byteface

Figured I’d share a random thought…

In space you have Alpha-matter, the matter with the most mass rule in this vacuum.

On earth life evolved, and the Alpha-species was the one with the biggest teeth.

Within a species you have an Alpha-male. One species dominated through invention of tools/weapons ruled the world.

With religions and feudalism came Alpha-Moral / Immoral .

From these things came heritage and intelligence. So after the printing press, intelligence became the new Alpha model alongside Money. Hence clever people today climb the ladder of control or people that have money call the shots.

I believe computing causes abundance of intelligence and less reliance on people for that. Also the financial system could potentially collapse meaning what is the next Alpha model?

Today if you assault someone physically you get called a bully or imprisoned. In my opinion many a good argument can be solved by a good old fashion punch up.

Yet If you use intelligence or money to control people, no-one batters an eyelid. In fact it’s promoted. again in my opinion this is still bullying.

Systems have always aggregated and rewarded those with alpha qualities to control the masses. If you want to get ahead of the curve you need to know what the next Alpha is. These metaphysical mutations however happen rarely.

Maybe the future is not about control or dominance? Maybe it’s not about the next Alpha

maybe its the time for Beta.

Maybe we don’t need Alpha any more? Maybe each of us being a nice person could change the world in the future?

This would come from love and sharing all the world and looking after the Beta.

If we don’t figure out the next Alpha soon, we could revert to a previous method of social control. Sadly that could be war.

Lets put the world into Beta and make it a Beta place to live for everybody.

Well I don’t blog enough, so figured I’d start blogging more of my thoughts on the singularity. These are musings as much as anything else and should be taken light heartedly.

I wonder if space scientists have yet tried to take raw chunks of unaffected carbon free floating in space and read the byte data off their magnetic arrangement, or something like that. It’s one potential way of detecting if a technological singularity happened once before, and all matter became one consciousness. Then chose to explode to smallest divisible bits of its own mass restarting the whole process. Over billions of years those pieces inevitably reorganize back again into rocks, planets, thinking matter (biology) occurs again through evolution and eventually a AI is created and a Singularity occurs again, which is composed of all matter in universe and uses it to think with. If somewhere, by chance, chunks of the previous complete universe were still floating around and if we could find them, what would we read off them?. Anyhow nothing to do with what I’m going to write about, just a passing thought.

Moore’s law is awesome. As I look around I see it in effect everywhere from screens to data storage, but even things like production of random products. It truly is remarkable and this rapid progress in technology is probably the reason you’re even conscious at all. You may be merely a historic replay of someones life that was recorded digitally billions of years ago on the cusp of AI. Think about it, your not conscious at any other time in the billions of years of lifes history, in all its multiple forms that have ever happened over time, in any fungus or animal or even the millions of bacteria on an animal. Your conscious now, as you, as we approach the technological singularity and are able to start storing all of the events of a life online meaning it would be simple to recreate them digitally in the future.

In terms of games, the time between Pong and Assassins Creed is a very small amount of time to see such huge leaps in progress. Crude graphics and basic physics turn into full physics engines with movie quality animations. And it’s safe to assume they will get better yet, why should they stop evolving?

Mobile phones are finally getting the attention they deserve. Quite simply everyone has a phone, not everyone has a personal computer and these days a phone is a pretty decent computer anyway. What is a ‘mobile’ though, if you start wearing them as glasses would you still call them ‘mobiles’?

You shouldn’t really need a keyboard at all, voice recognition has come an awful long way, and really carting a brick with a screen around is not as good as wearing digital contact lenses. But before we get as far as technology in contact lenses or upgraded eyeballs we will most certainly be wearing digital glasses/shades and we have seen evidence to support this in recent technologies. I would assume within next 10 years most people you see will be wearing digital glasses. You may think not but a few decades ago there was no internet, 5 years ago there was no iPhone and now millions of people use those things daily as if they’d always been around.

With digital glasses, on the outside a camera recording your view of life as it happens in realtime, and on the inside of the lenses a user interface to the internet and applications etc that work by nods, gestures, voice commands or by reading your hand gestures (from behind) to move the augmented objects within your view. The option to use other physical controllers to access digital data will still be there, and some people may prefer that. Yet ultimately most people will start wearing the digital glasses as they do carry phones today.

Augmented reality through the glasses gives us so much more possibilities in interactions with people and every day objects. If I watch someone walking along they could have their favorites songs or movies swirling around them (augmented by my digital glasses). They have chosen to share this information and therefore other people can reach out and pluck it from them as they walk by. Easy really when there’s face detection hooked up to Facebook, with also filtering faces to check based on current locations etc…

This may seem far fetched, or obvious depending on whether your a Singularitarian or not. But regardless its a really big deal. How big a deal exactly came to light when I considered an idea for a phone transition whilst making a call to someone. It’s an interesting concept that has consequences for how we think of our ’self’

Now consider this, you could phone someone now on your iphone or android phone. You hold the phone up to make a call and the camera takes a picture of where you are currently standing, it morphs that into street view and you watch a transition along the street in realtime to the person your callings location. As they answer the call you are able to see out of their camera. If the call ends you watch the transition backwards along street view to your current location.

