Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
If the truth did matter there is very little evidence of it. Quite often a viewpoint from the empowered is sufficient. We seem to have done pretty well thinking the earth the center of the universe. Knowing the truth seemed to be reason enough to end up in the market square to be incinerated. The Group decides what is true. Consensus Truth on the one hand and Emotional Truth on the other are the only choices. The emergence of alternative truths to satisfy the many solipsists is an industry. We sell cars to people who need a mobile platform for their cell-phones and handbags. A coffee cup holder may not be enough soon a car will show up with an espresso machine. Robot butlers and robotic chauffeurs in the ultimate version. Selling or marketing technology claiming it will elevate one's status, while serving as auxiliary memory prosthetic devices. The cell phone removes the burden of remembering phone numbers and you can have a photo for faces you forgot. The new growth industry may well be machines that will speak for us performing in a selected Stage style. Shakespearian or perhaps Rabelaisian affectations. Can we synthesize Basil Rathbone in a Sherlock Holmes-ian style. Technology has a nasty side effect of making us stupid and proud of it. Without extremists who risk immolation the human race would still be cracking nuts with a rock. The failure of extremists to cohere is no doubt a trait that allows every extremist to think s/he is the only competent member of a group. Such people are often Control Freaks who use the talents of others to advance socially or monetarily. There are control freaks and there are gifted people. Control Freaks are a bit like a Prima Dona without the talent. A control freak joins teams simply to garner status and acclaim. Resume padding. Or in more advanced cases the goal is to acquire the IPR's. Team projects do not often succeed because of conflicts between aspiring control freaks. The way Boeing worked on the 747 development seems a marvel or high note of co-operation. Perhaps Lockheed had it right by developing the Skunk Works system deliberately excluding most managers but very extreme. The ethics are an entirely different issue. vib -Original Message- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels Sent: July-18-15 9:05 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q But the point I was trying to make with those 3 articles still stands: that people who join communities for community's sake are not necessarily only drags on, disrupters of the system. They provide something like a dampening baffle that traps and eliminates the noise of the extremists, the purposeful missionaries. In fact, without _enough_ of that sort of middling or joiner, a project is more at risk when/if extremists fail to cohere. And I think this is true in open source projects as well as proprietary ones. Right, but from the missionary's point of view, the truth is out there, and if one project dies another will fill its place.. It is the truth that matters. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
Glen writes: But, again, you're being very binary. Practically, each member will be a member in part because they're aligned ideologically, in part because they contribute to the mission, and in part for promotional/egotistical reasons. Those sets aren't disjoint, regardless of what the participants think about themselves. Sure, ideological and technical preferences and selfish motivators can be correlated and causality can be hard to pin down. I'm claiming in my case low correlation, but not no correlation. Suppose individual preferences are represented by universal bit strings. The bit strings can encode floating point numbers or yes/no, or triples to say yes/no/don't care, or programs or whatever.Then there are other bit strings representing something global like Hackage, or the Library of Congress, a software company's intellectual property, or what's on Food Network.Couple all the individual preferences to the global bit strings as an Ising system with random weights. A clever marketing department (or a politician) figures out what bits matter and directs resources to select/change their bits to change frustration in the system to make their bits more crucial -- to be towards the center of the network.They can only have so many bits, so they have to choose the right ones.User-facing tools are an instance of those bits that happen to be strongly correlated to a lot of other individuals' bits. It's arbitrary what the semantics are for the bits. It's just history and a popularity contest. But investment will occur in controlling the state of an evolving set of owned bits so as to maximize influence the evolution of other bits. Meanwhile, preference bits of an individual have broader connectivity to other preferences (and their own) and global state bits. Different communities would be seen from the user-facing software vendor as isolated graphs given some minimum cutoff for what is a connection, and their cutoff would be relatively h igh compared to a free software developer. My claim is that free software developers, and GPL developers in particular, have a preference for exploring this broader type of connectivity, and are especially interested in the frustration of the interconnections amongst the global bits than in the relationship between individual preference bits or the relationship between the individual and global bits. Any slice or subset of bits might not be interesting by itself, but the concept of growing and compressing the totality of global bits is a core value. If FOO and BAR represent different kinds of strong technical preferences then that could explain why cooperation around multi-aspect software is harder. There's too much to fight about. But then consider loose cooperative efforts like Hackage, or CTAN, CPAN, CRAN, etc. each representing millions of lines of code. To say these aren't multi-aspect is absurd. They are very, very high dimensional, interdependent, and open-ended. Yes, but it would be a stretch to think of things like CPAN as user-facing tools. They are more middle-ware or back-end. At best, you can only think of the front-end script that accesses the databases as the front-end part. And that's certainly not multi-aspect. That /usr/bin/cpan script has a very narrow focus in handling the packages. I don't mean the script or the tool to manage the collection, I mean the collection. These collective efforts are more like federations than applications. And federations are methodological approaches to handling large sets of opinionated members ... like the EU or the US. They are explicitly _designed_ to handle the extremists and