macOS 我是当作生产力工具来用的，因而上面我安装的大多数 Setapp 应用都是我日常工作中助力非凡的应用：Espresso 专门给文章的 html 代码进行优化、TextSoap 批量处理文章中的常见误写、Canary Mail 是我的主力邮箱应用、Keysmitch 这款傻瓜自动化是我最近的新宠解决了我工作中许多死板的点点点、Mockuuups Studio 套壳做题图、Permute 批量转换格式、Paste 接管了我的常用字段和代码……一口气说太多简直停不下来

企业邮箱对于树立一个公司的形象很重要，有的公司的企业邮箱前缀是sales,sales2,sales3,sale4，就被用户吐槽说看着像骗子，不够专业

Mike is able to have some fast iterations by using After Effects and Cinema 4D, but he also advocates translating other ideas from web design such as the design grid. You can still do a lot of paper prototyping of interface ideas, but VR is a medium that has spatial, depth, and lighting considerations and so it’s helpful to see what it actually might look like in VR as well.

About half of The Brothers Vonnegut tells a familiar tale of Bildung: It’s the story of a writer becoming a writer, and it’s a compelling and uncommonly detailed one. Strand’s book focuses mostly on the period between 1945—when Vonnegut witnessed firsthand the bombing of Dresden, which would later inspire Slaughterhouse-Five—and 1952, when Bernard left G.E., apparently in a fit of conscience. 

In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut was asked by an interviewer why he started writing science fiction. “I was working for General Electric at the time,” he replied, “right after World War II, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines.” The machine was computer-operated, and it inspired Vonnegut to write a novel, Player Piano, about a future society in which industry has become completely automated, at enormous human cost. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he told his interviewer, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.”

Andreessen says that Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, which chronicles the banker's time as a Hollywood movie mogul, is one of his favorite books, and he calls Kennedy "the one who wasn't like the others." That sums up Kennedy, and it sums up Andreessen too. Both were outsiders (Kennedy an Irish Catholic Bostonian among Jewish immigrant traders from New York, Andreessen a computer nerd among financiers). "He's someone who looks at society and says interesting things," García Martínez says of Andreessen, "which is unlike most VCs, who are total followers and don’t have much interesting to say about the world."

The title of David Thompson's 2006 Hollywood history, The Whole Equation, is a nod to an oft-quoted passage about Hollywood in F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. "It can be understood," it reads, "but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."

Old Hollywood, writes Jeanine Basinger in The Star Machine, another book in the Andreessen lobby, was a factory that built illusions. It transformed ordinary men and women into "the gods and goddesses known as a movie stars." Take Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner. Born in an Idaho mining town, she landed a Hollywood agent after the editor of The Hollywood Reporter spotted her drinking a Coke in Currie’s Candy and Cigar Store, across the street from Hollywood High School.

Linux系统有句slogan，叫做“everything is a file”，意思是说Linux系统的一切东西都可以当做文件来进行读写。比如说你外接了一个USB设备，这个设备被Linux系统识别后，就会被当做一个文件，你可以对它进行打开、读取、写入等像操作文件一般的操作。但是你我都知道这东西它其实不是一个文件，而是一个USB设备，那么我们对文件写入的话到底写入到哪儿了呢？这就是驱动的作用了，它负责把你写入的东西放到该放的地方，使这个USB设备按你的想法运转。

Hotz started the autonomous car work because he sees it as Step 1 in the revolution. Transportation is an area where AI can have a massive impact. He hopes to take his technology to retail next, building systems that provide flawless self-checkout at stores. His desire to have AI take over so many jobs stems partly from a near-religious belief in the power and ultimate purpose of technology. “Technology isn’t good or bad,” he says. “There are upsides like nuclear power and downsides like nuclear bombs. Technology is what we make of it. There’s a chance that AI might kill us all, but what we know is that if you’re on the other side of technology, you lose. Betting on technology is always the correct bet.”

A short time later I slip into the back of a two-story amphitheater where Zuckerberg, dressed in a dark suit and a tie, has come to make the case that the Internet should be considered, like health care or clean water, a basic human right. He sees this as the most critical social endeavor of our time. Zuckerberg believes peer-to-peer communications will be responsible for redistributing global power, making it possible for any individual to access and share information. People could tap into government services, determine crop prices, get health care. A kid in India—Zuckerberg loves this hypothetical about a kid in India—could potentially go online and learn all of math. “It’s the underpinning for helping people get into the modern economy,” he says. “Ten years from now, we should not have to look back and accept there are people who don’t have access to that.”

底层的忙碌创造的价值是非常有限的，希望你能尽早意识到这一点，不要搭上了健康感动了自己，最后换得一个尴尬的结局。

神圣时间，很多著名的文学家、思想家、企业家都会设置自己的神圣时间，在这个时间段去写作、健身、冥想。在神圣时间里，要做的这件事「神圣不可侵犯」，任何其他事项，哪怕是工作、回复邮件这种事也不能抢占这个既定时间，严苛的专时专用。

IF THEN 由两部分构成，分别是触发条件和对应的行动。前面提到「人类是一个半成品」，这也说明，这个系统有很多「IF THEN」是缺失、落后的，需要补充或修正。我们看到高手总能态度坚决、行动迅速，小白总是犹犹豫豫，轻易沉溺，很重要的原因就是缺乏完备的「IF THEN」作支撑。

“Machine learning was one of the areas in AI that we thought was kind of most important for everyone to see, which is why that area is required for everyone,” Sahami said. “Through a class like CS 109 that provides an introduction to machine learning, everyone in the CS major will be guaranteed to see at least that level of stuff.” 

