Last week I met with my old friend from CRD days at the RCA,  Jussi Ängeslevä.  Jussi has been working for Art+Com for a few years now, and he drew my attention to two open source software projects that have emerged from A+C in recent years - Y60 and Creative Computing.

Kate Hollenbach of Oblong recently announced the release of greenhouse:

“Oblong’s SDK for creating gestural, spatial, multi-screen interactive systems. Internally, we’ve done a lot thinking about physical space, screens, gesture, and input devices, but we haven’t yet shared that openly with the world. Greenhouse is our first step toward sharing what we do with developers and creative coders outside of our own walls.”

Jussi also pointed me in the direction of the delicious Squama project: “Modular Visibility Control of Walls and Windows for Programmable Physical Architectures”.

What a lovely description for Git! It also led me down a rabbit hole of definitions.

Memo tweeted recently about the truth behind the Harlem Shake.

I was recently thinking about a quality metric for BitTorrent – do people use the ratio of Seeders to Leechers already? Surely a high Seed and low Leech is best of all.

Finally, Bloomberg with the news that mining for virtual gold in the form of Bitcoin is just as bad as mining for gold in the real world.

A kinetic sculpture race is an organized contest of human-powered amphibious all-terrain works of art. The original and longest race is held annually since 1969 in Humboldt County in far northern California. Participants compete for three days over 42 miles of land, water, sand, and mud. Other races are held annually in locations throughout the United States, and in Australia. Surely we should have one in Hackney?

Perhaps Hermann Tilke could design the next track? What an amazing job to have.

Jessi Baker recently saw a preview of my interview in the upcoming Clouds documentary:

I’ve tracked down the Jobs quote to here:

The NSA’s archive of it’s internal magazine on cryptography was recently released. Some interesting blacked out sections, naturally.

A terrifying and infuriating piece from 2009 on Goldman Sachs and the Great American Bubble Machine. Morally, how can these people do this? You don’t get any prizes for being the richest person in the graveyard. Is the corporation a highly efficient guilt assuager?

Steve Yegge complained way back in 2006 about how terrible Blogging software is. Why haven’t things moved forward? Intertia around WordPress? Is it “Good Enough”?

Michael Abrash has uploaded his slides from his recent Game Developers Conference talk on what he is doing in AR and VR.

Putting together the talk made me realize how many challenging problems have to be solved in order to get VR and AR to work well, and how long it’ll to take to get all of those areas truly right; it’s going to be an interesting decade or two. At least I don’t have to worry about running out of stuff to talk about here for a long time!

Elon Musk interviewed at TED – an interesting video, especially the part when he talks about what makes him different, and what he thinks people can do to be more like him:

1. A solid Physics education – so you don’t rely on analogy to explain the world around you.
2. Soliciting negative feedback from peers – hardly anyone does this.

All I want from a digital camera these days is low light performance. I hate flash. It looks like Canon is first in line to make what I want. Perfect for photographing parties and galaxies alike.

Russell Davies recently posted about BAE’s surveillance camera, the ARGUS-IS. What a system! Made up of four lenses and 368 cell phone cameras, at 5 megapixels each – making a 1.8 Gigapixel overall resolution. Effectively allows people to monitor an area of around 3 km radius, and scrub in time, with automatic tracking of every moving object. Look at the image that comes out of this thing!

Parag Mital is working on software to automatically reconstruct videos from other video sources. He’s recently been going around the houses with Justin Bieber and YouTube over the copyright of these videos. He’s also been working on doing image reconstruction from brain scan information – opening the way to a future where you can replay your dreams. Legally also fascinating – do I own the copyright on the images that I “see” in my head? If I made a video from the images in my head would I own it? Even if I was looking at copyrighted material? As I’ve said before, digital technology is outpacing our legal system’s ability to cope, and things are only going to get faster in the future.

A handy summary of some of the latest developments in AI/Neural Networks.

On the 1st of October, 2012, Kyle McDonald tweeted:

“Coding tutorials as Skate Videos”

< BEGIN POST POST EDIT>

Presstube (@presstube)
22/03/2013 12:48
@kcimc @JoelGethinLewis was from a(n).. email where I was blabbing about my wishes for Code Journal : )

With the help of the Internet, I was able to track down where this thought came from. From Presstube a.k.a. James Paterson. His series of (meta) posts on his Cyclic Vacuum Cannon. James has been doing lovely things for onkers. I thoroughly recommend watching them all.

