“muddle-headed thinking”: divergent-preferent “simple-minded thinking”: convergent preferent

Growth as controlled development, vs aliveness as uncontrolled development

Intel usually manufactures its own processors and acts as its own supplier, without going third-party integrators that incorporate its chips. But recently it signed a deal with Rockchip to supply it with Atom processors, and let Rockchip take care of integrating Atom with the rest of the China hardwar ecosystem.

The high-end 3G/LTE chips have native capability to support multiple communications bands, and even do seamless switching.

A complex chip that can juggle multiple bands may be overkill in countries without such a complex telecommunications infrastructure. So companies like Intel may create simpler, lower-end chips that are cheaper to manufacture—each separate chip design is usually called an SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit)

Intel’s manufacturing division does not have the manpower to migrate both Atom and Core processor lines to 14nm, so they had to choose one to work on first.

The one that is worked on later may have a delayed launch, if the migration process drags on. So choices have to be made.

Communications hardware used to be designed with a greater focus on download throughput than upload (typically with a ratio of 10:1). But these days, with more and more sharing going on, upload throughput is starting to rise in importance, and hardware manufacturers have to adapt to these new needs.

There is a cycle to new processor and hardware releases, typically a yearly one. Intel can release better and better products but so can its competitors, so there is the risk that each new product may not grab more market share.

4 years ago Intel literally had no presence in 3G/LTE hardware. Their maiden entry into the market was with their acquisition of Infineon.

Not only does Intel support a variety of communications protocols with their XMM series of chips, but each time they move to a new manufacturing process they port the entire portfolio too! That is a lot of work, and it brings power efficiency improvements as well as lower cost (due to the smaller silicon wafer space needed for each chip).

Such as create single-chip solutions, or fully-digital solutions—right now most communications chips still have some analog parts, which consume quite a lot of power.

The Atom x3 line is Intel’s budget line, competing directly with ARM-based competitors like Qualcomm and Samsung. If they can manufacture on 14nm first they will enjoy power efficiency advantages (better performance at the same power, or better battery life and lower temperatures at the same performance), perhaps gaining market dominance for up to a year before the rest catch up.

Intel has the advantage of speed because they are well-integrated vertically; the design and manufacturing departments work closely and can sort out issues faster than most other hardware partners can. Other firms have to work with incumbent manufacturing giants TSMC, Samsung, and Globalfoundries.

Intel has its own graphics chip, currently just known as "Intel HD graphics" at the lower end, and "Iris/Iris Pro graphics" at the higher end. But none of these are being used in the x3 Atom.

“Internet of Things”, basically the idea that every appliance and device in your house, car, etc will be connected to the internet.

Intel doesn’t just want to score a one-hit wonder, they want to master the ecosystem and entrench themselves somewhere in the hardware integration pipeline that lets them benefit year after year.

These are complete platforms, basically something like an unbranded tablet or smartphone, that hardware manufacturers can point to and say “this is what we have in mind for our hardware”. E.g. Nvidia Tegra Note

Hardware manufacturers usually release software development kits (SDKs) with pre-programmed examples of how to write code for their hardware, to make software developers’ jobs easier.

A.k.a. Bluetooth 4.0. This is a different version from prior iterations, which enables a low-power mode that has greatly extended battery life. The throughput of BLE is not very high, but enough for devices where battery life is more critical, such as Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, etc.

peer-to-peer

fear, uncertainty, and doubt

transferring data directly from device to device, without going through the cloud, or a router.

The basic sliding scale for hardware: something more powerful generally uses more power and hence runs hotter and has lower battery life. A successful processor has to strike a balance between the two.

A chip that contains computational cores, memory management, and peripheral management hardware all on the same chip. These different specialised functions used to be divided out into different chips ten years ago, with the CPU containing mainly computational cores, while memory and peripheral management was offloaded to the motherboard.

i.e. market analysis

the cost of a silicon wafer is fixed, so the more functional processors a manufacturer can make with each wafer (by shrinking the processor design), the cheaper each chip will be in terms of material cost.

