And Even If You Have Social Media Interaction...

...Does that really make up for meaningful, face to face, interaction? Interaction where you see, and feel, real caring attention to the fact that you matter to someone? Or that you matter to society at all?

I certainly don't think so.

And let's be clear here. It's not just the fact that we provide so little in funded social programs to offer isolated people aid (glaringly obvious thought that might be). Even more to the point is that our entire society is structurally organized to keep people apart; separation not only by the specialization of jobs, and whether you have a job or not, but also because everyone has to work harder and harder all of the time; either with simply more hours, or with both more hours and the pressure to work harder in every hour no matter the total hours. You add to that all of the other aspects of stress: the worry of losing your job, the worry of stretching what you're paid to make ends meet, the worry about your kids being educated enough to make it on their own, or the worry about what catastrophic illness, or natural disaster, or whatever else. You add all of that into the mix and you have to ask yourself how much can we expect to have left to give to other family members, or friends; either in face time, or emotional support.

The bottom line here is that this is what we get when a factory mentality of social organization meets the hyper competition that electrified technological change manifests. All in a world of dwindling resources and increasing global tensions.

How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

Dhruv Khullar DEC. 22, 2016

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As if having a climate change denier in the White House weren't enough...

...We now more alarming evidence of profound change in Arctic ecology.

As the linked article below from the New York Times indicates researchers have gotten pretty convincing evidence that less ice is producing a great deal more algae there. A fact that, on the face of it might lead one to think that more food at the bottom of the food chain would be a good thing, at least for aquatic life, but, as is usually the case, things are a much more complex than that; especially when considers what may happen to, say the reproduction cycles of different species if a great deal more algae were competing for all of the light and nutrients that early stages of other species might need. And of course less ice in general every year is going to wreak havoc in a number of other ways in any case: higher sea levels, less reflection so more absorption of sunlight as heat into the oceans, etc.

If you have even a basic understanding of the interconnected nature of life and the physical aspects of our planet you have to see this as another canary in the mine getting ready to drop dead. And if it can't breath down there what do you suppose your chances are of continuing to do the same?

One would think that even the Trump Chump brigades would have to take notice of this. Unfortunately a good deal of that prospect depends on the chump commander and chief coming back to reality. And more's the pity.

Global Warming Alters Arctic Food Chain, Scientists Say, With Unforeseeable Results

by Carl Zimmer

No Comment needed on Where This Guy Is Coming From

Bannon: 'Darkness Is Good. Darth Vader ... Satan. That's Power'

Think Long And Hard About Self Reinforcing Interlink Connections...

...Between all of your games and the behaviors of everyday life.

These kinds of interlink connections are exactly what Andrew Wilson is talking about in the linked interview you see below from The Verge.

Sure, in a best case scenario as Mr. Wilson describes:

"...From the minute I get up in the morning, everything I do has an impact on my gaming life, both discrete and indiscrete. The amount of eggs I have in my internet-enabled fridge might mean my Sims are better off in my game. That length of distance I drive in my Tesla on the way to work might mean that I get more juice in Need for Speed. If I go to soccer practice in the afternoon, by virtue of internet-enabled soccer boots, that might give me juice or new cards in my FIFA product. This world where games and life start to blend I think really comes into play in the not-too-distant future, and almost certainly by 2021..."

But what if the interconnects try to reinforce things that are not so benign or beneficial? What if comments made somewhere penalize you in gaming. What if purchases from only one vender of a thing, say the more expensive one, is the main way to get ahead in a game. And what if they start these interlinks very unobtrusively at first. Then slowly begin to increase them as your behavior changes. Would you necessarily notice? Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever the case you don't need to be an expert in B.F. Skinner's positive reinforcement to understand how this sort of thing might be fertile ground for abuse; especially as VR immersion becomes more pervasive.

Just imagine a scenario where, as internet bandwidth increases, people take to VR with a vengeance; using it to not only game, but slip back and forth from that to remote working, without ever exiting whatever the physical interface ends up becoming. Might you then have your employer also involved? Would performance, and/or hours worked, become an increasing game benefits provider? So much so that you begin to lose the connection between what you're actually paid for work done, and the amount of work you do?