their _splat_ of opinions on everything under the sun, because they allow even the extremists a way to focus in on the minimal agreement required to cooperate. This goes back to the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar. Large commercial organizations aren't automatically cathedrals just because they assert a mission. A plan needs to be identified and socialized over and over. That negotiation acts more like a Bazaar -- figuring who can do what, who they can work with, and how to reward and control them. A small organization of like-minded people can take the cathedral approach straight away but will be limited by available manpower. (Assuming there is in fact a distinction between conceptual work and detail work at all.) Large hierarchical organizations of the kind that make most user-facing software have some small group of people making executive decisions. They are just people though and not _that_ much better than the people on the leaves of the tree. So they cannot take on fundamentally _harder_ problems, they can only keep throwing human resources at it, provided they can keep their story straight about what problem they are solving. A hard problem is one that takes more intelligence to solve and that will be limited
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On 07/17/2015 09:44 PM, Russell Standish wrote: I do know about emacs. It survives, because it is bloody good at being a text editor, particular for programming. I suppose vi is the same - I've seen some people make vi stand up and sing, but for me, its behaviour when interacting with vt100 style terminals has always put me off. I agree (that both emacs and vi) are good text editors. But emacs, at least, is much more than just a text editor. I've used emacs as a window manager, spreadsheet, IDE, file manager, database, etc. It definitely has multiple and diverse aspects. But Marcus is right that it doesn't field the morons (or pander to users). The same is perhaps even more true of vi. You have to be a particular type of person to use the tool. But I think I disagree slightly with Marcus. Although it doesn't _pander_ to users, it provides a very navigable (damn near user-friendly, actually) exception system. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what went wrong when you do something stupid. You just have to be a little persistent. Such an exception system is always necessary for a tool with such a diverse set of functions. And that is in contrast to the sharply focused tools that dominate open source software. Mess up the configuration of, say, postfix, and you could spend a long while trying to figure out what you did wrong. So emacs is much more like libreoffice than it may seem at first glance. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On 07/17/2015 11:22 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: My claim is that free software developers, and GPL developers in particular, have a preference for exploring this broader type of connectivity, and are especially interested in the frustration of the interconnections amongst the global bits than in the relationship between individual preference bits or the relationship between the individual and global bits. Any slice or subset of bits might not be interesting by itself, but the concept of growing and compressing the totality of global bits is a core value. OK. Yes, I agree for the most part. Free developers will usually have a more synoptic view of software and more ... cumulative (for lack of a better term) goals. But the point I was trying to make with those 3 articles still stands: that people who join communities for community's sake are not necessarily only drags on, disrupters of the system. They provide something like a dampening baffle that traps and eliminates the noise of the extremists, the purposeful missionaries. In fact, without _enough_ of that sort of middling or joiner, a project is more at risk when/if extremists fail to cohere. And I think this is true in open source projects as well as proprietary ones. A hard problem is one that takes more intelligence to solve and that will be limited by individual human ability, not just orderly communication and a command and control apparatus. I'm still not convinced. 8^) I think there are some hard problems that succumb to the wisdom of crowds and brute force ... but then again, I've spent the overwhelming majority of my career writing simulations, which are numerical solutions to problems I'm not smart enough to solve analytically. So, of course, I'd have that bias, eh? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
But the point I was trying to make with those 3 articles still stands: that people who join communities for community's sake are not necessarily only drags on, disrupters of the system. They provide something like a dampening baffle that traps and eliminates the noise of the extremists, the purposeful missionaries. In fact, without _enough_ of that sort of middling or joiner, a project is more at risk when/if extremists fail to cohere. And I think this is true in open source projects as well as proprietary ones. Right, but from the missionary's point of view, the truth is out there, and if one project dies another will fill its place.. It is the truth that matters. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On 07/15/2015 08:08 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: If one wants a tool to do a job, why would that person have more opinions about tools not in that category?They just want that kind of tool. If FOO and BAR are competing, then it is different because BAR is like non-FOO. But that's not about being opinionated, that's about protecting an investment. FOO and BAR don't need to represent an ideology, just some random goal that for whatever reason the supporters happen to grow a community around. Well, we had been talking about community for community's sake. If we assume that the 2 categories (community purely for mission vs. community for the sake of community) are not disjoint and that there's a spectrum between them, then it's relatively easy to see how a given community, if large enough, will contain a mix of ideology and practice. In other words, we can assume everyone has at least a little ideology, even if it only manifests as slight preferences (like vi over emacs). If FOO and BAR represent ideologies, cohesion can help. For example, I would always choose to work on GPLed software rather than not if my intent is to make it free. In practice, that would typically mean to add-value to someone else's tool. My selection criteria is the philosophy behind the GPL, not the details of the tool itself (provided the tool is technically adequate). I know other people