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Life In Code - Ch 3+4 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-09 15:20:15
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

The Dumbing Down of Programming (Some Thoughts on Programming, Knowing, and the Nature of Easy)

Further expansion upon the philosophical themes of user-friendly interfaces. Here's three stirring paragraphs.

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Goodbye to everything pretty. Goodbye to video and sound, to wallpaper and fonts and colors and styles; goodbye to windows and icons and menus and buttons and dialogues. All the lovely graphical skins turned to so much bitwise detritus. This was not at all like Keir Dullea's turning off the keys to HAL's memory core in the film 2001, each key turn removing a "higher" function while HAL's voice descended into babyish pleading. I felt I was performing an exactly opposite process: I was making my system not dumber but smarter.

Now everything on the system would be something put there by me, and in the end the system itself would be cleaner, clearer, more knowable— everything I associate with the idea of "intelligent." (45)

}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}---|

Yet, when we allow complexity to be hidden and handled for us, we should at least notice what we are giving up. We risk becoming users of components, handlers of black boxes that do not open or don't seem worth opening. We risk becoming people who cannot really fix things, who can only swap components, work with mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. But when something breaks or goes wrong or needs fundamental change, what will we do except stand helpless in the face of our own creations? (51)

{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{---|

An immense calm settled over the room. We were reminded that software engineering was not about right and wrong but only better and worse, solutions that solved some problems while ignoring or exacerbating others. That the machine the world wants to see as possessing some supreme power and intelligence was indeed intelligent, but only as we humans are: full of hedge and error, brilliance and backtrack and compromise. (54)

<<<:::;;;::::''''''''',,,,,,,,,::::;;;;:>>>

What We Were Afraid of As We Feared Y2K

Took me an emotional rollercoaster, beginning believing the Y2K scare was superstitious bs, then slowly raising my heart rate into realizing the Y2K scare was REAL, then lowering me gently into gratitude and steely uncertainty.

Ullman is so ornate in clarifying the human input that makes computers relevant.

_____v----v

"Technology is not the driver of change; what drives technology is human desire." (67)

^----^

Particularly when she recounts her favourite Y2K solution, which is as simple as lying to the computer and telling it that its 1972. Then just translate the real year to the 1972 alternate timeline. Why not?

_____v----v

"Their solution reveals the deeper truth: computers have no idea what goes on outside of them except what humans tell them. I thought fondly of their machines running bravely forward into a false future, a fake "new year" already comfortably old." (69)

^----^

.........

Something I quite admire throughout these essays is glimpses into Ullman's rich personal life, particularly the persistent party hosting. You can really feel this is the result of fervent convictions about human connection and embodied life. It takes work to have a social life! A lot of care and intention and bravery and trial and error and trust. I need to work on this more in 2025! (the rest of 2024 is about content, money and myself, for personal reasons).

However, I have the rest of today: first I post this, then I throw on laundry, then I work work work on my liveshow coming up on Sunday so it's soooo good, then I am hosting 6 people who are visiting from out of town in a unique constellation of characters and conversation. Once next week hits I'm making a second >30 min vid and meeting with Ben to try to take the Rodrigo vid to the finish line too. New era! AUGUST AUGUST AUGUST!

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Dumb Fears Below!

Files

Comments

Chandler Sterling

I was born 7 months before the end of the world. I've managed to live a good two and a half decades since then with surprising ease, all things considered. "And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: we build our computers the way we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." (pg. 47) Y2K has always been the source of jokes to me because I grew up in a world with the benefit of hindsight. It is a testament to the effort of so many people that such a major problem can live on today as some kind of bad joke, but I didn't know that for most of my life. I couldn't even begin to comprehend the storied history that led from the first computer to the end of 1999. All I knew was that some silly little programmers thought that finding space for a four digit year was someone else's problem. Life is just a series of cans being kicked down the road. I have spent a lot of my life in the post-apocalypse learning that the mistakes that led to Y2K weren't mistakes, they were the cost of unyielding progress. For the sake of the people that the progress is supposed to support, I'd like to ask that we yield a little. "All this, too, is what brought me to Linux, I realize. Not just the machines but the people: the society of programmers, talking." (pg. 55) It's about making the machine subservient to the people's whims, not some self-sufficient knower-of-what's-best. The wizards are in their towers plotting on how to make "OK" look more appealing, so you stop noticing it's your only option. They are customer-obsessed, and they have learned that when it comes to technology, convenience is the customer's greatest obsession. I can't tell you the last time I read most of the instructions for an update, I just click "Next" until I can click "Finish". The computer is logic, it knows its system better than I do, right? As the wizards cast their magics above, the computer sits below, assuming that I clicked "Next" as an informed and knowledgeable party. It's a comedy of errors, but no one is laughing. "Programmers do not allocate company resources to one project or another. Programmers are the resources." (pg. 66) I ran from the field of computer science for this reason, I just didn't have the right words for it. Developers are allocated to projects in the same way that computers are. You have to specialize if you want any kind of staying power, and more than that, you have to make sure your specialization never reaches end of life. If you can be added to a project alongside the computers, you can be disposed of just as easily. The impulse that my soul couldn't survive a career in tech came from that unavoidable feeling that I was no different from a machine in their eyes. "Technology is not the driver of change; what drives technology is human desire." (pg. 67) I've desired a lot of change lately, in case my last post didn't contain enough yearning to piece that together already. I've been extremely aware of just how important and frankly divine even the simplest of relationships in my life can be with a little effort. Every interaction seems to be a chance to appreciate a world outside of my own, and that feeling definitely extends to my time here. The fact that I can read through so many incredible perspectives about this book and participate in a live conversation about it is incredible. I am very hopeful that this desire to be part of something more intentional and relational online will be a driver of change in some way. "UNIX presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being after all, and it is a mere operating system. Maybe you *want* to kill off your system[...] But DOS is not sure you know what you are doing. It's always checking up on you." (pg. 43) What are we supposed to do when the Internet sends endless error messages to our attempts to kill it off? It was certainly easier to build the Internet with no regards for what to do if it became inseparable from daily life. The Internet was never built to be omnipresent, and we realize with horror that we constructed this cage around ourselves in our fervor to see what we could build. I wonder sometimes what I mean when I say, "Kill the Internet!" What change do I really desire? I obviously like something about the Internet, I'm here right now. I think that I want to get rid of the idea of it. The idea that technology is solely what's been driving change for so many years now. The idea that DOS (and everything else born from that mindset) knows what I want from my systems better than I do. The idea that an operating system is anything more than mere compared to the people who made and utilize it. The idea that any of us have to be online if we want to be a part of something bigger. The idea that the apocalypse has already happened, and it was just a joke. I was born 7 months before the end of the world. I want to kill the Idea that it was anything less than dedicated, thoughtful, caring people that ensured that the water was running the next day. I want to Kill the Internet.

Just Connor

“UNIX presumes you know what you’re doing. You’re the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system. Maybe you want to kill off your system. There is an equivalent suicide method in the regular, home-system version of Windows. You insert a system floppy disk into drive A and enter: format C: But DOS is not sure you know what you are doing. It’s always checking up on you.” clearly the DOS style has persisted into web 2.0 and all the social medias. it’s very annoying to delete a bunch of accounts which have experience with now haha. i definitely appreciate the checking that it does sometimes as i’m kinda clumsy, but jesus the amount of questions and email codes and box checking can just wear me down. “Now everything on the system would be something put there by me, and in the end the system itself would be cleaner, clearer, more knowable—everything I associate with the idea of “intelligent.”” i’m not a programmer so like i can’t really relate but sometimes i feel this. if i could be the one to pick and choose elements of social media then maybe i could actually sustain a healthy relationship with it, but instead i have delete the apps and block the websites or else i’ll end up watching 7 hours of youtube everyday. no thoughts on the y2k chapter other than it was very good

Josh Milburn

I was born in the 80s so I remember Y2k pretty well; my mom was actually a medical software engineer and was one of the people spending several months making sure everything would go smoothly. I've always thought of it as probably the #1 tech example of the phenomenon where most people don't understand how much work can go into making sure things don't happen, and especially that just because things didn't happen doesn't mean they weren't worth worrying about.

