Lean Beliefs

  • Home

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Dear Twitter!

09/01/17 / pcsontos / Uncategorized / social media

The ONLY reason I’m using Twitter (alongside other social networks) is the ability to continue browsing tweets from where I left off last time.

This is the ability that makes it useful as a universal newsfeed (Other social media are not good for this). As Leo Laporte put it recently in the This Week In Tech podcast, Twitter kind-of killed RSS as it is doing almost the same thing just better. This may not be the only thing people are using Twitter for, but I think it’s one of the top 3.

This phenomenon makes it especially strange that in the 10 years of Twitter’s existence, they haven’t been able to further exploit this ability. It is not only unable to make me use my feed in a cross-device manner properly (my Google search “How to use twitter on multiple devices in a way that they remember where I left off?” has just provided zero meaningful results), but when I upgrade the Twitter app on my phone and launch it next time, it opens showing the top of my feed. Very annoying.

If there are UX researchers at Twitter, they could take a look at this.

It has begun

04/21/17 / pcsontos / Uncategorized / Climate Change

Recently I have started to listen to the audiobook version of the brand new novel of one of my favorite sci-fi writers, Kim Stanley Robinson: New York 2140 on Audible (which, I mean the Audible audiobook streaming service, I can highly recommend, as it makes the time of the daily commute much better spent, and even though it looks like quite expensive at first, it is actually not really).

The novel is, well, about New York, and the time of the story is in the year 2140. By this time, according to the novel, the city will have half-sunk in the Atlantic Ocean due to the rising sea level as a consequence of global warming. This is a very interesting story, but being fiction, and the time being such far in the future, I hadn’t thought through what this rising sea level phenomenon could possibly mean in our lifetime.

Until yesterday. Then I read this article about the impact of the rising sea level on the real estate market of Florida. Around Miami, the sea level has risen roughly 10 cms since 25 years ago, and by 2060, it is predicted that it will raise up to 1 meter.

So if you wonder if Elon Musk is right about climate change or Donald Trump, consider this: The consequences are real and they have already started to happen.

My post in Wait But Why’s “Dinner Table” discussion: How should we do government on Mars?

10/04/16 / pcsontos / Uncategorized / Mars, Space

See this for the whole discussion thread: http://waitbutwhy.com/table/mars-government

After reading through a whole library worth of opinions on the topic, I submitted this:

Flame war on true democracy / capitalism / realism vs utopistic / communistic / idealistic ideas seems to be over quite soon, so now my 2 cents.

I think no matter what kind of government we think will be created on Mars, it’s not going to be the product of any person on Earth, either us here in this discussion thread, or anyone else (Elon Musk and all politicians included). What I can rather imagine is some sort of emergent development of political system, rules / laws and enforcing of those. Only those rules are more than fantasies that have a way of being enforced. So the question of how rule / law enforcement will happen there is at least as important as what these laws will be or what decision mechanism will be used to create these laws. Why am I saying this? Because humans are fallible, and unless we want only robots to colonize Mars instead of people, things will be randomized by different points of view, mental issues or just simple lust for power (as properly discussed below), so things will go wrong, and there have to be ways of making them right again.

So let’s imagine John Doe, early Martian decides to play against the rules (at this stage probably defined by a not much more sophisticated mechanism than corporate hierarchy of SpaceX or NASA or whatever), or just thinks he can create his own rules hurting most of other Martians’ or the Company’s interests or points of view. While the colony is in its early stage, probably there will be very few people who absolutely rule out the possibility of getting back to Earth at a certain point in time, so as a first wave of enforcement, just the threat of “when you get back to Earth, you’ll be called to account for what you’ve done on Mars” will properly do.

Then, when enough people (either absolute majority or a large enough aggressive minority) will be like “I don’t go back ever” (and probably the Mars colony being somewhat self-sufficient and able to defend itself from being challenged by an “enforcer” spaceship sent from Earth), they will start demanding or creating their autonomy or power over the rest of the colony. Then it will somehow, probably through a step-by.step gradual process, result in a goverment model that is impossible to either predict or influence from Earth.