that can't imagine adding value to another person's tool. While they might give their work away, they would do it for promotional or egotistical reasons. They don't have this community's ideology. But, again, you're being very binary. Practically, each member will be a member in part because they're aligned ideologically, in part because they contribute to the mission, and in part for promotional/egotistical reasons. Those sets aren't disjoint, regardless of what the participants think about themselves. If FOO and BAR represent different kinds of strong technical preferences then that could explain why cooperation around multi-aspect software is harder. There's too much to fight about. But then consider loose cooperative efforts like Hackage, or CTAN, CPAN, CRAN, etc. each representing millions of lines of code. To say these aren't multi-aspect is absurd. They are very, very high dimensional, interdependent, and open-ended. Yes, but it would be a stretch to think of things like CPAN as user-facing tools. They are more middle-ware or back-end. At best, you can only think of the front-end script that accesses the databases as the front-end part. And that's certainly not multi-aspect. That /usr/bin/cpan script has a very narrow focus in handling the packages. These collective efforts are more like federations than applications. And federations are methodological approaches to handling large sets of opinionated members ... like the EU or the US. They are explicitly _designed_ to handle the extremists and their _splat_ of opinions on everything under the sun, because they allow even the extremists a way to focus in on the minimal agreement required to cooperate. So, collectives like Hackage et al don't bolster your argument, they refute it. They're examples that the members with loud opinions on one thing are likely to have loud opinions on other things. Hence, a federation is needed to help them minimize the amount of agreement required to cooperate. So I'll return to the view that proprietary mainstream user-facing software holds its place not because it is multi-aspect, but because its aspects are well understood and curated (and as Roger points out the marketing and product development are intertwined). Emacs is user facing but in contrast users come to appreciate Emacs rather than Emacs coming to appreciate (pander to) its users.Emacs is what its developer base wants it to be and everyone else can get lost. Programs like LibreOffice or maybe Eclipse do bolster your argument, I think. I don't know about Emacs. It's a strange beast that I think has survived for reasons other than coherence around a mission. But I'm certainly willing to be wrong, there. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 08:10:09PM -0700, glen wrote: Programs like LibreOffice or maybe Eclipse do bolster your argument, I think. I don't know about Emacs. It's a strange beast that I think has survived for reasons other than coherence around a mission. But I'm certainly willing to be wrong, there. I do know about emacs. It survives, because it is bloody good at being a text editor, particular for programming. I suppose vi is the same - I've seen some people make vi stand up and sing, but for me, its behaviour when interacting with vt100 style terminals has always put me off. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On 07/15/2015 05:07 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: To tie this back to the original question, I was thinking of actual open source projects. It is common when a group of people form to build a software package that the concept for what the capability is, is reasonably clear to the founding members. Make a better FOO. Then, some other people come along and don't understand that mission or try to advocate a different mission, like another BAR mission. The relevance of their input can be higher if they are productive people, but often they are not, and they are just in the way and taking up space, participating in advocacy of dubious value, etc.It is different from a commercial enterprise in so far as make a better FOO is measured some way other than by ROI in money. Better can mean technical properties that the group understands and see worth pursuing for its own sake. Yes, but the same hypothesis applies: those with the most extreme opinions (about FOO or BAR) will have more extreme opinions about non-FOO or non-BAR, creating noise of dubious value. And that would allow the middlings to be both productive _and_ there primarily for the sake of being part of the community, with little skin in FOO or BAR. Unless what you're saying is that, in your experience, the hypothesis does not hold ... that, perhaps particularly where $$ isn't the measure, the extremists can have only extreme opinions about the 1 thing and that it's the cohesion of the extremists that predicts success? But if that's what you're saying, then it's _not_ an argument for why there are fewer user-facing open-source tools than back-end open-source tools. Since user-facing tools tend to be multi-aspect, if the hypothesis is false and someone holding extreme views about one aspect can have middling views about all the other aspects, then they can be just as productive re: the aspects on which they don't hold extreme views. Similarly, they can cooperate nicely with others who hold extreme views about other aspects. But if the hypothesis is right, then getting a FOO-extremist to work productively with a BAR-extremist will be difficult because they'll both be extremists in both aspects: hence user-facing tools will likely be built for money, not ideology. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella Then I'm afraid you'll have to cry FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
