“In any case, I don’t think outsourcing per se is much of a threat. I bet much of the time it’s just a symptom of using a language that’s not abstract enough. In effect you’re using the programmers in India or wherever as human compilers.” — Paul Graham

If I’m reading this right, he’s saying exactly what my friends and I have been talking about for a couple of years now. Essentially, before too long, the idea is going to be what’s valuable — not the ability to implement it.

This is a major development in any field, really, and it certainly is in information technology. What it means is that like 75% of the IT work force is going to made obsolete. I’m making up those numbers, obviously, but it’ll be a lot.

Think about how many IT workers you know. How many are creating things vs. implementing them and doing common, repetitive tasks. Being in information security I am in the upper crust of standard IT workers, but the vast majority of my time is still spent implementing and doing common things. This will all be going away before too long, though.

The only thing that’s going to be useful, really, is hacking. Anything other than hacking is simply implementation of said creativity, and that’s going to get increasingly easy as languages improve and/or AI becomes more powerful.

As AI does get more…intelligent, it’ll essentially be every hacker’s familiar — sitting there ready to help implement whatever cool idea the hacker comes up with. Either that or the languages/IDEs will be so advanced (using AI, no doubt) that ideas will be written (spoken?) by the creator in pseudo-code, at which point the program itself will do the work necessary to make the idea usable to a computer.

Anyway, more ramblings from me. Let me know what you guys think…

If anyone else has a pen fetish like I do, you need to go and make yourselves one of these.

It’s essentially a $200 Monteblanc (not two words) pen — which is the pen to have — but it only costs like $15 to make. The short version of the story is that you just put the expensive, high-class ink into an inexpensive pen (namely a G2). So now you have the writing quality of the $200 masterpiece (since it’s about the ink more than anything), and you get it for less than $20.

Link: Make A $200 Pen For $15

Oh, by the way, it works. I did it just a few minutes ago and it’s über-sick. I went with the fine tip black ink, and will be going to get some of the standard black refills later. If you like pens, this is a must-do project. It took me all of 5 minutes to make the modification.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately. A couple days ago I started fantisizing about what nanotechnology could mean to the medical field, and ultimately to the lives of humans. I’m sure the majority of this stuff is assembled from dozens of tidbits I’ve read over the years on the topic, but I’ll indulge anyway.

Basics

The main idea for nanotechnology and medicine is a microscopic “robot” that can carry instructions given to it by its controller. In this case it would be the doctor/technician doing the treatment. The concept is that rather than being primitive and pumping a body full of general drugs that also target something undesirable in the body (while simultaneously tearing up countless other bits), a nanobot would see things at the celular level.

This perspective, combined with superior instructions and the ability to manipulate its environment, would allow such an entity to simply remove, deconstruct, and essentially assassinate known pathogens.

Imagine for a second that there is a bomb in a 50 story office building, and the bomb is capable of blowing up like half of the city. Well, current medicine, for the most part, releases a “death ooze” into the entire city that connects to everything. The upside is that when this ooze binds to bombs it’s able to disable them to a large degree, after which time if the bomb goes off it only takes out a room or two rather than the whole building.

The bad news is that the death ooze released to defuse the bomb also binds to other things. Cars, children, and everything else. Unfortunately, most of these things don’t react to well to the ooze. Some get violently ill; some die. Even when it’s not this extreme, it kills all the plants in the city, and it makes the whole place stink for 6 months.

The biggest problem with this technique is that little is actually known about the ooze. Essentially, somone figured out one day that the ooze works against bombs. And since it doesn’t seem to kill people immediately, it can probably be sold for large sums of money to those with a bomb problem.

The ooze I speak of is the pharmaceutical industry’s response to everything — drugs. It’s the crap that get pushed into one’s body in hope of the result being slightly better than the side effects.

A Better Way

Nanotechnology offers an alternative. Instead of releasing a myriad of mostly unknown toxins into the body in hopes of killing something worse than the toxins, why not just go and find the problem?

This is what nanotechnolgy promises — the ability to identify and counter any known pathogen.

Seek and Destroy

So imagine something like HIV. What if we could inject someone with an army of nanobots designed to do nothing but destroy HIV? They would course through the like a driver moving through traffic. So, using the car analogy, let us say that the nanobot knows that any car with 4 antennas on its roof is an HIV virus, and that it’s ability to harm other cells is due to its having a wench on the front bumper.

