Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe…
Programming languages are like cats. It is easier to get a new cat than to get an old cat fixed. Most successful languages are ultimately replaced by upstarts. Remodeled languages rarely match the glory of the original. Fortran was once the king of languages. It has been revised several times over the years, but the modernized dialects experienced a fraction of the prestige of Fortran IV. Similarly, Pascal was a popular structured programming language, but none of the object oriented dialects ever approached Pascal’s glory. Instead, languages tend to be superseded.
Metta World Peace thanks Jesus Christ that he still has his teeth (by losangelestimes)
Source: youtube.com
Taking this a couple of steps further, the article points out that, to many people, Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing doesn’t enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless. Let’s go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It’s also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what’s queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless. There’s no “sharing” at all. Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing. There’s something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it’s just a feed in some social application that’s constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It’s just another form of spam, particularly if I’m also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends.
Pretty rad video based on Charlie Chaplan’s closing speech in The Dictator
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.
Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.
A very few—as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men—serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
the definition of HARDCORE
Trendiness is seductive, especially to the young and inexperienced, for the principal reason that it offers no restraints, is lots of ‘fun’, permits unlimited possibilities for ‘self-expression,’ and doesn’t require conforming to the dictates of reason or aesthetics. ‘… Self-expression is real only after the means to it have been acquired’, comments the author of a brilliant commentary on the foibles of education, ‘Begin Here.’
Monkeys explain society
Microsoft Vision of the Future
If only they produced these types of products
The ONE graph to understanding #occupywallst
Siri is Apple’s Answer to Google and the Future
Here is the demo video of the Siri feature Apple announced:
Siri’s magic is a combination of Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Although currently demoed on the iPhone, Siri will be strategically important to Apple across all its current products and for the future of Apple computing.
The on the go mobile use case is the most currently relevant and obvious one. The video clearly depicts scenarios, such as running, in which the user is on the go and engaged in an activity that constrains their hands and attention. The traditional mobile model of looking at the screen and manipulating it with touch/type would require them to stop their current activity and refocus in order to engage. Siri allows them to continue their activity with minimal mental and physical disruption. This obviously breaks down where the content is long (e-mail, recipes) or not easily described (photos, restaurant listings) and thus require the users attention on the screen.
Even in these cases, the speech recognition portion of Siri can prove useful in helping the user avoid the painful mobile typing experience. When cooking in the kitchen Siri may be of no use reading the recipe to you but is quite useful if you can ask it to pull up the recipe on the iPad. On the AppleTV it will allow you to direct the interface much like the Kinect has done with the Xbox. It can also be helpful in situations where you need to type long form content, although I suspect the experience of dictating would feel strange at least in the short run.
Siri is a lot more than just a balm for the lack of the iPhone5. It’sthe core to the future of Apple computing. Mobile is the best proxy we have for ambient computing since it provides computational power + access to the net/cloud wherever you are. The realities of our current technological limitations require an integrated device that we carry around with us. As with all things technology, as time moves on the device will continue to shrink until it essentially disappears. This new environment will also be less integrated, with a separation of the display from the computational and input unit. Siri is what will make this all possible for Apple.
Remove the device from the scene and imagine saying out loud while cooking “Siri, please display the recipe for rice pudding on the kitchen display.” (Airplay is starting to seem more interesting!) Or imagine going on a run and hearing in your earpiece “You have a new message from Dan, what would you like to do.” The beauty of speech is that it doesn’t require you to have a screen in front of you to receive data or a keyboard to input data. This permits the data + computation to seem like it’s around you at all times. It accesses you via voice notifications and you access it via spoken requests. If the action is of a longer or more substantive form you can then move to a display and input device environment to continue. Throw in the cloud and you could see yourself saying “Siri, please move this project from the living room display to my display at work and pull up the route and traffic on the car display.”
So Siri works in the mobile world today and in the ambient computing world of the future but does it fit with Apple’s other computing contexts? If we isolate the NLP technology of Siri we begin to see why the answer is most certainly yes.
We may not realize it but NLP is more than just technological wizardry it’s an alternate and SUPERIOR input interface to the prevailing GUI environment.
