software

Writing: Software

~ Taran ~ 6 Comments

As I’ve mentioned a few times over at RealityFragments, I’ve been working on a book and I’ve been using LibreOffice for it. Why should I pay for a subscription to software to do something so basic? Why should I pay for something when I don’t have to? These are questions that many people who have been indoctrinated into the Microsoft brand don’t seem to ask as often as they should.

However, I seem to have outgrown LibreOffice for the book and did a lot of research on it. There’s a lot to keep track of even with a simple blog post here on KnowProSE.com, much less a science fiction/fantasy novel. I tried a few and I settled on Scrivener because where I have outgrown LibreOffice in this regard, I feel like I can grow into Scrivener.

I bought it last night, and am already finding it a step up from what I’ve been doing. I have been writing long enough now to know what I need to write. Before, this was not the case and LibreOffice worked well not just for writing as I was, but for allowing to find out what best I needed personally. The price of LibreOffice is also impossible to beat, and I still have it for the office suite.

Yet there was a cool thing that I didn’t realize that I needed. It cost me about $20 more, but I spent hours last night organizing some research using Scrapple. I’d best describe it as a Mind Map and a one-user Wiki. It’s actually one of the things I’ve been missing, having tried standalone Wikis to organize things.

Scrapple isn’t necessarily just for writing either. I could see it being used for a variety of things. That you can link documents in a ‘Scrapple’, images inclusive, is awesome for me.

If you are looking for a step up in writing tools, I’d suggest heading over to LiteratureAndLatte and give Scrivener and Scrapple a shot with their free trial. It may not be for everyone, but having spent hours last night with it, it’s worth a look.

If I’m up to it, I might do a deep dive review. I think that won’t happen because writing, as I know it, is a personal process and everyone is different. The tools we use have the commonalities we agree upon, much like language itself – we build our own little worlds.

It’s All Statistics.

~ Taran ~ 4 Comments

Everyone’s out to protect you online because everyone’s out to get you online. It’s a weird mix of people who want to use your data for profit and those who want to use your data for profit.

Planned obsolescence is something that has become ubiquitous in this technological age. It wasn’t always this way. Things used to be produced to last, not be replaced, and this is something to ponder before joining a line to get the latest iPhone, or when a software manufacturer shifts from a purchase model (where the license indicates you don’t really own the software sometimes!) to a subscription model.

The case has been made that software can’t be produced or maintained for free. The case has also been made, with less of a marketing department, that Free Software and Open Source software can do the same at a reduced cost. The negotiations are ongoing, but those who built their corporations from dumpster diving to read code printouts definitely have the upper hand.

Generally speaking, the average user doesn’t need complicated. In fact, the average user just wants a computer where they can browse the internet, write simple documents and spreadsheets. Corporations producing software on the scale of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and so on don’t really care too much about what you need, they care about maintaining market share so that they can keep making money. Software has more features than the average user knows what to do with.

Where the business decisions are made, it’s about the bottom line. It’s oddly like something else we’re seeing a lot of lately. It seems unrelated, yet it’s pretty close to the same thing when you think about it.

“…This is true of the cat detector, and it is true of GPT-4 — the difference is a matter of the length and complexity of the output. The AI cannot distinguish between a right and wrong answer — it only can make a prediction of how likely a series of words is to be accepted as correct. That is why it must be considered the world’s most comprehensively informed bullshitter rather than an authority on any subject. It doesn’t even know it’s bullshitting you — it has been trained to produce a response that statistically resembles a correct answer, and it will say anything to improve that resemblance...

…It’s the same reason AI can produce a Monet-like painting that isn’t a Monet — all that matters is it has all the characteristics that cause people to identify a piece of artwork as his. Today’s AI approximates factual responses the way it would approximate “Water Lilies.”…”

The Great Pretender, Devin Coldeway, TechCrunch, April 3, 2023.

Abstracted away, the large language models aren’t that different than business teams – except, maybe, business teams could actually care about their consumers, but instead rely on statistics – just like large language models do. It’s a lot like the representations of Happy, Strong and Tough that I wrote about with AI generated images. It’s an approximation based on what the models and algorithms are trained on – which is… us.

There could be a soul to the Enterprise, I suppose, but maybe the Enterprise needs to remember where it comes from.

2019: New Year, Same Problems.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Experimenting with proximity and remote control with @anki Vector.I’ve managed to avoid the deluge of end of year posts by people, as well as their bright and shiny posts of what they expect in 2019. After you’ve seen enough of them, you know the recipe and you can make your own – even if it’s not a very good recipe, even if it typically doesn’t stand the test of time.

A ‘New Year’ is just another date on the calendar for me these days – and truth be told, it has been for some time. So I spent this ‘holiday’ running some experimental code associated with the Anki Vector I picked up.

As a way of tracking what changes and what doesn’t, years are fickle. As an example, when it comes to code, the thing we sent that is furthest is still running 8-bit code, and it still seems to be working well. Looks like hunspell (that’s what you call it for pip) is the droid I was looking for, though the documentation on that… well…

Things that haven’t changed that much is the acceleration of technology – because it continues to accelerate, and documentation on it is simply horrible in some areas. I spent roughly an hour delving into replacements for PyEnchant, as an example, reading all sorts of the same thing that Google thought would be useful – and which wasn’t.

And this is, sadly, the sort of detritus that software projects leave behind. As a friend mentioned today, a lack of documentation is better than bad/misleading documentation – and when it comes to documentation, a lack of date tagging condemns people to whatever algorithm the search engine uses when college students are trying to find hardly known authors to plagiarize from.

It goes beyond that. There’s a trend where technology gets disposed of so fast that there is almost no documentation on any of it, or if there is, it’s dated and/or misleading.

This is why we’re not fixing things as much, those of us that have that mindset – because there are always a few people, statistically, that can fix things – remember repair shops? And then there are the people who pay to fix things. The way intellectual property – really, copyright – has gone in a legal sense keeps a space between people who would repair and the owners of copyright. And the contracts, threats about warranty… even more space, starving the ability for products to be supported by third parties.

Heaven forbid you reverse engineer something to fix it. That can get you in trouble with people have chain-linked bracelets and lawyers who love killing trees.

That’s where Open Source and Free Software were supposed to step in, at least in the context of software – but after a few decades, it’s all relatively young and the documentation is done largely in crayon hieroglyphics. The successful projects are documented, at least to some degree.

If there’s one thing that I’d like to see change this year, it’s people getting better at documentation. It’s as if they think what they do isn’t worth that investment.

And when they don’t, it isn’t.

Better Mousetraps.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Head in HandsIn ‘Solving All The Wrong Problems‘, Allison Arief tackles something that has been bothering me for some time:

…We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do…

I’ve always wanted to work on things that matter, that actually have a positive impact on the world or society. Over the last 2 decades, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a few things that did.

It seems more rare to find work like that. And it seems like it’s not a pressing issue when it comes to business, either. The great revelation for me was the lawsuit between iFart and PullMyFinger back in 2009, where millions of dollars are spent on making sounds on demand that most mammals can make for free, but it’s more endemic and less obvious.

All those features that you don’t use are bought and paid for by someone – yes, even Free Software and Open Source.

Allison Arief is correct, and it’s something that is irksome. We’ve been solving all the wrong problems. It would be good to work on some of the right ones – but the risk of working on one of the right ones is high because people don’t necessarily want to pay for ‘useful’.

The market drives.

1 TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Even if you pay nothing for software, it doesn’t write itself and basic amenities are required by humans to write it. Remember that the next time your company leverages open source and doesn’t give back to the project in some way.