6 ms·

The way I see it, if you need a map then it's too complicated.

rektide 6y ago
I am unbelievably tempted to dive into personal insult at such a repulsive, abbrasive, uncaring, unperceptive comment! How horrible! It is us who live too complicated lives. It is us who do not try to bring about consistency. It is us all who have our data scattered across endless different planes, who leave ourselves behind to wander between firewall & firewall, cloud & cloud, each time permitted to carry nothing with us, naked. Each time we begin anew, afresh, no bearings, no perspective, no timeline on ourselves. Nothing consistent. It is us who are too complicated. Karlicoss is one of the only rare few among us who are putting in the work to uncomplicate, to bring together, the endless isolated streams of data into something manageable, consistent, uncomplicated. Searching to no end to bring about simplicity, coherency, where the varied digital affords most low mortals zilch, nothing, chaos. What a disappointing sad view of things. Unwilling to try, easy to criticize. Raise your eyes up, off what you see as complexity, and try, for a second, to see what is trying to be achieved! The irony of it, that a user named generalizations, can see only the individual trees of this circumstance, and not the general forrest. This effort is exalted, more pure and uncomplicated than what any other digitally-connected mortal on earth has access to. It brings order, consistency, controllability, agency, all the exalted aspects of the amazing human spirit, out from the digital prisons it is trapped in. Exalted work, this.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  What the chart describes strikes me more as a prison than transcendence. Not all complexity is order, and not all chaos isn't simple. However, much of the wrangling could relate to contractual data preservation (like client communications), which means we don't have enough information to decide whether it's "too complex" for remuneration received. Doesn't mean the grandparent comment is wrong, though.
  - rektide 6y ago
    Having the capabilities, to me, implies nothing. What you do with gathered information is up to you. No one else has any capacity, capability, to gather, to understand, to begin to consider. We all live in eternal, scattered, not just unconnected, but unconnectable, un-understandable forms. The possibility should exist to try to harness our many forms. The digital should be a channel to explore, view, gather, from which understanding might possibly begin. But we have only ephemera, our thought & action owned inside other people's clouds.
    - readflaggedcomm 6y ago
      Data is what you make of it, and you can pile it up so high that you spend all your effort managing avalanches. Me, I like sand art.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- elseweather 6y ago
  I mean, you can also just let the data go. "nothing, chaos" is pretty simple. I don't believe being able to search my chatlogs from 2005 would make my life simpler, or better. Some people are natural archivists and love that second-brain stuff though, and this is a pretty sweet example :). One area I strongly relate to Karlicoss is how bad it is getting data out of my bank; as a regular non-institutional customer I don't get API access, so I have to download a PDF manually every month and run it through some script to parse out the line items.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I have friends who have died and for whom I’ve lost our chat logs (some back from the AIM days). I also carelessly lost my home dir from college with my thesis and thesis code/data in it. (Tar, gzip, ftp in ascii mode, don’t check for months.) Is my life meaningfully worse for those losses? No, not really. Have there been several times when it would have been better (even just temporary happiness/comfort) if I had access to the data? Definitely yes.
  - rektide 6y ago
