Pure Thought

Slashdot linked to Jalopnik's story on the RSV on Friday. Among the comments is this gem from Kulprit442:

I remember seeing car ads from the past (just because I am an automotive pop culture nut) and it wasn't uncommon for the small cars of the 80's, 70's and even 60's claiming 30-40mpg...so why with all the technology in 30 years can we not make alot more vehicles get alot more than they are now. I still say conspiracy!!!!

The thing about those old cars is that they didn't have much horsepower. The RSV included the 1.7L engine from the mid-70's Honda Accord. The sedan of today offers as its smallest engine a 2.4L 177 hp version, with a 3.5L 271 hp V6 available on the more premium trims. In 1988*, the Accord only offered 98 hp in the DX/LX and 120 hp in the LXi, both with 2.0L engines.

Over time, manufacturers have offered more power, and buyers have accepted it. Today's 110 hp engines find their way into subcompacts ranging from the Toyota Yaris (106 hp) to the Honda Fit (117 hp), or end up as part of a hybrid system, as in the 2009 Toyota Prius. (Ye olden subcompacts often made do with about 66 hp, but nobody truly liked them.) I don't really blame manufacturers nor buyers for this, though. Power is a lot more fun than economy, no conspiracy needed.

Although weight could soak up the performance difference between modern and older cars, the trend appears to have been for power to increase faster than weight. That 1988 Accord is only 2482 lb. for the DX sedan, for 25.4 lb/hp. The 2010 LX sedan weighs 3230 lb, for 18.2 lb/hp.


* This being as far back as MSN autos provides data for it, and I'm not interested in doing heavy research on Memorial Day weekend.

I recently had the opportunity to drive an '09 Jetta S with a 6-speed automatic for a couple of days while my car was in the shop. One of the things Julie brought up was how it feels much more like a luxury car than my New Beetle or the Honda Fit we test-drove last year.

After playing with it a bit, I realized one major difference is in the gas pedal. The Fit was always ready to spring forward if I pushed the pedal any harder. Its demand for ultra-precise control made it feel like a fast-reacting sports car, just waiting to show off its reaction time to the next challenge. Sometimes I had to just think about moving my foot, and that would elicit a response without making Julie rock back and forth.

The Jetta is the Fit's antithesis. There's a bit of purposeful delay in the reaction, so that the changes in acceleration are very gentle. And that gives the car that "big luxury sedan" feel, by simulating the inertia of an actual 4,000 pound car. Even alternating between flooring it and releasing the pedal didn't make my passenger complain.

In 2008, I had an '09 Forester for a day as the loaner, and I panned it at the time: "They ruined the Forester." I've since come around to the styling, but I remember describing its ride as bland. I wonder now if it simply felt more like the Jetta than the Fit, and my taste has changed in the meantime.

Some people carry around an appointment book stuffed with events and activities with friends for practically the next year. In April, you may find them saying, "I only have three weekends free the rest of this year. Should we get together in June or October?" Others are likely to make plans for the weekend after work on Friday.

These appointments are basically time debt: promises to spend time later. The more you carry, the more debt service is required. A full six-month schedule practically demands the overhead and formality of the planner, unlike the spur-of-the-moment approach. Time debt can also be defaulted on, by cancelling the appointments.

I've always been on the lazy side. I carry little external time debt. There's a seemingly infinite amount of time I could spend on personal projects, but I also have a lot of ideas for them, and they are defaulted on frequently. Freshwall hasn't released; I got it "in shape" for what I want the engine to do, and I haven't gotten around to updating the GUI yet. Debian packaging? Ubuntu inclusion? Ha! I've been missing my goals for three months.

This suggests that I should be looking at investing time, rather than spending it. If I start a project, I should finish it before it dies, unborn, of neglect. If I keep living with such high time losses, I'm going to turn 40 and ask myself, "Why am I not like my heroes?" and the answer will still be: because they finished stuff.

(Then again, we haven't seen much on Rhino's Not Rails or ejacs recently, either, so maybe I'm not so different. Ejacs at least made it to google code, but hasn't seen activity in almost a year.)

I've been working on increasing both post frequency and quality here on Pawprints of the Mind. It was easy at first, as a natural consequence of trying to write something once a day. When that effort paused during the holidays, with nothing produced between December 22nd and January 3rd, I had nothing to write about on my blog. The only post published in that window was a touching up of an old draft.

It seems that daily writing is important to help me think, even if its only actual effect is to devote time to actual thinking instead of the internet or video games. (During my hiatus, I played an entire game of Secret of Mana.) I suspect it's more than that, though. If I don't know what to write about when I start, creating the opportunity generally makes something appear.

