information technology

Bubbles Distilled By Time.

~ Taran ~ 3 Comments

We all perceive the world through our own little bubbles. As far as our senses go, we only have touch, taste, feeling, hearing, smell and sight to go by. The rest comes from what we glean through those things, be it other people, technology, language, culture, etc.

If the bubble is too small, we feel it a prison and do our best to expand it. Once it’s comfortable, we don’t push it outward as much.

These little bubbles contain ideas that have passed down through the generations, how others have helped us translate our world and all that is in it, etc. We’re part of a greater distillation process, where because of our own limitations we can’t possibly carry everything from previous generations.

If we consider all the stuff that creates our bubble as little bubbles themselves that we pass on to the next generation, it’s a distillation of our knowledge and ideas over time. Some fall away, like the idea of the Earth being the center of the Universe. Some stay with us despite not being used as much as we might like – such as the whole concept of, ‘be nice to each other’.

If we view traffic as something going through time, bubbles are racing toward the future all at the same time, sometimes aggregating, sometimes not. The traffic of ideas and knowledge is distilled as we move forward in time, one generation at a time. Generally speaking, until broadcast media this was a very local process. Thus, red dots trying to get us to do things, wielded by those who wish us to do things from purchasing products to voting for politicians with their financial interests at heart.

Broadcast media made it global by at first giving people information and then by broadcasting opinions to become sustainable through advertising. Social media has become the same thing. How will artificial intelligences differ? Will ChatGPT suddenly spew out, “Eat at Joes!”? I doubt that.

However, those with fiscal interests can decide what the deep learning of artificial intelligences are exposed to. Machine learning is largely about clever algorithms and pruning the data that the algorithms are trained on, and those doing that are certainly not the most unbiased of humanity. I wouldn’t say that they are the most biased either – we’re all biased by our bubbles.

It’s Pandora’s Box. How do we decide what should go in and what should stay out? Well, we can’t, really. Nobody is actually telling us what’s in them now. Our education systems, too, show us that this is not necessarily something we’re good at.

Information Fiefdoms

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Social Media Information OverloadYesterday, I found myself standing in Nigel Khan’s bookstore in Southpark, looking at what I consider old books.

I have a habit when I look at books, something I picked up in Trinidad some years ago after the Internet became more than a novelty. I check the date a book was published. It keeps me from buying antiques, though I have also been known to buy books in thrift shops abroad (though I am very picky).

I found myself looking at Tim Wu’s ‘The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires‘. Given some of the stuff I’d been talking about in different circles, it interested me – and Tim Wu I knew from his work with Network Neutrality. I checked the publication date.

November, 2010.
It’s August, 2018.

8 years. 5.33 evolutions of Moore’s Law, which is unfair since it isn’t a technology book – but it’s an indicator. Things change quickly. Information empires rise and fall in less time these days – someone was celebrating integrating something with OneNote in one of the groups I participate in, thinking that he’d finally gotten things on track – when, in fact, it’s just a snapshot more subject to Moore’s Law than anyone cares admit – except for the people who want to sell you more hardware and more software. They’ve evolved to the subscription model to make their financial flow rates more consistent, while you, dear subscriber, don’t actually own anything you subscribe to.

You’re building a house with everything on loan from the hardware store. When your subscription is up, the house disappears.

Information empires indeed. Your information may be your own, but how you get to it is controlled by someone who might not be there tomorrow.

We tend to think of information in very limited ways when we are in fact surrounded by it. We are information. From our DNA to our fingerprints, from our ears to our hair follicles – we are information, information that moves around and interacts with other information. We still haven’t figured out our brains, a depressing fact since it seems a few of us have them, but there we have it.

Information empires. What separates data from information is only really one thing – being used. Data sits there; it’s a scalar. Information is a vector – and really, information has more than one vector. Your mother is only a mother to you – she might be an aunt to someone else, a boss to someone else, an employee to someone else, and a daughter to your grandmother. Information allows context, and there’s more than one context.

If you’re fortunate, you see at least one tree a day. That tree says a lot, and you may not know it. Some trees need a lot of water, some don’t. Some require rich soil, some don’t. Simply by existing, it tells us about the environment it is in. Information surrounds us.

Yet we tend to think of information in the context of libraries, or of database tables. And we tend to look at Information Empires – be they by copyright, by access (Net Neutrality, digital divide, et al), or simply because of incompatible technologies. They come and go, increasingly not entering the public domain, increasingly lost – perhaps sometimes for good.

And if you go outside right now and stand, breathing the air, feeling the wind, watching the foliage shift left and right, you are awash in information that you take for granted – an empire older than we are, information going between plants through fungus.

There are truly no information empires in humanity other than those that are protected by laws. These are fiefdoms, gatekeepers to information.

The information empire – there is only one – surrounds us.

The Human Factor: Tangible Results

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Mas allá de lo tangibleOne of the issues I faced across the decades of my professional and private technology endeavors has been, simply put, the amount of intangible there was.

A visit from my father in the late 1990s saw him proud of what I was accomplishing, but he had really little idea of what I was doing. He was of the electro-mechanical engineering sphere, a meshing of the arcane art of visualizing the magnetic fields of motors and the results that they churned out, physically. He enjoyed the recliner, the space in my apartment, and the ability to watch a flat screen in any room he was in – he appreciated the rewards of my work but not the work itself. Later, when he saw me strip myself of those ‘rewards’, he had no idea what I was doing even when I was getting media attention.

The human factor of sharing any achievements is difficult enough given the shifting sands of technology and the ability to comprehend them to understand the achievements. Dealing with things covered with Non-disclosure agreements, non-compete agreements, trade secrets and so forth creates a divide between people one doesn’t work with – sometimes unbridgeable. The idea of being the keeper of secrets is a romantic notion when it can be pretty tragic. I know I lost a few girlfriends to my being lost in thought about something that we could not communicate about. Call it a personality flaw. Mine. I live what I’m doing and employers and businesses loved me for it.

And then there’s the disconnect within a business, where the tangible results are misted by horrid implementations of the Agile processes. It’s why I prefer a more DevOps methodology. In the latter, there are tangible results with Operations, who are part of the process.

There is no complaint in any of that, simply a statement of fact. I bring this up because in comparing my battling the Trinidad Roseau versus Software Cost Estimation.  On one hand, I have tangible results that I can write about and share with others, and on the other hand I am writing about how developers can’t properly estimate given the effective silos in a company that keep them from being a true part of the larger project. This is where startups are awesome to work with.

Everyone has a balance. Some people can balance these things better than I can, some people cannot balance them at all – at points, I balanced them well – but life isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

But I do think that Software Engineers and others in Information Technology deserve more in the way of expressing tangible results not just to others, but for themselves.