Please pick these ideas apart, a thread:
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Computer science has three lineages: engineering, math, and bicycles (of the mind). Engineering: C, Unix, buffers, bits Math: lisp, comparability, Haskell
: engelbart, @worrydream, etc1 reply 1 retweet 4 likesShow this thread -
All great info tech requires all 3: the math to figure out what can be done, the engineering to build it, and the
for how it fits and amplifies our minds.
The math and engineering often forget about the 3rd leg of the stool, the bicycle design. This is what Apple got right.1 reply 0 retweets 2 likesShow this thread -
A theory is not useful if not predictive: great new waves of computation are built on math and engineering, with a blind spot for the bikes part. Find a great new tech platform that’s messy and cutting edge? The math and engineering comes first. The impact comes with the bikes.
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Let’s take the web: math and engineering built it out in the 90s. But it wasn’t until we discovered that what humanity wanted to do with it was not share academic papers but to ~gossip (social media). Exercise for the reader: where is ML today?
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Replying to @ben_mathes
Your engineering layer is one abstraction level too high. Hardware is the primary engineering driver. The software later is a mathematical abstraction/fiction on top of hardware and can be combined with the math part.
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Replying to @vgr @ben_mathes
The biggest advances come from realizing the hardware envelope has expanded in an interesting way, and learning to exploit it by wasting/conserving hardware resources differently. I mean, you basically innovate against Moore’s law, programming is a derivative layer
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Replying to @vgr
This is a real thing, but there is still a distinction between C and Lisp. What would you call them?
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Replying to @ben_mathes
Mathematical aesthetics perhaps? Language design is underdetermined by all 3 elements (math, engineering, bicycle), that’s why there’s so much diversity there. Bicycle is a good observation. In future it might just be applied neuroscience/biology.
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The bicycle part tends to be underrated because it’s had such limited scope until recently. I think of bicycle=UX as a placeholder art-science, kinda like alchemy or astrology before chemistry/astronomy. But with VR/AR, voice etc, it’s coming into its own as applied neuroscience
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