Revenge of the Rubyist

Zed Shaw (author of the well-know Ruby tools Mongrel, liteweight web server and the Rfuzz fuzzifying HTTP client used in Web testing): One thing I'm currently working on is called Utu. It's not a Ruby project. It's a networking protocol.

"Utu" is a Maori word for a philosophical system of karma revenge. There was a New Zealander, an actor, who ordered a book from Amazon. They took four days to send it to him instead of two, so he went and did research and found prior art that might invalidate the Amazon one-click patent. Did this all in week, all by himself. PhD.'s, tons of people were trying to find this, but this actor in New Zealand finds it. He gets people to donate $3,000 so he can file the invalidation claim. It grows legs, might actually invalidate one-click. He says in an article I read, "I got real angry, decided there needed to be a little bit of utu ..."

The Utu protocol is encrypted, and as people communicate, they can apply cryptographic hate as a hash cache. The server will make you do this hash cache calculation before you talk to anyone else. So if you don't like someone, or you are getting spam, you can do an implicit "sender pays" system. Cryptographic hate is a natural throttle, a social network aspect.

I've been a programmer and IT manager for ten or twelve years. For the past year I've been working on Mongrel and consulting in Ruby. I have a degree in MIS, and am pretty much self-taught as a programmer. MIS was the only track I found that would let me study people, business, and economics in computers. The programming stuff I had no problem with. I wanted to learn about human interaction in this environment.

My overall interest is in how technology changes society and how people do things. Some people say you can't find an engineering solution to a social problem. You know what? Society is totally different Before Car and After Car, or Before Planes and After Planes.

Technology is always changing society, the way humans operate. There's a connection between the introduction of mass transportation and the incidence of obesity.

Computers are just such a new technology. I was born with computers, using them and programming them since I was twelve. I see how society has changed. Cars, planes, computers ... at first it's fascinating to people, then it becomes second nature, "We've always had highways." No, you haven't always had highways!

Computers change the way people think. There are kids who have no concept of life without computers, text messaging, email and chat. How does that change the way they think about things? They understand the Internet, the security problems, in a way older people don't really get. But they don't know why, or what was beforehand.

I started writing games in Basic and kept up. When things went to C++, I was doing that. Windowing systems, I was doing that. I've seen this progression, businesses coming and going. There are a lot of guys my same age here who started at web apps. They have no understanding of why certain things are the way they are.

Computer science is a unique discipline in that it has no concept of history. You talk to computer scientists, and whatever they learned, that's the way the universe is.

For me, computing is a way to articulate my ideas and change how people interact. Most of my projects are oriented around making things fun for others, but also kind of weird. What happens if I introduce a chat system where you can hate on other people? Will the whole network shut down because everyone hates each other? Will you be able to go in and say, "Hey, if you like these guys, you also like those guys, too, and if you hate this guy, you might like that guy"?

You'll build reputations. "Don't even let people with an average hate of 25 talk to me." This is something you can't do in current Internet communication. You just have to accept everything and then reject based on Bayesian filters.

I'm also really interested in the psychology of programmers and those strange beliefs they have. Beliefs which they don't understand where they came from. There were folks like that in business school, who had never read Adam Smith. Where do these ideas of capitalist economics come from. They don't really get it. They don't understand counter movements like Marx and socialism. For them, it's just how you make cash. There's no interest in why things are as they are.

Computer scientists, it's the same deal. There are just things they believe. Most computer programmers seem to break things down into Boolean logic. It's either THIS or THAT. There's always US vs. THEM, Windows vs. Linux, Vi vs. Emacs. They're famous for this, but they are scientists, they're supposed to be logical, but there are religions. My programming language vs. that programming language. GOOD or BAD, BETTER or WORSE, TRUE or FALSE.

They don't even know there are alternate logic systems that have "True", "False" and "I don't know". What if we just make logic fuzzy? They know nothing about statistics. It's like they're on another planet. No other human being thinks like a programmer.

My theory is that this is from working with code all day. The person they talk to most of the time, eight hours a day, is this computer that only understands Boolean logic. That influences their thought, how they think about problems in the world.

When quantum computers become viable, when you finally see the Altair of quantum computing come out, I think programmers now aren't going to be able to hack it. It's going to be new people who roll into it. They can do the math, but quantum computing is more about statistics, more about a lot of things that programmers today have no clue about.

Posted by Jack Woehr at 05:16 AM  Permalink

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