Brett Hutley's Blog » future

Hacking the EZ430 Chronos Watch on the Mac

brett — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:15:08 +0000

Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.

I then tried compiling the OpenChronos source code to build some custom firmware. In order to build the firmware, I had to install the following Mac Ports:

sudo port install msp430-gcc
sudo port install msp430-binutils (actually is probably installed with msp430-gcc)
sudo port install msp430-gdb
sudo port install msp430-libc

I then did a msp430-gcc -print-search-dirs to find out where msp430-gcc include files were. For me they install to the /opt/local/msp430/include/ directory. Following the Readme for OpenChronos, I did a sudo cp gcc/intrinsics.h /opt/local/msp430/include/.

When I tried compiling OpenChronos, the build failed with lots of warnings and quite a few errors. This is because OpenChronos was built using the older msp430-gcc4 project. I fixed the compiler warnings/errors and built an image. I copied the generated build/eZChronos.txt file over to my Chronos-Control-Center directory, and uploaded the image to my watch. Everything seemed to work OK, and the watch is currently running my newly compiled custom firmware!

My modified OpenChronos source is available from GitHub.

Race Against The Machine

brett — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:52:11 +0000

I just finished reading the Kindle book Race Against The Machine, a book I thoroughly recommend. This was the driver of the NPR article I blogged about recently.
The book is mostly oriented towards the US, although the issues they discuss seem to be prevalent across all major economies. The authors make the case that technological improvements are severely impacting every job market except those for highly-skilled individuals.

They argue, as I have argued, that the current employment crisis is caused by structural factors such as increased productivity due to technology, rather than cyclical or stagnation factors. We are simply living in a world where the educated and skilled are able to contribute to the economy in a disproportionate way, and the less educated/skilled are forced to compete for the fewer and fewer jobs that are currently too expensive to automate. This leads to money flowing from the workers to the owners of the business, which is an unsustainable situation for the long term.

The authors point out that to a large extent, we operate in a "winner take all" society. Technology enables the best and fastest-moving in the business to capture the bulk of a market. That in turn provides a strong incentive for those with capital to further invest in technology, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Not only is this situation self-perpetuating, but increased capital allows winners a disproportionate advantage in the race to take advantage of another business opportunity.

The positive news is that as we use technology to expand the frontiers of innovation, this will in turn create an exponential increase in the possibilities for further innovation.

GDP per Square Kilometre

brett — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:41:46 +0000

Over at EconBrowser, James talks about Geography and Income. He talks about the question of how much economic activity is dependent on geographic location. When you look at a map of GDP density - GDP per square kilometre - it's fairly obvious that the bulk of economic activity in densely populated areas which are near coastal regions.

This map is from a paper by John Gallup, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Mellinger in the International Regional Science Review (1999), as linked to from EconBrowser.

Look at how densely an economic region Europe is, with lots of crinkly coastline to aid incoming cargo ships. Obviously one of the primary factors to economic activity is geographic location. What will be interesting is to see how much this changes with technology changes in the future. Will geography be such an important factor in the future?

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Of Gaps and Grass-Eaters

brett — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:12:20 +0000

Are the American people obsolete? Salon argues that because of globalisation and technology there is now a increased separation between capital and labour. The activities that generate wealth have both been outsourced to cheaper shores, and become more efficient because of technology. As a consequence the social contract in Western society between rich and poor - the rich provide the capital while the poor provide the labour - is breaking down. The rich still have capital, but they can now move the production of goods to the East, creating a shortage of jobs in the West.

Philip Greenspun wonders if unemployed people are 21st Century equivalent of Draft Horses after the Industrial Revolution. Is it far more expensive to keep people in work, than automating their jobs, or outsourcing?

Finally; DailyFinance has a story of how the disappearance of the middle class and the increasing gap between rich and poor has affected Japan. Apparently those that have given up on ever breaching that economic chasm and who retreat from society are termed "Grass-Eaters" by the media. Is this a taste of what will happen in the West if this trend continues?

The Future is Addictive

brett — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:15:49 +0000

I read Paul Graham's essay on the acceleration of addictiveness this morning, and it really struck a chord. I feel as though it is almost impossible to become bored these days, there is so much to do. Is this because the world is getting more addictive, or just because I have gotten older and have much more control over my life so I tend to do only those things I want to do?