    Oh sure, you can opt to be an animal. You can opt to not gather your intellect, intelligence, to avoid trying to understand who you are, what you do, what you are, as you go about your time online. You can easily- we all easily- avoid reflection, understanding, coherence. Like animals. It's uncivil, the very definition of unbecoming: eternally forgetful. I don't even mind this low path! Sure! Be nothing! Remember nothing! Scatter your essence everywhere, collect & distill nothing! Fine. I don't oppose your choice to eternally disperse yourselves, to harvest & focus & observe nothing. Exist only in the now, for eternity. It's your right, as much as I think it is below you, less than what you probably ought merit yourself. What is just repulsive as heck, just dejected & pathetic, is that there are no alternatives. Except this work. Except what karlicoss is doing. The entire world lets itself be nothing, be zero, like you advocate, just sands of time. Karlicoss is focused on being a human, one with conscientiousness. Seemingly, to me, the entire rest of humanity lets all their data be trapped, contained in hostile corporate networks, under phones that don't give us access to our own data, existing on networks where we have no rights. Let it go is the only option available to nine nines, 99.9999999%. There are probably 7 people in this 7.5 billion person world doing anything at all like this, not letting it go. I'm sorry humanity, it's not your fault: you keep getting dealt a shit, ultra-consumerist crap un-personal computing hand, just getting shorter & shorter ends. But at some point, revolt, working, taking the effort, becoming a Karlicoss, opting to care, is the only sane, sensible option. I keep thinking of Google's mission statement, how much radical potential it embodied, how radically far & further from the tree we fall, every single year: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Even our own information is a mess, a chaos. Our own information leaks, worse & worse, every year. We retain less & less human potential of ourselves, each year, as mainframes & cloud dominate more & more of the public space, steal up the oxygen of computing & information technology that we could be using to invigorate ourselves, orient ourselves & each other, in the newly public, ever more shared world we cohabitate upon. We have made no progress. Karlicoss has.
mcint 6y ago
...Great (bait)! It seems it's not for you. The green labels show the simplicity of the structure: - export from services (a serious and shifting challenge for some or many of the services individually) - cached raw export values - imported internal/processed values - query, use, and visualization tools
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
karlicoss 6y ago
Hi, author here. Yes, it's complicated and this is exactly one of the points of this map, to illustrate how ridiculous it is -- that I have to jump over all these hoops to do something useful with the data that's already somewhere in my phone/was in my browser, but hidden and siloed (from myself!) for various reasons.
- generalizations 6y ago
  Fair enough. The effort and quality of your work is apparent - well done. I guess for me, I would have opted for greater inconvenience and simply let some of what you graphed slide, rather than deal with the mental overhead of actually tracking it all. But I would also not have enjoyed building that graph. :)
  - karlicoss 6y ago
    Thanks :) The thing is -- often it's very hard to know in advance how much time you would spend on something. You think "ah this would be kind of a nice feature to have/question to answer... hmmm it'll probably take only an hour", and then you spend weeks doing that, and something else related, etc. Sometimes you do wish you hadn't bothered in the first place, but then it's also sunk cost so it's tempting to finish. You know what's crazy -- I started with simply trying to improve my sleep (so exorting data from Jawbone bracelet) and wanting to be a bit more efficient at learning physics (and other things) in my spare time. I did learn some physics (and other things) thanks to all these systems, but certainly went down a massive rabbit hole too :)
Karawebnetwork 6y ago
Is it really that complicated? The map is pretty much straight lines from top to bottom. This is like saying that the subway system is too complicated. It is simply a series of tubes with stops. The map simply allows someone to view the entire system at once.
MarkSweep 6y ago
If you are doing everything by hand, perhaps. But if you are working at a higher level of abstraction using something like Apache Airflow, it will take care of making the map for you.

