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Of drakes and progress
Oct. 3rd, 2011 10:26 pmI'm still here! Work just cuts doubly from me: first, in that suddenly my day's cut in half, and second in that it uses energy that I then have to recover by resting, which cuts away more still of my day. As a result, I don't get much time to write posts or things of the sort after I've done both work and my daily routine. (But what can one do?)
Speaking of which, the work I'm doing (connecting-libraries-together sort of programming, as opposed to algorithm-invention sort of programming, so to speak :) ) reminds me how (oddly?) conservative I am, even though I spend so much time on technology. Everybody's going nuts over the whole smartphone concept, and I go "huh, I only need a phone to call others with, and barely even that". Then people go even more nuts over Apple's particular variant and I'm left scratching my head, thinking about how what you buy shouldn't define you[1].
I turn my head, and (this is where work comes in) outsourcing chunks of logic seems to be all the rage. Software as a service, get someone else to do everything you don't want to do and then link their "libraries" to your program through API calls, and if you can do it really well, call it cloud-based. I suppose I can see the benefit in it from a business point of view, but to my sense of aesthetics, it just seems... disconnected, fragmented, hard to pin down.
I turn my head again, and there's one company wanting to make ordinary computers' interfaces look like tablets' without minding the different input methods and screen sizes. Meanwhile, in another organization, the product manager moves to an extremely rapid release schedule, and when companies complain, said product manager says that's okay, because companies don't count anyway.
Maybe the technological acceleration turned my personal inflection point and it's just going too fast now. Or maybe my interest in technology is secondary, and it's taken me up to this point to really see it. Whatever is going on, it seems there's a mismatch between what we could broadly call advancement and what (I/people) can manage. If you really want to stretch it, you could say that my critters each represent their own solutions to this mismatch: the Vasai, in altering the advancement (since their technology advances relatively slowly - or has, so far); and the corvids, in altering themselves (so they can stand the pace, although even they give the external impression of careful deliberation and planning).
I have to think more about this - when I have the time - but distinguishing what's strange because of oneself (i.e. a lack of congruence between oneself and the world), and what's strange on a larger scale (having a lack of congruence between parts of society), is very hard. I only have this one mind with which to observe, after all.
[1] Although I guess that particular trick is quite old, it doesn't do anything for me. "Buy X to show you're Y!" Well, I know whether or not I am Y, I don't need to buy something to be secure in my knowledge. Perhaps this is because I don't deal all that much with others and so don't feel the need to manage what impression I give off? Or perhaps I just see through it. Who knows?
Speaking of which, the work I'm doing (connecting-libraries-together sort of programming, as opposed to algorithm-invention sort of programming, so to speak :) ) reminds me how (oddly?) conservative I am, even though I spend so much time on technology. Everybody's going nuts over the whole smartphone concept, and I go "huh, I only need a phone to call others with, and barely even that". Then people go even more nuts over Apple's particular variant and I'm left scratching my head, thinking about how what you buy shouldn't define you[1].
I turn my head, and (this is where work comes in) outsourcing chunks of logic seems to be all the rage. Software as a service, get someone else to do everything you don't want to do and then link their "libraries" to your program through API calls, and if you can do it really well, call it cloud-based. I suppose I can see the benefit in it from a business point of view, but to my sense of aesthetics, it just seems... disconnected, fragmented, hard to pin down.
I turn my head again, and there's one company wanting to make ordinary computers' interfaces look like tablets' without minding the different input methods and screen sizes. Meanwhile, in another organization, the product manager moves to an extremely rapid release schedule, and when companies complain, said product manager says that's okay, because companies don't count anyway.
Maybe the technological acceleration turned my personal inflection point and it's just going too fast now. Or maybe my interest in technology is secondary, and it's taken me up to this point to really see it. Whatever is going on, it seems there's a mismatch between what we could broadly call advancement and what (I/people) can manage. If you really want to stretch it, you could say that my critters each represent their own solutions to this mismatch: the Vasai, in altering the advancement (since their technology advances relatively slowly - or has, so far); and the corvids, in altering themselves (so they can stand the pace, although even they give the external impression of careful deliberation and planning).
I have to think more about this - when I have the time - but distinguishing what's strange because of oneself (i.e. a lack of congruence between oneself and the world), and what's strange on a larger scale (having a lack of congruence between parts of society), is very hard. I only have this one mind with which to observe, after all.
[1] Although I guess that particular trick is quite old, it doesn't do anything for me. "Buy X to show you're Y!" Well, I know whether or not I am Y, I don't need to buy something to be secure in my knowledge. Perhaps this is because I don't deal all that much with others and so don't feel the need to manage what impression I give off? Or perhaps I just see through it. Who knows?