world’s first self-powered camera.

When exposed to light, the camera’s sensor toggles between capturing an image and charging the power supply. It works well enough to capture one image per second, but it has a tiny resolution of just 30 pixels by 40 pixels (that’s .0012 megapixels, for those of you keeping count). Nayar and his team built the camera with off-the-shelf components, and used a 3D printer to create the body.

I registered HillaryHusseinClinton.com to keep it out of the hands of those who do not support her. For $13, why not?

I suppose I should have registered BarackRodhamObama.com just for the sake of symmetry.

The post HillaryHusseinClinton.com appeared first on Joho the Blog.

After we announced Amber.js last week, a number of people brought Amber Smalltalk, a Smalltalk implementation written in JavaScript, to our attention. After some communication with the folks behind Amber Smalltalk, we started a discussion on Hacker News about what we should do.

Most people told us to stick with Amber.js, but a sizable minority told us to come up with a different name. After thinking about it, we didn't feel good about the conflict and decided to choose a new name.

Henceforth, the project formerly known as SproutCore 2.0 will be known as Ember.js. Our new website is up at http://www.emberjs.com

(and yes, we know this is pretty ridiculous)

I wrote my first post on this blog in January 2007.

In 2007, this blog was the easiest way I had to write my thoughts down for people who cared to read them. I wrote long posts and short post (but mostly long posts). I wrote deeply technical posts. I wrote proposals. I wrote introductory posts.

I did not post often.

In 2012, there are many more ways to write and reach an audience. I write whimsically on Twitter. I write personally on Facebook. More and more, I find that I write casually on Google+.

Without the 140-character constraint of Twitter, I can start writing and stop when I reach the end of a thought. Unlike the long-form nature of my blog, I find myself writing often, whenever something is on my mind. If you're interested in reading that sort of thing, follow my Google+ profile. Because I never remember to include one person's Google+ account in my reading rotation, I made it easy: plus.yehudakatz.com.

I'll keep posting long-form pieces here. To keep things simple, I'll always link to them from Google+. If you follow me there, I'll make sure you always know when I post something, wherever that happens to be. If you care, join me on Google+.

The Hypothesis web annotation system is a browser-based application that talks to an annotation server, finds annotations for the current page (if any), highlights the selections to which the annotations refer, and dispays them in a sidebar alongside the page. We load a fair bit of JavaScript to do our job, and in the olden days we would simply have relied on bookmarklets to activate that code.

But times change, and bookmarklets are mostly dead. They’re not all dead yet. I expect I’ll still be able to use simple ones, like pinboard.in‘s, for a long time to come. But a new security regime limits the scope of what bookmarklets can do, and is forcing developers to create browser extensions instead — extensions that must be created and deployed differently for each browser.

So the realm of web applications that extend the browser is now becoming as balkanized as the realm of mobile apps. Developers target the dominant platform first — currently, that’s Chrome — and then port their extensions to other browsers as and when they can.

There’s another way to add behavior to a web page, though. You can send the page through an intermediate server (a proxy) that injects that behavior as the bookmarklet or extension would do. The Hypothesis proxy is via.hypothes.is, and you can use it to activate annotation for any web page — including this one — like so:

https://via.hypothes.is/blog.jonudell.net/2015/05/13/farewell-to-bookmarklets

The nice thing about this combo URL is that you can share the annotated page along with its annotation layer. Of course there are tradeoffs:

– Properly rewriting all the URLs in the proxied page is a tricky business.

– You can’t annotate pages behind paywalls (as you can with our bookmarklet and Chrome extension).

– You still need a way to activate the annotation layer for the current page. (You can use a bookmarklet to redirect to the proxy, but … sigh.)

The upshot is that we’re struggling to simplify the decision tree that Hypothesis users must traverse. You want to activate annotation for your current page? If in Chrome, install the extension, otherwise for Firefox or Safari or IE use the bookmarklet, unless the page enforces Content Security Policy, in which case use the proxy, unless the page is behind a paywall, in which case, sorry, you’re out of luck.

