Generativity is about caring about what comes after you. In a social context, it’s when old people care about subsequent generations, instead of maximizing their own happiness for the last few years. In business, it’s when executives care about the health and outcomes of the whole executive team, instead of their own career after this …
again: Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. Sometimes in the creation of an artifact, the artifact itself is less important than the process of creating it. Wardley Maps are like that too – it’s about the thought that goes into creating them, …
Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. I learned this from Erlang, a purely functional yet stateful programming language. Erlang uses actor-based concurrency. The language is fully immutable, yet the programs are not: every time an actor receives a message, it can send …
“Ideas don’t spring fully formed from the mind of an individual. Ideas emerge between people.” Avdi Grimm, in his closing keynote at Southeast Ruby, told how when he sets out to write a talk, he wants to go out on his deck and walk back and forth until he squeezes the ideas out of his …
Sometimes I think about, what if aliens kept humans as pets? Raised them from babies in isolation, without human language, without society. What would a human be like, outside of other humans? Not a person. As Abeba Birhane points out beautifully in her talk at NCrafts and article in Aeon, we aren’t people alone. We …
Des Cartes looked for certainty because he wanted good grounds for knowledge, a place of fixity to build on, to make predictions. Juarrero counters that uncertainty allows for novelty and individuation. In software, we like to aim for certainty. Correctness. Except in machine learning or AI; we don’t ask or expect our algorithms to be …
Our job as developers is to change software. And that means that when we decide what to do, we’re not designing new code, we’re designing change. Our software (if it is useful) does not work in isolation. It does not poof transition to a new state and take the rest of the world with it. …
Knowledge work has to be done for the right reason to be done well. If I choose to implement a feature because I’ll get some reward for it, like a gold star on my next review, then I will implement it far enough to check the box. I won’t get it smooth, or optimal. I …
Naturally intelligent systems do not passively await sensory stimulation. They are constantly active, trying to predict (and actively elicit) the streams of sensory information before they arrive…. Systems like that are already (pretty much constantly) poised to act. We act for the the evolving streams of sensory information that keep us viable and serve our …
The other day there was a tweet about a Chief Happiness Officer. Later someone remarked about their Agile Transformation Office. It seems like we (as a culture) think that we can add qualities to systems the way we add ingredients to a recipe. Systems, especially symmathesies, aren’t additive! Agility, happiness, these are spread throughout the …