I suspect that this will become something of a regular feature, but I’ve realized that given how I tend to concentrate my blogging energies on the tychoish.com project, even for subjects that would be relevant to the Cyborg Institute blog¹, that it would be useful to create a semi-regular Cyborg Institute feature to keep you all up to date on what’s going on beyond the scenes.

On the Wiki

• First, I’ve been doing some revisions with the wiki, and the good news is that everything works. I though everything worked when I started out, but it turns out OpenID was a bit buggy, and I had some problems with the git interface, but everything seems to be in order now. My general move has been to de-clutter some pages–the index primarily–split up things that went on too long in a given page (i.e. the current work on Sygn).

• I’ve been working on consolidating, clarifying, and tweaking the Sygn System pages to be a bit more organized and descriptive.

  If you didn’t notice, Sygn is a project to create a federated social networking data standard. This sounds really geeky and more “technological,” than “cyborg,” but in point of fact the “geeky” parts are (relatively) simple, and the implications and applications Sygn are very “cyborg.” Ongoing work on the wiki and the sygn chat room and we hope to begin work on a test implementation soon.

• I started working on some exploration for a wiki project hosted under the umbrella of Critical Futures, to explore the ways to do fiction and creative work using wiki as a tool. This is Cyborg if ever there was one.

• I’ve moved the Content Incubator off of the main page, and done a little bit of work to consolidate the initial footprint of the wiki and make the whole thing a bit more approachable.

General Site Things

• I’ve enabled a couple of sub-domains to work a little bit better for people who might be interested in various Cyborg Institute related projects therefore (.net and .org domains, at the moment are all identical to the .com):

  • The Cyborg Institute Planet: http://planet.cyborginstitute.com

  • The Cyborg Institute Wiki: http://wiki.cyborginstitute.com

• I’m thinking about giving up the pretense of the blog, as a first class publication of the Cyborg Institute and trying to fold the content into the wiki, and do more posts along the lines of this post.

  In pursuit of this I’ve imported the backlog of posts that were really just sketches of one sort or another into a personal sketchpad in the wiki. You can find that here.

  Thoughts?

Do be in touch, and thanks for reading.

Donald Knuth, originator of TeX and METAFONT, for typesetting, and for the concept of ”literate programming,” lamented the dirth of reusable software. Knuth is a brilliant guy and a great thinker, and although I’ve yet to read Coders At Work, thinking about software as reusable (which is certainly a prevailing trend,) and the possibility that this might be regrettable has certainly given me something to chew on.

Knuth is without question an Artist and a master craftsman. I suspect that the “regrettable” aspect of reusable computer programs for Knuth, is not that reusable programs are technologically flawed but rather that reusable programs mean that users of computers–cyborgs–can use their machines, and interact with technology without ever needing to know how the underlying technology works.

I don’t know if I can add a lot to this idea. I think it’s interesting and useful to think about addressing technological problems with human solutions in some cases. I think particular around the problem domains of desktop software and systems administration, we’ve stopped “learning how to develop single-use programs,” and have relied on reusable programs. The result is that desktop computer users, don’t know very much about the administration and development of the applications they use, in nearly all cases from advanced users to rank beginners.

My perspective might be skewed because, in the broadest sense possible, my work is focused on answering the claim that “free software is hard to use,” by educating users rather than developing software that makes technology easier to use by removing choice and options.

I think the design philosophy of Arch Linux follows this philosophy. The lack of anything resembling a “standard” configuration in emacs supports the goal of “learn how your technology works,” philosophy.

Returning to “reusable software,” for a moment, I’ll make an argument against myself (in comments), and say that in a lot of situations, the solution to a specific problem is often best solved with specific solutions. If software isn’t going to be reused, and we accept that the writing and rewriting of software is a constant process, I think the result is much more simple programs. Programs that need to only do one thing, or part of one thing well. Programs that are more simple. Better separation of programmatic interfaces and user interfaces. In point of fact, more software that’s built using bits and pieces of existing code.

And above all, more proficient (and arguably happier) users. That’s a good thing indeed.