Lady Mutsuta: You glisten too brightly- Tsubaki Sanjuro (1962), directed by Akira Kurosawa.
Sanjuro: Glisten?
Lady Mutsuta: Yes. Like a drawn sword.
Sanjuro: A drawn sword?
Lady Mutsuta: You’re like a sword without a sheath. You cut well, but the best sword is kept in its sheath.
Google Wave is a remarkable synthesis of existing communication streams (video, textual, 1-to-1, 1-to-many, graphics, etc) under a single meta-protocol.
When it is widely adopted, Wave will forever change how we communicate. Real-time is new, and Wave is not the first technology to flirt with it - we have FriendFeed. But Google has gone one step further to propose it as an open protocol, an open platform, and more daringly, as a replacement for email and instant messaging.
In one sense, I’m not surprised. Sometime, someone was going to take the latest paradigms (cloud, real-time, collaborative editing) and the old ones (emails, IM) to create something anew.
Synthesis, as John Boyd showed us, is the act of taking disparate parts and inventing a new whole. Google Wave is therefore a brilliant reinvention of the old internet.
I applaud it.
Chapters 1 & 2 of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science have a fascinating proposition - that “simple programs can generate complexity”. He uses several variations of a simple program (a cellular automaton) to illustrate that the generated patterns have no discernible repeated pattern. This suggests that the complexity that we see in, for example, nature may have been generated by simple logic.
Someone wrote to me today saying: “We’ll see if aggregation defeats simplicity”, in reference to FriendFeed and Twitter. For a moment, I wondered which was which.
Twitter is in itself a simple program, yet it generates significant complexity. But consider the number of services and fads that have been emerged around it. Twitter generates a stream of tweets - a simple function - yet it has turned out hard to manage… even for its creators.
On the other hand, consider FriendFeed, which is not as straightforward, and outnumbers Twitter in features. One can argue that an FF universe is somewhat complex, but it provides us tools to deal with that complexity: Filters, Lists, Likes, etc. One could also argue that FriendFeed is a suite of “simple programs”: Direct Messaging, Feed Aggregation, Groups, Lists, Comments.
Given the above example, can we suggest that Simple programs generate complexity _because_ they are simple ? Because they are simple, they cannot provide us the tools to manage complexity, because then they would become complex themselves.
If complex programs help us manage complexity, perhaps it is worth dealing with their complexity the first time round ? Should we be wary of superficial simplicity ?
Imagine those Greek or Roman philosophers, writing in their times. Did they ever imagine they would be quoted in the context of a century other than theirs?
Here, our scribblings could one day turn up in a search result for a term we cannot imagine.
“I’m sorry if you were offended”. Not quite an apology is it ?
Sometimes a sincere apology is the only way to defuse a situation. Don’t waste time justifying the act that caused offense.
That said, let us remember that Matt Aimonetti is an excellent hacker and respected Rubyist, especially for those who know of his stellar work on Merb. Let’s get back to work and learn from this controversy.
Oh, as for DHH ? He doesn’t care what we think. So … (shrug) do we care what he thinks ?
A friend, M, is on good terms with everyone and goes to great lengths to maintain that equilibrium even with difficult individuals. This is a good thing and serves him well. But why ?
I think it’s a fear of confrontation; not fear of the other person but fear of his own anger, fear of what he might do or say if he was angry. He’s afraid of losing it.
He has a good degree of control, having corked his bubbling interior well. But what I find interesting is his absolute fear of losing it. In rare moments, he admits, “Yes, I have a problem with my temper”. But most of the time he denies it, “No, I am cool.”, as if he could not handle his own admission.
That said, he has taken a certain step to discipline himself. I don’t know if its working, but I hope it does.
Oh, and myself? I’m cool … Puff-Daddy cool.
As a very green trainee at my first job, I asked a senior colleague, who would later become a good friend, “If the high season lasts only 3 months, what do people do during the low season ?”
He smiled wickedly, and rocking from side to side replied, “Oh, the games we play … the games we play”.
And now many years later, during a global ‘low season’, I see the games start anew.
Every event generates feedback. Where an event is physical, the feedback is visible or audible: e.g a broken window generates sound for bystanders; anguish for the owner.
When an event like 9/11 happens, there is human feedback: horror, sadness, anger.
But what happens when those events are inside our head: e.g thoughts. How do we obtain feedback then ?
Answer: We communicate (transfer or broadcast) those thoughts to others for feedback. Write, talk, exchange,
And then ? Accept Feedback, process it, and act, and generate more feedback. Eternal Change. The way of the OODA loop.
This is an exercise in writing. Immediate, imperfect, or incomplete - as it comes, I will write it.
This is also an exercise in thinking - analysis and synthesis, equally.
Ahsan Ali