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Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

manu.zone

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Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#131

Post by Barrin92 »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #15
Tomte wrote: post #3

From 'Life in Code': "We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."

Maybe that's the only possible way. More than a few systems have failed from over-planning and under-iterating. And they do say cities are the greatest invention of humankind

It's even how we as biological systems work, there's plenty of evidence of old stuff and iterations still within every body and within every cell. This even was an explicit programming paradigm in the 60s and 70s, "extensible programming", for example driven by a lot of the designers of languages such as Smalltalk, aiming to enable systems that can grow not unlike living systems.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#132

Post by Minor49er »

I read this book years ago. One part that I still think about from time to time is how the author was approached for a job that entailed maintaining an ancient mainframe. Despite the pay being so high, the mainframe and its model were dying. Both her and the employer knew this. The author turned the job down just because it seemed like it would have been an unfulfilling and depressing endeavor, despite the high pay. It reminds me that sometimes, a line must be drawn between pay and self-fulfillment

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#133

Post by consilient »

wizofaus wrote: post #123
msla wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just the lack of a piece of paper, it's the fact every project is new to some extent (to exactly the extent we can't just reuse existing code) and present somewhat new challenges. Also, some difficulties scale very nonlinearly, with single changes turning the challenge from needing a few extra weeks to solve to being effectively insoluble in any reasonable timeframe, if ever. ("Check this program to see if o…

Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it halts? Obviously it's not hard to imagine theoretical examples of a program so large nobody could figure it out within a human lifetime, but I'm not entirely convinced for real programs written by humans that checking for haltability is likely to be harder than checking for following coding standards (unle…

> Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it halts?

Any interpreter for a Turing-complete language is an example.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#134

Post by wizofaus »

consilient wrote: post #133
wizofaus wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it halts? Obviously it's not hard to imagine theoretical examples of a program so large nobody could figure it out within a human lifetime, but I'm not entirely convinced for real programs written by humans that checking for haltability is likely to be harder than checking for following coding standards (unle…

> Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it halts? Any interpreter for a Turing-complete language is an example.

I guess I wasn't assuming you needed to determine if it would halt for any possible (but finite) input. But fair enough.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#135

Post by eternityforest »

Ensorceled wrote: post #37
agentultra wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Is there any object permanence in our creations? I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey s…

> I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved the bulk of our science and technology to storage that requires that level of science a…

And yet there seems to be shockingly little effort towards making sure that doesn't happen. Why isn't there an underground bombproof chip fab somewhere?

It's like as if people don't really care about technological society, they just do what they always do, expand and try to do stuff that is hard and impressive, and if the computers went away... they'd be just as happy as a blacksmith or something...

Or maybe even happier.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#136

Post by lm28469 »

developer93 wrote: post #53
mannykannot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria..." Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)

There is a treasure trove, it's just mixed in with a lot of trash. Like panning for gold, you need to know where the good lodes are and recognise it when you see it.

Wikipedia in itself is a miracle. People forgot how it was back then.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#137

Post by sanderjd »

Tomte wrote: post #3

From 'Life in Code': "We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."

I feel like there is a duality here with:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#138

Post by eep_social »

senkora wrote: post #101
Random_BSD_Geek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What other similar books would you recommend? "Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.

Can you or someone else explain what they liked about Microserfs? I read it after hearing a recommendation for it somewhere online, but it didn’t really connect for me. I’m young enough that I don’t have any personal knowledge of the time period to compare it with, so maybe I’m missing a nostalgia angle. I don’t doubt that it is a great book, it just didn’t grab me for whatever reason.

I am an “old millennial” and Coupland’s work sort of resonates but my understanding is that it’s written primarily for and to gen x.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#139

Post by muricula »

manuhortet wrote: post #2

I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents". The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective…

I haven't read Ullman's memoir, but I'll just put down "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder as a peek into hardware history you may find interesting.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#140

Post by kragen »

marcosdumay wrote: post #96
delusional wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless we inexplicably decide to burn all of our accurate books because of some culture war.

Has any book-burning movement in history actually succeeded in getting ride of the books? Because I don't know of any, they manage to destroy a text here or there, but there were always some compatible texts that survived. AFAIK, we really didn't lose useful knowledge to them. (And let's not forget that today we made life much harder for the book burners.) What really does destroy knowledge is it becoming useless for…

yes, in most cases

the maya codices and the khipu were lost in very nearly their entirety, and the more abundant maya hieroglyphs carved on stone have been only partly deciphered. the khipu are entirely undeciphered except for arithmetic

of carthaginian literature not one book remains

the khwarazmian empire is known from the accounts of its neighbors and destroyers

qin shi huang ordered the burning of the history books for every kingdom he conquered; consequently what we know of most of them today is little more than legend, except for what the histories of qin tell us

in countless smaller-scale examples we don't even know the names of the nations that perished along with their language and books

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