Refactorings Roundup 08/26/2018 09/1/2018

September 2, 2018 By
This entry is part 3 of 9 in the series Refactorings Roundups

It’s been a surprisingly busy August, usually the doldrums for us consultant types. Good haul of activity to round up this week: 5 selections from friends-of-ribbonfarm, 12 from elsewhere on the internet, 7 short takes. Happy Labor Day, and here’s the fruit of some human and robot labor for your hopper.

There is now a “robot” at San Jose airport. It is not a very good robot.

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

I am the very model of a self-recursive modeler by putanumonit. Link

Exploratory conversation by @msweet. Link

How Do You Value a Human Being? by @vgr. Link

How to spot good “futurism” by @jcamachor@mastodon.social. Link

Introducing key terms by @meaningness. Link

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff We Read

Wired guide to quantum computing . Link. ht @vgr

Thinking about willpower, or lack thereof . Link. ht @bkam

Bret Victor’s Quotes Page. Link . ht @a

This helped me a lot to navigate the political waters these days—not that I understand it all. Link. ht @steve

The ‘Other’ category in Singapore. Link. ht @visakanv

Excellent post on how you can get infrastructure rot in important sectors of the economy. Link. ht @jdp

Interesting (and potentially FUD-inducing) example of future warfare… Link ht @msweet

Fascinating how even with the Internet you still have these separations between groups of humans in terms of available memetics [Sewage Analysis]. Link. ht @jdp

“Perhaps intuitive but an interesting study nonetheless on walking eight minutes to acutely raise creativity. Link. ht @bkam

Review of Edward Said ‘On Late Style’. Link. ht @bueno

Failures in audience respect when communicating about climate change. “Risky time.” Link. ht @necopinus

Emoji, part 1: in the beginning. Link. ht @ipfactor

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

Short Takes

“the left likes to pretend production is a solved problem, the right likes to pretend distribution is a solved problem” — @Harry_Pottash

New theory of ideological polarization/culture wars. When one ideology is taken seriously enough by those in power to exercise influence, ALL ideologues believe the pendulum might swing their way in the future and they’ll get their turn to try out their policy ideas. So all ideologues tend towards pragmatic centrism to increase their odds of gaining influence. But when ideology-apathetic opportunistic grifters are in power, all ideologues feel powerless and get more extremist. — @vgr

The only certainty in life is that the fragile will break. — @msweet

Mistaking the illegible for the non-existent and the legible for reality is one of the underpinnings of human nature.We’ve survived anyway because our explicit rationality doesn’t matter very much, in the long run. — @saamdaamdandbhed

A lack of information problem can hide like a master of disguise. Sometimes it presents as feeling directionless or uninspired. — @strangeattractor

Internet survival skill: when you read an accusation against someone, you must hold a kind of quantum superposition of “guilty” and “innocent” in your mind, to avoid being swept up and used as part of an online mob.The human brain really, REALLY doesn’t like holding that superposition for any length of time. Maybe this is why it “innocent until proven guilty” didn’t catch on until so recently in human history. — @nindokag

When people can shoot further than they can shout, it becomes wise to be very quiet. — @machado

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

How Do You Value a Human Being?

August 30, 2018 By

How do you value a human being?

Only two kinds of humans have a clear consensus value: first responders and what one might call first actors. Doctors, nurses, fire-fighters, cops, and modern soldiers are all first responders; valued because they defend one of the two borders of the human condition against the unknown; the border across which existential threats emerge.  At the other border, the exploratory frontier of the human condition, we find our first actors — scientists, artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, mystics and (when we interior civilians are feeling particularly generous) philosophers. They are the prime movers of the human story.

First responders restore a local human equilibrium after a negative disturbance; first actors disturb a local human equilibrium in positive ways. Both are boundary actors, charged with precipitating a response to things happening at the boundary between the changeless fictive interior of the human condition and the restive chaos of the universe beyond. The value of boundary actors is assumed. The value of interior actors usually requires justification.

Boundary actors are assumed worthy. Using them as a yardstick, everybody else must make their own case.

[Read more…]

Refactorings Roundup 08/19/2018 – 8/25/2018

August 26, 2018 By
This entry is part 2 of 9 in the series Refactorings Roundups

This week’s roundup features 4 new posts from friends of ribbonfarm: a book review, a career lessons type thing, 2 things about games. There are 8 links from elsewhere in the stuff-we-read section. Plus a new short takes section with <500 character thoughts from our Mastodon. We’re still working on tweaking the format.

