As I said, I am very much still alive (not quite kicking, but I’m working on that). It’s summer which means it’s warm outside and so I’m increasingly inclined to spend time inside. I don’t like the heat very much. While I’ve been gone I’ve been thinking about a number of things of varying levels of importance to me (and to you, my dear readers). So here’s a quick brain dump, in no particular order.

It’s been a while since I learned a new programming language. I’ve been using C and Python extensively and while I like good systems and scripting languages as much as the next hacker, it’s a bit like eating only whole wheat bread with Nutella. Not that there’s anything wrong with whole wheat bread or nutella, but I am craving a bit more variety. I’ve been looking at more exotic sources of nutrition, mainly Haskell and Clojure (nothing like a good Lisp to spice things up). Real World Haskell has been sitting idle on my desk for far too long – I stalled at chapter 4 and it’s about time I picked it up again. I’m considering grabbing a copy of Joy of Clojure too.

While writing code is certainly fun, I do missing writing words. And no, I don’t mean words meant for publication in a scientific journal (see whole wheat bread and Nutella above). In particular, I’ve been wanting to tell some good stories. I’ve always loved books and television and movies but it took some binge-watching of Doctor Who to help me realize that what I really like is a good story. And I like telling them as much as I like hearing (or seeing, or reading) them. It’s been entirely far too long since I wrote any sizeable amount of fiction and I can feel my storytelling muscles atrophying. If I put it off for much longer all I’m going to be capable of is Michael Bay-esque explosive blockbusters (though that might nicely supplement my starving grad student’s salary). I’ve been thinking about doing NaNoWriMo this year. NaNoWriMo sounds like a writing marathon and like all sporting events, training helps. I’ve always considered my blog to be training for non-fiction writing (and it’s helped) so maybe a similar fiction-writing training routine might help. Speaking of blogging, I miss it too. Writing really is a great way to sort out my ideas and think aloud (so to speak). So more of that too.

In other news, this blog runs off WordPress.com and I pay for mapping the Bytebaker.com domain to their servers. Apparently this will expire in about two weeks. I’ve been barking on and off about the need for next-generation content management systems that allow for more than a blog/static-site dichotomy. Given that it’s summer and I have a solid deadline this might be a good time to bite the bullet and roll my own. I did a half-hearted attempt a few years ago and round two has been long overdue. I’m still working out just what I want from this new system, but I have some cool ideas (mostly culled from other places). More on that later.

On a mostly unrelated note I tried out a new coworking space a few blocks from my place. It’s called the Popshop and seems to be run by a bunch of Cornell seniors. It’s pretty decent, they have lots of markers, whiteboards, air conditioning, a couch and a 3D printer. But the chairs suck so I may not be back too often. I’m also more in favor of quiet and isolated working spaces. I do spend most days working in an open plan setup, but we each have a lot of space to ourselves and there isn’t a whole lot of social interaction. I suppose coworking spaces are great if you’re looking for people to bounce ideas off but I prefer isolation when it comes to actually pumping out the code (or the words).

To recap: I’m alive. I’m looking forward to lots more hacking and writing in the near future. Coworking might be cool, but I’ll stick to my office for now. See you all tomorrow.

Readlists is one of those services that seem really simple in retrospect but fulfill a very interesting (and innovative) niche. What’s more, it’s executed very well, both in terms of functionality and design. Readlists satisfy a real need – tablets are great reading devices but a lot of interesting content is spread out over multiple pages on the Web. It would be really nice if there was a straightforward, simple way to collect all that distributed content and send it to your tablet. Readlists does that very well (it’s not quite perfect since they have to email the ebooks to your iPad).

Equally importantly, the experience for curators is also well crafted. All you have to do is paste in some links and (optionally) provide a blurb for each one and you’re all set to go. You can share easily on Twitter or Facebook or just send a permalink to your friends. The permalink isn’t human-readable, but that’s fine – it means you can change the title of your reading list if you find yourself collecting different kinds of articles than what you started with. There is practically zero friction involved in collecting and sharing (given you have a Readability account). There are no customization options and in this case I think that’s a good thing – there’s less work for the curator to do and you can move on to more important things (like your next Readlist).

I’ve created a Readlist called “So you want a PhD” which is a collection of articles about graduate school. Though the creation process was dead easy, there are some concerns I have. I don’t see any analytics so I can’t tell how many people are seeing or reading my list. It also seems like Readlists can be updated indefinitely, which is great, but raises the question of how do I tell readers there is an update? One of the properties of the Web is that everything is potentially a work in progress – change and evolution are at the heart of web content. It would be great if I could opt in for some sort of notification when a list changes (possibly via RSS or email). Of course these things add more complexity to the service, but I think that these additions are worth it.

