sent2null space

The recent news announcement by Google that it had created it's on design of a self driving car inspired much chatter on the social media services and I've opined from an Engineering stand point why autonomous roadways and public transportation systems will be a significant boost to commerce. I am going to formalize many of these ways in a post or two to come compiled from much of the analysis I've put forward in social media but this post is about a tangential idea I came upon while thinking about one key aspect of autonomous roadways that I mentioned in a Facebook thread. The comment in question: "The second is often overlooked completely, what happens when trucks drive themselves? The main gain is *they can be routed at any time* they no longer have to be coupled to human wake and transit cycles and because of that *deliveries* can happen all day and night and in fact can be optimized to be most dense when HUMAN transit activity is least dense thus making muc...

Melissa Corothers sat in the pew of the old church, silently thinking about her brother Alex. Her fingers clutched a cinegram of one of their last times together, a family barbeque taken while she was visiting him here in Colorado. The cinegram was a compilation of silent scenes, Alex had set the barbeque grill (one of the old kind  used for centuries in the Americas) and was hamming it up for the dronecams flitting about before using lighter fluid to ignite the coals and get the cooking on. He was so happy then. His life had been quite a ride, born 173 years earlier he'd experienced several revigoration treatments by the time of that barbeque. Yet one would be hard pressed to call him older than 32 at the time of the cinegram. He'd had his last revig. at the time just 6 years earlier and had settled into a mode where he was enjoying looking a bit more mature than he was used to since he started revigoration treatments. In the background his oldest children Becky and ...

The zeitgeist of big data trends has recently come alive with articles pointing to the statistical pitfalls that big data analysis is fraught with when particular attention is not paid to means by which statisticians prevent bias from creeping into the results of their analysis. As most of the data scientists being nominated at many companies are simply computer programmers with a title and not necessarily statistics degrees this is not surprising. I find it interesting because of a unique distinction to these methods and how the Action Oriented Workflow paradigm built into the AgilEntity frame work I designed inherently behaves. When I started work on the Action Oriented Workflow algorithm the idea I was trying to mine as that sufficient history on work actions on given business objects could be used to determine predictive ways to route new work through an organization such that traditional boundaries of stagnation are overridden. These boundaries include the offices, teams, buil...

I've often said that live code tests are bullshit that tell nothing about coding ability and stand by that assessment, today I was thinking about a way that one can mount a challenge to a company that has formalized a "live coding exercise" as part of its process. It goes like this, if you are told that a company you are interviewing with wants you to take a live coding test then you should tell them "I don't take live coding tests but if you wish to divine if my engineering skill is on the level of those in your team, I can give you a sample of code I've written and if you can't tell the engineering context and use for that code by inspecting it, I will have achieved necessary credits to be invalidated from taking the live coding exercise." The reason this reverse test is valid is the premise of what is really being interviewed for when hiring software developers. It is not knowledge in real time of any given programming data structures or algorit...

In the series of posts that I've written that concern the necessity to build a Self Healing Infrastructure using technology to enable humanity to pinch off the productivity loop I've gone on to examine a bit what happens to humanity socially in such a world. I wrote a story of love post supermortility , the coming age where death by aging is no longer mandatory but is a choice. I've also written on how interactions between people will change as apparent "age" is decoupled from temporal age, what I've dubbed the coming age of oscillating senescence . When a 200 year old looks no older than a 28 year old different cognitive dynamics of interaction are possible between people of vastly different levels of wisdom and these will effect society in unknown but I think ultimately interesting ways. Another reality under the age of SHI will come as Love, often claimed to be lasting "until death do us part" actually escapes the boundary of mortal death events ...

I've intimated this view before but, I abhor "live coding" exercises for engineering interviews and will never have them as part of any interview process I conduct. They are simply unrealistic to real world engineering in every possible way, they only test familiarity (or luck) with a tiny subset of solution methods to a specif subset of problems...that you either "nail" or get spectacularly wrong depending on who is observing you. They are mostly entirely unfair to the candidate on top of the pressure of having a gun under them while coding, only in the most extreme cases is coding under the gun and that's just competitions where the code is far from real world engineering related...so why test for general coding ability with such tests?? Stupid. I posit, it is significantly more effective to see examples of a candidates finished working code in the form of a project or projects they've created. How long it took some one to get some uber algorithm w...