Stephen Folkerts

After reading last night, I read a few pages to my dad and had a conversation about his experience with both Linux and Y2K. "And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: we build our computers the way we build our cities-- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." (p.47) My dad liked this analogy of archaeology-- there is a consistent layering of programming much as the physical layers/evidence of culture pile up in remains of human civilization. My Dad currently runs Linux virtually on top of windows on his desktop, perhaps because he is not as brave as Ullman to strip the machine bare. But, he also built our family PCs, often showing me the inner workings of the machines as a child. The computer solidified itself as a real, responsive and alterable thing in my mind because of these memories. My Dad also worked on Y2K response at the Pentagon. He, like many of the programmers at the time, thought there were solutions but had his own worries. It's interesting to think about how the rush of efficiency and "adult supervision" (management) mixed with ever-increasing desire forces engineers to plow forward into unknown territory. It can be hard to proceed with caution when you're not entirely sure what the effect of what you build will be-- reminds me of Lanier's discussion of Moore's Law. We can only learn from our history as we move forward. I am grateful for my Dad passing down his own history of technology for me throughout adolescence - it was something I took for granted. As I read this book, I realize I have my very own wealth of information and experience- unformatted, in flesh and blood- in the room next to me.

Lucas Regis

Reading the quote about complexity and tech black boxes and screaming AI AI AI at it because that's what it is. As Karl Marx warned us, history repeats, first as dumb spaghetti code you wrote drunk and don't understand anymore, and then as an existential threat ready to eclipse humanity's spirit for the sake of financial gains. Loved the Linux essay. It's so on-point. I've been switching back and forth between Linux and Windows for a decade now, and Ellen perfectly communicates what is so exhilarating but also annoying about Linux. It's wonderful to think of a system that has no bullshit, no corporate mangling, no treating you like a dumb baby; a system that has been continuously updated to work as efficiently as it can. But then the twentieth program breaks in a way you can only fix by manually opening the Terminal and editing the code and you realize if you want to do anything with your life but dive deeper into the machine you need to let go. It's exhausting to open my computer everyday and find myself mindlogging new issues that have propped up for me to troubleshoot, and I have no one to help me and no one to blame because afterall I have created the problems. Linux gets better every year but the Year of Linux will never come, because deep down it is built on a fundamentally different philosophy than Windows and Mac, systems made for Most People Doing Most Things who just want a system that works for the task they want to do and doesn't require that much from you other than you follow some of its weird authoritarian rules. You will ALWAYS have to open the Terminal in Linux, it's in the system's DNA, and this will never change because it is mostly built as a hobby by enthusiasts who deep down actually resent the average user for not wanting to learn to code.

azalea water

highlighting a hardcover feels like blasphemy  ---------------------------------------- The closest medium I can compare coding to is, strangely enough, comics: You have the freedom to write nearly anything you want. But that freedom is limited by what came before. Like coding, the continuity of comics is (to put it lightly) fucked. There are 100 writers with different ideas and reference points, all trying to display the same character or universe. And through that beautiful mess, you can see the origins, hidden under layers and layers of rewrites: “The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory.” - (Page 53) Sometimes the continuity gets scrambled. The different layers from multiple multiverses are knotted, and tangled together like wire. And in that situation, you hit reset. This isn’t an uncommon thing in comic books: DC has the crisis of infinite earths, and Marvel has their recent reboot, the “fresh start”. But those foundations built decades ago are still there, no matter how hard you try to erode them: Batman’s parents always die. And Ullman finds BASIC written at the bottom of her PC.  “Programmers come and go; the core group that once understood the issues has written its code and moved on; new programmers have come, left their bit of understanding in the code, and moved on in turn. Eventually, no one individual or group knows the full range of the problem behind the program, the solutions we chose, the ones we rejected, and why.” - (page 58) One thing I’d failed to appreciate about coding is how rich an art form it is. Like almost every medium, the audience doesn't see the mess behind the scenes. When I hear programmers going on tirades about how scuffed their code is, or how trashy it’d look to anyone who knew how to code, I think about writers with 40 pages of character notes or video editors who spend fifteen hours in After Effects for a five-minute video.  I empathise with Ullman when she rambles about click-and-drag interfaces. Because there’s a fucked-up beauty in the messy back-end of art. And by removing that complexity, you remove some of that mess. “My programming tools were full of wizards. Little dialogue boxes waiting for me to click “Next” and “Next” and “Finish.” Click and drag, and—shazzam—thousands of lines of working code. No need to get into the “hassle” of remembering the language. No need even to learn it. It is a powerful siren-song lure: You can make your program do all these wonderful and complicated things, and you don’t really need to understand.” - (Page 55) ---------------------------------------- When I think about Y2K, the computer apocalypse of 1999 isn’t what comes to mind. As a Zoomer, I think about Y2K as an aesthetic: tiny hoodies, mean girls, skinny jeans. Ice Spice’s new album isn’t a conceptual piece about the end of the world, it’s called “Y2K” because it fits with her aesthetic. Somehow, we “core”-ified a computer virus.   What scared me the most about Ullman’s description of Y2K was how human it was. Why would you code in a four-digit number date in the ‘60s? They didn’t have the memory, so they didn’t bother. So then, over the next 40 years, we built this binary game of Jenga until we hit the ceiling. Then we had to remove the bottom bricks without ending the world. Simple enough, right? Tom Scott had this term, bodging: putting something together just enough so it works. The history of coding seems to be an endless game of bodging on top of those who came before, borrowing bits of code here and there. Y2K was an example of bodging: we had to dig back through decades of binary to try and find a solution. The original programmers didn’t bodge one in. Why would they? “The company’s system is a classic journey back through technical time: New programs running over the internet. Desktops with 1990s interfaces connected to sturdy databases of the 1980s. UNIX servers running on an operating system written in the 1970s. All the way back to a mainframe computer of a late-1960s vintage, which is running programs that have never been formally tested, that ‘nobody thinks about,’ but that ‘have to run or we’re in trouble,’ says Bell” – (Page 66) Thankfully, the world didn’t end on January 1st 2000.  ---------------------------------------- I’m in love with the mess of coding. The next generation of programmers will be working on the bodges of those who came before, trying their hardest to work around bugs we didn’t know we had to fix. They'll be making beautiful, weird, amazing things with the tools laid out for them decades ago. And I can’t wait to see what messes we end up in.

