1st career
2nd career
3rd career
1940
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shannon
ENIAC
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Microsoft
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Google
you know when you go to a grocery store
and walk around out back?
you'll always see someone
on their smoke break
just eating a banana, exhausted.
grocery stores are so much work.
How many days
until march 30th?
Who was your tallest great-grandparent?
What's a good wage
for your babysitter?
I took this late-night class in university,
and the prof was always tired.
he said that a hard part of being an scientist,
is that nobody ever tells you what not to study.
that some subjects just eat-up your career,
and nobody tells you that.
some say that composing music is like cutting your own hair -
that anybody can make notes -
or use scissors
but the hard part is knowing when to stop.
which soundtracks have a french-horn?
How many sandwiches
did you eat last year?
How many words
did you say yesterday?
- an all-hands meeting at Google 24 years ago
the software world was meant to click into place
I always thought this would happen.
it never did.
and we've been trying now for a good while.
my parents (like most) love their iPads -
i write software for a living.
they still give me this look
like -
you sat at the computer all day?
why isn't it ... done?
in the mid-70s it was Unix program design
all information streaming as text-
a universal format, for concatenating programs
in the mid-90s object orientation
was the way to avoid inscrutible dark-magic
all the constant ad-hoc formats
resembling ordered programs, working together.
in the mid-200s the semantic web
let any data flip-around without software glue.
enabling unplanned cooperation 'mashups' between datasets.
There is this one moment in the history of software
that I cannot believe actually happened.
I wish it would be made into a movie.
At Google in 2001, frustrated with a lack of progress,
Larry Page fired all the managers in the entire company.
on one day. no warning.
it really happened¹
he wanted to 'let the engineers engineer!'
I won't spoil the ending.
google is such an untold story.
it's all an untold story, actually.
Consider this project, by Jaco Joubert in 2020:
he wanted to calculate the vacancy rate in condos in Toronto,
so he timelapsed a camera to monitor light-level changes.
he was the first person to get any information, in a long political debate.
no one else was using any information.
or consider this project, by /u/saund1pe
who logged the length of their thesis each night in an excel spreadsheet.
which is inspiring and sort of profound.
but, isn't that information already there somewhere?
why is the computer hiding it?
why is this graph hard at all?
the software world is not working.
something is broken inside of it.
it may be that, like goth music-
software was an exciting thing that we did for a while
then it ran to it's natural end.
and we stopped doing it.
because it dried up
nobody made 'born to run' in the 16th century -
cuz ..
people weren't .. in that place yet?
- being young and free was something people cared for -
so the album got made then
and not by a talented composer in the 16th century.
that's software -
we are the talented composer in the 16th century
there's just something that won't go -
and when you look why not,
it's just vague
like how grocery stores could have no employees today.
and we're all trying to create jobs.
we are not people that want software to work.
- we prefer it half-working.
today, when people talk about making decisions with data,
it sounds cool, but
.. do you mean like, a spreadsheet?
- cool, can you send me it?
or when people make an official statement -
- like Michael Scott 'declaring backruptcy' -
you mean ... you told somebody?
in sci-fi, there's the starship problem -
- if you are launching a spaceship to another star, you should wait
because a spaceship in a couple years will be better and just pass it.
Computer software did not work.
It was a large, monumental society-level effort.
All serious people got involved.
All levels of government.
Almost every stanford grad.
Everyone got exasperated.
after a few beers,
we tried.everyone will admit it doesn't really work
Computer knowledge done properly will be our first knowledge.
when software is working, we will not need more of it.
software is not working for a complex reason.
it's not anyone's fault
it's a hard thing to describe.
see also: