What are the limits of expressing thoughts in Twitter?

Here’s a powerful but inefficient (when run) thought that can be expressed on Twitter, a quick sort in Erlang in 126 characters.

A lot of Perl one-liners can fit into a tweet – powerful and useful ones.

Haikus can be expressed in a tweet.

The answer to the question, “What form of body language do most FBI interrogators consider to be the most telling?” can be answered in a tweet.

A marriage proposal can be answered in a tweet.

You can propose the concept of a hash tag in a tweet:

However, there are many thoughts that seem to be difficult to fit into a tweet:

• The Pythagorean Theorem and one of its many proofs
• Anselm’s Ontological Proof for God’s Existence
• Merge Sort in Ruby
• Merge Sort in PHP
• Why you should or shouldn’t outsource
• What qualities make a great tech hire
• Well-thought out political proofs
• How to subtly tell someone something in an indirect way with the only others knowing being those in the know
• A legally-binding, work contract – It would be amazing if you could!
• The mechanism for how DNA works

Twitter encourages the laconic expression of thought which means plenty of affirmations, aphorisms, insults, congratulations, and reminders that can display any combination of sharp wit, pointed humor, and succinctness of expression. The mot juste becomes very important with the constraint of 140 characters.

A brilliant insight just came to me:

Achieving true market prediction means having the capacity to create and predict the behavior of an artificial intelligence.

Here are the reasons why:
1. The description of AI from Caprica suggests consciousness can be built given a sufficient amount of recorded on-line activity.
2. If you know how the parts of a market works, you can know how the whole works.
3. A person is a part of the market.
4. How a person interacts on-line is part of a market, e.g. people build and use a system for products use.
5. An AI can imitate on-line market behavior such that it’s indistinguishable from a person.
6. If the program allows for predictive behavior, then you can predict a part of market behavior.
7. Since you can predict the part, you can predict the whole.
8. Therefore, in order to predict how the market will work, you need an AI.

This implies that the more AI-like or better your modeling, the more you can predict how the market will behave.

If AI proves to be un-predictive behavior, then perfect market prediction is impossible. (It might just be quantum in nature.)

If AI proves to be impossible, then perfect market prediction is impossible. (See the Chinese Room Argument.)

It’s not that difficult to store data into your Amazon S3 account and share that data with 50,000 or so people on the cheap.

Armed with just your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, you can use these two cool storage clients.

S3 Webmaster

For Windows, you can download the S3 Webmaster for free, and you just simply drag and drop your files and S3 will automatically set the permissions for public download.

S3Hub

For Macs, there is S3Hub, which works whether or not you have an S3 account. If you don’t have an S3 account you can view other public S3 buckets. If you do have an account you can easily upload and share the assets you stored.

Transmit

If your data storage needs run the gamut from sftp, webdav, iDisk, automated upload workflows, and S3, you’ll want to plunk down some cash like I did and get Transmit. At $17.95 it’s a bargain. I use it’s webdav and S3 features almost daily.