I am unbelievably tempted to dive into personal insult at such a repulsive, abbrasive, uncaring, unperceptive comment! How horrible! It is us who live too complicated lives. It is us who do not try to bring about consistency. It is us all who have our data scattered across endless different planes, who leave ourselves behind to wander between firewall & firewall, cloud & cloud, each time permitted to carry nothing with us, naked. Each time we begin anew, afresh, no bearings, no perspective, no timeline on ourselves. Nothing consistent. It is us who are too complicated. Karlicoss is one of the only rare few among us who are putting in the work to uncomplicate, to bring together, the endless isolated streams of data into something manageable, consistent, uncomplicated. Searching to no end to bring about simplicity, coherency, where the varied digital affords most low mortals zilch, nothing, chaos. What a disappointing sad view of things. Unwilling to try, easy to criticize. Raise your eyes up, off what you see as complexity, and try, for a second, to see what is trying to be achieved! The irony of it, that a user named generalizations, can see only the individual trees of this circumstance, and not the general forrest. This effort is exalted, more pure and uncomplicated than what any other digitally-connected mortal on earth has access to. It brings order, consistency, controllability, agency, all the exalted aspects of the amazing human spirit, out from the digital prisons it is trapped in. Exalted work, this.

readflaggedcomm 6y ago
What the chart describes strikes me more as a prison than transcendence. Not all complexity is order, and not all chaos isn't simple. However, much of the wrangling could relate to contractual data preservation (like client communications), which means we don't have enough information to decide whether it's "too complex" for remuneration received. Doesn't mean the grandparent comment is wrong, though.
- rektide 6y ago
  Having the capabilities, to me, implies nothing. What you do with gathered information is up to you. No one else has any capacity, capability, to gather, to understand, to begin to consider. We all live in eternal, scattered, not just unconnected, but unconnectable, un-understandable forms. The possibility should exist to try to harness our many forms. The digital should be a channel to explore, view, gather, from which understanding might possibly begin. But we have only ephemera, our thought & action owned inside other people's clouds.
  - readflaggedcomm 6y ago
    Data is what you make of it, and you can pile it up so high that you spend all your effort managing avalanches. Me, I like sand art.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
elseweather 6y ago
I mean, you can also just let the data go. "nothing, chaos" is pretty simple. I don't believe being able to search my chatlogs from 2005 would make my life simpler, or better. Some people are natural archivists and love that second-brain stuff though, and this is a pretty sweet example :). One area I strongly relate to Karlicoss is how bad it is getting data out of my bank; as a regular non-institutional customer I don't get API access, so I have to download a PDF manually every month and run it through some script to parse out the line items.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I have friends who have died and for whom I’ve lost our chat logs (some back from the AIM days). I also carelessly lost my home dir from college with my thesis and thesis code/data in it. (Tar, gzip, ftp in ascii mode, don’t check for months.) Is my life meaningfully worse for those losses? No, not really. Have there been several times when it would have been better (even just temporary happiness/comfort) if I had access to the data? Definitely yes.
- rektide 6y ago
  Oh sure, you can opt to be an animal. You can opt to not gather your intellect, intelligence, to avoid trying to understand who you are, what you do, what you are, as you go about your time online. You can easily- we all easily- avoid reflection, understanding, coherence. Like animals. It's uncivil, the very definition of unbecoming: eternally forgetful. I don't even mind this low path! Sure! Be nothing! Remember nothing! Scatter your essence everywhere, collect & distill nothing! Fine. I don't oppose your choice to eternally disperse yourselves, to harvest & focus & observe nothing. Exist only in the now, for eternity. It's your right, as much as I think it is below you, less than what you probably ought merit yourself. What is just repulsive as heck, just dejected & pathetic, is that there are no alternatives. Except this work. Except what karlicoss is doing. The entire world lets itself be nothing, be zero, like you advocate, just sands of time. Karlicoss is focused on being a human, one with conscientiousness. Seemingly, to me, the entire rest of humanity lets all their data be trapped, contained in hostile corporate networks, under phones that don't give us access to our own data, existing on networks where we have no rights. Let it go is the only option available to nine nines, 99.9999999%. There are probably 7 people in this 7.5 billion person world doing anything at all like this, not letting it go. I'm sorry humanity, it's not your fault: you keep getting dealt a shit, ultra-consumerist crap un-personal computing hand, just getting shorter & shorter ends. But at some point, revolt, working, taking the effort, becoming a Karlicoss, opting to care, is the only sane, sensible option. I keep thinking of Google's mission statement, how much radical potential it embodied, how radically far & further from the tree we fall, every single year: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Even our own information is a mess, a chaos. Our own information leaks, worse & worse, every year. We retain less & less human potential of ourselves, each year, as mainframes & cloud dominate more & more of the public space, steal up the oxygen of computing & information technology that we could be using to invigorate ourselves, orient ourselves & each other, in the newly public, ever more shared world we cohabitate upon. We have made no progress. Karlicoss has.

mcint 6y ago

...Great (bait)! It seems it's not for you. The green labels show the simplicity of the structure: - export from services (a serious and shifting challenge for some or many of the services individually) - cached raw export values - imported internal/processed values - query, use, and visualization tools

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

karlicoss 6y ago

Hi, author here. Yes, it's complicated and this is exactly one of the points of this map, to illustrate how ridiculous it is -- that I have to jump over all these hoops to do something useful with the data that's already somewhere in my phone/was in my browser, but hidden and siloed (from myself!) for various reasons.

generalizations 6y ago
Fair enough. The effort and quality of your work is apparent - well done. I guess for me, I would have opted for greater inconvenience and simply let some of what you graphed slide, rather than deal with the mental overhead of actually tracking it all. But I would also not have enjoyed building that graph. :)
- karlicoss 6y ago
  Thanks :) The thing is -- often it's very hard to know in advance how much time you would spend on something. You think "ah this would be kind of a nice feature to have/question to answer... hmmm it'll probably take only an hour", and then you spend weeks doing that, and something else related, etc. Sometimes you do wish you hadn't bothered in the first place, but then it's also sunk cost so it's tempting to finish. You know what's crazy -- I started with simply trying to improve my sleep (so exorting data from Jawbone bracelet) and wanting to be a bit more efficient at learning physics (and other things) in my spare time. I did learn some physics (and other things) thanks to all these systems, but certainly went down a massive rabbit hole too :)

Karawebnetwork 6y ago

Is it really that complicated? The map is pretty much straight lines from top to bottom. This is like saying that the subway system is too complicated. It is simply a series of tubes with stops. The map simply allows someone to view the entire system at once.

MarkSweep 6y ago

If you are doing everything by hand, perhaps. But if you are working at a higher level of abstraction using something like Apache Airflow, it will take care of making the map for you.