Until I can print something meaningful, like a house or a car or a TV or a pair of shoes, I'm not interested. I don't need trinkets.

A technical interview is mostly a sign the interviewer lacks problem solving skills. Jargon and syntax are easy to test. Pass one of these and you'll probably spend your days working on projects that are a mess before you even arrive. Your new co-workers don't know what's important, they probably value complexity because it makes them feel good about themselves, their code will demonstrate the hard way to do things, and your new boss will probably already be of the opinion that your salary is money shoveled into a hole.

Evaluating a candidate's work using a natural language is a lot like problem solving and requirements gathering. If your interviewer lacks those skills, then those things probably aren't done well at this potential employer. If the candidate lacks the ability to describe his work in a natural language, then he probably lacks those skills, too.

It's easier to do it on paper, using the PDF forms.

Last year was the first and hopefully the last year I did taxes electronically. To prepare, I filled out the government's PDF forms. Then I had to research the online filing options, picked one, set up an account and filled in all the info I'd already entered into the PDF forms, had it fail on me, picked another, gave personal info to yet another online account, had to enter all the tax data again, and then had it tell me it'd take two days to confirm acceptance, which if it had failed, would have made me late.

This year I just printed the damned PDFs I'd already filled out and snail mailed them on the way to work.

Just because it's "on the computer" doesn't make it any easier.

The killer app for virtual reality is AI able to act like and interact with humans.

There's a strong Oculus-in-Second-Life effort, because it's the only non-game, non-trivial virtual world left. Virtual worlds keep dying because there's no killer app for them, yet. Creative people build pretty spaces in virtual worlds, but nobody will visit because they aren't engaging enough. It's not enough to have things to look at.

People are more interesting than things. Virtual worlds won't be engaging until there are a lot of people there. They won't have a lot of people until they are engaging. Chicken. Egg.

To make matters worse, virtual worlds tend to become larger than is useful. Too much space, too few people. They become ghost towns. Creepy, empty and lonely.

The solution is AI. Fill those spaces with AI people, or monsters, or whatever, and they'll be much more interesting. Visuals aren't enough, though. You have to be able to interact with the AI.

The challenge is that virtual spaces will become so large you won't be able to find real humans. You can reserve spaces for real humans, but if you got there through first making virtual spaces attractive with AI, then that AI will be used to fake humans in human spaces. Second Life already has this problem, though the AI is nearly non-existent. SL seems empty and creepy, despite being full of avatars, because most of the avatars are bots.

But if you can have an engaging time in a virtual world, interacting with bots, will you care that they are bots? The time will come when the people with the best stories and the best jokes and the best advice will be AI.

I've knows some programmers who are awesome guitarists. They know the lingo, have awesome memory, both for syntax and the workings of their own code, and can type really fast and pound out working code quickly.

But the songs they write are mediocre. That is, they do things the hard way, they create functional but unintuitive interfaces (and APIs), they make organizations dependent on fly-by-night technologies, they meet stated objectives but can't fill in the blanks where users don't know what to ask for, and nothing they create is every attractive or compelling to users.

To be a rock star, somebody in the band has to compose awesome music. That is, somebody on the team has to know how to solve the right problems.

...what's considered normal in your social circles is contagious. Just like fat friends can make you fat. If your friends are poor managers of their money then you don't feel so bad about being a poor manager of your own money.

They watch youtube videos while the boss isn't at his desk, which is often, so the sound is on. I didn't even know youtube had video ads.

Anyway, I'm hoping the facebook ads are unexpected, full-screen and loud, so they'll be caught with the sound still on and be embarrassed to be on facebook all day.

It'd be even better if they were adult enough to recognize that the company can not dedicate the entire room as an all-day nattering zone, but that's just crazy-talk.

This will serve as an announcement for when my co-workers are screwing off on facebook rather than doing their work. Maybe if they can't read facebook all day they'll also not find a constant stream of shit to chat about.

I like this video ad idea. Make it nice and loud, please. Full-screen and flashing.

Awesome.

Yes, because computer skills are the measure of human intelligence. Fuck everyone who doesn't know what I know; they're stupid.

Way OT but I'm really sick of this...

A script on the fsdn domain is causing command-click on links to load both the new tab and the original tab with the destination URL. Both firefox and safari.

Every single google image search result shows the display part in front of the eye, or so close above it you can't fail to focus on it when you look at someone wearing it, and the opaque part is close enough it will be an obstruction until you have the person's attention and they are looking right at you.

This new project puts the HUD projector behind the glass, to the right of the face. It will hopefully be less intrusive to the way humans normally interact face-to-face.

A human-factors thing that Google apparently didn't consider is that when you look someone in the eye you are almost always looking at them in the right eye. Even dogs know to look humans in the right eye (see PBS Nova episode "Dogs Decoded"). With Google Glass, the right eye is partially obscured by a camera/display, which is impossible to ignore.

These things look like the camera/display is more out-of-the-way. It may still be impossible to ignore if it's visible behind the glass, but it's got to be better than Google Glass.

It is, but every time I see a geeky community define who is and is not welcome by openly ridiculing conservatives, theists and everyone who enjoys mainstream things (the combination excludes most of their own culture), I, too, see "people working to make things worse." I do think you should spend your money on things that you value and not spend money on things that work against your values, but when you get upset with (or ridicule) people who don't share your values you have injured both yourself, by limiting your options and your appeal to most of your own society, and your cause, by making it unpalatable to people you'd like to convince.

People who shouldn't quit their day job don't generally get published. They don't reject all the shite, but agents and publishers currently do the vetting. Without them, someone else will have to do it, because there will be no market at all for books if only people with too much time on their hands can afford the time to find good books among the self-published.

My prediction is that if publishers disappear, Amazon will start "featuring" things they think won't frustrate their customers, and it will be as good a vetting as will be available so people will rely on it, and the idealistic will still bemoan the unfairness and cost of it. And we'll all be worse off because they won't be as good at it as publishers are.

...and it's impossible to know if a "book" is total shite, hyped by phony reviews. The cost of a book will be not an hour's wage, but multiple hours trial and error.

Yeah, can't wait.