I’m confident in my opinions because I didn’t pick them up at the lifestyle store—instead I crafted them over time for internal coherence and reasonable correspondence with our current state of knowledge.
Too damn bad if at the end of the day the only thoughts
In your brain are all the things that they say, what a waste…
Too damn bad if at the end of the line
you got no idea of what’s on your own mind…
You’ve got no one to blame but yourself.
— Henry Rollins, Disconnect from Weight (1994)
It occurs to me how fascinating I find all of the language tidbits that accrue around the tools we like using. Handles and taglines and slang, oh my! Just all of it: the names of obscure command line utilities, code comments, server names, API in-jokes, boot messages, slogans > tldr.txt
Hey, #chatbot dummies, here’s some free historical training material.
Check the record on Eliza, the Eliza effect, and J. Weizenbaum.
“I had not realized … that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” — J. Weizenbaum
Okay, so I hope the basic idea is clear. This imaginary device simply brute-force generates every possible image for the resolution and colors we specified. It just keeps spitting out images, you see; I imagine them in a sort of slide show carousel. We are going to be dealing with a very large number here in a minute—but not to worry, it isn’t infinity, you won’t need any special equipment—and we’re not going to get all “mathy” or anything either.
Stairs erase up and down whereas ropes and slides insist on them. Too many ropes and slides in public software today. Don’t try to decide beforehand where users want to be; make it possible for users to get to where they want to get to in plainly reliable ways, then invite them for a climb or a plunge.
And no, I’m not ‘anti-elevator’…ach…this metaphor is deteriorating rapidly in earths' atmosphere…
To get at why stories seem to me fundamental building blocks of reality I have to backpedal and talk about pictures for a bit. ❡ Building blocks of reality? Dude, smoke another bowl… ❡ Pictures. We know what those are. Kind of freeze frames of the light available at some particular moment. Pictures of things, pictures of words. We consume and conceptualize them now as pixel collections, sometimes printed, mostly on screen.
As I was saying, telling a better story is important for me. I feel somewhat compelled to do it, if only in my head, but preferably also to create artifacts for future data waves. And what do I mean by better? More coherently truth congruent with repeatedly identifiable phenomena; the propositions therein match up with consensus reality; the shit rhymes. ‘But why stories?’, I pretend you ask. Because I’m convinced that in strange ways it is actually ‘stories’❡ that are the building blocks of our reality.
I want to emphasize in this post what I mentioned last time: not censoring myself out of economic, or other, anxieties. Anecdotally, in what were always described to me as “professional settings”, but turned out to just be “people in a room”, when I thought they were serious when they said “we want to hear what you think”, and I start with a phrase like “…well, your software kinda sucks…” I found myself plunged into a situation I thought I left in junior high school.
...because maybe somebody does read this, because maybe ON the OFF chance that somebody does read this, and perhaps thinks if I’m criticizing software in some sort of abstract way it must actually be about the platform I am posting my criticisms on, so perhaps Twitter, or where I secretly really hang out, on micro.blog. Well, it is not. I like twitter for what it is, mostly, and micro.blog is groovy, does just what it does without fuss.
Hey, #cybersecuritypros the only question you must have a yes answer to: When any of your systems do something you either did not ask for, or are surprised by, can you reach the on/off switch? Astounding how many times * scenarios I hear “I didn’t know you could turn it off.”