| Technology blogs

Monday, January 4, 2010

Books and stuff: three years of Amazon addiction

I'm a slow reader, but that doesn't stop me from buying a lot of books. Inspired by a Blippy review, I thought it might be fun to publish my Amazon order history.

My threshold for buying books is very low, so don't interpret these purchases as endorsements. Also, I haven't read most of them yet, so if you spot anything especially good, please let me know.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

10 predictions for the world of January 1, 2020

After writing my predictions for the past 10 years, I decided it might be fun to write a few predictions for the next 10 years as well. This is a little more dangerous though, since I now lack the benefit of hindsight and at least one of them will probably turn out to be as dumb as "Palin/Gore win the 2014 presidential election".

That said, here are my (random and probably over-optimistic) predictions for the world as of Jan 1, 2020, assuming civilization doesn't collapse first:

All data lives "in the cloud" and can be accessed from anywhere. Most computers are essentially stateless caches which can be replaced without any data-loss or need for reconfiguration or reinstallation. This prediction was copied from 10 years ago, but this time it's right.
Android and iPhone kill off all the other mobile phone platforms. Android will be bigger (it will run on all of the "free" cell phones), but iPhone will still be "cooler", and will work more seamlessly with Apple's tablet computer.
Facebook will be a big success, possibly as big as Google. I'm probably over-optimistic because I work there, but the people are smart and ambitious.
3D displays will be popular because people want to watch Avatar and all future 3D movies and games at home (plus porn, of course -- think of the porn!).
No human-like artificial intelligence, but computers get a lot better at both high level and low level intelligence. At the high level, Google will release an amazing question answering service that can answer complex questions and is in many ways smarter than any human. Low-level, insect-like intelligence will become common enough that I'll be able to quickly build a Lego robot that uses computer vision to spot ants and physically squash them (and it will be awesome).
There will be an even bigger economic crash. The system becomes increasingly unstable as we try to paper-over the damage from one bubble by creating an even bigger bubble elsewhere. Nevertheless, things continue semi-working for some reason.
The health care system continues to be badly broken, and attempts at reform probably only make it worse (here is a nice summary). Fortunately, solutions will come from outside of the system. People will get better at avoiding disease (start with Taubes), and bio-tech will start to deliver in a big way. Unfortunately, the bio-tech will probably come from China, since they don't have so many rules to slow things down. The Chinese treatments won't be approved in the United States, but we can simply travel to Mexico for care. Urgent care will be local, but non-urgent procedures will be performed outside the US. Not everyone will do this, but it will be a very visible and growing trend by 2020.
The drug war will be over, mostly. An increasing number of people will realize that the war is causing a lot more harm than the drugs are (it's killing Mexico, for example). The end of marijuana prohibition in California will demonstrate that non-addictive drugs are not as dangerous as the government claims. It's unclear what will happen with highly addictive drugs such as heroin, but bio-tech may offer a solution that removes the addiction.
The energy problem is largely solved by cheap solar. It's not 100% done obviously, but we'll be on the ramp. Nuclear technology (Thorium?) could do it too, but probably isn't politically feasible. Edit: To be clear since not everyone has the same definition of "solved", for me it means that we have a relatively cheap and scalable energy solution, not that we're fully converted to it.
Politics will evolve much faster than in the past due to the Internet and social networks changing the core architecture of society (what people think and how they came to think it -- the professional media and government are no longer at the center). New movements will arise and gain power very quickly. Obama beating Clinton was the first hint of this. Political outsiders will begin winning elections. Steven Colbert will win the 2016 election -- the left will think he's joking, the right will think he's serious, and both sides will think that they are tricking the other ;)

Friday, January 1, 2010

My poorly remembered and partially imagined predictions from Jan 1, 2000

Reviewing old predictions is fun. Unfortunately, I didn't bother to write any down, so I'm working from memory here, and of course human memory is very unreliable and selective, so this is rather bogus.