This may seem extreme pessimism but it's already been suggested in the YouTube video "Uncanny Valley," a frightening depiction of how VR putting you into a game might actually have you operating actual killing robots in some foreign land without you're realizing it.

YOUR LIFE WILL BE A VIDEO GAMEANDREW WILSON | CEO, ELECTRONIC ARTS
BY CHRIS PLANTE | NOV. 16, 201
See Also:


We are Already Living in a Multi Faceted Fantasy. Isn't that Kinda Horrible?

Experience is Experience, but can one ever substitute for the other?

Experience the New Experience

Once AI Gets Good At This...

...And it likely will, not only will we not be able to decrypt it, we won't have any understanding at all of how it was done.

Ah, you reply, won't we then just get other AI to decrypt it for us?

Maybe. But how paranoid do you think we will become in wondering about whether the new decryptor was convinced, logically of course, to switch sides? And how would we really know if we couldn't determine what they were saying to each other?

Google’s neural networks invent 

their own encryption

By Timothy Revell

A Category Five Reality

Whirling shards
roiling around the core;
the hurricane
of tornados twisting
so many fragments,
flashing thought,
echoed feelings,
descriptive snatches
torn from any continuity.
My mind
and the maddening
matrix that made it.
Shit and shinola
fact and fiction
smoke and mosaic
mirrors, always shifting;
the angles and dangles
juxtaposing
every juxtaposition
endlessly.
All of it roaring,
at the tearing away
and crashing into
thin membranes of cognition.
And still
connections are made.
That miracle all
the more maddening
by all of floundering
to articulate
a small thread of understanding
out of all of the chaos,
which itself flutters
away in the torrent.
Can it ever be
caught
by another mind
to stitch together
a common weave
to hold
something shared?
A way to meaning
we can agree to?
Take the turn
of what we toil
to boil
in what we know
accelerating
off the electric burner.
To find the calm
within the eye
that sees a better vision
of how to find
and make our way?

The Big Expectations for Christmas Spending

As the article linked below indicates retailers are likely to ring up a big total for the holiday shopping season, and again I have to confront all of the mixed feelings this sort of thing resonates for me.

On the one hand it would be more than a good thing if people were feeling optimistic enough about their finances to indulge in giving generously to their loved ones. It doesn't take a keen viewer of the national scene to divine that we could all use a big dose of what Christmas is supposed to be about now, with all of the hate, fear, and bigotry demonstrated in Presidential campaigning so far. And it always amazes me just how much people can still pull out that core, loving motivation from all of the plastic, glitz and flash inherent in the commercialization that has taken over Christmas. Even for a non believer of deities like myself, one can always harken to the idea of families coming together to celebrate the ideals of a man that are real, even if he wasn't, or, even if he was, but not actually the son of one particular deity. Love. Empathy. Compassion and tolerance for all life and all people.

It has always seemed to me that you can believe in those even if you don't believe in other aspects of the religion that brought forth the ideas.

Be that as it may, though, my practical side can't help but wonder about what a number like $800 billion represents.

As in how much of that stays here to foster new investment (or sustained current investment) in more jobs, or the firming up of existing jobs, here? Wouldn't it be nice if the folks who report these kinds of statistics provided that kind of background context?

What is the carbon price we pay when that much extra spending gets pumped into our economy?

How much of that spending can one expect to be placed on the debt load that Americans are currently carrying?

I also have to wonder what the difference would be if, instead of using abstract counters to buy more trinkets, we were in an economy where you had to make all of the gifts you wanted to give yourself. An economy set up with the technical aids, and all of the component basics to allow you to do that very thing; just as you would be doing for all of the other items you wanted, or needed, for yourself.

Can you imagine the resources that would be freed up in just the elimination of product packaging, sales promotion, and global transportation costs (moving the items as well as the packaging)? Can you also imagine what such a thing would do to bring us back to a more complete focus on what this gift giving is supposed to be about? I can. And I have to tell you that it breaks this old man's heart everytime I see the difference between that possibility and what we live with now.