In conclusion, I think Readlists are a great idea for the modern web. Along with devices like the Kindle and iPad and services like Readability and Instapaper we’re moving to an increasingly readable, seamless web. We can discover great content on a laptop or desktop and seamlessly move to a tablet or other more comfortable reading device (or vice versa). There are still unanswered questions (such as changing lists) but I think we’re taking steps in the right direction. There will certainly be challenges as we move into a world of multiple devices in different forms but it’s good to know that the Arc90 folk are meeting the challenges head on.

Programming culture is generally synonymous with hard work and long hours — death marches, all-nighters, 80 hour work weeks, we do them all. But we’re talking about grit here, not masochism. Grit isn’t strictly equal to working obscenely hard, long hours. Part of the problem with thinking about grit in relation to programming is defining what success means for a programmer. Is your definition of success simply finding a working solution? Does it mean finding the most efficient solution? Are you successful if you cover every single edge case or is it enough to just take care of the most common ones? Is your program really better if it handles everything you could throw at it or should you handle core uses cases well and fail gracefully on the others? Part of the problem of coming up with a good solution is asking the right question. This is especially true of building software. However merely coming up with the right question requires a certain amount of grit. We need the patience to look beyond the obvious problems and solutions and ask the hard questions.

So now we’ve found the right question and defined bounds on the possible solutions. What next? How does grit help with the actual act of writing code and building stuff? Programming is not easy. It can be fun and exciting and uplifting, but sometimes it is downright hard and depressing. Sometimes we spend hours sifting through possible solutions before hitting upon the appopriate one. Sometimes we spend several intimate hours with a debugger tracking down pointer bugs before finding that one variable we forgot to initialize. Being tenacious and persistent in the face of seemingly unrelenting roadblocks is not an added benefit for a programmer – it is a bare necessity. When it comes down to the act of sitting down, writing and debugging code grit is not optional. Without it not only can we not be good programmers, we can’t even be an average ones.

But if our goal is to be a good (maybe even great) programmer, then grit will continue to help. One of the qualities of good programmers is that they get a lot of stuff done. In particular they do a lot that isn’t strictly their job. This includes fixing and extending their tools and improving core infrastructure. They do this even if they aren’t in charge of infrastructure because they realize that their code depends on what’s underneath. Grit is the difference between waiting for someone else to fix the annoying bug in the library that you depend on and diving in and fixing it ourselves. When Steve Yegge talks about the difference between “superhumanly godlike” and “smart”, grit is a part of what he’s talking about. Not that there’s anything wrong with being smart, but it might not be enough. Of course to cultivate that level of grit we need to cultivate a good deal of courage. Diving into someone else’s code and fixing it can be a daunting task but it’s one that has to be mastered.

While I’ve always liked programming it’s taken me a long time to understand the importance of grit. When you do something because you like it (mostly) it’s tempting to stay away from the parts that are painful and hard. For a long time I avoided writing large programs because I was afraid of all the complexity that was involved. I was afraid of becoming familiar with complex algorithms because I was afraid of the possibility that I’d get it wrong. I understand now that I can’t become a good programmer if I don’t push myself to do the things that I consider hard and dislike. I need to have the grit to handle large complex problems and spend the time to understand and apply advanced algorithms. The good news is that just like perseverance and discipline, grit can be trained and improved. I’m no longer as afraid to dive into unknown codebases as I was a few months ago. I now find it much easier to hold complex code paths in my head. I’m certainly far, far away from being superhuman, but I try to suck a little less every day.

To be clear, they’re not the wrong model for everyone and everything. But they’re certainly not the end-all and be-all of web publishing. As I start measuring the lifetime of my blog in years instead of months, I’m starting to get just a bit frustrated by a platform designed for immediacy. Blogs are fine if you’re writing about what’s happening in the world right now. Blogs are great if you want an online diary of your life. Blogs are wonderful for documenting the growth of your project and community over the years. However blogs are perhaps not so great for people who want to use their writing to augment their thought process. They are not all that great if there are a handful of topics and ideas that you keep revisiting and refining over time.

For example, I’ve written about writing for the web and publishing models before. This will be the third in the de facto series. However, the posts are widely separated in time. In a typical blog format they won’t appear side-by-side unless I remember them and put in links. It would be great if I could have a single web page, at a fixed URL that holds the evolution of my thoughts on the matter over time. As a visitor to the site you could see each of the versions, not just the most recent one. You could comment on each of the versions, or on the combined document. While we’re at it, I’d also like to see paragraph-level comments and version histories (but with a UI better than standard diff).