And that’s just for the desktop! Mobile browsers make things even crazier. I’m able to perform the gymnastics required to use the Hypothesis bookmarklet on my Windows Phone, on my iPhone, and (most acrobatically) on my Android tablet, and I really need to document those procedures, but it’s so depressing I’ve avoided doing so.

What seems most promising, for mobile browsers, is to add Hypothesis as an option that shows up when you ask to Share a web page. Activating annotation for the current page isn’t really Sharing, but the Share mechanism looks like the sanest way to redirect through the proxy, which in turn looks like the sanest way to activate the annotation layer in mobile browsers.

It looks reasonably straightforward to create an Android app that shows up when you Share a page and broadcasts the intent to view the proxied version of that page. Things look a bit more complex on iOS. Should there be a Safari-specific extension that redirects to the proxy? A system-wide Share extension that Chrome could also use? Both?

Of course activating Hypothesis on the mobile browser is only half the battle. As a sidebar-based app we manage pretty well on the desktop and large tablets, but are uncomfortable on smaller screens. If we’re routing through a proxy anyway, maybe the proxy should also do a Readability-style rewrite to simplify the page. We’re good at fuzzy anchoring and can anchor annotations to different representations of the “same” document.

There’s lots to do, and while bookmarklets will continue to help us do it, their era is over. Browsers are more standards-compliant than ever, which makes our mission to bring an annotation layer to the web easier than it would have been five or ten years ago. But browsers are now also less easily extensible and that’s a new challenge.

In spring 2012 Chris Granger successfully completed a Kickstarter fundraising and got $300K (instead of the requested $200K) to work on a live-feedback IDE inspired by Bret Victor "Inventing on principle" talk. The IDE project was called Light Table. It initially supported Clojure (the team's favourite language) only, but eventually added support for Javascript and Python. In January 2014, Light Table was open sourced, and in October 2014 the Light Table development team announced that they decided to create a new language, Eve, that would be a better fit for their vision of programming experience.

There is little public about Eve so far, no precise design documents, but the development team has a public monthly Development Diary that I found fairly interesting. It displays an interesting form of research culture, with in particular recurrent reference to academic works that are coming from outside the programming-language-research community: database queries, Datalog evaluation, distributed systems, version-control systems. This diary might be a good opportunity to have a look at the internals of a language design process (or really programming environment design) that is neither academic nor really industrial in nature. It sounds more representative (I hope!) of the well-educated parts of startup culture.

Eve is a functional-relational language. Every input to an Eve program is stored in one of a few insert-only tables. The program itself consists of a series of views written in a relational query language. Some of these views represent internal state. Others represent IO that needs to be performed. Either way there is no hidden or forgotten state - the contents of these views can always be calculated from the input tables.

Eve is designed for live programming. As the user makes changes, the compiler is constantly re-compiling code and incrementally updating the views. The compiler is designed to be resilient and will compile and run as much of the code as possible in the face of errors. The structural editor restricts partially edited code to small sections, rather than rendering entire files unparseable. The pointer-free relational data model and the timeless views make it feasible to incrementally compute the state of the program, rather than starting from scratch on each edit.

The public/target for the language is described as "non-programmers", but in fact it looks like their control group has some previous experience of Excel. (I would guess that experimenting with children with no experience of programming at all, including no Excel work, could have resulted in very different results.)

Posts so far, by Jamie Brandon:

• Eve so far (October 2014): a summary of the work from January to September 2014. The general vision; a move from a functional pidgin to a datalog-like language motivated by non-programmers testing; discussions of algorithms for incremental Datalog evaluation (ending with a poor-man solution).
• October: bootstrap editor, experiments, aggregates: the team picks five concrete use-cases and draws lessons for their language needs
• November: more experiments, better performance, integrity constraints, zztrees
• December: more zzjoin, communication, process spawning
• January / February: GUIs, time, joins and aggregates
• Version control, collaborative editing and undo

Some random quotes.

