Tag: git

Coin of My Realm: Meaning

~ cafebedouin ~ 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking on this tweet a bit lately. How do we determine what is the coin of our realm? What is important to us?

I wanted to expand on this tweet. Isn’t really “what others offer” is a question of what we value in ourselves, and in other people? Lets leave aside the fact that this is a transactional model of relationships. Instead, let’s focus on the value. If we really want to understand what we value, I think the real question comes down to time.

How do you spend your time? With whom do you spend it? Because, when it comes right down to it, the only thing each of us has of any value is who we are as people and how we spend our time. Everything else just expands our agency within that framework.

I have been spending a lot of my time lately doing writing, providing support via Discord & Telegram and doing some minor programming for a cryptocurrency called Ergo. I’ve learned a lot about:

  • How cryptocurrencies work
  • The psychology of people in the cryptocurrency space, which is indicative of people more generally
  • Learning to use new software tools

The last is an interesting development, I’ve never collaboratively worked on a project using git. I have use it to provide back-ups and versioning for my own work, such as configuration files, bash scripts and so forth. But, it’s a different experience to work collaboratively with someone else with it. The collaboration has value, independently of the code being created or the ideas behind it. This is something that is missed in the above tweet.

Things change so fast in the cryptocurrency space, and it is filled with people trying to make quick money. Or, “life changing money,” which normally means they can stop working and do whatever they dream of doing, perhaps driving cross country in a Lamborghini. Wen lambo? This is a question often asked, jokingly, but it is also serious.

Given the environment, integrity is very important because there is such a lack of it. Most people are hoping to strike it rich, which means there is a large pool of people that can be scammed.

Beyond the get rich environment, it is also interesting thing to note how little agency people have in the space. At the level of the cryptocurrency itself, there are wild price swings, and much of the variance is market manipulation. Imagine all the problems of the stock market, without most of the regulatory restrictions.

But, it is also clear that the restrictions that are in place are there to benefit certain people, just as much as they are to protect people involved. So, there’s a distrust of larger governance, particularly governance by a state.

In its place, in cryptocurrencies, you have governance by unelected bodies, software developers, investors and other interested parties. It’s never governance by people using the cryptocurrency, in any form whether it is democratic, the choosing of representatives, and so forth.

Best case, it’s a meritocracy. Often, these meritocracies have a benevolent dictator, and while they may wish for more user input, do not know how to move from where they are at to a system where people using the tool are deciding how it should be used and what capabilities to develop.

Without any kind of real governance and input into the decision-making processes necessary to be a functioning entity, discussion tends to devolve into who has the biggest microphone and who can shout down opposing points of view. You might say this is the defining feature of our times, when people have little agency over the things they care about.

One solution to this problem is to care about different things. If you limit what you care about to the things that you have agency over, then you don’t have to argue about it with other people. You can simply do the thing.

Of course, anything sufficiently large is going to require organization beyond mere individuals. But, moving our scope out that wide quickly limits our agency. Most of us scope our concerns so they are beyond any real action on our part. It’s why we develop what the Unabomber describes as surrogate activities, or things we do that serve as a substitute for real agency over things that matter. It’s why people decide to run marathons, climb corporate ladders, or whatever. We set goals such as these when life is unfulfilling.

Where can we find meaning? Where can we find agency? I think the answer to this question in our age is the same answer Voltaire gave in Candide: Il faut cultiver notre jardin, or tend your own garden. Narrow your concerns to a few people. People that show themselves to be unworthy of concern? Remove them from your garden. Spend your time and energy on projects you control and involve yourself in the lives of people you know around you.

Those people don’t need to be “insightful”. Gardens need shade as well as fruit, and every tree and plant can bring something different to the ecosystem. But, we need to thoughtfully engage with the question: what is the garden for? Is it to grow the biggest, best vegetables? Or, maybe there’s something bigger to be found there, such as meaning and agency.

The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Sciences by Kieran Healy

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment
The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science is written for graduate students in the social sciences, but useful for any writer. For people not doing sophisticated data analysis, the key suggestions are to use a text editor like Emacs for writing, Markdown for formatting, git—such as on GitLabs—for version control, and a translator program like Pandoc to translate your text file into a variety of formats, such as epub, pdf, doc and so forth. Additionally, he strongly recommends automated backing up of your data with a cloud service. He mentions two standards but if you go that route consider a privacy focused service like SpiderOak, or the free software alternative, NextCloud.

Details

The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science is worth reading for anyone involved with writing, research or data analysis. It introduces the problem of thinking about the tools that we use to do our work and serves as a technical primer for a particular style of writing.Kieran Healy starts with a dichotomy, c.f., Section 1.2. There are two computer revolutions. One revolution is trying to abstract out the technology and present people with an easy, touch interface to accomplish specific tasks. Using your phone to take a picture, send a text message, post to social media, play YouTube videos, etc. are all examples of this type of technology. It’s probably the dominant form of computing now.

The other revolution are the complex computing tools that are being developed that cannot be used via a touch interface. At this point, there is no way to use an open source neural net like Google’s TensorFlow in a way that is going to make sense to the vast majority of people.

As we move to using a keyboard, this tension can be seen in the different types of tools we can use to write, research and do analysis. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, etc. were designed to be digital equivalents to their analog predecessors – the typewriter, the overhead projector, the double entry account book or the index file. Of course, the digital equivalents offered additional capabilities, but it was still tied to the model of the business office. The goal for these tools, even as they include PivotTables and other features, is to be relatively easy to learn and use for the average person in an office.

The other computing revolution is bringing tools to the fore that are not tied to these old models of the business office and is combining them in interesting new ways. But, these tools have a difficult learning curve. For example, embedding programming code that can be written into a text analysis to generate calculations when it is typeset is not a feature the average person working in a typical office needs. But, it clearly has some advantages in some contexts, such as for data analysts.

Complexity makes mistakes easier to make. So, it requires a different way of working. We have to be careful to document the calculations we use, track versions from multiple sources, be able to fold changes back into a master document without introducing errors, and so forth. The Office model of handing a “master document” back and forth and the process bottle-necked waiting for individuals making revisions isn’t going to work past a certain minimum baseline level of complexity that we are slowly evolving past.

So, laying out this case, he then suggests various tools to consider: a text browser such as Emacs, Markup for formatting, git for version control, Pandoc for translating text documents into other formats, backup systems, a backup cloud service, etc. All of these tools are equally important to complex writing of any sort, whether it be for writing long works of fiction, research analysis, collaborative writing, and other circumstances we are more likely to find ourselves in, which these more powerful tools help make possible.