Programmatic Conquest

The programmatic activities and interests of an R&D hacker.  J Corwin

[outlawpoet]

January 4th 2019 Update

New Year New Direction!

I’ve gone to Mattel, where I accepted a contract to be an R&D ML Engineer for them. It’s similar to work I did for Disney, and I’m looking forward to making smart toys and video games again. There’s really nothing like a happy kid engrossed in something you made. The position is very focused on applying advanced tech, so I’m also happy to be back using my AI experience more heavily after a few years of being a generalist. 

I spent a fair amount of time looking for a new job after getting laid off at Hyperloop, and one place I came very close to joining was OpenPath. I have a number of friends there, they have a great product, I can’t recommend it highly enough. And they are still hiring if you happen to match one of their openings. It just came down to a great opportunity at Mattel I couldn’t say no to. 

Still running things at Crashspace, if you’re in the LA area, come by on Tuesday nights to check it out. 

My new years resolution is to spend an hour a day working on a project for myself, hopefully some of which should bear fruit I can put on here. 

[programmaticconquest]

[programmaticconquest]

the core of all ethics is a negotiated or discovered equilibrium that creates and perpetuates a society

Patiency is not a virtue: the design of intelligent systems and systems of ethics | SpringerLink

[programmaticconquest]

October 25th 2017 Update

A realization that I hadn’t updated my “professional” site in a while. 

I’m still at Hyperloop One, I converted to full-time this year and have been promoted to Manager of Physical Networks, which means I’m responsible for ensuring that all the radio systems function, which is trickier than it sounds given the speed and environment and safety critical nature of things.

Crashspace is still the best community of hackers, artists, and nerds I know. If you’re in the LA area, consider stopping by, particularly if you need tools that don’t fit in your apartment, we have them. 

This year is challenging for many reasons, but I’m still hopeful. 

[programmaticconquest]

They weren’t dumb, these guys. Indeed, they remain some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But you can only be as smart as the framework of your reality permits. And they—or, more to the point, the organizations, institutions, habits of mind, legal systems, and social practices of which they were manifestations—had created a box that was hard to think themselves out of.

Is Cyberspace Still Anti-Sovereign? | California Magazine

[outlawpoet]

(via General Leonard H. Perroots who Deescalated Risk of Nuclear War During Able Archer 83 Has Died; DIA Cannot Find His Letter Warning of Danger | UNREDACTED)

Just one of those guys, (like Petrov) who saved the world during the Cold War. 

“The PFIAB report (which the National Security Archive fought for 12 years to declassify) revealed that the danger of Able Archer 83 ebbed after Perroots, then a young air force officer, made the “fortuitous, if ill-informed [] decision” … “out of instinct, not informed guidance” to do “nothing in the face of evidence that parts of the Soviet armed forces were moving to an unusual level of alert” during the exercise.  By not responding to Soviet escalation in kind, Perroots essentially ended the two Super Powers’ nuclear anteing during the War Scare –and, as it turned out, the entire Cold War.“

Try not to think too much about how both he and Petrov acted against orders when they saved us, and the military command at the time reprimanded them.

[programmaticconquest]

The public domain C standard library project

this is actually really interesting. attempting to open a generic c library up even more than open source licenses do (which often keep commercial programs from using them) might drive more adoption and compliance. I don’t know that i subscribe to the “one large library” concept, but it seems like there is a happy medium they are shooting for. 

I would like to stop rewriting some things in c over and over across projects. 

[programmaticconquest]

(via John Oliver Reacts to Trump's Victory | Alternet)

yeah.

So, that happened. 

A week later, people are coming to grips with the new normal, so I thought I would take a moment to update my “professional” blog. 

So. 

I’m still contracting for Hyperloop One. (they changed their name). It’s a really fun set of problems and I’m getting to work on hard stuff.

I am very proud of crashspace, as we enter our seventh year of operation, it’s stronger than ever as a hackerspace and community. As President of it, I get to share in the glory, but it’s really all our other members doing cool things. 

I did some contracting for smaller companies, like Pinpoint Eyes and FlyHydra, whom you may hear from soon. They have cool products, and I’m not a full team member but I am happy to have contributed some. 

I may be launching a Patreon or Patreons soon, to support some overtly political projects I am kicking around with friends privately right now. I will post about them as they launch. 