Retrospective:

Excited, we presented our prototype to a small number of non-programmers and sat back to watch the magic. To our horror, not a single one of them could figure out what the simple example program did or how it worked, nor could they produce any useful programs themselves. The sticking points were lexical scope and data structures. Every single person we talked to just wanted to put data in an Excel-like grid and drag direct references. Abstraction via symbol binding was not an intuitive or well-liked idea.

[...]

Our main data-structure was now a tree of tables. Rather than one big top-level function, we switched to a pipeline of functions. Each function pulled data out of the global store using a datalog query, ran some computation and wrote data back. Having less nesting reduced the impact of lexical scope and cursor passing. Using datalog allowed normalising the data store, avoiding all the issues that came from hierarchical models.

At this point we realised we weren't building a functional language anymore. Most of the programs were just datalog queries on normalised tables with a little scalar computation in the middle. We were familiar with Bloom and realised that it fit our needs much better than the functional pidgin we had built so far - no lexical scoping, no data-structures, no explicit ordering. In late March we began work on a Bloom interpreter.

October:

Where most languages express state as a series of changes ('when I click this button add 1 to the counter'), Eve is built around views over input logs ('the value of the counter is the number of button clicks in the log'). Thinking in terms of views makes the current language simple and powerful. It removes the need for explicit control flow, since views can be calculated in any order that is consistent with the dependency graph, and allows arbitrary composition of data without requiring the cooperation of the component that owns that data.

Whenever we have tried to introduce explicit change we immediately run into problems with ordering and composing those changes and we lose the ability to directly explain the state of the program without reference to data that no longer exists.

[...]

In a traditional imperative language, [context] is provided by access to dynamic scoping (or global variables - the poor mans dynamic scope) or by function parameters. In purely functional languages it can only be provided by function parameters, which is a problem when a deeply buried function wants to access some high up data and it has to be manually threaded through the entire callstack.

December:

Eve processes can now spawn subprocesses and inject code into them. Together with the new communication API this allowed much of the IDE architecture to be lifted into Eve. When running in the browser only the UI manager lives on the main thread - the editor, the compiler and the user's program all live in separate web-workers. The editor uses the process API to spawn both the compiler and the user's program and then subscribes to the views it needs for the debugging interface. Both the editor and the user's program send graphics data to the UI manager and receiving UI events in return.

I HIGHLIGHTED so many passages in this brief, well-focused design argument, it’s almost embarrassing. Read it (it takes about three minutes), and you’ll wear out your virtual highlighter, too:

Material Design is a design language introduced by Google a year ago, and represents the company’s bold attempt at creating a unified user experience across all devices and platforms. It’s marked with bold colours, a liberal but principled use of shadows to indicate UI layers, and smooth animations that provide a pretty pretty user experience on Android (and some Google apps on iOS).

One thing about Material Design, however, has bugged me ever since it was introduced last year: Floating Action Buttons.

FABs are circular buttons that float above the UI and are “used for a promoted action,” according to Google. They act as call to action buttons, meant to represent the single action users perform the most on that particular screen.

And because of the bold visual style of Material Design, FABs are strikingly hard to ignore and stand out — and herein lies the problem.

While FABs seem to provide good UX in ideal conditions, in actual practice, widespread adoption of FABs might be detrimental to the overall UX of the app. Here are some reasons why.

—Material Design: Why the Floating Action Button is bad UX design by Teo Yu Siang

1. 87% of Android Devices Insecure -- researchers find they're vulnerable to malicious apps because manufacturers have not provided regular security updates. (via Bruce Schneier)
2. A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography (Google Research) -- take multiple photos from different angles through occlusions like a window with raindrops or reflections, and their software will assemble an unoccluded image. (via Greg Linden)
3. Algorithms for Affective Sensing -- Results show that the system achieves a six-emotion decision-level correct classification rate of 80% for an acted dataset with clean speech. This PhD thesis is research into algorithm for determining emotion from speech samples, which does so more accurately than humans in a controlled test. (via New Scientist)
4. Software Learns to Recognise Microexpressions (MIT Technology Review) -- Li and co’s machine matched human ability to spot and recognize microexpressions and significantly outperformed humans at the recognition task alone.