Maggie K

“...released in unreadable binary form, so easy to install, so hard to uninstall.”(53) A while ago I was looking into getting a so-called dumbphone. I’d fallen in love with the idea of communication in the old fashioned ways of phone calls and in person conversation, no misinterpreted text tones or implications of being left on read. I’ve had a phone since I was 9, and that isn’t unique for my generation but the impact of it is underestimated in a lot of ways. What I discovered when looking into getting a dumbphone is exactly what Ullman is referring to, how difficult it is to ‘uninstall’. It’s intimidating the simplicity of integrating technology into our lives, and the subsequent complexity of detangling it from our identities if we ever wish to do so. I find the idea of human vs. digital memory in both of these chapters to be fascinating. In one of my favorite philosophical essays “What is it like to be a Bat?” Negel brings up how subjectivity completely limits our ability to understand the conscious experience of other living beings. I feel this also extends to computers in a strange way. Negel’s bat argument sprung into my mind when Ullman was discussing her process of taking apart the computer, completely unsure of what was causing the problem. The issue however, is that if Ullman was interacting with a living thing, say a dog with an illness, the dog would be aware of it’s illness and experiencing the effects of it. A computer has no subjective experience, or feelings related to the fact it’s memory is inoperable currently. As a result, in many ways the inner workings of computers are more inaccessible to us than the experiences of other living creatures. Something I think about a bit in regard to digital vs physical space is this idea of the desktop. If I had a physical desk, covered with documents and photographs and CDs, I would have a concrete understanding of all my possessions, the space they occupy, and their relative existence. Whereas with my digital desktop, I haphazardly pile all these same possessions into folders, and have no true understanding of all the things occupying space there. While on the physical desk things can go missing, lost between the crack of the wall and the backs of drawers, on the digital desktop things simply sit, in my laptops memory, but completely absent in my own. The lost digital artifacts continue to take up space I am completely unaware even existed, their ‘lost’ quality coming from my flawed memory, rather than a physical change in the space they occupy.

D.S Films

Today I'm thinking about the people in that rail company that have their own Y2K coming up in 2028 if they set their computers back to 1972. That's when they will be having their millennium. Is fixing a problem merely delaying it to an unforeseen future? But seriously, of course, as Ullman predicted, it is now an issue which is much easier to fix. For good or for bad.

Josh Foreman

Random (maybe) side note. Listening to her read her own audiobook is a true delight. I've worked with several programmers who talk like her and I wonder why. But I like it.

Josh Foreman

It's weird... I was born in '75, and was working in the game industry in '99. So I knew a lot of programmers and was very aware of the stir. (I still have a dopey little latex puppet of a bug holding a screen that says "Y2k Bug" (GET IT?!) But despite all this exposure I was not the least bit worried. I'm guessing some of my programmer friends (who were also probably in their mid-20s) who assured me it wasn't the big deal it was made out to be. After reading this, now I wonder if it actually was like one of those nuclear near misses, like Bay of Pigs or something...

Leo V.

Dumb Fears. Sure thing: “Although I had a deep sympathy with the social distress, I was almost gleeful that the secret was out: computers fail, sometimes spectacularly.” I’ve been thinking about Efficiency. Soon, I would like to research what exactly that term means, and whether there is actually coherent systems of values to describe it, because I never seem to find a clear answer. This is where I start going into hypothesis and intuition over theory, but my initial thoughts always start with this: it is not more efficient to check what time it is on a smartphone than it is on a wristwatch. A smartphone becomes a worse version of a pocket watch, with a built-in mess of distractions. I’m not trying to reject technological advancement — I’m making the argument that efficiency seems to depend on the goal of the user, but even then it often gets conflated with technological novelty without a social component built in. So what does efficiency even mean? I think of latency playing a big part here: the delay between your input and a tool’s response. Less delays can be equated to higher efficiency. Personally, I’m fascinated by how latency affects you psychologically (there were some beautiful comments on this last week), and whether higher latency can enable healthier relationships with tools. But the idea of deliberately creating that between yourself and your personal tools is gonna be a tough sell. My guess is that this could come down to a qualitative approach. It’s a similar argument for film directors to shoot on film, rather than the more currently accessible avenue of shooting hundreds of gigabytes of digital video — the decision to shoot on film serves quality over efficiency. However, the part of me that thinks in logistics sees a struggle in terms of viability and funding, unless your barrier of entry into shooting on film is very small (you have more resources and wealth), or you choose the sacrifice of allocating most of your budget into one single component of creative exploration. Even for the sake of aspiring to quality, it makes me understand why it can be useful to prioritise efficiency over qualitative exploration, because it's part of a bigger balancing act. Working within your means can be your quickest way to get the job done — so in a way, the efficient route becomes the more accessible way to actualise your best results. So I’ve yet to find the framework to turn latency into a useful collective solution, over an individualistic one. And I can’t pretend that things taking longer than they need to doesn’t put me off sometimes. Even this section made me aprehensive at first: “The UNIX team members were accustomed to not knowing. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall “productivity” of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was not the handiwork of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of “hard”.” While I’m on Ullman’s side when it comes to reclaiming direct communication with your tools — to not let UI infantilise the user or the programmer — this is where I start to feel resistance. My current position is that of a non-programmer. For a non-programmer to get closer to the machine, it almost feels like a language of conflict. The learning curve sets me into a frustrated stance. When it comes to picking up certain technical skills, my initial process tends to prioritise “how” over “why”. I tend to skim over tutorials to create a bigger picture out of quilted cliffnotes — the output is more important than the ways in which I get there. I collect enough of what I need to facilitate the practical component. There’s not enough time for all the theory in the world. This approach helps me streamline. But not always — sometimes it makes me miss important pieces of context. I have to go back and sift through them. The patience described by Ullman to do the “hard work” of programming from the ground up is painted like a painstakingly hyperfocused task, and to do that for every case study? It seems like something impossible to democratise. It does not seem accessible for the average non-engineer or programmer to get their hands dirty with low-level code. But I could always be wrong. A creative tech producer gave me some advice recently: “I’ve seen a lot of people say they need to crack open some theory before they build any tech, and what happens is that they become very good at talking about tech theory, but don’t really build anything. There’s no amount of theory that’ll get you to be good at building machines. If you wanna make things, there’s no shortcuts. You have to go and make the fucking thing, and be bad at it.” Then he recommended me a workshop, happening next Tuesday. So I’m gonna go build some machines. Do the necessary work of fucking up in public. It’ll be fun. I’ll see if it informs my relationship with the next bookmark. It’s daunting to Make with Your Hands! But I always try to remember: AI makes more objects in 5 minutes than I have in 5 years. It shows its own ass on the daily and doesn’t fear its own failings. So it reminds me that I really don’t need to either. Ullman also puts my worries at ease by the end of this section. She doesn’t advocate for you to learn everything about low-level code. Just to not ignore the situation altogether; to give some thought to the tech tools that are woven into your everyday life, to *try* and learn how they work. Plus, science is all about the falsifiable! And it’s a useful measure of process and progress. Another one from Ullman: “An immense calm settled over the room. We were reminded that software engineering was not about right and wrong but only better and worse, solutions that solved some problems while ignoring or exacerbating others. That the machine the world wants to see as possessing some supreme power and intelligence was indeed intelligent, but only as we humans are: full of hedge and error, brilliance and backtrack and compromise.” My current research has also led me to a fun single page in Bret Victor’s blog (worrydream.com): “”Rhetoric” is trying to convince others that you’re right. “Science” is trying — by every conceivable means — to convince others that you’re wrong, and failing.” I have more thoughts and ideas, but I’ll put em on a separate comment

Leo V.

