Gordon
@gordon.bsky.social
Everything around me was someone’s lifework.
Everything around me was someone’s lifework.
From Three Horizons, The Patterning of Hope , by Bill Sharpe Horizon 1: The status quo. The current, dominant business or system, which should be maintained and improved. Horizon 2: The transition zone. The contested space where innovations are…
How would Rich Hickey decomplect the actor model ? I’m thinking: Messages: immutable values Queues: actor inboxs (and outboxes) become queues (see Queues decouple producer from consumer ) State: state is stored by ID in a KV store (see…
If you're going to decomplect a class into a bunch of component slices, you're going to need a way to tie those slices together. You need identifiers that you can use across multiple systems. So you'll be using a lot of globally-unique identifiers…
Process note: One of my lessons-learned from Subconscious was that project management for startups should be done via deadlines and workbacks not via agile methods. Agile is designed for steady-state maintenance. But when you are going from 0-1,…
If there’s a coalition, think about the game theory. Who is participating, and why? Who would defect, and why?
They’re mostly self-sufficient, actually... They all got software and seeds. That’s the basic necessities. - Kim Stanley Robinson , Green Mars Related: Whole Earth Catalog
"Playing to your outs" is a term from poker by way of Magic The Gathering. The idea is, when you're bound to lose, you gotta stop making sensible plays. Instead, you must identify a specific card or sequence that could still win you the…
In chronological* order: Kinship systems Religion Art Clothing/jewelry Music Gift exchange Language Oral recitation Written language Law Money Bureaucracy Voting Double-entry bookkeeping Facts Scientific method Peer review Printing Markets…
Driscoll's model of reflection (Driscoll, 1994): What? So what? Now what? Often used by the intelligence community to structure briefings. Good heuristic for generalized problem solving .
Put another way: commodity work breeds commodity software. This is why suites emerge (Office suite). They are lowest-common-denominator, but everything works together. Exception: software for teams that drive direct business value. If a product…
From The Language of the System , by Rich Hickey : Now we get to moving things around. I think it's one of the things in Clojure maybe I didn't make clear enough because I didn't need to wrap them is that the queues in java.util.concurrent are…
Beer thought that ecosystems are smarter than we are—not in their representational cognitive abilities, but in their performative ability to solve problems that exceed our cognitive ones. The quote above is from Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic…
But Beer started from this realization: in a world of exceedingly complex systems, for which any representation can only be provisional, performance is what we need to care about. ( Andrew Pickering , 2010, The Cybernetic Brain ) Stafford Beer and…
Smaller story arc s can be composed into larger ones, or woven together. Try this: zoom into a small story arc about one or two people. Then zoom out to a larger related story arc. Then zoom back in. This works well when trying to communicate a…
Amazon.com has a product development process they call Working Backwards . Rather than starting from an idea or a technology, you start by writing the press release for the product. The target audience is the customer. The press release is…
Simple models outperform complex models when data is bad or sparse. Simple models work better in VUCA environments. From the SFI Podcast Apr 6, 2020 , discussing Jurgen Jost and Luu Hoang's paper on making the most of bad data : When data is really…
We live in a networked world, a world governed by asymmetry, feedback loops , and power laws . The US Army and Navy War College has an acronym for this kind of world: VUCA . Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous
What is time? Our modern sense of time is homogenous. It divided and measured in "units" to be filled. Clock time. These time units have no meaning themselves. They are empty containers, filled with meaning by us, through activities we do…
The three act story structure is a framework used in screenwriting and novels. Act 1 — Setup Beginning Inciting incident Second thoughts Climax of act 1 Act 2 — Confrontation Obstacle Obstacle (ascending action) Midpoint (big twist!) Obstacle…
Richard Feynman was a polymath , who did pioneering work in the Manhatten Project, quantum physics, parallel computing, and nanotechnology. One would expect he knows a thing or two about learning. Lucky for us, he boiled his technique down into 4…