Injection surgery

by Jason Preston on May 2, 2012

I was just reading about how we’re starting to be able to “grow” processor and memory chips instead of assembling them in the traditional fashion. We’ve created biological computing components (molecules, atoms) that self-align themselves to electronically conducive pathways.

This is fantastic because it allows us to build computer hardware that features hundreds of millions of nanometer components without have to place each component properly on the chip.

But think of the other opportunities that arrive if we can start to grow our technology. Imagine getting a surgical injection — and then a supplement pill for a few weeks.

The doctors would inject you with a self-replicating and self-aligning piece of technology that would begin small enough that it could be injected through a needle but then “build” itself inside your body, based on the component materials that you provide it through the pills you take.

At the end of the month you could have a relatively painless reinforced spine, repaired hip joint, enhanced lung, or who knows what else. Large structures could be placed into the body with very small beginnings. Even better, large technologies could be built around complicated bone structures like your spine because it would grow together with it, much like a vine on a fence.

Injection surgery would open the door to some very cool possibilities.

April 13, 2012

In a nut, the app allows you to choose any product available in any local retail store and have it hand-delivered by one of Postmates’ network of couriers in less than an hour, anywhere in the city.

Anyone remember MyLackey.com?

April 12, 2012

We needed Barack Obama and the congress to compromise the entire U.S. stock market because it’s too expensive for a publicly-listed company with billion-dollar ambitions to hire an accountant? That almost sounds like a comedy routine

It’s an interesting perspective, and I have to admit I’m not completely up to speed on what’s in the JOBS act, but I think RS is deciding to ignore certain aspects of reality.

The fact is that even billion dollar ambitious companies respond to incentives, and the deck has been stacked against going public. What that means is that companies will avoid going public for as long as possible and in as many ways as possible . . . which means that newly generated wealth stays in small, private, relatively unregulated spaces for much longer.

Additionally, firms like Goldman have figured out ways to bundle their top clients into an investment vehicle to “by proxy” invest in Facebook as “one” shareholder, bypassing the whole 500-shareholder limit rule.

Basically, the US government is facing the reality that when it’s too inconvenient to go public, companies will contort in all kinds of ways to stay completely private. We’ve decided — and in principle I agree — that it’s better to make it easy enough that companies want to go public, because it’s better they do that than that they avoid the stock market (and attendant account requirements and social benefits) altogether.

April 10, 2012

The study reports that ionizing radiation is the major environmental risk factor for meningioma and that dental X-rays are the most common artificial source of exposure to ionizing radiation in the United States.

Those who know me know how I like to tout the dangers of unnecessary exposure to radiation. But I have to ask: isn’t flying the most common artificial source of exposure? Or does that not “count” because the radiation from the sun is “natural” even though the altitude is artificial?

March 29, 2012

If you’ve been using DuckDuckGo to search, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of search terms have a little “instant answer” box above the normal link results you’d get in other search engines.

Turns out those are basically plugins that anyone can write and submit to DDG, much like apps for iOS through the App Store. Genius. I might see if I can build a few.

March 28, 2012

A year or so ago, I started to wonder, with the right team of undersea pros, could we find and potentially recover the F-1 engines that started mankind’s mission to the moon?

Turns out the answer is yes. I love that Bezos actually does things like this for fun.

If new rumors are true about Sony’s PlayStation 4 (named Orbis), then Sony is about to take the console lead in the war against used games.

This is a story that has already played out, to a certain extent, with games on the PC (go ahead and try to buy a used game on Steam), and in the ebooks market (buy a used book on your Kindle).

Once you realize that games are digital content, and that console games have only managed to mirror the physical markets of old school books is the closed hardware of the consoles themselves. Of course, if you want to hack your console and copy a bunch of games to the hard drive, well you’ve been able to do that for years.

Frankly it seems like overkill to me for Sony to insist on making used discs worthless.

March 22, 2012

The Virtual Intelligent Assistant

by Jason Preston on March 22, 2012

I remember the Ender’s Game sequel “Speaker for the Dead” as the first science fiction story with a really compelling AI character. The computerized “Jane” follows the grown up Andrew Wiggin from world to world and in many ways is his only real friend and companion, and exists as an accidental AI borne from the interconnections of an interplanetary “internet.”

