Self

Live for yourself. If you always conform to others' expectations, you'll betray yourself. You'll lose your integrity. Integrity isn't doing what other people say is right; it's doing what you know is right. Of course, if you know nothing, you can do nothing, and integrity is impossible for you. So know what you believe; if you believe nothing, seek something. Find out who you are. Honest fidelity to your true self is powerful; other standards of conduct can only create facades.

Enhance

We play games in real life. Many people think that gaming is divorced from reality, but in reality, life and games exist side by side. Exceptional games can motivate their players to behave in exceptional ways. Whether that behavior is good or bad depends on the game and the way players engage in it. Wandering thoughtlessly through a game is like zoning out in a chemistry laboratory. Attentive people can accomplish marvels in either place, but careless fools will generate catastrophes. So remember to let your virtue control the game, or the game may empower your vice.

The One and Only Vlog

Solo

We need a-social media. A-social people might be an anomalous minority, but they do exist. Such people are source nodes or orphaned nodes in the graph of society. They maintain this status by refusing incoming connections. Social tools exist to improve reachability in the social graph; they add edges in every possible place. A-social people don't allow others to build edges to their nodes, so they obtain nothing from social media.

Social media is a major use of the internet. Social people spend long hours on the internet using social media. The computers and protocols people use, however, are developed by people who tend to be a-social. A lot of engineers and technical people find math and machines more interesting than people. A lot of them enjoy many aspects of the internet and computers but eschew the social ones. If the entire internet were converted to an inherently social environment, its core developers might feel out of place and stop working on it. Don't write people off merely because they live in their own private world and don't use your favorite social sites; they might be the key people who make such sites possible.

Social Engineering

All food should taste the same. Most restaurants cater to a miniscule audience: the one that likes their food. This is quite unfair, as people should be able to go anywhere they want and enjoy themselves.  Restaurants should cease their foolish tricks and cater to all comers. Unfortunately, this change would crush most establishments. They simply could not afford to provide such a variety of food. To fix this, we must decrease the variety; to ensure it works for even the smallest restaurants, we should eliminate variety entirely. This, though, is absurd. People would be dismayed if everything they liked disappeared along with the things they disliked. We should probably leave well enough alone.

Power Attack

If you miss, roll more dice. In fact, just get a bucket of dice and roll them all at once. Pick out the ones with the best numbers, and proceed with your attack. This method works admirably for defense and trap checks as well. Design a lore friendly “magic bag of dice” for your party leader, and you'll be unfailingly prepared. Serious RPG fans might disapprove. Open source developers, though, embrace this approach. Granted, they've modified it a bit; they make other people roll all the dice. Still, the final step is the same. Keep sifting until you score a critical.

Fluffy

Learn to speak cloud. The cloud is everywhere and nowhere, and people try to do everything with it. They mold it into whatever they want it to be. Some people even store their brains in the cloud. All their communications are routed through the cloud. Knowledgeable cloud-speakers are the only ones who can reach them. A cloud-based system for translating into cloud would be good, but to really understand cloud culture, you have to go native. Live long enough among the cloudians, and they shall accept you and teach you their ways. You can then make an excellent living as a guide or translator. You could also be a cloud anthropologist. Don't forget your roots, though, or you'll be trapped in cloud land forever.

Not Fair, Not Fun

America needs an anti-cheat daemon. People cheat to receive credit for work they didn't do. In games, players sometimes cheat to bypass annoyingly hard or boring tasks. This is fine for single player games. In multiplayer games, cheating would allow people to take advantage of each other, and developers do their best to squash it. For some reason, though, the developers of our government create laws which are analogous to cheat codes for multiplayer games. Lazy people leverage these laws to take rewards for others' hard work. Currently, there is no punishment for abusing the system. There should be. Anyone found exploiting the legal system needs to be permanently kick-banned. That is, if they misuse the laws, they are forbidden from ever again using the courts.

Cheap Caution

Most people don't care about security until it's too late. They entrust their data to large companies simply because those companies are large and well-known. Those companies generate massive profits without charging for service, but this doesn't raise any flags for most consumers. It shocks people to discover that free-service providers readily distribute their data. Trust should be honored, but in many cases, it isn't. It is unwise to dispense valuable information casually; think about what happens if it escapes. 

