Glass Beads

https://outlandishclaims.substack.com/p/seven-glass-beads

by honoredb • 2 years ago

18 2 2 years ago

outlandishclaims.substack.com

marijn• 2 years ago

Missed chance, to fail to reference Le Guin's [patterning frame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Illusions#Objects) somewhere in there.

WillAdams• 2 years ago

Well-written and thoughtful.

The "create a system to play a game" is actually referenced in one of Fred Saberhagen's "Berserker" short stories.

I find it really sad that Gibson didn't read Hesse --- almost as sad that I haven't met a person IRL who has since I was in the military.

Surprised to see this link here, since it speaks more to society and ethics and technical aspects --- which again, I'm bummed by because I've found the various thoughts about using "The Glass Bead Game" as a matrix/construct/template for programming and information systems fascinating, and have really wished that one would be workable for the population at large and become popular/influential.

The problem as I understand it is that the representation presentation is bounded by screen-sized chunks, so reviewing/parsing it creates this problem of which direction does one scroll in, and by how much --- but if you try to increase the density by modularizing with functions and subroutines then you return to the textual representation which presumably you were trying to escape from, just wrapped up in drawn boxes and highlighted by lines/nodes, because it seems to sideskip a fundamental question which we don't seem to have an answer for:

What does an algorithm look like?

I've been trying to do this sort of thing for 3D:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/osge_cut...

but am currently working using a hacked-together Literate Programming system (see literati.sty in the above repository) which at least reduces scrolling to one dimension (up/down) and allows one to do it in a PDF which has a ToC, marginalia, hyperlinks, and indices --- all of which framing seems to reduce my cognitive load sufficiently that I'm hopeful one more re-write will get me to a point where I can evaluate if re-creating at least portions of it in OpenSCAD Graph Editor will be sufficiently expressive that including the images of the code will be worthwhile.

By way of contrast, the ethical problems of society are arguably solved by being awash in data and record-keeping --- recent conflicts have demonstrated that there is no need for military efforts against stateless actors, since instead, there is sufficient potential bandwidth in terms of individual legal action to put forward arrest warrants for those who have committed terrorist/criminal acts, which can then be acted on by law-abiding societies working in concert --- the problem of course is that that is a two-way street, and there are very few governments willing to subject themselves to such scrutiny. Hopefully, society as a whole will step forward and insist on such transparency and evaluation of legal proceedings, and punishment systems.

Glass Beads

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