Perhaps this is how NaNoWriMo works. By establishing time for people to write, it helps them focus their efforts and allows the result to happen, instead of deferring it in favor of day-to-day living. It's important to allocate time and use it, because less work translates to less reward and more difficulty in trying to pick it up later. There's a need for breaks, but there's also a danger of spending too much time relearning it when returning to the project. There's a sweet spot between the two where unusual thoughts and angles flow more freely.

The quality of posting, I hope, is also going up as a result of trying to produce daily, but post only weekly. I have a lot more space to draft out my thoughts, which allows for more cutting of fluff and a deeper exploration of the chosen topic. Although it's no secret that I admire Steve Yegge's storytelling skills, I'd really like to focus on writing like Paul Graham: dense and flowing toward interesting.

So that's a behind-the-scenes look at sapphirepaw 2010. See you later this week!

In online communications, it seems that the more open a system is, the more likely it is for the noise of abuse to drown out the signal of quality. Precious few of the comments on reddit for a given link will be deep insight. Other "democratic" channels like email, open blogs, forums, and wikis are swiftly buried in spam unless protected. Search engines must fight with people trying to spam their result pages. Systems that successfully defend against spam are immediately faced with the problem of trolling.

Access to the capability for anonymous, uncensored speech is important to general freedom, as a means of bringing suppressed or ignored issues into the public eye—Wikileaks for instance. Anonymous discussion can be useful, but anonymity is obviously not a sufficient condition to generate high quality discussion, where quality is roughly defined as the amount of "signal", the fraction of posts that are non-spam. Perhaps one-line jokes would also be excluded. (I'd love to exclude trolls as well, but I suspect trolling is a generalization of Poe's Law, which makes measuring trollishness futile.)

Reddit ends up being a fairly democratic back channel for the entire internet, since it allows for virtually anyone to comment on any link, whether the source allows, moderates, or disallows comments themselves. It also unifies all sources into a single, consistent comment interface, and allows community votes to determine what content is worth keeping. Yet out of this set of features comes not an intellectual utopia, but a culture that loves memes and pun threads, and can be rather harsh on opposing viewpoints. Part of this is a result of the churn rate: if a hot link is really only visible for a few hours, then a comment needs to be produced quickly to be seen at all. That applies the pressures for the quick jokes and jabs.

I also wonder if part of the appeal of the noisy posts are in the fact that there's so little invested in jokes and insults as compared to real responses. It's easy to proclaim that someone is an idiot, but a lot harder and slower to eloquently rebut their points. So the former tends to happen a lot more frequently.

Is there a way to remove the noise from online conversation? The only way I can really see to have a noise-free channel is to meet in real life, away from the Internet's permanent floating riot club. Darknets (e.g. private invite-only forums or friends-only livejournals) are the online analog, but the problem with both of these methods from a democratic point of view is the limited participation. It can so easily become a glorified clique.

I guess a full range of spaces are required. Wikileaks has a vulnerable core, uncensored systems can be overrun, and darknets have their problems too.

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I would like to pass some credit to danah boyd's discussion of her talk at Web 2.0, where the back channel (commentary about the talk) was displayed during the talk, for the whole audience to see. It was this post that started me thinking about back channels, reddit, and democracy. (Incidentally, showing the back channel as part of the front channel still seems like the worst possible thing you could do to a speaker.)

It's been a few days since I first read Doctor Professor's "Awesome by Proxy" article, and I have one other thought I'd like to add—that awesomeness by player skill can exist in a role-playing game (RPG), but it's rarely measured.

My dad used to be convinced (and maybe still is) that Final Fantasy VI adjusted the monster levels if your party's levels exceeded some threshold. After playing through about 15 times, I submit that this is not the case. He's probably fighting less efficiently, and getting more entertainment versus using only the most powerful characters and attacks every move.

This efficiency thing: there's no reward to finishing the game in under 26 hours, nor any penalty for running the clock up to 99:99. Only one game series that I can think of reacts to time played: Metroid, where for instance completing Super Metroid in under 3 hours attains the best ending sequence. (Chrono Trigger comes to mind for providing alternate endings, but it's more a puzzle of using "New Game +" and finding the entry points than real efficiency of play.)

Nevertheless, efficiency is still the visible artifact of mastery in an RPG. The mastery itself is in the study and applications of the game's rules to bring about the necessary plot advancement as quickly as possible. Yet this is a different kind of mastery: it involves some book learning and symbol-pushing in the mind to accomplish. The necessity of fine timing, of experience and practice, that so characterize action games, is notably rare in RPGs. Sabin's Blitz may require Street Fighter-like input, but in Wait mode, battle time freezes while this input is taken. Sabin doesn't have to work that input into his regular attack/block/dodge actions.

