2024-05-16: Code, Cards, Bums
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did At Work Today
1. Code-headed
I could never have been a programmer — I'm not a good coder, for one thing, but also because the kick I get from doing even my bad programming is far too heady. It's like heroin. I achieve a little thing, and I'm reeling in intellectual pleasure for hours. I'd be a computer bum, like Stewart Brand 🄽 s 1972 Rolling Stone article "S P A C E W A R", Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" that started the whole media revolution in how technologists are presented. You can get demos of Spacewar by its original coders at the Computer History Museum, by the way. Anyway, I am a bit high on playing around with the Anytype code. I'm not totally recommending it, yet, but it's stuck in my head and I thought you should know.
2. Worried about Maintenance
Very very informally, but we're probably going to use and adopt Singularity 🄽 for a few projects at FFDW. The nucleated company that was going to take it on didn't happen for a few reasons, but we have some partners who are using it, so we're fostering it in-house. It's made me think and talk a lot about what it takes to maintain a piece of software. I feel like I'm running too much on my internal vibes and experience. Does anyone have any good books or papers about the Gentle Art of Maintenance? Apart from the aforementioned Stewart Brand's The Maintenance Race which I think is the first chapter of a probably unfinished book.
3. Interconnected
When I'm in coding mode, I fall a little from human grace. I think I swap out the bit of my brain that I use to connect with other people, when I connect with machines. Lots of today was me being slow at understanding, or quick to misunderstand. Part of the trick is to set aside a little part of my brain that watches out for this failing, and gently steers me back on course.
TIL
- A standard 52-card deck has roughly 80000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 possible configurations. If you shuffle it fairly, chances are you've created a card order that has never before existed and never will again. (From Tim Clare, reminding me about 52 factorial)
Links Du Jour
- These are possibly a bit hardcore in comparison, but I've been enjoying following this discussion by two of Rust's key figures about why Rust's borrow system means that Rust code is easier to formalise than other languages. Takes you from 1974 to the future of computer languages.
- Christine Lemmer-Webber 🄽 , Eva Galperin 🄽, Hayley Tsyukayama 🄽 and others in this much more accessible PBS documentary: Secrets in Your Data.