Tag: me

GregorFriendz 5.0

It’s been 5 years since i started with my GregorFriendz series. GregorFriendz is about reaching out to my friends, celebrating them, thanking them, and cheering them on. in this tradition, let me get started on this years issue.

what has 2001 been like. for me, it was the year when i went global and virtual, and reemphasized connecting. let me explain:

go global
i spent a third of this year in asia. bangkok, thailand to be precise. the time was well spent. it was a powerful notion when i realized that i could be working from anywhere on the globe. granted you hear these statements all the time, but to experience it firsthand is an altogether different matter. in fact, while i was in my internship in thailand, i worked for a project in zurich, switzerland (where i had come from) connectivity to the world was provided with a simple dial up line, like you would find in any hotel room in the world. with a notebook in my suitcase, it would have been just as easy to work from hong kong as it has been from bangkok.

my past experiences with travel have been different. travel as a tourist was always fraught with uncertainties about money or time running out. in contrast, with my source of income always with me in my suitcase, i could stay in one place as long as i wanted, and move on whenever i felt like it. maybe a little too simplistic a view, but a very liberating one nonetheless.

go virtual
going global would of course not have been possible without going virtual at the same time. as i increasingly relied on facilities of the internet to get my work done, i became aware how powerful tools make all the difference. for instance, during my stay in bangkok i collaborated with ben who was in mexico at the time to organize a talk series in zurich. we used the facilities of our personal web logs / diaries to keep in touch, and learn about new ideas.

web logging, or the culmination of my thoughts in a non intrusive way, empowered me to achieve things that might have been very difficult, if not nearly impossible by other means. i was hooked. towards the end of my internship, i began to participate in the development of a weblog system, postnuke. i realized that the vision of that project coincided with my vision on the future of online collaboration. i have had a strong interest in the field for several years. however, 2001 was really the year when it all came together in a big way. i strongly believe in the vision these tools offer, and, murphy-willing, i will base my business on some of these ideas.

connect
enough technobabble already. at the root of the aforementioned phenomenons lies a decidedly non-tech cause. it’s got to do with community building, and the network effects that result from it. also a familiar topic for GregorFriendz regulars, this is the reason i am doing all this. sharing thoughts with friends has produced very powerful results in 2001. onward!

what’s in store for 2002?
2002 will be the year where i get to know every nook and cranny of my room as i prepare for my final exams starting in january. with that top priority out of the way, i want to continue working on weblog solutions, and as always, pursue new opportunities with vigor. almost nothing in 2001 came about by a great master plan, so i’ll avoid setting my sights too keenly on specific goals. hows that for an evasive new years resolution? i wish all of you a great 2002), and may your dreams come true as you work to fulfill them.

-gregor

GregorFriendz are, in alphabetical order:

	sabrina amgwerd sabrina.amgwerd@dim.usz.ch after an absence, we are talking again. Let’s see to it that 2002 continues in this regard.
	roger amgwerd amgwerd@gmx.net our long-standing interest in role playing received a new boost with the release of the brilliant lord of the rings.
):-)	adam_baum (greg) adam_baum@ndezign.com howdy stranger 😉 greg, one of the project admins of postnuke, sent me a nice xmas message, and is generally a nice guy as far as i can tell. he hails from canada, and even though i don’t know his real name, it’s been fun.
	oliver “rocco” belin belin@mydiax.ch rocco helped me to keep my sanity in a place that is insane by western standards. even if it meant doing the insane thing now and again. thanks.
	andreas bobak bobak@icu.unizh.ch flatmate no 1), kept the servers running smoothly and continues to be inspirational with his abstrakt portal.
):-)	john “niceguyeddie” cox admin@dinerminor.com john is the fearless leader of the postnuke project and made me feel at home in a global project that spans 4 continents. his sense of humor and easygoing manner prevented many disasters in the sometimes frantic pace of development.
	benjamin danech danechbenjamin@hotmail.com the man with the trumpet. seriously cool guy who is making heroic efforts to convince me that jazz is worth listening to.
	sinan demokan sdemokan@kpmg.com sinan has been a reliable companion in the messy ups and downs that is corporate life since 1999.
	balint dobozi b.dobozi@swissonline.ch the man is trying to have it both ways. producing dance hits under funny pseudonyms and finishing his studies. so far with great success.
	marton dobozi doboz@gmx.ch not content to produce a 3d walkthrough of the zurich main station, marton set off to senegal to experience malaria firsthand. he is back, and alive.
	elke engel elke@icu.unizh.ch while not busy travelling in india or the middle east, elke is forging ahead with her very unique style. kudos.
	may erne mayerne@mayerne.ch former roleplay mate may is covering recent events from the inside. in his spare time he can be seen studying at columbia university, new york.
):-)	andreas feuz afeuzz@cytanet.com.cy andy forewent the lush beaches of zurich for the scant ones of cyprus. many eons ago he tried to teach me some business manners, lessons i can draw on to this day.
	sven furrer sven.furrer@comit.ch sparrow sven has been known to answer phones when other people are soundly asleep. to say he knows everyone in zurich is probably an understatement.
	florian gnaegi gnaegi@icu.unizh.ch flatmate no 2), having survived his worst year (by his own admission) is bound to rock the tech world again. a project to watch in 2002.
	diana graemiger diana@dolcevita.co.uk diana introduced me to the finer points of censoring. with constant vigilance she made sure everyone was pictured favorably in my gallery.
	sandra “sa” greminger sgreminger@kpmg.com a regular at our parties, sa makes sure a good time is had by all. sven & myself have an outstanding offer to go out that we should “implement” next year.
	roger hacmac rhacmac@kpmg.com currently missing in action in some godforsaken corner of sweden, roger is bound to return to zurich to fill his contact list once more.. 😉
(-E	mike hampel digitaldrummer@gmx.net mike has ways to introduce me to wonderfully strange people and music. if my neurons cope, this will hopefully be the case in the future also.
	sabine hanimann bienli@access.ch locked in her room for the past year, she went where i will go in 2002), to the final exams at university. i hope she has not lost her subtle sense of humor in the process.
	rene herrmann rherrmann@kpmg.com rene is having a hard time fighting off the idiots that surround him at his place of study. he copes with a sense of humor that leaves you gasping for air.
	oliver hoeffleur oliver@icu.unizh.ch maybe my 4-year allegiance with kpmg had more to do with this guy than with the company..
	guido innerhofer g.innerhofer@mydiax.ch after having spent months on role-playing scenarios, guido is the designated expert for computer-based roleplaying.
	christine ito c.ito@smile.ch one of these years we will throw a birthday party again. if we ever happen to be in the same place at the same time, that is..
	fabian jaeger sumoforpresident@gmx.net chameleon. is shedding his craftsman roots for full time student, without the silly side-effects. funny actions are still part of the game, though.
	andrea kaul andrea@icu.unizh.ch every other year we get on bad terms, 2001 included. i dunno about the future though.
):-)	sonja kraner sonja@swissonline.ch a good friend, transcending distances of 10k km with a phone call.
	stephan kuhn skuhn@gateinfo.com easygoing and inclusive, stephan made sure i had a good time in his company during my internship.
	stef leone sleone@kpmg.com we no longer go out regularly until the wee hours, but if we do it continues to rock.
	derk louwerse louwerse@student.unisg.ch while we dont meet very often, derk always has his heart in the right place. thanks for your end-of-year thoughts.
	fabienne meier stobien@gmx.ch fay, as fabienne is also known, sure knows how to chill out. can be a very cool pal when in the mood.
	thomas meier tome@icu.unizh.ch showed me that snowboarding is not the hopeless case i had thought it would be.
	iris mittendorfer iris@limmat.ch i would love to go climbing with you, but then again my shoulders don’t allow that anymore.
):-)	markus naef markus.naef@gretag.com we picked up the thread after a multi-year hiatus, to arrive at very similar conclusions coming from very different backgrounds. will be interesting to carry these thoughts forward.
	dominik ogilvie d.ogilvie@access.unizh.ch dominick’s fine taste of music and varied interests made working with him a pleasure.
):-)	george paxinos geopax@dplanet.ch the impersonation of murphy’s laws, george showed me time and again that what can go wrong, will. the efforts spent on his computer are bound to pay off sometime soon, aren’t they?
):-)	daniel puskas dfp@gmx.ch old buddy is throwing a silvester party. might as well check it out, for i haven’t seen daniel in a while.
	asti roesle groesle@student.ethz.ch stopping by in zurich to finish her studies, asti has been very inspirational. having been in corners of the world i don’t even know how to spell, her tales are as funny as they are educational.
	tobias romer rot@mad.ch hard to reach, but a good sport to do things off the beaten path. looking forward to eccentric ideas in 2002.
	christine rothfuss bupu@gmx.net it’s not easy to be a sister is it. christine manages with no problems. her efforts to introduce me to the horn-glasses crowd may break my resistance next year..
	mom & dad rothfuss rothfuss@gmx.net i regard it as a privilege to have been raised by these fine folks. not to talk of the ongoing support. thanks a lot.
	monika schilling mschilling@kpmg.com moni has THE most beautiful apartment in zurich. oughta pay a visit sometime soon 😉
	philipp spinner pspinner@kpmg.com philipp is so diligent he makes more than up for my laziness. has been known to man the battlestations at the office while i was “away” in the east.
	christian stettler cstettler@kpmg.com gave me a seriously needed valve for stress reduction with fragging.
	daniel szakats danysfx@hotmail.com how this guy manages to be both a successful dj and study is beyond me. dany will share my pain next year with the preparations for the final exams.
	teddy tirziu tirziu@dplanet.ch his keen design sense has inspired my room, even though i cannot yet afford the furniture he sells..
):-)	regula utzinger regula@utzinger.ch an achiever, regula relentlessly uncovered the weak spots in my thinking, for which i am grateful.
	eric vido evido@student.ethz.ch not be outdone, eric maintains an air of cool. its always fun to hang out with this guy.
	benjamin voigt egal@icu.unizh.ch the visionary. not content with the state of the art, ben pushes steadily forward. many inspirations this year would have gone nowhere without him.
	christoph widmoser c.widmoser@freesurf.ch introduced me to surfing and shares my interest in digital photography. thanks christoph.
):-)	andreas wobmann a.wobmann@lse.ac.uk jovial andreas currently resides in greater london, a place high on my list to visit.
	thamar xandry xandry@access.unizh.ch busy as always, it’s not so easy to get in touch with thamar, but it’s been well worth it every time. the amount i learn when i meet her is staggering.
	harry zink hzink@fizbin.com another member of the postnuke core team, harry remained level-headed when i was getting angry at the stupidity of our users or somesuch.
the older issues of GregorFriendz may be of historical interest: I (1997) \| II (1998) \| III (1999) \| IV (2000)