I suspect that aspirations are, like most ideological constructs, less causal than we think they are. Going back to what Marcus actually meant, it seems to me that (most) humans are so ultimately/fundamentally social, that all they _ever_ do is seek out community just for the comfort of being in the community ... that those of us who look for, or form, or switch amongst, communities in order to achieve various objectives are somehow psychopaths ... or narcissists, abusers or exploiters. In that same vein, these articles caught my eye: http://www.girlfriendcircles.com/blog/index.php/2013/08/not-a-joiner-club-class-meet-people-make-friends/ http://www.salon.com/2015/07/11/addiction_is_not_a_disease_how_aa_and_12_step_programs_erect_barriers_while_attempting_to_relieve_suffering/ http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/10/joiners-v-middlers.html The last one, in particular, seems to imply that those who are most likely to think a community really has a mission (as opposed to the illusion of a mission) are the most extreme of the bunch, the hard-liners, the obnoxious ones. Everyone else just kinda buys into it (or the illusion of it) and goes about socializing. With AA, perhaps what happens is that most people just join the community to burn time and socialize _until_ they spontaneously mature out of their habit (the extremes become evangelicals or have lots of lapses). As such, perhaps rather than people voting according to their aspirations, they just vote according to whatever forcing structures their embedding social system tells them to vote for. I hope I'm wrong and you're right, because this would make me a psychopath, narcissist, abuser, exploiter, et al, concept with which I don't really want to identify. 8^) On 07/15/2015 02:34 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote: Sometimes I wonder if our society may in fact be a collaboration of the criminal minded. The fact that it appears to promote civilization seems a convenient Cover-Up story. If money is the only incentive how can we distinguish corporation execs from drug lords or war lords. Even the courts seem to be nothing more than an appendage of the system that defines itself as much as politicians define their labours as Hard work, deserving of ample rewards. Well I am somewhat cheered that a machine is delivering pictures from Pluto. Civilization thrives beyond the planet but apparently not in our neighborhoods. Let 's assume civilization and society have less in common than a Hot dog vendor and a bank robber. Given a choice the people would always vote for the one that appears to represent what common people aspire to be... Glamourous Rascals. -- ⇔ glen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
The last one, in particular, seems to imply that those who are most likely to think a community really has a mission (as opposed to the illusion of a mission) are the most extreme of the bunch, the hard-liners, the obnoxious ones. To tie this back to the original question, I was thinking of actual open source projects. It is common when a group of people form to build a software package that the concept for what the capability is, is reasonably clear to the founding members. Make a better FOO. Then, some other people come along and don't understand that mission or try to advocate a different mission, like another BAR mission. The relevance of their input can be higher if they are productive people, but often they are not, and they are just in the way and taking up space, participating in advocacy of dubious value, etc.It is different from a commercial enterprise in so far as make a better FOO is measured some way other than by ROI in money. Better can mean technical properties that the group understands and see worth pursuing for its own sake. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
Sometimes I wonder if our society may in fact be a collaboration of the criminal minded. The fact that it appears to promote civilization seems a convenient Cover-Up story. If money is the only incentive how can we distinguish corporation execs from drug lords or war lords. Even the courts seem to be nothing more than an appendage of the system that defines itself as much as politicians define their labours as Hard work, deserving of ample rewards. Well I am somewhat cheered that a machine is delivering pictures from Pluto. Civilization thrives beyond the planet but apparently not in our neighborhoods. Let 's assume civilization and society have less in common than a Hot dog vendor and a bank robber. Given a choice the people would always vote for the one that appears to represent what common people aspire to be... Glamourous Rascals. vib -Original Message- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen Sent: July-14-15 7:06 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q I'd (probably wrongly) interpreted Marcus' comment to mean something about keeping the corporate drones (who can't imagine doing work for anything other than incentive) away from people who have the knowledge to create weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological weapons ... hence, the article about DIYBio myths. It was a little bit of agreement with a little bit of disagreement combined. BTW-FWIW, since we're talking about motivation vs. incentive, I just saw this in my inbox: The Ethics of Whistleblowing with Edward Snowden http://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/ethics-whistleblowing-edward-snowden John: A lot of people see you as a hero. But others, intelligent ones too, have called you a narcissistic traitor ... How do you see yourself at this point? Snowden: I don't think about myself. I don't think about how I'm going to be perceived, because it's not about me. It's about us. This is the type of thing that makes me think Snowden is, at least, disingenuous, if not worse. He's clearly not afflicted with any of the major psych disorders that prevent him from reflective thought. Hence, he _does_ think about himself and how he'll be perceived. If he'd just answer the damned question honestly ... like Hell yeah, I think about myself and how I'm perceived! I think about how my fellow US citizens view me. I think about how/whether they want to know the information I leaked, whether a jury of my peers would convict me if presented with the evidence ... Etc. If he'd answer that way, I might start to trust him. Instead he answers with this pseudo-altrustic nonsense, public-relations/politician-speak. Ugh. On 07/14/2015 04:43 PM, Parks, Raymond wrote: So, I'm not getting the relevance of the DIYBio movement to Marcus' comment. Are you suggesting that it is an example of community for community's sake? On Jul 14, 2015, at 4:15 PM, glen wrote: On 07/14/2015 02:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: Sometimes I think circles such as yours and the people Glen is talking about just must be kept apart from one another, if they don’t avoid each other naturally.That’s about as close I get to advocating community for community’s sake. http://phys.org/news/2013-11-first-ever-survey-do-it-yourself-biology -myths.html -- ⇔ glen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
