Conrad Hofmeyr › Comments

The Chinese leadership strikes me as pragmatic. If they thought the harm from Global Warming would be more costly than carbon emission cuts, they would make them. But neither China nor India wants to remain poor. Any poor country is likely to benefit much more from development than the harm development will cause through additional carbon emissions (unless it's the Maldives). And neither countries' regimes can benefit from buying the votes of a green constituency with expensive projects of uncertain value. Rather, their legitimacy is strengthened by delivering increased living standards, and that is just what they intend to do. - Conrad Hofmeyr

First of all, pretending your advanced cell phone network is a modem, and thus bringing up questions like "should I use touch tone or pulse dialing?" and "do you think 19200 bps is fast enough?" and "what happens if I get a busy signal?" is a joke. - Conrad Hofmeyr

It also helps if the companies represent a credible wave that investors can extrapolate to some giddy future. The biotech IPO boom was boosted twenty years ago by the belief that all those companies were going to cure cancer and make us live forever; the Internet IPO boom was driven by the belief that our lives would never be the same after the Net. This looming IPO boom will likely be driven by a belief that the new ways we connect and communicate and play—social network and mobile and games—will change the way money and time get spent worldwide. - Conrad Hofmeyr

How could I possibly look my mother and father and all of the others who have sacrificed so much for me in the eye and tell them, “I can’t?” I couldn’t bear it. The shame of dishonoring their sacrifice by giving up would poison my soul. - Conrad Hofmeyr

While watching Memento, we directly experiment the retrogression of the film form: we have to grasp the film structure, the diegetic temporality, the structure of actions. We don't find it difficult to place the narrative elements into a coherent structure, but we feel a sense of difficulty in using our own memory. When recalling a part of the film, we are not able to place a fact after another, because we cannot remember if it was before or after; if we should place it in the structure of the film or in the film's fabula. - Conrad Hofmeyr

This creeping medicalization of everyday life means that almost any problem of excess can now be portrayed as an individual falling foul of a major mental illness. While drug addiction is a serious concern and a well-researched condition, many of the new behavioral addictions lack even the most basic foundations of scientific reliability. - Conrad Hofmeyr

I'd implore you to please, please, please stop seeing Marx as a misguided would-be hero. Almost every bad person in history thought of themself that way. Marx's works were both incorrect from an academic standpoint, very emotionally appealing to certain kinds of people, and generally fostered violence and hostility between groups of people that do the best when they work together to create the best world together. Marx was no friend of humanity, and should be remembered as someone who had bad and violent ideas that led to millions of people oppressed and killed as part of the "proletariat revolution to overthrow the bourgeois". - Conrad Hofmeyr

This is not intended as an attack on you, just in case it might sound that way, but: I wish people, when saying that "the market doesn't work for _____" would specify what their definition of "working" is. This is not a trivial issue! Markets are distributed systems that optimize economies for... the kind of behaviors that succeed in the market (in some respects resembling biological evolution, only less stupid and short-sighted). External forces and constraints on a market change the parameters that get optimized, sometimes in unpredictable ways, and there's no such thing as a market without external constraints warping it. Most of the time, when someone says "the market doesn't work" what they really mean is "I value parameters A, B, and C, but the market is not optimizing the economy to maximize those", but rarely do they indicate more than obliquely what those parameters might be. - Conrad Hofmeyr

For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters. But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year. - Conrad Hofmeyr

The "perfect" architecture. I came up with THE architecture a couple of years ago. Pushed myself techically as far as I could so there were 100% loosley coupled layers, extensive use of delegates, and lightweight objects. It was technical heaven. And it was crap. The techical purity of the architecutre just slowed my dev team down aiming for perfection over results and I almost achieved complete failure. We now have much simpler less technically perfect architecture and our delivery rate has skyrocketed. - Conrad Hofmeyr

Ask for forgiveness, not for permission; (Most) Screw ups are OK; Try out stuff; Get out of your comfort zone; Ask the uncomfortable questions; Best things are taken, not given; Don’t be an asshole - Conrad Hofmeyr

corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline. - Conrad Hofmeyr

The World’s Resources by Country - Conrad Hofmeyr

The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state - Conrad Hofmeyr

Pounding their way along 16.2 miles of pavement, train track, or gridlocked tarmac to arrive at their Official Place of Work, most will sit down, throw six triple-espressos into throats scorched by artificial air, and rub eyes zapped by fluorescent death rays. - Conrad Hofmeyr

Pounding their way along 16.2 miles of pavement, train track, or gridlocked tarmac to arrive at their Official Place of Work, most will sit down, throw six triple-espressos into throats scorched by artificial air, and rub eyes zapped by fluorescent death rays. - Conrad Hofmeyr

