Uncategorized

How do you get better? Here are some ideas:

To summarize these results:

• The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
• but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
• and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin.

I remember a really interesting discussion (I think it was on reddit, but google has failed me) about how working ‘overtime’ (an ambiguous term, I admit, but stay with me) is a sign of a poorly designed work process.

Should there be such a thing as overtime? If you’re a doctor or lawyer or some kind of hourly-paid professional the concept is ambiguous. If you’re not paid hourly you’re paid for delivering some kind of completed project and the concept is even more ambiguous.

How about this?

Most of the time, a week in which I work 40 hours sucks. If I’m working on interesting things, 40 hours is not enough. If I’m working on boring things, 40 hours is far too many. Either way, not so fun. 40 hours is a compromise week in which I don’t actually get a lot of work done, but I’m probably stuck in the office a lot.

And there’s no question that even 40 hours at your desk yields something less than 40 hours of solid work. Work productivity ebbs and flows. If you work 0 hours one week and 85 the next, how much overtime have you worked?

To Horce Dediu’s post where he argues that Siri might be the next revolutionary interface. Here are his points in its favor:

There are many things going for it:

1. It’s not good enough
2. There are many smart people who are disappointed by it
3. Competitors are dismissive
4. It does not need a traditional, expensive smartphone to run but it uses a combination of local and cloud computing to solve the user’s problem.
5. It is, in a word, asymmetric.

He’s really thrashing his straw man with the first few points. My informal read of the commentariat suggest Siri’s boosters outnumber its haters by an order of magnitude. The 4th, though, is important

But read his whole post. His real point is this:

In 2007 something happened which changed the industry. It took a few years to even realize it was happening but by the time it was obvious, it had changed to such a degree that huge companies found themselves in financial distress.

Revolutions are hard to predict, even when they’re happening. And they’re slow, so don’t go getting all frustrated that Siri’s best case scenario is dominance in 3 years.

File this one under: things I ‘should’ do since I live in New York.

The evening is comprised of stuffing 700 people into an auditorium to watch a bunch of live tech (software and hardware) demos.

In the most Burroughs-esque way this is junk for innovation junkies.

You feel the pain of demos gone wrong, you cheer awesome implementation of awesome ideas. You can feel a jolt of charisma from some of the young entrepreneurs and you can smell the money backing the most polished products.

The audience is packed with all sorts of folks: computer nerds, unemployed equity analysts, employed equity analysts, friends of presenters, VCs and random enthusiasts like myself.

I sat next to an unemployed equity analyst with a CS background looking for startup ideas for himself. Interesting fellow and good for the odd sensible comment on the presentations.

I’m skipping the after-party tonight, but maybe I’ll make the time when I come back next month.

And come back I will.

I’m heavily influenced by my own educational experience, obviously, but I think that the educational standards of the future should take heed of what CFA Charterholders and Actuaries need to do.

You need to do three things to enter into these clubs:

1. Have experience in the profession (vouched for by an insider). 2. Pass a bunch of (very) challenging exams.
3. Have a college degree.

My question is what the hell is the point of #3? All it does is restrict the pool of candidates to those than can afford to go to college.

The only valuable effect of #3 is that it sets an age floor for beginning the apprenticeship. And there should be a minimum age restriction of some form.

There shouldn’t be any 23 year old fully qualified actuaries. They aren’t mature or experienced enough to fulfill the role’s obligations.

Everyone focuses on the exams because they’re difficult, but the experience is much more important. It’s the apprenticeship that matters for performance.

Why can’t we have more independent exams to signal intelligence and drive and, from that pool of exam-takers, select apprentices? Then make the apprentices work for 10 years or something.

It’d be cheap, it’d be effective. It would make society better off.

If you haven’t, you should consider reading Create Your Own Economy, by Tyler Cowen.

In it, he discusses, among many many other things, the idea of autism: what it is, what it means, what skills people with that kind of ‘cognitive profile’ have and lack.

Ok, now read this.

Richard Stallman is definitely some kind of super-functioning autistic. Cowen, whose link I followed to the piece, approves, unsurprisingly.

The document is an introduction to what it takes to get Stallman (RMS) to come speak at some event for you. This is what he does for a living and so I was expecting there to be lots of very specific instructions. And there are lots of good to be specific, too. See Van Halen’s contract!

But get a load of this (long quote):

I am willing to stay in a hotel if there is no other way.
Please book the hotel for me and arrange to pay the hotel directly.

But please DON’T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored
other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I
would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I
can close, in order to have some privacy). Staying with someone is
more fun for me than a hotel, and it would also save you money…

…Above 72 fahrenheit (22 centigrade) I find sleeping quite difficult.
(If the air is dry, I can stand 23 degrees.) A little above that
temperature, a strong electric fan blowing on me enables me to sleep.
More than 3 degrees above that temperature, I need air conditioning to
sleep.

If there is a substantial chance of indoor temperatures too hot for
me, please arrange _in advance_ for me to have what I need.

If you are planning for me to stay in a hotel, DO NOT take for granted
that the hotel has air conditioning–or that it will be working when I
arrive. Some hotels shut off their air conditioning systems for part
of the year. They often think it is unnecessary in seasons when the
temperature is usually in the mid 20s–and they follow their schedule
like stupid robots even if there is a heat wave…

I like cats if they are friendly, but they are not good for me; I am
somewhat allergic to them. This allergy makes my face itch and my
eyes water. So the bed, and the room I will usually be staying in,
need to be clean of cat hair. However, it is no problem if there is a
cat elsewhere in the house–I might even enjoy it if the cat is
friendly.

Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me, unless they
are small and cannot reach much above my knees. But if they only bark
or jump when we enter the house, I can cope, as long as you hold the
dog away from me at that time. Aside from that issue, I’m ok with
dogs.

If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be
very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I
can visit with, that will be nice too.

DON’T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To
acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If
you don’t know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally
scarred and spend many decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you
buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating
practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it.
Meeting that sad animal is not an agreeable surprise.

Email:

It is very important for me to be able to transfer email between my
laptop and the net, so I can do my ordinary work…

I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol. If the network
requires a proxy for SSH, I probably can’t use it at all…

…In some places, my hosts act as if my every wish were their command.
By catering to my every whim, in effect they make me a tyrant over
them, which is not a role I like. I start to worry that I might
subject them to great burdens without even realizing. I start being
afraid to express my appreciation of anything, because they would get
it and give it to me at any cost.

…I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about
what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up.

And on it goes. Fascinating stuff.

Been light on posting as I dash myself against the rocks of Machine Learning programming. Here are some neat things I’ve read in the last 20 minutes:

1. What is Dark Matter?. No answers, but an illustration of the infurating paradox: there’s almost unquestionably a THERE there, but nobody has any idea what’s there. The most important problem today in basic science?

2. Steve Jobs’ best interview ever? Stay tuned.

3. The Post-Industrial Economy. Ridiculous phrase for a concept I really care about. Bottom line: people will have ever greater power to make their own stuff. 3D printing, programming skills, ridiculously cheap education on just about anything. Try to wade through the consultant-jargon and think about these concepts.

My blind spot for human progress is materials science and 3d printing. I know nothing about these two massively important topics so they’re not on this list. If I could stitch together even one coherent sentence on the matter, I’d be all over it.

Read the theory of status by Robin Hanson.

Alt title: Today in Photoshop

Photoshop can now unblur.

But, wait. Why don’t they just enhance?

Kindle fire, eh. Pretty neat.

A few observations:

1. As many others have noted in many ways: 10 years ago how many leaps of faith would it take to name the three biggest innovators in tablets/smartphones: Apple, Amazon and Google? Shit like that don’t happen in Soviet Russia.
2. It’s also interesting that each of these players have their fingers in lots of different pots. Any one-trick ponies left in mainstream consumer electronics? They call this convergence, I hear.
3. Stripping the luxury features and going cheap isn’t exactly a hard strategy to figure out. Executing it is tough, though, and Amazon’s new browser appears to be the cog that makes it work: speed without speed, storage without storage.
4. But it’s not like that’s a new idea, either. Web developers make very careful decisions about what content gets rendered and processed locally and remotely and this balance changes with advances in technology. There have always been workarounds for slower connections.
5. Still, Amazon crushes it with its ready-to-go access to all those resources in its cloud. Apple will get there, too, eventually. See #2.
6. And it’s cheap. Cheap is good. Never underestimate cheap.