This probably adds another layer of rationalization for the performance oriented: they're playing something that takes intelligence, not a dumb just-stab-the-monster game like Zelda, right?[1] You're smart if you can handle Final Fantasy Tactics! The five-ninja Death Crew is the ultimate fighting team, and they're all special and uniquely yours. Right?

I certainly thought so, once. But now I don't have such infinite faith in myself. Being special doesn't really count for much, and if it were true in the extreme, we'd have no friends because nobody could relate to us. It's just something we tell kids so that they'll have the motivation to get started on learning something complicated enough to make a career of.


[1] Wrong—Zelda has some tricky puzzles, too. Possibly even trickier than RPGs.

I read Awesome by Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement the other day, and realized that yes, my gaming is rather performance oriented. If I'm not playing some RPG, it's probably Spyro with the character voices off so that the NPCs can't taunt me for failing their challenges. (And I still skip the harder challenges, except for the Sparx Worlds in Year of the Dragon, which have an immediate reward for completing them.)

The exceptions seem to be for social games like Unreal Tournament at HA, or Dance Dance Revolution when I was in Buffalo. Games where the point is to earn something, not just to have some fun saving the world. Games that don't have tons of side quests of questionable worth.

Recently, I played through Final Fantasy VI for the nth time, with the goal of completing it "quickly"—a task that's been kicking around my head since my wife mentioned that she'd been playing FF XII for 40 hours and it seemed like it was just getting started. I set a goal of 25 hours, and I almost made it: I started the final battle with Kefka at 25:00. To get there, I cut a number of corners and skipped a few side quests, and in the end, none of that mattered. I lost one character, and even throwing Ultima at full cost, none of the other characters ran out of MP. I was actually surprised and disappointed that it wasn't harder.

It puts the idea of performance games in sharp relief: this is a game where I've become so fascinated with Leveling Up that I've almost lost track of even trying to attain the goals at all. When I consciously cast away my safety blanket, I find that I am still nigh godlike in my invulnerability to the most difficult battles of the game.

It, along with Doctor Professor's article, also uncovers an interesting concept hiding in the cobwebs of my mind: I don't think I'm any good at action games, so I don't play them. Instant self-fulfilling prophecy! I perceived my current skill at action games as an absolute limit, rather than something that can be moved with effort. By the time I realized the falsehood of that, I was old enough to question whether the result of mastery was worth the time investment.

Actually, considering the time investment cuts both ways. Even though it can keep you from working on pointless things, if you're too worried about the returns, you'll never get anything done. There's always a "tedious" part of mastering a skill, where you have to do the same thing faster or more precise than you're accustomed to in order to actually improve, and this process can't be short-circuited. It can be dragged down by living in the comfort zone too much, but it can't be accelerated. It absolutely requires time and practice.

The same point is hidden in Steve Yegge's old Bob Paradox: if you believe that your current skill can't be improved, then you won't put in the effort to do so. If Bob can program, why show up for programming training? It's a waste of time. If I can play Final Fantasy, why bother with Zelda? But change the perspective from Bob to Joe, and look at it as something that can be improved or mastered, and I would be surprised if there is any limit beyond the time requirement to how much improvement can be made.

It's been said before: more data beats more code. In our latest example, I would like to pit three recommendation engines against each other.

First up, last.fm, where I've been a member since 2007, and have scrobbled 1100+ tracks. last.fm is notable for being the place where I first surveyed the trance genre, and I marked a decent number of tracks as favorites in those days.

Next, Amazon, widely considered "spooky" when it was first released on the unsuspecting world. I took the trouble to tell Amazon what items in my history were really mine, and which ones were gifts. In addition, I rated all the CDs I had purchased, to give it all the data it will accept.

Finally, Pandora, beloved of many. I have two stations to call my own, one based on the global Trance station, and one built on a couple of tracks of Anjunabeats Vol. 5 that I particularly like. Pandora is particularly interesting in that it knows the features of a song, so if you seed a station with instrumental songs like Oceanic and Indonesia, it tends to avoid vocal tracks.

Results

Amazon holds the title of worst recommender, but they're at least willing to tell you why they recommended something. To complement Classic Trance Nation, Amazon recommended Sarah McLachlan and Celine Dion. Neither of which I have any interest in whatsoever. There's also a huge catalog of ambient music in my recommendation list, because I picked up Structures from Silence by Steve Roach for technically unrelated reasons. I do like the music, but I'm not really interested in more of that, either.