As we are now beginning to make accelerated leaps in our understanding of the human brain — Paul Allen just dumped a very large number of dollars into new neural research — and distributed computing technology brings us closer to the hardware reality of simulating the human brain’s abilities, I think it makes sense for us to think about the ways in which our virtual companions will first bring themselves into our lives.

For the past decade or so, I think the most common assumption has been that we will ultimately build a piece of hardware (like Watson) or a “droid” (like C-3PO) that will be, if not sentient, capable enough to become a helper and companion to anyone who owns one. But this vision ignores two very prominent trends: the exponential growth of communications technology, and the massive worldwide adoption of smartphones. It may be no accident that Google chose the name Android for their phone.

In traditional science fiction a robot is a standalone computer. A bit of hardware imbued with its own memory and localized processors. No doubt this will ultimately happen, but our ability to shrink the physical size of our processing power (especially per dollar) has not yet outpaced our ability to scale processing power over distributed systems.

As a result, we will be able to simulate a near human intelligence in a distributed system far sooner than we will be able to simulate a human intelligence in hardware that fits inside an individual robot. Furthermore, a distributed system that holds a single human intelligence simulator will be able to optimize itself in ways that individual robots could not: the inefficiency of a human simulated intelligence not doing something even for a few seconds, on aggregate, is astronomical. Ultimately this will not matter because the hardware and software will become cheap, but for the near term it will not be doable.

So what we are most likely to find is an intelligence that reaches us and manipulates the world around us, for us, through increasingly ubiquitous and speedy communications channels. This intelligence will be customized (it will have an “interface”) for each person or set of people it interacts with, complete with associated memory and environmental information.

This intelligence will be vastly more helpful than any individual node robotic intelligence because it has complete access to the information in its system as it pertains to all other humans, the Internet, and activities occurring.

It also obviates the need for a human-robotic form because it will be able to manipulate the environment directly, without needing the physical intermediary of hands or fingers.

Where will this Science-Fiction style intelligence first reach us?

The answer is simple: it will reach us on our phones, the devices we carry with us in nearly all places we go, that have microphones universally built in, and already connect us to the communication channels in which this intelligence will operate.

No one is better positioned than Apple to accomplish this, because of the massive iPhone install base and the uniform structure of their code and APIs. Their cash hoard enabled them to build the hardware necessary to power distributed intelligence, and their record as anti-porn and family friendly will allow them to introduce ever “creepier” concepts to the public at large without overly alarming people.

For now, Siri is a harmless feminine-robotic voice attached to our iPhone that can set a reminder for us, do a quick search, or dictate a text message.

But complex systems grow quickly from simple systems, through straightforward combination. And when Apple truly open a Siri API for developers to integrate with, Siri will increasingly be made aware of other devices and services connected to these communications technologies, and soon your phone will allow you to set the lights in your home, or prepare the oven, without you even asking it to do so.

When this, I will be able to interact with the technology around me in the same way that I interact with the people around me. I can’t wait.

March 20, 2012

Probably my favorite part of speaking at SXSW

by Jason Preston on March 20, 2012

In the speaker packet they handed out at registration, they included a little one-sheet with helpful tips, of which the best was clearly this Star Wars pun.

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March 6, 2012

I just downloaded the app and within two minutes got a message from a friend in San Francisco who says I’ve been the “FOAF” for most of his notifications so far.

March 1, 2012

How you know Google is worried about DuckDuckGo

by Jason Preston on March 1, 2012

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo instead of Google for the past few weeks in the wake of all the Google privacy concerns. I switched all my default search to DuckDuckGo and I’ve pretty much stopped using Google for search (although I still use gmail, google docs, maps, and other services).

I know I’m not alone, and DDG has been seeing some massive growth lately. They’ve got some funding, too, which means they’ll be really going for it.

But I’ve been thinking that DuckDuckGo is not really a long-term “real company” name. If they’re going for the big show — the “grandma knows about it” market — they need a better name, and the obvious choice is Duck.

