Thursday, Jan. 4th 2018
Big businesses have been created on top of great innovation. The inverse is, according to Kay, unlikely, if not impossible: One cannot innovate under business objectives. Businesses are trying to solve problems—fundamental research, first of all, finds problems.
This references some intersting Alan Kay emails that have apparently been made public.
Has there ever been as pure of research focused look at interaction design since Xerox PARC? I would think not especially considering that all of our operating system analogies are still the same today (see also: Files.app on iOS).
Thursday, Jan. 4th 2018
In the middle of the AlphaZero paper is a diagram called Table 2. It shows the 12 most popular chess openings played by humans, along with how frequently AlphaZero "discovered" and played those openings during its intense tabula rasa training. These openings are the result of extensive human study and trial — blood, sweat and tears — spread across the centuries and around the globe. AlphaZero taught itself them one by one: the English opening, the French, the Sicilian, the Queen's gambit, the Caro-Kann.
This is one of my favorite parts about AlphaZero. The fact that, over the course of a few hours of playing itself, AlphaZero taught itself (without prior knowledge) human chess openings that took us centuries. Perhaps it's weird that I find it more validating that horrifying.
Friday, Dec. 22nd 2017
Although this post is a little long, I found it interesting and worthwhile. The section discussing areas of interest was especially thought provoking. I really enjoyed brief discussion about San Franciscans drawing their mental maps of the city.
Across the sketches and interviews, Annechino and Cheng observed a common theme in how the interviewees described the city.
Many of San Francisco’s neighborhoods have a single street that commercial activity is centered around. And these “main drags” or “commercial corridors” act as destinations, attracting people from other parts of the city.
Tuesday, Dec. 19th 2017
For the last two month's I've been working with a client doing both design and development. Because I have been paranoid about the clarity of my code recently, I've really been enjoying spending a little extra effort adding some documentation that can explain the thoughts and concepts of the code I have been creating.
This post has been an invaluable reference.
Tuesday, Dec. 19th 2017
Apple also wanted to make it clear that the iMac Pro is also a developer’s tool and demonstrated how a 10 Core iMac Pro can simultaneously handle three iOS simulations (on screen was what looked like screens for an iPhone 8, an iPad and iPhone X all running the same application), a Linux Ubuntu VM serving Apache PHP code, a, yes, Windows 10 virtual machine running 20 Chrome browser sessions, and a virtualization of the previous Mac OS, without missing a beat or making loud wheezing sounds. Seriously, I didn’t hear a peep from the system.
This scenario seems implausible based on my anecdotal experience. Sadly, it's the Electron based app Slack that is usually eating up a lot of my memory. Having awesome hardware available is nice (although at a premium), but having well-made software will benefit everyone.