Some urban goatspace

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age (book review) by @stefanozorzi. Link

Any Experience is Good Experience, and Other Falsehoods by @james. Link

How to Not Lose at 4d Chess by @vgr. Link

Player of Games by putanumonit.com. Link

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. We mainly feature selections from longform blogs with a refactor-y vibe.

Stuff we read

“Federation is the worst of all worlds”. Link. ht @vgr

If you haven’t seen The Prisoner I can’t recommend it enough. Link. Link. ht @britt

Some Arctic Ground No Longer Freezing—Even in Winter. Link. ht @vgr

Everyone is stupid and contagious right now in Washington. Link. ht @jdp

Designing Happiness (interview with Stefan Sagemeister). Link. ht @mark

Ambient particulate air pollution reduces life expectancy at birth by average of 1 year, globally. Link. ht @strangeattractor

A weirdly fun and good “11 laws of showrunning” essay (pdf) that could serve as a leadership guide as well. Link. ht @vgr

The Great Chinese Art Heist . Link. ht @vgr

f you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up Feed Fox.

Short takes

Resilience is having the strength to shoulder much, and the wisdom to carry little. — @zacharius

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up Feed Fox.

Flying Blind into the Anthropocene

August 23, 2018 By

For several days, Seattle has been enveloped in wildfire haze, with an air quality index (AQI) between 150-200, coded red for unhealthy. For these few days it has been among the most polluted cities on the planet. Many of us learned for the first time about N95 masks, which are rated to keep out 95% of 3 micron particles. Supposedly an AQI of 150 is equivalent to smoking 7 cigarettes a day.

Photo credit: Sean McCabe in Vanity Fair

It struck me that we’ve been doing the everyday equivalent of piloting an airplane on instruments. Weather reports, AQI numbers, mask ratings, and metaphoric comparisons to cigarettes have been more useful for guiding behavior than direct sensory evidence. Even the knowledge that we are breathing wildfire haze rather than some other sort of less harmful smog is based on on instruments, since the actual fire is in Canada, too far away for the smell of burning to carry.

Though there has been direct sensory evidence — being outside felt like being in an awful smoke-filled bar, the sunsets have been a lovely red, and visibility has been poor — the sensory reality has been something like a spectator sport with a very misleading relationship to atmospheric reality and meaningful responses to it. Air quality degrades to harmful levels well before you notice it. You can either believe the reports and numbers, or find out the hard way that going for a run outside is a bad idea. You can either wear the recommended mask, or find out the hard way that being outside for a long time makes you feel ill.

AQI numbers are abstract proxies and open to criticism, but they are not bullshit. They have a detectable relationship to reality. Wearing the masks is a matter of faith in the science, but their efficacy exceeds that of ceremony or superstition. Understanding the numbers and responding by limiting outdoor activity, keeping windows closed, and perhaps wearing masks, is instrumentally rational behavior in a literal sense: it has to do with how we think about reality through instruments.

By this standard, only a small fraction of people in Seattle (many of them tourists from Asia where mask-wearing has been socially normalized) are being instrumentally rational. I have been among the instrumentally irrational. Though we own a mask, the idea of wearing it and standing out made me not wear it, so I came home the other day wheezing and short of breath.

Our condition this week in Seattle has been something of a microcosm of the human condition in the anthropocene. Through a mix of design and accident, we’ve created a novel environment that is at once strongly shaped by human behaviors and highly opaque to normal human sensory modalities. But we haven’t instrumented this environment well enough to make up for our sensory deficits.

Worse, we seem to collectively lack the instrument rating to fly this civilizational airplane.

So we are flying blind into the anthropocene, without the appropriate instrument rating, on a wing and a prayer.

Feed Fox Links: 8/12/18 — 8/18/18

August 20, 2018 By
This entry is part 1 of 9 in the series Refactorings Roundups

We’re starting a little community experiment. Zach Faddis has written a nice bot named Feed Fox that monitors a bunch of friends-of-ribbonfarm RSS feeds and toots out links on the Refactor Camp mastodon instance (which we’ve decided to leave open for registration for now). It also listens for, and boosts, links tooted by members and tagged #heyfeedfox. We’ll be publishing a weekly selection of links farmed thusly by the bot, probably on Sunday or Monday. If you want the unfiltered real-time firehose, you can follow the bot itself.

Moodpic: Mt. Rainier enveloped in wildfire haze and clouds, ht @vgr

Stuff written by friends of ribbonfarm

Review – The Artist’s Journey by Steven Pressfield by Zenpundit

In Conversation: Things We Like This Month by @adrianryan

The tyranny of the perfect day by @msweet

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle.