Hackers think about escaping data. They want to catch it. Groups like the Chaos Computer Club flourish because so many people find data theft amusing. Other groups sell this information or use it for political purposes. Some hackers are honest thieves, but the worst ones hide. Worse than any hacker, though, are governments and companies. Some employees of these organizations, if not the organizations themselves, will misuse this information. They have easy access to the information of thousands or millions of people, simply because those people trust them.

The internet survives on trust, and lack of trust will kill the internet. A complete lack of trust is the consequence of too much trust. People who trust too much will be betrayed at some point. They will then get scared and refuse to trust again. In contrast, trust in small amounts is easy to grant and replace; the risk is low. Internet users should trust only when necessary, and they should be conscious of their own (in)security. If they are wise, the internet can blossom into a grand community. If most users are foolish, the internet will collapse into a ghost town.

I was inspired to think this way about trust by The Cuckoo's Egg, which is a fascinating book. It reads like a novel, but it isn't a work of fiction. The author, Dr. Stoll, should have been a professional writer. Of course, if he had chosen that occupation, he'd never have had the experiences that made the book so interesting.

The One Program

The future cannot be contained in one piece of software; there will always be users for whom it does not work. There exists a lot of software which, while popular, is not very useful. Conversely, many useful programs are lost in obscurity. Software is born from want. If users don't find an existing program that fits their exact need, they look for another. Many users have the skills to create alternatives for themselves, and the ones who don't will buy from them. So even though large companies may hook a majority of consumers, they'll never catch us all.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/chrome-os/googles-new-desktop-strategy-invade-and-conquer-228300

Twitter Overload

I set out to follow #ldsconf. I'd never used Twitter, so I had to experiment to find a working solution.  The fist site I tried became unresponsive; it probably had server problems. Then I tried Twitter itself and learned that you can't follow hash tags automatically. So then I tried another aggregator. That one held up under load, but it didn't allow any speed controls on the feed. Tweets came pouring in and the screen flickered at a seizure-inducing rate.  Unable to read that fast, I tried one more service. It kept the refresh rate to two minutes and gradually let new tweets in. Despite changing feeds several times, I managed to follow quite a bit on Twitter; I don't think any of it was very important compared to the live talks.  I feel like I missed important messages because I split my attention too much.

Lament of a Lukewarm Genealogist

I believe that genealogy is important, but I haven't done much of my own. Most of my experience with genealogy comes from the FamilySearch Indexing program. I did try to do my own work by taking a class on Scandinavian family history. It was a good class, and I learned some useful techniques from it. Sadly, though, I haven't continued my work. Perhaps I just find the research too time consuming. Time, though, isn't the only cost. The best archives for Sweden cost money to access. BYU subscribes to them, but you can only access them from campus. I'd like to see free genealogy archives for more countries; I might be persuaded to spend more time on genealogy if I could freely browse census records during a spare moment at home.

Translation

Perfect translations don't exist. You see, translation is writing, and as writers, we rely on the human mind for feedback. We ask for consensus from our own mind, our editor's mind and the minds of all our readers. Sometimes we ignore the consensus. We take risks. The definition of 'good' changes whenever somebody forms an opinion. Machines can't translate any better than we can, but their translations are still useful. If nothing else, they can break translator's block by suggesting an idea you'd never have dreamed of in any other way.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/09/28/2025205/automatic-translation-without-dictionaries

Comment Crawler

You always intend to read just one comment. Somehow, though, that one always has a long history. Start tracing it, and you enter an infinitely-branching maze. The maze is filled with fiery traps, gluttonous trolls and a few brave heroes hacking through. You feel compelled to follow your favorite hero, vicariously battling his foes and grasping for glory. When you leave the dungeon, you are drained. You wish you'd never entered.
Then a new comment catches your attention.
      

I found some good news: the state of comment threads may be improving. Go here to read about it.

Fire From the Gods

Technology is a powerful gift. Like simple fire, it can be used to accomplish all manner of useful tasks for the benefit of mankind. Also like fire, it can be the means of great destruction and mayhem. Technology is ubiquitous, so we tend not to think about it. Think we should, though; if we don't, we won't be able to control what technology will become. It is not bad or good any more than humans are. We decide whether technology will help or harm our world. If we don't want that world to burn up, we'd best keep an eye on the fire.