I wrote one initial comment about Dumb Fears, so this one is about some extra ideas! I’m very glad this quote got pinned to the original post, because it grabbed my attention too: “Goodbye to everything pretty. Goodbye to video and sound, to wallpaper and fonts and colors and styles; goodbye to windows and icons and menus and buttons and dialogues. All the lovely graphical skins turned to so much bitwise detritus. This was not at all like Keir Dullea's turning off the keys to HAL's memory core in the film 2001, each key turn removing a "higher" function while HAL's voice descended into babyish pleading. I felt I was performing an exactly opposite process: I was making my system not dumber but smarter. Now everything on the system would be something put there by me, and in the end the system itself would be cleaner, clearer, more knowable— everything I associate with the idea of "intelligent." Ullman brings up language earlier in the book. I think a lot about language — specifically about how knowing more than one language is a point of access, and how you start being aware of how that changes your relationship to reality. Ullman breaks down, in this chapter, how it’s nearly impossible to find the foundations of a programming language, or what tools are still able to speak it. We don’t typically strip back the layers of language. But if we do, they tend to come with historical context. These sections on old languages of programming wormed themselves into my brain. I start thinking of BASIC and Stallman’s GNU operating system — languages that I’d never even heard of before this book, described as having a small barrier of entry. I may not pursue them, but wondering is free: are they still running anywhere? What if the heart of their design gave us an alternative, the seed for a diverging timeline that at some point got discarded for in favour of prioritising convenience, efficiency or profit expansion? Is there any way to find the hardware that would run them? This year, I started digging into UX design. The same kinds of questions can be applied to that field: what if the visual slang we use to speak with technology had followed a different path? What if our dialects weren’t spoken in buttons and dialogue boxes? What if we stopped taking these conventions for granted? I got tired of my creative practice being funnelled into making pretty buttons, pretty windows, pretty billboards; we can design pretty buttons and update design trends all we like, but it always boils down to new coats of paint over the same old building blocks. A layered series of unquestioned habits, co-authored by engineers and users. In the first chapter, Ullman tells the story of an environment of programmers repulsed by ethics and pro-social design. She makes the argument that our user interfaces and experiences have been layered over this foundation. Why not be deliberate about bringing in ideas from outside of technical craft and engineering, to inform new propositions for UX design? A couple of days ago I heard of a documentary called The Net (2003) (about the Unabomber, of all things??) directed by Lutz Dammbeck. Here’s a paraphrased quote from Dammbeck I ran into: “Before a machine is constructed, it is usually preceded by a philosophical superstructure and a utopia, which originates in literature, philosophy or fine art. That is the necessary hummus and intellectual climate before the engineers can reach for the drawing board.” … hello, Patreon thread! *** There were lots of cute bonus sections that I thought were nice. I love how clear Ullman is at stripping back a troubleshooting pipeline so that non-programmers can understand it. I like how her distrust for the chauvinism of the programming world translates into openly absurd, filmic vignettes. But I think the most in-context section I’d like to bring up is this conclusion to the Y2K chapter: “I am glad for the coming of the year 2000, almost sorry for the lack of a failure tonight. The outside world may not understand what peril we were under and what my colleagues have done to keep us from it. Yet I know, as the next weeks and months unfold, there will be some problems that are “locally severe,” in Abshier’s words. By then I hope society will remember its fear, and its relief, and feel a little fear again, and know that the danger was real.” I love these kinds of stories. I’ve seen them happen a lot. Sometimes in grim, exploitative or underappreciated ways, but this section comes with a sense of pride — bringing up the kinds of unsung heroes that keep the planet spinning. Some of the best skills are shown through things running seamlessly. The wires that hold these structures together can be hard to see, because that would defeat the point of seamlessness — it’s the kind of “manual breathing” thought process that makes you aware of your lungs. But we could. We could sit for a minute and figure out what our lungs do.

Kiara

"and down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: we build our computers the way we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins" All hired programmers think that their code will be rewritten better in 30 years when they actually become a calcified part of the skeleton that is The Program. And they wont realize that they may be the only expert left. I LOVE YOU ULLMAN, YOU MAKE ME FEEL HUMAN!

thegrimlessreaper

TW - Panic attacks Welp, chapter 4 probably put the fear of God (the God known as the computer) that I already had into everyone else reading it. I'll visit *the* horror at some point later on in this post, but for now, another horror - AI! When I was in college and generative AI had recently started booming, there was a cohort of students who were considering dropping out because AI was "going to take our jobs." I disagree with this on the basis of a simple fact about programming - there is always another layer of abstraction. Everything in programming is an abstraction. A bit of a silly anecdote: there was a guy in some of my CS classes in college who would answer almost every question the professor asked the class with "ABSTRACTION," and he was right about 50% of the time. The IDE is an abstraction of what's being input into the compiler which is an abstraction of... etc etc until we get to 1s and 0s which are abstractions of some rocks talking to each other using electricity or something. As Ullman puts it - "No wizard can possibly banish all the difficulties. Programming is still a tinkery art. The technical environment has become very complex—we expect sections of programs running anywhere to communicate with programs running anywhere else—and it is impossible for any one individual to have deep and detailed knowledge about every niche" (pg 51). Programmers said that wizards would take their jobs, and programmers say that AI will take their jobs. I don't see this ever being true because there will always need to be a thing that inputs into a thing that inputs into a thing that inputs into a thing... etc. This is, of course, the double edged sword that leads us to Y2K - long term maintainability is sacrificed for short to medium term ease of use. In other words, the black box. "When something breaks or goes wrong or needs fundamental change, what will we do except stand helpless in the face of our own creations?" (pg 51). ----- "Something happens to everyone who spends time really thinking about Y2K. A deep fear begins to overtake them, some sort of an animal insecurity, as if they’re sniffing something scary upwind" (pg 57). I actually have panic attacks about Y2K sometimes. Obviously not literally about the event of Y2K, but the current presence of it. It starts with the issue of systems upon systems upon systems... etc. Think about the amount of code that has to be run for a single Google search. Now think about the fact that Google searches are happening many thousands of times per minute. The sheer scale of this is too much for our tiny human brains to actually, truly comprehend. The thought of that code needing to be maintained... staggering. Everything is built on everything - everything is an abstraction. This is the beginning of the thought spiral. Here's a palette cleanser about the beauty of computers. "Their solution reveals the deeper truth: computers have no idea what goes on outside of them except what humans tell them. I thought fondly of their machines running bravely forward into a false future, a fake 'new year' already comfortably old" (pg 69). The solution that the engineers at that train company came up with? Beautiful. Tricking computers is beautiful. Using the limitations of the system against itself? So satisfying. It's a reminder to the computer that you don't control what you do, I CONTROL WHAT YOU DO!!! If you want another example of this in action, I highly recommend Cathode Ray Dude's Quick Start series, specifically Episodes 4 and 7. https://youtu.be/q5M0TwnkWUM https://youtu.be/ssob-7sGVWs ----- A final, terrifying note - this will happen again. On January 19, 2038, the integer storing the epoch (the number counting from 0 that computers use to keep track of time), assuming it is stored as a signed 32 bit integer (which is likely the case for a lot of systems that have not been updated since Y2K), will run out of space. The integer will overflow and suddenly it will be December 13, 1901. We have 14 years. "I hope society will remember its fear, and its relief, and feel a little fear again, and know that the danger was real" (pg 80).