“I ask because it'd seem like a business wouldn't want to use something where they couldn't see the code (for instance).” Because employers and employees are different people, and the individuals that would want to see the code details (and could interpret and act on them) tend to be employees (i.e. specialists in organization), it is common for those employees or their superiors to look at the issue in terms of risk reduction. Risk can be reduced by buying/licensing a product with a support agreement or buying insurance of some sort. There’s a way to pass the buck. There are situations in which this is terrible behavior, like when lives could be a risk if a failure occurs. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On 07/13/2015 07:39 PM, Russell Standish wrote: What I see is that proprietry software is just the visible tip of the iceberg, but its largely open source underneath. Me too. I'd be interested to see some sort of analysis of software pathways, chains of software packages that were hit when a large sample of use cases were exercised. I'd guess that pretty much any use case that involves the internet relies on open source somewhere in the chain. The only proprietary package I use on a regular basis is Quickbooks. I don't think I need to see the chains invoked when I, say, download a tax table update or submit payroll for a direct deposit. But I would like to see the chain invoked when I, say, Save to PDF. I'd also like to know which tools they use to make their data files sharable across multiple clients. I can imagine those chains are all proprietary and licensed ... but I have no idea. On that same front, Gary's right about that last 20%. But user-facing software has a much harder last 20% than what happens behind the scenes _because_ those occult tools are allowed to be very focused, tight, and single purpose, whereas user-facing tools have to handle, ameliorate, shunt, faciliate the myriad things a general intelligence can/will do. User facing tools have to deal with morons and geniuses, whereas internal tools can get away with well-defined contracts. Another factor, I think is the old saw that we humans only want to pay for things we can see/touch ourselves. This may be more true of Americans than elsewhere (based on how much we bitch about our relatively low taxes). But I think it's fairly natural to object to, say, hidden fees at banks or for childless couples funding schools through property taxes. So, it may not be so much that proprietary software pays to do that last 20% of work, so much as that nobody will pay for anything but the user-facing equipment. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
For many front end developers, jQuery/jQueryUI is what they mean when they say I know JavaScript. And with more apps (mobile) moving to web frameworks (React, say) Node.js/Linux for services, I'd say there's a healthy bunch of OpenWare out there. Totally agree that the user-facing parts are all in-house. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
I think the issue with that last 20% of user facing software is that it's very expensive to run the marketing campaigns to persuade users that it's really, really good when in fact it sucks, especially when your competitors are working very hard at marketing their own brands of sucky user interfaces. Most software is very hard to use, you only get good at it by investing your own time in learning the ins and outs of tons of stuff that doesn't make much sense, and if you take some time off from using it you will lose the hardest earned skills and find yourself making the same noobie mistakes all over again as you rediscover how it works. All the fanbois are right, all the other fanbois are deluded to think their preferred software is intrinsically better. That said, it is quite amazing how much of the web is powered by open source. It would be instructive to have a browser plugin that checked for open source javascript inclusions and showed a little scoreboard for each web page visited. Scroll down to the Examples section at backbonejs.org and look at who uses it to build websites, though the list is probably sorely out of date.. -- rec -- On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Marcus Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote: On that same front, Gary's right about that last 20%. But user-facing software has a much harder last 20% than what happens behind the scenes _because_ those occult tools are allowed to be very focused, tight, and single purpose, whereas user-facing tools have to handle, ameliorate, shunt, faciliate the myriad things a general intelligence can/will do. User facing tools have to deal with morons and geniuses, whereas internal tools can get away with well-defined contracts. Although there is open source software for office and accounting, I can't imagine wanting to spend my free time on such a thing.It is just boring and depressing to think about.I don't think it has anything to do with it being hard. Hard is New Horizons.. Meanwhile, as Gary points out, the commercial World of Boring circles the wagons around music streaming and participation in mobile app markets, banking, and other such things so that they can control prices.The software is coupled to the protocols and one would have to buy-in (with $$$) to see how the pieces fit together and make free alternatives. What a hassle. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
Motivation is such a subjective thing. Like most people, I like to work on things that are at least a little challenging intellectually, but sometimes, just seeing the end result and knowing that I did it is reward enough to make the tedium bearable. A few years back, I did a bunch of very tedious work that synchronized video of conference speakers with their slide presentations NM INBRE. The idea was to create a Flash presentation that showed the video of the speaker, but displayed static images (taken from the PPT presentation) representing the auditorium's screen. This saved a lot of bandwidth compared to streaming a composite video of both the speaker and the actual screen, and in the 2006 timeframe, really was necessary. So, I had “capture” video from tape from two sources (speaker and screen); scrub through the two resulting videos, recording slide translation timings; export and trim images for each slide; compress video into appropriate formats; import images and video into Flash, and enter the timings that I recorded; etc etc. All that multiplied by 10 or more speakers, it took me over a month to complete. Kind of like mowing your lawn with a pair of fingernail clippers. I automated as much as I could, but given the number of tools that I had to deal with, I really didn’t have time to automate very much. So, I just became a robot for a month or so. But the end result was very nice for the time, and despite lack of intellectual challenges, was one of my proudest accomplishments that I was able to make myself stick to it. In fact, I even did the same robot work again the next year. I’ve always been meaning to get to automating that type of work... On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 2:19 PM, Marcus Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote: Interesting vs. boring is orthogonal. So, there's interesting-hard and boring-hard. I'll accept money for either type of work, though I much prefer interesting-hard ... obviously. How about engaging, imaginative, educational, or surprising work vs. detail work. Doing detail work may be delayed gratification or it can no purpose other than to respond to extrinsic motivation.Remove the extrinsic motivation (money), and it is boring and depressing. Ok, if one is tasked with making an app to print checks, it could be educational to learn how to put widgets on a screen or to do page layout. What that discovery process is over, either another naïve person is needed or extrinsic motivation. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