What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view, by Bret Victor.

I do not fear, by John Goerzen. “If governors really wanted to save lives, they would support meaningful mass transit alternatives that would prevent tens of thousands of road deaths a year. They would support guaranteed health care for all. They would support good education, science-based climate change action, clean water and air, mental health services for all, and above all, compassion for everyone.”

The UNIX Time-Sharing System (PDF), by D. M. Ritchie. Previously unpublished 1971(?) draft.

The Visual ARM1, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of ARM Ltd., UK.

Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need, by Max Kreminski. Required reading for everyone teaching anything.

Broken Performance Tools (PDF), slides by Brendan Gregg.

How to make error handling less error-prone (YouTube), by Daira Hopwood at StrangeLoop 2014. (Slides)

Quantum mechanical derivation of the Wallis formula for π, by Tamar Friedmann and C. R. Hagen.

Macbook charger teardown: The surprising complexity inside Apple’s power adapter

If you want to say…

North Korean Interiors

We know shit.

I mean, in respect to the Everything that surrounds us, and the culture in which we are pickled from start to finish, what we know rounds to nothing and is, with the provisional exception of the subjects and people we study and love, incomplete and therefore somewhere between questionable and wrong.

But we can’t operate in the present without some regard for the future, which brings me to a comparison of futurist related ideologies, from H+pedia, which was new to me when I saw this in a post to a list I’m on:

Here is my reply to the same list:

Must we all be “ists?”

I mean, is a historian a “pastist?”

I’m into making the future better than the present by understanding everything I can. Most of what I can understand is located in the past, but I’ve only lived through a few dozen years of that, and none of the future. So I tend to be focused on enlarging the little I know, with full awe and respect for what I don’t, and never will.

Hey, we all do our best.

A shrink I know says nearly everything mentally productive about us owes to OCD: obsessive compulsive disorder. Same goes for nearly all our problems. Name one of either, and there’s a good chance OCD is at work there.

Just passing that along. Not sure it’s a learning, but as provisional wisdom it doesn’t fully suck.

And maybe that’s the best we can do.

Whch is also, by the way, roughly what I got from The End of the Tour, which I watched on a friend’s home screen a couple nights ago. Here’s a good essay about it by Stephen Marche (@StephenMarche) in Esquire.

1. Radical Candour: The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss -- this, every word, this. “Caring personally makes it much easier to do the next thing you have to do as a good boss, which is being willing to piss people off.”
2. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon -- recreates the British early modern social network to trace the personal relationships among figures like Bacon, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and many others. (via CMU)
3. Last Bus Startup Standing (TechCrunch) -- Vahabzadeh stressed that a key point of Chariot’s survival has been that the company has been above-board with the law from day one. “They haven’t cowboy-ed it,” said San Francisco supervisor Scott Wiener, a mass transit advocate who recently pushed for a master subway plan for the city. “They’ve been good about taking feedback and making sure they’re complying with the law. I’m a fan and think that private transportation options and rideshares have a significant role to play in making us a transit-first city.”
4. Mobile App Developers are Suffering -- the top 20 app publishers, representing less than 0.005% of all apps, earn 60% of all app store revenue. The article posits causes of the particularly extreme power law.

The Pirate Book, A compilation of stories about sharing, distributing, and experiencing cultural content outside the boundaries of local economies, politics, or laws. By Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska.

Despite being the nation that ostensibly spearheads the war on piracy, the United States was at its inception a “pirate nation” given its refusal to observe the rights of foreign authors. In the absence of international copyright treaties, the first American governments actively encouraged the piracy of the classics of British literature in order to promote literacy. The grievances of authors such as Charles Dickens fell upon deaf ears, that is until American literature itself came into its own and authors such
as Mark Twain convinced the government to reinforce copyright legislation.