Christine Guzman

Had to look back at chapter 3 to remember what it was about, since I was completely engrossed in chapter 4. My first encounter with the idea that we were dumbing ourselves down to tech was Jaron Lanier. Since then I cannot unsee it, and it was fascinating reading how a computer scientist was seeing it happen in real time. And her concerns about what this not-knowing would bring, as it happened deliberately. “This not knowing is fine while everything works as expected. But when something breaks or goes wrong or needs fundamental change, what will we do except stand helpless in the face of our own creations?” (51). This hits differently after CrowdStrike. The Y2K chapter gave me flashbacks. I was a kid then, but remember seeing it in the news because they talked about it as if it was literally the end of the world. I’ve heard Y2K referenced by people both as a conspiracy as well as an example of people actually tackling the problem. My younger self thought that if the crisis was as dire as they said, the adults would be able to fix it. And they seem to have done the job well, while discovering things about the internet and thecode. Twenty four years later and I don’t think things are much different now. Seems like all of Silicon Valley runs on a “break things” model. And they have broken a lot of things. The finger pointing that ensued with Y2K was fascinating to read. Venture capitalists and shareholders are still the ultimate decision makers, desire makers, and we are now in the enshittification of the entire internet. “The internet it self was designed so that circles of colleagues could converse with trust, a calm community digitally unprepared for the invasion of thieving hordes.” (67)

Ti

For the Programming essay, it's so true how many current devs really don't know anything about the context of the code in front of them. At my current job, there's been many a times when asking about how specific X product we sell/deliver to customers works to Engineering and Product folks and then being told the team that originally managed that was actually dissolved and no one at the company is left that actually has a solid understanding of the actual substance of the program/product in general. There is such a sense of defeat knowing that so many folks go about their days, just assuming "we'll never know" when someone literally built it!!!! At the company only a few years ago!! And their solution is either to ignore it or to quietly deprecate it without bothering to understand it in the first place. In regards to the Linux aspect of the essay, I'm making the slow journey to switch over to Linux myself and doing my best to absorb any and all information regarding what the switch would require and taking the world of Linux bit by bit. In the essay, she did point out how there were specific conferences where folks developing and using Linux can attend. How for Open Source to truly work, there needs to be offline, real life collaboration to establish meaning context and connection to those who care about the project in general or at least general rapport and connection that exists outside of the project itself (i.e. being friends/respectable peers instead of user and distributor/creator). For the Y2K piece, it reads like a great Sci-Fi story, kind of akin to Ray Bradbury short stories, except it happened in real-life and oh goodness what a ride. A joy to read from beginning to end and such an ode to the capacity of human experience despite fears and pressures beyond measure.

alex

reinstalling an os is such an old song and dance for me. the first time i did it was when i was 11 and i was trying to restore internet connectivity to my old desktop computer, and i covertly used my mom's laptop to download the driver to the network adapter. this was high-tier technological stuff for an 11 year old, ok, i was firing on all cylinders. at one point, i was using a linux distro just for the hell of it. this ended when i wasn't willing to get into the nitty-gritty of things, and then also realized i couldn't install sims 2 off of the like 20 discs it was on. ugh. in a sense, the chapter felt like homecoming. i've done it so many times for so many different reasons, but ullman points out that we don't think a whole lot about the code doing all this work for us. or the layers on layers that it's built from. i think we can conceptualize it without acknowledging it? like, the progress from windows nt -> xp -> vista -> 7 can be plotted on a visual timeline (we don't acknowledge 8.1), and it all looks largely familiar. maybe that's, in part, efficient, but it also does kinda show the developers' hands. unlike UNIX, windows assumes (correctly) that you don't know what you're doing. and it's weird, because a lot of kids my age either have been dealing with their whole extended family's technological issues, or just for lack of better words, stunted by the chromebooks they were handed. app-based learning has done such damage to the way we're able to interface with our technology, it's kind of insane. insane enough for me to try and mention what happened with y2k, and my sister (whose 20 year old hand i just held through setting up her new iphone), just looked at me in complete confusion. it strikes me how isolated their thinking is forced to be, because i like the way ullman describes technology: "Layers of code are now wrapped around layers of codes like new skin growing over old, integrated, to become a single organ." (60) "..failures flowing downward and outward, to cells, veins, capillaries. An epidemic of infection: the whole massively interlinked organism succumbing to sepsis." (65) i think that's an easier conception rather than these tiny islands apps seem to stand on. so it makes me wonder what the point was in entirely pulling down the hood, cutting kids off from filesystems and (god forbid) filename extensions. does it make their lives easier in the short term? sure, i guess. in the same way that it makes your life easier to put a dumbphone in a boomer's hands. but since they're going to have to keep growing with it as the technology advances (layers of code like new skin growing over old), it doesn't make sense to stunt their growth. one other thing made me smile. "So I say no, Y2K can't be the end of time - it's too obvious." that hit me in the old southern preacher. i dunno, there's something assuring in that kind of wisdom coming from an older gentleman's mouth.

sophiaswhirld

the dumbing down of programming ✧ “My programming tools were full of wizards. Little dialogue boxes waiting for me to click ‘Next’ and ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’. Click and drag, and—shazam—thousands of lines of working code. No need to get into the ‘hassle’ of remembering the language. No need to learn it…you don’t really need to understand” (49). “‘My Computer.’ This is the face of the machine offered to us by Microsoft. ‘My Computer.’ ‘My Documents.’ Baby Name. My World, mine, mine, mine. ‘Network Neighborhood,’ just like Mr. Rogers’s” (47). “We risk becoming users of components, handlers of black boxes that do not open or don’t seem worth opening. We risk becoming people who cannot really fix things, who can only swap components, work with mechanisms we can use but do not understand it in crucial ways” (51). As I referenced in my post last week, I’m in the process of learning how to code HTML. It’s going slow. I had to work a lot this week and now a lot next week, and then I will start university again, so we’re in it for the long haul. I’m adopting the language because I want to know exactly how to interact with the internet. I’m not someone well-versed in computer science; hell, I made it my mission never to take another COMPSCI class after I was forced to in junior high, but now I see exactly why it is important to learn. Being able to interact with your machine, to talk with it, builds a reverence for it. I’m among the people out there who use a computer daily and have no clue how it really works under the colorful skin and “My Documents.” I am a “user of components,” as Ullman states, and I don’t want to be. In my escapades in UI/UX studies, I learned how to organize basic components and prototype them, and that’s it. None of the nitty gritty into how or why the commands I set will run the animation. Nothing. Is that a failing on my part, my institution, or my short-sightedness when it comes to choosing a degree? That’s for you to decide; I’m tired of thinking about it. Wizards and “My Computer” are designed for the user. The “dumbing down” is meant to create a frictionless experience for those of us who aren’t programmers to understand where things are and an implicit understanding of the functions they perform. Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company, and it wants to keep raking in all the revenue it can in the form of a streamlined experience because the user will turn back time and time again. Capitalism…shocking, right? They do what every company out there does: cater everything to the user, baby them, and provide them with 0 resistance to experience the thing they bought. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because now you don’t have to be a programmer to interact with a computer. However, just like Ullman points out, we don’t know how anything works and won’t know what to do when there’s a problem. Thank god for forums. I understand completely where Ullman is coming from, though. I see it when I look at the UIs of apps on my phone, and I wish I could demolish them all and rebuild with pure design in mind, not profit. When did we stop making things that care about the user en masse? Did we ever? I read a New Yorker article today, “Why I finally quit Spotify,” and the author, Kyle Chayka, tore into the company, as well as many others, on “the negative consequences of such corporation-centered design.” I hate Spotify as much as the next person, not only because it rips revenue away from the scores of creatives that interact with the service daily, but through the design itself: “The uppermost menu now offers three options, each given equal real estate—Music, Podcasts, and Audiobooks—and the Music tab is filled with rows of playlists, autoplay “radio” stations, and algorithmically generated mixes. The only option for browsing full albums is a small item in the lesser Library column, to the right of yet more buttons for Playlists and Podcasts.” The UI is a hellscape because the designers are herding us all like sheep to the money makers, the “Playlists and Podcasts,” and now audiobooks because that’s their new venture. I’m tired of companies this hold they have on me and everyone else. It’s time to sail the high seas… what we were afraid of as we feared Y2K ✧ “The public was getting a glimpse of the real guts of digital systems, computers in their physical existence, metal and wires, hardware and software, creations of mortal human beings. Although I had deep sympathy with the social distress, I was almost gleeful that the secret was out: computers fail, sometimes spectacularly” (58). I’m a zoomer, so my knowledge of Y2K is relegated to the never-ending slog of aesthetic edits on social media, jokes from Futurama, the podcast episode “The Y2K Bug” from You’re Wrong About, and this chapter. I never thought it was a hoax, mainly because no one around me talked about it much, and I was more worried about school and drawing to look anything up about it when I was younger. It had the same energy, oddly enough, as 9/11 did in my mind: it happened before I was born, it was a big thing, a lot of grown people don’t talk about it, and when they do talk, they have strong opinions. I enjoyed learning about what the programmers did to mitigate disaster because I can only imagine what it felt like to find out: “IF NEW-YEAR LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO CURRENT-YEAR THEN CALL ‘ABEND’ BY CONTENT/ ERROR MESSAGE/ END IF” (64). “ABEND. That is, crash...Something in me is being shaken. I’ve always known systems have their peril, but I’ve also known their beauty….Beauty is giving way to peril” (65). Our interconnected system, all built around this machine, can fall apart so easily if one thing happens to contradict the rules programmers set up so long ago. Oh, the wonders of the dumb-god! It’s freaky to me, analyzing the chain of interdependence of Texaco to every system that runs on oil; we, the consumers of these services, put gargantuan trust in these people to keep the world moving. Where will we be when it all stops? The preppers will be vindicated! “The media reports become more hysterical as the end of the year approaches. Deaths by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, black death by a new and more lethal bug” (75). Negative news preys on our limbic system, driving engagement til the end of time. “I’m attending a workshop about creating a ‘time machine,’ a virtual time environment to test ‘fixed’ Y2K programs, like the one Jim Fuller talked about. Carl Gehr of the Edge of Information Group is patiently explaining that, when designing the test environment, ‘you have to specify your upper limit’ for the year… ‘But what upper limit?’ I find myself saying out loud. ‘Should we be worrying about the year 9000? or 10,001” (68). I’ve been researching a bit on the paradigm of human exceptionalism (mainly spurred from the new Philosophy Tube Video “How Philosophers Confront Death (ft. Caitlin Doughty)”, and that because we developed the machine and live in the digital age, we are somehow exempt from the natural processes of the world by proxy. Will there even be an us by the year 10,001? Will we have killed all vestiges of human society that no one will know by the time it is 10,001? Or will we succeed in uploading consciousness to the cloud, and a year like 10,001 is equivalent to a second of our time? I would like to think there will be an Escape From L.A. moment, where a Snake Plissken type triggers a worldwide EMP, disabling all tech, and we have to start again. Delete everything the tech giants gave to us, rebel, and rebuild from the source. I can’t stand the idea of people wanting to live beyond the constraints of death. It feels like the only reminder we have now to cherish the time on earth, however little or fucked up it is, it’s ours, and it’s being taken away. We don't like to think about how we're worm food because it's an existential threat to the majesty of international society, to the eternal digital footprint we all have. Every moment is being recorded, so much more now that smartphones are so ubiquitous, and I'm envious of this time Ullman writes from in Web 1. That’s why I was so happy to read that Ullman threw her New Year’s Eve party because she and her friends all throw holiday parties, and New Year’s Eve is turn. Even though the world could end, “Water won’t flow. Water!” (77), people keep living. Y2k was an opportunity for people to reflect on the machine of their own creation, reaching certain death. They scrambled to fix the code, to go back into COBOL and BASIC, find the original writers who thought it would’ve been deleted and scrapped years ago, and fear mongered all the way to January 1, 2000, and beyond. Nothing spectacularly devastating happened, and now the event is lauded as a hoax to some and a distant memory to others. It has to be because “The old code then achieves a sort of immortality. It runs. Leave it alone. Don’t think about it” (61).