What I’m describing is more of an essay platform than it is a blogging platform. However I don’t want stiffly siloed platforms either. I’d like to be able to post articles like the one about what I learned in my first semester of graduate school. These posts would fade into the background over time, just like a normal blog. Writers like Craig Mod do a good job of creating large, permanent articles surrounded by smaller “satellite” articles. But when I last asked him (over Twitter a few months ago) he maintained it by hand. Another solution is two have two separate sites like Dustin Curtis does: one for permanent works and one as a traditional blog. But personally I’m of the opinion that software should do as much work as possible and I’ve already separated some of my writing.

The strange thing about the web is that it is both ephemeral and permanent. Today’s hot articles will be lost and forgotten tomorrow. And yet nothing that gets put online ever truly gets deleted. What I want is a writing and publishing platform that reconciles these two opposite natures. There are other technical and interface aspects I could highlight, but they’re orthogonal to the overall purpose of this platform: let me post time dependent pieces which can be archived after a few days, but also let me have long running, heavily edited works.

I don’t know that such a platform exists. I also don’t know for certain that such a platfrom doesn’t exists. I suppose that the only way to really get what I want is to build it (after all, talk is cheap, show me the code) and I hope one day I’ll actually get around to it. Till then I’ll keep thinking about how we can support writing and publishing for the bipolar web (and linking back to older versions). I’d love to hear what you think about the matter.

Compared to the energy of creating and making things, consumption almost always feels draining. There is a difference between buying things and consumerism. For better or for worse it’s possible to be a consumer without spending money. Thanks to all the free content around the web I can easily spend hours and days consuming without spending a dime. Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo, Spotify, etc. are all incredible (and seemingly unending) sources of consumable content. I don’t spend any money (or at most very little money), but I do spend a large amount in terms of energy and time. It’s so easy to sit on the couch and just hit the next button. Before I know it, it’s dark outside, the day is gone, I’ve forgotten to get dinner and accomplished pretty much nothing. The problem with this form of empty consumption is that it’s not relaxing or refreshing and it’s definitely not useful. The day just melts away into a sea of unproductiveness.

Television is particularly soul-sucking. It’s almost drug-like in the effectiveness with which it shuts down my brain and makes the rest of the world go away. When I sit on the couch and turn on Netflix I can feel my brain turning off. There’s a fog of semi-consciousness descending on my mind. I’m awake, I can see and touch and feel, but I’ve lost all the will to act or do anything other than hit the next button. After a few minutes it’s more work tearing myself away than hitting “next”. I suppose this is what being a zombie is like. This is my brain on television and in hindsight it’s quite terrifying. Perhaps there’s a reason it’s been called the “idiot box”.

Modern society seems to be predisposed towards consumers. Everyone is a consumer whether or not they want to be. Even the point of creation is to make money to be used for more consumption. I’m not about to make a grand sweeping statement like “consumption is evil”. Personally I think the occasional (even regular) indulgence is fine, maybe even healthy. But for me, consumption as a way of life is depressing. It’s synonymous with days sitting on the couch watching bad television, feeling my brain gradually atrophy a handful of neurons at a time. It’s synonymous with buying a nice shirt and then wearing free t-shirts to class everyday. Even though it might feel good in the moment, it quickly turns to disappointment and regret. Personally, I’ll take the pain of discipline over the pain of disappointment and regret.

Creation is different. Creation should be harder, it should take up more energy, it should leave me feeling trained and tired. And sometimes it does. But even if I feel physically tired, at a deeper level I feel energized. It feels good to know that today I made something. It makes me look forward to getting up tomorrow morning and making it better. It’s good to be able to show something to people, to get their opinions and ideas and then go back and polish. It’s good to know that I can the change the world in some way and maybe, just maybe I can make a bigger difference. Creation is good.

I don’t know why being creative feels good. I’m sure there’s some reward pathway in the brain that gets triggered by designing something, making plans to make it happen and then actually following through on those plans. I would like to believe that what I make helps other people in some way. Even if it doesn’t, I think I’m fine with pursuing creativity for personal reasons. I’m hoping that a life with less random television, fewer RSS feeds and less time glued to Twitter and Facebook will translate to more blog posts, more working code and more meaningful connections with real people. I’m hoping that it’ll also keep away the dreaded feeling of brain decay that a few hours of “entertainment” produces. Even when I do consume, I’d like it to be good books, good music and movies, blog posts that are actually insightful and interesting and not shallow proclamations of half-formed thoughts.

What I consume should be what I aspire to create. I want to create more than I consume.

Part of the problem is that there are large gaps in our understanding of how our bodies work and how they are affected by our environment. We’re not sure if sugar is toxic, we’re only just starting to understand how aging works, our brain is still a place of great mystery. On top of it much of our decisions about our bodies are driven by convenience and market pressures rather then science.