For instance, the use case that Apple demoed at the event of asking Siri “show me the best Mexican restaurants around here.” The traditional mobile GUI approach would likely involve:
- Open Yelp
- Select the “nearby” tab
- Select the “restaurants” menu item
- Further refine by “Mexican”
- Further sort by rating
The same goes for something simpler like “remind me on July 15th at 8 am that it’s my wedding Anniversary.” The traditional GUI approach requires many consequent actions after opening the app:
- Find the specific date
- Click the “add an event” icon
- Type the description
- Select the time
- Select the reminder
- Select one of many other options
The reality of the GUI interface is that it is inherently limited in two dimensions:
Firstly, we trade off the benefits of simplicity in exchange for sub-routines - instead of having a mess of an interface with every possible option in your face, we hide things behind menus, drop-downs, and next-steps.
Secondly, the GUI is limited in that it needs to provide a field/icon for every action. Even once you’re at the screen for adding an event it provides every possible option for this event - start time, end time, reminders - and each one of these has their own list of sub-selections (best exemplified by a drop-down for every hour of the day).
The natural language queries that NLP permits are better interfaces because they are the exact opposite of anticipating every possible action/option. All they require of the user is to state exactly and only what they want achieved. Even on a computer with a full-sized keyboard, being able to type these NLQ’s would be a significant increase in utility over today’s experience. And that is exactly why Siri should worry Google. Well, it should kind of worry Google.
The NLP in Siri is not the magic sauce that most futurists envision. Let’s take the “Best Mexican Restaurants Around Here” use-case and compare the magical NLP to Siri. As far as I can tell, Siri is essentially executing the GUI equivalent of the Yelp process we outlined above. In fact, in most of the examples that Apple presents the NLP is used to essentially execute a series of GUI steps in lieu of the user within a specific application.
The futurist NLP (ok not pure NLP but NLP plus some other computation techniques) for the same query would look something like this:
- Use a dataset to find all the Mexican restaurants within x miles
- Find the reviews/ratings of the open restaurants across multiple datasets
- For the reviews ratings, look at the user who left the review/rating and score them based on a variety of factors (site reputation, reputation across other data sources, skew of reviews on the site, language level used, etc)
- Once we have that score, compile an aggregate rating for the restaurant taking into account time-weighting for the reviews
- Understand the actual content of the reviews and adjust the score accordingly
- Find news/articles about the restaurants, understand the content and adjust the score further
- Create a final score for each restaurant and deliver a results list
What Siri’s NLP is essentially doing is taking a spoken request and deciding which application is best suited to handle it - for restaurants it’s Yelp, for music it’s the built in Music app, for directions it’s Google Maps - and then converting the request into it’s equivalent GUI steps within that application.This is not to minimize what has been achieved here. Siri’s ability to understand a variety of human phrases that all mean the same thing is a major accomplishment. Its ability to route a natural language query to an appropriate data provider is not a simple task. (It’ll be interesting to see how Siri performs with ambiguous queries)
This is in stark contrast to Google’s approach which is a lot closer to the futurist NLP. Crawl the entire web and then use a variety of algorithms to attempt to deliver a list of results that answer the query. The only problem is that without all that futurist magic Google’s results are not perfect and require a lot of refinement and deep diving on the users part. Google is better positioned than Apple to achieve some form of alchemy NLP but who knows when that will happen.
Apple as always is providing the more curated and refined experience. Yes, the results may be limited to Yelp and it’s ratings but for the most part that will get the job done just the same. Apple has chosen to attack search from a different angle. Instead of crunching ALL of the web’s data and trying to build a result set per query a la Google, Apple has chosen to assign a vertical to your query and then pass it on to a vertical specific application/content provider. Restaurant query, pass it to Yelp. Video query, pass it to YouTube. Information query, Wikipedia. You get the picture. Considering that the web has been steadily verticalizing this provides Apple with a good content base and reduces the usefulness of search for many queries.
For the foreseeable future, traditional search will perform better for certain types of queries - research and recall come to mind. Siri could pass those or any others it can’t quite understand off to Google, a much smaller % of overall queries on mobile than Google is used to. It’s been a popular topic of speculation for some time now whether Apple would build a search engine after Google invaded their turf with Android. Well in a way, they just did.