Finally, probably in an even later stage, when there will be already 2nd, 3rd etc. generation of Martians who are less idealistic, super-educated, motivated, whatever, than the 1st generation, people will start showing up who either just can’t weigh the consequences of what they do or they have nothing to lose, and are willing to cause real damage to other Martians or the whole colony. Then, the key question will be not only how to enforce certain rules or laws, but also how to proactively prevent big catastrophies from happening (as the Mars colony will be very vulnerable). Therefore, both passive and active protection of key infrastructure pieces will be necessary. Passive like redundancy and robustness, and active like guards, security systems etc. I think this need for protection mechanisms is more or less independent from the form of government or how it changes, so it should be something like the very core of how Mars is operated. Similarly to the 3 laws of robotics.

My first experiences with 3D printing

10/13/15 / pcsontos / Uncategorized / Internet of Things

What a day!

On the same day, #1: the national team of my country almost (yes, again, almost) qualified for a global football championship – EURO 2016 (and to achieve this “almost”, Turkey had to score against Iceland in the 88th minute – the usual bad luck for us); #2: really juicy situations happened at my workplace due to a broken drainpipe; and #3: I had the chance to play around with a 3D printer. Here I’d like to share my impressions about the 3rd topic, the first two stinking too much for my taste.

I had known that a 3D printer was a sensitive and tricky animal (material stuck inside, having to use adhesive, bail and tweezers etc.), working horribly slowly, needing to be patient not only because of this, but the lots of trial and error involved.

The starting point being like this, it was a positive surprise how quickly I could learn even these tricky parts, and also how to “create” 3D models for the printer. With the tons of free STL models on the internet and the ease of use of Cura for Ultimaker 2 software, it was really quick and easy to familiarize and become fairly effective.

However, what I missed very much, was the lack of “intelligence” on the designer software side. It was very easy to download models to the printer that just didn’t work (like the thickness of the object was not enough at some places, the shape not fitting the 3D printing process, or the object not standing stable enough and falling down in the middle of being created). I could imagine enhancing this kind of software with algorithms that would handle these issues much better.

Anyway, this is cool stuff, maybe in 5 years when the prices will be less than a tenth of what they are currently, I’ll have a 3D printer myself as well :).

Life, the universe and everything about lean software engineering

Blog by Péter Csontos,
a nice guy from Hungary

twitter: @pcsontos

Recent Posts

  • On the popularity of programming languages – Vol. 2.
  • The only messaging platform that really works: E-MAIL
  • Dear Twitter!
  • It has begun
  • My post in Wait But Why’s “Dinner Table” discussion: How should we do government on Mars?
  • On the benefits of unit testing
  • Functional programming: “expression was too complex”
  • Software architecture is dead, long live software architecture
  • Lean Startup vs The Innovator’s Dilemma
  • The art of micromanagement

Tags

Artificial Intelligence Big Data books C# Climate Change Cloud Computing Coding Kids Continuous Delivery Definition of Done DevOps estimations eXtreme Programming HTML5 Internet of Things Java JavaScript kaizen kanban Kotlin Lean Startup maintainability management Mars metrics microservices Mobile Apps programming languages Python Recruiting refactoring Robots Ruby SAP scrum self testing code social media Space Speech Recognition Swift TDD teamwork technical debt The Innovator's Dilemma unit testing Wearable Gadgets

Categories

  • Agile
  • Lean
  • Management
  • Personal
  • Philosophy
  • Software Engineering
  • Uncategorized

Archives

  • April 2019
  • May 2018
  • September 2017
  • April 2017
  • October 2016
  • June 2016
  • April 2016
  • February 2016
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
December 2019
M T W T F S S
« Apr    
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
© A WordPress Site
TwitterFacebookLinkedIn