June 24th, 2014 § § permalink
A supernova remnant about 20,000 light years from Earth (Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution)
building a company is incredibly hard. so hard, that it often drives some of the smartest and most capable people i know mad, because in the spur of the moment they dont understand what is wrong with them that they are still ‘unsucessful’. truth is, they are pretty sucessful comparatevily, and they are doing all the right things, but building a company is just hard.
it takes 5-9 years to build a company said eric 7 years ago. i was shocked, because i lived in a techcrunch bubble, just like 80% of young ambitious entrepreneurs i meet. i guess this bubble actually enables creation of at least half of the startups, because it fills them with optimism.
2 years later, after blind optimism wears out, all you are (hopefully) left with is groundworks for the actual future company and the burning ambition to prove everyone that you weren’t wrong. in reality, if you survived 2 years, that probably means you have a team or some market validation or some traction, or some angels, or some advisors, or any combination of them, and you are actually light years ahead of where you’ve been. but it still feels dissapointing.
dissapointments is a function of expectation often said my brother and our first ceo ales. and he was right, entrepreneur must at some point in time suspend her expectations and face the reality – your company will be something else than what you imagined on that cocktail night, but it’s going to be real, and shaped by thousands of interations of other people with it, where you are merely a sheppard. observe, react, nudge, endure.
if the only thing that’s missing is ‘success’, you’re probably on the right track. forget your ego and enjoy and learn.
August 20th, 2012 § Comments Off on The Personality Layer § permalink
A Rocher, layer by layer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I really admire product, technology and design people, who dare to incorporate the findings of psychological science into their work. I deeply believe our whole generation is ignorantly reinventing the wheels all the time.
This is a great article about the layers of great design, where giving the products personality is the final stage.
Do something unexpected and new. Uniqueness Differ from other products in an interesting way . Attention Offer incentives, or offer help even if you’re not obliged to. Attraction We all like attractive people, so build an attractive product. Anticipation Leak something ahead of the launch. Exclusivity Offer something exclusive to a select group.
via: uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com
August 17th, 2012 § § permalink
We live in amazing times – in a couple of years, we will have digitized all books every published (that survived), and we will be able to apply machine learning to the past. It will spur a whole new era of historiography.
#linguistics With millions of books scanned and digitized by Google, a new type of linguistic analysis has become possible – as people are able to delve into hundreds of years and millions of books’ worth of data.
via: io9.com
… that the research has been done by a fellow Slovenian is not a coincidence – lots of talent over here 😉
March 31st, 2012 § Comments Off on Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them. § permalink
Public speaking (Photo credit: brainpop_uk)
I really like this attitude:
If all data was clear, a lot fewer people would subtract value from the world, he says. A lot more people would add value.
… eventually, everything will be made transparent, and we will demonstrate that people are inherently good. And politics will go back to be what it was supposed to be – the art of the argument and debate, rather than manipulation.
January 30th, 2012 § Comments Off on reblog: Stonehenge’s great escape § permalink
to think that someone would want to build a highway under Stonehenge…
Today is a double landmark for the Heritage Journal. This is our 1,000th post since we switched to our current WordPress format and coincidentally it is also 3 years to the day since we did so. So we thought it a good moment to start an occasional series in which we revisit some of our earlier posts. We are calling it “As We Were Saying”….
via: heritageaction.wordpress.com
November 17th, 2007 § Comments Off on Future of semantic web § permalink
Working with web technologies, one cannot escape all the hype being built up around semantic technologies, Powerset, CYC, natural language technologies in general. We have more or less gotten used to this set of fancy new buzzword compliant companies raising obscene amounts of dollars for products, I personally believe are unachievable and are bound to dissapoint a whole generation of users.
These guys are making a dangerous bet, that they will be able to formally describe the world in a rational structure of well defined entities and relations. This sounds incredibly similar to what the structuralists were claiming 40 years ago, and failed.
These guys are smart, they recognized that top-bottom approach to building an ontology of the world will fail, so they bet everything on understanding natural language and deducing the meaning of the message with help of grammar as a translation layer for their rational representation. Their bet is, that the natural language grammar is rational enough, that they can follow it’s structures and translate them into mashine-readable format. 100 yars ago Wittgenstein and de Saussure started a movement around premisses like these, but unlike these contemporary nerds, they knew what their objectives and limits were. Wittgenstein described formal relation beetween language and mind, Saussure practical one. None of them was prudent enough to think he could invent the sense of the world.
The sense of the message is encoded into the context surrounding the individual words, not into their grammatical relations. Or better said, there is a substantial amount of sensful information that cannot be recognized using rational analysis, because language is not a rational structure. Human beings learn to communicate with observation and repeating after other. To know a language is mainly about interpolating it from the aggregated behavior of others. The interpolation is done according to ‘rules’ deSaussure and structural linguistics recognized, and has logical limits Wittgenstein and logical positivismus described. Actual ‘grammatical’ rules are the result of each individuals constantly growing interpolation and are never fixed. The message is always ‘in-between’ words and language rules, simply because humans don’t relly on language rules in order to tranfer the message, but rather adapt to current receiver’s language code.
Anyway, main reason for writing this article was seeing Powerset demo, with handpicked use cases, none of which worked. And some computer scientists around me simply wouldn’t accept the fact, that philosophy has already tried and abandoned the hope of rationally sorting out the world. And the only true power of computers lies in the abbility to crunch numbers at a scale so large, that the practical statistical analisys starts to give usefull results. Statistics is just like interpolation, and preserves the human approach to content; while logical deduction simply doesn’t have the infromations avaliable, on which it could reliably run. So it tends to take wrong turns and end up on entirel wrong part of the tree.