Silver

My physical copy arrived horrayy I dont know why but i don’t seem to have many thoughts while reading these anecdotes (in contrast to ZMM, where im slowly getting through the incredibly dense and long Part III, having thoughts literally every two paragraphs), even though i find them incredibly beautiful “[…] we built our computers the way we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.“ (p. 47) Love this. I mean many cities in the US are indeed planned, but here in europe this comparison hits home. Something beautiful about the chaotic creativity of generation culminating in the patchwork of systems we interact with today. “While everyone scribbles notes, an awful thought occurs to me. ‘But what upper limit?‘ I find myself saying out loud. ‘Should we be worrying about the year 9000? Or 10,001?‘“ (p. 68) Satisfying to read after the condescending way these people talked about the supposedly shortsighted prgrammers, but it also just shows how ridiculous our idea of never ending growth and ‘progress‘ is in the face of *time* “I find it thrilling. The solution reveals the deeper truth: computers have no idea what goes on outside of them except what humans tell them. I thought fondly of their machines running bravely forward into a false future, a fake ‘new year‘ already comfortably old.“ (p. 69) Something in this stirs me, though i can‘t quite place my finger on it. Something about the realisation, how completely disconnected computers actually are from reality, despite us constantly treating it like the opposite. Idk my thoughts feel very superficial somehow. Maybe it’s because i just now come to actually critically read philosophy and so on and, as CJ somewhere said, have to learn how to best read and engage with this literature. Also I dont really have much to say about the importance of body and human real life in face of Internet and social media as it seems like everybody else already formulated it perfectly. We’ll see i think ZMM and this were good choices of books to read as their respective narrative aspects keep it all relatively grounded.

benedict.m

what a lovely constellation of thoughts & perspectives <3 even with a book as beautiful as this, yet again the discussion is arguably my favorite part. I don't have a whole lot to add; I feel hesitant to translate my experience of the truth & beauty in these pages into words, into a post. I want to be interfacing with the book directly, presently, not thinking about how I'll represent it in the future online. but some of that feeling is selfish and silly. I want to talk to you guys, so I'll offer a couple thoughts. "And then there would be the problem of finding programmers willing to work on the code of a bygone era. Young programmers want to be at the forefront, feel themselves to be the inventors of the world....The young are forced to recognize their desperate need for Papa's knowledge and Mama's wisdom; to learn from them, and quickly, before their elders leave them without passing on their secrets." <61> like in so many other areas of our world, in programming the ego-driven death instinct is prioritized. we need to value & encourage the life instinct: the slow, patient, un-flashy maintenance that keeps our world working, that kept the water running and the trains on time in the year 2000. "Something in me is being shaken. I've always known systems have their peril, but I've also known their beauty. At the heart of me is a love for what the machines can do, the wonders they can achieve in the hands of dedicated human beings...the elegance of thought that can be at the core of [programming]--thought that makes things, thought that works. And now there is the prospect of a great not-working. I don't want to believe the harbingers of doom. And yet, and yet....Beauty is giving way to peril." <65> next to this passage I wrote one word: NOW.