Technologies of coordination and cooperation

the community meme is quickly taking hold. i met 2 friends yesterday who want to do the same things in the music space, what a coincidence.

the key issue in the coming weeks / months will be striking a balance between centralization and decentralization.

i talked to some social scientist recently, and he confirmed what i had assumed all along. communities are the next big thing. duh. on a different note i want to have the autolink stuff working decently. manually entering links cannot be the answer.. maybe if it scours my past articles and my link db for hints..

Accelerating change

The world is getting more complex at a rate we can’t cope with, it seems. The fabric of society needs to be updated. Collaboration needs to happen at deeper and broader levels, entire layers of abstraction need to be designed to fight complexity. Can massively parallel collaboration technologies help? I hope so, and David Gelernter thinks so as well.

His livestreams concept sounds like an advanced form of weblogs to me.
2003-08-03: Accelerating Change

~~I’m considering attending~~ I will attend the Accelerating Change conference.

In both universal and human history, there is a special subset of events that have continually increased their speed and efficiency of change. Accelerating systems are regularly able to accomplish more with fewer resources; as a result, they avoid normal limitations to growth. Over the 20th century, several domains of technological development have accelerated, even during deep recession, driven primarily by the powerful new physical and economic efficiencies that they introduce into the human economy. Perhaps even more interestingly, looking ahead we can see no natural limit to specific accelerating physical and technological efficiencies.

2003-09-13: The mixer at Accelerating Change was mind blowing. A very diverse group of people at my table, from Todd who is a researcher with the Alcor life extension foundation to Michael Anissimov to Alex Jacobson who was at reorient too.
2003-09-14: The Accelerating Change conference is still going on. There is so much good material being presented, and not having wifi forces me to just write down the major points.
things to look up
Caloric Reduction
eintelligence.com
innovationwatch.com
openEEG.org
IPTQ.org
notions
3D computing makes slow circuits (brain) fast
exponential computing power applied to exponential problems leads to linear increases (speech processing etc). This is valuable
Is substrate-independent computation possible?
There are 1000 basic protein shapes. Think of it as the atomic table of proteins. All these are assembled with 1 protein
As computing power increases, the simulation becomes the reality
GP (genetic programming) is able to find patentable new solutions with 30 day runs on a 1000 node cluster.
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as a singularity trigger
One human life has ~10²¹ bytes of information
The universe has performed 10¹²⁰ computations since the big bang
People to follow up with
Paul Boutin
Michael E. Muston
Steve Jurvetson
2003-09-15: Accelerating Change was without doubt one of the most inspiring conferences I attended the last couple years. It will take me weeks to digest the torrent of mind boggling, challenging notions I gathered in these 2 short days. The crowd was most excellent, to the point that I felt like a toddler among adults. The schmoozing was most excellent too. I conclude with some random notes (again, no time to write them up properly, alas)