Consumers Will Spend Almost $800 Billion on Holiday Shopping

by HERB WEISBAUM


See Also:

'MANY THINGS ARE BETTER THAN SHOPPING'

Nick Offerman Makes A Case For Making Stuff

Our favorite woodworker (outside of Matthias Wandel) talks about work ethic and the power of creation.

Just a Reminder That You Can Get A Deeper View of Cosmolosophy...

...If you've a mind to of course.

The Parable of The Ultimate Container of Containers

Cosmolosophy: A Starting Point and a First Question Cosmolosophy and the Anthropic Principle Cosmolosophy and the ideas of Connection, Involvement, Shared Vision, and New Frontiers Cosmolosophy: The Immorality of the Hard Sell. Cosmolosophy: What carries on after a self no longer associates? Cosmolosophy: Good & Evil Cosmolosophy: Loving Too Much And The Notion of Letting Go Cosmolosophy: Why is Faith Important Cosmolosophy: On the Announcement of the Higgs Boson discovery Cosmolosophy:On a certain “reality problem” in Quantum Physics Cosmolosophy: Causality: The will of Gods, shit happens, sentient choice and probability realization. The compl

The Dichotomy of Simulacrum

As the linked article below indicates the debate about whether we live in a simulation or not continues. It continues to fascinate me because I have lived with feet firmly planted in two worlds: The world of words, metaphor and expression, as well as the world of computers and information processing (I got into the latter because the former lead me to become a student of Marshall McLuhan). Because of this I see things from a perspective that emphasizes the ideas of objectification, the layering of abstractions, and meaning derived by the interactive gap between to objects (read "From Cliche to Archetype" by McLuhan to get a quite interesting take on this). As such for me what we live in is both simulation and not simulation.

Simply put, our vector of energy interaction and translation, from which we associate meaningful objective relationships, starts out with what must be the assumption that we simply can't interpret all of the interactions. There is so much, in fact, that to properly process it all would require a processor reality all its own outside of our 4 dimensional realm. For the practicalities of biological interaction the meaning processor that evolved to be us had to start using filtering shortcuts (see Robert Ornstein's "The Evolution of Consciousness"). We ended up with a brain that makes quick, best guesses on objective interactions going on around us, and that usually works out to our advantage.

In this context, then, what we amalgamate of meaning is a representation of what is actually interacting at many scales of consideration. It is a representation that works so what we miss out on should certainly be contemplated, but not overly fixated on, at least as far as I am concerned.

This notion, however, that all of our reality, even the stuff we don't fully perceive, must be a simulation is ludicrous to me. It may certainly be possible, but the probability of it actually being so is infinitesimally low. I say this because I disagree with most of the main assumptions that are made to argue for the proposition. Let's take them one by one.

First let's talk about simulations in general. It's true that the computational ability to produce visual, auditory and near physical recreations of dynamic, ongoing experience has progressed at an incredibly fast pace. Because of that pace, and related notions that increases in the structure of knowledge leads to ever greater ability to gain more, makes it easy to assume that nothing of a technical matter will stand in our way of either duplicating sentience, or linking created experience directly to existing brain structures. That this might be easy, and/or intuitive, to see does not automatically imply the postulated result.

The fact of the matter is that there is simply so much we still don't know about how synapses and neurons link to what we live as sentient beings that making any kind of "assured" predictions is just foolish in the extreme. Even if we create what we think are sentient copies of our own meaning processor, there will be no truly objective means to verify it; if for no other reason than we will never be able to fully objectively define what we already have as sentience.

The same goes for artificial experience. We can't objectively fully quantify or measure what that is now, not only because of the uncertainty principle, but also because the filtering, and the process of experience association, that actually links meanings to the process of objectifying, as we grow from infant to adult, is so subjective in the first place, and subject to a host of environmental, and cultural factors we may well never be able to fully identify, and model with any absolute precision.

What I have always maintained about virtual reality is this: no matter how high fidelity it might become it will never have everything that actual experience has. Whether you consider what might be missed when you hug or hold a person you care about now, or what might be missed in being in the presence of an actual living mix of other life, you might make the tactility more amplified, or the scents, colors and sounds more vivid, but you would never get everything. Experience will always be experience but one side will also always have something the other does not, and in that we might find another example of how small inputs can have profound effects in truly complex systems. Profound to the point of our folly.

