Some interesting thoughts on what it takes to get to an "information age": https://www.incaseofpeace.org/the-age-of-information/

I suspect the information age, when it arrives, will unpack a lot that we currently mix into the single word "documentation". https://diataxis.fr is the smallest baby step in this direction. As the smallest example, while working on https://github.com/akkartik/teliva today it occurred to me to ask the question:

What is the difference in privileges between "standard" Lua code always loaded by Teliva the framework, vs Lua code loaded from a Teliva app?

I have an answer now[1], but now I'm not sure where to store this information that I can be confident it will be available to someone else asking the same question. [1] Zero difference, both nominally and prescriptively.

I take issue with the article's suggestion that "everyone knows what data is". IMO, nobody knows what data is. The term is as contentious as information itself. What's more: I posit that it's impossible to define "data" in a way that doesn't make it either a synonym for "information", or vacuous (e.g. "every atom and/or collection of atoms in the universe is data").

I’m not sure I follow what he’s getting at, but I like the style. Reminds me a bit of one of my favorite articles on the ’net (favorite not for its imagined futures, but for its images, mental models & thought experiments): https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html I agree about the importance of clarity around “information” & “data.” Personally I find them both to be “meaningless words” in the Politics & the English Language sense. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/. Insofar as the concepts denoted by “information” and “data” might be made meaningful, I’m currently thinking of them something like this. “Information” is relative, always defined in reference to an agent, its environment, and the agent’s model of its environment. Any agent has a body, through which it interfaces with both its environment and its internal model of its environment via a set of sensors and actuators. “Data” is also relative, always defined in reference to a given set of sensors, their environments, and a set of models of each sensor and its environment. Data is a sequence of observations from a set of sensors, represented according to a set of models of each sample, sensor, and environment. An agent uses its internal model to decide how to act on itself and its environment, and uses data to decide how to update its internal model. Information is defined operationally as data that leads an agent to update its internal model of its environment. (Just a snapshot of where I’m at on this.. not looking for any feedback in particular but def curious if you have any.)

My take on this: the fact that terms like "data" and "information" are used in many different but overlapping meanings is an indicator for a rapidly evolving domain. Which is why we are here. We shouldn't complain 😉