Now thats cool, but imagine doing that with glasses on. So I say call my wife, and my vision races down the street or even zooms out of world on a google map transition and then zooms back into street view and suddenly I’m looking out of her eyes. At realtime. Cool eh!. But what if someone calls you whilst your looking out of someone else’s eyes. THAT is the freaky part. So I call my friend, my vision flies down the street and I’m looking out of her eyes. At the same time my mother calls me and she’s looking out of my eyes. Where is my mind? in the body my mother is currently watching from or out of my friends eyes?

Vision is just the start of augmentation of other peoples lives. You will obviously also have the hearing augmented with headphones and it may seem crazy to suggest but eventually all the senses. How far away that is, totally another debate. But given Moore’s law has seen screen technology evolving quite quickly and mobile companies are looking to compete with each other all the time, it perfectly feasible that you will at least start to be doing this and it could mean starting to let go of your body. No your consciousness is not uploaded YET, but your practicing the gentle transition towards letting go of at least where you physically are. Baby steps into uploading your consciousness.

Imagine tuning in to ‘watch’ out of the eyes of your favorite celebrity. At a cost of course, that could be to suffering immersive advertising or simply pay per view events. But a spawn of Youtube/Facebook will emerge in the interweb as a service, something like ‘youBook’ that means you can monetize your own content and earn money by sharing your life experiences or knowledge with others.

Youtube is generally recorded content but realtime content all over the place, having actual open live channels seem like next logical step for video on the web and that will most likely come through peoples networking profiles. Camera positions from millions of peoples glasses in one place will mean crowds become multiple cameras for matrix camera control in live environments like sports events or concerts.

Imagine for example everyone in the crowd at a football match was wearing digital glasses that recorded the event and sharing that recorded content to a network where you can switch between the cameras at reatime.

anyways, that’s the end of today waffle…

was up late playing with particles on font points… posted about it here.

http://www.qbn.com/topics/653349/

It would be seemingly simple to move robots over large distances using phones to remotely control their motor devices.

For example it would fair to assume you could text a signal to a phone strapped a device like a small toy car, which would carry instructions for direction. You could do this via arduino to pass the text signal to the device controls. The device would also have satnav and able to transmit its location back so you could render it on a map, also on board would be a camera so you could see through its eyes. All these things available from a phone, recharging the car being the main problem.

you could potentially also phone the device attached to the car and pass audio signals giving you a realtime active open channel to control the device.

I searched youtube.. humorously its done on a fullsize car as an iphone app but I was thinking more in terms of a toy…

I think this has much more potential for small toys and such an obvious idea, wouldn’t be suprised to see a lot of these hit the market, the smaller the cooler. However also incredibly dangerous to society. Thinking in terms of privacy invasion, or terrorist weapons. Cheap, simple to make remote controlled devices carrying bombs etc…

blimey, been that long since I blogged!!… lol.

ok I got a javascript parser for truetype fonts in github, been there a while but some great examples in there and you can see the potential for creative fun.

https://github.com/byteface/js-font-parser/tree/

It’s no different just because Apple are doing it, since I can remember everyones bitched about Flash. To be honest even Flash devs do it. But hey, they’re allowed right? cos they’re Flash devs. It’s funny to witness around the blogosphere Flashers complaining of how their tool is restrictive by nature and holds back their creative ambition, but when other technologists do it they cut them down and rush to defend their beloved platform.

Steve Jobs ‘opinion’ and HTML5 are the current arsonary against Flash and it should be pointed out that these are viable forces. However, is Flash to be judged on its current state and not how it will change and adapt? So we are allowed a HTML5 but not a Flash 11? or 12 or 13? Technology evolves must faster than the pace of standards and the future certainly isn’t at the pace that we comprehend things. Flash has always stood to innovate in the place of things that weren’t standard and to be honest it always will. Standards today wont be the standards of tomorrow and are merely a current direction for growth, but we will always need a concurrent non standard technology running on top of that for the sake of innovation. This is what lets our usage shape how the next standards should emerge.

The biggest problem with Flash over recent years has been inclusivity. Users dictate the most ubiquitous platform and as Flash has evolved it’s increased in complexity, this is contrary to why it became popular in the first place. Programming in Flash today is like writing an application for a large corporate bank and thats just to make a ‘fart button’. But once upon a time it was a way for people to quickly and simply convey an idea.

