They say that one of the reasons to write is to find out what you think, and looking over my previous blog posts it seems I spend more time thinking about Artificial Intelligence than I knew. I am a spectator to that world, someone who finds it fascinating as technology and as cultural phenomenon, as […]
Thoughts on “The Lawnmower Man”
The future, as a concept, is one of the most compelling ideas we have: the past can be reflected on, the present is before our eyes, but the future is where our hopes and dreams, as well as our fears and nightmares, reside. As it is imagined in science fiction, it is a world of […]
On Being Curious
Those of us who have decided to enter the rewarding—and occasionally frustrating and exhausting—profession of software development know that learning is a daily requirement, a subject I have written about before. If you include yourself in that description, you also know how quickly you see the limits of your knowledge of the field recede before […]
Book Review: Codex Metallum
I’ve always had a certain fascination with the dark and morbid, and as a teenager my taste in music, reading and other media reflected my interest in the grotesque. It was Napalm Death and Carcass, Lovecraft and Poe–for that matter, my favorite wrestler was The Undertaker. I’m old enough so that this was back in […]
Thoughts on “Tron”
Artificial intelligence is both a science and a dream: a set of algorithms and methods for developing systems, along with a set of ideas about the nature of intelligence to guide that development, and at the same time a vision of our future, in which our technology will no longer be limited to adding machines […]
Thoughts on “The Net”
Recently while looking through Netflix for something to watch I came across the 1995 action thriller The Net, starring Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, a Software Analyst (an appellation that seems meant to convey technical competence without being too specific) who becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving the Federal Government, malware and floppy disks. While […]
On Text Editors
There is an interesting dichotomy in the tech world: innovation is constant, yet there are widely used technologies that bear a strong resemblance to what developers were working with thirty or forty years ago. We still have sed and awk. Fortran is still used for some purposes. We still use terminal emulators based on the […]
Book Review: Codex Seraphinianus
Surrealism is a genre that invites us to put aside our store of familiar associations, to forget the logic of cause and effect we have become comfortable with by daily repetition. It presents a world arranged according to a different set of rules, woven from different threads than those which hold our familiar world together. […]
Useful Abstractions
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” So goes the quote attributed to Einstein. This is excellent advice for programmers, but the last part should be especially noted. How do you know when you’ve reached that point at which things can’t be made simpler? And once you know, or think you […]
How I Learn
I learned to code late. It was not until around the time I graduated with my bachelor’s degree that my interest in programming began, and I started that journey with everything to learn. Now that I’ve been programming professionally for over a decade, there is still no shortage of new things to learn, working in […]