dorian

He literally says (at 39:48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA&t=2388s) "And it's because [the patterns are] only really fragmentary perceptions of this deeper structure that I'm describing [i.e., centers, the 15 properties…], that they are ultimately unsatisfactory; I think they're not capable of delivering the goods." So maybe not an outright renunciation per se, but definitely a deprecation.

Thanks for bringing attention to this; I just released Chapter 8: Deep Interlock & Ambiguity. Gonna try to get Chapter 9 (Contrast) out on a reasonable schedule.

Haven't visited any because the majority are private residences (although this one in Berkeley-ish has been on and off the market https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/700-Hillside-Ave-Albany-C... ). The only ones you can just go to are West Dean in the UK and Eishin just outside Tokyo (which IIRC you need an appointment for). I suppose there's also the Fresno farmer's market but that's barely a building.

(You may also be able to go to the Mexicali compound which is apparently still standing: https://maps.app.goo.gl/UkwKqYDrGBcfQLnd6 but don't know what the story is with it.)

Yeah, it was about a thousand bucks the last time I checked and probably more now that he's passed. Why I ultimately didn't feel too bad about not reading it was because from what I understand, its contents are ostensibly mostly covered in Nature of Order. Same goes for Linz Café. I am, however, glad I read The Mary Rose Museum because it has a contract in it (excerpted in Nature of Order) that inspired me to write my own service contract "from scratch" (for some value of the term).

As for the software industry, it really latched on to patterns because (and Alexander himself nails it) they offer both a format and a formula for exchanging ideas that are either too ephemeral to write into a library, or otherwise transcend particular languages/frameworks. A lot of the really important insights though appear to have been lost in the process. (I have the Gang of Four book and a Fowler book, and have found neither to be especially useful.)

If you're going to read the whole Alexander corpus (which I did minus the two hardest-to-find volumes—the Linz Café and the one about carpets), be prepared for it to take on the order of years. While there is for sure a lot of repetition, the insights are frustratingly smeared across the entire thing.

Moreover, there is a clear arc to Alexander's career that goes a little like:

• Mathematical era (PhD/Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is not a Tree)

• Pattern era (Timeless Way, APL, and about four case studies)

• 15 properties era (Nature of Order)

As one might expect, a lot of the earlier work is recapitulated in the later work, but the fact that he explicitly deprecated patterns at his OOPSLA 1996 keynote (https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA ) is important. People are aware of APL because of Gang of Four and Richard Gabriel etc but not so much that lecture.

As for the fifteen properties in Nature of Order, they mainly concern Euclidean geometry and the ordinary physics one would associate with constructing actual buildings. The evidence that they would need to be adapted to a more generic semiotic-topological domain such as software is the fact that Alexander himself saw fit to draw up (in Book 4) eleven analogous properties pertaining exclusively to colour (a 1:1 correspondence except for four which coalesce two of the geometric properties each). Concepts like "life", "wholeness", "center", "the fundamental differentiating process" etc. can be used unchanged.

lol

Yup, and the weird thing is it was just bursitis; the imaging otherwise came back clean. I've hurt myself way worse than that with fewer consequences. Must be getting old.

So, I was looking for a drop-in replacement for swimming (~3-~4km per day, so ~60-90 minutes plus commute) that could be done:

• outside

• by myself

• in the winter (~-10°C)

• without needing access to any (locked down) facility

• or significant investment in equipment

• or additional time

• that isn't mind-numbingly boring

• and that would yield a similar metabolic effect.

"No choice" is shorthand for "I don't feel like plumbing the depths of all possible forms of exercise to come up with a suitable match under these constraints so I'll just pick running."

Genuinely interested in any alternatives that satisfy those criteria because I bet they'd be creative.

As for the ice, I bought a decent pair of trail shoes that seemed to work fine.

I mean, the really glaringly puzzling thing is the lossy process of hand-transcribing the information from the authoritative (and necessarily structured) source to a muddy, ambiguous target. Obviously somebody cares enough to put the schedule on the website but the neurons that understand that this could be a simple automated transformation operation instead of an additional task for somebody on the comms team are nonexistent.

But then that somewhat affirms your point about the yes-ministerization that occurs the second information systems (which are technologically invariant) touch computers.

ding ding ding

https://dorian.substack.com/p/radical-interoperability-is-a-...

oh yeah ps the specificity gradient (https://youtu.be/dDE_y7Qri9w which I recorded much later) is stewart brand/frank duffy "shearing layers"/"pace layers" stuff; see https://doriantaylor.com/shearing-layers-applied-to-the-web

lol i suppose i should clarify that royce's paper is "generally credited as being the origin of waterfall despite actually advocating against it" or something to that effect. i know boehm refers to it but didn't know boehm was the one who originally (ab)used it as a straw man, so thanks for that. ;)

Are those mappings in the book you linked? Or something you just came up with?

Notes on the Synthesis of Form is a lot more systems-theoretic. The algorithm is more or less recursive min-cut partitioning which is now well-researched.

There is, however, a real logistical problem is getting the input requirements, massaging them to identical conceptual scope, and then connecting them together so you can perform said decomposition. That is a massive, massive bottleneck.

That's why it's so telling that Alexander abandoned the technique in his thesis in favour of using the building site itself, in effect, as a computational medium.

The Web from its inception until about ~1996-97 was like this.

This is something I've been working on for a while. A friend suggested I post it here. The basic idea is that while there have been developments in improving the product (UX) and improving the development process (Agile), I haven't seen much talk or action about attacking the rigid nature of the (commercial, legal) deals struck to achieve them.

About two years ago I began working on the technical infrastructure that makes it possible to even consider incremental contracting for incremental development; now I'm working on project controls, and later this year I expect to do the legal stuff.

Anyway, have at 'er.