Pandora has been excellent, with the curious exception of a track from DJ Baby Anne's album Mixtress showing up on the Indonesia station—I never thought of Above & Beyond being very heavy on either breakbeats or funk, but apparently Pandora thinks so. On the other hand, a quick thumbs-down has apparently been taken to heart. If Pandora has a drawback, it's that the Indonesia station has a surprising amount of music that I already own. On the other hand, since I buy music once I know that I like it, that's a good indication that they're able to pick likable music.

Last.fm falls between the two. The main pitfall of theirs is that listening to a whole song is implicitly an endorsement of it, so if you're using it to discover music, you have to pay close attention and skip something if it's only OK.

There's one curious thing to note about this lineup: Amazon doesn't collect any data with finer granularity than an entire album, and it comes up with the worst suggestions. Last.fm collects data per track, as does Pandora, but the latter has the advantage that they also know what's inside those tracks. Thus, they can find tracks that are not only similar socially, but similar in sound. And so the winner is the service that uses the most data in their decisions.

For some time, it was an explicit goal of mine to become the world's best programmer. At some point, I felt like I achieved it in large measure, and so I carried on doing what I was doing and generally considering myself to be an awesome win. But today I am not so sure.

For one, I tend to value philosophical purity rather highly, even though it's not usually required for working code. This leads to either lots of rewriting when I'm getting toward a workable-but-"ugly" solution, or to not enough reworking when I'm changing an existing system. In the latter case, it happens because I leave something unchanged that should be changed, in order to keep the codebase consistent within itself. Such imposed limits to the rate of conceptual drift of the project is good for collaboration, but are not so useful for a one-man effort to have.

I'm also in a stage again where I don't plan out my code much before jumping in and hacking. This tends to increase the amount of rewriting that needs done, when a half-baked plan turns out not to work. While I think this is faster (and it's certainly more fun) than planning first, since even planned code is subject to later revisions, I don't have any data on which way is higher quality or more efficient. Certainly speed should not be the only metric, even if it has been a favorite one.

Once upon a time, old hands at software would deride people who couldn't code without a compiler to tell them what their errors were. My current approach to programming is not really all that much different, in that I'm losing the habit of thinking about code outside of the editor. (When that editor is as poor for coding as Dreamweaver, this is probably doubly bad.)

There's clearly more to do and more to become, even after the years put in so far. Which has to make me wonder: are those programmers who read or write programming blogs actually in the top 10% or top 1% of programmers, or do programming blogs just say that to give their readers unwarranted optimism about their own abilities, thereby increasing their readership?

I wonder sometimes if people in the past, when reading Dickens was considered entertainment, may have actually been more intelligent in some manner than we are today. I'm not certain about this one, because obviously dealing with larger words and more complex sentences in print will make someone appear better on a test that considers those things important. Yet I still wonder if being frequently exposed to things like Dickens increased intelligence in other areas, in the same sort of way that learning a second language has an observable effect on I.Q.

What we're exposed to clearly does affect our minds, in a cultural sense. Having begun programming in an unashamedly procedural world (i.e. BASIC), object-oriented and functional programming styles were immensely difficult to understand when I first encountered them. Left to my own devices, in a Java- and Lisp-free void, I would most likely have continued making bigger, better, and more complex procedural programs—in C, the Real Man's language.

Ruby people like to kick around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as an advantage of their language: Ruby's (and most other contemporary dynamic languages, actually) metaprogramming capability makes you a better programmer because they allow you to express more concepts than other languages. I'm not entirely certain that metaprogramming allows for the expression of more concepts, only that it enables cleaner expression of the same ones. Sort of like Steve Yegge pointing out that Strategy objects are first-class functions (or closures, if they have state) in OO clothing. But then again, I'm tainted. I have these concepts now through my own brief exposure to Ruby, Scheme (SICP), and JavaScript (Crockford).

On the opposite side, even having these concepts does not make them permanent. They seem to need exercised, or else they fade out of the mind. Having written so much OO code lately, I started to forget how to do procedural code. On a PHP4 conversion project, I found myself converting $row = $mysqli->query($SQL)->fetch_row() into $res = mysql_query($SQL); $row = mysql_fetch_row($res);. Working on similar code the next day, I realized a more accurate translation would be to pass the function return value right into the next call: $row = mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query($SQL)); Duh! I was obviously forgetting how to program.

It makes me worry a bit more about our modern culture, where we are constantly watching TV (or just channel surfing) or YouTube or compressing our thoughts into a few chrs 2 txt or tweet. Video is engaging and the realtime nature of cell phones and the web can be fun, but when do we have our silence? When do we think big, dream big, or plan big? Does it ever happen, or do we numb ourselves so much in the constant chatter that we become numb to numbness?