In Search of Certainty
by Mark Burgess · first published 2015
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4HN commenters
2014–2026first – last mentioned
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I like the take Mark Burgess gives in In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure where he states that separation of concerns is "a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane." Perhaps having…
on “The key to building an idea seems to be blind faith” ↗…enough if-case. But you need that deterministic input and outcome on each side to make sure that results are predictable enough that the system doesn't eat it. <Insert lenghty ranting about "Go read In Search of Certainty again, Mark Burgess is right" here>
on “Show HN: Aura – a Rust agent that investigates and fixes production incidents” ↗…physics. What was once considered invariant, is usually only apparently invariant on a certain scale. When one looks in more detail, we find that we may only have invariance of an average. - Mark Burgess, In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure (2013) This accords well with the opening quotation Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view. - John Gay, English poet and dramatist…
on “The Art of Computer Programming: Random Numbers” ↗…the software team will be congruent. (paraphrasing of Conway's Law) Separation of concerns ... a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane. (Mark Burgess, In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure, 2013) [1] Taken from my fortune clone https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
on “Quit Covering Up Your Toxic Hellstew with Docker” ↗…have a sense of control. - Mark Burgess Separation of concerns ... a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane. - Mark Burgess These quotes are all from In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure (2013), via my fortune database https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
on “Are Cities Too Complicated?” ↗I hear you. The book I mentioned (Thinking in Promises) is the introductory-level public book. https://www.amazon.com/Promise-Theory-Principles-Application... is the heavy-duty scientific stuff. "In Search of Certainty" (https://www.amazon.com/Search-Certainty-Science-Information-...) is somewhere in-between. I would say promise theory is its own kind of logic and notation. Thanks for the correction @dozzie.
on “The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)” ↗…Theory and Promise Theory are both similar and related. For instance, they both deal with notions of interiority. And Mark encodes his axioms with categories. He's written several books on the topic, like "In Search of Certainty" and "Smart Spacetime", and has published papers on arxiv. I recommend "Smart Spacetime" to see how powerful this kind of semantics can get. https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5563
on “Category theory is a universal modeling language” ↗