reddit Writing Prompt entry -[partially complete ]

The old man paused, smiled and picked up his cup. I don't remember how I got to talking to him at the library's cafeteria, but there I was, wolfing down the sandwich on which I'd put ketchup. One buys sandwiches at the library for the same reason we look at our cellphones even when we know there's nothing there. Then we put ketchup on it and wolf it down, or unlock the thing and play with a couple of buttons and then put it back in our pockets again . It's a pretense. "I don't get that type of music", he said. "Never got past the first track of any record ever... " Ah yes, we both had been standing at the bargains shelf, looking at $1 CDs, and I had picked up a Jazz one. It had a black & white photo of a man in a checked jacket holding a saxophone on the cover looking .. well ,looking blank. But I too had never gotten past the first track of any jazz record myself. And here was Bob saying the exact same thing. "Coincidence !", I said to myself, as I filled it in my trip report. The console blinked and the detailed-incident-report indicator flashed on. I flipped the device to voice mode and started narrating the incident in detail - where I'd landed, what I looked like, when it was , how I met the man in the library named Bob , and what his thoughts about music were. My next case was an investigation. A senior agent had died recently, somewhere in Ardennes, in 1941. This was surprising, because the agency has all sorts of protocol and regulations & permissions in place just to avoid this specific type of event. Contaminating a timeline by choosing it to be your final resting place is strictly frowned upon. Influencing is allowed , interference is not. Time is a place you can visit but not stay - Agency motto. I had been in a future time at that time, sneaking some hashes into certain bankchain thus short-circuiting the spiralling growth of a certain family-run business . The agency believed in redistribution whenever possible, and interference in events before they were extensively manifest. Actual interference needed approvals. Influencing by nipping in the bud was supervisor-sanctioned. I remember a couple of us had visited his graveyard, in the middle of a war, to see if we could make some sense of the act. We found a minimal grave with the most basic headstone . The epitaph, also carved crudely and in a hurry, read " God split himself into myriad parts so that he could have friends ", which was decidedly weird for that age. Scans revealed skeletal remains which matched our agents', and spectral scans confirmed it. A Timeline Archive Search Report flagged the epitaph to be the contaminant. Nobody'd've noticed anything odd about the grave or its contents at this time or place, but someone could find the epitaph anachronistic,said The TASR. It said it shouldn't exist until 1973. - to be completed

ramblings

Culture Patterns
By focussing on data and not code, I feel Yahoo! managed to accumulate a fertile mass of brains.
By switching to Java, the stratification index climbed, and trees bearing fruit of higher complexity left.
By focussing on end-points and not stacks, Groupon quickly accumulated global developer muscle, with a multitude of stacks and languages.


Large Dev Patterns
The Interpreter Tracer Bullet
It might be a good idea to build a groovy interpreter into your web application  when you start. Working in an enterprise environment is clunky, and when you are connecting to databases which might not have data, libraries which are obtuse  etc , trying out things is the only way to get anything done. And restarting a tomcat for every single code change makes for slow and frustrating progress.

Over-tech

Code reviews and coding standards are the crutches for the weak at best, and a ball and chain at worst.
Intelligent programmers do not need them . Intelligent programmers need higher principles enshrined. It is the weak & blind who need to be guided step by step.

religion as a set of practices for self actualization
religion as a domination system

the 5 features of swarms

the self-realized man as a potent weapon

swarm vs swarm - global war

interlock of the various
division of labour and the loss of the individual

Powerpoint as an form of communication within organizations

A power point does not convey information, much as a menu does not provide food. It is not to be confused with a book or a research paper. It is merely an illustration of the power of a technique or idea in the real world, without any information on how to go about it. That being the case, the powers that be who see the powerpoint presentation  and call that person whose name sits on the ppt, to take up the work. It is a selling tool - it is an advertisement for your skills. And if you can sell to the real world, your group head will want you to implement it for him and his client.

references in a ppt are stupid, unless you need the authority.

this presupposes the bloom5 model ,with the ppt being targeted at the  resource shifters.

corollary : utility sorters serve the resource shifters. resource shifters are the core of the game.or the borg.And they are required to track sustainability and dependability in their utility sorters.

the world as we know it .

consists of three classes :
-o-   Cats who love a saucer of milk
-o-   Cow
-o-   Milkers

In the capitalist world of consumerism, the consumers are your Cows and your salaried and commission workers are the milkers. However, after 5pm, or midnight, the  milkers become the cow.

edit : how does this map to the bloom5 ?
cats = resource shifters, milkers = conformity enforcers, diversity generators, utility sorters.

The bloom5 model allows for evolution in castes, with complex hierarchical superorganisms, or Purushas adapting and surviving and building more sophisticated problem solving machinery consisting of moist robots (to borrow a term from Scott Adams)

innovation is dead

the giant components are caught in a self feeding cycle that promises to make the poor poorer and the rich richer.  
Industry is in a stage of consolidation, with the biggies buying out the competition. Once consolidated, the market will be nothing more than golden geese which will be milked to death, unless some effort is made to return purchasing ability to the middle.
However, the top 1 % will never find any reason to not maximise the inflow of cash.
forget innovation, there's only one game in town , and that's 'keep your job at all costs'. If too many become unemployed too fast, then the wheel might turn and off-the-grid alternatives might pop up.

it would be nice to think that all this technologization is taking us someplace. Unfortunately,
we're pretty much in the same place. Who was it who said that society never advances, every inch it gains from one side it loses from the other.
Today's vast technology machine is nothing more than a replica of the medieval ages, with pipelines directing flow of material into the 20% with the established salaried-man-machine -combine forcing effort in the opposite direction. The Daimyos and the Nobility used swordsmen to do this work. Today the Fed directs flow of credit and salaried designers create clothes and toys and meals that one MUST acquire or lose social face.