My take on hacking Mark is that it is a good thing, just like viruses and cancer are a good thing, because nature requires these things in order for us to improve and remain resilient. So we must view hacking as a natural force that keeps us on our toes when designing secure systems and thus we design better systems that are more reliable. I accept nature for what it is. We do our best to be in harmony with nature (perhaps that comes from my smidgen of Cherokee genes, not my German, Celtic, and French ancestry). Tom's wit is still alive in my vivid memories.
Hey did you see that Shawn Grunberger from Fractal's Tech Support went on to create Bandcamp. I spontaneously took the initiative during the short time span I was at Fractal to be a liaison between our developers and Tech Support. I suggested to (and encouraged) Shawn he seemed to have the ability to become a programmer. I think he had mentioned the idea for Bandcamp to me in 1995. I tried to contact them about collaborating but wasn't able to get a reply. Since that I discovered they had completely shut down their effort to stream songs for free over an API a la SoundCloud. So I suppose they have homed in on the iTunes model + band paraphernalia. I have a different idea
Oh yes I entirely agree that crypto currency in its current incarnation is going no where in terms of adoption by the masses. The use case is nefarious. However I think perhaps I have identified a mass adoption use case which can't be done with Apple Pay, but it requires a different block chain design which can do instant microtransactions. I am not going to mention it in a blog post. Note I am aware that microtransactions typically don't have a use case, because users prefer subscriptions than nickel-and-diming. But there is a case where subscriptions can't work. Also the unbanked billions are another big factor, but those who said uᴉoɔʇᴉq could help them were totally out of their minds. Yet I see a use case that does.
Yeah I remember the math guy we had at Fractal who was trying to push us to use wavelets. As for autodidact education, I am a prime example. Due to topsy-turvy family situation, my education was highly neglected until 9th grade when my dad enrolled me in Ecole Classique. Before that I was in inner-city public schools in Baton Rouge and New Orleans (a different school and neighborhood every year). My sister and I were the only non-African Americans in one of the schools and we learned how to make spit balls all day. Then my college education was cut short by complete lack of family presence. My point is I've learned more since the invention of the internet, than I learned in school (note I am not racists, my kids are half-filipino). Yet I regret not having a few more years of math, as this handicapped me later on (e.g. I am lacking the number theoretic abstract math for crypto). I was attaining a 4.0 when I was there (both high school and university). I was preparing to teach myself higher maths while also teaching my daughter starting from algebra in my mid-40s, but then I got sick and my kids are with their mother by now. Any way, I think I can make a contribution in spite of this. Btw, I love math. I took Calculus at junior college when I was a senior in high school. I am confident I could have started much earlier in my early teens if I had the right situation in childhood. My mother said I was the only kid she knew who took apart his toys and built new toys from the parts. This started before age 5. I read a Radio Shack book on microprocessors when I was 13 (after reading dozens of volumes of the Hardy Boy series and Arthur C. Clarke's books as those were the only books made available to me), and I instantly new how to program a computer from the logic gates up to machine code. I am embarrassed though that I am handicapped in higher math. Maybe I'll still have time to rectify that, but I think right at the moment there is a more urgent priority to work on. I have enjoyed your blog posts that include any math or algorithms. The intricacies of the geometric art side of your interests seems to grab me less so. That is the unique skill you have to be so smart on the analytical side, yet also so inspired in the details of art (including images and music). I really love music though, although what ever minute musical talent I may have had from growing up in the Jazz town, I seem to have lost it for the most part (perhaps it is lurking and I need an improvising Jazz band around to inspire me). I did briefly play the violin in my youth. The other competition for my free time is my love of sports, so I think the music interest got crowded out by more pure love of algorithms and GUIs, plus full-time sports. It is interesting to me how we humans are different and unique. Cross-sectional shared interests bring us together to collaborate.
I think collaboration is the future economics of the Knowledge Age. Well so does every one else who are creating social networks, or do they really
Well I (and millions of others) share your disgust over our privacy and data being owned by corporations. That is why I am preparing to attempt to do something about this. There are others working on decentralized social networks, such as Diaspora which apparently near Beta so many years after it was $200,000 crowdfunded. But I just don't think those attempts have the chops to make it work and popular. The devil is in the details on both the software and the marketing, as I am sure you would agree.
Mark I agree with all of that, especially the social motivation and creative bandwidth fostered by in-person communication; or at least some VOIP verbal, but lacks in-person sketches, 3D gestures, body language, etc. We are social creatures. I have to reach out over discussion forums for social feedback, which is not ideal for a close-knit productive lab due to the lower S/N ratio, lack of economies-of-scale of working with same people (imagine any new person comes along and wants the entire three year history re-summarized!) on top of the Mythical Man Month concept.
However my initial experience with 99designs.com is I am instantly connected with designers all over the world and instantly collaborating on logo design. This ostensibly has some value, albeit some trade-offs.
Ostensibly a contrast from your Painter days and now, is your work was more visible in a way that was associated with you. I presume you are working on very interesting projects and getting motivational feedback in-house. We can wonder.