The paragraph above is copy/pasted from the book. It is symptomatic of a publication that informs, challenges any bias and assumptions you might have about piracy and does so with wit and intelligence. It also shows the spirit of The Pirate Book, a work more concerned with contemporary cultural practices around the world than with the legal subtleties of copyright infringement.

Sonidero in Mexico City

Music distribution from mobile phone to mobile phone in West Africa

The pirate book is an impeccably curated collection of essays and photos by artists, researchers, militants and bootleggers who share their experiences and anecdotes of piracy and anti-piracy practices through history and across cultures.

The first part of the book, the Historical Perspective, brings side by side key moments of the history of piracy with their contemporary counterpart. I’m not going to list them all (you can quickly check them for yourself as the book is both print on demand and free download) but here is just one example:

Above: Pirate Bus in Regent’s Park, during the General Strike, 1926
In London, independent bus operators appeared in the mid of 19th century, following the tourism boom that accompanied the Great Exhibition of 1851. Their vehicles were soon popularly termed
“pirate” buses

The contemporary correspondent of the London buses are the Google private shuttle buses, viewed as symptoms of the ruthless gentrification of San Francisco driven by the tech sector. Activists also denounced the unpaid use of public bus stops by private companies, which leads to delays and traffic congestion.

TV detector van, UK, 1963

Another entertaining chapter lists the strategies that cultural industries have adopted in their fight against piracy: educational flyers, hologram stickers, game alterations, false TV signal detectors (vehicles equipped with very conspicuous antenna that were supposed to be able to detect which households had not paid their TV licence), torrent poisoning, etc. I’m quite fond of the rather baroque way the publishers of the game Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) adopted to protect the copies from piracy:

Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), 1988

In order to be able to launch the game, players were required to posses a physical copy of the instruction manual. When the game started up, it presented the player with a photo of a random woman. The player had then to look through the physical instruction manual, match her image with a telephone number and input it into the game.

I found the last part of the book particularly compelling. It counts a series of essays that explore local practices of piracy in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, China, India, and Mali and other countries where piracy is the only affordable way for many people to access culture, entertainment and education. The stories i was less familiar with came from Mexico City and from a city in India called Malegaon:

El Paquete hard drive, a pouch that protects the disc and a USB cable

Cuba’s isolation by the US embargo made audio-visual piracy vital not only for citizens but also for the government itself who needed content for its official television channels as well as books and academic publications for universities. Most Cubans don’t have access to internet and when they do it is neither fast nor safe from governmental scrutiny. But what they do have is El Paquete Semanal, a terabyte of music, movies, soap operas, mobile phone apps and even a classifieds section similar to Craigslist. Every week, unidentified curators compile a selection of content which subscribers upload on a hard drive that can be plugged directly into a TV.

Supermen of Malegaon, the documentary, 2008

In India, the city of Malegaon has built a parallel cinema industry that creates spoof movies of Bollywood blockbusters. These cheaply shot and edited films echo their own local context and rely on an infrastructure enabled by media piracy and the proliferation of video rentals.

The final chapter, written from Ernesto Van Der Sar founder of TorrentFreak.com, argues through an analysis of music and film sales that the music industry is doing better than ever before but systematically blames piracy as soon as a new film or record doesn’t sell well.

That’s it! A quick and very incomplete overview of The Pirate Book. I’d recommend that book to anyone who can’t make up their mind about piracy, to your mother who thinks pirates are a bunch of ruffians who prevent Celine Dion from making a living, and to anyone who’s simply interested in contemporary popular culture and in non-western perspectives on DIY and inventiveness.

Views inside the book:

The book is an extension of Maigret’s installation and performance The Pirate Cinema, A Cinematic Collage Generated by P2P Users which uncovers in real time the hidden activity and the geography of peer-to-peer file sharing but also the aesthetic dimension of P2P architectures.
As befits the theme of the book, the authors invite readers to copy the texts of this book and do with them as he/she pleases.

The Pirate Book was published by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Co-published by Pavillon Vendôme Art Center, Clichy.
Produced by Aksioma, Pavillon Vendôme, Kunsthal Aarhus and Abandon Normal Devices.