Max > Recent Status Updates

Part 1 was about an interesting heuristic to think about the mind, consisting of "system 1 and 2". But everything is based on overinterpreted small scale psychological experiments, which often failed to be reproducible. Not convincing so far.

"Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" - I enjoyed the premise of this: Commercially available devices allowing one to communicate with one's self in a branched of alternate reality. But the scam story and drama built on this premise dragged on too much for me.

"Omphalos" - good stuff!

"The great silence" - not really a story, but passages of text meant to accompany a multimedial exhibition

"The truth of fact, the truth of feeling" is an interesting discussion of the implications of perfect, searchable episodic memory as a mental peripheral. The juxtaposition with a story about the introduction of writing to an oral culture felt heavy-handed though.

"Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny", neat, mostly for the style of writing

"The life cycle of software objects" -- this one dragged on for too long before presenting some interesting ideas, then ended before really developing them

Column 6 "Perspective on Performance"

Column 5 "A small matte of programming" rings true and important. Luckily, these days testing frameworks are much less exceptional than the "scaffolding" Bentley describes.

"Exhalation"

"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"

column 4 on program verification was a bit dreary

"Data structures programs" shows its age a bit. The problems didn't inspire me.

"Aha! algorithms" -- kind of neat

Column 1 was inspiring! Constraints on hardware require us to clearly specify the problem, from which we find a way to "cheat", turning sorting into an O(n) problem. Figuring out the bit fiddling for the problems was quite fun, too!