Well, at that point it simply finds all cars/virii with 4 antennae on them, and then it violently strips them of their wenches. Voila! Now the virus can do no damage. This happens on a mass scale through the whole body, until a certain predefined point is reached. Then the master-bot reports back to the doctor that x number of virii have been killed, and that the infection is under control.

Repair

So that’s how the basics work — you can go in and manipulate things on the sub-cellular level. This presents some very interesting possibilities in terms of fixing existing problems. Let’s say that in 10 years we know what causes aging, or what causes cancer. And using the car analogy, it turns out it’s cars that have a certain kind of tint on the windows in addition to having too little air in the front right tire.

Well at that point we could send in a special team of bots to start fixing cars. Take the tint off the windows. Put some air in those tires. Or, if there’s a problem, just destroy any car that you see with those issues.

I can see someone going into the doctors office in the future and watching with the physician as the number of cancer cells in their body is reduced from 2 million to 2,000 in a matter of hours. They watch this happen on a screen — a screen showing vitals and receiving reports from the controller-bot within the patients body.

Active Defense

That’s all cool and everything, but the most exciting thing for me (maybe because I’m in information security) is the notion of maintaining an active defense using these nanobots.

We’ve all heard of antivirus, right? Like on a computer? Well, imagine this. When you are born you get your “nimunization” (nano-immunization). It’s a set of bots that monitor for what we receive vaccines for now. Polio, Anthrax, Mumps, whatever. They sit in the infants body and wait for their enemies to show up. When they do, they attack with impunity.

I envision a doctor having alerts coming to his personal computing device on his hip — reports on all his patients as updated via the bot controllers. So when an outbreak of measles happens in his area, and like 400 of his kids suddenly get faced with the virus, the bots within his patients will attack the intruder and then report (via their own personal computers that interface with the bots via short-range wireless) to their doctor the status of their body.

So the doctor’s sitting there eating lunch and his device alerts him that this morning 46 of his kids were exposed to measles (which their bots then killed). So at that point he knows there’s an outbreak. The interesting part comes when the bots’ analysis engine also reports that the virus was not as easily killed as before, and that based on current projections the next variation will be resistant to the bots’ attack. :)

Misuse, Terrorism, and Warfare

The most frightening implications of this technology are that it would be utterly trivial, if in control of this technology, to harm and/or kill people in a very granular fashion. It’s not so much the speed of killing — many poisons can do that already — it’s the fact that one could decide who to kill, and could program the killing-bots to make the decision on very specific attributes.

Someone could, for example, decide to kill everyone with blue eyes, or with black hair. Or perhaps everyone with a gene that’s linked to a disease or disability later in life (if the creator was trying to grow a “healthy and strong” future. Or in the case of war, how about designing bots to kill a specific race (and then giving the counter/antivenom to those of that race loyal them). This would probably be very hard to do given the splash damage, but it’s only psychopaths that’d be considering it in the first place.

Random Ideas

So anyway, here are a few random thoughts along these same lines. I’d love to hear more if you have them, and/or other tangents in the same vein:

• Heuristic Bots Due to the quickly-mutating nature of the threats of the day, bots are then coded with a separate mechanism for identifying attackers that they are not specifically coded for and then “learning” to defend against them without being specifically programmed to do so.
• Realtime Updates Imagine new organisms being uploaded instantly to a massive, centralized computer that determines whether or not it’s hostile or benign, and then writes new counter-attack strategies if it turns out to be hostile.
• The Class Gap What if the cost was prohibitive for all but the wealthy? What if simple illness became a non-issue for those who had money, while it could wipe out huge swaths of the poor?
• Technology Genocide “If you can’t afford bots, you don’t deserve to live.” This mentality could lead to a generated pathogen being made to attack the poor. Probably not the best idea, though, since the rich make money only if the poor exist. Good sci-fi, though.
• Realtime Mass Health Monitoring What if we could, over the course of 5 years, monitor the national health effects of a new diet fad? So, in 2046 bots had to do x amount of heart repair in the United States, but after the release of so and so book, it dropped to y amount. As such, this diet made the country z more healthy.