In 2009, there is a photograph where my father is no longer there. He passed away a few days after his 91st birthday. My mother continued to wave good-bye to me. Her face became more forlorn with my departures. In 2017, my mother had to move to assisted living. For a few months, I photographed the good-byes from her apartment door. In October of 2017 she passed away. When I left after her funeral, I took one more photograph, of the empty driveway. For the first time in my life, no one was waving back at me.

Plato believed that expertise is the critical attribute of a leader; He criticizes democracy of seldom producing such characters. Rather, it elects popular spinsters who are effective in manipulating popular opinion.To depict this, Plato uses an analogy of ship navigation in Book VI of ‘The Republic’. He contests that in order to select the appropriate captain, a popular vote is ineffective because people can be swayed by characteristics as irrelevant as their appearance. Instead, we should seek out only the most knowledgeable candidate as it is he who holds the required expertise.Plato illustrates the ignorance that democracy yields in producing a captain:… the true navigator must study the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all the other subjects appropriate to his profession if he is to be really fit to control the ship…[the electorate] think that it’s quite impossible to acquire the professional skill needed for such control and that there’s no such thing as the art of navigation.

Everything has changed—the cinema and the importance it holds in our culture. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that artists such as Godard, Bergman, Kubrick, and Fellini, who once reigned over our great art form like gods, would eventually recede into the shadows with the passing of time. But at this point, we can’t take anything for granted. We can’t depend on the movie business, such as it is, to take care of cinema. In the movie business, which is now the mass visual entertainment business, the emphasis is always on the word “business,” and value is always determined by the amount of money to be made from any given property—in that sense, everything from Sunrise to La Strada to 2001 is now pretty much wrung dry and ready for the “Art Film” swim lane on a streaming platform. Those of us who know the cinema and its history have to share our love and our knowledge with as many people as possible. And we have to make it crystal clear to the current legal owners of these films that they amount to much, much more than mere property to be exploited and then locked away. They are among the greatest treasures of our culture, and they must be treated accordingly. I suppose we also have to refine our notions of what cinema is and what it isn’t. Federico Fellini is a good place to start. You can say a lot of things about Fellini’s movies, but here’s one thing that is incontestable: they are cinema. Fellini’s work goes a long way toward defining the art form.

It's a Dorian Grayish fable, transposed to the twenty-first century: Steve Jobs has become Steve Jobs by doing what nobody else has done before -- by treating computers not just as tools but as mirrors, by making technology not just the engine but the emblem of transcendence. One day, however, he will have to do what everybody else has done before, and will wind up demonstrating what it's like to be mortal, even in the age of the beautiful machine. And now that he has drawn undeniably closer to the day that has given all his other days their urgency -- now that the face staring back in the mirror has lost its shiny-haired California glamour and has taken on the frank rapacity of an old Arab trader -- it's worth asking what the pressure of continual existential awareness has done to him.

ProPublica’s story exposed racism in the algorithms police use to predict repeat offenders. Assigning a prisoner’s credit score, these algorithms are factored into determining how long a person will stay in jail and at times even used by judges when sentencing. Not only did they FOIA a data set and do a statistical analysis, but this work also made it into a White House report on AI. The article has even influenced a subdiscipline of computer science; at the time of this writing, there were 13 papers on arxiv.org about ProPublica’s article. It turns out that auditing a black-box algorithm is nontrivial.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Green wrote three fantastic cover stories about the upheaval in the Republican Party that led to the election of Donald Trump. Josh doesn't see it this way, but I look at them as a trilogy because they’re interconnected. The first, “This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America,” introduced many of us to Steve Bannon, the merry provocateur behind Breibart News. OK, this piece came out last year, but bear with me. The second, “How to Get Trump Elected Without Wrecking Everything You Built,” chronicled the sorrows of Reince Priebus, the seemingly hapless GOP chairman who was struggling with Trump’s rise. It also featured an unforgettable cameo appearance by the candidate himself at Trump Tower. Then there was “Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go,” in which Josh and Bloomberg’s Sasha Issenberg visited the Trump campaign’s data collection headquarters in San Antonio and talked to the foot soldiers who helped pulled off the Election Day upset. The gang’s all here in the piece. Bannon is now Trump’s campaign manager. Priebus seems to have figured out his man has a good shot at the White House. Then there’s that techie who looks like an Amish guy prospecting for votes on the internet, who got the job because he designed a cheap website for Ivanka. They all talked at length to Josh because he doesn’t have an agenda; he just wants to find out what’s going on, and when he does, he knows how to turn it into an irresistible read, which is the only way to describe this trilogy. I told him he should turn it into a book next. I still think so. Josh, are you reading this?

But everything truly did sort of get set in motion by a TV show—a 1982 BBC program called The Computer Programme. This was an attempt by the BBC to educate Britons about just what the hell all these new fancy machines that looked like crappy typewriters connected to your telly were all about.

