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<rant> As an aside, I find it interesting that we are still contained by the limitations of our surfaces, specifically paper and screens. Hell, one could throw
by dvdhnt 7y ago
<rant>
As an aside, I find it interesting that we are still contained by the limitations of our surfaces, specifically paper and screens. Hell, one could throw stairs and ladders into that.
The result seems to be a mindset that the holy grail of software excellence is distilling our work down to a tree-based structure that will result in us experiencing some Thanos-like post-snap rest.
Yet, at the risk of mass downvotes, I dare say it doesn't particularly matter in 99% of our work. Unless you are working on software that could take/give life or increase/decrease suffering.
Does that mean we should just throw our hands up and build slop? No, it just means that perhaps we would all be better off if we embraced the ideal that our software is more like an organism than a space shuttle. Birth it, mold it, shape it, feed it. Let it grow into a robust, complex thing. Eventually, it will grow old and you can let it die. It will have been both beautiful and disgusting depending on whom you ask.
The point was to say software is at the very least three dimensional. Reducing it to anything less and applying a handful of labels that all end in "ability" will not have made your life worth living.
</rant>
Go outside today.
- lotyrin 7y agoDread it, run from it, complexity still arrives.
- hinkley 7y agoInvite it in, and it will bring its whole family.
- hinkley 7y agoHow would you rate yourself on spatial intelligence? I'm sure there was a time I could say exactly what you did but I am not 'normal' with respect to being able to reason about objects. If I help a friend move I am forever re-packing their car to reduce the number of car-loads to one less than they thought they needed. They try to debunk 'learning styles' routinely but the fact of the matter is that certain media are much more comfortable for many people, and 3-D is bad for certain modes of reasoning. But perhaps as importantly, it's bad for some forms of tooling. For example, "show me the difference between the model now and a year ago when we first discussed this." We use tools like this as a kind of 'isomorphic projection' of something that has way more than 3 dimensions so we can figure out the 'shape' of things.
- dvdhnt 7y agoI would rate myself high on spatial intelligence based on my love of solving puzzles, and anecdotally, my perfect score on that portion of military testing. However, I will admit that as I age, my interest in arbitrary puzzles has declined. I much more enjoy putting together puzzles of scenes or artwork I find attractive. Funny enough, I would say I used to do just as you describe - rearrange carloads of things or otherwise challenge myself for whatever reason to come in "under budget" on space and time. It's probably from sheer exhaustion that my drive for doing so diminished. Your closing thoughts inspired me to search for 'isomorphic projection'; that led me to find 'graph isomorphism' [1]. I have not dived deep into that particular page, but the image of Graph H is very interesting as it illustrates what I see in my head when trying to distill software. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_isomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_isomorphism