Quotes « Vincent Gable’s Blog

July 16, 2008

Determinism and Bending the Rules

Filed under: Quotes,Research | Cheating, Consciousness
― Vincent Gable on July 16, 2008

There is a very clever little experiment that you would be amused by, run by my colleague Jonathan Schooler. He has a bunch of students read a paragraph or two from the Francis Crick book, Astonishing Hypothesis, which is very deterministic in tone and intent. And then he has another group of students reading an inspirational book about how we make our own decisions and determine our own path. He then lets each group play a videogame in which you’re free to cheat. So guess who cheats? The people who have just read that it’s all determined cheat their pants off.

—Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga discuss neuroscience, psychology, status, and free will over at Seed Magazine.

(Via Big Contrarian.)

Comments (1)

July 15, 2008

Using a File Erasure Tool Considered Suspicious

Filed under: Quotes,Security,Tips | Habits, Police State, Privacy
― Vincent Gable on July 15, 2008

I have often recommended that people use file erasure tools regularly, especially when crossing international borders with their computers. Now we have one more reason to use them regularly: plausible deniability if you’re accused of erasing data to keep it from the police.

— Bruce Schneier

Finder -> Secure Empty Trash

Comments (1)

July 7, 2008

Bug Triage Priorities

Filed under: Programming,Quotes | Bugs, Debugging
― Vincent Gable on July 7, 2008

Roughly, my triage order is:
* Data-loss bugs
* Unavoidable crashers
* Functionality-blocking bugs
* Avoidable crashers
* Avoidable bugs
* Misfeatures
* Performance issues
* Feature suggestions
* UI feedback
This is, of course, a rough ordering

–Wil Shipley

I totally agree that data-loss / corruption is a higher priority then crashes. You can upgrade|downgrade a crashy program. But once data is gone, it is gone. Protecting users data should be your prime directive. I have always strongly disagreed with any bug triage that put crashes at spot #1.

Comments (0)

Rands First Law of Information Management

Filed under: Quotes,Tips,Usability | blogs, Information, Internet, RSS, Twitter
― Vincent Gable on July 7, 2008

Rands’ First Law of Information Management: “For each new piece of information you track, there is an equally old and useless piece of information you must throw away.”

—Rands in repose

So true.

Comments (0)

The Cost of Computing

Filed under: Programming,Quotes | Business, Cost, Economics, Software Development
― Vincent Gable on July 7, 2008

But if you look at the history of the computer business, where we are at now in terms of costs is probably similar to where we were in the 80’s and early to mid 90s. Most of the cost was in manpower. That was the case then and it is the case now.

—Hank Williams

Comments (0)

July 6, 2008

Open Systems Can Be Built With Closed Systems

Filed under: Quotes | Freedom, Internet, Technology
― Vincent Gable on July 6, 2008

Even the worst of our closed platforms, the telephone system, wasn’t closed enough that the internet couldn’t be built on top of it.

— Jack Shedd

Comments (0)

Designers Don’t Solve Stuff

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes
― Vincent Gable on July 6, 2008

Designers are so low on the list of people capable of solving the problems we face … I don’t care how clever your layouts are, we, as designers, are incapable of solving global hunger, poverty or warming. We are what we have always been. The messenger, not the message.

Developers on the other hand …

—Jack Shedd

Absolutely true, if “Designers” continue to limit themselves to style, and not how it works.

Comments (0)

July 3, 2008

NP-Complete is Often Easy

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes | Complexity, Haskell, NP-Complete, NP-Hard
― Vincent Gable on July 3, 2008

There are a lot of problems that are, in theory, incredibly difficult – but because the difficult cases are very rare and rather contrived, they’re actually very easy to solve. Two examples of this that I find particularly interesting are both NP complete. Type checking in Haskell is one of them: in fact, the general type inference in Haskell is worse that NP complete: the type validation is NP-complete; type inference is NP-hard. But on real code, it’s effectively approximately linear. The other one is a logic problem called 3-SAT. I once attended a great talk by a guy named Daniel Jackson, talking about a formal specification language he’d designed called Alloy. Alloy reduces its specification checking to 3-SAT. Dan explained this saying: “The bad news is, analyzing Alloy specifications is 3-SAT, so it’s exponential and NP-complete. But the good news is that analyzing Alloy specifications is 3-SAT, so we can solve it really quickly

—Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC

Comments (0)

Unfriends

Filed under: Design,Quotes | facebook, Security
― Vincent Gable on July 3, 2008

Facebook‘s “People You May Know” feature shows you a few links to profiles of people you … well, may know. Put another way it’s a feature that
shows you people that all your friends know who you are not friends with. There aren’t pleasant names for these kinds of people.

Facebook is a spiteful conniving bitch

It continues to put my ex in the “people you may know” section.
You fuckin’ dirty backstabbing whore, facebook, I’ll kill you. Just keep rubbing that shit in, I’ll fucking kill you.

—some bitter guy.

Applying the ‘The Security Mindset’ can keep you from implementing a similar feature.

Comments (0)