The bottom line here is that to truly understand our place in not only a particular reality, but in the entirety as a whole, we will have to ultimately resort to a philosophical description. And the ultimate guide there will be whether it feels right or not because reason alone won't get us there. This is, as I have stated before, why I have come to rely on a description that puts both mind and the elemental embrace as the fundamental elements of the entirety. From this the creation of meaning processors is an absolute given. At the very beginning of each vector of association the probabilities for the resolution of boundaries are already resolved to make meaning processors possible. It has to be that way not only because there has to be the points of reference that make an "observer in the first place," but also because that very "singular" beginning might itself be the start of sentience at another scale of consideration.

Is our world a simulation? Why some scientists say it's more likely than not
A swath of technologists and physicists believe that ‘simulation theory’ will be proved, just as it was proved that the Earth was not the center of the universe

by Olivia Solon in San Francisco

Tuesday 11 October 2016 08.30 EDT

When Should Art Think About Restraining Itself

Real art isn't supposed to be pretty; at least not necessarily so (an adage I think's been around for some time now). It's meant to resonate with and invoke all aspects of our emotional and sensorial experience. Especially with photography do we see where ugly or horrifying tells the story of other realities we need to understand on more than just an objectified level, such as worded descriptions might provide.

I think most of us get that. That being said, though, doesn't excuse art from the nostrum that there can always be too much of anything, or that anything can be taken to extremes. A case in point is the mixed modality installation now making waves in LA called the Tension Experiment.

First of all, let's be clear here. This is undoubtedly clever and creative. That's not the point though. I say that because, in my view, what we have here is a corollary to what Jeff Goldblum's character said in the first Jurassic Park movie:  "...Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think about whether they should..."

The thing is, we are already being saturated with fear of all kinds within overlapping commercial, cultural information environments. And even more disturbing, the commercial dynamic is accelerating the path towards instant gratification of whatever fantasy that might be imagined. What we risk in this is setting up a self reinforcing emphasis on stimulating the baser parts of our brains to get at ever more extreme fantasies to keep the spiral going; and make no mistake, with the potential sums involved to be made here, there will be way too much incentive to do exactly that.

The bottom line for me here is that I just wish artists would put considerably more soul searching in play when they consider putting on any kind of exhibition. They would be among the first, after all, to demand that of the scientists and engineers among us.

The Future of Fear: Inside the psychological maze of LA's most insidious theater event

Director Darren Lynn Bousman gets under my skin with The Tension Experience

• By Bryan Bishop
 
• on September 30, 2016 10:00 am

Misstating the Relationship Between Physical Space and Meaning Space

I get a little frustrated when I read about certain conclusions being made from some very interesting research. The article from Quanta linked below is a case in point

Stating that our perception of "reality" is an "illusion" is so fraught with connotative baggage that I am amazed that a very smart person like Donald Hoffman would be so imprecise. To put the matter more clearly, one needs to frame the situation a little differently.

Is there a physical totality that we do not get all the information about at a conscious level? Absolutely. So much interaction is going on in the whole process of energy exchange at every scale of consideration, how could it be otherwise. The thing is, in my view, sentient consciousness isn't here to give us any kind of absolute reality. It is here for the purpose of creating meaning space. Through the process of experience association, and objectification, it builds a complex sedimentary layering of abstraction (inherent in the whole process of adding layers of abstraction). What we live in consciously is the interactive mix of physical space and our built up meaning space. Therefore you must think of our reality in that context.

If you think about, however, physical space is nothing more than a layering of abstractions in it's own right, as all objects are simply other objects interacting, with those lower scale objects following the same breakdown as far as you want to keep going in scales of consideration. What is salient here is what decides the resolution of boundaries at any given scale. And this is where physicists start talking about wave functions collapsing through various probability ranges. All of that, though, presupposes this wondrous thing we call an "observer."

