Mr. Ferriss packs himself in ice (cooler core temperatures send you to sleep faster), buys an REM sleep monitor to tweak his REM-sleep-to-total-sleep ratio (higher is better) and tests the polyphasic sleep habits of super-programmers in Silicon Valley.
On the offense, super-programmers were building free, open source encryption tools, such as Philip Zimmerman's "Pretty Good Privacy," which allowed better public oversight of their vulnerabilities and weren't subject to export regulations.
They know that a super productive, amazingly talented programmer is worth 1,000 times more than an average person, so they'll pay 1,000 times more," says Bruce Upbin, who manages the technology coverage for Forbes magazine.
Takeshi Hayakawa, the lead programmer for Super Mario Galaxy 2, created a development tool that allowed different staff members, including visual and sound designers, to easily design and create stages without waiting for programmers, many of which were incorporated into the final game.
The recruitment page consisted of a listing for programmers for Super Smash Bros. 6, which is expected to be released in 2015 for both the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS.
One of the programmers of Super Mario 64, Giles Goddard, explained that these few linear elements survived as a means to force players into Bowser's lair rather than to encourage exploration.
Outraged by the raunchy behavior, or simply to capture some of the Super Bowl's supersized audience, some religious programmers are now producing halftime shows of their own.
More importantly, he represents a new breed on Wall Street, highly-paid programmers behind super-fast, lucrative trading strategies.
I don't envy the programmers who are endeavoring to bring a super intelligence into our world, knowing that their creations may also consciously hate things — including its creators.
"I figured the city would be locked down," said Craig Brabham, a programmer from suburban Hazelwood, Mo., who had heard that the Super Bowl would be the most oppressively secure ever.