Both of these comments touch on something that irritates me quite a bit. Because I have a chip on my shoulder and enjoy confrontation, I regularly apply for jobs even when I'm only a tiny bit interested in changing jobs. (Plus, who knows? Maybe someone will make a really good offer.) In doing so, I often apply for jobs for which I'm over qualified. I don't get paid much for what I _am_ qualified to do. So, it wouldn't be much of a hit to take a job for which I'm over qualified. These jobs almost always have something educational about them. I regard the education as part of the compensation. I'm willing to take a lot less money in exchange for the chance to learn-on-the-job. The interviewers never seem to understand that point. When it comes down to the practicals of offering me a job, they often get caught by my inadequate answers to the question Why would you want to do these jobs, for this salary? Why give up what you have already? I don't know ... YOLO? It happens so often, perhaps I should be less enthusiastic about whatever projects I'm working on at any given time. Maybe if I'm all grumpy about the sh!t I have to do, I'd get less complaints about me being over qualified for some other job ... which obviously I'm not. My incompetence knows no bounds. I've never had a boring job, from selling carpet water proofing door-to-door, to sacking groceries, selling electronic parts at the university store, flowcharting assembly code for obsolete avionics, etc. There are always boring tasks to every job, but the jobs have never been boring in their entirety. In any case, it seems to me like incentive is always weaker than motivation, regardless of the dimensions involved. But, then again, I'm a white male from a middle-class household in the US. So, surely that biases me. On 07/14/2015 01:05 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote: Motivation is such a subjective thing. Like most people, I like to work on things that are at least a little challenging intellectually, but sometimes, just seeing the end result and knowing that I did it is reward enough to make the tedium bearable. A few years back, I did a bunch of very tedious work that synchronized video of conference speakers with their slide presentations NM INBRE. The idea was to create a Flash presentation that showed the video of the speaker, but displayed static images (taken from the PPT presentation) representing the auditorium's screen. This saved a lot of bandwidth compared to streaming a composite video of both the speaker and the actual screen, and in the 2006 timeframe, really was necessary. So, I had “capture” video from tape from two sources (speaker and screen); scrub through the two resulting videos, recording slide translation timings; export and trim images for each slide; compress video into appropriate formats; import images and video into Flash, and enter the timings that I recorded; etc etc. All that multiplied by 10 or more speakers, it took me over a month to complete. Kind of like mowing your lawn with a pair of fingernail clippers. I automated as much as I could, but given the number of tools that I had to deal with, I really didn’t have time to automate very much. So, I just became a robot for a month or so. But the end result was very nice for the time, and despite lack of intellectual challenges, was one of my proudest accomplishments that I was able to make myself stick to it. In fact, I even did the same robot work again the next year. I’ve always been meaning to get to automating that type of work... On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 2:19 PM, Marcus Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote: Interesting vs. boring is orthogonal. So, there's interesting-hard and boring-hard. I'll accept money for either type of work, though I much prefer interesting-hard ... obviously. How about engaging, imaginative, educational, or surprising work vs. detail work. Doing detail work may be delayed gratification or it can no purpose other than to respond to extrinsic motivation.Remove the extrinsic motivation (money), and it is boring and depressing. Ok, if one is tasked with making an app to print checks, it could be educational to learn how to put widgets on a screen or to do page layout. What that discovery process is over, either another naïve person is needed or extrinsic motivation. Marcus -- ⇔ glen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
Interesting vs. boring is orthogonal. So, there's interesting-hard and boring-hard. I'll accept money for either type of work, though I much prefer interesting-hard ... obviously. How about engaging, imaginative, educational, or surprising work vs. detail work. Doing detail work may be delayed gratification or it can no purpose other than to respond to extrinsic motivation.Remove the extrinsic motivation (money), and it is boring and depressing. Ok, if one is tasked with making an app to print checks, it could be educational to learn how to put widgets on a screen or to do page layout. What that discovery process is over, either another naïve person is needed or extrinsic motivation. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
