What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
I am using a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. This is my only computer, and I use it all the time. I chose it because I can run it with 100% free software even at the BIOS level.
I spend most of my time using Emacs. I run it on a text console, so that I don't have to worry about accidentally touching the mouse-pad and moving the pointer, which would be a nuisance.
NetNewsWire for RSS reading, SnapnDrag for taking screenshots of application windows, iShowU for taking screencasts, Keynote for presentations, SuperDuper! for creating mirrored backups,
I use it as my primary machine, and have been using Mac laptops that way for probably the last 5 years or so, starting with the fabled and wonderful aluminum 12" Powerbook.
I'm currently using a 15" MacBook Pro, the 2.8GHZ version with 4GB of RAM. It has a glossy screen, even though 75% of people will tell you that's wrong. I don't work outside that often, so I've been pleasantly pleased with it.
On the iPhone I swear by Tweetie 2, MLB At Bat, Ego, The Weather Channel (a New England requirement), Ramp Champ, and recently the WordPress app for the iPhone (mostly for quickly moderating comments).
But if you examine the business impact of innovation, you will soon discover that the most frequent gains come from the small, incremental innovations, changes that lower costs, add some simple features, and smooth out the rough edges of a product.
I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.
mIRC is for IRC, Miranda is for everything else. I used Trillian for a few years, but it became more and more bloated. Miranda starts quickly and uses very little memory.
I use Paint Shop Pro 5 from 1998 for working with graphics - it is still the best program ever made for dealing with images at the pixel level and converting between formats.
I have a 30" Cinema Display mounted on an aluminum monitor arm (from Space, but I can't find their online presence). I like the aesthetics of this arm as the mount is through a hole in the table instead of a clamp, so it takes up less desk space than the original holder (and allows greater degree of movement).
Also, I tend to keep my keyboards covered with a KB Cover. It's rubbery and looks pretty attractive, but it does slow you down a little until you've become accustomed to it.
I'm also completely unimpressed by Apple Cinema Displays. They're way too pricey, and actually what I want out of a second monitor is color inconsistency.
Next to my main keyboard is my main mousing device: a four-button Kensington Expert Mouse. It's hard to believe but I've been using Kensington trackballs for over sixteen years now. It's my favorite mousing device by far.
I use a neoprene laptop sleeve from Incase to shuttle it around; it's actually a case sized for a regular MacBook which means it's a little bigger, but I need the extra room to tote along a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter and a USB-to-Ethernet adapter too.
WindowShade X is the most significant, as my sole remaining APE module. So-called "haxies" get a bad rap, but I seriously don't know what I would do without WindowShade.
I've tried LaunchBar and a few others, but I always come back to Quicksilver. I want my launcher to appear, react to my input, and disappear instantly. Quicksilver has always felt the snappiest to me.
So in addition to the Dock, I run DragThing with two docks: a "process dock" growing down from the upper right corner, a la Mac OS 9, and a "folder dock" in the lower right corner containing my most frequently accessed folders.
On the other hand, I continue to find Photoshop unintuitive, though it has made me more productive to downgrade from the full edition to the more limited Elements edition. A good example of the less is more usability maxim.
For me, Last Chance to See is a real eye-opener, with the idea that you can take a depressing subject – species on the verge of extinction – and present it in a way which is so engaging, so funny and so humane. I would like to be able to do that as a writer.
Yes, James Lovelock wrote The Ages of Gaia, I think, in 1988. It wasn't his first Gaia book, but it is probably the best written one. I have just been re-reading it recently and certain themes that he picked up on are ones that are still considered novel today. Not just the whole idea of the way the earth works, almost as a living organism. But also looking at the way humanity is going to have to reconcile itself with the constraints and the limits of the planet.
What I like about the book is the anti-humanism. The rejection of this idea we all have, that humanity is at the centre of the cosmos, which is a post-Christian thing.
This is a really useful way of trying to figure out why different humans turned out the way they did, while considering the influences of technology and of the environment.
His thesis is that the tipping point is a social phenomenon. It could just be a make of trainer, but if enough people wear them, then everybody wants them.
We hope that the scale, accuracy, diversity and hierarchical structure of ImageNet can offer unparalleled opportunities to researchers in the computer vision community and beyond.
The explosion of image data on the Internet has the potential to foster more sophisticated and robust models and algorithms to index, retrieve, organize and interact with images and multimedia data.
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed.
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.
Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.
In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
To that end, KeePass secures the eight dozen passwords I can never remember, Mozy backs up my files online, Evernote stores notes, and I share my keyboard and mouse between the Mac and PC when the laptop is at my desk with Synergy.
Exceptional things — be it ideas, writing, mathematics, or art — require hard work. This, in turn, requires boring stretches during which you ignore a mind pleading with you to seek novel stimuli
Miscellaneous other hardware that might qualify as work-related, roughly in order of how much affection I have for it: a Ricoh GR-D point-and-shoot camera
LaunchBar to get to what I need quickly and to keep my clipboard history accessible, Growl and HardwareGrowler to get visual notifications from software
For these pundits, the most dismal indicator is that we have a Republican Administration. They have been gloomy for six years now.
Their words now
I will add that I was definitely not expecting Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to have ventured so far away from the idea of investment-quality mortgages that they had enough exposure in subprime loans to wipe out their capital.
