Improved Means for Achieving Deteriorated Ends

Originally published at Improved Means for Achieving Deteriorated Ends. You can comment here or there.

Okay.

Random blog post thingie. I didn’t really expect to post anything but frequent, random and disjointed is a lot easier than occasional and structured/intelligent. So here goes.

First of all, many of you may know/love XKCD. I mentioned to some of you but for some reason didn’t think to post that I found this great little talk that the author of XKCD, Randall Munroe, gave at a programming conference. It’s actually totally worth watching for at least the first 10 to 20 minutes just to hear some of his funny stories about FAA Regulations on Kite Flying and other such craziness. After that he talks for another hour about other stuff and there’s comedy interspersed but it’s not quite as constant.

There were some reassuring thoughts after having watched the first hour or so of that. One significant one being that Randall Munroe doesn’t think he’s a very good programmer because he can settle for “good enough” style hacks. The other being that here’s this guy who’s clearly pretty intelligent but maybe not interested in “the real world” and managed to go off and be interesting and do his own thing that he’s interested in. He created a successful job that I couldn’t have imagined and that certainly if it had been mentioned in table conversation as a future aspiration would’ve been laughed at. But look at him now. It makes me feel like you really can come up with some crazy thing and maybe actually live off it. Then again he might just be extraordinarily entertaining.

Two other thoughts:
What if hiring companies (you know, outsourced HR) did hiring like mutual fund and brokerage groups do investment? What if employees were low, medium, and high risk and selected by experts in a given sector of business? Certainly would change things a bit wouldn’t it? And if people are really the biggest investments a company makes why isn’t this done? (I’m thinking of this in terms of software and in response to a lot of things I’ve read lately including the latest raganwald post and some resumes. It’s an interesting thought though isn’t it?)

Finally, I read a really cool blog entry by a pretty smart and experienced guy (intimidating resume, don’t know that mine could ever look like that) about an Erlang-based OS running on Minix 3. It’s really a what-if kind of thing but very interesting none the less and compelling if one considers the fact that we are moving away from the present single processor, non-parallel, side effect laden nature of software.

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Originally published at Improved Means for Achieving Deteriorated Ends. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been stumbling across these this morning and find them all quite provocative. What do you think?

“As Navrozov explains, the word “power” in Russian means “possession” and is a cognate to the English word “wield.” Since in a democracy public opinion is power and universities are the source of all legitimate opinion, they can be said in a sense to possess and wield our minds. So no one at a university should be surprised to smell the marmoset, not even in an innocent little department called “computer science,” but I knew the stench from childhood and to say I was shocked would be an understatement.” - Unqualified Reservations

“Of course, in a sense, anything you do with in a computer can be described as “mathematics.” The point is not whether or not programming is math. The point is what notation is most effective for expressing programs. Choosing the best notation is the entire problem of programming language design, and this problem is neither mathematical nor scientific. A programming language is a user interface for programmers, and if you can reduce UI design to math, science, or any formal process, call Apple, not me.” - Unqualified Reservations

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