I was taking a broader swipe at how much of society and the economy is setup to pigeonhole people into being one thing. Find a role, stick with it, don't shoot too high or too low. Stability and identity, as an aim in itself. The need for community is to create a platform for parting with conservative values to explore other values, values a community can just invent. Unfortunately, the people that seek out these communities can become burdens on the community's mission if they seek comfort in the group rather than add momentum to its purpose.No, I don't care about the people who know how to do things finding common ground with corporate drones.It's not about good and evil or safety and danger.It's about the purposeless and ordinary draining the will and attention of the unique and interesting.Universities, labs, DIY biology groups at least protect that to some extent but each have their pluses and minuses. -Original Message- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2015 6:24 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q I'd (probably wrongly) interpreted Marcus' comment to mean something about keeping the corporate drones (who can't imagine doing work for anything other than incentive) away from people who have the knowledge to create weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological weapons ... hence, the article about DIYBio myths. It was a little bit of agreement with a little bit of disagreement combined. BTW-FWIW, since we're talking about motivation vs. incentive, I just saw this in my inbox: The Ethics of Whistleblowing with Edward Snowden http://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/ethics-whistleblowing-edward-snowden John: A lot of people see you as a hero. But others, intelligent ones too, have called you a narcissistic traitor ... How do you see yourself at this point? Snowden: I don't think about myself. I don't think about how I'm going to be perceived, because it's not about me. It's about us. This is the type of thing that makes me think Snowden is, at least, disingenuous, if not worse. He's clearly not afflicted with any of the major psych disorders that prevent him from reflective thought. Hence, he _does_ think about himself and how he'll be perceived. If he'd just answer the damned question honestly ... like Hell yeah, I think about myself and how I'm perceived! I think about how my fellow US citizens view me. I think about how/whether they want to know the information I leaked, whether a jury of my peers would convict me if presented with the evidence ... Etc. If he'd answer that way, I might start to trust him. Instead he answers with this pseudo-altrustic nonsense, public-relations/politician-speak. Ugh. On 07/14/2015 04:43 PM, Parks, Raymond wrote: So, I'm not getting the relevance of the DIYBio movement to Marcus' comment. Are you suggesting that it is an example of community for community's sake? On Jul 14, 2015, at 4:15 PM, glen wrote: On 07/14/2015 02:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: Sometimes I think circles such as yours and the people Glen is talking about just must be kept apart from one another, if they don’t avoid each other naturally.That’s about as close I get to advocating community for community’s sake. http://phys.org/news/2013-11-first-ever-survey-do-it-yourself-biology -myths.html -- ⇔ glen -- ⇔ glen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
I'd (probably wrongly) interpreted Marcus' comment to mean something about keeping the corporate drones (who can't imagine doing work for anything other than incentive) away from people who have the knowledge to create weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological weapons ... hence, the article about DIYBio myths. It was a little bit of agreement with a little bit of disagreement combined. BTW-FWIW, since we're talking about motivation vs. incentive, I just saw this in my inbox: The Ethics of Whistleblowing with Edward Snowden http://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/ethics-whistleblowing-edward-snowden John: A lot of people see you as a hero. But others, intelligent ones too, have called you a narcissistic traitor ... How do you see yourself at this point? Snowden: I don't think about myself. I don't think about how I'm going to be perceived, because it's not about me. It's about us. This is the type of thing that makes me think Snowden is, at least, disingenuous, if not worse. He's clearly not afflicted with any of the major psych disorders that prevent him from reflective thought. Hence, he _does_ think about himself and how he'll be perceived. If he'd just answer the damned question honestly ... like Hell yeah, I think about myself and how I'm perceived! I think about how my fellow US citizens view me. I think about how/whether they want to know the information I leaked, whether a jury of my peers would convict me if presented with the evidence ... Etc. If he'd answer that way, I might start to trust him. Instead he answers with this pseudo-altrustic nonsense, public-relations/politician-speak. Ugh. On 07/14/2015 04:43 PM, Parks, Raymond wrote: So, I'm not getting the relevance of the DIYBio movement to Marcus' comment. Are you suggesting that it is an example of community for community's sake? On Jul 14, 2015, at 4:15 PM, glen wrote: On 07/14/2015 02:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: Sometimes I think circles such as yours and the people Glen is talking about just must be kept apart from one another, if they don’t avoid each other naturally.That’s about as close I get to advocating community for community’s sake. http://phys.org/news/2013-11-first-ever-survey-do-it-yourself-biology-myths.html -- ⇔ glen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
I'd (probably wrongly) interpreted Marcus' comment to mean something about keeping the corporate drones (who can't imagine doing work for anything other than incentive) away from people who have the knowledge to create weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological weapons ... hence, the article about DIYBio myths. It was a little bit of agreement with a little bit of disagreement combined. BTW-FWIW, since we're talking about motivation vs. incentive, I just saw this in my inbox: The Ethics of Whistleblowing with Edward Snowden http://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/ethics-whistleblowing-edward-snowden John: A lot of people see you as a hero. But others, intelligent ones too, have called you a narcissistic traitor ... How do you see yourself at this point? Snowden: I don't think about myself. I don't think about how I'm going to be perceived, because it's not about me. It's about us. This is the type of thing that makes me think Snowden is, at least, disingenuous, if not worse. He's clearly not afflicted with any of the major psych disorders that prevent him from reflective thought. Hence, he _does_ think about himself and how he'll be perceived. If he'd just answer the damned question honestly ... like Hell yeah, I think about myself and how I'm perceived! I think about how my fellow US citizens view me. I think about how/whether they want to know the information I leaked, whether a jury of my peers would convict me if presented with the evidence ... Etc. If he'd answer that way, I might start to trust him. Instead he answers with this pseudo-altrustic nonsense, public-relations/politician-speak. Ugh. On 07/14/2015 04:43 PM, Parks, Raymond wrote: So, I'm not getting the relevance of the DIYBio movement to Marcus' comment. Are you suggesting