So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?

For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the new CEO of Stack Overflow .

在过去的几个月里，Prashanth Chandrasekar 逐渐成为 Stack Overflow 的新任首席执行官。

I’m still going on some customer calls and have a weekly meeting with him, but I have freed up a lot of time.

我仍然会接一些客户电话并每周与他会面，但我已经腾出了很多时间。

I’m also really enjoying discovering just how little I knew about running medium-sized companies, as I watch Prashanth rearrange everything—for the better.

当我看着 Prashanth 重新安排一切并变得更好时，我也很高兴发现自己对经营中型公司知之甚少。

It’s really satisfying to realize that the best possible outcome for me is if he proves what a bad CEO I was by doing a much better job running the company.

意识到对我来说最好的结果是，如果他通过更好地管理公司来证明我是一个多么糟糕的首席执行官，这真的很令人满意。

Even though I live in Manhattan’s premier NORC (“Naturally Occurring Retirement Community,”) I’m thinking of this time as a sabbatical , not retirement.

尽管我住在曼哈顿首屈一指的 NORC（“自然发生的退休社区”），但我认为这段时间是休假，而不是退休。

And in fact I’m really, really busy, and, in the interest of deflecting a million questions about what I’m doing nowadays, thought I’d update my long-suffering readers here.

事实上，我真的非常非常忙，而且，为了转移一百万个关于我现在在做什么的问题，我想我应该在这里向我长期受苦的读者更新最新消息。

I’m chairman of three companies.

我是三个公司的董事长。

You probably know all about Stack Overflow so I’ll skip ahead.

您可能了解有关 Stack Overflow 的所有信息，因此我将跳过。

Fog Creek Software has been renamed Glitch , “the friendly community for building the web.” Under CEO Anil Dash , they have grown to millions of apps and raised a decent round of money to accelerate that growth.

Fog Creek Software 已更名为 Glitch，“构建网络的友好社区”。在首席执行官阿尼尔·达什 (Anil Dash) 的领导下，他们的应用程序数量已增长到数百万个，并筹集了一轮可观的资金来加速这一增长。

I think that in every era there has to be some kind of simplified programming environment for the quiet majority of developers who don’t need fancy administration features for their code, like git branches or multistep deployment processes; they just want to write code and have it run.

我认为，在每个时代，都必须为大多数开发人员提供某种简化的编程环境，他们的代码不需要花哨的管理功能，例如 git 分支或多步骤部署过程；他们只想编写代码并让它运行。

Glitch is aimed at those developers.

Glitch 就是针对那些开发者的。

The third company, HASH , is still kind of under the radar right now, although today they put a whole bunch of words up on their website so I guess I can give you a preview.

第三家公司 HASH 目前仍然处于低调状态，尽管今天他们在网站上放了一大堆文字，所以我想我可以给你预览一下。

HASH is building an open source platform for doing simulations.

HASH 正在构建一个用于进行模拟的开源平台。

It’s a great way to model problems where you have some idea of how every agent is supposed to behave, but you don’t really know what all that is going to add up to.

这是对问题进行建模的好方法，您对每个智能体应该如何表现有所了解，但您并不真正知道所有这些加起来会是什么。

For example, suppose you’re a city planner and you want to model traffic so that you can make a case for a new bus line.

例如，假设您是一名城市规划者，您想要对交通进行建模，以便为新的公交线路提供理由。

You can, sort of, pretend that every bus takes 50 cars off the road, but that’s not going to work unless you can find 50 commuters who will all decide to take your new bus line…

你可以假装每辆公交车可以减少道路上的 50 辆汽车，但是除非你能找到 50 名通勤者都决定乘坐你的新公交线路，否则这是行不通的……

and the way they decide is that they check if the bus is actually going to save them time and money over just driving.

他们决定的方式是检查公共汽车是否真的比开车更节省时间和金钱。

This is a case where you can actually simulate the behavior of every “agent” in your model, like Cities: Skylines does, and figure out the results.

在这种情况下，您实际上可以模拟模型中每个“代理”的行为，就像《城市：天际线》一样，并计算出结果。

Then you can try thousands or millions of different potential bus routes and see which ones actually reduce traffic.

然后，您可以尝试数千或数百万条不同的潜在巴士路线，看看哪些路线能够真正减少交通流量。

This kind of modeling is incredibly computationally intensive, but it works even when you don’t have a closed-form formula for how bus lines impact traffic, or, in general, how individual agents’ behavior affects overall outcomes.

这种建模的计算量非常大，但即使您没有关于公交线路如何影响交通的封闭式公式，或者一般来说，单个代理的行为如何影响整体结果，它也能发挥作用。

This kind of tool will be incredibly useful in far-ranging problems, like epidemiology, econometrics, urban planning, finance, political science, and a lot of other areas which are not really amenable to closed-form modeling or common “AI” techniques.

这种工具在广泛的问题中将非常有用，例如流行病学、计量经济学、城市规划、金融、政治学以及许多其他并不适合封闭式建模或常见“人工智能”技术的领域。

(I love putting AI in “scare” “quotes”.

（我喜欢把人工智能放在“吓唬”“引号”中。

There are a lot of startups out there trying to train machine learning models with way too little data.

有很多初创公司试图用太少的数据来训练机器学习模型。

Sometimes the models they create just reproduce the bad decision making of the humans they are trained on.

有时，他们创建的模型只是重现了接受训练的人类的错误决策。

In many cases a model with simulated agents running a white box algorithm is going to be superior).

在许多情况下，带有运行白盒算法的模拟代理的模型会更优越）。

Ok, so those are the three companies I’m still working on in some way or another.

好吧，这就是我仍在以某种方式工作的三家公司。

That still leaves me with a couple of free days every week which I’m actually using to work on some electronics projects.

这仍然让我每周有几天空闲时间，我实际上用这些时间来从事一些电子项目。

In particular, I’m really into pixel-addressable RGB LEDs, like those WS2812b and APA102-type things.

特别是，我真的很喜欢像素可寻址 RGB LED，比如 WS2812b 和 APA102 类型的东西。

Right now I’m working on designing a circuit board that connects a Teensy 3.2 controller, which can drive up to 4416 LEDs at a high frame rate, to a WizNET Ethernet adapter, and then creating some software which can be used to distribute 4416 pixels worth of data to each Teensy over a TCP-IP network in hopes of creating huge installations with hundreds of thousands of pixels.

目前，我正在设计一个电路板，将 Teensy 3.2 控制器连接到 WizNET 以太网适配器，该控制器可以以高帧速率驱动多达 4416 个 LED，然后创建一些软件，可用于通过 TCP-IP 网络向每个 Teensy 分发 4416 像素的数据，希望创建具有数十万像素的大型装置。

If that made any sense at all, you’re probably already a member of the LEDs ARE AWESOME Facebook group and you probably think I’m dumb.

如果这有道理的话，您可能已经是 LEDs ARE AWESOME Facebook 群组的成员，并且您可能认为我很蠢。

If that doesn’t make any sense, rest assured that I am probably not going to burn down the apartment because I am very careful with the soldering iron almost every time.

如果这没有任何意义，请放心，我可能不会烧毁公寓，因为我几乎每次都非常小心地使用烙铁。