<BEGIN POST POST POST EDIT>

James sez:

"- To try and capture and communicate that feeling you get when you're blazing through code in complete flow. To give non-coders or people just starting out a voyeuristic hint of that feeling. A bit like a skateboard video, more idealized porn than a record of gritty reality in all its somewhat more tedious glory. Something to get you 'stoked' and infect you with enthusiasm, but at the end of the day the only way to learn to kickflip is to go out there and try it a hundred thousand times. "

<END POST POST POST EDIT>

<END POST POST EDIT>

What a lovely idea. There are so many useful “tricks” to creating interaction that are only learnt through bitter experience – I remember being amazed watching Ash Nehru code at the speed of thought when I first started at UnitedVisualArtists in 2005. I couldn’t believe anyone could type that fast! How could it work? I remember the first time I read “Coders At Work” by Peter Seibel. I was so relieved to read that ALL of the coders featured used printfs to debug!

Going Around the Corner Piece by Bruce Nauman, 1970. 4 video cameras, 4 video monitors arranged around a cube inside a room. I saw this piece first hand when I returned from inter-railing (remember that?) around Europe with my friend Rick Adams. I don’t think I’ve ever been the same since. By placing these standard pieces of technology in a novel arrangement, Nauman produced an infinite loop. He made a system that people explored, and made their own narratives within. It was the first time I had ever seen technology used to tell a human story, full of emotion. Walking around the cube, I glanced the back of my head, just going around the corner as I turned it. No matter how fast I ran, I could never catch up with myself.

There are many artists and designers out there working with LED – but few appreciate how easy it is to drive huge LED displays – I remember being staggered to see my mouse pointer go across a massive collection of Barco LED – and all through the DVI out of my Macbook Pro. If it has to go on the road, it has to be roadie proof.

I’ve always loved Science Fiction. From the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, to my first reading of Neuromancer in 1997. What a summer that was, I’d finished my A-levels, was preparing to go to work for IBM, and also listened to OK Computer, which was released that year. Below are four Science Fiction novels that I have read and enjoyed over the past few years.

“The Stars My Destination” by Alfred Bester. This one I came across via William Gibson – he has consistently named it his favourite, and after reading it the influence on him is clear. The introduction of the concept of “jaunting” – the ability for humans to teleport themselves at will – is only limited by the ability of the person to imagine the space they want to go with sufficient clarity.

Accelerando” by Charles Stross. From a near future character that has created software that automatically patents his every business thought, to an orbiting group of lobster based AI, Acceralando starts fast and bends time to go faster. Available for free from the author here.

“Tau Zero” by Poul Anderson. A future world ruled by Sweden. My introduction to so called “hard” SF. A starship aiming to explore the stars suffers a brake failure, meaning all they can do is accelerate to the end of the universe. Where next?

“Diaspora” by Greg Egan. A scrupulously accurate in research terms hard SF writer. Famously has no images available of himself online. Diaspora deals with a group of people digitising and copying themselves 1000 times, and dispatching micro-spaceships to the farthest corners of space in attempt to understand the universe. As an astounding ending as I have ever read.

When I attended the lovely Beyond Tellerrand 2012 conference, I was lucky enough to catch Andy Baio‘s keynote.

He covered many things in his talk, but the one that really stuck was his demand that we all watch two documentaries immediately:

• Indie Game The Movie
• We Are Legion

Indie Game The Movie tells the tail of three independent developers, and their attempts to make their own dream game, outside traditional EA style game development.

The three games featured are:

• Super Meat Boy
• Fez
• Braid

We are Legion tells the story of the beginning of Anonymous, operation AntiSec and LulzSec. They also made lovely timeline.

I can’t recommend each film enough, and you can download them both through VHX.

The final story that Andy told was that of his festival, XOXO (Kiss Hug Kiss Hug), for independent makers of all kinds. You can see all the videos from the festival for free here.

I am truly excited about the future for all independent makers – the devils bargain that was previously necessary to distribute your work has evaporated.

“No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.”

Bob Black writes in his seminal essay about what would happen if we had a Ludic Revolution. Thanks to Bruce Lawson (@brucel) for the link. More background here.

“Profit is the reward for correctly understanding an aspect of reality ahead of your peers.”

Above is a quote from Alain de Botton that I keep bringing up in presentations. Isn’t this the purest form of entrepreneurship – anticipating the future?

“I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.”

Black and de Botton got me to thinking about Bertrand Russell‘s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness“.

“Some people seem to think that getting acquired should be the highest aspiration for an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. I disagree vehemently.”

Vinod Khosla recently complained that the current crop of startups in Silicon Valley seems to be obesssed with getting accquired and cashing out – which used to not be the highest aspiration. As he says in the article “You are missionaries NOT mercenaries” – precisely because missionaries are the only people that can attract the best employees – the primary challenge of any creative business.

Sometimes I dispair when reading Hacker News that this is all that the current crop care about – but I guess this is selection bias, on my and their parts.

Which ones have the vision at the moment? IMHO:

Github – organising all the worlds code.
Dropbox – organising all the worlds media.
Vicarious – helping computers think like humans.
D-Wave – harnessing quantum computing for real world applications.
Planetary Resources – gathering resources from outside our gravity well.

And no discussion of Silicon Valley would be complete without a link to Steve Blank’s comprehensive Secret History.