The novel is very good. The author writes with good scientific rigour. The writing is supported by repeatedly introducing new mysteries in every chapter... to keep you coming for more. The characters are believable and well drawn.
planes are already almost as energy-efficient as they could possibly be. Planes unavoidably have to use energy for two reasons: they have to throw air down in order to stay up, and they need energy to overcome air resistance. No redesign of a plane is going to radically improve its efficiency.
if we covered the windiest 10% of the country with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2 ), we would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person, which is half of the power used by driving an average fossil-fuel car 50 km per day.
This guy may be in France, but obviously holds strongly to his identity as an American, so he’ll say the words correctly, but keep the American twang that he knows as his voice.
But it seems the first thing I’d want to do when first learning a new language is to imitate the accent completely, to get that sound in my mouth, to sound as native as I can.
And amazingly enough, if you insist on looking at the world through a bucket of shit, the world starts to look an awful lot like a bucket of shit: by the end of the book, Rosenberg has left the lay reader with the sense that we are careering towards some sort of software heat-death, after which meetings-about-meetings and stickies-on-whiteboards will prevent all future progress.
My favorite so far is the just released Hedge Hunters: Hedge Fund Masters on the Rewards, the Risk, and the Reckoning, but then again I am a sucker for the “Market Wizard” style books.
It's probably because we read No Silver Bullet, a stunningly important essay from way back in 1986, by Frederick P. Brooks (he of Mythical Man-Month) that has proven again and again to be spot-on.
A wonderfully dark novel, structured loosely around a series of recipes. You won't learn any new culinary tricks, but you'll be drawn into the wicked plotting of Tarquin Winot as he spins his schemes with considerable savoir faire . The first book I recommend to people I think highly of.
Caudwell has written a mystery novel populated by barristers of supernatural wit and cleverness, resulting in one of the most consistently amusing books I've ever read.
This was his first, and it's a masterpiece of twisted imagination. There's a surprise ending, but the convoluted path by which you get there has a terrifying internal logic.
When forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Savings in time feel like simplicity. And we are thankfully loyal when it happens, which is rare.
When the software designer defines the visual representation of her program, when she describes the pictures that the user will interpret, she is doing graphic design, whether she realizes this or not.
For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.
The above village story was adapted from John Paulos’ excellent book, Once Upon a Number and was repeated in his, other, also excellent, book, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market.
The above village story was adapted from John Paulos’ excellent book, Once Upon a Number and was repeated in his, other, also excellent, book, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market.
Let me end, though, by quoting Michael Aronstein, who, in the excellent book, Five Eminent Contrarians, pretty much agreed with my own views on the subject, by saying:
The greater the flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true.
The use of a single risk adjusted number to summarise a surgeon's results runs the risk of lending a level of spurious credibility to an analysis that does not take into account the impact of influences that are not patient related.
The administration believes the performance of a surgeon cannot be separated from that of his or her institution as quality is highly dependent on institutional systems.
Measurement of outcomes from medical or surgical interventions is part of good practice, but publication of individual doctors' results remains controversial.
The vast majority of software development projects will fail: they will overrun their schedules, produce substandard results, or sometimes not even finish at all. This isn't an argument; it's a statistical fact.
Why are updates to my reading list so rare? Because computers change a lot in 10 years, but people don't. To make better software, you need to understand how people work, and that is what the books I recommend tend to focus on.
This is the book that introduced the world to the concept of personas: rather than thinking of users as an abstract, difficult-to-describe, amorphous group of people, personas instruct us to talk about specific users who have names, personalities, needs, and goals.
Programming Pearls is the next best thing to working side by side with a master programmer for a year or so. It is the collective wisdom of many journeyman coders distilled into succinct, digestible columns.
This book reminds me a lot of Programming Pearls, but it's actually better, because it's less focused on code. Instead of worrying about code, the authors boiled down all the practical approaches that they've found to work in the real world into this one book.
I may be a card carrying member of the "Keep It Simple Stupid" club, but I'm making a meteor sized exception for regular expressions. Written properly, they will save you a tremendous amount of time in string manipulation, and I've never run across a project where they didn't come in handy somewhere.
Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances.
Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding.
If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.
Any good developer knows that they can code the same stuff with huge variations in lines of code, furthermore code that's well designed and factored will be shorter because it eliminates the duplication.
Differences between the general public's positive economic views and economists' resemble other judgemental anomalies: Laypeople and experts systematically disagree.
A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, indicating that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.
This feature is found to be a consequence of the two generic mechanisms that networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, and new vertices attach preferentially to already well connected sites.
A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, indicating that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.
This feature is found to be a consequence of the two generic mechanisms that networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, and new vertices attach preferentially to already well connected sites.
Wesco is not an equally-good-but-smaller version of Berkshire Hathaway, better because its small size makes growth easier. Instead, each dollar of book value at Wesco continues plainly to provide much less intrinsic value than a similar dollar of book value at Berkshire Hathaway.
A new learning paradigm, called graph transformer networks (GTN), allows such multimodule systems to be trained globally using gradient-based methods so as to minimize an overall performance measure.
Convolutional neural networks, which are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques.
Given an appropriate network architecture, gradient-based learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing.
Learning to store information over extended time intervals by recurrent backpropagation takes a very long time, mostly because of insufficient, decaying error backflow.
Learning to store information over extended time intervals by recurrent backpropagation takes a very long time, mostly because of insufficient, decaying error backflow.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.