Friday, September 19, 2003
Finally, a reason to buy music again...
Forget iTunes' proprietary DRM-encumbered file format and the RIAA's obnoxious lawsuits. EMusic sells unencumbered MP3 downloads. For real! And they have musicians I actually listen to, like Pizzicato Five and Stereolab.
(Via Dirk Deppey's column on micropayments in The Comics Journal.)
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Flexing the C++ muscles again
I'm sick, and hence feeling too crappy to do real work. Also, I have some rather unpleasant emotional stuff going on right now. As a result, I've been escaping from reality by playing around with KDE programming again. Since the Python bindings for KDE aren't quite ready for prime time (they don't ship with all distributions, and every time I've tried to build them myself, I've run into a compilation error), this means writing in C++. So, I've spent the past two or three days hacking around with C++ code. I'm fairly fluent in the language, but I haven't done this in a while; these days I mostly hack in MultiJava.
My conclusion: I can program anything at least twice as rapidly in (Multi)Java as I can in C++.
KDE and Qt are about as nice a C++ framework as you could ever hope for, and KDevelop is a top-notch IDE. Yet all these nice tools cannot hide the massive anti-productivity orientation of the C++ language. C++ was not designed to make life easy for programmers; it was designed to enable programmers to invest lots of labor in getting the machine to run fast. C++'s most prominent problems are, of course, the lack of garbage collection (and a corresponding lack of type safety). Manual memory management may be appropriate in some domains, but it makes life hell for high-level application programmers. Forget dangling pointers, memory leaks, and segfaults; these are all heinous, to be sure, but the mere fact that you must spend mental energy thinking about the consequences of allocating things in different storage classes is enough to slow you down. Programming in C++ after you've used a garbage collected language is like running through a waist-deep pit of molasses. Without STL auto_ptr, C++ would be totally unbearable, and I'd probably just quit.
Oh, in case you're curious what the program is (pffft, as if the end product of programming ever mattered), it's yet another RSS reader. Yes, it's obviously a vanity project, given that there's a billion of them out there (including one that comes bundled with KDE), and that an entire RSS framework will be shipping in the next stable version of KDE. Like I said, I'm doing it for fun and escapism, not utility.
(If you noticed a contradiction between my bitching about C++ and that last sentence, then you have yet to grasp the fundamental masochism inherent in the programmer's psyche.)
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Oven Digital: Where Are They Now?
Speaking of Oven Digital, it looks like it finally bit the dust. My memory for the names of people who worked there is rather rusty, but let's do a bit of Googling...
- Co-founder/CEO Henry Bar-Levav (who was consistently the best-dressed individual in the firm, of course) still holds the oven.com domain, but Google only turns up old hits. Maybe he got rich and retired young?
- Co-founder/lead designer Miles McManus has since moved on to Mode20. After I left, I heard that some people found Miles "challenging" to work with, but he was great to me when I was a young intern who barely had a clue. He gave me lots of responsibility, and freedom to learn on the job. (Yes, Oven was small enough when I started working there that a production/programming intern would still interact regularly with the lead designer.) We had one of the industry's first working integrated intranet/extranet systems, programmed by yours truly and used by every company employee every single day. Looking back on it, I wince at the ugliness of the code I once wrote; but, on the other hand, considering the salary I was paid, Oven definitely got its money's worth.
- Speaking of my ugly code, Owen Lansbury moved from Australia to NYC to work for Oven shortly before I left, and one of his first jobs was to clean up some of my code. Sorry, Owen. Really. I mean it.
- Designer Heather Champ has been doing some lovely photography projects.
- Scary Unix guru Bennett Todd was hired during my last summer there, and he proceeded to upset lots of applecarts with his weird Unix ways. Of course, he was right about nearly everything (although I'll never agree that Perl is a nice language). With his level of expertise, he has no doubt moved on to many lucrative consulting assignments. Here's some software he's written. It's a little odd to think that, if the person I was in 1999 met me today, 1999-me would probably find 2003-me about as scary as Bennett.
- Tony Kirman was also hired during my last summer there. A genuinely nice and unassuming guy, and a very productive web hacker, he was alarmed by the general atmosphere of upheaval (including some caused by disagreements between Bennett and some other employees) and left shortly thereafter. Google turns up nothing, but his neat late-90's web hacks are still up at los.org.