halley

firstly I just want to appreciate the artistic use of keyboard signage in this post, it really enhances the experience! --- < "it is a powerful siren song lure: you can make your program do all these wonderful and complicated things, and *you don't really need to understand*." - "why study the technical underbelly, since it's already working" - yet, when we allow complexity to be hidden and handled for us, we should at least notice what we are giving up... > what really stood out to me in this first chapter was the value of doing things that aren't really necessary anymore- learning where things come from and how they're made, especially things that are ubiquitous and used regularly. there's an interesting relationship between choosing the inconvenient option and how it relates to freedom, in a world where we're predisposed and encouraged to seek convenience. I could have so easily and quickly made my website with google sites or so but, for some reason, water silk pleading NOT to make another squarespace site and to do it yourself really resonated with me- enough that I felt like I needed to take a glimpse at this technical underbelly for myself, to learn how the letters sound even if I have no intention of ever speaking the language, just enough to say 'hello world' with my own fingers as a person who interacts so regularly with this world of online things I barely understand. I see parallels in this line of thinking to my interest in DIY and learning ancient crafts/folk art, wanting to learn by doing the whole process of going from seed to food, sheep to scarf, clay to cup- precisely because I don't have to. sometimes when I've told people about my hobby of spinning yarn I've been asked if its cheaper than buying yarn which strikes me as such an unrelated question, as it misses the point entirely. sometimes people telling you not to do something is the best motivation for doing it. < "no one left who understands..." > this is such a haunting phrase/theme of these chapters. it makes me think of dying languages and folk art practices fading into obscurity as young people aren't learning and carrying on these traditions because they're incentivized against it at every turn, towards a more profitable investment of time and resources and attention. --- I love reading about her creative impulse to dive deeper into the machine and how she sees beauty in the process, and it reminded me a bit of Lanier going on about wikipedia. personally i'm grateful there's wizards and pretty UI (and wikipedia) for us normies with other interests who sometimes just need to use the computer to get a job done, and I felt like she came off less condescending than Lanier to the average user in this regard. --- < "that the machine the world wants to see as possessing some supreme power and intelligence was indeed intelligent, but only as we humans are: full of hedge and error, brilliance and backtrack and compromise." > this is such a grounded and balanced critique of the worship of intelligent technology as superior to human intelligence. the machine reflects us back to ourselves, every failure of AI is our own hubris in thinking our creations could rise above our human biases and tendencies. --- < "I cannot convince myself that technologists truly do drive computing, that it is not all marketing; cannot convince myself that, if we only get the source code into the hands of people who understand it, we will redeem our human souls. " - "programmers do not allocate resources. programmers are the resources. managers make those decisions. corporate officers make those decisions. venture capitalists decide which new technologies shall be funded and which shall not." - "these systems did not see 'it' coming because the future comes step by step... - the human reaction to the technology itself- our using it, imagining what we can do with it- determines what the future will be. technology is not the driver of change; what drives technology is human desire. " > it helps to keep in perspective who the true villains are in the story. I think the marriage of technology with advertising in the grow-or-die capitalist system has spiraled out of control to give us this wildfire of what the web has become, with all the terrible real-life consequences. I feel like reading about what it could have been, the idealism of insiders like Lanier and Ullman who worked with it in the before times when it seemed to embody more of a democratic sense of hope and possibility accessible to anybody, is softening my approach to tech. I think the element of imagination is crucial here, to combat the power of the market approach in limiting creativity by actively recognizing it and imagining other ways of being. --- <3

valentin

.The dumbing down of programming. (this is all slightly sleep deprived airplane prose) "Goodbye to everything pretty. Goodby to video and sound, to all paper and fonts and colours and styles;..." I started working on my littol website a while ago. Doing it in html because I'm KiLlijg the Internet! Html is really easy to learn and there is an immediacy to everything you do. Type something into html file, refresh your site and !boom! there it is on your little white box in your medium sized black box. Then you start fucking around with your options. What if I want this text to be bold? In colour? Centered? With every problem you solve a five new opportunities to use the skill you have just learned arrive. Whenever I use the neat graphic interface of Wix I feel more distant to whatever I'm working on. There's a feeling of telling someone to tell someone to do something for me. Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 was programmed in the x86 assembly language. To my layman's knowledge this programming language is what Ullman would call "close to the machine." Actively telling your computer what to do instead of going through every middle man imagineable. And while programming in x86 is (to my layman's knowledge ) a tedious affair to say the least, I can't help but marvel at the result. A full simulator of an amusement park, built from the ground up. Minimal lag, pixels moving smoothly from place to place. I don't want to romanticise difficult ways to program. I myself use html, which in my knowledge is also a middleman for another middleman. But I do really appreciate when someone goes out their way to do understand something with precision and detail in order to deliver the best product possible.

reva

coming in late this week because i am on vacation right now! visiting my friend in boston right before going back to school, spending time in the city has been wonderful. being able to walk everywhere and also eating meals with my friend has given me a solid schedule and i spend most of my days outside, which feels SO much better than my mind-time summer schedule of always watching shows and eating whenever and sleeping whenever and generally feeling lethargic. one point for real-time! chapter 3 was really exciting to me. i have a mixed relationship with programming, i have found it fun in the past but think that coding as a career would make me miserable. but this chapter illuminates something that really excites me about it: being able to fully understand a machine, and being able to manipulate it how you want. the idea of ripping out the pre-installed "smart" operating system to get the computer at its core, so you can see all of its parts laid bare, is extremely appealing to me. i feel very quickly aligned with ullman's distate for "easy" and "user-friendly" design because i LOVE a challenge. let me rip into a machine and figure out how it works no matter how long it takes, because when the clock hits 3am and i'm sitting at the end of a long chain of stackoverflow links, i'll finally be able to feel the pulse of the machine under my fingertips. i love how both of these chapters introduce an understanding of code as physical infrastructure. just because programs can be written and run as quickly as a person can type doesn't mean that they exist in some sort of perfect world where every program can be easily edited and everything kept up to date. programs undergo the same type of aging that buildings do — something gets built by a group of people with a vision, and then it is left, and new people might buy the building and change it, and then they will leave. knowledge of the building's origin gets lost in the passage of time. some hidden part of the building might be rotting or breaking down, but people have to find out about it before they can fix it, if they choose to fix it at all. programs seem to be no different. chapter 4 left me feeling the way lanier's epiphany left me feeling. unfathomable systems and technologies function around us every day. when they fail or break, as they inevitably will, hundreds of people somewhere in the world fight against entropy in order to fix them, and they succeed. we are bathed in what could be called love. makes me hopeful. :)

silentcrystaltears

hello book club ive wrote a personal story about linux here. i adore the y2k chapter but i don't have anything special to say about it :3 "Last month I committed an act of technical rebellion: I bought one operating system instead of another." pg. 39 in june, i committed this same act. microsoft has gone all-in on AI. copilot is built into windows, another bit of bloatware that power users are going to continue manually ripping the package out of the system every time the system updates. an alternative option is to not install every update, as ullman did, but today an exploit was uncovered and patched in windows that allows malicious code to be executed from just visiting a website. if you use windows, and have not updated your computer, you absolutely should. i would also urge you to delete copilot once you do, there's easy-to-follow guides online showing how. i had already, months before, installed linux on my macbook pro. i had received it used for far cheaper than i could buy any other laptop with its specs. macOS is very user-friendly, in the derogatory sense that ullman uses. as an example: it doesn't trust users to run software that hasn't been officially notarized by apple, meaning that as an independent developer it is easier to install the windows versions of my games (and many other indies) under a compatibility layer for macOS and linux called WINE, than it is to port them to macOS properly. so if it's not clear, i immediately knew when i got the laptop that i did not want to (primarily) use the operating system it came with. this gave me a perfect opportunity to experiment and learn. i decided to "dual-boot" the system, allowing a small section of the computer's hard drive to be dedicated to an install of macOS which i could use if anything breaks, and gave the rest of the hard drive to an installation of linux mint, giving myself the option to choose every time i turn it on. this was incredibly important, as the tool that i use for music production does not have a linux port, i wound up running it on the system through WINE, which, along with the install of linux itself, needed to be tooled around with before i could be ready to go without the simple, friendly world of macOS. as for my desktop: one day in june, i decided, impulsively like ullman, that i was done with windows. my previous experiments with my macbook shielded me from anxiety as i removed everything from the system, saved what i needed to, and installed linux mint. i'm writing this on that computer now, having solved bugs and updated components and configured my desktop, it's worked out pretty well for me, and i encourage others to attempt this act of rebellion. experimenting with something small (like an old laptop, or a raspberry pi, which is a small $15 hobbyist computer that runs linux and can be configured for lots of diy use-cases) can be really helpful in gaining the computing literacy required to run linux as a daily driver.