We do keep track of projects, especially after we’ve killed them. For two reasons: No. 1, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We don’t want someone who gets hired two years after we kill a project to come up with the same idea and then spend three months rediscovering it. Reason No. 2 is we want to keep track of the ideas that we’ve had—and we do have a database—because sometimes there are presumptions [that could be revisited]. Say we’re going to not work on this project because one of the necessary constituent ingredients is a battery with 10 times the energy density of lithium-ion; it doesn’t exist, we don’t consider that a safe bet that it will appear in the next five years, so let’s not start this project. But then if that battery appeared, we would want to be able to go back and say, “Hey, wait a second, now we can reconsider this as a potential moonshot because that was the reason we killed it and that technology has now appeared.”

So our process is first you have to say what the huge problem is you’re trying to solve. You have to be able to describe it in order for it to have any chance of taking root at X. And there has to be some articulatable, hard but potentially solvable, technology problem at the middle of it. Once that’s true, we go down a path where instead of saying, “What’s most fun to do about this or what’s easiest to do first?” we say, “What is the most likely reason this project won’t make it?”

When you think about the Twitter-driven shake-out of blogging this evolution makes sense: Twitter captured the long-tail of blogs, in the process dramatically expanding the market for publishing text, but that by definition meant that the blogs that remained popular had readers that would jump through hoops — or at least click a link — to consume their content. It makes sense that the most sustainable way for those bloggers to pay the bills was by directly charging their readers, who already had demonstrated an above-average interest in their content. My personal bet is that podcasts will follow a similar path. Podcasts, even more than blogs, require a commitment on the part of the listener, but that commitment is rewarded by a connection to the podcast host that feels even more authentic; host-read podcast advertising leverages this authenticity, but for most medium-sized podcasts charging listeners directly will make more sense in the long run.

A Journey Into the Animal Mind

在 GitHub 上看到了一个基于 Python + TensorFlow 的开源 方案，等我学会 TensorFlow 了再研究吧

“In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content—it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use ‘playback’ to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”

靠着这份默契，两个人有十余年几乎没说过话，就用食物交流。每次去对方店里，主人用心做，客人用心吃。

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington recently wrote: “I thought Twitter was driving us apart, but I’m slowly starting to think half of you always hated the other half but never knew it until Twitter.” This is a good point that highlights something easy to overlook: 1) everyone belongs to a tribe, 2) those tribes sometimes fundamentally disagree with one another, 3) that’s fine if those tribes keep their distance, 4) the internet increasingly assures that they don’t.

And there’s a lot of them. The most important thing about this topic is that people don’t judge their wellbeing in a vacuum. They measure their worth relative to the people they see around them. If your income stays the same while people around you see their income rise 10%, you will likely feel worse off. This is usually subtle, as the material possessions of those with more money inflate your aspirations, often taunting you to close the gap between you and them by taking on debt.

All that matters here is that it happened, and happened enormously. It’s a Big Thing that impacts all kinds of other topics. Writing in the 1950s, historian Frederick Lewis Allen described the social revolution that took place as the Gilded Age gave way to a more balanced economy: To understand the America of today one must not only realize how vital to its development was the revolt of the American conscience, which implanted in Americans the idea that you could repair the economic and political machinery of the country, so as to make it work better for the majority, without stopping the machine … … through a combination of patchwork revisions of the system–tax laws, minimum wage laws, subsidies and guarantees and regulations of various sorts, plus labor union pressures and new management attitudes–we had repealed the Iron Law of Wages. We had brought about a virtually automatic redistribution of income from the well-to-do to the less well-to-do. And this did not stall the machine but actually stepped up its power. Just as an individual business seemed to run best when it plowed part of its profits into improvements, so the business system as a whole seemed to run better if you plowed some of the national income into improvements in the income and status of the lower income groups, enabling them to buy more goods and thus to expand the market for everybody. We had discovered a new frontier to open up: the purchasing power of the poor. That, it seems to me, is the essence of the Great American Discovery. And it has its corollary: that if you thus bring advantages to a great lot of previously underprivileged people, they will rise to their opportunities and, by and large, will become responsible citizens.

John Maynard Keynes predicted countries wrecked by war would go on to have a “craving for social and personal security,” and indeed they did. Historian Tony Judt writes of post-war Europe: Only the state could offer hope or salvation to the mass of the population. And in the aftermath of depression, occupation and civil war, the state—as an agent of welfare, security and fairness—was a vital source of community and social cohesion.

Dynamicland is a spatial computing project and new tech organization located in Oakland, California. They are dedicated to understanding how user interfaces will evolve over thousands of years. Dynamicland transforms a building into a computer–the UI can be a wall, or a table. Paper and sticky notes can be found everywhere. The ceilings are covered in cameras and projectors. Each individual section of paper is its own piece of the Lua programming language. Some printouts have their own code printed on them. One use is with paper representing datasets, and moving them together to the graph sheet, bringing the data into the graph. Another page uses a stick as a slider to pick the year of information visualized. Multiple users can interact with a program and the code directly, and together in the same space. Dynamicland as a creative space reflects the vision of SpatialFlow, creating an environment encouraging collaboration and playful experimentation, as well as movement through the space. The concept of using physical objects differs from that of SpatialFlow, where the user currently only manipulates virtual objects in the room. Dynamicland’s displays are rather flat, as they are based on sheets of paper, while SpatialFlow’s visualizations are three-dimensional for the most part. It will be interesting to see how the physical and the virtual can be best combined for ease of use. Dynamicland has inspired the transition of SpatialFlow’s prototype into more of an open-office plan environment, where creators may feel more at home. This allows users to understand the context of the space they are creating in, making it more believable and relatable to real working environments.

