This started as a “what are you working on this week?” comment. But it became huuuge. 
Apologies if this should be a blogpost…
dayjob
Blocked waiting for someone’s DB schema. Well no I’m lying, I can do something else but am procrastinating.
procrastination: 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10,
Ten authors meditate on a 1-liner that creates a maze. (Talk about literate programming!)
procrastination: The Fire of the Jaguar
Like us, anthropologists model what people do & return something infused with their insights. (But a book, not a tool.)
David Graeber’s foreword to “The Fire of the Jaguar” shows anthropologists have eerily similar-sounding problems & infighting:
- undefined/incoherent state between transitions
- static vs dynamic
- objects vs relations
- syntax vs semantics
- dealing with higher-order abstractions
- infinite layers of abstraction — like 3-Lisp’s infinite towers of reflection?
- coordinating unbounded perspectives on a single complex form of interaction
State’s big. Example: a ritual flips your state from child → adult. (When different observers perceive different states, they’ll invoke different social logics if a cop shoots you as a child vs adult.)
Vocabulary I’ll bring into my programming:
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“internal contradictions”: like “complected”, this is a step beyond saying awesome or b0rken. (Less handwavy than “architectural strain”?) This week, I’m integrating two systems that’ll have an internal contradiction: transactional vs analytics workloads.
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fieldwork: not actually mentioned, but it always drove me nuts how managers shield me from users. I always want to start by immersing myself with them, suspending my beliefs & disbeliefs. We suck at the social part of social media — so we trap people in our biases & ideologies.