Hmm…

Anyway, let me know what you guys think.:

“If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” — Voltaire

I just realized something today — the majority of my time in Windows is spent waiting for the OS to reboot after doing updates.

It seems whenever I log in for the first time in a few days, or, increasingly a couple of weeks, I tend to be forced into the following drill:

• Log in.
• Open programs to be used.
• Start updates.
• Start working (barely).
• Get prompted for a reboot.
• Close everything I’ve opened and reboot.
• Wait for the system to restart.
• Log in.
• Start up my apps and try to start working again.
• Check for additional updates.
• Download and install them.
• Get prompted for a another reboot.
• Realize I never should have opened any apps at all.

That was painful to write, and it’s a hundred times worse to actually go through. It’s sickening, really. Windows to me has essentially become a gaping wound that needs constant attention. I can’t just log in and work — not unless I want to ignore the latest slew of highly critical updates. Baahh.

Anyway, just wanted to vent.

So what RSS feeds do you guys subscribe to? I am looking specifically for alternative news and information security blogs sources. I like good aggregate sources as well, such as Digg and Reddit.

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions I’d love to hear them.

Yes, that’s the prediction I’ve had for quite some time: the single biggest factor in peoples’ decision to move to OS X is going to be the fact that Vista is going to bomb. When I say bomb, I mean an utter failure. Here’s a quote from Paul Thurrott — a consumate Windows guru:

“Since the euphoria of PDC 2003, Microsoft’s handling of Windows Vista has been abysmal. Promises have been made and forgotten, again and again. Features have come and gone. Heck, the entire project was literally restarted from scratch after it became obvious that the initial code base was a teetering, technological house of cards. Windows Vista, in other words, has been an utter disaster. And it’s not even out yet. What the heck went wrong?”

Uh, yeah…

The latest issue he wrote about is Microsoft’s attempt to mimic the Unix model of limiting user access to the system, i.e. making sure people can’t tear up their own machines as easily as they can in older versions of Windows.

Well, as some expected, Microsoft’s attempt to do this is an utter joke. Again from Paul’s piece:

“The bad news, then, is that UAP is a sad, sad joke. It’s the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to any software product, and yes, that includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older Office versions. The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for the same action would be comical if it weren’t so amazingly frustrating. It would be hilarious if it weren’t going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness.”

It’s April, folks. April. This far in and they are still grappling with major design issues? It’s like these people are lost somewhere with no leader. Microsoft is full of awesome programmers, so why can’t they make things the way Apple or Google does? I don’t get it.

Anyway, regardless of the reason, they are in major trouble. I think Vista is going to be the single biggest reason for people moving to OS X and Linux. People are going to be somewhat hesitant, yet excited to some degree about the release, but once they see it — and see how many issues there are with it — their loyalty to Windows will suddenly turn into anger.

Basically, it’s not Leopard that Microsoft has to worry about — it’s Vista. It’s the reason people are going to leave them in droves, not the competition’s offerings. If both Vista and Leopard were great, but Leopard was a little better, most would stay. But Leopard is going to be revolutionary, and Vista is basically going to limp onto the scene. Microsoft is going to have to hire a slew of people just to do public damage control for how much it sucks — a fact that’s no doubt going to make Jobs laugh uncontrollably.

Some predictions are too grand to make, but I’ll make one anyway. This is the beginning of the end for Microsoft’s dominance of the home market. Apple is surging faster that most people relalize, and if Microsoft doesn’t do something soon they’re going to be tired and stale within a couple of years.

Thoughts?

I don’t have any idea why I didn’t know this before, but in Firefox you can search within a given web page by pressing the "/" key (that’s a forward slash). For those that are *nix-literate, you’ll recognize this as the way to search within vi.

Actually, that’s how I discovered the option; I was about to look for soemthing on a page and I subconsciously pressed the / key as if I were in vi.

I saw the search bar pop up on the bottom, but it didn’t sink in for like 5 seconds. I was like, “Did I really just see that?” Once I confirmed that I wasn’t seeing things I backtracked to figure out why I pressed that key to search in the first place, and more importantly — why it worked.

That’s when it struck me — it’s how you search in vi! Wow. Very cool. To add to the novelty, the search bar goes away in a few seconds if you don’t actually use it. Yes, definitely cool.: