in the process of chastisinglinus about his lack of discipline, eric raymond makes some of the most lucid comments i’ve ever read regarding the “curse of the gifted” [it’s amazing to me that he just tore this off in an e.mail]. i certainly think the particulars of this e.mail can be generalized. i’ve got the bruises to prove it:
“When you were in college, did you ever meet bright kids who graduated
top of their class in high-school and then floundered freshman year
in college because they had never learned how to study? It’s a common
trap. A friend of mine calls it “the curse of the gifted” — a tendency
to lean on your native ability too much, because you’ve always been
rewarded for doing that and self-discipline would take actual work.
You are a brilliant implementor, more able than me and possibly (I say
this after consideration, and in all seriousness) the best one in the
Unix tradition since Ken Thompson himself. As a consequence, you
suffer the curse of the gifted programmer — you lean on your ability
so much that you’ve never learned to value certain kinds of coding
self-discipline and design craftsmanship that lesser mortals *must*
develop in order to handle the kind of problem complexity you eat for
breakfast.”
“But you make some of your more senior colleagues nervous. See, we’ve
seen the curse of the gifted before. Some of us were those kids in
college. We learned the hard way that the bill always comes due —
the scale of the problems always increases to a point where your
native talent alone doesn’t cut it any more. The smarter you are, the
longer it takes to hit that crunch point — and the harder the
adjustment when you finally do. And we can see that *you*, poor damn
genius that you are, are cruising for a serious bruising.”
“I used to worry about what would happen if Linus got hit by a truck.
With all respect, I still worry about what will happen if the
complexity of the kernel exceeds the scope of your astonishing native
talent before you grow up.”
well, shoot. i need to hang out in the bloggerdiscussion groups more often. it looks like i can now do something useful with my cassiopeia because i think it’s a bit overqualified for it’s current role as glorified paperweight:
“So, imagine: you’re at the deli. You order a salami and turkey on a roll. The turkey? Perfectly moist. The salami? Wonderfully spicy. The roll? My gosh, it tastes just like a tender, sweet, soft pretzel! You have to blog this fine dining moment! But you’re at a deli! What do you do? What do you do?
Well, now you can whip out your handheld and blog away, my friend. The AvantGo Client for Blogger lets you do a handful of the same operations available to you on Blogger.com–
create, view, post, and publish. ”
[required explanatory aside – some may be surprised that i own a cassiopeia. “you?” i can hear you saying. “sweet jesus, man! you just landed in negativeland as far as credibility is concerned.” ” well, hah!” i say, ” it was f – r – e – e!”]
well, whadya know. AOLiza passed the turing test. or at least aol users ruined the curve for everyone:
“”I noticed AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] had a robust script library,” says Fox. “If you could hook it into a program, which would it be?” The answer he came up with was Eliza, an AI Perl program that responds to text messages with psychoanalytic-styled questions. He dubbed his new hybrid “AOLiza,” and set “her” loose on August 15.
Once AOLiza was up and running, it wasn’t long before she was fooling unsuspecting AOLers who messaged him by mistake. Now, AOL may not exactly be the digerati hangout that, say, The Well is, but its members aren’t stupid either — or at least all of them aren’t. AOLiza was working, and working pretty well. Users began carrying on elaborate conversations with AOLiza.
One person — who Fox dubbed “five” — even entered into a drawn out conversation about his ex-girlfriend with Eliza”
“Many of Britain’s most eminent medical scientists believe the birth of a cloned baby is inevitable despite
society’s current aversion to the idea.
More than half of a panel of 32 scientists surveyed by The Independent said “reproductive cloning” would be attempted within 20 years if the technical and safety issues could be overcome.”
i see a whole army of me in the future. think of all the blogging i could get done.
ha! this bit on navigable maps of the web won’t be found on slashdot:
“Mapping the Web is a huge field that falls into two main pieces: maps that show us something interesting about the Web, and maps that help us navigate the Web. These two need not be essentially connected.”
“There will be many solutions to this problem, and which ones we like will have everything to do with our personal way of thinking and the type of problem we’re trying to solve at the moment. But navigable maps of Web sites clustered by relevancy to our interests are of unique important to the Web because the Web space is itself organized not by uniform units of distance but by *interest* itself. Distance, on the Web, is measured by irrelevance. Navigable maps capture this essential fact of our new world, and thus not only map Web distance but conquer it.”
and just in case you thought i was beating someone to the punch. don’t. because, i appropriated it from peterme.
“The Theme Builder is a graphical tool made to simplify the creation of themes for Mozilla. This beta version of the tool gives users the ability to apply new graphic designs to the browser without changing its functionality. Individuals can use the tool to create their own personal themes while companies can “brand” the browser with their company colors and logo.”
oh for cyring out loud, yes, i know it was onslashdot. what can i say, it’s all slashdot all the time today.