| property | value |
|---|---|
| created | $=dv.current().file.ctime |
| modified | =this.modified |
| Random thoughts and extracts from recent readings thought you’d like/think about. Used OCR to extract these so might be a bit garbled. |
Seems important…
Callahan remembers at least a couple people inside Facebook raising a concern that would prove prescient: they worried, he told me, that “low-effort directional feedback,” in the form of a “like” or “awesome” button, would “eliminate thoughtful en- gagement, because people were lazy and would take the lazy way out” if given the option.
She found that all caps made people judge happy messages as even happier (IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!!! feels happier than “It’s my birthday!!!”) but didn’t make sad messages any sadder (“i miss u” is just as sad as I MISS U). When it came to anger, the results were mixed: sometimes caps increased the anger rating and sometimes it didn’t, a result which Heath attributed to the difference between “hot” anger (FIGHT ME) and “cold” anger (“fight me”). A single capped word, on the other hand, is simply EMPHATIC.
NOTE
[just quoted because I liked hot vs cold anger]
After all to be excited to meet someone or help someone is also to be sincere about it. This change is well under way: a 2006 study by Carol Waseleski found that in emails, exclamation marks were infrequently to indicate excitement, occuring only 9.5 percent of the time with either strong language, like “These damn programs are out of touch with reality!” or effusive thanks, like “Thank you so much for your comments — they are very, very helpful and the list of resources is wonderful!” In comparison, exclamation marks indicated friendliness 32 percent of the time (“See you there!” “I hope this helps!) and emphasized statements of fact another 29.5 percent of the time (“There’s still time to register!)
NOTE
[Definitely feel I use ”!” to de-fang statements as work. Often stuck in a situation where I prematurely close “Thanks!” and then there’s a follow up, and it is left dangling uncomfortably]
One way of creating in-jokes is to play with the language of computers itself, writing humorous pseudo-code in the style of a programming language. Let’s say you wanted to mark a particular string of text as italic in HTML: you could put want the italics to start where you want the italics to end. This naturally lends itself to creative uses, like
I fail to see the problem this , or in abridged form, THIS IS TERRIBLE /rant. computer, humorless beastie that it is, does not recognize a ‘sarcasm or /rant command. But your fellow humans who are used to talking to computers may think you’re rather clever, especially if you find a novel way to use it.
NOTE
[Interesting case. I think /rant has more use with people. Slash commands are a bit more familiar. Less ambiguoity than emojis. I have had recent issues with this. I used the kiss emoji, thinking it was a “whistle” kind of like minding my own business. But it can also be interpreted (I think I am in the minority as well) as a blown kiss. Also thinking on a favorite the upside down face emoji. It doesn’t represent the way your face ever actually is, but we can collectively relate to the feeling of either playful joking or a situation gone awry)
As we saw in the previous chapter, the average internet person no longer knows how to code, and so code-based internet slang re- mains limited to Old Internet People and techy subcultures of later generations. A more common typographical tool is asterisks and underscores as a way of emphasizing in environments that don’t support proper bold or italic. But asterisks also look like tiny stars, and early internet denizens seized on their decorative potential as well, especially when combined with the fanciful swoop of the of tilde. In the plain text of late 1990s and early 2000s instant messenger status messages, sparkle punctuation would range from
just oneto many sparkles.
NOTE
[I know that I used // to show italics. I /surround/ them like this. Markdown doesn’t use this. I wonder if it is because of increased prevalance of ”/” for example “live/laugh/love” cases with accidental italicized rather than asterisks. Might be as simple as that. It could be my method is typewriter shorthand influenced.]
Dennis Ritchie and his team developed the C language, which, along with Unix, was part of a research project con- ducted inside the storied Bell Labs technology incubator. The language gave the team’s programmers a great deal of freedom, including direct access to the contents of memory, something systems normally do not allow, in order to protect the integrity of the coding environment. That level of freedom was fine as long as their work remained a research project. According to Brian Kernighan, who coauthored the book that introduced C to the world,’ Ritchie did not anticipate that the operating system and language would become “as big as they did.” Yet they did indeed become big. Programmers’ access to memory then escaped into the wild: programs acquired the dangerous ability to invade and manipulate the memory space of another program (mostly by accident), and that invaded program can invade another’s (and so on), enabling a world of perplexing bugs. Then there is the Internet itself, derived from the ARPANET, which was created as a platform in which a limited group of researchers could converse openly about scientific subjects.9 Security was not assumed to be needed. And so arrived the hackable digital universe.
On early programming field developments with influence. Chomsky Hierarchies and formal language in the 50s? Just dealing with the concept of
Reminded here of that idea we talked about, the puzzle solution being part of the room vs “stepping back” and peering into the solution. “A word is a box containing words.” A programming language fully divorced of language. A parameterized universe, able to function due to the array of light speeds being arbitratily fixed to c.