Poets and philosophers have warned almost forever against this kind of comfort. Socrates famously claimed that his wisdom came from knowing he knew nothing. John Keats defined “negative capability” — a quality he attributed to men “of Achievement” — as the ability to stay “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Donald Barthelme, in his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing,” argues that it is “what permits art to be made.” Georges Bataille thought “non-knowledge” was inherent to the human condition. The “unknowable immensity” of the universe “infinitely eludes an individual who seeks it,” he writes in Inner Experience (1943). Knowledge is “the means [by] which man attempts to take himself for the whole of the universe.” Designed to reduce the world to the answers it can provide, Google belies (or tries to belie) the universe’s infinite elusiveness.

“There will be only answers,” the writer Marguerite Duras said in 1985 when a TV show asked her to make a prediction about the year 2000. “The demand will be such that there will only be answers. All texts will be answers… about [man’s] body, his corporeal future, his health, his family life, his salary, his leisure. It’s not far from a nightmare. There will be nobody reading anymore.” Duras, who proceeded to complain about screens, was probably thinking of TV. But no medium has transformed texts into answers — obliterating certain kinds of ignorance and camouflaging others — more systematically than search engines.

This is a story about a story. The original, by Matt Stopera, appeared on BuzzFeed, and its title describes, and evokes, all of what followed in a four-part meme gone wild: “Who Is This Man And Why Are His Photos Showing Up On My Phone?” Its subtitle, “This weird thing happened to me,” is the perfect distillation of the BuzzFeed mode. The story is an agglomeration of homemade phone photos, GIFs, Twitter snapshots, listicles, and some writing, too, much of it in one-sentence paragraphs. (“Bali!” “So I go to China.”) It has no form any writing teacher would ever understand, but it’s filled with the wonder and joy that’s missing from most everything else I read. It is the story of a man in China (he’s mostly known as Orange Man, or Orange Brother) who unwittingly acquired a phone that Stopera had lost on the Lower East Side in New York, and what happened when their photo streams crossed, and then the Internet got involved.But this is a crafty recommendation, because, while I am essentially admitting that I totally enjoyed Stopera’s story, which had all the style of a DQ Blizzard, and was just as tasty, I am not actually technically saying I am jealous of it. I am saying I am jealous of Chris Beam’s sensitive, restrained, human take on his story, which probably way fewer people read. Beam, who is a terrific writer, went to visit Orange Man, the subject of Stopera’s piece, and found a much more complicated person, in a much more complicated situation. But Beam doesn’t arrive at the expected place either. We don’t learn that Matt Stopera cynically used Orange Man or anything like that. It’s just an odd, totally real story that gets more interesting with every post, or article, or tweet, or whatever. —Bryant Urstadt

Oh hey, this blog post on artificial intelligence looks like a fun quick read. At least that’s what I thought to myself as I clicked. And that’s how I fell into this 23,000-word wormhole of fact and prognostication—the format of choice at Tim Urban’s Wait But Why “blog.” I read the piece in January when it first appeared, and it basically inspired me to devote all of my 2015 book reading to science and science fiction about the near future. I know what you’re thinking: Who has the time for this? But don’t worry, it’s just a blog post ... —Tom Randall

I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.

"We thought it was this big joke that would die off," laughs Palmer.

阿司匹林治疗

Attention is a bit like the air we breathe. It’s vital but largely invisible, and thus we don’t think about it very much unless, of course, it becomes scarce. If that’s the case — to extend a tortured metaphor — it feels as if our attention has become polluted. We subsist on it, but the quality has been diminished. This is certainly true in my life, where I’ve become so reliant on the constant stimuli of our connected world that I find myself frequently out of control of my attention. I give it to others too willingly — often to those who will abuse the privilege. I’ve also become dependent on the attention of others, even those who bestow it in bad faith. I’ve become a version of the very person Mr. Goldhaber described in 1997, for whom “not being able to share your encounters with anyone would soon become torture.”

It’s tempting to argue that Amazon’s true innovation has been the ruthless exploitation of human labour in service of speed and efficiency, but that’s really only part of the picture: the aim is removing humans – with their need for toilet breaks, their stubborn insistence on sleeping, their tendency to unionise – as much as possible from the equation; the grim specifics of the labour conditions are only ever a byproduct of that aim. This has been an aim of capitalism since at least as far back as Henry Ford, and in an obvious sense it’s precisely the dynamic you experience every time you wind up with unexpected items in the bagging area at Tesco. As usual with Amazon, it’s not that something new is happening – it’s that an old thing is happening with unprecedented force, speed and efficiency.

