Public Goods and Libertarianism

Step One:  Listen to lots and lots of different podcasts and get all sorts of good ideas jumbled into your brain.

Step Two: Try to sort those good ideas out.

I currently feel like I am failing terribly at step Two.  The influx of good ideas is just too great.  It is so fantastically easy to find interesting, useful sounding information in our connected age.  It's the feeling of trying to fill a sieve with sand.

But anyways, I'll start here with two little ideas.

1. Public Goods - The stuff that I would like to make

Public goods are things that can be used by someone and their use does not in any way reduce the value that someone's else use has.  This is non-rivalry.  The second property is non-excludability. Meaning that is generally impossible to prevent people from consuming the good.

In the old days, things like lighthouses and roads are often thought to be Public Goods.  Stuff that everybody can use and it generally doesn't hurt the other users of that good.

With the advent of the digital age suddenly an enormous amount of things have the potential to be public goods.  Computers copy and broadcast all sorts of things with enormous ease.  It's the nature of things in the digital age to be public good.  The alternative will always require a battle, we see that with patents, lawsuits, drm and all that fun stuff.

What this brings me to is the realization that fundamentally the type of work that I would like to partake in would me Public Good work.  This does not necessarily mean that I take the "good" word all that literally.  It's not about applying what I think is "Good" to the public.

I feel drawn towards this concept because is that it so clearly lines up with the fundamental properties of our digital age, and any other direction forward would simply be fighting against a current.

2.  Libertarianism - Providing unnecessary incentives

(note some of this information may not be accurate, the details should only be considered as hypothetical as further research suggests some of these ideas do not apply in Canada)

The government is capable of setting all sorts of rules, laws and taxes to suggest to people how they should live their lives.  An example I heard about earlier was about the concept of marriage, and how the government, in creating tax and other rules surrounding marriage, could incentivizing it.  And that just seems weird, and most importantly unnecessary.  They are adding another layer of consideration to a question that should mainly be made between the two people in the relationship.

I can certainly see the need for a government to work as a legal support to marriage.  They could provide the base contract that outlines the legal implications of marriage, and allow the two people to modify it in any way they both deem acceptable.  But beyond that I guess I don't think they should have any involvement.

As I also heard today, things like passports don't in themselves hold any power, the real power comes in the ability for a passport to be taken away from you.

Kyler

Drawing code

My friends and I are working on a neat game that I am sure I will speak about more later, and I am mostly working on the art.  But sometimes some little bug comes up, or feature that I really want to get added and I feel like I want to get some coding done.

But reading code is difficult because there are so many steps that are interconnected that it is very difficult to see the overall picture to actually understand how it works, and more importantly, how to fix a bug.

So I ended up going through the code line, jumping between all the functions drawing out exactly what was going to happen.

I ended up finding the tiny oversight that was causing the bug and implemented the little fix that was needed to fix it. Anyways, now I understand what the heck is going on slightly better.

Kyler

Anki - 3 Months In

Below are the stat output of my Anki experience.  The first one is in Month view, and the second is in Deck Lifetime, meaning about 3 months.

While this isn't producing some sort of miracle learning in terms of me speaking Cantonese, I do at least remember something like 160 different words to varying degrees.  This includes pronunciation and audio recognition.

I am also listening to lessons, and I definitely find that having Anki deal with the memorization problems frees me up when listening to the lessons.

The whole process is actually sometimes spooky.  I will be shown a word in cantonese, or hear one, and feel like I can't remember it, but then the first thing pops into my mind, and 95% of the time that first thing is right.   That is when the system is working on the very edge of my memory.

One lesson I learned is that you have to be very careful when adding new cards.  At one point I was adding 15 new cards a day, which means 5 new words, and very quickly I was struggling and having a very bad time.  It made the process very stressful.  So I cut it down to just 4 cards a day, less than 2 new words, and it feels much better.

And I have found this to be a very easy habit to pick up.  I've studied 90% of the days since I started. And most incredible is the fact that it only has taken a total of 11 hours.  Imagine trying to learn 160 words, spelling and pronunciation in 11 hours.  That would be impossible.  

But I did it?

