Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To - The Daily WTF
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Sobering.

The problem with programming is that most of the time the resulting code should boring and simple, not "clever"

John Gruber on #iphone http://bit.ly/Gp4hX [from http://twitter.com/igeeo/statuses/1437949138]

"The problem is that while successful complex systems evolve from simple systems that work, not every simple system that works can support additional complexity. It’s not enough just to start simple, you have to start simple with a framework designed for future evolution and growth."

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

YES

What is fragile should break early while it is still small.

N.N. Taleb's ideas about how to avoid financial black swans in the future, based principally on greater regulation (regulating to help people from themselves)

"No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

Computational complexity lectures

Fields Medalist Tim Gowers' lectures on computational complexity.

"Systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence... Brain scans used to map the connections between regions of the human brain discovered that they form a "small-world network" - exactly the right architecture to support self-organised criticality. Small-world networks lie somewhere between regular networks, where each node is connected to its nearest neighbours, and random networks, which have no regular structure but many long-distance connections between nodes at opposite sides of the network. Small-world networks take the most useful aspects of both systems. In places, the nodes have many connections with their neighbours, but the network also contains random and often long links between nodes that are very far away from one another. It's the perfect compromise."

Do ideas sometimes pop into your head from, it seems, nowhere? Yes, and it’s because your brain actually operates on the edge of chaos. In fact, your brain is like a pile of sand, but don't worry: that's why it has such remarkable powers

I've met too many developers who don't grok big O

nterface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed. I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. In this article, I’ll go over some of the issues surrounding complexity and techniques that can be used to manage it.

An interactive semantic view of visualcomplexity.com

stunning compendium of work from visualcomplexity.com via @bbhlabs

reMap: a project by Bestiario based on visualcomplexity.com

Visual Complexity reMapped

Interface to VisualComplexity.com

SHARED USING: http://www.tagle.it

Being NOTES and SLIDES on a talk given at PLAYFUL 09, concerning CHARLES BABBAGE, HEATH ROBINSON, MENACE and MAGE

'...slightly larger than the Crab Nebula. And that is pretty awesome.'

Broad-based MIT project aims to reinvent AI for a new era. By going back and fixing mistakes, researchers hope to produce ‘co-processors’ for the human mind.

ai

Proyecto del MIT que busca rescatar algunas investigaciones en inteligencia artificial de hace 50 años, para conformar nuevo proyecot MMP

"This time, they are determined to get it right — and, with the advantages of hindsight, experience, the rapid growth of new technologies and insights from the new field of computational neuroscience, they think they have a good shot at it."

Shit is NOT easy.

Measurement of quantum phenomena could be affected by fractal nature of the object being measured.

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

"When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t."

Charlie Bit My Finger

An exhaustive exploration of recursion, tail calls and TCO

IF YOU found a self-replicating organism living inside your computer, your first instinct might be to reach for the antivirus software. If, however, you are Andrew Wade, an avid player in the two-dimensional, mathematical universe known as the Game of Life, such a discovery is nothing short of an epiphany.

First replicating creature spawned in life simulator

Posted by Supybot

One of the best laypersons explanation of algorithm complexity that I've seen.

Traditional computers can solve problems in polynomial time. Certain things are used in the world because of this. Public Key Cryptography is a prime example. It is computationally hard to find two prime factors of a very large number. If it wasn't, we couldn't use the public key systems we use.

Stack Overflow post about Big O notation