Re: Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
Posted by
Steve Smith on
Mar 15, 2013; 7:24pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Google-Reader-and-More-Google-Abandoning-of-Apps-Services-tp7582001p7582042.html
The Siren's call is LOUD!
PostModernism(tm) always struck me as a cheap trick... it is
pretty easy to replace "trying to understand everything"
(Modernism/Rational Pragmatism?) with "you only have to understand
one thing: nothing is understandable". Kurt Godel would bitch
slap me with my own hanky for saying that in public.
That said, I prefer to riff on the concept of "the best way to
predict the future is to create it" (Alan Kay) with the idea that
my immediate (usually geographic and almost always topological)
neighborhood is at least vaguely predictable (referring back to
the broken tool) *because* I not only percieve it, but effect it
in a feedback control-loop. And not unlike a supercavitating
torpedo, in my younger years I felt I could (though I didn't
apprehend it this way exactly) move forward fast enough with
enough projected intellectual/emotional energy that the path in
front of me made sense as I clove it open with the shockwave of my
impending passage.
Now, as that innocent bravado slumps into a more morose
introspective cynicism (with a pinch of pollyanna), I wonder that
I ever thought I knew anything well or for sure. I once actually
thought I understood computing from subatomic physics, nucleonics,
molecular dynamics, chemistry, on up through material properties
of semiconductors, LSI design, Boolean Logic, fundamentals of
OS/FileSystem/Network design, parallel and dsitributed computing
paradigms, OO and Pattern Design, etc. ad nauseum. I can
probably still tear down and rebuild the engine (and hydraulic
subsystems) on my 49 ford dump truck or my Kubota Tractor more
effectively than ever before in my life, but somehow that just
doesn't satisfy the way it did the first time I pulled off such a
trick. It just reminds me that I can't do the same nearly so
easily on the gen1 Honda Insight Hybrid my wife drives... and if
even that, what got hard with fuel injection and electronic
ignition got crazy hard with embedded computer controls of the
same and loads of undocumented details (or at least obscured to
me). Referring to your distrust of a GMail server you can't field
strip in the rain and the dark.
What is this egomaniacal self-serving riff about? As a
neo-postmodernist, I can only say... I don't know and I can't
know... why try? Is there a something in the adjacent possible to
PostModernism more like PeriModernism? Isn't it enough to
understand enough to function within a limited context for a
limited time? Isn't that what all life (referencing C. Elegans
and
Arthrotardigrada Marcus for example) are about... apprehending
and effecting (and maybe predicting?) a tiny (both in extent and
dimensionality) subset of the universe in their immediate
(physical and logical) environment? To us, C Elegans and the
Tardigrades look almost like Flatlanders (Edwin Abbott Abbott) to
us in their limited ability (and apparent need?) to apprehend
anything outside of their tiny universe.... so why wouldn't some
rule of self-similarity suggest we are just as limited in our own
incredibly expansive way?
That is just my opinion (of the moment), I could be wrong. (WHY
did I let Dennis Miller back in my head?)
- Steve
Slam
Dunk!
Maybe dementia is just part of the annealing schedule? Assuming
of course there were actually a Plan(tm).
What blows my mind is the apparent lack of
movement in the # of people
who _think_ they understand what's going on around them. I had
that
conversation with Nick awhile back. He keeps asking about
postmodernism
and my answer to him was that postmodernists are simply people
who admit
they have no idea what's going on ... well, authentic
postmodernists,
anyway. You always get posers in any domain. Modernists are
people who
think there is, should be, or have a plan.
I look around me every day and see all these people who think
there's a
plan ... some rock solid ... True(tm) ... perspective from which
you can
grok the world.
If I've learned anything over the past decades, it's that a)
there is no
plan or b) if there is a plan, I'm too dense to understand it.
And the
more my tools ecology grows, the denser I feel. I'll never be
liquid or
gaseous again like I was in my youth ... unless maybe dementia
sets upon
me like a heat bath.
Roger Critchlow wrote at 03/14/2013 09:57 PM:
Funny.
Going back to Hamming's lectures, again, in one of the early
ones he
lays out the case that scientific knowledge is growing
exponentially,
that most scientific researchers who ever lived are alive now,
and that
keeping current is "a very awkward problem" both personally
and
institutionally. It was true in the 50's when they made up
the argument
at Bell Labs, it was truer in the 90's when Hamming was giving
the
lectures, and it's still truer now.
I started ignorant, I'm getting exponentially more ignorant
all the
time, and I'm never going to the reverse the trend -- now, go
back to
work and do something really smart.
So, Google the search is an attempt to ameliorate this
problem: if you
can guess what the answer is called, then maybe Google can
find it for
you, and maybe you can figure out if it's really what you
wanted.
And Google the company is a place founded on the same
principle: its
projects and knowledge grow exponentially, no one person can
ever know
what it's doing, all they can do is occasionally kill some of
it off to
make some empty space for the rest of it to grow into.
So, why is progress supposed to make sense?
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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