The last few years have been pretty incredible for the San Francisco Bay Area.  You really have to have lived here as I have to see how easily capital has flowed into the area, the effects of it trickling into nearly every industry even remotely tech related.  Just two years ago, there was San Francisco being more expensive than most cities but not quite at the level of New York or other top tier cities.  Now an apartment that once rented for $2500 can command mid-$3000s or higher.  A place the size of a walk-in closet at under 200 sqft can be found at $1700 or more.  When I first graduated college in 2013, the predominant attitude I saw in my peers was still that of caution and skepticism about the job market.  Now I have peers who have literally switched full time tech jobs every 4 months, some who would buy up an armful of snacks at a convenience store only to throw it all away...[More]

When you deny the existence of the rest of the world, the only things left in your head are facts.

The trend has been pretty clear I think.  We're going to get to the point where DSLR quality cameras can be small enough to carry in your pocket.  Three years ago when I suggested this, even with the release of the first Sony RX100, I'd have to answer to claims that getting that quality in a small camera is physically impossible, but it looks like that's slowly no longer becoming the case.

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/sonys-new-sensors-exciting-new-cameras/

Previously, you always had the tradeoff of more noise with higher megapixels or camera resolution if the sensor wasn't large enough to accomodate, but now it seems Sony has managed to minimize this trade off so that it's no longer a consideration.

Obviously a high-end DSLR today is always going to be better than a pocket camera today, just as it always has been, but the difference is getting much smaller.

     One thing I've come to notice is my thinking style tends to be much different than most when it comes to planning or managing how to pursue multiple tasks.  Some have suggested I think very linearly when much of the world is moving towards nonlinear or multitasking, but I'm not exactly the person one would consider tunnel visioned or laser focused nor is it accurate to say I only do one thing at a time.  Instead, it's more like I plant the seeds of each of my tasks in a way that allows me to shift my focus to other things while each continues in the background.  If you're familiar with business terms, it's like balancing lead time, where one does the things that just need to be started but not tended to for a while so they can be returned to later.  If you're more familiar with engineering terms, it is like pipelining to have multiple things done at the same time, not by having multiple processes but by having one process...[More]

Entering the Stronghold (2015) by Denny Schneidemesser

This is another idea for a short film or animation (probably better fit) that I woke up with as a dream.  It was extremely vivid, like an actual animated film being watched.  The colors come off very strong, with death and decay being black and red while life is green and blue.  Both share occasional streaks of purple though.
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Two brothers are living in a somewhat burned down or devastated forest/wilderness/village.  One of them is out in the woods one day when they are cutting down a tree and release a water spirit.  The water spirit takes the form of an innocent child-like figure that heals the countryside.  

One of the friends get obsessed in dark magic upon realizing magic exists in the world and eventually starts becoming some sort of electricity or energy spirit, spreading smoke/decay and mutation but overall kept in a small corner of the woods because the water spirit would find out and destroy him.  He also doesn't...[More]

I'm trying to build the ship and take sail, yet I can only find people wanting to debate the existence of the water.

Summer Cover by Kyle Landry and Josh Chiu

Interstellar Piano Cover by Kyle Landry

     Where do I find people like myself? That question has consumed me for as long as I can remember.  Over the past few years after college, I've managed to only come across maybe a handful of people out of the thousands I met who I can really relate to or consider like-minded.  In the eighteen years of school before that, there were maybe three, each at different times of my life.  What do I consider as being like-minded or similar to myself? For me, understanding a person is all about understanding the person's motivations - seeing through their actions, breaking them down and figuring out what really drives them deep within, what would cause them to crumble if they lost it but what would also make them truly happy.  This is a hard topic to discuss simply because it can easily be misconstrued as arrogance or prejudging others, but I am not referring to first impressions or character judgment.  This is being able to actually focus on why a...[More]

Sun and Stars by Really Slow Motion

A memoirs of sorts reflecting the talks I've had with most engineers that I met in SF the last few years.  It's funny to encounter at first, but when you're living it everyday, it really drains one's patience.  Maybe I'm having the worst of luck meeting people here, but this has been the bulk of my experience.  All responses are based on real conversations I've had; many are actually toned down from the original statements while others are pretty much direct quotes (besides obvious name changes, etc).  
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Sam: Hi, I'm Sam. Nice to meet you.
Engineer: Hi.
Sam and the engineer shake hands.
Engineer: Sorry....[More]