When the pen was invented the pencil stayed around. This is a problem with technology on the whole, when version updates appears the older software is pushed into the rubble of time. The entry level for programming in Flash is now higher than ever before and is the single biggest problem for Flash today. Adobe need to focus on maintaining its simplicity and maybe should consider keeping older versions of Flash available. Why not?.. Flash is backwards compatible right?… What’s the point of building that compatibility in, if your not going to make use of it?

Flash ( with instruction ) can consume any xml schema. XML is intended to be humanly readable and often its created and written by humans. Over the last few years we have seen everyone from hobbyist to practitioners creating custom data structures to contribute to a dynamic web. Amongst these user contributions emerge standards like SOAP, REST, SVG, XLIF, etc. The ability to create new data constructs and parsers rapidly make Flash an incredibly powerful tool for a morphogenetic internet that we are shaping as we use it. Moreover, when that contribution is more inclusive ( simple to use ), which Flash was traditionally, it causes proliferation of a tool that humans can use to communicate in metaphors. Metaphorical comprehension (like dreams) is optimised data storage so metaphors are a great way to share ideas.

This leads us towards the concept of the semantic web, and I believe the web 3.0 semantic notion (data tagging) binds very simply to the xml hierarchal node model giving fruition and growth to the web, also it creates a simple way to iterate over and compare data, creating a thinking response engine or difference engine. Flash has ‘a role to play’ due to it being able to evolve at the pace of its designers, it is at the pace of its users… us.

Collective thinking and interpretation of the universe. The growth and contribution to this will be supported further by the semantic web as this is something that anyone can contribute towards simply by tagging, date stamping or giving a location to. Basically we answer questions on objects… who, what, why, where, when, how. We didn’t invent those words to explore, they are words that define the possible ways to explore the given universe and we then found words for those types of exploration that were already there.

XML is undoubtably the simplest programming language to learn. It is nothing more than a construct for data which you can then write interpreters (programs) for. So effectively as long as theres something that can unwrap that data then there’s a way for it to be comprehended and represented. One (of many) reasons Flash exploded was because normal people could create custom xml schemas and programs to interpret that, meaning a dynamic web became available where anyone could contribute/amend a program to adapt the metaphor by just updating the xml.

Using simple data relationships in a nested/hierarchal way we can build very quickly a programs, if the interpreter is clever enough to render the component parts. For years developers in many languages have been writing programs to interpret nodes of information. A lot of this sits festering on peoples drives but maybe in the future if they could be collated and used on request to render at runtime our metaphors. In other words when a computer can start doing my job, which is to bind data to programmed objects for the sake of interpretation, any concept could be conveyed with little effort.

A collective programmable data parsing machine was possibly conceived at the beginning of object orientated programming but hasn’t been fully realised yet. This is because interpretation can change based on context, so the data itself cannot fully manifest interpretation. At the moment we share this job with the browser using javascript, html, embedded objects and back end languages to interpret and render all the different types of data that are put into it. In the future we will have to build not just with data tags, but with colors, sounds and images. We need to be programming with more than just tags and words as input.

When technology really becomes a finished era and not one we are currently bound, is when it can be considered from a point of relative completion. This will be the sum of all parts. Like all art contributing to the definition of art collectively, but yet still continues to expand within the confines of what it knows about itself. With the creation of metaphors via a multi-parisng response tool a collective thought on a subject can be quickly achieved. These tools can educate us on how to contribute towards the purpose proposed of us. Our combined efforts to understand creation or purpose of that creation.

Rate of change is so rapid now we are not aware of it. So no-one will really be surprised when a being with the vernacular for all life emerges and wants to plot out its own sense of purpose in the universe. We are a very small piece of life and a thinking machine will consider the agenda of all other creatures not just humans. A technological concept could combine with biological processes and the physical shape of the universe would start to change at a large scale. Instead of salts in a sea forming into thinking compounds, a collating form may operate at a universal scale, ultimately that form could unrest the mass of space. Planets would find themselves mined for resources, and suns for energy as a super intelligent being spans out to ensure its own survival in the universe.

Typically of me, I have digressed completely.. lol. However i’ll continue and finish my point. Flash may face the threat of being de-throned, however it is yet to show us how it can evolve. Apple may be the most powerful technology company on the market today and so forth are attempting to dictate the shape of the internet. However its not the strongest that survive but those who are most adaptable to change. Flash will adapt, it always has in the past so I see no reason that it wouldn’t in the future. By closing its doors to an entire platform and network of developers Apple are hindering their ability to adapt when change is required.

AIR proved the web does not have to be consumed by a browser and that html rendering is just a plugin to what the internet is going to become. As apps are proving the web can be created and consumed by easier to create programs with correct given instruction. In ‘a cloud’ an operating system that is lightweight, easy to contribute to and ubiquitous will gain further proliferation. Flash can be and in many ways already is all of these things.

