Without over-explaining how the soup gets made, I’ll just mention that this, and the third, things for you to savor this week are exceptionally nerdy this week. I’m not sure whether I’m more excited by the contents of this essay (which to be fair, I only skimmed) or the fact that it’s from like 1992.

[I]n having a body, we are spatially located creatures: we must always be facing some direction, have only certain objects in view, be within reach of certain others. How we manage the spatial arrangement of items around us is not an afterthought: it is an integral part of the way we think, plan, and behave.

~ David Kirsh from, https://adrenaline.ucsd.edu/Kirsh/Articles/Space/AIJ1.html

Those four sentences are a good start at explaining what it means to be human. I heard Ido Portal (on a podcast) say something like that… about our legs for moving, arms for manipulating, and our spine for orienting ourselves. Just some random thoughts today around space (not “outer”) and ourselves.

Success

This week I’ve been reading a lot and doing little work. That’s the way things ought to be. That’s surely the road to success.

~ Anne Frank

Technology of societies

As I’ve written before, sometimes I find something that just makes me raise my eyebrows… and back away slowly… and, okay, lots more people should actually see this. Thus I present to you everything you never even thought to wonder about how the Athenians process-ified Democracy.

The Athenians had to keep those bodies flowing smoothly, then, and that was largely a matter of keeping track of who belonged where and when. They also had to maintain a smooth and dependable flow of the information generated by those bodies — the votes, the decrees, the endless speechifying. They had, in short, to do a lot of stuff that modern information technology would have helped them tremendously to do, and nonetheless they managed pretty well, with the materials at hand, to build the tools they needed to make their system work.

Those tools — the info tech of ancient Athenian democracy — are the subject of the following Notes. I present them now without further ado.

~ Julian Dibbell from, https://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html

I’m at a loss for words here. o_O

Luck

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

~ Michael Lewis

Communities

The negative point in the quote below is obvious, but it bears repeating since, somewhere, there’s some excited youngling rushing to build technology and online communities . . .

We thought that we could build new communities online that could replace the ones we’d built in real life (IRL), but we were wrong. As internet usage has gone up and face time has gone down, we’ve become more isolated, depressed, and in some cases, violent. We are as unhappy as we have been in a long time.

~ Packy McCormick from, https://www.packym.com/irl/finding-our-place

But McCormick’s point is that—as the saying goes—the kids are alright.

Humility

A man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Technical debt

Everything goes in cycles, right? Back in the 90s, we became excited about “4th generation” programming languages. In short, programming is very difficult and so people write programs, and they write tools to help them write programs. Eventually, those tools are really just new programming languages… and the rising tide (lifting all the boats) has gone up a generation.

Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.

~ Ste Grainer from, https://alistapart.com/article/the-wax-and-the-wane-of-the-web/

Keep in mind that the rising tide does not move the foundation layers at the beginning/bottom. There’s ever-increasing distance between the hardware at the bottom, and the “surface” of the rising tide at the top. Yes, sure, we refer to the increasing complexity of keeping all the stuff (from foundation to surface) maintained and working as technical debt.

The part that bends my mind is this: There’s more and more room (from the foundations to the surface) for an increasing number of people to find things (places in the layers, particular technologies) that they love. Yes, the technical debt increases… Yes, non-human intelligence is coming… But there’s more—every day—space in those layers for so many people (and non-humans) to find their passion and craft and art!

Until next time, thanks for reading.

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