What happens if you type duck.com into your browser? It takes you to Google.

(Update: I may be wrong here – see Matt Cutts on Hacker News over a year ago).

Holy crap that’s awesome.

The new bookmarklet now also supports automatic saving of every page in multi-page articles.

Seriously. Thank you Marco, from the bottom of my heart, for building an app that lets me read a freaking article without clicking 19 times like a brain-dead lab rat.

If you read things on the internet, you need to be using Instapaper. Period.

Great analysis on Quora of the state of the legal industry. I admit I have a bias from my own experience, but it seems to me like the obvious thing for an unemployed lawyer (or accountant, etc) to do is to start their own solo practice at 1/3rd the corporate rate.

February 28, 2012

Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach for the media industry to take. And it’s not working. It’s unrealistic and naïve to expect everyone to do the “right” thing when the alternative is so much easier, faster, cheaper, and better for so many of them.

Yep.

Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy, on starting a startup “later” in life:

To start a company with young kids you have to really want to start that company. There has to be nothing else in the world you can do and possibly be happy. No new parent is starting a company just for the life experience of starting a company. While a 21-year-old with no mortgage, no girlfriend and a low-burn rate may have nothing to lose, a 40-year old with a career, a mortgage and kids has everything to lose. So if he starts a company, make no mistake: It’s not something he’s emotionally detached enough to flip in a few years.

There’s no shortage of thought going in to this as I approach the arrival of my first kid. Every step of the way so far: wife, mortgage – I understand the new barriers being placed in front of me towards launching a company.

I have to agree, though, that while low barriers to entry are good for the collective (more ideas are tried, successes appear where before they would not have been tried), high barriers to entry are good for the individual (less time is wasted on ideas that have less merit or drive).

For me personally, higher barriers is probably what I need. My ideas should have to pass muster.

February 23, 2012

520′s Good To Go Fabricating Trips?

by Jason Preston on February 23, 2012

I find it unbelievable that I have to spend time tracking and ARGUING with an automated toll system that is fabricating vehicle trips. I just sent this through the (very hard to use) web system for Seattle’s “Good To Go” pass system:

My account shows a $5 charge for crossing the bridge (direction not indicated) in the “violations” section and under “outstanding balance.” It indicates that the bridge was crossed on 2/21/2012 and that a billed amount of $5 is due.

This vehicle was not driven on 2/21/2012 and, additionally, it is registered with an active Good To Go pass which is placed properly on the windshield. Even if driven across the bridge, the maximum amount which should be charged is $3.50. Can you please remove this error from the account promptly, or explain why it is not an error by providing more specific detail and adjusting the toll rate to the appropriate amount?

If it turns out I’m wrong somehow, I’ll update that here as well. Can’t imagine why we’d have driven my wife’s car (she works on the westside, myself on the eastside) one-way over the bridge, never to return. It certainly didn’t happen on the day indicated. And this is the SECOND time they’ve charged the pay-by-mail rate for a car with a registered (and properly displayed) pass.

Lars Doucet calls out the “four currencies” of buying a game:

  • ($M) Money-dollars
  • ($T) Time-dollars
  • ($P) Pain-in-the-butt-dollars
  • ($I) Integrity-dollars

And points out, correctly, that the best solutions to piracy do not add to the total “cost” of the game by making it more difficult and more time-consuming to purchase, but rather by taking the cost down as compared to the hassle, integrity cost, and time commitment of piracy:

This game was expensive, it took forever to install and deal with the invasive DRM, which was only slightly more fun than getting groped by the TSA in the comfort of your own home.  The only thing that was cheap about the game was that buying it was “the right thing to do,” wasn’t illegal, and it didn’t make the player feel guilty.  The only way this service competed with piracy was in the $I cost.  

February 22, 2012

A Tesla Roadster that is simply parked without being plugged in will eventually become a “brick”. The parasitic load from the car’s always-on subsystems continually drains the battery and if the battery’s charge is ever totally depleted, it is essentially destroyed.

Hmmm. That does seem like a problem. Especially since it’s $40,000 to replace that dead battery.