It is here, I think, that we must ultimately fall back to a philosophical framework. An observer in my philosophy is simply a meaning processor of some sort, which presupposes an abstraction handling system, which is why mind, here, is just as fundamental as the "elemental embrace," or the absolute requirement for interaction and exchange. After all, what can interact and exchange if it hasn't already been objectified in some way.

In the larger sense this is why I see the entirety as an unimaginably immense, recursive question answer engine, the whole point of which is to determine meaning, at every quantum moment, at every scale up to the infinite singularity that is the entirety itself, which has no outer objectification. In this are infinite matrix arrays of time vectors where meanings are associated into nominal, local realities (what I like to call reality ray tracing).

What you have to realize in all of this is that meaning will always be fleeting, and subject to the ongoing moments of context. Just as every answer is just another set of questions, every connection made to a new meaning (which is its own new object) creates a context framework for any number of new juxtapositions, and thus, new meanings. Is, then, what we hold as a current meaning an illusion? Not in my view. It is simply what makes sense in the current context, based on experience association to that point.

The other thing you have to realize, however, is that our hold on meaning space, as it interacts with physical space, influences it, which then feeds back to influence us. Or, stated another way, we make it just as it makes us. Which is why balance is so important in the way we live; not overemphasizing either mind (or rationality), or the elemental embrace (which you can also refer to as love). As such, what we do, and how we do it, matters both literally and figuratively. Which is why striving for thoughtful, loving structure is so important.

Living in the moment, as well as beyond the moment, mustn't be overly concerned about "illusion;" mindful, of course as we can certainly deceive ourselves. What is much more important is to strive for meaning structure that keeps both mind, and love, working together for the best possible continuance of thoughtful loving structure. Meaning progression along that line of experience association will give us the best possible probabilities for meanings to keep doing the same.

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions.

All You Need to Know About the I-Phone 7

Personally, I've never understood the need to have humungous amounts of functionality in a device with a screen about the size of a couple of playing cards. Of course, I have the eyes of a 65 year old man so you can probably see the bias there. Still... If I'm going to interact with apps and games of various sorts I want at least one 27 incher, and more preferably two or three. If you're going to keep it to two than they have to be 30 inchers at least. And if it has to be one then, as I have now, it ought to be a 60 inch, 4K compatible behemoth because... Well... Some of us just have size issues.

Anyway... As far as the I-Phone 7 is concerned this YouTube clip from CollegeHumor (via Digg) puts things in a proper perspective.

HIT THE ROAD, JACK

Parody Apple Ad For The iPhone 7 Hits The Nail On The Head

96 diggs Advertising

People don't understand that Apple has released a completely innovative product, in that it is not innovative at all. They've done something that seems counterintuitive: They made it worse.

The Simple, Kinetic Poetry, of an Intimate Connection to One's Tools

There's a contrast to be made between two expressions of the Info Sphere recently that ought to give one a moment to pause and consider what the factory mindset of Capitalism, now mutating ever faster under the pressures of electrified competition, does to the dichotomy between work and making things, and the tools we use to make either happen.

On the one hand is the making of a wallet, and on the other the making of a home. Both processes involve an ostensibly practical output, and both could provide an equal possibility for either great personal involvement with the tools and crafting, or great disconnection, as with the cursory involvement of a machine applying motive force, and interchangeable attachments providing, cuts, blows, transfers and placements.

As anyone who has spent any time at all looking into can tell you, working with wood, or working with leather can provide ample opportunity for a true craftsman to show off what a connection to one's tools can yield. And it matters only in small part whether one is putting together large assemblies of wood or leather (as in a house, or involved leather apparel), or smaller ones (as in a wallet or a cabinet), that connection will still be quite apparent.

So we now come, first, to the video of a leather craftsman making a wallet, and it is a beautiful thing to behold; not only because the end product is aesthetically desirable, but because one can see the deep involvement of the craftsman as he works. And the thing is, you could change this example to a master custom car builder, making a one of kind vehicle creation, and you'd get much the same involvement. The tempo, the different cadences of the tools used, and the different tactility of the materials used, would provide a completely different feeling certainly, but deep involvement would be the same.