The Snowy Day

Much like a brain deciphering pieces of information, the artificial neural network looks at the information it hasbeen given and generates the next word, based on its neighbouring words. Over time, it “learns” which words to focus on, and where to make the best contextual connections based on previous examples. This process is a form of “deep learning” and allows translation systems to continuously learn and improve as time goes on. In NMT, deciphering context is called “alignment” and happens in the attention mechanism, which is situated between the encoder and decoder in the machine’s system.

To be selected for the Top 100 is to be anointed by Jobs, an honor not necessarily based on rank. Jobs referred to the group, but not the conclave, in an interview several years ago with Fortune. “My job is to work with sort of the Top 100 people,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they’re all vice presidents. Some of them are just key individual contributors. So when a good idea comes … part of my job is to move it around [and] … get ideas moving among that group of 100 people.” Privately Jobs has spoken even more strongly about the Top 100’s importance. “If he had to recreate the company, these are the 100 people he’d bring along” is how one former Apple executive describes Jobs’ characterization.

Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken place with the aid of large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies of the computer and the Net were invented with the aid of massive state subsidies. For example, the first Difference Engine project received a British Government grant of £517,470 - a small fortune in 1834. From Colossus to EDVAC, from flight simulators to virtual reality, the development of- computing has depended at key moments on public research handouts or fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM corporation built the first programmable digital computer only after it was requested to do so by the US Defense Department during the Korean War. The result of a lack of state intervention meant that Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the first electronic computer in the late '30s when the Wehrmacht refused to fund Konrad Zuze, who had pioneered the use of binary code, stored programs and electronic logic gates.

We’re in the middle of a data revolution. Business processes everywhere are becoming digitized. Firms like Walmart and Target know exactly what you search for and what you end up buying. Other firms like ADP, Mastercard and FedEx are intimately involved in payrolls, transactions, delivery and every other stage of the commercial pipeline. And every single action that these firms take is recorded and stored for analysis. Human interactions are also becoming digitized. Social networks, instant messaging and web search paint a dynamic, real-time picture of what people are interested in and who they’re talking to. Again, every single action is recorded and stored for posterity. Smartphones are ubiquitous. This means an accurate location sensor, audio recorder, still/video camera, radio transponder and internet connection in every pocket. Almost no part of the world is outside the limits of cellular coverage. Cars and trucks now have embedded sensors, tracking position, velocity, traffic and much more. Satellites and GPS have gone from the preserve of the few (military) to the plaything of the many; imagery and position data are today a public good. As a result of these technological innovations, we are swimming in a sea of data. Yet this data would be meaningless if it weren’t for another, parallel advancement in the area of computation. Thanks to the relentless progress of Moore’s Law, we have the bandwidth to capture all this data, the memory to store it and the cycles to analyze it and extract commercial value from it. This capacity has transformed industries everywhere.

孔子说“不占而已矣”，他有三个原则。

占卜的目的是什么？一般人都会说，占卜就是要知道结果，这就全错了。 一个人做事情，不能问结果怎样才去做。

老子说：“不知常，妄作，凶。”（《道德经》）一个人不知道常规，就开始乱变，最后结果只有一个字——凶。人一味乱变，变到最后，自己连立锥之地都没有了，这是多可怕的事情。

中国人有跟没有合在一起，要跟不要合在一起，好跟不好合在一起，善跟恶合在一起，都是不能分的，一分开就完了。我们不要认为这样的人糊涂，不负责任。在中国社会，立场太分明，就得不到群众的支持。我们明明不喜欢的，也都说“好”、“没关系”，然后再想办法慢慢地把它一个个否定掉，而绝不会一开始就全盘否定。这样大家才知道，为什么美国的小孩子一做错事情，爸爸一定要问谁对谁错，然后只骂错的，不骂对的。 我有两个儿子，他们一吵架，我就两个都罚站。我首先教他们两个，对是没有用的，不要以为你对就没事了。等到兄弟两个站了五分钟以后，我就把弟弟叫来，对他说：“今天你没有错，就是哥哥一个人的错，不要以为爸爸糊涂。可是既然你没有错，我为什么罚你站？”弟弟说：“这样比较好。”我说：“你不高兴就说不高兴，不用拍爸爸马屁。”他说：“我真的没有不高兴。”我问为什么，他说：“有一次不晓得为什么，你只罚哥哥站而没有罚我，结果事后我被哥哥打得好惨。”我说：“哥哥打你，你就告诉我好了。”他说：“不告还好，告了打得更惨。”我说：“那我要怎么样呢？”他说：“就像这样好了，不管我有没有错，都罚我站，事后我会安全些。”这其中的道理，很多外国人一辈子都想不通。 然后，我又把哥哥叫来，问他：“今天是谁的错？”他说：“是我的错。”我又问：“弟弟有没有错？”他说弟弟没有错。我说：“你这不是知道得很清楚吗？”他说：“当然了，是非我总还是知道的。”我们看，中国人是表面没有是非，但心里一清二楚，叫做心中有数。我又问哥哥：“那为什么我还要罚弟弟站？”他说：“你是给我面子。”我说：“我干吗给你面子？”他马上说：“你是要我以后更加爱护弟弟。”我就说：“你知道这些就好了。”这样一来，兄弟两个今后会减少很多的争执和不快。