cool stuff

tribe.net social networking
iawiki.net information architecture
danah boyd has a “net nanny” blog with netiquette rules
keith devlin writes awesome math books
stumbleupon.com social bookmarking
quantumtheology.com intersection of technological change and consciousness

notions to think about

there are more molecules in a drop of water than transistors ever built
brain circuitry is 10k times more efficient than CMOS
solid state lighting will reduce energy consumption for lighting by 50% worldwide
how much do you have to vertically integrate nanotech to have a product? can’t sell a speck of sand can you 🙂
Imago has a 3D atom imaging device
it should be possible to bootstrap new organisms starting from a minimal genome of 300 genes
technology enables more and more non 0-sum games
0-sum games do not communicate, while non 0-sum games rely on communication
there is a recognition stack for voice recognition that goes like this: phonetics – phonology – morphology – syntax – semantics – pragmatics
the nuance vocalizer 3.0 has achieved almost human levels of speech synthesis
computers outperform humans in certain voice recognition tasks (noisy environments)
tim o’reilly claims that NCSA was inspired to write mosaic by o’reilly pitches
the read / write ratio for wikis is approx. 20 / 1

stay in touch

terry frazier
ross mayfield
mila golynski
ramez naam
2003-10-23:

“Crackpots, too SciFi,” were the comments he kept getting from other nanotech entrepreneurs. “I still find it absolutely amazing that one early-adoption population considers another early adoption population a bit too ‘out there.’ “

Hm, I guess that makes me a double crackpot (or a kool aid drinker) for attending Accelerating Change. I’m ok with that though.
2004-09-18: I will be attending Accelerating Change 2004. This will be without doubt the best conference of the year again.
2004-11-06: Accelerating Change 2004 has begun. Last night was simply awesome (writeup over at terry frazier’s). It is not every day that you get to casually hang out with Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Doug Engelbart at the same time. Doug and Larry had a lot of fun playing with Roomba, and we had a discussion with Helen Greiner from iRobot about upcoming APIs for these autonomous robots. Pictures coming 🙂

This morning I am sitting in a presentation by Helen. She is talking about how her field, robotics, benefits from accelerating change. Roomba, their cleaning robot, sold 1M units already, with prime time advertising. Their vision is “Eliminate dangerous and repetitive tasks.”
She is showing movies from Afghanistan, with special ops soldiers sending robots into caves for reconnaissance, and Iraq, where robots defeat bombs remotely. One of these robots is about a 100k worth of equipment. She estimates the size of the autonomous robotics industry to be about $500M today, with their company increasing business 4x in the past year.
Now she is showing a movie with 10s of robots swarming in a room, only communicating with their closest neighbors. It looks surprisingly like an ant nest.
How can robotics tap into accelerating change? Moore’s law of course (Helen mentions CCD sensors as an example: what used to require extremely heavy computation for object recognition is now helped by advances in sensor quality). Getting OEM involved to grow the market, strategic relationships (iRobot developed $200 toy robots, brought it down to $18 by learning from their toy industry partners) She is showing a video of a velociraptor toy, complete with roars. Think Aibo, dinosaur style. Another strategic partnership: John Deere. Think robotic tractors.
Helen predicts that the aging population will drive demands for robotic elder care applications. “building on the beerbot idea, the robot that brings you a beer during the super bowl, build a robot to make sure people are sufficiently hydrated at all times.”
Entertainment: 33% of furby sales went to adults without kids.
Interesting sightings

Buddy Buzz, combining mobile speed reading with posse-style recommendations. It’s principal BJ Fogg has some scary ideas about persuasive technologies that he calls captology.
Alicebot is the leading bot technology, with an open source community behind it’s aiml, the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, which is the markup language for the alice bot. Seems obvious to try to apply wikipedia lessons to the nurturing of its body of knowledge.
Digital space, a commons in cyberspace which tries to bootstrap old and new organizational models using the tools cyberspace offers.

2006-10-03: A pretty decent futurist blog by Michael.
2007-03-01: Nice accelerating change type video.

2007-08-15: A warning

Given this mysterious and rapidly approaching cloud, there can be no doubt that the time has come for the scientific and technological community to seriously try to figure out what is on humanity’s collective horizon. Not to do so would be hugely irresponsible

2014-09-29: Factors of accelerating change

From Moore’s Law to property development, drones, and space exploration, Steve Jurvetson discusses factors affecting accelerating technological change.