Early forms of code like the Bouchon’s machine and the Jacquard loom.
NOTE
[I really like the idea that a weaver/merchant kicked it off]
Bouchon himself came from a musical background: his father was an organ maker. It’s probably no coincidence that Bouchon had exposure to the construction of musical instruments from a young age, the connections among looms, musical instruments, and early computers run even deeper. Just as Herman Hollerith drew inspiration from weavers, he also probably learned from the player pianos that were commonplace in American homes during Hollerith’s era. These player pianos used a perforated roll of paper to play a melody, not dissimilar from how perfo- rated paper dictated the patterns on Bouchon’s looms. At their peak in the early 1920s, player pianos, capable of performing automated tunes without human control, outnumbered conven- tional pianos by nearly 50 percent.12 In a sense, the patterns on fabric and the verses of songs became the “loops” in modern computer code. Code as holes in paper deserves a special spot in this book cause of how important punch cards became as a way of repre- senting both data and the code used to manipulate data. Binary or the representation of data using Os and Is, is still the building block of all code and all computing: when computers became electronic, these Os and Is reflected the presence absence of an electric signal. The punch card, it turns out, is all you need to represent number, any poem, any song, any computer program: practi- cally anything at all.
NOTE
[Computer program as a song, like the movement of air passing holes being played in a flute. Idea of a computer of the wind, so precise articulation of circuits (trying to approach actual modern architecture) rather than something listenable]
Tnanks to some clever politicking by Hopper the Navy adopted COBOL as a standard, forcing its manufacturing con- tractors to build machines that could run the language. And soon the entire computing industry reoriented itself toward the new language, which became so entrenched in computing infrastructure that the Long-Range Committee was never even formed. By 2000, 80 percent of all code on the planet was written in COBOL. Even today, almost half of American banking systems run COBOL, and 95 percent of all ATM transactions rely on it to function. COBOL is not a beloved programming language. The Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra famously called teach- ing COBOL “a criminal offense. These days, scarcely anyone teaches it, which means there is a global shortage, yet again, of programmers. Although sensitive infrastructure worldwide relies on COBOL to function, its ongoing maintenance is con- tinually deferred due to lack of resources and political appeal. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, state unem- ployment systems built on COBOL were strained to the brink, with few qualified people to fix them. As the technology histo- rian Jeffrey R. Yost points out, in our technoculture, “Innovation is revered, and maintenance is not.”12 When we ignore the vital importance of maintenance, we are blind to what actually holds our world together. We are blind, also, to the maintainers.
NOTE
[Adage on programming - difference between developing and maintaining a system is difference between lifting something vs holding something up indefinitely. Not exactly accurate but illustrates a point. There’s a push of “progress” in endless frameworks, aided by better tooling but there are regressions. It’s mostly good but even in my experience I’ve seen a back and forth of “consensus”. There can be value in maintaining working legacy systems, and cleverness within. Older definitely isn’t inherently inferior.]
Steven Piner, a MIT student and member of TMRC, wrote a text editing program that made revisions to Spacewar and subsequent programming of the PDP-I considerably easier. Jokingly named Expensive Typewriter since it mimicked the function of a $395 IBM Selectric typewriter on a S12Ø,ØØ0 computer, Piner’s program has since been celebrated as the first word processing program written for a general-purpose computer. Robert Saunders saw players jostling for space in an area meant for a single operator, became concerned about damage to the PDP-I, and built custom controllers. Made of wood with a Bakelite top, each had a firing button and two small levers, one for right-left rotation and the other for acceleration when pulled back and hyperspace when pushed forward.’
NOTE
[On Spacewars, first computer game. Expensive computer being retasked for play. Concerned about damage of the machine, provide a controller for use]
The 1975 comment’s fame became so persistent that 30 years later, in 2004, Dennis Ritchie, one of the original pro- grammers who wrote that Unix code, found himself creating a special web page just to share his own recollection of the real story behind it—if only to correct a common misperception. “It’s often quoted as a slur on the quantity or quality of the comments in the Bell Labs research releases of Unix,” Ritchie wrote—as though the code was so horribly convoluted that no sane reader could be expected to understand it. (“Not an un- fair observation in general, I fear, but in this case unjustified,” Ritchie had added.) Instead, he wrote, the original programmers simply felt that their code was addressing an obscure edge case, and “we tried to explain what was going on. ‘You are not expected to un- derstand this’ was intended as a remark in the spirit of ‘This won’t be on the exam,’ rather than as an impudent challenge.” Ritchie also explained that ironically, “The real problem is that we didn’t understand what was going on either.”