Stuff read by friends of ribbonfarm

Dominant men make decisions faster ht @vgr

No senses playing by the rules when the adversary won’t. Also it’s wartime. ht @britt

Denialism: What drives people to reject the truth ht @britt

Olmsted probably didn’t believe the “lungs of the city” theory he used to promote his parks movement. ht @vgr

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up Feed Fox.

Refactor Camp 2018: Cryptoeconomics and Blockchain Weirding Post-Mortem

August 16, 2018 By

refactor camp 2018

Refactor Camp: Cryptoeconomics and Blockchain Weirding was a 2-day conference held in Austin Texas on May 12-13th 2018. The event featured talks, workshops, and breakout sessions focused on blockchain technology, the sociology of blockchains, and whatever other weird nonsense the speakers could come up with.

Our hope with this event was to “stretch the Overton window” a bit in terms of thinking about the implications and elements of blockchain technology and, in the Ribbonfarm tradition, facilitate some more speculative thinking and discussions than what happens at other cryptocurrency events.

Topics covered included:

  • Blockchain as Metaphor – Take some feature of a mature blockchain ecosystem and map it into another domain (e.g. Decentralization in urban infrastructure or.)
  • Sociology of Blockchain Geopolitical implications of blockchain
  • Magic, Ritual & Blockchain
  • Blockchain as an International / Multicultural Phenomenon
  • Crypto Econophysics

We were able to record most of the talks and have uploaded them to Youtube as well as embedding them below. Special thank you to all the speakers who took the time to prepare a talk. [Read more…]

Tarpits and Antiflocks

August 9, 2018 By

Computers used to be the size of buildings. Today my computer gets lost between the seat cushions. But two parts of the computer didn’t become a million times smaller and faster: the display and keyboard. They are the low speed, power hungry, monkey-compatible data ports. Our biology is holding us back.

Naturally, there are a hundred teams screwing around with every idea they can think of to connect directly to the brain. They are tickling neurons with magnets and brain monitors and even wires under the skull. They are training computers to pick up subvocal cues, theorizing about quantum tunneling, etc etc. Then they talk to journalists who put out breathless articles on “USB ports for your brain”.

The people who make fun of the dubious science in these projects are right. They also miss the point. Individually, each team’s approach is almost certainly wrong. But collectively they are doing the right thing. They are an antiflock, exploring a tarpit.

[Read more…]

Boilerplate

August 2, 2018 By

Most texts and speech utterances are produced on the spot, by a particular writer or speaker, translating meaning into a linear arrangement of words. The final products of this process tend to be amazingly unique: you usually only need to google a short string of words in order to find the single source that they come from. (Try it – you rarely need more than four or five words, even very common words, and a whole sentence is usually overkill.) How incredible that most short strings are never repeated! Meanings are repeated over and over, expressed in different ways, but their manner of expression varies. However, there is a class of texts and speech utterances that are interesting precisely because they are boilerplate: they are reproduced over and over, pretty much verbatim, by different writers and speakers.

One class of these texts is the chain letter: a document whose content implores the human reader to reproduce it (or to share it on social media). But some of the most widely copied texts and speech utterances do not themselves ask to be copied. These pieces of boilerplate language are copied verbatim for reasons outside the context of the texts themselves. For example, boilerplate language in legal contracts is included not because the language says “include me in your contracts or you will be visited by the Litigation Demon;” rather, they are included because specific linear arrangements of words have been judged in the past to have a specific legal effect. Historically, in contract law, it was difficult to tell when a late performance still counted as performance. Courts held that the boilerplate incantation “time is of the essence” demonstrated that a performance had to be on time to count, and that exact string words still makes its way into contracts in order to ward off claims that late performance is good enough. [Read more…]

Armpit Futures

July 24, 2018 By

I’ve long been on record as an August hater. Recently I decided that August will henceforth be known as Armpit, at least in my head. Armpit is the True Name of August; it is truly the armpit of the year. My greatest fear for the future is that it will be an Eternal August. I call such possible futures armpit futures. Listless, sweaty grey timelines where history just sort of runs out of narrative energy with a whimper rather than a bang, and settles into a shitty plotless equilibrium full of T. S. Eliot’s hollow men that everybody hates, but not energetically enough to do anything about. Sometimes, I think the explanation for the Fermi paradox is simply that it is August all the time, almost everywhere in the universe.

Anyhow, why is August, I mean Armpit, so bad?