- I seem to remember that programmer Brian Duggan had the odd habit of using obscenities, instead of "foo" and "bar", in debugging statements. But this might have been someone else at Oven. My memory's pretty fuzzy on this score.
- Mike Knowlton's Macromedia Evangelist page is still his first hit on Google, but he appears to be the CEO of Nascent State.
- Designer Mary-Lynn Williams and production dude extraordinaire Lars Gelfan now comprise Oculant.
- Scott Pilutik: someone else I don't remember very well. Like many dot-com refugees, he's apparently gone to law school.
- I remember Klokie's login, but nothing else about him. Weird how that happens. If I saw a picture, I'd probably remember more though.
- Kio Stark is a writer in Brooklyn. (Or was. Or, maybe that's another Kio Stark. When I was at Oven, she was in grad school, so it's a bit odd that she's not on any academic sites. Whatever.)
Finally, I notice that there's an ex-Oven employees listserv, started by David Cantrell from the short-lived London branch. It's unclear whether it's still active, and I'm too shy to join it. Besides which, it seems there's some bad blood between Oven London and Oven NYC. Obviously, I had nothing to do with it, but it's probably best not to open old wounds.
BTW, I still have my Oven Digital company t-shirts. Our designers were among the best in the industry; and our t-shirts were correspondingly cool.
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Neat CSS tricks
Back when I was an undergrad, and the web was young, I interned as a web monkey at Oven Digital. I spent many hours cursing the grotesquely ad hoc design of HTML and JavaScript. I was therefore somewhat amused to see this neat little demonstration of "rollovers" without JavaScript. HTML+CSS really is way better than it used to be.
(Via paranoidfish.org)
Monday, September 15, 2003
Eolas analysis: Lotus Notes is prior art?
Ray Ozzie points out that Lotus Notes is demonstrable prior art for the concept of an extensible wide-area-network GUI program --- a concept on which Eolas claims to have a patent. As I've said before, my personal opinion is that this patent is obvious and overbroad, and therefore prima facie invalid. It shouldn't be necessary to demonstrate prior art. However, if prior art in Notes can kill the Eolas patent, then that's great.
(Via DeLong)
Our! New! Building! Rules!
Returned from the East Coast and unpacked my office in our department's resplendent and minty fresh new building, whose magnificence you may not full appreciate unless you've seen our old one. Yee haw, as the kids say.
"Transhumanism": Friend or foe?
While I was visiting NYC, I had a conversation with PM and JW (and later BM) about transhumanism, a topic that's been occupying a lot of my thoughts lately. Basically, we all agreed that it seems possible to radically alter certain aspects of the human form and psyche. What we disagreed about was whether one should use the label "transhumanism": I thought that it was an accurate word that served the useful purpose of provoking thought, whereas PM and JW thought it was an inaccurate piece of mystification whose only purpose was to obscure power imbalances in existing human societies. To summarize PM's arguments, perhaps, unfairly:
- Humanity is not defined by its physical form, psychological urges (sex drive, etc.), or limitations (mortality, etc.); it is defined by the fact that it creates cultural artifacts. Therefore, even "transhumans", regardless of how bizarre they become, will still be "human", because they will create cultural artifacts.
- The differences between "transhumans" and present-day humans will be no greater than the differences between present-day humans and primitive humans from, say, 10,000 years ago. Therefore, calling these future beings "transhuman" is misleading.
- It is evil to have a society in which some people are "human" while others become transhuman (or, since PM says that the "transhuman" label is irrelevant, "much more powerful humans"). Therefore, talking about transhumanism is wrong.
All three of these points seem fundamentally wrong. To begin with, the first point's definition of "human" is deeply flawed. For example, this definition would call "human" any hypothetical race of space aliens, as long as they had something you could call culture. A spacefaring race of metal-eating bacterial colonies that communicate using protein-bearing spores? A society of sentient asteroids that travel across the galaxy searching for stars whose gamma ray signatures express the [*untranslatable*] of the [*untranslatable*]? Would these aliens be "human" as long as they produced "cultural" artifacts? This contention is absurd.
We can expect that radically altered humans would be no less foreign to us than these hypothetical aliens. No doubt they will share some characteristics with us, but they may share equally many characteristics with a termite mound, or a wheat field, or a hurricane. To call such beings "transhuman" or "posthuman" seems only accurate.
