Name: Christopher Lewis
Location: Burlington, VT

Part time philosopher, full time coder. I dabble in many things. One day I will probably write half a novel about it.

I'm not much of a photographer, but I like to play one on Instagram.

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Google’s New Glasses And The War On Serendipity

via Linda Holmes at NPR:

It is fundamentally opposed to the idea of figuring anything out for yourself. It advances the notion that we are entitled to a noncorporeal, completely nonpersonal presence we talk to like a person (“Where’s the music section?”) so we don’t have to expend the mental energy to suffer the indignity and inconvenience of potentially taking a wrong turn in a bookstore.

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It’s inevitable that stuff like this will be on the consumer market one day. We might as well sort out the philosophical implications now before we’re all incapable of even the most basic tasks without the help of technology.

Tags alternate reality design google google glasses npr science fiction tech news web ukelele

The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable

via Adrian Chen at Gawker:

Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit “check out.” He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins—untraceable digital currency—worth around $150. Four days later the drugs, sent from Canada, arrived at his house.

“It kind of felt like I was in the future,” Mark said.

Between this, the actions of Lulzsec, and the antics of Anonymous, I’m sensing a growing underworld far beyond the reach and control of our existing state-run policing agencies. I wonder what William Gibson’s perspective is on all this, he basically predicted all this would happen.

I doubt Silk Road will last for much longer now that the secret is out, but I’m sure there are a number of other sites just like it that we simply don’t know about. The use of Bitcoin here requires an entire analysis all its own; we’ve simply never had such an untraceable currency before. I’m hoping this doesn’t completely destroy its reputation though, I’m genuinely excited to see it take off.

Read more here.

Tags tech web news security drugs

 Source Gawker

Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

An interesting article from Ars Technica about a surprising change in direction by Microsoft. In a nutshell, they are transitioning the platform to be based primarily on HTML5 and javascript. Now, this has a lot of Microsoft developers worried, and rightly so - they’ve spent decades coding with proprietary Microsoft tools.

But there’s something more interesting going on between the lines here. Now it looks like any joe web developer will be able to develop apps for Microsoft with relative ease. Personally, I think this is the first exciting thing to come out of Microsoft in a long time.

Tags tech coding web

via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum at NYU today, and the morning plenary has been a series of fascinating short talks. But one talk, by Jim Gilliam’s “The Internet is My Religion,” brought the house down. Jim worked in many early and influential Internet firms, went on to produce Robert Greenwald’s extraordinary films, and do many other notable things. Among them was surviving two bouts of cancer and a double-lung transplant. The story of how he went from a Jerry Falwell born-again to an Internet advocate and film producer ended with a standing ovation and not a dry eye in the house. Watch this, please, I’d consider it a favor.

Mr. Gilliam is viscerally passionate about the topic of God, but his approach to worship is unconventional by traditional standards. His argument is profound in its simplicity - that God exists within the interactions of people, and the internet, with it’s millions of users, is the new congregation.

I usually vear away from topics religious, especially when it borders on proselytizing. Still, I find it hard not to agree with Gilliam on the point that the amalgamated actions of people are hugely powerful, of which there is no question that the internet is a grand facilitator.

There are some people who would write off religion as delusional hocus-pocus. Instead, I’d like to think that the author and scientist Arthur C. Clarke was right when he posited his third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Tags religion web philosophy