lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Originally posted on posted Fri, 17 Oct 2003

Ownt has an interview with the Running with scissors' Vince Desi. The interview was posted on October 7th 2003, but I did not blog about it then. Vince is an all around cool guy, not because he uses a lot of fu** and shit (which Ownt has not censored graciously), but because he has his head in the right place and knows a thing about computer games. In case you do not know, Running with scissors made a wonderful game called Postal, which has helped to bring cheer into a lot of stressed out people(many of whom are programmers). It has lots of violence (you can burn people and there is lot of blood). Here is how they describe themselves at their site

We are Running With Scissors, notorious video game developers despised by Senator Lieberman, the United States Post Office and the Australian legislature (to name but three), for daring to produce the tasteless and insensitive videogames POSTAL and POSTAL 2.

. My favorite quote in the interview is

Q: Back then did you think much about the fact that games could somehow "inspire" the player to commit acts that were portrayed in your game, or any game for that matter?
A: First let me say that if I thought we could make a game that would honestly motivate people to do things in real life, then I would make a game about fucking, cause this world needs more sex than killing that's for shit sure.

You can read the rest of the interview at Ownt. (link to archive.org's archive). Be warned beforehand if you have sensitive feelings.

Before I got myself the rajshekhar.net domain, I used to have a blog at journlaspace.com. I have stopped posting to it completely (I use the JS account to read the blog of siome of the people ), but there are still a few good entries in it. Over the next few days, I will bring them into this blog. This suddent spurt in posts should not be seen as a burst of creativity

A few observations (they are rather dull)

1. I saw an ad for United Colors of Benetton, which was a pic of some women and men standing together in small amounts of colourful clothing and my first thought was "hey! that is an ad for Ubuntu"
2. I saw a girl wearing a t-shirt with some message on the front, and my first thought was "Why is the t-shirt using courier font! It would be better if they used some serif font"

rshekhar@rshekhar$ dict hypothesis 
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
  hypothesis
       n 1: a proposal intended to explain certain facts or observations
       2: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that
          is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain
          facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives
          experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he
          proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted
          in chemical practices" [syn: {possibility}, {theory}]

Here are some of my hypotheses, tentatively named lunatech's immutable laws of life

1. All new PHP programmers want to write a content management system
2. All new Java programmers will write a chat client
3. All college students love complexity and will do everything to increase it (at least the amount of complexity in their lives)
4. All college students want to do a project in 'networking'

Yesterday Lig and me put out the third edition of the PHPCommunity Gazette. It has some very nice articles, do check it out. If you want to write an article for it, drop us a mail, but remember that we would not be able to pay you anything, except a nice "thank you" note - it is a voluntary effort .

Geek Pick-Up Lines: Part 3 - Also collected from part 1 and part 2

• No matter how I sort things, you'll always be first.
• You put the SPARC in my workstation.
• By looking at you I can tell you're 36-25-36, which by the way are all perfect squares.
• My 'up-time' is better than BSD.

Some good parts from a speech by John Gilmore

• I want a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves things like real privacy of personal communications. Encryption strong enough that even the NSA can't break it.
• We also want real privacy of personal records. Our computers are extensions of our minds. We should build them so that a thought written in the computer is as private as that thought held in our minds.

Some weeks back, I was talking with my manager about AI and how it is such a bogus field. My manager replied that in a few years we will see applications that use AI in our daily life. However, I was quite skeptical - and I refused to agree to this. He then gave an overview of neural net and how they can learn to solve the problems. Here I pointed out that Bayesian filters can also be considered a form of AI, as they can learn from their previous data and they can make decisions, but Bayesian filtering is mathematics and not AI. At this he replied that most of AI is mathematics and only some part of it is hocus-pocus and hand waving.

This brings me what I have been thinking for a long time.Joel write

A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," he said.

. I had always suspected this and had also felt that this was the way to go. A few months back, we had a presentation by a researcher (not a Yahoo! employee), who was working on extraction and summarization of documents. He had a formula that he was applying on the sentences of the documents to find the weight of the whole sentence and then finally if the weight of the sentence was above some limit, it showed up in the summary. I was skeptical about this approach - my belief is that the Bayesian approach can be used to classify documents. Luckily, there is a project that seems to provide a framework on which things can be built further.