Hey all, I wanted to (re)introduce myself and try to articulate why I’ve been so absent for those who might be interested in my experience. Sorry for the length… I used to be very active here, but over some time I developed a kind of disillusionment with my own thinking. I could no longer connect the dots between much of the work being done and long-term aspirations. I became skeptical of our ability to express or communicate with each other around the systems we wish to build, design, or see emerge. There’s a lot of deep discussion in this community that gets toward many major questions: - how can we make systems interoperable? what is interoperability? - in what ways could human-computer interfaces be different? How can we reason about interfaces? - how can we collapse the user-programmer divide? What would a dynamic medium look like? - what does it mean for computing to be truly participatory? What does participation and agency look like across scale and context? - What’s the difference between data, structure, behaviour? Are these all the same? - what are the limits of possibility derived from current theory and mathematics? With so many areas, where do we focus? (systems sciences, FLT, PL design, HCI, semiotics, knowledge representation, models of computation, etc) - many more These big and often broad questions, lines of inquiry, and conclusions resemble a sort of theoretical-adjacent foundation for the work being done in this community. There’s also the opposite end: concrete, current, specific discussion that supports each others efforts and current projects. With all these rich and amazing discussions, which so clearly have merit, I became even more disillusioned. Not only was I lacking the language to articulate my own goals and desires, but I also felt like existing knowledge was underutilised, with many amazing individuals unable to build on each others work, many contributions left unused. It began to feel like I was thinking in the wrong place, and trying to do the wrong things (for me, anyway). So I ended up taking a year+ ‘pause’ with some key goals for myself: 1. Become genuinely familiar with fields which address key, foundational problems, some key focuses for me were on: a. Complex & dynamical systems, control systems & cybernetics b. knowledge representation, information & communication theory, linguistics & FLT c. distributed systems & governance d. lots and lots of math! 2. Seek out a versatile but robust frameworks for reasoning that are portable across the computing landscape while remaining grounded in the material world. 3. Explore what a theory of change grounded in systems sciences looks like, as a component of future-oriented work. 4. Be academically rigorous and move towards more long-term research-oriented work To cut a long story a bit short, I did some much needed re-orientation, discovering some really cool stuff along the way which I’m excited to share, and I have never felt better. I had to let go of a lot of ideas I held quite dearly, most of which I haven’t mentioned here. I’m actually more hopeful about the future of computing than I ever have been, but I’ve shifted positions quite a lot along the way. I now also have a research job in this exact area — knowledge interoperability in distributed socio-technical systems I’m now very focused on understanding representations and representation systems — which are very under-theorised and often invisible to us, or left implicit. I’m hopeful we can develop common frameworks for understanding existing systems that also allow us to reason about entirely new systems. Lots of compelling work from knowledge representation and systems sciences here. I’ve never felt so excited about a research direction before, and it’s already churned up some super compelling stuff. I couldn’t cram any actual theory contributions into this message, but I hope my excitement is contagious! I’m glad to be back, y’all are fabulous. <3

@Orion Reed I am working on opentangle.ai

I'd love to hear more specific details about what you're working on, or planning to work on. I'm not familiar with some of the jargon you've used.

Yeah, I'd be curious to hear more too. 🙂 Any papers that you'd point at?

@Amit Rathore OpenTangle looks interesting, I’ll check it out 🙂

@Orion Reed Could "code" (in the original sense) be a synonym for "representation system"?

Code: A system of words, letters, figures, or symbols used to represent others.

It's a shame the term was reappropriated to mean "instructions executable by a computer".

@Nick Smith Not exactly, but theres definitely a connection. Just looked it up and the word ‘code’ came from manually compiling laws together. Quite a systematic, authoritative, and discrete event which produced a mostly static artefact like a book. So the word ‘code’ to me kind of shows us how we got here, and makes sense if computing is just emerging. I think that regardless of the words we use: the idea of code as inherited from history is insufficient for understanding how these systems work.

@Orion Reed you might enjoy this talk:

@Daniel Krasner I did! It was nice to see that kind of talk at strange loop, I liked the framing (one quite familiar in this community I think) and really appreciated the critique of some common notions (like the notion of ‘bicycles for the mind’) I'm not doing the same kind of work as him, but am always happy to see projects like his.

@Orion Reed Glad you enjoyed it. Understood this is heading in a bit of a different direction, but Eric and I are always happy to talk, think, and all that.