How much work does the average college student get done? Almost none. Yet the same person, injected into a corporate bureaucracy, becomes a reasonably effective worker. Why? Most people have terrible time management skills. This limitation is of no consequence in public school. The school tells you where to sit and what to do and when, at least for six hours per day. This limitation is of no consequence at most jobs. The employer tells the workers where to sit and what to do and when, at least for eight hours per day. - Conrad Hofmeyr

“If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.” - Australian psychiatrist W. Béran Wolfe “Find a happy person, and you will find a project.” - Sonja Lyubomirsky - Conrad Hofmeyr

Some [hopefully] useful extensions to Ruby’s String class. It is made up of three libraries: ActsAsUrl, Unidecoder, and StringExtensions. - Conrad Hofmeyr

The Chinese regime’s ongoing embrace of mercantilism; all those political and monetary resources deployed in support of keeping the currency unreasonably low and the export opportunities unreasonably high. With, as a consequence, insufficient money flowing into service industries and, more important, middle-class pockets. I continue to think that what China needs is some good old-fashioned Social Democracy, where you use labor laws and bank regulation to route spending power to working peoples’ wallets. If that happened and for a while the RMB soared and the dollar sagged, it’d be good for both China and America. But it’s not going to, because China’s oligarchs are blinkered and corrupt; existentially threatened by any slackening in economic growth, they’re just not going to change the recipe that’s kept their heads above water this last few decades. - Conrad Hofmeyr

Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (Bill Gurley's analysis is an essential read.) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications, and so far, is making it available for free only on Android. Google's prowess is not just in search, but in mapping, speech recognition, automated translation, and other applications driven by huge, intelligent databases that only a few providers can offer. Microsoft and Nokia control comparable assets, but they too are Apple competitors, and unlike Google, their business model depends on selling access to those assets, not giving them away for free. - Conrad Hofmeyr

Credit card companies, for example, use SAS to detect unusual buying patterns in real time, and to spot potentially fraudulent charges. Giant retail chains use SAS to tailor pricing and product offerings down to the store level. Telecommunications companies use SAS to identify the few thousand customers, among millions, most likely to switch to another cellphone carrier, and to aim marketing at them. SAS software is also used to parse sensor signals from North Sea oil rigs, combined with weather and structural data, to predict failure of parts before it happens. Of the 100 largest companies worldwide, 92 use SAS software. - Conrad Hofmeyr

Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we've built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We're happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community. - Conrad Hofmeyr

"Web technology is still relatively weak, and improving slowly." On the iPhone (and, to a lesser extent, on the desktop) there is no comparison between the quality of native apps and the quality of web apps. Native apps still afford much more to the developer. Yet the web stack has proven to be very developer and user friendly. Unfortunately, it is crippled by the browsers (especially one browser in particular...). Somehow we need to accelerate the empowerment of the web stack. One way to do this is to diminish the power of various "native" stacks. Ironically, Apple is one of the companies leading the way in this regard. The latest version of iTunes is almost entirely WebKit based. In the end, I have to agree with Google's strategy: bet big on HTML5. Eventually, all apps will be web apps (though hopefully they won't require a native app -- the browser -- to run). I just don't know what to do in the interim while the web stack is still crippled by the browsers. - Conrad Hofmeyr

It's a bit scary. It looks *just like a modern programming language*. It's got C-like types (although to be more accurate, C has Algol-68-like types). It's got user defined polymorphic perators (with user defined precedence). Keywords and identifiers occupy different namespaces. Identifiers can contain spaces! It's got block expressions. - Conrad Hofmeyr

the amount of leverage available to a modern Internet entrepreneur is far, far greater than was available to entrepreneurs of previous generations. The number of entrants has dramatically increased as well. The overall hit rate might be lower, but the ones who win, win bigger and faster thanks to the leverage. - Conrad Hofmeyr

Business strategists increasingly view the consumer market as a template for enterprise solutions that enable more flexible work models, catalyze informal interactions and connect people with shared interests. - Conrad Hofmeyr

But there is another less obvious bug in capitalism that I don't believe regulation can quite handle. It is the fundamental flaw that our celebrated system rewards speculators much more than creators - Conrad Hofmeyr

A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots. - Conrad Hofmeyr

Collaboration is the big opportunity, and is probably underserved by today's crop of applications. Social software for within the enterprise is low hanging fruit (from the technical perspective). Communication is usually so difficult and fraught within large corporations that improving it is almost trivially easy. - Conrad Hofmeyr

Thanks to technology and globalization, power is shifting away from large corporate structures and returning to individuals. More and more, it’s about niche specializations, not generalists. We see this manifest itself in an increasing number of freelancers and consultants. In the United States alone there are 42 million independent workers; 30% of the entire labor force. We are now in a project economy where the creative class is flourishing thanks in large part to lowered barriers to entrepreneurship brought about by advances in technology and the internet. - Conrad Hofmeyr