If you're interested in working with graphics or sounds, I'd recommend checking out openFrameworks, which bills itself as a "creative coding toolkit". https://openframeworks.cc
As a programming instructor the Eve demo video gave me goosebumps. The emphasis on prose+code, world=data, and the discoverability afforded by the inspector are of particular interest to me.
Our current learning stack for folks with zero coding experience is Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu) to Processing (https://processing.org) to Java.* I'll be watching the Eve project carefully to see how it might fit into our intro to programming path.
*If these intro students continue to our full program they learn C#, SQL, PHP & JS/HTML too.
My understanding is that even with their web login process your password isn't sent to their servers in plaintext. From the comments on their heartbleed blog post: "We only use one-way salted hashes (after going through PBKDF2 rounds) to send to the server for authentication."
So their servers get a hashed version of your password, but not the password itself. Their servers likely also store a hashed version of your password so that they can authenticate you. This style of auth is also used when you use the "show me the password" feature.
I'm not sure that "the universe as Turing machine" is anything more than a theory. The universe can contain Turing machines -- we're both using one right now -- but I don't think we can say for certain that the universe is one.
Also, not everything is computable. Alan Turing proved this in his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." The Halting Problem is a related example of the limits of computation.
A quick look at the MobiRuby example code worries me. It looks like Objective-C, but awkwardly written using Ruby syntax. In other words, it looks more like an Objective-C wrapper, than a Ruby DSL for writing iPhone apps.
However, with plans to port the system to Android, perhaps a unified DSL could be built to target both platforms.
Like some others have said, the Turing Test is more a human mimicry test than a test of intelligence or consciousness. We humans love to anthropomorphize, so tricking us into believing a machine is human shouldn't be how we gauge the effectiveness of our AI.
I ran across these "Fundamental Principles of Cognition" that might do a better job:
Many smartphone users are prevented from upgrading their firmware/OS. So even if the device lifecycles are shorter, developers cannot ignore legacy devices. If we look at the current Android stats for top entertainment app users:
"So what's in common with these two games? They're both originally mobile games." (Emphasis mine.)
The sad part is that once converted to HTML5 these games won't be able to run on many (most?) mobile devices. Current mobile browsers are too slow or non-standard to run HTML5 based games. The exception is iOS 5 powered devices (iPhone/iPad) since the browser now includes hardware acceleration for both HTML5 canvas and CSS3 animation transforms.
In late 2003 I was laid off from my job as a hardware/firmware design engineer. I spent the next two years away from work. During this time I spent nearly a year on self-study, got married, and then went travelling with my wife in Europe and south-east Asia. We worked on and off while travelling to be able to afford to continue our adventures.
If you are a self-motivated learner I would highly recommend a study break. The stuff I learnt during my break helped me secure my current job. I spent most of my time learning about web development, both client-side and server-side technologies. I now teach these technologies at a local college. I also do contract web work on the side.
As others have mentioned, be sure to pick some solid learning outcomes. Map out your study goals. Give yourself timeframes and be sure to reward yourself when you meet these milestones.
I'd recommend either blogging about your experiences or putting together a portfolio of work. This will come in handy when future employers ask about the gap in your resume. Working on one or two open-source projects might also be worth while.
Learning to live frugally and within your means is also key.
For those curious what a stripped-down version of noise-based clouds would look like, it's only 50 lines of js: https://editor.p5js.org/stungeye/sketches/LPdeHgz9B