If he is right and the world is becoming a more addictive place, then there are obviously many interesting implications for society as a whole. What will happen if most people are too addicted to the many pleasurable activities available to actually contribute to society? How can we make economically productive activities have the same level of addiction as those that consume economic capital? Definitely food for thought.

Eclipse Phase RPG

brett — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:35:07 +0000

I just read this awesome thread over at RPG.net about character creation in the new RPG Eclipse Phase. Man, this RPG sounds awesome! As ExNihilo mentions in the thread:

The fact that a question like "Can my character upload his
living consciousness into a distributed network-swarm of
microscopic robots?" results in actual debate is enough to
convince me that I'll like this game regardless of what the
answer itself turns out to be.

Some character ideas referenced on the thread:

Alícia Seiroco, whose cortical stack is home to not just one, but two separate personalities, each with their own distinct mannerisms, skills, and memories, incorporating dangerous and forbidden nanotechnological augmentation.
Aineko is an AGI who started out life a few decades before the fall as an open source robotic pet owned by an eccentric futurist. Aineko was able to bootstrap himself into full intelligence about 10 years before the fall, although he never told his owner. Since he wasn't officially a citizen at the time of the fall, he had few assets to fall back on when his owner died (gruesomely, of course) and had to flee as an infomorph. Forced to kick the habit of pretending to be a cat all day, he's discovered an aptitude for programming an nanotech design.
Leonidas: Re-Instantiated Scum. Your number one, take no shit, biggest gun in the room is the Plasma Rifle. Leo needs it, he needs it like a baby needs its mother's milk. It's Expensive (ie, costs 20 CP), and can only fire twice before needing to cool down. You know what we call weapons that can fire more than twice without needing to cool down? UNDERPOWERED. But the cooldown thing is a worry: Leo doesn't want to be caught defenseless. So let's go right ahead and sling an underbarrel seeker micromissile launcher on that puppy. It's only moderate cost (1 CP), and 20 High Explosive Armor Piercing micromissiles for it are only 2 more CP. It can only hold 6 micromissiles at a time. Naturally, it's smart-linked (ie, it integrates with Leo's mesh and gives him an accuracy bonus by displaying a targeting reticule in his vision. 1 more CP for that).

I HAVE TO PLAY THIS GAME!!!

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Social Collapse – Best Practices

brett — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:20:03 +0000

Hmmm.... first I read this transcript from a speech by Dmitry Orlov entitled "Social Collapse - Best Practices", and then I saw on Boing Boing the post How are you coping with Collapse-Anxiety?

The first post describes what might happen if the US collapses in the same way economically as the USSR did in the 1990's. It then goes on to making recommendations about what to focus on - essentially food, transportation, shelter and security. I thought it was fascinating because although I have been thinking for a number of years that the economic situation was going to get bad, I didn't envision quite a collapse of that order of magnitude. As the crisis continues however, the possibility suddenly seems to become credible.

I found the comments interesting in the Boing Boing post. It seems as though quite a number of people were actually starting to find themselves in situations reminiscent of those described in the first post - primarily from posters in the US. Scary.

Evidence of the Impending Singularity?

brett — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:47:01 +0000

While reading this article in The Economist, the section on rising inequality leapt out at me. The newspaper suggested that technology may be to blame. This is certainly a situation that I've been expecting for a while.

In contrast to the Singularity proposed by Vernor Vinge, I believe that as people become more educated, have better tools, and live longer, it will be harder and harder for young, less well educated, and poorer people to compete. This will stratify society.

The Redshift Techno-Economic Theory

brett — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:19:06 +0000

The Redshift theory basically categorizes computing needs as either growing faster or slower than Moore's Law. Traditional business is over-served by Moore's Law, whereas applications such as financial market simulations, drug industry research, computer animation, and the high-growth end of the internet industry (Facebook, You-Tube, Flickr), are needing computing resources faster than Moore's Law. These industries are apparently the ones going to generate above-GDP levels of return to an investor.

This theory was advanced by Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems. One of Sun's solutions for servicing the computing needs of "Redshifting" companies is Project Blackbox - providing as much computing power as possible inside a shipping container.

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