The bottom line is this: We humans have to adapt to the machines as much as the machines have to adapt to us. Our careers depend on it. Amazon runs simulations to figure out how to keep their human workers comfortable when loading robots with packages. This includes their range of movement from an ergonomics standpoint and their safety. Or such questions as how best for a human to grab a parcel, scan it, place it, and reach over to hit the button that sends the robot on its way. “There's an art to making it feel seamless between what the robot is doing and what the humans are doing,” says Brad Porter, VP of robotics at Amazon.It’s the kind of dynamic environment that’s perfect for the development of Amazon’s next iteration of its system. The company is working on a new modular robot called Xanthus with different attachments, say to hold containers instead of using a conveyor belt. This machine will in a sense bridge the divide between fulfillment centers, where humans are loading products into boxes by hand, and sorting centers, where they’re mostly working with those assembled boxes.

To map out all this madness, Amazon runs simulations. Those in turn inform how the drives themselves should be performing. What’s the optimal speed? What’s the optimal acceleration and deceleration, given you want the deliveries to be as efficient as possible while keeping the robots from smashing into one another? After all, a bump might toss a package to the ground, which other robots would spot with their vision sensors and route around, adding yet another layer of complexity to the field. (The robots have sensors on either end of their conveyor belt, by the way, so if a package starts to slip off the side, the belt automatically engages to pull the package back on.)

This one was Cozmo, a $179 gadget produced by Anki, which has taken more than $200 million from venture capitalists to bring “artificial intelligence and robotics to our everyday lives.” The company was founded by Carnegie Mellon graduates in 2010, one of many businesses spawned by the university’s robotics program. In downtown San Francisco, Anki employs nearly 200 people making toy robots governed by artificial intelligence.

When an item is collected by hand, the picker scans it with a handheld device to ensure that the correct object has been taken. And every item’s progress throughout the warehouse is constantly monitored thanks to a series of points at which it is scanned again – for example at the moment of being labelled with the customer’s name and address. “We are able to track where the item is at any one time at the fulfilment centre,” says Low, who is both confident and clearly proud of the attention to detail.

Three principal conclusions may be drawn concerning the significance and implications of the ideas that have been presented.6a First any possibility for improving the effective utilization of the intellectual power of society's problem solvers warrants the most serious consideration. This is because man's problem-solving capability represents possibly the most important resource possessed by a society. The other contenders for first importance are all critically dependent for their development and use upon this resource. Any possibility for evolving an art or science that can couple directly and significantly to the continued development of that resource should warrant doubly serious consideration.6b Second, the ideas presented are to be considered in both of the above senses: the direct-development sense and the 'art of development' sense. To be sure, the possibilities have long-term implications, but their pursuit and initial rewards await us now. By our view, we do not have to wait until we learn how the human mental processes work, we do not have to wait until we learn how to make computers more intelligent or bigger or faster, we can begin developing powerful and economically feasible augmentation systems on the basis of what we now know and have. Pursuit of further basic knowledge and improved machines will continue into the unlimited future, and will want to be integrated into the "art" and its improved augmentation systems—but getting started now will provide not only orientation and stimulation for these pursuits, but will give us improved problem-solving effectiveness with which to carry out the pursuits.6c Third, it becomes increasingly clear that there should be action now—the sooner the better—action in a number of research communities and on an aggressive scale. We offer a conceptual framework and a plan for action, and we recommend that these be considered carefully as a basis for action If they be considered but found unacceptable, then at least serious and continued effort should be made toward developing a more acceptable conceptual framework within which to view the over-all approach, toward developing a more acceptable plan of action, or both.6d This is an open plea to researchers and to those who ultimately motivate, finance, or direct them, to turn serious attention toward the possibility of evolving a dynamic discipline that can-treat the problem of improving intellectual effectiveness in a total sense. This discipline should aim at producing a continuous cycle of improvements—increased understanding of the problem, improved means for developing new augmentation systems, and improved augmentation systems that can serve the world's problem solvers in general and this discipline's workers in particular. After all, we spend great sums for disciplines aimed at understanding and harnessing nuclear power. Why not consider developing a discipline aimed at understanding and harnessing "neural power?" In the long run, the power of the human intellect is really much the more important of the two.

A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building and the Internet is one of the greatest network building tools of all time. However, DARPA doesn’t have a strong web presence and the idea that DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence may be how they avoid asymmetric career risk suggests that there are good reasons for the low Internet utilization. However, the Polyplexus project, a DARPA effort to foster an idea-generating online community, suggests that DARPA may realize that it’s no longer at the pareto front of this tradeoff and that it might be able to more effectively use the Internet to execute on its model. The Internet could conceivably help PMs find people working on the edge of a space, foster communication between performers, and find gaps in the state of the art. What would a riff on the ARPA Model built to take advantage of the Internet look like?

In Dynamicland, the computational media is not "hidden away in isolated virtual worlds", but rather exists in the common meatspace for all to see and get their hands on. This enables powerful ways of collaboration and sharing, working together with many hands and in eye contact with others around you. Dynamicland is "as multiplayer as the real world". Another Dynamicland principle is that everyone, not just specialist technicians, can make apps, these dynamic documents of the new medium. And everyone can modify existing artefacts to make them do what they want, just as anyone can craft artful or useful things from paper and clay and office supplies. In Dynamicland one walks the path from playing to crafting to remixing all the way to building useful things. This is programming liberated from the confines of the iridescent rectangle.