Any complex product needs a hierarchical building process. C.f. Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine

The only other behemoth that has this kind of capability is Samsung, which designs its own Exynos chips (based on ARM microarchitecture) and also manufactures them. AMD used to have this capability but its manufacturing arm was split off, and became GlobalFoundries.

A decade ago CPUs used to be just computing cores and little else; memory and connectivity came from controller chips on the motherboard. As photolithography manufacturing processes shrunk the size of transistors, these capabilities came to be integrated into the processor chip, providing throughput and latency improvements as well as lowering power consumption.

Apple not only designs their own chips (although they are manufactured by someone else, usually Samsung), but also integrates these chips into their own products, and then does the marketing and software-development for those chips, outsourcing little else (only assembly). The only other company that does this is Samsung.

original equipment manufacturers, a.k.a. OEMs. Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, and most other brands you are familiar with.

A “black box” meaning that you don’t know what it looks like inside, how things are arranged, but you know what the expected result should be for any input into this computational black box.

E.g. any calculator, no matter what it is made of inside (electronics, or gears, or levers), must always produce the result “2” from the input “1+1”.

This is why standardisation, and by extension standards (such as USB and Wifi), are so important.

This has close parallels to the famous brain paradox: “Can the human brain ever fully understand itself?”

“Can a processor ever fully simulate itself?”

Generally, a CPU has to put out more heat to reach higher performance levels. The TDP of a chip is a measure of how much power the manufacturer expects it to be putting out while under load. The higher the TDP, the more heat it is expected to put out, and hence a more effective heatsink (i.e. one with greater surface area) is required.

The self-transcending and self-asserting tendencies of the human holon.

C.f. Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine

I find it hard to imagine how this could be usefully implemented. How is monitoring of data collection going to be done?

Even simpler ideas, like the Do Not Call registry, have difficulty clamping down on businesses that breach regulations.

Simply requiring it is not sufficient, if there is any link along the entire transmission chain that provides an entry point. And the weakest entry point is usually on the client (user) side.

This is probably the most feasible measure of all the ones mentioned about cybersecurity.

What does this mean? Efficient in what way? Smart in what way?

Current when the adjective “smart” is prepended to a device, it just means it has sensors that can report its status remotely. If that is the case here, I fail to see how a smart bin can reduce or even eliminate the need for sanitation workers.

If by “smart bins” the author means a humanless waste collection system, that’s a different matter altogether.

Not likely. Our information systems are not as comprehensive as we’d like to think for fully-driverless systems.

A driverless taxi system still requires lots of informational infrastructure: a list of valid pickup points/zones, drop-off points/zones, digital speed limits, accurate navigational maps (which none of the currently available maps are), …

Not to say it won’t happen, but I don’t see us moving forward on this anytime soon without a paradigm change in the government’s thinking about open data.

This qualifier already nullifies the rest of the sentence. If 3D printers, drones, and advanced robotics are used in future Singapore, it will be in any manner but freely.

Example of the kind of unthinking statement that reflects lack of nuance in this article.

The only way most foreign migrant workers will return to their countries (permanently) is if they are forced to do so, whether its because of structural unemployment or a clamping down on foreign labour import.

Singaporeans are in a bind because the available jobs are not jobs they want, and the jobs they want don’t come with the pay they want, and the pay they want isn’t available in the country they want. they do “have the option” to return to their country when they are “made redundant”, and it has been exercised.

Seems to be a blanket statement without considering what these shifts in labour trends are, and what they imply.

A large part of the 140 million workers are in large-scale manufacturing industries, where capital investment goes into scaling fully automated systems. That kind of investment does not make sense in Singapore at the scales we are operating at.

In 2014, manufacturing was 18.4% of GDP, and trending down. Business services is 15.8%, and trending up. Singstat.gov.sg

The shift in labour trend will happen, it’s just not going to be homogeneous worldwide.

Disingenuous. This consequence is fully intended by those who design the systems (although they would never admit to it). Bits of this attitude leak out in quotes like Eric Schmidt’s (2009) interview: “If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It”

Any designed system promulgates an underclass which doesn’t thrive under it, and an elite class which does. I do not see how Singapore’s authoritarian high modernist state is going to be any different.

