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Cognitive Filtering and Bayesian RSS

I hope one thing from the future will become popular in 2009: cognitive filtering. If the Internet was Dr. Dorian from the hit tv show “Scrubs”, I would be Dr. Cox with his list of things he cares very little about.


I got this idea from a science fiction book. In John C. Wright’s Golden Age Trilogy the singularity happened and people can upgrade and back up their wetware in any way they can afford. They still had the same problem that Henry Kuttner described in his short story “Year Day” - an overbearing amount of very innovative ads that masquerade as information and other spam. The trick in Golden Age was cognitive filtering: configurable software that removed any manifestations of anything an owner considered unpleasant: ads, sounds, pictures, symbols, and even people.

I like Twitter, and I like Robert Scoble. But I am tired of Robert’s relentless posts about friendfeed (sometimes I’m not even sure if he works with me at Fast Company or at friendfeed). Filtering this out would not be too hard - I could just ignore any post that has “friendfeed” in it. In fact, a Bayesian filter for Google reader, Facebook, and Twitter after a bit of training could do this automatically: I’d just flag posts that annoy me and the filter would analyze the words in the post, figure out which ones occur together more frequently in the posts that annoy me and hide future annoying posts based on that.

To take this a bit further, I would also like a Bayesian filter that would find me good posts from the firehydrant rss flow based on the ones I already like. There seem to be a few of these out there, but I find it hard leaving Google Reader.

Happy New Year!

I am continuing this blog’s tradition of a New Year’s cards, even while thinking of closing down deadprogrammer.com. I might do it the Dr. Fun way - get it to 10 years and call it quits.

This was a tough fricking year. I spent it on call for application breakdowns, learning system administration, stressing out of my mind, hitting hard deadlines, missing soft ones, gaining 15 pounds, etc, etc.

I was stupid enough not to listen to my very smart friend and keeping my 401K in S&P 500 instead of in cash equivalent funds. I did have enough sense to sell it after Lehman Brothers shat the bed.

This was my first year of being 99% free of Microsoft Windows. Indeed, once you go Mac you don’t go back.

An interesting new web application that I worked on in my spare time should launch around February. I did waste a lot of my free time watching “my stories” (“The Wire”, “Mad Men”, “How It’s Made”, and other yuppie deligths), but I did not waste all of it. You’ll see.

In any case, I wish you all a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

Back to Livejournal

I did a bit of posting in Livejournal’s community related to my hometown and received more comments that I accumulated at deadprogrammer.com in a couple of years. The posts are in Russian, but I believe they will be interesting to a significant portion of my readers, especially the comment part where I debate merits (or lack thereof) of speedos, man purses, and other things.

Одесские наблюдения

Возвращение

Монета

Два вопроса

Привоз

The rest of you please enjoy these two pictures from one of the posts:




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What's All this Then?

My name is Michael Krakovskiy, and this is my blog.

Here’s what you might find interesting:
100 Views of the Empire State Building project: I try to take 100 interesting photos of Manhattan’s (sadly) tallest building.

My Gastronomic Adventures: I eat weird food - from 13 year old New Coke to Durian and parasitic fungi.

My attempts to grow exotic plants: pineapples, coconuts, etc.

My photos, mostly of New York City.

My musings about architecture mostly illustrated with my own photos. Would you like to learn about a mental patient who died at 103 who served as a model for some very famous sculptures? How about Brooklyn’s ugliest building? How about a wooden skyscraper?

I find myself frequently writing about logos. The most popular article I ever wrote is about the redesigns of the Starbucks logo.

I wrote a series of “Best Sci-Fi You Haven’t Read” posts:

Psywarrior
Yes, Virginia There Is Synergy
Call Time Police - We’ve Got a Time Traveler

Other topics that interest me include NYPD, New York City subway system, Japan, and things made out of titanium. On top of all of that, I seem to be interested in pigeions and Rupert Murdoch.

Dear reader, please browse around. You are sure to find something interesting. I could really use some help in bringing in readership: subscribe to the rss feed, digg the stories (there’s a convenient button at the bottom of every article), link to my blog from yours, write some comments. I put in a lot of effort into writing, and I really appreciate your attention.

If you don’t want all this pseudo-intellectual and want some lolcats? Please don’t go away. Here, I have that stuff too. Here, here’s another. And another. And another. I lied about not posting cat pictures.