Much of what people refer to as machine learning today is what's considered "weak AI", in that it is not actually thinking, hypothesizing, or behaving with a sense of self.  The latter is what some would call "strong AI," "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), "artificial life," or just plainly "artificial intelligence" (as opposed to "machine learning").  Below is an approach I've been rummaging for a while on how to create an intelligence that behaves like a person would in any circumstance.  It's something that I've loosely applied to my own projects, but I've not managed to fully explore it in the general sense due to time and resource constraints.  This approach to AI is intended to behave more like a creature or child than anything mechanical or data-driven.  If one reflects on intelligence in biological life, it really doesn't make sense that a truly sentient AI would...[More]

Attended the GDC VR Mixer last Thursday, which was ironically more impressive in VR than the GDC event itself.

Thought this was hilarious - just making fun of how ridiculous the lightsabers in Star Wars 7 are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgSylgBFi-I

This is a very interesting read detailing Bitcoin, Ripple,and other aspects of the FinTech industry before the drama with Jed McCaleb last year. It’s like the Dark Pools book of the cryptocurrency industry. I recommend reading it in full.

Wells Fargo, for example, actually had a dedicated 20 person team researching bitcoin last year and was ready to dive into cryptocurrencies before MtGox went bust.
http://observer.com/2015/02/the-race-to-replace-bitcoin/

This is primarily a response to Erik McClure's blog post on age discrimination.

I'm of the same age, followed a roughly similar path through school, and also thought that young adults in general were fully capable if given the chance. I've since graduated and moved to the SF Bay Area though; you'd be surprised just how many new college grads actually cannot think freely and critically. I'm sure you must have seen at least a few headlines pointing out some of the absurdity in Silicon Valley now. (Having lived here for 6 years now, I'd say the media actually understates how nonsensical some of the thinking around here is, but that's for another discussion.) That's not to say we should box people up even more when they're younger, just that I can see where some of the prejudice is coming from (yet it can be argued that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy from treating people like drones in the first place).

Speaking on just my own experience in the SF Bay Area though, my thoughts are not so much that the issue is a prejudice against age as much as the issue is an overemphasis on credentials, test scores, and numbers in general. The problems with education today are what I personally see more as part of an overall lack of critical and creative thinking in society - too much data driven. People just want to look at some threshold, do an if-greater-then condition, and be done. If you look at some of the most talented programmers, as an example, many actually do not have a formal degree in Computer Science or are self taught; recruiting based on numbers like we do now would never find them and actually weed them out. On the other side of things, I've met engineers from Ivy League schools who can barely code but get the job nonetheless from great marks in school; some cannot build a program from scratch at all unless you give them the skeleton to fill in the details on, which is arguably the bulk of the work.  I've come across engineers from firms as prestigious as Google who would not even dare explore restaurants without some external confirmation of their decisions, justifying their decisions with "social validation" (their words, not mine); there's actual fear in their eyes at the thought of going somewhere that doesn't have enough Yelp reviews, fear of the uncertainty and making any decision not backed with numbers. Of course, this is flawed thinking, lots of appeal to majority, authority, and other fallacies, but the sad part is a lot of our peers who do this most likely are not even aware of what things like logical fallacies are (in a non-math context). If you've read books like "City and the Stars" or "Childhood's End", it is getting quite close to that at least in some pockets of the country.

I agree with...[More]

The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke

It's been two years now since I moved to San Francisco.  It's hard to decide whether to move away as the people around will constantly tell you this is the place to be and how awesome it is.  Yet it's harder still to ignore that there's no real scene outside of tech as well as how unsophisticated (read - ghetto) many things are that you'd think would be taken for granted in a big city.

Some of the posts I've found on Quora are pretty spot on with my own experiences, though mine are limited more to the San Francisco side of it.

SF vs Chicago
    ...[More]

Watch out for the sheep in wolf's clothing.