The very idea of a community is one that separates its identity from others by classification. Forcing different communities together is not inclusiveness, it’s asking for trouble.

A nuanced treatment of the idea can be found in updated urban design textbooks.

Accumulation of wealth by a “handful of entrepreneurs” does not hint at a divide.

When it spreads beyond “a handful” and reaches a certain critical mass (e.g. the kind that would spark off Occupy Wall Street, which is probably closer to 10% than 1%), and when “the ladder is pulled up” preventing the non-elites from climbing up into the elite class, that is when the divide happens.

It takes a lot more than hyper-connectivity to make that happen. One also needs a user-design zeitgeist that leaves behind those who won’t get on board with the latest updates, an education system that actively discourages its students from picking up relevant skills, and other attitudes that “pull up the ladder”. Some of these are gradually creeping in, though.

For a nuanced treatment, see What Technology Wants, and its related idea of The Technium, by Kevin Kelly.

Missing the point about causes of the divide. See above. This is hardly nuanced.

Some nuances to consider:

1) Cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) are high-modernist, in that a paradigm of cost-and-benefit must be adopted before the analysis can be done. This involves a lot of subjective judgement, and naïve CBAs can be just as harmful as no CBA at all.

2) This presupposes that “high-tech system” is A Thing™ that one can decide whether or not to adopt. (Again, one sees the pernicious influence of high modernism.) Technology is like a meme in the way it spreads; its effects are only localised, like a benign cluster of cells, until it hits a major transmission pipeline and metastasises.

The level of technology employed by the government, in the absence of deliberate instruction, arises from what is chosen by the IT vendor (which I’ll bet is NCS), which in turn depends on what is available in the commercial packages chosen by said vendor. Commercial packages are not static code, made once and frozen for sale; they are living projects, morphing and evolving with the demands of its customers and with the zeitgeist of the era. In this way, technology makes its way into the government whether they like it or not; it is not a decision to be made.

What the government can choose, is whether to stick to a legacy system—by which I mean systems that have fallen behind the times, and hence incur higher maintenance costs due to the lack of widely available parts—or “go along with the times” and adopt a more up-to-date system from a list of choices. I am not implying that the latter is the right choice, just that it is the natural choice for a cost-concerned government.

It is the height of hubris to suppose that one—be one a person or organisation—could design failsafes for a (high-modernist monolithic) system and satisfy all stakeholders.

See Crash-Only Thinking for an alternative failure-resilience model. We can’t grow/test/evolve redundancy systems unless we provide enough opportunities for it to happen.

Helpful to keep in mind, especially as the author says later,

Rather than aim for a perfect system that never fails, [multiple layers of failsafe] might indeed be a more realistic approach.

See The Design of Crash-Only Societies for an alternative view.

To the best of my knowledge, I have never seen the Singapore Government carry out a cost-benefit analysis for completely new and untested systems.

The question to ask for any new high-tech system is not “do the estimated costs outweigh the estimated benefits”, but “has it been successful elsewhere on our kind of scale, and how can we replicate that”?

I am not criticising this approach, just pointing out the reality of novelty-adoption. It is senseless to ask if driverless-car systems make sense for Singapore when no such system in the world has been verifiably successful yet. (The closest one to keep your eye on is probably MCity.)

Demonstrates a lack of understanding of what it is low-skilled workers do, and the reasons for automation.

Automation does not happen for its own sake; it is usually a to a need for lower production/service cost, or higher efficacy (greater production speed, more consistent quality, and so on).

The need for lowering the cost of key public services often leads to them being carried out less frequently, or to wage depression of low-wage workers. It is far easier for small contractors to do this than to invest in the kind of infrastructure required for full automation. This is not a mere investment of money, but more importantly of attention, mindfulness, and a willingness to adopt a new business model.

Full-automation systems will most likely come about when a conglomerate successfully acquires the required technology, integrates it vertically, and offers the complete package as a series of contracts to be completed over a decade or two. The technology is almost there, but the level of integration with ministries (MEWR, MND, MTI, MOT) and stat boards (URA, HDB, BCA, NEA, among others) this requires means that it will spend more time clearing red-tape than actually being engineered.

