Category: technology
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why VR?
The “high-tech, low-life” aesthetic that makes cyberpunk cool is the only setting where VR/AR doesn’t seem out of place as “consumer tech”. The problem for Apple is that they are a luxury goods brand that is out of place in the aesthetic. It’s like if the child soldier in Africa was using a Louis Vuitton…
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Thoughts on “what programming language should I learn?”
“What programming language should I learn?” is a perfectly reasonable question. You might have asked it yourself. Almost every answer to that question you’ll get is bunk. The one that isn’t, sounds something like, “It depends on what you want to do.”. Which is, while not complete bunk, still very bunk-ish because it isn’t really…
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No Technical Solutions for Social Problems
You can’t solve social problems with technological solutions. This seems like it should be obvious, but in many circles it is far from obvious. That’s understandable, we want technology to save us from ourselves, but in the end technology is just tools and the knowledge to use them. We have to save us from ourselves,…
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The problem with APIs
The problem with APIs is that they are dead — they just sit there like an Easter egg waiting to be discovered, and once found, waiting to be asked a question, and then (maybe) they respond with an answer. This dead-ness then permeates all the things we try to do with APIs, from building applications…
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Taylorism and Software Manufacturing
When we make software like it is a commodity that is manufactured, and that can be managed like a manufactured product, we are bringing in all the baggage of Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s ideas that dehumanize the labor force in service of an efficiency-centric view of labor productivity. The first problem with that is that creative…
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Thoughts on the inevitable attempts by organizations to control the use of LLMs by their members
This is a quick run-down of the major concerns I’ve heard voiced by organizations — mostly corporations and schools — about Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and to a lessor extent about generative neural networks (gNNs) like Midjourney. It is admittedly cynical in the sense that taken together it sounds somewhat defeatist, but also…
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An Internet that fits my notion of what the Internet is
We are all reflections of the world that raised us, shimmering and twisting and deforming as ripples distort our surface, and so it is that our notions of what should be and of what ought be and of what could be are each derivative of this reflection. The Internet is a technology, and like any…
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Feckless Engineering
Chaos engineering is when you intentionally introduce random failures to build the resilience of a large system. Feckless engineering is when you intentionally introduce random failures because you don’t care about the stability of a large system.
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What could have been
Coalescing thoughts about what I’m calling “the Web decorporation” – the return of smallish communities connected by Web technologies not for financial gain, not to advance the interests of a corporation, and not to help you climb a ladder but just because you want to have friends, hear from folks who aren’t your friends but…
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EIS: Building Integrated Systems
Anyone can set-up a computer, and if you can set up one, you can set up two. Almost anyone can plug those two computers into a hub or switch and get them to talk to each other. If you can do that, then replacing the hub or switch with a broadband router isn’t much harder,…