Predictions for the next 10 years, from Jan 1, 2000 (as remembered on Jan 1, 2010):

Prediction: Linux will continue expanding into new spaces and will eventually make Microsoft irrelevant. Windows 2000 is the last release that anyone will care about.

Result: I was over-optimistic about Linux -- the community is unable to produce anything worthwhile on the desktop, most development has moved to the web anyway (making the desktop OS irrelevant), and OSX popularity among developers took away a lot of energy (I develop in Linux, but use OSX to host my web browser and other apps). Linux is a huge success on the server-side though and continues to grow in more "embedded" contexts, such as Android and Chrome OS. Microsoft made itself irrelevant -- they still make a lot of money, but they are no longer changing the world.

Prediction: Wireless data access (such as that provided by Ricochet) will become fast and practically ubiquitous, meaning that the Internet is always with us.

Result: It took longer than I expected, but we're finally starting to get there, and it is awesome.

Prediction: "Computer Aided Reality" will provide a cool visual overlay by using computer vision to identify objects and then fetching info about them from the Internet.

Result: I was very over-optimistic. There are a few basic "augmented reality" apps around, but nothing major. I still think that this will happen, though the display technology is still very uncertain (I haven't even heard about direct retinal projection lately).

Prediction: All data lives "online" and can be accessed from anywhere. Your computer is a stateless cache which can be replaced without any data-loss or need for reconfiguration or reinstallation.

Result: I was over-optimistic. We made some progress with things like Gmail, but computers still store information (configuration at the very least). Chrome OS may be more like what I had in mind, and the iPhone is too if you set aside the fact that it requires manual syncing.

Prediction: The Java VM will get good enough that people will finally stop using C++.

Result: I was over-optimistic. The JVM got somewhat better (though it still has significant GC problems), but Java got worse due to cultural problems. Fortunately, a lot of other interesting languages became popular, including Javascript, and there are a number of fast virtual machines in the works.

Prediction: Google will be a big success, possibly as big as Yahoo. I'm probably over-optimistic because I work there, but the people are smart and ambitious.

Result: I was under-optimistic. Google is bigger than Yahoo ever was, and is getting close to Microsoft (their market cap is 70% of Microsoft's).

Prediction: Humans will be cloned. After the initial outrage, people will stop caring once they see that the result is just a regular baby (like the "test tube babies" before them), not a "soulless monster".

Result: To my knowledge, that hasn't been any successful human cloning, though I wouldn't be surprised if there has and they are just keeping quiet about it.

Prediction: The stock market will crash, and take Silicon Valley (and other bubble-zone) real estate markets down with it.

Result: The market crash came (sort of), but instead of going down, real estate kept going up! Even when it did finally crash, local prices (especially Palo Alto) remained remarkably high.

Prediction: A meteor strike will destroy all life on Earth on November 5, 2007, so I don't need to waste time writing down my predictions for 2010.

Result: I meant 2012, there was an off-by-5 error in my calculation ;)

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Tablet thoughts

I don't know anything about Apple's tablet, and I generally don't pay much attention to the speculation about their unannounced products. However, John Gruber has a nice post today which discusses the hypothetical Apple tablet.

The best part is the core product question -- how does this new product fit in with all existing products? Revolutionary products are underestimated because we evaluate them relative to existing products. This quote gets it:

Like all Apple products, The Tablet will do less than we expect but the things it does do, it will do insanely well. It will offer a fraction of the functionality of a MacBook‚ but that fraction will be way more fun. The same Asperger-y critics who dismissed the iPhone will focus on all that The Tablet doesn't do and declare that this time, Apple really has fucked up but good.

That was certainly the case with the iPod, or as slashdot put it, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

When considering revolutionary new products, we can not simply compare them with existing products, but must instead compare them with the products that don't yet exist, but should. For example, the PC was more than just an expensive, hard-to-use typewriter -- it was a whole new thing that just happened to have some typewriter features. Obviously this comparison is much more difficult than the "count the checkboxes" approach that we like to use when evaluating the "better mousetrap", but it's critical if we're going to understand or create anything truly new.

I have no idea what Apple is planning to release, but to me the revolutionary product need is in bridging the virtual and physical worlds. If you spend your entire day in front of the computer, this need may not seem real, but if you move between the two worlds you may notice that they are strangely disconnected. For example, imagine that I'm looking at a picture on my computer and want to give you a copy. In the physical world, I would simply hand you the print (I would have gotten double-prints), but with computers it's nearly impossible. Yes, there may be some complicated 10-step process that I can use to share the image, or maybe I can download and install some obscure software, but I'm not going to do that and neither are most other people. Imagine if I instead had a simple (built-in) gesture for passing the photo off to person standing next to me, and it were just as easy as handing them a real photo.

Of course exchanging photos is just one small example of these physical/virtual interactions. It's a whole new category, so many of them, including the most important, haven't been invented yet. However, you can get some ideas by thinking of the marketing cliche where two people are standing around a computer collaborating on something, taking quick notes, working off a recipe, etc. Those images occur in marketing because they are appealing, but they don't occur much in real life because our existing devices and software are awful. Current laptop computers are too bulky, awkward, and keyboard centric (the ui needs to be gesture-centric), and the iPhone is too small and limited. I want something about the size of a notepad that can be used naturally while standing up and walking around, just like an actual pad of paper, except that it's fully integrated with the virtual world as well as the physical world.

I hope this is what Apple is building -- it would be a great product. (or someone else could build it, though honestly I can't imagine anyone besides Apple getting it right)

Saturday, November 28, 2009

So I finally tried Wave...

Last week, TechCrunch published a story about me not yet trying Google Wave ("Gmail Creator Thinks Email Will Last Forever. And Hasn't Tried Google Wave"). The is apparently unacceptable, or as one commenter put it, "Paul may have been trying to be cool and ironic, but really he should be ashamed for not having tried Wave yet." I'm not sure if this is because I have an obligation to try all new products, or because my views on the longevity of email will seem hopelessly naive once I try Wave, but either way, I mustn't disappoint the good people of TechCrunch :)

The Google Wave About page and video does a good job of summarizing what Wave is and how it works. If you want to learn more about Wave, I would start there and skip this post. That said, here are my thoughts on Wave:

First off, Wave is clever and full of interesting ideas.

Second, comparisons to Facebook and Twitter are nonsensical. If Twitter were CNN Headline News, Google Wave would be Microsoft Office. Wave is less of a social network and more of a productivity tool. It's Google Docs meets Gmail, or as Google puts it, "A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

Third, although Wave is very promising, it's clear that it still needs some refinement. This is why Google calls it a "preview release". The trouble with innovative new ideas is that not all of them are worth keeping. While developing Gmail, we implemented a lot of features that were either not released, or not released until much later. Some of the most interesting ideas (such as automatic email prioritization) never made it out because we couldn't find simple enough interfaces. Other ideas sounded good, but in practice weren't useful enough to justify the added complexity (such as multiple stars). Other features, such as integrated IM, simply needed more time to get right and were added later. Our approach was somewhat minimal: only include features that had proven to be highly useful, such as the conversation view and search. It's my impression that Wave was released at an earlier stage of development -- they included all of the features, and will likely winnow and refine them as Wave approaches a full launch. The Wave approach can be a little confusing, but it allows for greater public feedback and testing.

From what I've seen, the realtime aspects of Wave are both the most intriguing, and the most problematic. I think the root of the issue is that conversations need to be mostly linear, or else they become incomprehensible. IM and chat work because there is a nice, linear back-and-forth among the participants. Wave puts the conversation into little Gmail-like boxes, but then makes them update in realtime. The result is that people end up responding (in realtime) to things on other parts of the page, and the chronological linkage and flow of the conversation is lost. I suspect it would work better if each box behaved more like a little chat room. A single Wave could contain multiple chats (different sub-topics), but each box would be mostly self-contained and could be read in a linear fashion.

So now that I've tried Wave, do I expect it to kill email? No. The reason that nothing is going to kill email anytime soon is quite simple: email is universal (or as close to it as anything on the Internet). Email has all kinds of problems and I often hate it, but the fact is that it mostly works, and there's a huge amount of experience and infrastructure supporting it. The best we can do is to use email less, and tools like Wave and Docs are a big help here.

I don't know what Google has planned for Wave or Gmail, but if I were them I would continue improving Wave, and then once it's ready for the whole world to use, integrate it into Gmail. Moving Wave into Gmail would give it a huge userbase, and partially address the "email is universal" problem. They could use MIME multi-part to send both a non-Wave, HTML version of the message, and the Wave version. Wave-enabled mail readers would display the live Wave, while older mailers would show the static version along with a link to the live Wave.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life

"Open" is a great thing. Everyone likes it. Unfortunately, nobody agrees what open is. There are many meanings, but in general, I think "open" must be the opposite of "closed". In the world of abstract things like software, protocols and society, closed is secret, hidden, or locked.

"Closed" limits our mobility, prevents discovery, and discourages new connections. Imagine being in a building where all of the doors are locked or guarded, and it's difficult to move from room to room or leave. A closed world is one where people are forced to stay in their place, sometimes because of physical constraints, but more commonly because they simply don't know where else to go. A closed world is giant prison.

In an open world, people are able to see more clearly, and more easily explore new ideas and possibilities. An open world is more fluid -- people and ideas easily flow over boundaries and other borders. This openness is what makes the Internet so powerful. The Internet is melting the world, but in a good way.

Open standards and open source software are important for making technology open and available to everyone, but it's important to remember that open goes beyond tech. Wikipedia makes knowledge open to everyone. Blogs and YouTube make broadcasting and mass communication open to everyone -- news and events that would have been suppressed in the past are now reaching the whole world.

These things have been discussed to death, but there's another "open" that still seems a little frivolous: our lives. We like to joke (or complain) about people who share every boring detail of their lives and thoughts on Facebook or Twitter, but they may be doing something important.

Most of our happiness and productivity comes from the everyday details of our lives: the people we live and work with, the books we read, the hikes we take, the parties we attend, etc. But how do we choose these things? How do we know what to do, and how do know if we'll like it? The obvious answer is that we do and like whatever the TV tells us to do and like. I'm not certain that's the best answer though.

By sharing more of our own thoughts and lives with the world, we contribute to the global pool of "how to live", and over time we also get contributions back from the world. Think of it as "open source living". This has certainly been my experience with my blog and FriendFeed. Not only do people occasionally say that it has helped them, but I've also met interesting new people and gotten a lot of good leads on new ideas. These are typically small things, but our lives are woven from the small details of everyday living. For example, I saw a good TED talk on "The science of motivation", shared it on FriendFeed, and in the comments Laura Norvig suggested a book called Unconditional Parenting, which turns out to be very good.

The next step is for people to open more of their current activities and plans. This is often referred to as "real-time", but since real-time is also a technical term, we often focus too much on the technical aspect of it. The "real-time" that matters is the human part -- what I'm doing and thinking right now, and my ability to communicate that to the world, right now. We see some of this on Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter, and also location-aware apps such as Foursquare, but it's still fairly primitive and fringe. When this activity reaches critical mass, it should be very interesting for society. It dramatically alters the time and growth coefficients in group formation. It enables a much higher degree of serendipity and ad hoc socializing.

The basic pattern of openness is that better access to information and better systems lead to better decisions and better living. This general principal is broadly accepted, but we're just now discovering that it also applies to the minutiae of our lives.