In the meantime, low-skilled workers remain the obvious choice.

And create more, author forgets to add. It will be a long time before they are fully automated; the difficulty in automation lies not in the programming and engineering (which is actually alarmingly fast by industry norms), but in figuring out what exactly needs to be automated.

In the meantime, new income opportunities arise from the new technology that is becoming available. Consultants, operators, designers are growing in numbers. If they act as mediators of technology that carries out service needs, do we consider them service workers? Are cleaners no longer in the service industry if they drive floor-cleaning vehicles?

The way to keep being alive rather than merely living is to keep accepting change and novelty.

Problems that involve doing nothing—meditation and focus. The AI equivalent = ?

Anti-intelligence: choosing not to see the sense in a situation, or rejecting the commonsense analysis of the situation.

AI that is anti-intelligent enough to “reject the premise of the question”

Dopamine triggered by anticipation—the neural equivalent of stock market derivatives?

Use framing narratives to program the brain and change its perception

“Growing” emergent success rather than copying emerged success

Activation energy (chaos) is required to disturb stable arrangements (habits) and allow new ones.

People fear the implication of conceptual, existential failure more than the direct consequences of financial failure?

Lifestyles are vulnerable to crashing; there is no smooth exit/transition from one lifestyle to another, only the abrupt termination of one and bootstrapping of the other.

Stories as paths in a non-conservative field; they are irreversible.

To help people change, help them to accept their mistakes rather than treating it as a source of shame

“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go.”

– Clayton Christensen

What they (Google’s execs) see as beneficial for Google, and for a visible subset of the world’s population.

What commitment will they make to exploring benefits and downsides for different stakeholders, or encouraging their participation in discourse?

What happens when those cultures and societies do not agree with Google’s goals?

Given what we know about machine learning, the difficulty of this may be insurmountable. But it is always worthwhile to try.

This was not demonstrated in the way they handled James Damore’s memo.

Sounds like Google will still pursue military applications, but will wait until they have an appropriate story to tell.

E. Glen Weyl Talks to Jaron Lanier About How to Live with Technology.

Jaron Lanier is a writer, musician, and pioneering computer scientist who helped create modern virtual reality. He is also the author of several books about technology, most recently Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. E. Glen Weyl is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, where he works on the intersection of technology and economics. He is also the co-author of Radical Markets.

Let’s see how predictable the powerlessness of power posing was ahead of time. We want to find out how cortisol fluctuates throughout the day (which would affect measurement error) and how it responds to interventions (to estimate effect size).

All our impact on the environment, beyond that of other species with a comparable planetary range and biomass, can be traced to our runaway brain development and the impact of the associated cognitive surplus.

With an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from Paul Allen,4 Etzioni and his team are trying to develop a layer of common-sense reasoning to work with the existing style of neural net. The first problem they face is answering the question, What is common sense?

Karl Friston’s free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself.

https://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/portfolio-item/human-tails/

The source of the myth is Galileo's first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani. Viviani is not considered a credible source because of other errors in the biography. There is documented evidence of two Tower of Pisa experiments during Galileo's time, neither conducted by Galileo.

highlight: https://hypothes.is/a/uUpFrroYEeiszw-CjTl8sw

from http://www.scientus.org/Galileo-Myths.html

Should the narrative of science have a say in the outcome of science: the collective body of knowledge that is acknowledged as reliable?

Gelman’s response: http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/18/beyond-power-pose-using-replication-failures-better-understanding-data-collection-analysis-better-science/

How do we do replication studies without the unpleasant shaming that people tend to do if a finding that doesn’t replicate?

Are talks/seminars based on (unreplicated) findings fair game for mentioning?

What were the old norms of public critique?

Exceptionally high for a psychology study? Or exceptionally high for a replication study? Or exceptionally high for a psychology study that failed to replicate?

How much of a say should citizens have in how their cybersecurity rights are to be protected?

