Admitting your mistakes

Admitting your mistakes

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Speaking at QCon back in 2009, Tony Hoare admitted to probably one of the biggest mistakes of his career – one that every programmer knows all too well. The invention of NULL because ‘it was so easy to implement’.

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.

At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

Yanko Designs turntable

Yanko Designs turntable

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Yanko Designs reports that Miniot has decided to re-invent the record player. Miniot calls it simply Wheel. It features a neat upright design and plays records from the back. One of the most unique elements is the barely visible tactile control system that lets you press and push parts of the hidden wheel to jump tracks, change volume, and even set the stylus weight.

The Miniot site shows it runs $2187 – $4156 depending on the options and color you select.

Introduction to making your own Light Plates

Introduction to making your own Light Plates

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Joshua Vasquez walks through his adventure of making his own cool looking Portal light plate. He introduces us to Snell’s law, how companies do this for other purposes with a sandwich approach with acrylics, window tint layers, diffuser layers, prism layers, reflective backing layers, etc).

Definitely a cool little project and worth a read if you’re interested in creating such a panel

Oregon Promise of Free Community College Failed to Deliver

Oregon Promise of Free Community College Failed to Deliver

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Oregon was hailed as a national leader by Bernie Sanders and Democratic leadership when it pass Senate Bill 81 in 2015 offering free community college to residents. Fast forward to 2023 and it’s now on the chopping block.

A new report by the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Committee (Which has been interestingly removed by the state and replaced with a much slicker brochure-style with NONE of the relevant data that summarizes these failures. The original report is still on the wayback machine and I include a local copy here) found that the Oregon Promise has failed by almost every measure. Here’s just one of their conclusions:

It has failed to encourage more high-school graduates to enroll in college, failed to narrow equity gaps in enrollment, and failed to increase college completion rates. And while it has helped a small number of students afford to go to college, most low-income students approved for the program still can’t meet the costs of higher education.

“While Oregon had some unique issues, overall the findings are not unique to Oregon,” he said. “Other places where this has been tried, you find a small pop in enrollment the first couple of years, and then it comes back down to pre-program levels, doesn’t really seem to do much in the long run to boost enrollment, or even movement onto four-year degrees.”

Articles:

Japan’s Highest Literary Award Won by Author Using AI

Japan’s Highest Literary Award Won by Author Using AI

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Rie Kudan has won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, with her most recent book: The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy. The judges praised the book, with one even calling it ‘flawless’.

What came next is unexpected. She revealed that she use AI to write parts of her novel (The Times). She revealed about 5% of the book was verbatim sentences she generated using AI.

This wasn’t the first time AI has won a top prize either. The winner of 2022’s Colorado State Fair’s prize for digital art also turned out to be AI-generated.

Nor is it the first time AI has won a writing prize. Journalism professor Shen Yang at Beijing’s Tsinghua University wanted to write a science fiction novel about the metaverse and humanoid robots. The AI ended up generating his entire book – which then took out a national science fiction award Jiangsu Science Writers Association . Using 66 different prompts, the AI drafted ‘Land of Memories‘ in just 3 hours.

After we went through dozens of prompts, the AI generated all of the content – from the pen name, title and text to accompanying pictures. And it’s not half bad. Here’s an excerpt:

In the metaverse’s edge, lies the ‘Land of Memories’, a forbidden realm where humans are barred. Solid illusions crafted by amnesiac humanoid robots and AI that had lost memories populate its domain. Any intruder, be it human or artificial, will have their memories drained away, forever trapped within its forbidden embrace.

Land of Memories

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Lessons about faith from horses

Lessons about faith from horses

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Todd Pierce was a hard drinking, hard fighting, top-tier professional bronc rider that now teaches a lot about God through his work with wild horses. I think a lot of the struggles he went through are ones we all know – especially dealing with childhood hurt, loneliness, and the emptiness of the world despite success. His clarity came when he realized how he wasn’t that different than the wild horses he trained and embraced a higher truth in God.

The amazing lessons he learned through horses should not surprise us. We’re are part of a whole universe full of beauty that all echoes the wisdom of God. Definitely worth a listen.

Lofi lock that is activated by your phone light

Lofi lock that is activated by your phone light

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There’s lots of different door locks out there that use manual keypads, RFID card, biometric device, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. Mirko Pavleski shows off an arduino powered door lock that works by correctly timing a light pulse for an exact number of milliseconds.

I wouldn’t call it the most secure kind of lock since it only requires a single timed light pulse. A more secure solution would be a pattern of on/off lights. While clever, it’s likely vulnerable to ‘shoulder surfing’ by others watching from a distance with a detector (even if it was UV). This would be true at night when the light would be quite visible. But it’s a fun idea.

Invisible until it moves

Invisible until it moves

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Interesting visual effect where objects animated on a random field of black and white pixels are only visible when they are moving. Still images just look like random noise. Maybe this is how animals with highly motion based vision experience the world?

A game called Lost in the Static uses a very similar effect: https://silverspaceship.com/static/ Lost in the Static dev Sean Howard wrote a blog entry on how it works.

The graphics for the youtube video were generated by a simple Win32/C++ app at https://github.com/ChrisBLong/POV