“Lisp, Python and Smalltalk have lacked the catalyst that great languages seem to need.

“Dr. Jean-Loup Baer was our department chair (which is a catchy rhyme if you sing it)

“A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is a universe of millions of these experiments in potentia. Hackers, activists, advocates, competitors, designers — all of us — can query the data-stream to find out what, for example, happens to the high-impact rubber on our sneakers’ soles at the end of their life — are they being recycled into schoolyard playgrounds or are they becoming aerosol carcinogens? Spimes, in Sterling’s view, are the hactivist’s ultimate tool — an evidentiary rallying point for making the negative outcomes of industrial practices visible and obvious so that we can redress them.

“We propose that the subjective experience of boredom is a first level safety mechanism analogous to pain, that has evolved to keep humans moving about so that they can discover and exploit their environment. This safety mechanism could itself prove fatal in siege situations, such as having to hide quietly up a tree until a predator leaves. So a second safety mechanism has evolved to place a human into a partially conscious standby mode after the human has been bored long enough that it would have moved on if it possibly could. The level of the neuroinhibitor dopamine in the human’s brain rises. This induces a subjective experience of self-absorbed well being, while rendering the human quiescent but sufficiently conscious to notice when it is safe to move..

[The modern consequence:] People can get addicted to boredom, and so lose access to a whole layer of cognitive abilities based on the use of precisely tuned feedback loops in the brain.

“A disproportionate number of people I’ve recruited in the past, that worked out really well, were already looking to make a big change in their lives.

“I get tons of lovely fan mail.. the memories of these valentines fades quickly. Not so the ill-considered, pseudonymous rant.. Many’s the time I’ve found myself neglecting a warm bed, a hot meal, or a chance to go out for a cup of coffee with a friend in order to answer some mean-spirited note..

Don’t let assholes rent space in your head.

“Many community conveners are not technically capable of writing their own message-board tools, but socially qualified to wield them. For example, Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a troll-whisperer. For some reason, she can spot irredeemable trolls and separate them from the merely unsocialized. She can keep discussions calm and moving forward. She knows when deleting a troll’s message will discourage him, and when it will only spark a game of whack-a-mole. Teresa calls it “having an ear for text” and she is full of maddeningly unquantifiable tips for spotting the right rod to twiddle to keep the reactor firing happily without sparking a meltdown.

If you want to fight trolling, don’t make up a bunch of a priori assumptions about what will or won’t discourage trolls. Instead, seek out the troll whisperer and study their techniques.

“Slashdot uses an elaborate scheme of blind moderation in which users are randomly assigned the ability to rank each others’ messages so that other users can filter what they read, excluding low-ranked posts. These strategies are effective for weeding out the pathetic attention-seekers, but they don’t have a great track record for creating rollicking discussion. Instead the tone of the discussions, even read at the highest level of moderation, is an angry, macho one-upmanship. The top posts are often scathing rebuttals of someone else’s ill-considered remarks.

“Stupid code banter is a fundamental human need.. it’s more fun to review code before the flaws are petrified in a subversion trunk.

“No one will ever invest in your idea. Make it both of yours.