Contrast this with the commercialized modality of building a home now. Standardized methodologies of cutting, placing, and fixing in place make for a process that excels in efficiency; so much so that, more and more, homes now can either be manufactured modulary in a factory, with a great deal of machine, and assembly line, applications, printed outright now on sight, or still built by hand, but with only the most cursory skill sets required (at least for the major part of the framing).

I mention this because an article today from nbcnews.com indicates that a now hot housing market has suddenly found itself short of carpentry workers. Not surprising as the last fall off of market demand left former workers scrambling to find other vocations. The thing is, the expectation here is that workers, who used to do who knows what kinds of various things that are now not so marketable, ought to be flocking to this new demand opportunity. The assumption being that training of one sort or another would be provided, though it is not always clear who will be expected to pay for that training. And low and behold, the unemployed are now gainfully set, even if $16 or so an hour might be a pretty big come down in wages.

Of course the real problem with this is that the workers moved over will be fine only so long as the hot market lasts, or an assembly method is found to do their skill more cost effectively. But hey, no big problem, right? We can just have them shuck off that last bit of cursory tool connection and form a new set of same with some other temporary skill requirement.

And as time progresses, and competition increases, this process can only be seen to cycle around ever more rapidly. The question then needs to be asked: Is there an intrinsic part of the human psyche that needs a deep, and lasting, connection with tools of one form or another, and the kinds of involvement that goes along with them? And if there is that need, what do we do to ourselves when we thwart it ever more severely?

Think about this. Think about it carefully because it matters greatly as just one of the aspects of what is making us all increasingly insane right now

Stressful Day? Take A Deep Breath And Watch This Video Of An Artisan Putting Together A Wallet

5 diggs Art

The music is a tad cheesy and occasionally it all feels a bit self-aggrandizing but, goddamn, is it relaxing.

Equus Leather via Reddit

See Also:

Construction Worker Shortage Weighs on Hot Housing Market

by REUTERS

See Also:

PIPE DREAM

Training The Next Generation Of Oil Workers For Jobs That Don’t Exist

17 diggs Narratively Education

A new federal program signed up hordes of eager students — just as the industry went bust.

.

Every Body Wants To Rule the World?

Maybe if there were more of us who simply wanted to live, and love, creatively, as well as responsibly, we could have a world that could resonate without dischord.

Hammered Dulcimer Cover Of Tears For Fears Is One Of The Most Beautiful Things We've Ever Heard

26 diggs Music

That title sounds like hyperbole, but it's not. Give this a listen.

Ted Yoder

The Kind of Creative Thinking...

...That would help make nearly self sufficient city states possible, as well as allow everyone involved participate in their own well being.

The Farming Machine To End All Farming Machines

48 diggs Technology Agriculture Science

There's nothing more soothing than a machine that fulfills one specific purpose on a farm. Except, of course, this machine, which does a little of everything until your garden is done growing and your veggies are ready to eat.

FarmBot.io Via Reddit

The Impossibility of AI Interpretation...

...Another aspect to the tradeoffs of inherent in "layers of abstraction." This is what the linked article here from Nautilus makes me think of.

Not being able to understand how various sorts of deep learning, or neural network, systems get from input to desired output is an interesting parallel to our own inability to fully understand not only why we do the things we do, but what all that wetware is doing to allow us to "think" in the first place.

I have always been suspicious of efforts to create true "AI," even if it might be possible. The fact that you might then create self aware entities, gifted, or burdened, depending on your point of view, with point of view, and thus the singular notion of identity, from which ego might arise, without the same aspects of fear, and chemical/emotional response that we inherited, via lower brain functionality, from our genetic ancestors, presents questions of behavioral possibilities that one could speculate endlessly on. And that doesn't even begin to consider the other process we go through, as we progress from infant to adult, of extensive experience association, making complex connections between inner feelings with outer stimuli; all while in the necessary care of other sentients who have already made their own such connections, and pass on subtle influences into the mix. We generally think of this as learning, but it is a great deal more than that as it literally structures a tremendously flexible neural system into the specific patterns to handle the physical, language and cultural matrix we are born into.

