leonardoe

Just yesterday I was discussing many of the ideas presented here with a coworker. I had just walked out of a workshop led by $BIGTECHCOMPANY where someone presented the following toy example:

A service goes down. He tells the agent to debug it and fix it. The agent pulls some logs from $CLOUDPROVIDER, inspects the logs, produces a fix and then automatically updates a shared document with the postmortem.

This got me thinking that it's very hard to internalize both issue and solution -updating your model of the system involved- because there is not enough friction for you to spend time dealing with the problem (coming up with hypotheses, modifying the code, writing the doc). I thought about my very human limitation of having to write things down in paper so that I can better recall them.

Then I recalled something I read years ago: "Cars have brakes so they can go fast."

Even assuming it is now feasible to produce thousands of lines of quality code, there is a limitation on how much a human can absorb and internalize about the changes introduced to a system. This is why we will need brakes -- so we can go faster.

This observation really resonates with me. I have spent a lot of energy trying to communicate that ditching formal languages for natural language is a terrible idea in some (most?) domains. The power of formal languages comes precisely from their "limitations".

Software is not the output. The output is the theory-building process by which one arrives a formal description of both the problem and (hopefully) the solution. Avoiding the effort to express a problem (or a model of the problem) in a formal language is a self-defeating enterprise.

Intro to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G.K. Chesterton:

"THE human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun."

I needed to replace my 2010 macbook air and after much consideration I ordered a maxed-out (excepting SSD) 2015 mbp last week.

Buying previous generation hardware feels weird, I hope I don't regret this decision.

In case anyone enjoys reading about the history of control systems, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics by David Mindell is so much fun to read.

https://www.amazon.com/Between-Human-Machine-Cybernetics-Tec...

I can't wait to write a nyan cat app for the TouchBar.

Hopefully the next XCode build will include a TouchBar simulator so there's no need for me to get a new MBP in order to work on this.

In case anyone is interested here is a HN page-mode for Conkeror I wrote a while back: https://github.com/legumbre/hackernews-mode It makes the site a bit easier to navigate.