For instance, in Singapore, many government services require a Singpass for access. Singpass offers 2-factor authentication (2FA) by two means only: SMS and a key dongle.

SMS 2FA is known to be insecure, but a key dongle is cumbersome to carry around (especially once other companies start implementing them as well. Banks have already done so.)

There are better security options available, such as hardware keys. To what extent should governments be required to explore the use of all security options?

A government that actively updates its security measures also requires a citizenry that is willing to learn and update its knowledge of cybersecurity. To what extent should citizens (of any age) be required to do so?

How would people enforce their right to cybersecurity?

Would they sue firms or companies that fail to provide an adequate level of cybersecurity?

Would cybersecurity be legislated, like our imports, and insecure services offered by individuals be banned under law?

Is this comparable to jailing? We jail criminals to ensure they do not enter the same spaces as us and harm us. Should we do that to hackers who pose a threat to our data?

We are responsible for securing our physical spaces by ensuring our windows are closed, doors are locked, and other openings re secured. Nonetheless, under the law, the physical space bounded within the house is considered private property, and breaking into this space is a crime—burglary—punishable by law.

How would this extend to cyberspace, where the boundaries are not so clearly drawn? Who "owns" the data? Even if we are supposed to "own" the data, it is stored physically elsewhere and managed by someone else—to what extent are they responsible for protecting our information?

I am not confident that AI will help us sort that better. Even humans have a hard time deciding the gray areas; AI simply helps us to scale up such decision-making.

Will they be able to share what they want, how they want to? Even if it’s not as a Facebook post?

This is part of what leads to “loss of common understanding”, and what helps to build up filter bubbles.

Correction: “any single system that attempts to govern billions or trillions of entities will have lots of mistakes.”

That thing about evolving towards a system of local governance is likely a better idea. But is Facebook comfortable with the idea of ceding control of its platform?

It’s eternal tension between a filter bubble and a “public life” (in the sense of involuntary civic engagement)

Much agreed, and I hope this pursuit never ceases.

It sounds like Facebook has suddenly realised it is a political entity, much to its chagrin, and while figuring out how to handle all the stones being thrown at it, is also starting to revel at the sheer power it has, and just how much it can influence people’s lives. With great power comes great responsibility, perhaps too great for a single man—or company—to bear.

I believe the communities of people on Facebook are sufficiently diverse that it is a fallacy to attempt to shoehorn all of them into a single set of cultural norms.

It would be hegemony if Facebook decides to stop finding better ways to accommodate multiple cultures and instead forces a single set of norms on its users, excusing it as “operational scaling issues”.

It is striking that Facebook mediates what goes into the Community Standards, whereas such things are traditionally arrived at by consensus. And there is much non-consensus about the way Facebook enforces their consensus.

There are also some problems that span platform boundaries. When will Facebook facilitate sharing to other apps and open up their APIs so that we can tap on the collective resources and minds of developers worldwide?

This is a pretty scary proclamation of Zuckerberg’s dreams: to simply dominate decision-making with the sheer size of people on a platform he can influence.

Statements like this worry me. Zuckerberg just went from saying “read-share correlation is a good sign the headline was sensational” to saying “we reduce sensationalism by taking this into account” to “signals like this will identify sensational publishers” in 3 consecutive sentences.

It sounds like a quick path to circular reasoning: “articles that people are less likely to share after reading are sensational, and sensational articles are less likely to be shared if people read them.”

This is misleading. The “common understanding” had not existed to begin with, and thus cannot be lost. And often nuance is not something that can be stuffed down peoples’ minds.

How will the line between fake news and “misinformed but valuable perspectives” be drawn? Where does tolerance of falsehood in the name of subjectivity end?

If there is a powerful effect leading to loss of common understanding, it would be the Filter Bubble.

I.e. the effect of clickbait, especially when it leads to fake news

Probably the closest that Facebook will come to admitting the part they played in the results of the 2017 election.

Social infrastructure to monitor the use of funds and resources would be really handy here, too, and not just for raising money.

I’m not sure there is actually some tangible community there. Perhaps many scattered communities, brought together for a single purpose at a single point in time, but calling that a community sounds like a stretch.