Sharing your boring thoughts and activities may seem narcissistic and self-absorbed at first (I'm still kind of embarrassed about having a blog), but there is virtue and benefit in it. Naturally there will be challenges and fear along the way, but in the long term we're contributing to a more open, fluid society, where people are more able to find happy, productive lives. It also encourages us to be more accepting of others. Everyone is flawed, and the more we see that we aren't alone, the less we need to fear that truth.

People can not truly live and thrive in a prison -- we require freedom and mobility. This may explain my incomprehensible analogy, "Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life".

Go forth and share.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. "Hacking"

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules ("reality"). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform "miracles" -- things which violate the perceived rules.

Hacking is most commonly associated with computers, and people who break into or otherwise subvert computer systems are often called hackers. Although this terminology is occasionally disputed, I think it is essentially correct -- these hackers are discovering the actual rules of the computer systems (e.g. buffer overflows), and using them to circumvent the intended rules of the system (typically access controls). The same is true of the hackers who break DRM or other systems of control.

Writing clever (or sometimes ugly) code is also described as hacking. In this case the hacker is violating the rules of how we expect software to be written. If there's a project that should take months to write, and someone manages to hack it out in a single evening, that's a small miracle, and a major hack. If the result is simple and beautiful because the hacker discovered a better solution, we may describe the hack as "elegant" or "brilliant". If the result is complex and hard to understand (perhaps it violates many layers of abstraction), then we will call it an "ugly hack". Ugly hacks aren't all bad though -- one of my favorite personal hacks was some messy code that demonstrated what would become AdSense (story here), and although the code was quickly discarded, it did it's job.

Hacking isn't limited to computers though. Wherever there are systems, there is the potential for hacking, and there are systems everywhere. Our entire reality is systems of systems, all the way down. This includes human relations (see The Game for an very amusing story of people hacking human attraction), health (Seth Roberts has some interesting ideas), sports (Tim Ferriss claims to have hacked the National Chinese Kickboxing championship), and finance ("too big to fail").

We're often told that there are no shortcuts to success -- that it's all a matter of hard work and doing what we're told. The hacking mindset takes there opposite approach: There are always shortcuts and loopholes. For this reason, hacking is sometimes perceived as cheating, or unfair, and it can be. Using social hacks to steal billions of dollars is wrong (see Madoff). On the other hand, automation seems like a great hack -- getting machines to do our work enabled a much higher standard of living, though as always, not everyone sees it that way (the Luddites weren't big fans).

Important new businesses are usually some kind of hack. The established businesses think they understand the system and have setup rules to guard their profits and prevent real competition. New businesses must find a gap in the rules -- something that the established powers either don't see, or don't perceive as important. That was certainly the case with Google: the existing search engines (which thought of themselves as portals) believed that search quality wasn't very important (regular people can't tell the difference), and that search wasn't very valuable anyway, since it sends people away from your site. Google's success came in large part from recognizing that others were wrong on both points.

In fact, the entire process of building a business and having other people and computers do the work for you is a big hack. Nobody ever created a billion dollars through direct physical labor -- it requires some major shortcuts to create that much wealth, and by definition those shortcuts were mostly invisible to others (though many will dispute it after the fact). Startup investing takes this hack to the next level by having other people do the work of building the business, though finding the right people and businesses is not easy.

Not everyone has the hacker mindset (society requires a variety of personalities), but wherever and whenever there were people, there was someone staring into the system, searching for the truth. Some of those people were content to simply find a truth, but others used their discoveries to hack the system, to transform the world. These are the people that created the governments, businesses, religions, and other machines that operate our society, and they necessarily did it by hacking the prior systems. (consider the challenge of establishing a successful new government or religion -- the incumbents won't give up easily)

To discover great hacks, we must always be searching for the true nature of our reality, while acknowledging that we do not currently possess the truth, and never will. Hacking is much bigger and more important than clever bits of code in a computer -- it's how we create the future.

Or at least that's how I see it. Maybe I'll change my mind later.

See also: "The Knack" (and the need to disassemble things)

Technology blogs

Pages

Blog Archive