yennik arual

i do not code, but have had to for assignments during my undergrad. i would rather say i did not enjoy my time doing these assignments because i was not taught to code to necessitate the tests, rather than say i did not enjoy them because i do not like coding. coding is difficult. but i can't say i don't like it because i do not know how to code. i recently had something published that used r and it required a lot of assistance from the friends i am reading this with and rstudio. egads, a wizard >< !!! i get ullman's insistence against The Dumbing Down of Programming—the temptation of convenience has led to material problems—and i would like to code. but instead of bemoaning those who stop at convenience, could she instead bemoan the people and systems that surround and influence those who stop at convenience. sometimes solutions are as simple as... integrating better coding education into things for people that may be required to code. am i missing something ]+++++++[ i was speaking to the third friend who could not join us for the initial ch1+2 discussions last week (ironically because she has a bias for asynchrony). she pointed out the centring of oil in the cascade/infection analogies in the Y2K chapter. to paraphrase, even though oil is a hugely versatile resource, it's often merely a scarce resource in post-apocalyptic texts, and rarely referred to as the foundation of society. idk how much i agree with this, but i understand oil's pervasiveness (≠ importance) and it's interesting ullman chose to focus on it . having laws to enforce its constant pouring in through pipelines seems so grand and consequential and a Big Deal but somethign so menial mundane minute and tiny as not responding for four hours causes such a big reaction!!!!!!! and how so much related code hasn't received any maintenance over the last (at the time) thirty years just carries this image of institutions being weaker than they are? does that make sense? like, instead of concrete pillars holding us up, they are matchsticks. it reminds me of when i've approached companies or clubs to work or volunteer at, and they hold an image of prestige, or well-upkeptness, or some other signifier of a hearty, thorough and strong brand, but then i've actually joined their ranks and everyone seems to (not) know just as much as the next person. you would expect something as important as texaco or the federal reserve to maintain upkeep, to replace its important code with stronger or up to date ideas / strategies / languages / processes / programmes in the same way you'd expect a service to rotate stock or something.

phil e the theyby

I think both of these chapters left me reflecting on the alienation of not actually knowing how the world around you works. In pre-agricultural societies, we didn’t know how all kinds of things worked, so we developed social systems to manage the things we could and used myths to make sense of things we didn’t understand and couldn’t control. Now, we understand a lot more about how the world works (and we make scientific myths to explain the things we don’t understand), but we don’t actually understand anything about how our society works. We’ve built all of these immensely complex systems and assigned management of them to specialists of various kinds, and none of the specialists talk to each other and learn how all of this shit works. And I personally find that deeply alienating. We can try to learn about specific systems (even reading this book gives me a little knowledge on how code works that I didn’t have before), but there’s so much out there, and each one of us individually becoming knowledgeable about things doesn’t change the cultural reality of different disciplines not talking to each other. I did love Ullman’s rebellion against this specific aspect of alienation in chapter 3. I think the discussion of Y2K made it really clear how much we don’t talk to each other and actually understand how interconnected systems work, and she does a great job of capturing that dread that comes from realizing that we might all be kinda fucked because of it. I don’t have a solution to this problem besides coming to spaces like this and hearing from people in different lines of work and different systems, and trying to have more of those cross-disciplinary interactions in my personal life as well. But that’s what these chapters left me sitting with. All that to say, I appreciate everyone here sharing their perspective! Whether it’s about something technical (“how a system works”) or just your own intellectual, emotional, and spiritual reflection, I always find it rewarding to hear from others and expand my perspective.

Seoyoung Park

Aw fuck! I am late for this one, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The Y2K essay REALLY got me. The orientation towards the future (yet never imagining that the 2000s would come so fast), the imminence of an unknown present, and the combination leading to a Huge Undertaking of troubleshooting really got me... I actually had No Idea that y2k was a real thing, and I thought it was a superstitious hoax that a hoard of old people accidentally bought into! I was not conscious during y2k, and the adults around me had always told me it was silly fear-mongering, but I guess it just passed so seamlessly, everyone thought the technologists were being silly! I was so shocked to read this chapter-- particularly at getting to the end of the chapter: "the outside world may not understand what peril we were under... i hope society will remember it's fear, and its relief, and feel a little fear again, and know that the danger was real." How quickly fear is forgotten... Even the succeeding generation believes it was all a hoax! I was really really moved by the idea of engineers programming our futures for us, and at the same time started feeling this creeping nebulousness invading everything I touch.... So much of the "anticipated desire" that we're subject to with social media is the anticipated desire of profit-chasers. I was reminded of the oft-spoken anecdote about cocoa farmers in the global south having never tasted chocolate, and the man saying he never knew what the federal reserve did-- EXCEPT HE MADE IT! HE MADE THE FEDERAL RESERVE! I think that's one of the things about life in the anthropocene... we never know how we're partaking in our own destruction, never know how to stop our own floundering, and how to contribute to our own flourising. Those are facts that only the puppet masters are conscious of. (the third? second? stock market crash since I graduated college happened, and I'm feeling the disappointment of the world in my bones right now.) I love the idea of creation as a type of time travel between a time when someone will interact with Object and genesis. I completely neglected to talk about the other chapter, but I was just too moved by this chapter.... One thing I was thinking about though: Mysticism if a function of planned obsolence! We look at our magical objects that run on magic and fumes, and one day they stop working, and we can't do anything about them! They are mysteries, and they are broken. ~~~~~ I was in Chicago with a friend I haven't seen in two years which is why I hadn't done any reading! But as CJ was saying: it is important to maintain in person modes of constant connection... I stayed with a friend I had a crush on as well, and they had pizza+movie nights every sunday with their chosen family, and everyone PCR tested/rapid tested before. There was so much care in the space, and it was so filling. I have been bedbound for most this year. I continue to have a contentious relationship with leaving the house even after months of medical treatment; my world gets smaller and smaller into an online world these days. It's important, now more than at any other point in my life, to be mindful of what the technological spheres are doing to me... they are most of my world right now.

Julie

Continuing on my journey through this past chapter of the book club, maybe there will be someone else even later stumbling upon this and I think it's nice to add to this space. Chapter 3 resonated with me the most as I have converted to being a Linux user a year or so ago out of sheer principle. And - it is definitely more inconvenient in many places. I've had many frustrating run ins with seemingly mundane issues that took hours to solve, browsing through increasingly obscure and old forum posts just as Ullman describes 30 years earlier. I came close to abandoning my open source principles time after time but am still sticking around, yet left wondering how much inconvenience people will reasonably take on. When I talk to people about this they usually respond with interest and appreciation for the necessity and value in disengaging from closed digital ecosystems and subscription services for applications, yet the threshold to make these changes for oneself seem gargantuan. It's just too inconvenient, time can be better spent elsewhere rather than trying to figure out how to set up your Linux installation. Digital literacy and establishing some sovereignty over the technology we use seems key to me, it holds the same pleasure as being able to fix your own bike and with little knowledge gain a powerful tool (compared to walking or being able to fix and run a car). From my firsthand experience I can also say that the switch came with a great peace of mind - knowing I'm not dependent on one company's decision about their products but rather a vast community of people who, for some reason or another, dedicate their time to develop and improve software and hardware for others to use, simply because it's necessary and useful. This experience has definitely also made me more attentive to how dumb any given software assumes me to be, what parts of it I can access and which I can't, and how inconvenient it's made for me to leave the software behind for something else or make it more compatible with another useful bit of software. This awareness functions as a window into the philosophy, whether conscious or unconscious, of the company who wrote the code I'm now using, giving way to immediate sympathy or antipathy.