Tags: problem

Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine | Quanta Magazine

The mathematics behind the halting problem is interesting enough, but what’s really fascinating is the community that coalesced. A republic of numbers.

Benjamin Parry~ Writing ~ Marking the homework of a twelve year old ~ @benjaminparry

Don’t get me wrong, there are some features under the mislabeled bracket of AI that have made a huge impact and improvement to my process. Audio transcription has been an absolute game-changer to research analysis, reimbursing me hours of time to focus on the deep thinking work. This is a perfect example of a problem seeking a solution, not the other way around. The latest wave of features feel a lot like because we can rather than we should, because.

Little Big Updates: dispatches from Quality Week

This is a wonderful piece of writing by Marcin, ostensibly about bug-fixing but really an almost existential examination of the nature of coding.

Bugs are, by definition, a look backward—at past behavior, at code that already exists, at the old work of engineers whom you’ve never met. It can feel more fun to write new code, chart new territories, add new functionality.

But the past can be fun, too. A good bug is a puzzle. A mystery. A whodunit. To solve a bug, sometimes you have to be a scientist: observe and measure, chart out the logic, follow the math. But then, two minutes later, you need to wear a hat of a very particular detective—take your flip notepad and interview different pieces of code to understand not what they claim they do, but what they actually do.

Rationality Is Not A Way Out Of Group Action Problems like Climate Change and Covid – Ian Welsh

Rationality does not work for ethical decisions. It can help you determine means, “what’s the best way to do this” but it can’t determine ends.

It isn’t even that great for means.

Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders - Earthly Blog

A great tool is not a universal tool it’s a tool well suited to a specific problem.

The more universal a solution someone claims to have to whatever software engineering problem exists, and the more confident they are that it is a fully generalized solution, the more you should question them.

A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker

I don’t agree with all of the mythbusting in this litany of life lessons, but this one is spot on:

The best thing that can be done to a problem is to solve it. False. The best thing that can be done to a problem is to dissolve it, to redesign the entity that has it or its environment so as to eliminate the problem.

Remember that next time you’re tempted to solve a problem by throwing more code at it.

Robin Rendle ･ A Rocket-Powered Jumbo Jet

Before the hagiographical praise for working with an iPad Pro, Robin nails the fundamental shape of the design process:

I had forgotten that there are two modes of design, just as there is in writing.

The first mode is understanding the problem, getting a ten-thousand foot view of the land. It’s getting people to acknowledge that this really is the problem we need to agree upon. This work needs to happen in a sketchbook in the form of messy, back-of-the-napkin drawings or in writing. All this helps you to form a proper argument and focus your thoughts.

The second mode of design is taking that ten-thousand foot view and zooming all the way in to the hairs on the back of the rabbit; figuring out the precise UI and components, the copywriting, the animations, the everything else. This should be done in a design tool like Figma or Sketch. And this is when we should be talking about color palettes, icons, design systems, and consistency.

The problem with almost all design work is that first phase never really happens. People don’t take that ten thousand foot view of the problem and are focusing instead on the pixels; they’re trapped by the system they know too well.

Yes, yes, yes! Spot on:

I think people get stuck in that second mode because productivity in design is often tied to “how many pages or frames did I design today?” when productivity should instead be thought of as “how did my understanding of the problem change?

How I think about solving problems - Human Who Codes

1. Is this really a problem?
2. Does the problem need to be solved?
3. Does the problem need to be solved now?
4. Does the problem need to be solved by me?
5. Is there a simpler problem I can solve instead?

28c3: The Science of Insecurity - YouTube

I understand less than half of this great talk by Meredith L. Patterson, but it ticks all my boxes: Leibniz, Turing, Borges, and Postel’s Law.

(via Tim Berners-Lee)

Thinking vs Choosing – The Haystack

There seems to be a tendency to repurpose existing solutions to other people’s problems. I propose that this is the main cause of the design sameness that we encounter on the web (and in apps) today. In our (un)conscious attempts to reduce the effort needed to do our work, we’ve become experts in choosing rather than in thinking.

