Category Archives: software

Happy Christmas/Hanukkah from Trinity Acres

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Happy Christmas/Hanukkah from Trinity Acres – home of this Grateful Recovering Deadhead, Zen Baptist, Groucho Marxist, eCommerce Entrepreneur, Remote Online Notary, Dudist Monk, Army Veteran, Advocate for Democracy, Longevity Enthusiast and long-time Software Aficionado.

Susan has taken on a leadership role in People4People, speaking from stage and continuing her writing journey with Empowering Women’s Alliance. Sarah is doing well and has found a new interest in baking. I’m pretending to be retired and focusing on my education now that the election is over. No more canvassing and volunteering with the Pima Dems, so I might as well learn massage, reiki, cyber security, software development and how best to exploit AI.

This year America voted for autocracy over democracy. That’s a little disappointing. I’ll concede that neither of the current American political parties have proven to us that they have our best interests at heart. That being said, The choices in the last election were clear. Perpetuate at least an illusion of democracy and the liberal consensus, or cede power to the broligarchy. The wannabe trillionaires appear to be so greedy that they’re willing to destroy all the progress we’ve made over the last century to expand the vast wealth they already control.

Research from the Rand Corporation shows that the top 1% of U.S. income earners have taken more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% over the past several decades. That study was from the last decade, and my guess is that the number is substantially higher. The wealth gap not only continues, but widens at an accelerating pace. Can we count on the giants of industry and commerce to have our best interest at heart? That supposition has little evidence to support it other than a few libraries, schools and museums.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is here. Now. What does that mean for all of us? We really don’t know.

On the one hand, it is now possible to create literature, music, art and “film” from a text prompt.
It may also mean we have access to education for the masses, solving climate change, curing previously incurable diseases and creating free energy.

On the other hand, if an artificial super-intelligence (ASI) realizes that humanity is not only unnecessary but dangerous to the planet, then all the post apocalyptic scenarios from Skynet to the Matrix may come to pass. Hopefully, there’s a power at work in the universe that will allow for the evolution of the species.

What’s my take away? Stay healthy, work on myself spiritually, learn AI and build multiple streams of income to support creating safe communities for our fellow travelers that are at risk.

Currently on a OPC3/Juice+ kick leading into a Reset 25 start to the new year. Susan and I are both in Wisdom this year, although we may not be posting our insights to FaceBook or other social media where the algorithm is controlled by the broligarchy. And I’m also looking for alternatives that are more open to different points of view. Also learning what I can about autonomous AI agents, including AgentForce.

I’m experimenting with sustainable housing. We tried a 300 square foot bell tent, a cabin tent and a dome tent in our first foray into glamping. All of those failed miserably. Too much wind up here on Hilltop and the sun can be brutal. Now we’re toying with the idea of domes. Aircrete in the DomeGaia tradition, and/or geodesic following Buckminster Fuller’s pattern.

Also see value in lightening up. I would love to give away a few hundred books, CDs, DVDs, bootleg cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes, and equipment to a good home. The end-game would be to downsize into an RV or sailboat.

The journey continues…

Flye to Freedom, Work from Anywhere

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A piece of my next game is “Flye to Freedom, Work from Anywhere”. It’s not off the ground, and I’ll give you the concept. Partner with a bunch of IT folks that are tired of working in a cube farm. Create a culture of cheap or free travel using WorldVentures and shared vacation ownership then create a platform where we can collaborate on projects using all the latest technologies, allowing us to be geographically untethered. Employ automation and marketing to reach an expanding customer base and generate unmatched value. The end goal is a state of perpetual vacation where we get to play with technology from anywhere there’s wifi.

Or this was the game until yet another vehicle for this possibility emerged from my “Grateful We’re Not Dead” game.  What about circling the plant with hostels where anyone can drop in and stay (spend the night, the week or the month), bath, eat, meditate, garden, jam, paint and work to support the community. Don’t want to work?  Pitch in a nightly fee.  

So what is a hostel? https://www.hostelworld.com/blog/what-is-a-hostel 

The only thing really different in my vision is the “work to stay” model.  I’m not so sure that this is unique. When I mentioned this to Tina and Susan (Tina had Susan on the massage table at the time), Tina said I was talking about her wellness centers.

Man, does that ever fit into my Game in the World.

