2014-06-07 at

Achived: Dating Profile

I talk too fast. I rarely lose my cool. My MO is to fix problems slowly, and systematically - so I'm into eating right, sleeping, and working out to feel better. (It's also how I tend to approach love and sex.) I tend to bore people with my breadth of interest and depth of detail.

I love getting work done - adding value to an operation is my idea of fun. Most people's games bore me. I'd rather be alone than in an overly emotional relationship. I could see myself in a relationship with a co-pilot... or mutual spotter... who enjoys cuddling, and building things, like software, and buildings, and food, and businesses, and music, and clothing... someone who really likes hard problems.

I like women. I prefer women I can work out with, women who run, bike, or gym. I don't care how old we are, as long as we're legal. I have no aversions to marriage - I view it as a legal contract, and it bears no emotional content to me.

I may need to swear off trying to love people who care about feelings. :)

Rearrangements

Time to start taking work home. I'm almost certain that keeping my laptop beside me all day and night will help to improve productivity.
Well it certainly does when I'm working for myself, and I carry my laptop everywhere I go
Hmm. But in order to use my laptop, I am going to need to pack up my development workstation. Ok, off to the storeroom with you. We'll play again when I no longer need to take the laptop home.

Perhaps, in September.

---

Between commercial mundanity and boring technology the only rational thing to do, is fall asleep. Fight reason, with coffee. Do the right thing. Deliver all the goods. 

Being a rationalist merc kinda puts one in a strange place in the world. 

:)

CTO vs. VP of Engineering in small companies


Summary:
https://medium.com/engineering-leadership/defining-roles-cto-and-or-vp-engineering-f1c7563643a3

Dates of articles are not intended to reflect a rate of change in the definition of roles, but to show the persistence of elements of the definitions across recent history.

2007:
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engineering.html

2011:
http://avc.com/2011/10/vp-engineering-vs-cto/

2012:
http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/cto-vs-vp-of-engineering

undated:
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-difference-between-a-cto-and-a-vp-of-engineering/

2014-06-06 at

Pricing Theory

Everything has a price.

So I wonder what the price is, for something drastic, like endless pain, or a castration... or as a college professor once said, fucking a gorilla. A billion dollars? Two? Half? How many people could I help with that much money? Would it be legend? Legends too, have a price.

Management vs Leadership :P

Ok... after 9 years of studying commerce, I have come to a definition of "leadership" that I can agree with, something along the lines of:
Leadership: the act of converting inherently talentless objects into functional business resources.
... which stands to differ from management, vis-a-vis:

Management: the act of allocating functional business resources in an efficient manner, towards particular objectives.

... which leads me to think that anyone who's averse to cooperating with idiots just loses points in terms of "leadership potential".

2014-06-05 at

Musings

I was just thinking about how companies allocate leave benefits. Natural selection favours the tribal psyche. Resultingly, if you prioritise your family more than your job, and career, and hobbies, you are in a safe place in the eyes of many. But if you prioritise your career over your hobbies, and job, and family, then suspicions arise and hence you may need to move more stealthily. Perhaps I just have just been around family-oriented folks for the majority of my brief lifetime.

Today was a day full of interesting challenges. We reviewed the Monty Hall problem, and I'm glad that it is now well documented that the correct answer depends highly on the definition of the host's modus operandi. I was reading up on this in the jam home.

Many things to get done. Support sales. Support HR. Support accounting. Develop product. Develop processes. Learn Rails. Learn Ruby. Build a framework, for building AIs. Stay within budget. Drive safely. Stay awake. Don't fuck with stupids (they cry easily). Be honest. Be kind. Try to stay on time.

A good day. Hopefully, a few more to come.

2014-06-03 at

Jenaime

Well, now this AI project has a name. I also registered the .com just for kicks, and I think it's punny. More wasted funds. Haha. And a long self-absorbed spiel - check it out on GitHub - not now, maybe in a week after there's actually anything to be found there!

Motivations

(Seriously, who cares? But anyway...)

I'll admit that this project draws some inspiration from Linux. Once upon a time, there was no grossly dominant open source personal computing platform, no such operating system for multiple hardware architectures. The Linux movement essentially grew into the communal infrastructure which enabled just about anyone to dive into work on operating systems in a scalable fashion. Now anyone can jump into the activity of programming computers with nary a care in the world, thanks to the ecosystems which have emerged since 1991. That problem is resolved.

Today it's 2014, and the field of machine intelligence is still toddling about. Variance in models is high, a few high-profile projects such as Siri (AAPL) and Watson (IBM) dominate the press. We have many robust operating systems, and hardware architectures, both physical and virtual. But there are no simple frameworks which are also abstract enough to be powerful, and elegant enough to be broadly adopted, such that anyone can dive right into the business of making machines which are more human. Artificial intelligence remains the almost-yet-un-consolidated software design domain, of our generation. I think it's only a matter of time before a solution emerges, so I've decided to take a whack at it in my free time. Well actually I've been building my toolset for a few years now, but since I've finally gotten to writing code in C, I figured it's time to try and integrate existing libraries from the open source world at large into this project.

It's only a matter of time before the quality of our machinated minds reaches the biological sophistication required for self-propagation, learning, and self-healing. Soon after that happens, whenever it happens, we will quickly have more people on this planet that are based on electronic virtual machines running off x86 hardware, than people based on organic DNA. It takes years to train a natural human mind, due to our lack of grasp over wetware. Once the algorithms for artificial minds are of quality, it will take fractions of a second to train one to reach the equivalent mental capicity of an educated adult natural human. Entire societies of artificial minds will be born, warring, and extinguished in hours. It may be bright, or bleak, but anyhow, I'm curious to find out what the future will be like when there are more counselours than broken people in need of counsel.

So let's get on with it.

2014-06-01 at

Ahead of the Curve

My favourite snippet from the office BBQ:

"so there are these guys in who marry their virtual girlfiends, who live on their Ninetendo DS, and pay to take their new wives on elaborate holidays"

"dude, i'm sure that one day i'll be taking a girl out for dinner, chit chat, and sex, and i won't know if she was born in a hospital or a factory, but a Nintendo DS... man, that's ahead of the curve..."