The Facebook PA system. This is actually a good idea, if it can figure out how to prevent abuse.

And this would require Facebook to start making active decisions about what kind of social infrastructure to build up, rather than letting the data shape where it wants to go. Are they ready to pivot?

How does Facebook plan to do this when its metric is based around increasing user interaction with the interface, and not necessarily with each other?

What about ways for people to contest claims of representation by a Facebook group they didn't create?

This is dangerous if chased as a global, persistent goal. Chasing a measure makes it no longer an accurate gauge of the thing that's being measured.

a.k.a. Goodhart's Law

What if the way to do so is not through Facebook? Would Facebook stand for that?

Who gets to build the public space? The platform owners have the chance to shape it, and the affordances of the platform very well shape the kind of world that can be achieved. Is Facebook building the world they think people want, or the world they want?

Facebook algorithmically prioritises user interactions with Facebook

Safety concerns of parents for children

Design for differing levels of mobility

UX considerations: ground superstitions do need to be addressed as well.

Recommended family-friendly measures

http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/open-strollers-allowed-on-buses-from-april-2

Open strollers allowed on buses from April 2

On adapting to different bus models

Broad generalisation that lacks the nuanced understanding of information hyperconnectivity.

These disruptions so far arose from hardware failures: power lines, track signalling, etc, none of which were the fault of hyper-connectivity. Software issues, of the sort that lead to immediate breakdowns, are generally much easier to spot, isolate/contain, and rectify.

If anything, it was hyper-connectivity that helped alleviate some of the effects of these disruptions: people searching alternative routes on Google Maps, looking up bus arrival timings to pick a different route, SMRT informing commuters of line breakdowns, and so on.

Much harder to spot are systemic issues—the “unknown unknowns”—which lead to sub-optimality, or even systemic breakdown under certain conditions. This is not the fault of hyper-connectivity, it is the fault of authoritarian high modernism that fails to acknowledge its shortcomings and allow other entrants to fill in its cracks.

“Reeling”? Why the sensationalism? The recovery was pretty quick once the fault was isolated, and aside from the initial delays, things were back to normal rather quickly.

That’s what I’m thinking about when I see someone claiming that “the public is still reeling”.

This happens with low-tech systems too. Just saying. It happens because of hyper-connectivity (think technology-mediated globalisation), and not because of technology per se.

Technical malfunctions is just one part of it. They are at best unmitigated, at worst amplified, by systemic malfunctions.

Disingenuous. If our interactions over social media are cold, it is because we haven’t picked up on the rituals of social media (the FB-like, the emoji, the hashtag, the meme-image, appropriate replies that fit in 140 characters, etc).

Face-to-face interactions are mediated by social rituals, and social media is no different. Interactions are enriched when participants are well-versed in these social rituals and know when and how to employ them.

I just want to point out that people have been doing this for centuries. When our forebears didn’t have digital words to retreat to, they had summer villas, office work, hunting trips, all sorts of other activities to lose themselves in before they can no longer avoid the mundanity of their everyday lives.

So author is blaming “hyper-connectivity” because it can be used as an excuse? Well, well.

If I don’t want to meet someone and use technology as an excuse, does that make the reduction in interaction technology’s fault?

Hyper-connectivity is not the reason for limited face-to-face contact. Long working hours and other family-hostile work policies are the reason for that. And communications technology is helping to mitigate some of those effects by allowing interactions between family members when face-to-face interaction is impossible.

From interacting with teenagers for over two recent years, I can tell you that if a teenager doesn’t want to hang out with her family, it has less to do with the smartphone that is always in her hand, and more to do with the fact that most teenagers just don’t want to spend more than a few hours with family over a weekend. They want to do things, try new activities, eat food, hang out with friends … there is a lot to distract teenagers these days and that is not the fault of hyper-connectivity.

Disingenuous. If you know anyone who has used such technology (home cameras for monitoring kids/pets, for example) and considers it a perfectly valid replacement for face-to-face communication, I would like to meet them.