NOTE
[“you are not expected to understand this” is one of the most famous computer code comments. As the text describes it was seen as a challenge, when in fact it was just a remark that understanding it wasn’t necessary, and they didn’t fully grasp it themselves]
But those seven words from 1975 would live on for Instead of warning off readers, the enigmatic comment intrigued them, becoming famous in its own right, and for all the wrong reasons—an accidental icon, resonating„,. its unseen audience for the way it seemed to capture an too-familiar reality from every coder’s world of intense cal complexity. At a 2016 tech conference, systems reseani;. Arun Thomas agreed that the comment had attained a cult following among programmers? “You started seeing wearing sweatshirts, T-shirts, and baby onesies with not expected to understand this.’ It was an expression of pride of technical mastery.
Of course, the hyperlink is not perfect. For all his protes- tations that he eventually intended to make it go both ways, Berners-Lee’s classic hyperlink is unidirectional. If I link from my blog to yours, a third party can see the direction of inten from me to you. But what happens if they were to stumble upon your blog first? The value of the citation does not flow backwards. And believe me, there is value in both directions. You only have to look at the market cap of a little company called Google to realize this. The other great organizing principle modern digital thought, “search,” was only made possible b cause Google set out to reverse-engineer hyperlinking retroactively.
NOTE
[directionality of links]
Likely that the most downloaded image ever isn’t the Mona Lisa. the Google logo, or the first page of the King James Bible. fact. you’ve never seen it, even though your browser proba- sly requests it from servers every day. That’s because it’s not a famous photo or illustration—it’s a single transparent pixeli that’s used by all sorts of entities to silently gather data about and your web activity. These minute pixels are scattered across websites and embedded in Emails. Simply by existing, they gather identifying data like your IP address, what browser vou’re using, and which operating system you’re running. And they’re everywhere. This is the unseen power, and menace, of the tracking pixel—a relic of the ’90s Internet that has played an outsized role in the twenty-first-century digital marketing machine. Also known as “1 x 1 pixels,” “web bugs,” and “invisible GIFs,” among other names, transparent 1 x 1 pixels were originally used as iäsual spacers in early web page layouts. Before the 1996 debut of Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS, the web programming language used with HTML for content layout), web developers relied on an array of hacks and workarounds to create the visual elements they wanted and get everything aligned. Tiny trans- parent images could sit next to text boxes or visible images to make room between components or smooth out any awkward formatting—like the blank type spacers used in physical printing.
NOTE
[invisible pixels were big, a clever hack.]
A function’s definition is a symbolic expression built up recursively from previously defined functions. The regressus of expressions composed of func- tions whose definitions are expressions composed of functions ultimately bot- toms out in a small and irreducible set of atomic elements, which we may call the “axioms” or “ground truths” of the symbol system. In a computer these are the CPU’s op-codes, its hardwired instruction set. In the system of arithmetic, they would be the primitives “identity” and “successor,” from which the four basic arithmetic operations can be derived and back into which they can be re- duced.
text the problem presented by electronic communications, which by definition are “noisy,” meaning that a transmission does not consist purely of intentional signals. Thus, they pose the problem of how to distinguish the intended sig- nal from the inevitable artifacts of the systems that convey it, or, in Shannon’s words, how to “reproduce at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.” Shannon was especially clear that he didn’t mean meaning: Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.
In this sense, computer control languages could be more broadly defined as syntactical languages as opposed to semantic languages. But this terminol- ogy is not without its problems either. Common languages like English are both formal and semantic; although their scope extends beyond the formal, anything that can be expressed in a computer control language can also be ex- pressed in common language. It follows that computer control languages area formal (and as such rather primitive) subset of common human languages.
All computer software controls are linguistic regardless of their perceiv- able shape, alphanumerical writing, graphics, sound signals, or whatever else. The Unix command “rm file” is operationally identical to dragging the file into the trashcan on a desktop. Both are just different encodings for the same operation, just as alphabetic language and morse beeps are different encodings for the same characters. As a symbolic handle, this encoding may enable or restrain certain uses of the language. In this respect, the differences between ideographic-pictorial and abstract-symbolic common languages also apply to computer control languages. Pictorial symbols simplify control languages through predefined objects and operations, but make it more difficult to link them through a grammar and thus express custom operations. Just as a picto- gram ofa house is easier to understand than the letters h-o-u-s-e, the same is true for the trashcan icon in comparison to the “rm” command. But it is difficult to precisely express the operation “If I am home tomorrow at six, I will clean up every second room in the house” through a series of pictograms. Abstract, grammatical alphanumeric languages are more suitable for complex compu- tational instructions.10 The utopia of a universal pictorial computer control language (with icons, windows, and pointer operations) is a reenactment of the rise and eventual fall of universal pictorial language utopias in the Renais- sance, from Tommaso Campanella’s “Cittä del sole” to Comenius’ “Orbis pic- tus”—although the modern project of expressing only machine operations in pictograms was less ambitious.