It’s up to Adobe to open up the offerings of Flash as much as possible. By giving anybody and everybody the ability to create a .swf, so that even my Gran has the ability to create a metaphor. I cannot predict the future but would assume the big platform of the future would be one that could render any input even when contributed by a layman not just a programming professional. Flash nearly does that already with its current and previous versions, but it just needs to realise that and give itself away quite literally for free to the world. Making swf is the big future and that needs to fall into the hands of everybody.

Flash is the free thinking imagination of the internet. It can conceive things that are not yet standard. The future won’t be created by a company thats hindering progress based on business decisions but by a difference engine trying to convey from one interpreter to another, an idea.

Eric Arthur Blair wasn’t shy of the mark when spewing his metaphors of dystopia upon our existence. Our reality has much deeper consequences as societies evolution will be driven by us and our use of technology. We are undoubtedly in the midst of a metaphysical mutation where collective thought becomes the totalitarian big brother, however the pace with which our expectation for change is increasing means were unable to even see the inevitable and evenly negative outcome of zero.

Ontology is lost when we use technology to influence our being and on the surface to most people it’s called ‘web 3.0′ because they are looking at the immediately attainable next step. To some (like myself) it is called the technological singularity where an apex of our technological advancements causes an ever increasingly vertical gradient towards perfection. With web 3.0 we’re effectively at the beginning of this etha of thought, working together to store and reuse our intelligence. As this effort is rapidly entering the physical world we will get closer to a unified intellectual understanding of the universe.

We are effectively becoming an epistemological proxy to ourselves using the physical world around us to feed our behavior. It starts small, like leaving a note for ourselves as a reminder to do something, Yet put that note in ‘the cloud’ and all of a sudden the physical world has the ability to influence your actions based on your location, direction etc. I’ll briefly surmise these modern web definitions ( which I call tags… lol ) for the sake of context…

web 1.0 was ultimately internets birth, data storage and remote retrieval offered in a public domain. web 2.0 was distinguished more by richer media, much more accessible to the point of taught rather than discovered, storing and sharing the limits of our creativity in any medium. Some people store a graphic depiction of these occurrences others a technological one but overall as we move to the next tag, web 3.0 promises the digital world to proliferate into the physical with ubiquity of knowledge shared physically from one space to another begging for interaction by the subservient machines and programs.

You will have a physical interaction with the digital space wherever you are. i.e whilst driving your car, whilst waking down the road. Now to begin with this seems ideal, you can leave the house and the fridge knows you have run out of milk, as you enter a shop you look through digital glasses and arrows may appear pointing out the things you need, but adopting this attitude towards a superior controlling influence on decision making reduces our own choices and deviations born of limitation, and where do we stop?

It is not the easy life that causes evolution, its a difficult one. Consider that we do not actually evolve. Evolution is not a purposeful process but a fluke of existence that means the strongest survive. We make ruddy clones of ourselves then fight against the physical nature of the universe around us. If by chance our spawned biological selves had some physical difference, it could potentially hold an advantage in survival therefor those physical differences stay in the gene pool and evolution occurs.

Animals adapt physically to their surroundings, humans believing they are not animal shape their surroundings to suit them. This is not a great way to evolve physically. In fact place most of us back into nature right now without the comforts of the last few thousand years of invention to support us and you may see that our chances of survival are very much diminished compared to when we started thinking. We’re clearly aware of this which is why a return to nature seems so difficult and we’re moving swiftly in the opposite direction. Trying to create an existence that isn’t necessarily physical at all.

Digital in the physical space or using technology to assist us has been happening for years, every time you set your alarm clock to wake yourself up you have created a program to wake yourself. Why?.. because you would fail to wake otherwise?. We even set the alarm if we think we might wake up, but we don’t trust ourselves to even be in control of our own existence. It’s approaching faster by the day and will do exponentially over next few years of your life as a human. But by the time people awaken to the controlled lives they are willingly open themselves up to, it will be to late to change direction. This is the apex of the technological singularity as I see it, the point where we realise we have shaped the physical world to continually move towards the comforts of our existence and are unable to change it.

On the most part we have got a lot of the way there without technology. Consider religion, policing, society, governments… these concepts come from idealistic approaches to harnessing knowledge to drive towards utopian existences. However they are all rules unto themselves which tickle your own docile pleasures giving you a sense of moral life by keeping you unchallenged and taking away your own identity or responsibility for drawing the lines of acceptance for you. But the point is to draw your own lines no matter what the size of influence, your voyage of self discovery should be allowed to have dystopian experiences as those are lessons that leave a terminal scar leaving you, and the world around you, with deeper impression of….. you. You are your perspective and a beautiful little crease in the our universe.

anyways fuck it, its late. Im off to bed.