I got an iPad Pro, and I can confirm the Pencil is the best electronic drawing experience I’ve had yet. I will post art on my personal tumblr. 

I hope everybody is safe and hopeful and hopping mad, because we’ve got some work to do. 

[programmaticconquest]

Get ready for LIVE-Tweeting from Las Vegas, May 10, 5pm PDT @HyperloopTech

[programmaticconquest]

I don’t know if it’s possible to make a competitive modern workstation that is fully open, secure, and high performance, but this is the best attempt I’ve seen recently.

[programmaticconquest]

The Loop so far.

Hyperloop is a crazy place. The whole company is focused on solving so many technical problems simultaneously it’s hard to get a sense of where things are. But it’s all pretty interesting.

I’m here for radio design, and am full-time, but still a contractor. Not sure if I’ll become a full employee or not yet. I was thinking after Disney I could use more time on my own projects I’ve been planning, but there’s a lot to get done here, maybe it’s more useful to focus on that. 

Crashspace continues to be the coolest place to be, our art show last month was astoundingly successful and has brought a lot of new people in. Our annual member meeting is coming up, and plans for the next year are percolating. 

[programmaticconquest]

Jobs

This is my last week at Disney. Working on Playmation has been incredibly interesting, but my contract is up, and it’s time to move on. 

My next contract is with Hyperloop, building something truly crazy. Expect more details and a return to some of my other projects in a week or two, as I’ll have a little more spare time in between. I’m hoping to have a few entries in the Hackaday Prize and other design challenges this year too. 

[programmaticconquest]

This is a deeply technical and boring article, but decentralized websites is a super key technology that will change the current giant Stacks paradigm of web businesses.

[programmaticconquest]

A review of recent results confirming the decade or so old suspicion that old blood seems to ameliorate age-related biomarker decline. They even have a protein semi-isolated, GDF11. Look for the price of whole blood from teenagers and twenty-somethings to go up in the next few years. Transfusion is so well safety-defined already, doing human trials of this would actually be very simple, once you have an excuse to run it (the FDA does not consider “aging” a pathology, so you’d need some kind of therapeutic reasoning to get only old people in the trial. Age-related hearing loss or cognitive speed deficits maybe?)

Interesting stuff, and a perfect PS from Derek on this one:

"Irreverent aside: (Countess Báthory, an apparent pioneer in this field whose dosing protocols were suboptimal, does not seem to be cited in any of the press reports I’ve seen. Not sure about her publication record, though - maybe she’s hard to reference from the primary literature.)"

[programmaticconquest]

We’ve launched our Indiegogo campaign to get a new CNC Mill and provide you with cool classes. Check out the link for more details.

[programmaticconquest]

Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it's literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There's a team at a Google office that hasn't slept in three days. Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead. And if these people stop, the world burns.

Programming Sucks This is one of the best articles I've ever read. What people don't understand about programming (even many programmers) is that it is not a mature discipline. It's comparatively young, and so freakishly quickly being applied to every single thing in our civilization that the amazing thing is that it works at all. Some day we'll have a sane software platform for all the things we want to do, but it is probably not going to happen until a similar amount of time to say, constructing a cathedral is spent. There are too many details, and someone is just going to have to go through them all. There is no solution to this. And the half-assed solutions we make now so that we can ship a product in less than five years just means someone will have to come back and solve it again. But what's the alternative?

[programmaticconquest]

"When people come and go in the industry, they have all these contacts and better access than other people have and more opportunity for their voices to be heard and their influence to be deployed," he said. "I think that only enhances the power of the special interest at the expense of the public interest." The revolving door "isn't peculiar to the Federal Communications Commission. It's kind of everywhere you look. Probably it's one reason why a lot of people have diminished trust or diminished faith in government."

Washington’s revolving door: Cellular lobby and FCC have traded leaders | Ars Technica Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, speaking about the shockingly pro-industry decision by the FCC regarding Net Neutrality, and why allowing industry members to regulate themselves by the backdoor is problematic. The current FCC Head was previously the president of the National Cable and Telecom Association, and obviously has close ties to companies like Comcast, which was welcomed the rules change which will allow them to charge individually negotiated ransoms to provide "better service" to sites on the internet.