Kyler

Cruise

Recently we had the were able to take a fantastic cruise in the Caribbean.  The full album is at

Caribbean Cruise

My Personal Stash of Hints

This is a live version of a google doc in which I store my personal trove of hints for computer software. It is very specific and obscure, but I thought it should at least be public. Someone, somewhere, will hopefully find it useful.

This is where my hints will always be.




Kyler

Learning Cantonese

For a while now, I've been wanting to learn Cantonese.  My first attempts to learn were straight from Jackie.  That probably worked for about 5 words, and at least got me introduced to the concept of a tonal language.

But there was only so much I could learn in such an unstructured way.  So I purchased a book and CD set for learning Cantonese.  Initially, this seemed like a pretty good method.  I got through a few chapters, and wrote some of my own notes, and listened to a bunch of the CD tracks.  I learned more words and phrases this way.  The book was built out of dialogues.  And even though dialogues are interesting examples to look at, they feel too set-up to be really useful.  It’s like the author was throwing me into the deep end of learning things instead of slowly building the whole process up out of smaller parts.  It felt like I was always continuously going back to the books and the audio, to learn on tiny particular things that was in the middle of a large amount of comprehension.  It never felt like it would stick.  There was so much context switching going on all the time.  Trying to break the dialogues into useful chunks that I might want to use; trying to learn what individual words meant; and trying to get the pronunciation of the individual words right.  The whole process felt like a jumble, I couldn’t get into the habit of studying.

My ability to learn Cantonese felt like it had stalled, so much effort for so little pay off.  But process is always in my mind. Generally I don't like to just plow my way through a problem.  I would much rather search around for the weak link in the problem, sharpen my tools to overcome it, and slice the problem into manageable parts.

At first I thought the solution might lie with using something like Rosetta Stone, a software program that is designed to teach language.  I don't know much about the details, but I suspected that there must be something to the software that would be more powerful than a book and CD.  Unfortunately Rosetta Stone doesn't even have a Cantonese learning package, apparently an audience of something like 80 million native speakers just isn’t enough to make it worth it.

After more searching I found a website called PopupCantonese.com.  It is a podcast styled language learning site.  And the most important thing I initially liked about the site was how personable the podcasts sounded and felt.  The original "Learn Cantonese" books and audio CDs I got felt so completely dead and fabricated that they were a pain to learn from and listen to.  Popup Cantonese actually feels like it has real people living in China learning the language, and are having some fun while they do it.

What really sold their website to me was their study tool section that they have.  For each episode there is an interactive transcript that allows you to play each word individually, create word study lists, and practice flashcards based on those lists.  And the most important feature of all, was an export button that allowed the study list to be made into a simple spreadsheet format that could be input into any learning system I could find.

Just seeing that the export button existed informed me that there must be software available that would import it and help me learn it in some useful way.  The software that I found is called Anki (http://ankisrs.net/).  It is open source and free (on PCs, android and web, you have to pay for the iPhone version apparently).  It is available on every platform and syncs through the web so that all the studying you do with it effortlessly flows between the different places you might study.

The basic concept of Anki is to present a flash card, have you think of the answer, show you the answer, and have you rate your answer on your ability to recall it.  Cards that you find difficult will be represented to you again soon, while easy cards will only return at a later date to ensure you memory of them.

The software is fairly advanced and provides a massive amount of control in the creation and presentation of cards.  It took me a few days to really get my head wrapped around setting up the cards that I wanted to use, though actually doing the studying is a breeze, just tapping buttons, having you rate your memory ability.

It feels easy to make using Anki everyday a habit.  It’s not really a gamified experience, but it has some simple bars that fill up that help show your progress.

So I am heading into learning Cantonese with a very potent process. I’m sure you will hear how I make out in the future.


And a wired article about this approach to memory.

Zoi Gin
Kyler   

Finally a phone solution

After having an Android phone for a year and dealing with a limited internal memory,I finally discovered an app call s2e that allows me to partition a section of the external memory to be used as internal memory.

It's a very stupid problem that should not have required rooting the phone to fix, but that is the environment that is Android.

So now I finally have space to fit the blogger app on my phone. Meaning I can post from nearly any where.

Kyler