Operationally Dynamicland, Victor's research lab, follows the spirit of Douglas Engelbart and Xerox PARC, who decades ago invented the technologies and principles that became the foundation of the computer revolution and the information age. This first DL instance in Oakland is being realised by a small non-profit research group with a long-term orientation, something Victor is highly passionate about.

Future media and technologies – including what happens when virtual reality and augmented reality, for example, are combined with accelerated computational power – could amplify this angelic tendency, says Miroshnichenko, and bring about a new kind of “augmented humanity”. “Now we are about to totally live inside our latest medium. Almost all our activities are already there. Humankind is resettling from biological bodies into the digital body.”How, ultimately, media and technology affect us all – and the degree to which human nature is remoulded and redefined by our ‘tools’ – is open to debate. And that’s McLuhan’s point: “The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message,” he told Playboy magazine. “That by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them.”

“Electronic media cancelled the physical time and space limitation for humans to be present at events. Digital media advanced this new quality of human beings even more, they make time elastic, which is impossible in physical reality. In video games, a player can slow down, stop, reverse, repeat time. Resurrection becomes everyday routine for video game players, who save and restart their digital selves, and for social media users, who can delete and restore their profiles.”

The chief strategy for combatting future shock, according to Toffler, was to double down on the future itself. He called for government committees to fund large-scale future studies, for science-fiction writers to bring more methodical forecasting to their stories, for American schools to teach future-oriented courses (as a counterpoint to history classes). “To create such images and thereby soften the impact of future shock,” he wrote, “we must begin by making speculation about the future respectable.” This was not a new challenge; even H. G. Wells had taken pains to emphasize that the systematic attempt to project potential futures based on contemporary data could be a science, not mere fortune-telling. But Toffler’s book pushed futurism into the mainstream, not just in the realm of militarism (i.e., the type of nuclear-scenario planning pioneered at the RAND Corporation) but also in the “soft” spaces of everyday life, from “politics and playgrounds to skydiving and sex.”

Under a White Sky is one of several major books on warming being published this winter, presumably timed to the inauguration of a new climate-conscious president. But unlike Michael Mann’s The New Climate War or Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, it marks a notable turn in perspective for its author. Kolbert is, by temperament and intellectual inclination, a preservationist and a conservationist. Her first two climate books, The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes From a Catastrophe, were works of explicit lamentation and implicit exhortation. The new book begins from the premise that the world is already past a point of no return: “Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future,” she writes. The book’s key question is: What innovations will we jerry-rig, and what risky interventions will we conscience, as we slide down the precipice? Her ambivalent response is “If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control.”

To build this weapon – the ‘automatic simulations’ that gave the company its portmanteau name – Simulmatics assembled top scientists from MIT, Johns Hopkins and the Ivy League. According to Lepore, many of the academics ‘had been trained in the science of psychological warfare’. The result was the creation of a ‘voting-behaviour machine, a computer simulation of the 1960 election’, which was ‘one of the largest political-science research projects ever conducted’. The simulation was meant to provide granular predictions about how segments of the population might vote, given their backgrounds and the circumstances of the political campaigns. The company claimed responsibility for JFK’s win, but the president-elect’s representatives denied any relationship to the ‘electronic brain’, as newspapers dubbed it. Simulmatics went on to predict much else: it simulated the economy of Venezuela in 1963 with an aim of short-circuiting a Communist revolution, and became involved in psychological research in Vietnam and efforts to forecast race riots. Soon after, the company was the target of antiwar protests, and filed for bankruptcy by the end of the decade.

Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author and engineer, and is chairman and co-founder of Applied Minds.  Previously, he was Vice President and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering and was a co-founder of Thinking Machines Corp. Danny pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, and RAID disk array technology used to store large databases while completing his PhD at MIT. He holds over 150 U.S. patents, and is the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.  Danny is also the Judge Widney professor of engineering and research medicine at the University of Southern California, and serves as co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation, and is on the board of the Hertz Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Leadership Forum, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

First, the correct design was not obvious. For centuries, progress was stalled because inventors were all trying to create multi-person four-wheeled carriages, rather than single-person two-wheeled vehicles. It’s unclear why this was; certainly inventors were copying an existing mode of transportation, but why would they draw inspiration only from the horse-and-carriage, and not from the horse-and-rider? (Some commenters have suggested that it was not obvious that a two-wheeled vehicle would balance, but I find this unconvincing given how many other things people have learned to balance on, from dugout canoes to horses themselves.) It’s possible (I’m purely speculating here) that early mechanical inventors had a harder time realizing the fundamental impractiability of the carriage design because they didn’t have much in the way of mathematical engineering principles to go on, but then again it’s unclear what led to Drais’s breakthrough.

