The rebrand to Contraptions has had me excited ever since you announced it and really enjoyed this first post!
Definitely putting in to better words the things I’ve been feeling about working with generative ai and ai agents. Have started mentally translating “AI Agent” to “AI contraption/gizmo/doodad”, not to dismiss or downplay what people are building, more on the expectations of reliability.
With any new foundational technology you probably need to go through this contraption phase as people try to put a veneer of low CF_apparent on it before the reliable implementation patterns have been discovered and formalized. You saw this with Smalltalk > C++/Java in the early desktop days, then again with Ruby/javascript/python > rust/go/typescript with web2.0 style web apps.
Most recently I’ve actually been using Postel’s Law, which seems like a contraptiony principle from the early days of networking, as a talking point for how to think about working and building with Gen AI and LLMs.
Also fun to think about how a lot of the jokes around contraption makers are that their things have a high CF but others don’t realize it like Honey I Shrunk the Kids or a lot of the contraptions that Rick Sanchez builds…
All great points, but especially the one about Postel’s law. I typically don’t like confining myself to a narrow lens but contraptions seems both very rich and particularly apt for our times. Not just tech like AI, but the world itself seems to be growing through a contraptiony phase.
Ties in well with your other statement that "personas are like APIs that put a hard interface around squishy interiors". In that sense, at the risk of overstretching your contraptions model, all complex entities are a bundle of some smoothly-integrated, some band-aided, and some put-together-momentarily components that occasionally pretend to be a internally coherent unit. What's stranger is that outsiders aren't concerned about a unit's internal mechanisms as long as they're getting what they want, and I realise I'm talking more and more about people here, but we nonetheless obsess over our UIs as if they did.
In his book The Inner Eye, Prof. Nicholas Humphrey argues that consciousness evolved so that we were able to better understand others' internal states based on their external presentations by tying together our feelings with involuntary physiological changes. So when Apple goes to great lengths to hide its products' contraption-ness, and consumers exalt in its seemingly smooth perfection (does that explain the religious zeal it used to inspire?), we trade a bit of our inquisitiveness for a little transcendental high. What is godhood if not perfect non-contraptionness?
"The CF of the hardware is probably close to zero" - Do you mean close to 1? It can be zero only when System Complexity (numerator) is zero.
Aside: I thought of what will happen when the denominator is zero. One can assign drugs and other materials that can only be grown in space to this category. But I think they will still have a DI close to zero and not zero. At absolute zero will be things that can never exist or collapse as soon as they are formed no matter the conditions including zero gravity or zero kelvin.
Sure that works. Inf on both the numerator and denominator lead to some interesting cases. Inf on the bottom: the microchips would appear as Inf on the bottom to Industrial revolution age folks - you can essentially design any logical scenario and the Inf on the bottom will make it all so sweet in terms of CF. Having a hard time imagining Inf on the top. Perhaps the Big Bang.
Also it is interesting to me I have "zero" anxiety on the denominator, but never Inf, and it didn't even occur to me. I suspect this is habit due to working with computers and real world data on the regular. There are far more zero based bugs than Inf based bugs in nerd life.
The rebrand to Contraptions has had me excited ever since you announced it and really enjoyed this first post!
Definitely putting in to better words the things I’ve been feeling about working with generative ai and ai agents. Have started mentally translating “AI Agent” to “AI contraption/gizmo/doodad”, not to dismiss or downplay what people are building, more on the expectations of reliability.
With any new foundational technology you probably need to go through this contraption phase as people try to put a veneer of low CF_apparent on it before the reliable implementation patterns have been discovered and formalized. You saw this with Smalltalk > C++/Java in the early desktop days, then again with Ruby/javascript/python > rust/go/typescript with web2.0 style web apps.
Most recently I’ve actually been using Postel’s Law, which seems like a contraptiony principle from the early days of networking, as a talking point for how to think about working and building with Gen AI and LLMs.
Also fun to think about how a lot of the jokes around contraption makers are that their things have a high CF but others don’t realize it like Honey I Shrunk the Kids or a lot of the contraptions that Rick Sanchez builds…
All great points, but especially the one about Postel’s law. I typically don’t like confining myself to a narrow lens but contraptions seems both very rich and particularly apt for our times. Not just tech like AI, but the world itself seems to be growing through a contraptiony phase.
Other candidate examples:
- Waymos honking at each other in a parking lot (at 4am) https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2024/08/15/waymo-driverless-cars-honking-parking-lot-video/74810195007/
- Bots' bidding war on an Amazon book: https://www.wired.com/2011/04/amazon-flies-24-million/
- Amazon Alexa ordering dollhouses after overhearing a news segment https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/7/14200210/amazon-alexa-tech-news-anchor-order-dollhouse
Ties in well with your other statement that "personas are like APIs that put a hard interface around squishy interiors". In that sense, at the risk of overstretching your contraptions model, all complex entities are a bundle of some smoothly-integrated, some band-aided, and some put-together-momentarily components that occasionally pretend to be a internally coherent unit. What's stranger is that outsiders aren't concerned about a unit's internal mechanisms as long as they're getting what they want, and I realise I'm talking more and more about people here, but we nonetheless obsess over our UIs as if they did.
In his book The Inner Eye, Prof. Nicholas Humphrey argues that consciousness evolved so that we were able to better understand others' internal states based on their external presentations by tying together our feelings with involuntary physiological changes. So when Apple goes to great lengths to hide its products' contraption-ness, and consumers exalt in its seemingly smooth perfection (does that explain the religious zeal it used to inspire?), we trade a bit of our inquisitiveness for a little transcendental high. What is godhood if not perfect non-contraptionness?
"The CF of the hardware is probably close to zero" - Do you mean close to 1? It can be zero only when System Complexity (numerator) is zero.
Aside: I thought of what will happen when the denominator is zero. One can assign drugs and other materials that can only be grown in space to this category. But I think they will still have a DI close to zero and not zero. At absolute zero will be things that can never exist or collapse as soon as they are formed no matter the conditions including zero gravity or zero kelvin.
Design integrity —> infinity for platonic perfection?
Sure that works. Inf on both the numerator and denominator lead to some interesting cases. Inf on the bottom: the microchips would appear as Inf on the bottom to Industrial revolution age folks - you can essentially design any logical scenario and the Inf on the bottom will make it all so sweet in terms of CF. Having a hard time imagining Inf on the top. Perhaps the Big Bang.
Also it is interesting to me I have "zero" anxiety on the denominator, but never Inf, and it didn't even occur to me. I suspect this is habit due to working with computers and real world data on the regular. There are far more zero based bugs than Inf based bugs in nerd life.