People don’t use such technology to replace face-to-face communication. Video calls replace phone calls, not personal visits. Technology augments interaction rather than displacing it.

Naïve, presupposes that we were less detached from one another in a nostalgic past.

Not really. Author just needs to read more sci-fi, not the predictive kind, but the kind that examines the effects of technology on psychology and sociology.

It’s not about understanding hyper-connectivity, it’s about understanding communities and cultures.

“Picking” a programming language.

How deployments are automated and scaled.

Why everyone loves git. And why everyone (who’s anyone) ought to know git.

The importance of being tested.

What is a framework, and how is it different from a programming language.

Programmer problems.

What programmers use to make iOS apps.

Why many programmers dislike PHP.

Why Javascript has become so big in the past decade.

I hope the programmer you get understands what SQL is.

Gifted programmers.

Most of the time you don’t really need a specialised C programmer.

How programming languages are used together in a project.

On the importance of programming languages in the working world.

“Minimum requirements” for programming.

Every programmer today should know about version control, and git/github. If they don’t know what a commit is, be very wary.

Recent working tools.

The parts of “programming” that don’t actually involve programming, but are very helpful for programmers to know.

Standard libraries (parts) and toolboxes speed up work a lot. Don't write from scratch unless you're trying to learn, trying to optimise, or trying to make something that doesn't exist yet.

What it takes to do programming: the tenacity to dig until you get at the root of the problem.

The programming languages you were asking for. But note the caveat.

Choice of programming language, choice of framework, choice of backend will keep changing; it is more important to gather a team that works well together.

“Kids stared at their teachers for hundreds of hours a year, which might explain their expertise. Their survey answers, it turned out, were more reliable than any other known measure of teacher performance—­including classroom observations and student test-score growth.”

– From Why Kids Should Grade Teachers, The Atlantic

“A new evaluation system in Washington, D.C., for example, requires five observations each year, compared with the previous systems that required one or two at most, and in many cases none at all. Starting next fall, a Tennessee law will require at least four observations a year, rather than one every five years.”

– From Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher, The New York Times

Room to Grow

– From Infinite Sums, Jonathan Claydon.

– From National Geographic

– From Ocean Minds

– From CIRM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons

See reviews from Jonnyguru, HardwareSecrets.

Not only does this unit not care about the hot box, this unit gave me the exact same voltage readings as it did cold for almost every single test. Seriously, I can't remember the last time this happened. The 3.3V rail and the 5V rail were so solid that every number I got in the hot box progressive tests matched up exactly with the corresponding cold test. The heavy 3.3V/5V crossload test was the only thing that got either rail to budge, and even then it only moved the 5V rail down by 0.01V compared to the cold test. That's... amazing. Even the 12V rail did its best to stick to its cold numbers, again moving only 0.01V on any one test. Where's my lower jaw? Oh, there it is... on the floor. Folks, this may be the best X series unit I've tested yet. Voltage readings so solid you couldn't budge them with a Peterbilt. Ripple results so low an ant couldn't trip over the waveforms. And to top it all off, you have that Gold level efficiency, a fan that turns off when not needed, and complete indifference to high temperatures. I have to do a 10 here.

– Jonnyguru

The Seasonic X-Series 560 W can really deliver its labeled wattage at high temperatures. Efficiency was extremely high, above 87% at light load (20% load, 112 W) and at 89% at full load, peaking 90.3% at 60% load (336 W). Really impressive.

Voltage regulation was another highlight of this product, with all voltages within 3% of their nominal values – including the -12 V output. The ATX12V specification allows voltages to be up to 5% from their nominal values (10% for the -12 V output). Therefore this power supply presents voltages closer to their nominal values than necessary. Noise and ripple levels were always extremely low. Below you can see the results for the power supply outputs during test number five. The maximum allowed is 120 mV for the +12 V and -12 V outputs, and 50 mV for the +5 V, +3.3 V, and +5VSB outputs. All values are peak-to-peak figures.

– HardwareSecrets

e.g. Seasonic Platinum fanless series.

The daily temperature range here is 26–32°C!

e.g. Lenovo Ideacentre

e.g. Alienware X51

Such as SFX, TFX.