A very thoughtful piece from Stephen.

When we use existing solutions or patterns, we use a different kind of thinking. Our focus is on finding which pattern will work for us. Too quickly, we turn our attention away from closely examining the problem.

Is CSS Turing Complete? | Lara Schenck

This starts as a good bit of computer science nerdery, that kind of answers the question in the title:

Alone, CSS is not Turing complete. CSS plus HTML plus user input is Turing complete!

And so the takeaway here is bigger than just speculation about Turing completeness:

Given that CSS is a domain-specific language for styling user interface, this makes a lot of sense! CSS + HTML + Human = Turing complete.

At the end of that day, as CSS developers that is the language we really write. CSS is incomplete without HTML, and a styled interface is incomplete without a human to use it.

The Elements of UI Engineering - Overreacted

These are good challenges to think about. Almost all of them are user-focused, and there’s a refreshing focus away from reaching for a library:

It’s tempting to read about these problems with a particular view library or a data fetching library in mind as a solution. But I encourage you to pretend that these libraries don’t exist, and read again from that perspective. How would you approach solving these issues?

Solving Life’s Problems with CSS | CSS-Tricks

It turns out that Diana Smith isn’t just a genius with CSS—she’s a fantastic writer too. This post is somehow heartfelt and lighthearted at the same time. It’s also very humorous, but beneath the humour there’s an excellent point here about the rule of least power …and doing things the long, hard, stupid way.

Because something about those limitations just calls to me. I know I’m not alone when I say that a rigid set of restrictions is the best catalyst for creativity. Total artistic freedom can be a paralyzing concept.

That can sometimes be the case with programming. If you have the most powerful programming languages in the world at your disposal, it starts to seem natural that you should then have no difficulty solving any programming problem. With all these amazing tools offering countless solutions to solve the same problem, it’s no wonder that we sometimes freeze up with information overload.

I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe - The Atlantic

Robin Sloan smushes the video game Fortnite Battle Royale together with Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy and produces a perfect example of game theory, cooperation, and the prisoner’s dilemma.

Based on my experiments in the laboratory of Fortnite, I think Liu Cixin is wrong. Or at least, he’s not entirely right. Fortnite is more Dark Forest theory than not, and maybe that’s true of the universe, too. But sometimes, we have a lever against the vise of game theory, and in this case, it is a single bit of communication. I mean “bit” in the programmer’s sense: a flag with a designated meaning. Nothing more. My heart emote didn’t make Fortnite cuddly and collaborative, but it did allow me to communicate: “Hold up. Let’s do this a different way.”

Swimming in Complexity – James Box at UX Brighton 2017 - YouTube

Boxman’s talk about complexity, reasoning, philosophy, and design is soooo good!

Wicked Ambiguity and User Experience

This is my kind of talk—John Snow’s cholera map, the Yucca Mountain think-tank, the Pioneer plaque, the Voyager record, the Drake equation, the Arecibo signal, and the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

♫ These are a few of my fav-our-ite things! ♫

NSA: The Decision Problem by George Dyson

A really terrific piece by George Dyson taking a suitably long-zoom look at information warfare and the Entscheidungsproblem, tracing the lineage of PRISM from the Corona project of the Cold War.

What we have now is the crude equivalent of snatching snippets of film from the sky, in 1960, compared to the panopticon that was to come. The United States has established a coordinated system that links suspect individuals (only foreigners, of course, but that definition becomes fuzzy at times) to dangerous ideas, and, if the links and suspicions are strong enough, our drone fleet, deployed ever more widely, is authorized to execute a strike. This is only a primitive first step toward something else. Why kill possibly dangerous individuals (and the inevitable innocent bystanders) when it will soon become technically irresistible to exterminate the dangerous ideas themselves?

The proposed solution? That we abandon secrecy and conduct our information warfare in the open.

Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, Verse 2: A close reading with Fourth Amendment guidance for cops and perps

A blow-by-blow legal analysis of the second verse of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems.

Cleverest crows opt for two tools

Crows is smart. And yes, I am using the "Bookmark this..." link at the end of the article.