It has always seemed to me that, whether true, "sentient," AI is possible or not, it is absolutely not something we should be pursuing now; especially with our own ignorance of ourselves. What is reasonable, as well as useful, would be context specific reasoning engines. Procedurally based contingency processing systems that could help us de emphasize the need for skill specialization so that we can rid ourselves of an operating system that has taken specialization to an absurd extreme; something that should be self evident when you consider the possibility that it is the insane need of competitive advantage that is a significant part of what is driving the push for sentient "AI" in the first place (there is also, of course this insane idea that such new "sentience" is the natural, next step in our evolution, which to me is utter nonsense. Especially when you consider that we haven't yet even begun to explore what human ability might extend to if it were allowed to develop in an environment of truly thoughtful, loving structure; as opposed to the fear based economics of scarcity we have now).

Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?

Despite new biology-like tools, some insist interpretation is impossible.

BY AARON M. BORNSTEINILLUSTRATION BY EMMANUEL POLANCOSEPTEMBER 1, 2016

The Tradeoffs of Object Oriented Programming

What this BrightWork article is really talking about here is the process of adding abstract layers to the tool kit of a developer; a hallmark of object oriented programming. In this ever increasing libraries of already developed functionality are easily grafted into new development projects; which can obviously be a powerful productivity tool.

Everything has a downside though. It doesn't take many iterations of layers being created from the foundation of previous layers, and then new layers built atop of that, adnauseum. Not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it can still be fertile ground for unexpected logic anomalies to be created; especially if one adds in the concept of "inheritance," and "polymorphism" that are also powerful aspects of object oriented programming. One can create a new class, with greatly expanded functionality, simply by starting with the inheritance of an old class, and then adding new functional code.

What can happen in all of this layering is that a problem can be the manifestation of subtle interactions between multiple layers, and the process of tracking back down through the layers to find it hardly trivial at all.

Another problem, in my mind, is that we are already well on the road to when a coder won't be necessary at all; what with the possibilities of a visually oriented development environment. In this context you have a gui interface that renders functionality into icons of various sorts, selected so that they make intuitive sense as to the functionality they represent. One then merely needs to select the icons of choice, make icon related links (of interactive functionality) between them and one has a functioning app.

This has been a significant guiding principle in web development for some time now as the idea has become ingrained that graphic artist oriented folks are much more suited to putting together what is essentially a visual experience. This too has been a useful development as it has also made it possible for ordinary folks to create quite complex web applications.

The problem, as I see it, is that, if we continue to rely on the "cost" mentality of an economic operating system bent on reducing costs, we could likely find ourselves in a situation where there are fewer and fewer actual coders who are able to dig down into the layers of code to find a problem; layers that might someday represent many decades of development. In fact, it might soon be the case that only other pieces of software would be able to do so, whose own inter-workings none of us would understand.

This would be, in my opinion, not a very good position to find ourselves in. It would also be an example of an aphorism I have been using for some time now: heaven help those who become too separated from that which sustains them.

Just something to think about when you view things through the lens of "cost" based assumptions.

When Will the Last Ever Line of Code Be Written?

31 AUGUST 2016

One of the Results of What Pandering to the Dark Side Does

The New York Times video link to below gives one a visceral connection to the consequences of what pandering to the dark side of people's natures does. So many things of late have given us real insight into just how self centeredly irresponsible Mr. Trump is, but this example really cuts to the bone. If you don't think this man has become a cancer to general social well being and cohesion then you probably spend far too much time participating in what has become of the Trump Chump Brigade.

WARNING: A WHOLE LOT OF HATE SPEECH

Some Of The Truly Terrible Things People Have Said At Trump Rallies

14 diggs The New York Times Election 2016 Politics

Trump supporters use harsh, often violent language in a pattern "not seen in connection with any other recent political candidate, in any party," explains The New York Times.

The New York Times

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AL-ZARQAWI WOULD DISPUTE THIS

Donald Trump Says Hillary Clinton Is 'The Founder Of ISIS'

15 diggs Election 2016

In a speech given Wednesday, Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton "the founder of ISIS," coining a new title for his opponent. After beginning a critique of her Middle East record, indicating his belief in the larger theory that America's Iraq invasion fueled the growth of ISIS, Trump abruptly gave Clinton her new nickname.