that it is an example of community for community's sake? On Jul 14, 2015, at 4:15 PM, glen wrote: On 07/14/2015 02:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: Sometimes I think circles such as yours and the people Glen is talking about just must be kept apart from one another, if they don’t avoid each other naturally.That’s about as close I get to advocating community for community’s sake. http://phys.org/news/2013-11-first-ever-survey-do-it-yourself-biology-myths.html -- ⇔ glen -- ⇔ glen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On 07/14/2015 10:24 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: Although there is open source software for office and accounting, I can't imagine wanting to spend my free time on such a thing.It is just boring and depressing to think about.I don't think it has anything to do with it being hard. Hard is New Horizons.. Well, you're a much better programmer than I am, even easy things are hard for me. I tend to think of hard as synonymous with work. Interesting vs. boring is orthogonal. So, there's interesting-hard and boring-hard. I'll accept money for either type of work, though I much prefer interesting-hard ... obviously. Interestingly, there are also interesting-easy tasks; and whether one should pay others to do interesting-easy tasks is an interesting question. (Hah! 4 uses of the same term in the same sentence! My gift to the compressors.) Meanwhile, as Gary points out, the commercial World of Boring circles the wagons around music streaming and participation in mobile app markets, banking, and other such things so that they can control prices.The software is coupled to the protocols and one would have to buy-in (with $$$) to see how the pieces fit together and make free alternatives. What a hassle. Yeah, it blows my mind what people will pay for. There's also this article: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/13/apple-inc-continues-to-dominate-smartphone-profits.aspx Furthermore, of the world's eight largest smartphone makers, Apple captured 92% of operating profits in Q1, according to data compiled by Canaccord Genuity (via The Wall Street Journal). I can't, for the life of me, imagine buying an Apple product except when some client/project demands it. What are these people thinking? 8^) -- ⇔ glen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On that same front, Gary's right about that last 20%. But user-facing software has a much harder last 20% than what happens behind the scenes _because_ those occult tools are allowed to be very focused, tight, and single purpose, whereas user-facing tools have to handle, ameliorate, shunt, faciliate the myriad things a general intelligence can/will do. User facing tools have to deal with morons and geniuses, whereas internal tools can get away with well-defined contracts. Although there is open source software for office and accounting, I can't imagine wanting to spend my free time on such a thing.It is just boring and depressing to think about.I don't think it has anything to do with it being hard. Hard is New Horizons.. Meanwhile, as Gary points out, the commercial World of Boring circles the wagons around music streaming and participation in mobile app markets, banking, and other such things so that they can control prices.The software is coupled to the protocols and one would have to buy-in (with $$$) to see how the pieces fit together and make free alternatives. What a hassle. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
When you say “app”, I assume you’re talking about mobile; is that correct? Even if you consider all non-server software, even stuff that runs on desktops, I think it’s still pretty miniscule (I don’t have numbers to back it up). In my opinion, the reason that open source software has made so little inroads into consumer-facing applications generally is that it’s relatively easy (and fun) to get software about 80% “finished” (perhaps in lines of code), and relatively hard (and boring) to get the last 20%. That 20% represents things like a polished, consistent user interface and good end user documentation. Usually, only a profit motive is enough to get developers through that boring, hard part. As far as mobile apps go, we at least started out with a less sophisticated user base (phone users) than we had with desktop and laptop users, so software and its installation have got to be incredibly easy in order to attract users. For the most part, this means “app stores”, primarily the iTunes Store and Google Play. The iTunes store requires going through the difficult and uncertain process of getting an app approved in order for someone to even be able to use it, even if it is free. The only alternative is “jailbreaking” the phone, which I imagine only a very small percentage of users are interested in. Android’s “sideloading” is an alternative for that OS, but again, most users won’t go to the trouble. So, in order for a company or individual to be willing to go through all the pain of getting an app approved, a profit motive is usually required. That’s my 2cents worth. Gary On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 8:44 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.com wrote: Speculative Q: Anyone care to speculate why Open Source apps not have gotten much traction out side some exceptions? I ask because it'd seem like a business wouldn't want to use something where they couldn't see the code (for instance). FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] speculative Q
On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 07:44:35PM -0600, Gillian Densmore wrote: Speculative Q: Anyone care to speculate why Open Source apps not have gotten much traction out side some exceptions? I ask because it'd seem like a business wouldn't want to use something where they couldn't see the code (for instance). As a developer working in commercial software houses for the last decade, I would say the complete opposite has been my experience. Whilst they may be Windows/Office centric, and in some cases Visual Studio, open source software plays a big role, whether it be the Linux server for doing continuous integration, or database functions, Postgres is used in preference to MSSQL or Oracle, subversion or git instead of MS Source Safe, and hundreds of other open source libraries used, such as boost or cairo. What I see is that proprietry software is just the visible tip of the iceberg, but its largely open source underneath. And the reason - it's so easy to do - just slop in a library when you need some functionality, no management approval needed, aside from being a little bit careful around the use of GPL'ed software. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
