Karl Schultheisz @kdsch@social.coop

> Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform.

https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p5.html

In open source, the tradition is that the users are developers. Thus, the language already exists.

But this doesn't generalize. It would be informative to do some case studies of how such languages have developed. I admittedly have little knowledge of any such studies.

The language itself can be seen as a community, for it provides frames for understanding the world.

We speak of inclusion, but what would that mean? Does it mean domination of one language over another?

This suggest that for communities wherein customers and engineers think differently, there must be a conscious, perhaps formally organized effort to ensure that the groups develop a useful interface language.

Elaborating on my guess:

If customers have more power, engineers implement something they don't understand. If engineers have more power, customers get the wrong product.

There can be cases where X really doesn't make sense. Nevertheless, there must be an effort by somebody to bridge the conceptual chasm. I say it should be mutual. Otherwise, the project is frustrated.

For instance, useful products often come out of user-developer communities because the two roles are thinking the same way.

In the old Waterfall model of the engineering process, you begin with requirements. These are supposed to be good enough that a satisfactory design can be devised.

But that's an idealization. Typically the requirements are messy. Customers say the problem is X, but X doesn't make sense to the engineers.

My guess is that the outcome of such a lack of mutual understanding depends on the balance of power between customers and engineers.

Enjoying https://beta.resonate.is/artists/3180 as I set up my own Git server.

What do you think of IoT? For those of you blessed enough to not know the acronym, it means Internet of Things. And for those of you blessed enough to not know the phrase, I salute you.

I came to work in IoT by accident. It makes me think of "surveillance capitalism". I think of user freedom eroding. Even if the devices run open source software, it makes no difference when privacy and user agency are the least concerns.

Am I being unfair?

We tend to view metaphor as just a way of speaking that is not literal. And there is some language that is nonmetaphorical. But most complex thoughts involve metaphors, to the degree that speaking literally would be less useful.

Most of us use metaphors unwittingly, per the conventions of society. But innovative metaphors have a role: they allow us to change our thinking for our benefit.

New metaphors allow us to experience things differently. They actually change our brains.

I'm reading George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By.

Most of us think of argument as war; as something to be won or lost. We attack our opponent's positions. We shoot down their points.

What if we came upon a culture that viewed argument not as war, but something else; for instance, dance? They would experience argument differently than us.

Yet we would not recognize them as arguing. They'd be doing something else, for us.

Metaphor is cognitive and experiential, not just linguistic.

Just learned that the project I've been working on for the past year is going to be open sourced. (Don't know under what license, yet.)

That's a relief, because it could use some code review.

I have been employed as a programmer for a bit more than a year. It's been a learning experience.

Every few months I learn some new way to express myself and rewrite everything by using that. A few months afterward, I find the old way inadequate.

It's getting tiresome, and makes me doubt my progress.

Maybe I'm looking for somewhere to grow, and my project doesn't provide a good opportunity for this. Or maybe I just don't get software engineering. It's too easy to fiddle with.

Reactions to http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/googles-news-chief-richard-gingras-we-need-to-rethink-journalism-at-every-dimension/

Tame questions, terrified responses.

Google is in no position to see that maybe the way to get local journalism to flourish is for them avoid any big, centralized dependencies.

Test toot from madonctl.

Has anyone used https://pi-hole.net/, the ad-blocking DNS sinkhole?

I'm extremely curious about it, but would like to hear some reviews before trying it.

I've read that there are APT packages, but I haven't found them.