Steve is the rarest of creatures: a VC who gets it at a MUCH deeper level than all the “social media / disrupt” clowns. You might not agree with everything, but he’s consistently interesting.

Experiment in knowledge scaling

we did it. our rainbow weblogs project is taking shape, and it seems bound to succeed. what will really determine our success, however, will be our ability to foster a community. i plan to attack this problem with these measures:

Integrate Instant Messaging
Shared experiences, instant support, quick tossing out of ideas are just some of the more obvious uses for instant messaging. to avoid the creation of yet another “ghetto”, its important to integrate IM tightly with the web by having web clients, and archiving discussions on the web.

Integrate Mailing Lists
Because email is such a handy tool, many valuable discussions are taking place via email. it is therefore important to bring these discussions on the web, to make them searchable, archive them, and accessible to a wider audience.

Communicate transparently
Be it support, be it ongoing development, be it fresh ideas, most things gain value when they are unlocked from some private audience. the rule is to make it public in general, and private exceptionally.

Leverage RSS Content Flows
Because activities and content are distributed,
it is important to aggregate that content so that other can learn about it.

Increase Network effects
By really pouring valuable content into the community, we hope to lower the threshold for others to participate. as more and more people participate, it becomes increasingly lucrative to do so.

Let a 1000 weblogs bloom

I have started to read the Lexus and the olive tree, a book about globalization. It has many inspiring thoughts in it. It got me thinking what i could do to unlock some value that is hidden within the brains of my surroundings. Raising literacy and the level of discourse is an obvious candidate. Therefore, my aim is to make it easier for folks to communicate their thoughts and share it with others. This comes down to setting up a lot of new weblogs, making it easy to connect them to each other, and so on. I’d like to do these things:

Provide an out-of-the-box weblog system for rainbow customers
Promote weblog usage and research into their significance through cooperation with the literature department at University of Zurich.
Promote weblog usage among friends and family by assisting them & teaching them
Move more of my communication to weblogs, ie think of ways to attach email flows to my weblog
Research more on the topic of management by weblog.

heading to hong kong

i will spend the weekend in hong kong. the flight is cheap as always, and i found a nice hotel for the grand total of 12k baht. not bad.

having just read china wakes, it will be very interesting to visit one of the most vibrant cities in china today. stay tuned..

unabomber feelings rise

it was only a matter of time before gun nuts would come out of their caves and claim that giving everyone a gun would have prevented this tragedy. typical of backwards-facing people..

especially eric s. raymond.

We have learned today that airport security is not the answer. At least 4 separate terror teams were able to sail right past all the elaborate obstacles — the demand for IDs, the metal detectors, the video cameras, the X-ray machines, the gunpowder sniffers, the gate agents and security people trained to spot terrorists by profile. There have been no reports that any other terror units were successfully prevented from achieving their objectives by these measures. In fact, the early evidence is that all these police-state-like impositions on freedom were exactly useless — and in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center lies the proof of their failure.

my answer:

lets face it. this event will increase surveillance everywhere. no point in returning to the caves and carrying guns. actually, it is largely irrelevant whether you carry a gun or not. what is truly relevant is whether you will be allowed access to all these surveillance systems, so that it becomes peer-to-peer surveillance, or if some hidden agency controls it all. think decentralization. nobody cares if you run around with a gun, you will be closely watched, anyways. trying to ignore this reality is a weakly disguised attempt to flee into an unabomber utopia.

Value of getting out of the way

micromanagement kills productivity. as experienced at my former employer

people criticize microsoft for many things, but there is a reason why they have become such a successful company. they get it. they don’t have layers upon layers of stupid decision-making committees, instead management stays out of the way so that the line can do its work.

if this is not the case at kpmg once i return, then bye bye.

The professionally idle

Well, I was bored, so I went out to Narcissus. As it happens, I meet this girl who asks me to come to a private party. Which I promptly did. The party turned out to include some 20 people, all crowded in the room of a rich Chinese son. Once inside, the music was turned to full volume until 13:00.

After which I finally found some sleep. When I asked some of the attendees what they did for a living, they went like: “nothing”. Apparently it is rather common to do just that. !?

First cvs commit

well, after some weekend hacking, i have committed XML-RPC support to the postnuke CVS. unfortunately i had no time to finish it properly, so it will probably not work for now. it’s most likely a minor issue though, and maybe there is someone else interested in fixing it up. meanwhile over on bloggerdev, the discussion continues.. and some other open source projects might support this api in the future.

it will be interesting to wait for a little while and then cook up a great demo for the talk series i am preparing at zurich university.