 

What does it take to implement a successful software product or service?

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It has come to my intention that some of the best concepts, products, and services I’ve ever been associated with either died on the vine or are yet to make their mark on the landscape. Considering that there was no lack of talent, vision or leadership on any of these projects, the question remains, what does success require? Timing, persistence and resolve?  Some folks have had lightning strike multiple times, so what sets them apart?

Perhaps belief in their vision, themselves and their ability to manage a team. The ability to distinguish what’s in the way and remove it, or put in what’s missing. The ability to cause effective leadership.  The ability to enroll others in the value proposition and take action, and if it doesn’t succeed, try again.  And perhaps that’s the secret.  Instead of fearing failure, embrace the mantra of “failing fast”.  And perhaps that’s one of the driving factors for agile – get a product or service to a point where there’s demonstrable value for the stakeholder rapidly  and be able to react to changing requirements.

The heart-braking big-bang products that never made it to market in my world were largely waterfall, and that can take the wind out of your sails.  If the market doesn’t adopt it, don’t lose heart. If you can’t use what you developed as the platform for something different, at least you built a team and gained experience.  Who did you get to be in the process? That’s valuable in itself.

the meaning of work

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I remember a poster on the cube wall of a coworker a few years ago that posed a question something to the effect of “if a tool performs the task, is it still work?” To put it another way, as an information worker automates more and more of the daily mundane tasks with less and less human intervention required, at what point do those element of the job description stop being “work”?

I’m going to venture an opinion that “work” is much like a stream. You can step in the same stream but it’s never the same twice, the water moves on. Over time, we can hope to find ways to minimize the mundane, but the stream is always moving. The repetitive can be automated, but technology and tool sets are always changing, and our focus naturally looks to ways to link together automation in a way that’s repeatable and measurable. The work at hand becomes more a function of looking for patterns then finding and implementing tools that add value in the simplest repeatable and maintainable way possible. Leveraging the work of others.

Dawn of a Virtual Classless Society?

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One definition of the proletariat is the class of people that have only their labor to support them, i.e. don’t own the “means of production”, classical factors of production including instruments of labor and subjects of labor. I would assert that we have entered an era where a large segment of production centered around information has made this concept obsolete. The means of production (or MoP) of a software based product today is free, at least from the perspective of a developer with an idea and the skills and desire necessary to implement it. The tools required to develop quality software can be accessed or downloaded with zero monetary investment. This includes development of enterprise scale applications. There are no licensing or maintenance costs associated development using the JDK, and like it or not, Java/EJB has a commanding lead in the enterprise marketplace over it’s closest competitor, Microsoft’s .NET. Serious relational databases now exist in the open-source world – MySQL and PostgreSQL for example. World class IDEs exist for Java development that may be used and extended, free of charge. The documentation needed to learn to develop software with these tools is freely available on the Internet. Access to the Internet is free at most public libraries as well as the coffee shop down the street.

According to the MoP article on Wikipedia as it existed on 20100107, when the workers control the MoP directly, it embodies the pure ideal of socialism:

“In the pure ideal of socialism, such as that ‘communism’ was/is supposed to be, the MoP are controlled by the workers production collectives directly. In fact this situation has only been historically realized temporarily such as in the Israeli kibbutz or the early Soviets before the entrenchment of the communist party as a ‘New Class’, or in isolated or preliminary form such as in the final phase of the Second Spanish Republic, or various experimental utopian communities.”

If this is the case, it may well be that the open-source community accomplished what the Soviet Union could not. Perhaps such a “utopian community” now exists in cyberspace. When it comes to information based products, and we live in an information age, the MoP now rests in the hands of the workers. Development environments, libraries, frameworks, source control systems, collaboration tools, issue/defect management systems – are are freely available under license agreements no more restrictive than the GPL or BSD licenses. Anyone with sufficient will and vision can produce and market a product to the entire planet. Some may argue that it takes considerably more, and this kind of opportunity is only available to members of the Bourgeoisie, since there’s no way to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to bend the available tools and infrastructure to your ends without considerable investment of capital in the first place. That’s not my experience, and I’m more than willing to debate the issue. Any resourceful “potential programmer” can find all they need at their fingertips – including tutorials and a strong support community. All that’s really needed is a recognized need and the willingness to pursue it’s solution.