Yeah the age of specialization is actually a combinatorial permutation (explosion) of potential network effects. Metcalf and/or Reed's Law scaling perhaps. Exciting! I hope to be back to helping build that expressway and get off the slow boat.
P.S. I made the mistake of isolating myself. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) makes it impossible to be highly productive, i.e. weaving in math research. I struggled past years to keep my forehead off the keyboard. Rectifying both.
I can imagine the working environment at Apple is loaded with smart and interesting people and projects. I agree there is no way that one person can simulate those economies-of-scale entirely with virtual interaction (at least in our fields), although the gap has probably closed significantly since the 1990s when I tried to do it prematurely.
My guess is that your position at Apple enables you to work on very esoteric high tech imagery related algorithms, psychometrics, etc. that other companies would have the same incentive to invest or focus in. Would Facebook need your research?
But what about all the indie gamers, musicians, and graphic artists. Do they have all the creation software they need or is the field still wide open? I am not close enough to those art and music studio production details to know. I am interesting in helping the indie artists and developers on the framework, distribution and monetization side. Think Facebook apps on steriods.
For all that I admire about Steve and his accomplishments, I believe there is a yin and yang between closed and open source.
I would guess (while lacking the data) that the extent to which the very successful Painter did not achieve the orders-of-magnitude greater usership level of for example the iPhone is ostensibly due to target demographics and has nothing to do with the choice of between open and closed. And it apparently requires 1000s of employees to achieve a Facebook. Any bets on whether a social network could scale to a billion users with less then two dozen in-house employees?
Android is doing very well with global market share. Not everyone wants to create natural media arts on their computer. Though I observe apparently the number of indie artists and creative people is increasing in this globally networked computer a.k.a. knowledge age.
It seems often good enough chaotic openness scales faster than refined perfectionist control. I note that is fundamentally because the speed-of-light is finite thus there can't exist a global ordering because a top-down observer can't process all the partial orders on earth in real-time. Local orderings annealing faster to opportunities. If the speed-of-light were not finite, past and future (spacetime) would collapse into an infinitesimal nothing for the Lorentz factor would be unity for an relative velocity between inertial frames.
There is apparently a market for both. As I remember back in the day, Windows was more open than the Mac in terms of interopting with any third party hardware. Seems the pattern may be repeating.
Btw, I remember looking at your patents a couple or few years ago relating to afair to screen displays or rendering algorithms. And from that I had deduced approximately what you had been working on relative to products and features that Apple had released. But I have forgotten the details now. I am not stalking you, lol. I had seen a news article that lead me to a patent that had afair Steve and your name listed on it. Or maybe my vague recollection is incorrect.
I am not going to claim the Theory of the Firm should die tomorrow an Apple's (and other large corporation's) economies-of-scale which enable them to pool talent will disintegrate. But I do think there is a gradual transformation underway that will undermine the Theory of the Firm. I wrote about that an essay which I think I may have linked on your blog in the past. I believe I wrote this in late 2012 or early 2013 so my understanding may be more refined now:
http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Demise%20of%20Finance,%20Rise%20of%20Knowledge.htmlApology for rambling on.
Steve Jobs had that talent for identifying the sweet spots in marketing and feature sets. He was also a perfectionist. Do you know I was thinking of exactly what Steve Jobs created for the iPhone last time I was in the USA in 2006. I was thinking someone who combined a mobile phone and a handheld tablet computer, would create a revolution. I hadn't dug into the point where I would have invented swiping, but I think it is in my nature to conceive of necessities of invention that naturally follow from a problem space. You too Mark. And so too others at the top of this field.
Hope I can get to work on something exciting again. It is has been too long I been in the desert (figuratively).
Right now I need a logo that depicts collaboration with the 6 letter name I have chosen. Imagery and art! I was really drawn to contact Fractal seek a job because of the amazing artwork in your print ads for Painter version 1.3. I contacted Fractal with a cold call. They put me through to Tom. Biggest mistake you and Tom every made, lol. Btw, I did help guide Priscilla Shih on how to be very good at finding bugs. I saw myself more as a facilitator when I was there, than as the productivity leader. I was trying to be clever and create leverage.
Word!
I had to deepen my specialization because some facets of my generalism was missing the mark due to lacking knowledge of essential details. So concur there is skill for knowing what you don't know and separately when you need to know.
Up until now, I did not have an idea for a project that justified the scale of working in a team. I lack updated experience on teaming with other developers. And I lack scale and don't know who will help me scale yet. Joining a startup would be easier, but who is doing something I believe in. I have invested a lot already in my current project idea. If I only had infinite extra time to become aware of all the other startups and make a rational assessment of my opportunity cost.
The logo design so far is a collaboration of my sketches and the logo designer's ideas. Probably could be improved. You may find the mintees.com Tshirt artwork for sale site interesting. I am trying to buy the Wario design there. To me it resembles a Saddam Hussein, Popeye Brutus variant of Mario.