As for the second point, consider a hypothetical baby Alice born 10,000 years ago in a hunter-gatherer culture. Imagine transporting Alice into the present and raising her in a modern society. Now imagine downloading Alice's psyche into a colony of hyperintelligent nanomachines designed for asteroid mining, while simultaneously altering her personality so that she could never feel any emotions. I think you have to be willfully contrary to claim that the latter leap is no larger than the former leap. Hunter-gatherer Alice and modern-society Alice both have two arms, two legs, a face, a single brain; they'll grow up into people who walk around, who eat and drink, who desire sex, who fear death, who may feel love or anger or hate or jealousy. Nano-colony Alice's body is not even composed of biological materials; her thought processes are deeply foreign to every human being who has ever lived. To me, it seems obvious that the leap between nano-Alice and modern-society Alice is at least as great as the leap between Australopithecus and Homo sapiens. Only a tendentious reading of the facts could conclude otherwise. We call Australopithecus proto-human. We should call nano-Alice post-human.
Finally, as for the third point --- that transhumanity implies immoral differences in power --- we can clearly foresee that radical alterations to humanity will become possible. We can also foresee that some of these alterations will make people much more powerful. We can also foresee that some of the alterations that make people much more powerful will nevertheless not be universally adopted --- do you want to be downloaded into a hyperintelligent nanobotic asteroid mining colony? Some people would say yes, but most present-day humanity would say no. In other words, many people value their humanity, or at least certain aspects of it, and would therefore refuse an alteration that took away those aspects of their humanity. Therefore, one has three choices:
- Establish a world government that bans all transhuman alterations.
- Establish a world government that coerces everybody into having the same set of transhuman alterations.
- Establish a society based on ethical relationships between transhumans and humans.
The first two alternatives seem monstrous to me, and therefore we are left with the third. Refusing to talk about transhumanism doesn't make the third alternative any less real. And calling radically altered people transhuman doesn't obscure the power imbalance; rather, it brings that power imbalance to the fore, and highlights its unique properties. Past power imbalances among humans have mostly derived from the fact that some people wish to deprive others of power. The power imbalance between transhumans and humans is more fundamental: it derives from the fact that some humans will not wish to partake of the power offered by transhuman enhancements. To be sure, there may be transhumans who wish to deprive humans, or other transhumans, of power, but the imbalance between transhumanity as a whole and humanity as a whole is new.
When I said that transhumanist ethics should require that transhumans set aside enough space and resources for humans to live fulfilling human lives, PM derisively compared it to "keeping the savages on the reservation". But I don't see any other alternative.
Should transhumans instead compete with humans for the same resources? Transhumans would win every time. A single transhuman might produce more intellectual output than an entire human population of billions. A transhuman might be able to manipulate human legal systems with the ease of a child playing with Legos. And physics dictates that a transhuman psyche downloaded into a computer with the mass of a golf ball would be able to colonize remote planets faster than any human (who would be encumbered by a mass weighing in the tens of kilograms). Transhumans might have the power to destroy human economies, subvert human legal systems, and establish sovereign governments far beyond the reach of any human. The only forces stopping a transhuman from doing these things would be its own conscience and the will of other transhumans, not any human power.
So the resources left for humans would be only those that transhumans made a conscious effort to set aside for that purpose. (Note that a second tenet of transhumanist ethics is universal enfranchisement --- any human who wants to become transhuman should be given not only the liberty but the resources to do so. So humans would be human by choice.) For savages like us, it will be a matter of choosing between the reservation and transhumanity. There's no other choice.
And actually, I don't think PM had any other choices in mind. I strongly suspect that his reaction against my description of transhumanism stems from denial, not any positive agenda. Like many other anti-transhumanists, I think he dislikes the notion of a society founded on vast power imbalances, and therefore prefers to invent reasons not to think about it. But avoiding the idea won't make it go away.
Note, BTW, that most transhumanist thinkers are fully conscious of the risks involved in the transhumanist project, or at least as fully conscious as anyone can be. In fact, analyzing these risks is (yet another) major aim of transhumanist thought. See, for example, Nick Bostrom's many writings, including his discussion of existential risks to the human race, and his unconventional analysis of the future of human evolution.
Labels: futurism