Here’s the thing, besides all the obvious things wrong with it (ranging from listlessly ugly, enervated weather  to the ugly social calendar as documented in this David Plotz anti-August rant), Armpit is when people give up on the year. It is the month of abandoned hope. The inescapable liminal passage of refractory ennui you must get through before you can peel yourself off the floor (where you will have been lying sticky and facedown for 31 days) to take another swing at Destiny.

Through the end of July, which vaguely sounds like June and so vaguely feels like you’re still in the first half of the year with a shot at salvaging something, you’re basically fine. Armpit is when you realize it’s too late, but can’t do anything about it. In September, you can formally write off the year as a deadweight loss booked in Q4, reset your horizons and start thinking about the next year or seven.

But for the 31 days of Armpit, if you have a brain, you’re in that sweaty, muggy, hopeless, newsless, atemporal state of mild-to-medium existential despair that is not even severe enough to justify active intervention. Like airplane food that is just short of bad enough to complain about. Where eating it versus going hungry seem like equally bad options. You kinda just have to get through it. It won’t be good no matter what you decide.

Europeans and VCs in America try to put lipstick on the pig by collectively going on “vacation” but as Plotz argues, the good vacation month is actually July. Armpit is when you kind of just take a weak swing at pretending to be alive to keep up appearances, since it is not polite to act dead in the West. Adults have beach-time poisoned by dreading Fall Budgeting Bureaucracy. Kids have their last few weeks of vacation poisoned by looming schoolwork. Nobody is having a good time, and most people don’t even have the energy to pretend.

Anybody who is enjoying Armpit is either clueless, or powered by energy drawn from the dark dimensions. All signs of life in Armpit are hollow and fake, a case of civilizational premium mediocrity on display (not coincidentally, I wrote that post in Armpit last year).

Armpit is awful everywhere on the planet (even the southern hemisphere I suspect), and I think the reason is that it is the truest glimpse we get of the human condition. Yes, we’re most likely to end up in an armpit future, not a dystopian or utopian one. And Armpit is the one month of the year we cannot avoid facing that fact, like Sisyphus in the moment just after he summits and watches the rock wobble portentously.

September is the dawn of new hope. Even the Eternal September of the online world, despite the generally n00b-infested, culture-warring craptitude of it, is tinged with hope and demented stupid energy. October through July we have The Struggle, when we manage to steal a shred or two of dignity from the universe.

Other naturally bad months during The Struggle, like blazing-furnace-hot July and calamitously cold and depressing January, at least have interesting social action going on. Or present the kind of urgent stress you can feel good about tackling head-on and overcoming. The plot is moving along even if most people have lost it.

But Armpit? Pure zombie month. Not even a villain of a month. The entropic heat-death month of the calendar, during which Time may or may not choose to regenerate. Beating August doesn’t even feel like a win.

Enjoy your last week of July. As with every Armpit, there’s a small chance we’ll never come out of it, and end up in an Eternal August armpit future.

Quiver Doodles

July 19, 2018 By

I don’t know if this is still true, but I once read about exploited workers in the ship-breaking industry who were worked so hard, and paid so little, they could not even afford to buy enough calories to sustain themselves. They were slowly starving to death. I call this phenomenon entropic ruin, a generalization of the idea of gambler’s ruin to open-ended games that can be non-zero-sum and need not involve gambling. In this case, it’s a deterministic death march. If you systematically consume fewer calories than you expend long term, you will die a premature death.

Entropic ruin gives us an interesting way to measure the quality of a strategy. Here’s a 12-point reference scale based on the idea.  Entropic ruin is represented as a reference circle in all 12 cases. A bunch of arrows shows the set of activities that are trying to outrun ruin. I call the drawings on the scale quiver doodles (think of each as a quiver viewed from above).

Trivially, in the long term, we all face the ultimate case of entropic ruin, death, but what’s interesting about non-trivial cases is that you don’t even beat the house in the short term. So entropic ruin can be defined as predictably dying faster than you need to. No matter what you are doing, you can draw a little circle of entropic ruin around your activities. If you’re inside that circle, you’re heading for premature death.

If you have (or are generating) abundance on every resource you might need in relation to your goals, you don’t need a strategy. The circle can shrink to zero. This is the other end of the spectrum from entropic ruin: entropic flourishing. A wealthy person who is earning more in interest on their capital than they can spend in a day is an example. The scale is really more of a 6-point scale that zig-zags between entropic ruin and flourishing up 6 levels between complete chaos (Brownian motion) to complete order (laser beam).

If you’ve been through the ups and downs of enough projects, the 12 quiver doodles on the scale probably make intuitive sense to you, but let me offer a bit of additional explanation for those who need it.

[Read more…]