To understand the process of discovery—not so much what was discovered, but how it was discovered. Primary sources are best: the words of somebody who discovered something, as they were discovering it. The more examples I see, the more likely I'll be able to discover something tomorrow. To understand the process of failure. We learn a good deal from historical errors, not only from our own. It also helps to know that even the greatest minds are unable to grasp things that seem obvious to us. Leibniz spent much time working on combinatorics, and most of what he did was underwhelming and totally wrong. To celebrate the contributions of many cultures. There are many ways of thinking, many points of view, and many independent researchers. Fibonacci numbers were discovered in India long before Fibonacci. Catalan numbers were discovered in China, a hundred years before Catalan. Many uneducated people have discovered wonderful patterns in numbers, and I can share their joy of discovery. Telling historical stories is the best way to teach. It's much easier to understand something if you know the threads it is connected to. Give credit to Fibonacci, but also to Narayana in India. The complete story is of many separate individuals building a magnificent edifice with a series of small steps. To learn how to cope with life. How did other scientists grow up, make friends or enemies, manage their time, find mentors, mentor others, and serve their communities? Balance is important. To become more familiar with the world, and to know how science fits into the overall history of mankind. What was life like on different continents and in different epochs? The main difference between human beings and animals is that people learn from history.

The plan for NDN is one approach to what's known as information centric networking (ICN), an idea with roots in Ted Nelson's 1980s experiments with hypertext. It wasn't until 2006, however, when projects at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and at the legendary Xerox PARC launched the idea into the networking mainstream. Internet pioneer and PARC researcher Van Jacobson, whose talk at Google in 2006 has been widely cited as the start of the ICN movement, is now a leader of the NDN project alongside Zhang.

Anyone who is serious about mitigating the damage done to humankind by the social web should, of course, consider quitting Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and any other algorithmically distorted informational environments that manipulate people. But we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change. The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

For a “book” is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year. The Future Book is here and continues to evolve. You’re holding it. It’s exciting. It’s boring. It’s more important than it has ever been.

It’s this thing that we were warned about. It’s this thing that we knew could happen. Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics, warned about it as a possibility. And despite all the warnings, and despite all of the cautions, we just walked right into it, and we created mass behavior-modification regimes out of our digital networks. We did it out of this desire to be both cool socialists and cool libertarians at the same time.

In particular, try to go deep on multiple things. (To varying degrees, I tried to go deep on languages, programming, writing, physics, math. Some of those stuck more than others.) One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won't change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can.

For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding. “One person turns up every few days. Some of them have heard about the promise of Solid, and they are driven to turn the world upside down,” he says. Part of the draw is working with an icon. For a computer scientist, coding with Berners-Lee is like playing guitar with Keith Richards. But more than just working with the inventor of the Web, these coders come because they want to join the cause. These are digital idealists, subversives, revolutionaries, and anyone else who wants to fight the centralization of the Web. For his part, working on Solid brings Berners-Lee back to the Web’s early days: “It’s under the radar, but working on it in a way puts back some of the optimism and excitement that the ‘fake news’ takes out.”

The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Web. Working with a small team of developers, he spends most of his time now on Solid, a platform designed to give individuals, rather than corporations, control of their own data. “There are people working in the lab trying to imagine how the Web could be different. How society on the Web could look different. What could happen if we give people privacy and we give people control of their data,” Berners-Lee told me. “We are building a whole eco-system.”

And Apple has a wonderful product called Swift Playgrounds. It’s an app for your iPad but it’s really an environment where kids can learn to program. Apple is of course invested in getting as many people to use their technology products as they can, and in fact they promote their Swift programming language with this page on their site, with the headline “Everyone Can Code.”

I think often and fondly of Bret Victor’s lab in Oakland. He’s been exploring – with admirable determination – new modes of physical computing. And he’s doing so by using really boring technologies: a constellation of networked cameras and projectors smartly deployed. That’s interesting. Bret and his crew made a magic bookshelf. They are concerned with the real world. They are concerned with accessibility and connection. I think many of the philosophies of quietude and disconnection and silence not only can be applied to technology, but should be. Must be. Technology and quietude are powerful partners.

I’ve been reading about John McPhee’s process of writing his giant New Yorker essays thirty or forty years ago, and wow, it sounds like an alien world. The process is so slow and deliberate. At the end, he would hand in an eighty-thousand-word piece. That’s a book! Whatever structure allowed McPhee to write this way back then, it barely exists today. Unless you cobble it together yourself, or hunt it down through non-profit institutions.

Patrick’s desk is covered in books. There’s a copy of The Dream Machine, about J.C.R. Licklider, the technologist who conceptualized and funded the early internet. The volume was out of print, but Patrick loves it so much he bought the rights and paid to publish hundreds of copies for employees and guests. The wallpaper on his computer displays a countdown clock for his life: He has 52 years and a few days left. “This is a very coarse estimate, but it’s a reminder that you get old quickly,” he says, a touch of gray now in his red hair. “When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.”

Seven years in, however, Stripe’s mission is less to send more books, vacuums, and grooming kits into the world than to “increase the GDP of the internet,” Patrick says. To do this, the company is beginning to move beyond payments by writing software that helps companies retool the way they incorporate, pay workers, and detect fraud. It’s part of an ambitious bid to revamp how online business has been conducted for 20 years and to give anyone with a bright idea a chance to compete. “We think giving two people in a garage the same infrastructure as a 100,000-person ­corporation—the aggregate effects of that will be really good,” Patrick says.