SFX PSU

TFX PSU

– From Wikipedia, ATX#SFX and ATX#TFX

Such as the Intel DH61AG Thin-ITX motherboard.

picoPSU plugged into 24-pin motherboard connector housing

A 24-pin power connector on the motherboard.

More detail on the testing process can be found in HardwareSecret’s Understanding the 80 Plus Certification.

– From Anandtech, Seasonic X-Series 560W

PSU efficiency also varies with the input voltage—they are slightly more efficient with 230V input voltage, and less so with 115V input. But this is not relevant for the purpose of this article.

Much more detail to be found through in-depth articles like HardwareSecret’s Everything you need to know about power supplies.

INTERVIEWER You’ve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always instead a treatment of the present.

GIBSON There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolating a future history. My position is that you can’t do that without having the present to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that from the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into the real future.

– From The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 211

See: Thirteen going on Thirty, et al.

Schiller wrote of a ‘watcher at the gates of the mind’, who examines ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind ‘the intellect has withdrawn its watcher from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.’ He said that uncreative people ‘are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators . . . regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps in collation with other ideas which seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.’

From Impro, Keith Johnstone, quoted in Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture.

Being multiple also provided subtle comic relief from an insufferable boss. "During meetings, as he repeated the same stuff for the umpteenth time, we'd poke fun inside where he couldn't hear us," she says.

From Are Multiple Personalities Always a Disorder?.

1530s, "to fill with boldness or courage," from Latin animatus past participle of animare "give breath to," also "to endow with a particular spirit, to give courage to," from anima "life, breath" (see animus).

From EtymologyOnline

A "multiplicity system" refers to the group within the body itself (i.e., "I'm part of a multiplicity system"). The system might consist of two people, or it might consist of 200. The "outer world" is this physical plane that we're all stumbling around in, while "inner worlds" are the subjective realms where their system members spend time when they're not "fronting," or running the body in the outer world.

From Are Multiple Personalities Always a Disorder?.

I use the term “possess” here because I think it more appropriate than “control”; if you don’t like the connotations, you may consider “inhabit” as an alternative term.

I am well aware of what Einstein said about this quote, but his desk is cluttered because he knows where his things are but others don’t. Most Downloads folders are cluttered in a way that nobody knows where anything is without a Ctrl-F search.

If you have big customers (ASUS, Apple, etc). OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) are companies that manufacture the devices, sourcing subcomponents to other companies. or Tier 1s are companies that manufacture components in use for other companies, e.g. LG & Samsung making LCD panels for tablet OEMs.

SoFIA: Smart or Feature phone with Intel Architecture

Most phones are expensive because they have to include a cocktail of chips providing different capabilities: audio processing, wifi/bluetooth, 3G/LTE, etc. SoFIA is Intel’s attempt to make a chip that integrates as many of these capabilities as possible so as to make entry-level phones even cheaper.

Silicon wafers are expensive, so the material cost of each chip depends on its size. The fewer chips you need to include, the lower the material cost (excluding R&D costs for manufacturing research).

making sure that the modem blueprint can actually be manufactured with the process they have in mind (currently 14nm node lithography; each new process requires a new round of testing)

working on the modem roadmap, showing when each new generation of modem chips is coming out and what capabilities they will have. But this is not integrated with the computing processors (Atom, Core) yet.

LTE (4G) chips are separate microchips in a smartphone/tablet, but Intel has managed to bundle this capability with one of their processors. It is not yet available in market at this point, but is being tested.

This is something that few competitors can match, because many of them do not make processors and hence cannot bundle their communications chips inside. The engineering and design expertise required to achieve this is immense.

Intel has traditionally been focused on computing microchips—processors meant for general-purpose computation, rather than communications chips. They’re a latecomer to the field but are quickly catching up.

The incumbents in communications chips are Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, Realtek, etc.

Everything that has a microchip inside should be connected to the internet, sharing information through it and controllable through it. This is possible now with microchips that have inbuilt capability to communicate wirelessly (previously they had to have a separate chip included).

The social civilising of brothels