However, each day we learn more and more about how to preserve our bodies and our lives. We learn that our bodies are made for endurance running. We learn that just half an hour of exercise on a daily basis can dramatically reduce our chance of disease and increases our quality of life. We learn that reducing caloric intake greatly extends the lifetimes of worms and that humans share many of the same metabolic pathways. And there are people trying to help us live longer, perhaps forever.

As we learn more about our bodies, about disease and health I hope we can also rethink our ideas about health, life and death. Perhaps one day we’ll realize that simply being disease-free is not enough. We’ll understand our bodies well enough to be able to determine what each individual’s optimal body state is and how to get there. Perhaps one day “normal” will be defined as “optimal” and not just “not sick”. And maybe, just maybe, one day we’ll start to think of death as a disease, the last human disease and work to eradicating it.

The effort to preserve and optimize our lives brings its own challenges. What happens to agriculture and food supply chains in a world of health-conscious eaters? What happens to the planet’s natural resources (especially the scarce ones) when there are fewer deaths and large numbers of healthy, active people? If we do get on the path to eradicating death, how many people will the Earth support? Will it finally force our hand and push us into colonizing other planets?

Who knows?

I think we’re entering (and maybe we’re already in) a golden age of biology and health science. Backed by incredibly precise biochemical tools and powerful computational strength we’re going to have an unprecedented amount of knowledge about how our bodies work and react to various conditions and inputs. How are we going to use this knowledge? Will it substantially improve the condition of the human race? I hope so.

Live and let live. Let’s start with ourselves.

Around the Web

Though Readability is a great service and they have great supporting apps they have one flaw. However, it’s not entirely their fault: I think it’s a side-effect of the difficulty of predicting human intent. The problem has to do with Readability’s reading list. When you install the browser plugins you get three buttons: a “Read Now” button, a “Read Later” button and a “Send to Kindle” button. The “Send to Kindle” button formats and sends the web page you’re on to your Kindle (assuming you’ve set up and connected your Kindle properly). The “Read Later” button saves the page you’re on to your Reading List which can be synced to your iOS or Android devices. The “Read Now” button will do the Readability formatting on your current page and show you the cleaned up version right then for you to continue reading.

That’s all great. However, the “Read Now” button also drops the page you just converted into your Reading List. This is great if you start reading a long article and then have to leave your machine. You can come back to it later, on another browser or another device entirely. But what happens if you finish reading the article right there and then? The article still ends up in your reading list. That would be fine if the list was simply a history of things you’ve read. However the Reading List is also a list of things you’re going to read. So the Reading List now contains things I’m going to read, things I’ve read and things I might want to read again. I think this problem stems from the fact that Readability started as a formatter and added read-later functionality unlike services like Instapaper which are designed for savings articles for later.

How can we differentiate between all these types of articles? Readability provides the ability to “Archive” and “Favorite” articles. Once I’m done with reading an article I Favorite it if I’m going to read it again and Archive it otherwise. But could Readability do this for me? Could Readability somehow figure out what I want to happen to the article? The simplest solution would be to archive whatever I Read Now and only add to the Reading List ones that I mark to Read Later. However that means that if I start reading something and then have to leave it ends up in the Archive where I might never look at it again. Could Readability be a little smarter? One heuristic would be to check where I am in the article. By default an article is always added to the Reading List as it is now. But when I scroll to the bottom Readability takes that to mean that I’m done reading and moves it into the Archive. If I liked it and wanted to come back to it I manually mark it as a Favorite. (I don’t expect Readability to be that clever. Yet.)

Without having actually tested the solutions, I can’t say how well they would work. There are certainly edge cases: what if I scroll down to read a footnote and then scroll back up to read the rest of the article? What if I get to the end and then go back to re-read a particular section? What if I quickly skim through an article to get to the end and want to come back later to read it in more depth? I think there’s no clear answer because fundamentally we’re trying to have Readability “guess” what we’re trying to do without giving an unambiguous signal. Sure, all of them could be solved with a few manual interactions. But the whole point of having advanced software is so that I don’t have to tell my computer what to do in excruciating detail.

Like I said at the beginning I don’t think that Readability is necessarily at fault for how their service works. Any attempt to automatically manage the Reading List would require making some assumptions as to what it is the user wants to do. Even if those assumptions are right most of the time, there will almost certainly be times when they’re wrong. We are, after all, dealing with people here, and people aren’t perfectly predictable agents. If they were, human computer interaction and economics would both be very different fields.

Predicting human intent is a hard problem. Ultimately, some amount of direct intervention might be inevitable. While Readability is meant to be a product it would be interesting to see researchers using it (or similar services) for doing research with real users about how our software can make choices for us in a way that closely reflects what we would have done ourselves. Unlike some people I don’t want my software to do less and have fewer features. I want it to do more so that I can concentrate on more important things. Like saving the world.