The End Of Programming As We Know It

Since AI is what everyone's talking about... I could add my two cents regarding CHOP (chat oriented programming), which I first learned about (the acronym that is) at a Python User Group here in Portland. I've been chopping and hacking and finding Gemini in Google Colab more helpful than just StackOverflow. I love the term "chop slop" and plan to keep using it.

However, my use of chatbots is more of a natural language processing flavor in that I'm not looking for source code prototypes as often as I wanna lurk in on gossip. For example, I made up a query about spin doctors wanting to rebrand these LLMs as "whisper chambers" and getting back a lot of inside scoop on how marketers are thinking these days, when it comes to sounding sincere.

Beyond lurking in on the disciplines, I like to mine history. If you prompt the right way, giving a lot of proper names and context, you're likely to get back something that hangs together. I was able to overlay what we call the Naga Story in my classrooms, with something more scientifically credible, and yet still a myth, as the book that includes it comes up as poetical in its approach. Hello Ezra.

One of the big stories I've been trying to tell is the Westward Ho! migration, eventually along the Oregon Trail, of European high culture, such that Portland, Oregon would become a capital of open source and glass bead games. German Idealism via Kant and Hegel, forking to Marx, with another fork through Pragmatism, yet reuniting with a Transcendentalism. Emerson. Whitman. Back to Coleridge and Kant.

You might be thinking: these paths are all known. Romanticism was a backlash against the ugly side of industrialism (automating stuff) after which New Englanders followed, with their first take on Transcendentalism, already encountering more Asian thought patterns, foretelling the Californian subcultures, theosophy and so on. Yes, true, but such complicated stories bear retelling with the benefit of hindsight. Call it revisionist if you like, but lets keep it neutral on whether "revisioning" is a bad thing. That depends. Could be enlightening.

The evolution of the women's movement in the context of voting democracies figures in, along with two world wars galvanizing their participation in both the factory and the office space, blue collar and white, thereby finding out first hand what their husbands had been doing. Have men been exploring in the other direction. The roles need to be studied and experienced from all sides for the society to understand itself well enough to cohere. I start with women more than equal to men as intellectuals. That's a reference to my Graph Theory slide deck.

Graph Theory 2025

:: narrating my Google slides (February 2025) ::

Contemporary Synopsis

This House, January, 2025

Rebooting K-16

Another Philosopher

Existing is Crazy!

Philo of Math Talk

from 2019

Spherical Pinball Machine

If you’ve been jumping around inside these blogs, and you’ll know the ones I mean if you’ve been doing that, then you’ve seen the statistical material seeping in by osmosis, as the author, yours truly, is placed in sink or swim mode vs-a-vs some objective reality we know not, being not omniscient.

I summarize data science for my students as the business of predicting the future, which may seem too narrow given all the data sifting we’re doing to get better pictures of the past. But that’s the thing: where will we expect to get those better pictures? In our future. The past is already over, and is immutable. In that sense, anticipating what will be is redundant. We face forward in time, try turning that around. Not easy right?

Enter the Active Inference lingo, where we partition off future from past (priors) with a Markov blanket. Your energy budget is to spend on countering entropy within your own model, which you might as well call the action (sometimes gradual, sometimes steep) of gradient ascent, as descent, these are as left vs right conventions (gotta pick one, just be consistent within your own namespace). 

To the extent you’ve not reached an apex, you’ve got free energy left to try. Once in equilibrium, you’re not tapping out savings so quickly, yet every belief system leaks. Your hand is always needed on the tiller even if your touch is light. It’s that experience of free agency that keeps us from calling it autopilot, which isn’t to say the pilot is forbidden from taking cat naps.

The active agent’s response to sensory or “sent-int” is action, preferably constructive such as to restore mental model applicability. No one wants to throw out a mental model and start over from scratch, except in sandbox areas, such as we provide in some of our workshops. 

The agent actively shapes her, his or their world to conform to expectations, and only resorts to backup responses if no such restorations ensue. So then there’s shifting gears and taking a new position.

Which reminds me, when people ask me about the est Training (1970s mostly) what do I say? Not that I’m always able to predict my own banter (I learn what I’ll say when I say it), at the moment I’m gonna say it was all about “getting off it” which means owning one’s condition sufficiently to make a leap to a next condition not only feasible, but gracefully accomplished and already in the rear view mirror. Yes, that’s wishful thinking in many cases but at least we’re clear on for what we wish.

Other times I’ll steer them to that steersman handbook, a relevant piece of 1970s published esoterica. Marshall McLuhan and Bucky Fuller overlapped a lot in the intellectual culture (IC) of that time. Werner Erhard got some big wheels turning, the Hunger Project being one of them.

The Bayesian (vs Frequentist) is dash boarding it, flying in some OODA loop, and adjusting en vitro, looking to optimize. The instruments on the dash keep updating, not just in content, but in makeup. Different instruments come along, providing new freedoms. Some instruments fade making room. Attention may be all you need, but it’s also finite. We’re not the omniscient ones.

Like I said, the material is seeping in by osmosis, a stochastic process. Both 52LivingIdeas and Math4Wisdom chapters were about thinking schematically, meaning diagrammatically. TrimTab had some of that too, and of course FSI. We have this other way of thinking more graphically rather innately these days. The right brain is back from vacation.

It’s less about which structures you use, than about using such structures in the first place, and being willing to hop between them, as none in isolation is likely to sufficiently serve.  

One learns to bounce around in a spherical pinball machine of sorts. I tend to use that metaphor a lot in my YouTube channel (see above).