Alan Kay

  • system programmers are high priests of a low cult
  • inverse vandalism
  • science is a set of heuristics to get around buggy brains
  • put “not” before popular ideas to get novel ideas. E.g. “not Big Data” => “Big Meaning”.
  • model time explicitly (cf. Rich Hickey / Datomic). “Computation is rendezvous of ephemera” (ref)
  • build for a galactic scale
  • the map is not the territory

Dedalus: Datalog in Time and Space

“How to deal with distributed systems”. Key features of a concurrency control protocol: atomicity, mutual exclusion, sequencing (order).

Paucity of pertinence

  • Eric Schmidt (2010): “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003”.
  • Phil Hendrie still gets clueless callers, despite being on the radio for decades.
  • “We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.” — Rutherford D. Rogers

Edsger W. Dijkstra, “On the cruelty of really teaching computing science” (2000): “The shallowness of the underlying analogy is worthy of the Middle Ages. Confrontations with insipid ’tools’ of the ‘algorithm-animation’ variety has not mellowed my judgement; on the contrary, it has confirmed my initial suspicion that we are primarily dealing with yet another dimension of the snake oil business.”

Emergence

“When someone says: ‘I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done’, give him a lollipop.” — Alan J. Perlis

Notation matters

Have you noticed patterns in the concepts of communication? patterns that aren’t yet delineated? of information, of the representation of ideas? Some little basic building blocks must exist, which dictate the behavior of these systems. There may be an abstract definition of a system somewhere out there.

Maybe there are laws that intrinsically govern these parcels and eddies. Maybe they can be optimized… maybe re-typing and re-explaining things to people in your organization will someday be a thing of the past. Maybe multimedia compositions will someday be unfettered by format-friction and source-searching.

Maybe someday, you will know whether you need to buy nails or whether you already have nails in your garage, because your entire garage was automatically cataloged by your smartphone. These patterns, and an algebra for annotating them, have already been started: automata, grammars, Turing machines, set theory, information theory, systems theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Unexpected_connection

the design of all modern communications and data storage devices, from cellular phones to modems to hard disk drives and DVDs, rely on Shannon entropy

Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement

The holographic principle states that the entropy of ordinary mass (not just black holes) is also proportional to surface area and not volume; that volume itself is illusory and the universe is really a hologram which is isomorphic to the information “inscribed” on the surface of its boundary.

an isomorphism is a kind of mapping between objects, which shows a relationship between two properties or operations. If there exists an isomorphism between two structures, we call the two structures isomorphic. In a certain sense, isomorphic structures are structurally identical, if you choose to ignore finer-grained differences