Ivan Reese

Oh, that poor drawing canvas. Someone tied it to a nasty, brutish text editor. We should cut those tethers and set it free.

Interesting. But... why put output before the code that produced it?

Good article. Lots in common with worker-owned collectives; the blockchain stuff is just an implementation detail that seems to make running the collective easier? That's a more compelling pitch than I've seen before.

This seems relevant: https://yakcollective.mirror.xyz/aJdO_SO3gw34cLtwBwNC2OD3s0YT3us9C-C2NNPQ_us

+1 to Kartik Agaram, except it's very unclear to me what value the DAO is adding to this?

Hi Jack Rusher although people processes are the foundation. They have nice DAO/voting tools etc.. I’m curious if this becomes available in my country (Germany) too. Which is why I have a talk with someone about that today.

I'm also very interested in worker co-ops, including watching how legal affordances for them are growing in Germany. Here's a nice article on the topic (link to German version at the bottom):

https://www.mitbestimmung.de/html/renewing-worker-cooperatives-for-the-10960.html

... but I still don't see the benefits of choosing a blockchain as the technology to implement the technical side of such an organization 🤷‍♂️

Thank you! I will take a look.

Another thing that somehow hangs on my mind..

I also had this very interesting discussion with a friend of mine. He is part of a bigger project and he told me about how he NOT wanted to use Lisp( clojure) for that project new 2022 effort ( building something). Because of the things that happend with a project using clojure in 2017. I told him about the Lisp Curse http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html And it went to some interesting places I think. Would you be interested in discussing these for about 30 minutes next week Jack Rusher?

The main societal interest I see in DAOs is that they attract lots of fresh new minds to the question of governance at various scales of human organizations. My bet is that whatever they come up with can then probably be better implemented without a blockchain.

Hi Konrad Hinsen! I think the crypto/web3 people agree with you:

https://twitter.com/notscottmoore/status/1475901623994130445?s=20&t=ZyWOR5odUt7oGQwedEeDrA "I conclude that what may have the most impact on the future isn't decentralized digital technology alone but the governance patterns it culturally normalizes."

Its a interesting playing field, but they are still - of course - wrestling with all the problems that came before: How to create technology that has a "non negative influence" on attention? How to organize patterns of Resonance? Technology Narratives like Blockchain/crypto/web3 or AI always are strong projection spaces. As you can imagine there are people in the world who have preconceptions about "money" and they now are pushing hard their values and believes in the blockchain/crypto/web3 narrative. So from that perspective I always try to encourage people to find their spot in it, maybe to finally realize better visions of "money" and all which that entails.

Andreas S email is generally better for me than synchronous communication, but we can maybe work something out this coming week

Andreas S There's perhaps a fundamental problem of human nature at work: The people who tend to invest a lot of energy into social change tend to hold strong and simplistic beliefs as well, and I guess that's what it takes for motivation. On the other end of the spectrum, you find people who are aware of the complexity of the world and are paralyzed by it.

Konrad Hinsen it’s definitely a challenge in humility, to see things you can do and do them but also see the things you can’t not do and accept those. I recently read this interesting perspective. Which provides an interesting model consisting of a triangle: inner change, cultural change and system change. Balancing those is a tough challenge. I see web3 and technology more generally between culture and systems change. But all of that needs some kind of foundation within the individual. As such I’m happy to see that these sensemaking individuals now slowly form groups. Eventually they will meet the “others” and we will see if these movements provide patterns which help us better that what we have now.

https://ecosystem.lifeitself.us

Andreas S That's an interesting map of metamodernist movements. The one I am most familiar with is Metamoderna (aka Hanzi Freinacht), which I'd put higher up on the triangle because it does care a lot about inner change. I agree with you that web3 is stuck on an edge of that triangle, I'd even say close to the corner of systems change.

First I want to say thanks for posting this. And definitely want to encourage you to post any papers you find interesting over at #reading-together. Really would love for that channel to become a wealth of papers on these topics.

I haven't read the paper. Just skimmed it. But sadly it has reinforced my biases.

I really want to be charitable to empirical research in CS. But they make it so hard.

Visuals can simply be poorly designed or be inappropriate for a task. Therefore, visuals do not always provide a benefit and can sometimes encumber the programming process

Of course! No one thought otherwise even before a study was done. Even the argument for is bad.

An underlying premise of visual programming research is that visuals will improve the human-

machine interface by catering to human cognitive abilities.

Or that visuals are a fun way of doing things. Or that visuals might be actually harder, but less scary. Or that visuals do not come with the cultural baggage associated with math. Or that visuals appeal to us aesthetically. Or that visuals are a distinct way of communicating that some people prefer.

I could go on and on. There seems to be this obsession with efficiency or reducing errors, or speed of learning or various metrics like that when people do studies in CS. But is that the goal? Why should it be the goal?

Poetry is not the most efficient manner to express propositions. But no one is doing a study to see if we should write poetry instead of just writing prose.

Moreover, within the current context of programming, in which software engineering is struggling to move from being a craft to being an actual engineering discipline, scientific method beckons.

I know I am turning up the snark here. But I just can't help it here. I'm going to ignore the fact that is debatable that engineering follows science or if it is really science that comes along after to explain engineering.

What I instead want to focus on is just the rhetorical effect of this sentence. The elevation of engineering over craft. The idea that unless empirical methods are being used the work is not "serious". The whole thing just bothers me.

To try and bring it back to less snark. I just find this whole discourse of empirical methods confusing. So many times they seem to be investigating premises that are not ones anyone with a sophisticated view holds to. Even ignoring the methodology of the studies, the questions being asked seem so misplaced. Or a guess more charitably, to only want to investigate a particular lense, usually around efficiency or comprehension.

I just want to step back and ask, assuming a perfect study with zero methodological issues. What should we do with this information? If visual programming was found to be worse than text based programming in terms of efficiency. What does that mean for us? Should we abandon it? Should we not use it?

I don't see how any of that follows unless you assume efficiency is the only important measure.

Ultimately, any software engineering technique or theory of programming is judged by whether it produces cost-effective results.

I guess that is the case for this author. Or maybe they are making an empirical statement? It is just true that people will judge it based on that? Or that people should judge it based on that?

Either way, maybe that's what we need to change.

Oh cool, didnt know that was a channel!

Your comments remind some prior discourse on the current state of HCI https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1297663323916210179?s=20&t=NABUNRLYhx66YYT_J00wRQ

Jimmy Miller thank you for pointing at the obsession with efficiency! I think it’s important for much of the work in this community. Worth adding too that it’s usually ‘efficiency’ in a very narrow sense, often meaning economic efficiency and worker productivity. As if a programmers measurable addition to profit is the be-all-end-all of what makes computing interesting.

IMHO usage of a term like efficiency has deep ideological implications, because the meaning of these terms are in historical and current conflict. Our usage of efficiency today takes a lot of meaning from the turn of the 20th century when it was used to imply less economic waste in factory production and cost-effective worker management (less “waste” of human labour).

Many other terms are highly political/ideological/philosophical of course, but this is often left unsaid, even in an academic context.