Watching Strangeloop 2022 Videos

I wasn’t excited by the dozens of podcast episodes I had already downloaded to my phone, and I needed something to speak at me while I exercised this evening, so I put one some videos from the Strangeloop 2022 conference. This one and this one and then this one. What did I take away from these? What will I remember?

I checked in on a project I had held in my mind as a reference for ‘a great demo’ from years ago - one that inspired me. And that project had fallen behind my expectations, but advanced in a new direction. The main takeaway was that manipulation of generics is more powerful when building a humanist system, because humans manipulate metaphors, rather than the content/thing itself.

I was reminded that academia approaches problems in such a general way as to render any solution or advancement anemic and lacking in application. The actually applicable pattern [of building a feedback loop between automated systems with humans providing input] was referenced only in passing.

I was reminded that poor communication distracts, complicates, and weakens the message itself. Good ideas and interesting observations can be inverted by mixing them into a soup of extraneous content.