i very rarely post news-related articles, but john naughton's short commentary on the intricacies of building a silicon chip fab factory in the US briefly mentions sociologist harry collins, whose analyses of tacit knowledge in technical sciences is worthy of more scrutiny

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/21/silicon-chips-taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing-company-tsmc

collins' works rest heavily upon his academic predecessor michael polanyi - a chemist and philosopher of science. polanyi wrote extensively on the subject of "personal knowledge" - indwelling and tacit knowing as crucial parts of the scientific process.

in the physical sciences, and - i've noticed more specifically in computing sciences - the concept of tacit (what we might call "unconscious") knowing are verboten. all knowledge is assumed to be focal, conscious, descriptive and discursive.

the undescribed and undescribable are treated as either hurdles to knowledge, or annoying noise in the signal.

two of his books, Personal Knowledge and the Tacit Dimension, are among the top ten most influential books i've read in my academic career. they deal extensively with the concept of tacit knowing and its role in scientific discovery, among many other important insights into the phenomenology of pre-conscious human experience

i bring this up because i now work in an industry that lies right on the borderline between tacit and explicit knowledge.

making games requires a tacit understanding of 'what makes something fun or enjoyable' that is not completely linguistically describable. making games also requires, in equal parts, objective, logical descriptions of behaviour - written as code! - that rely purely upon explicit description.

these two forms of knowing are "both sides of the same coin" as polanyi would put it - but they're also inherently contrastive. programming something to be fun or playful isn't the same thing as having fun playing it.

i guess i mention this because i wish more had been done to integrate advancements made in the philosophy of science into creative disciplines, like programming and art.

seeing john naughton bring this into something as technical as chip fabbing warms my heart.

while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.

i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.

some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.

best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.

i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎

really proud to announce Another World (Out of this World) is for the first time available for PowerPC Macs! 🥳

i spent a week rewriting and Cocoa-ifying gregory montoir's original interpreter code from 2004. it's a WIP in terms of UI, but the game should be completely playable beginning to end now!

so if you've got a PowerPC-based G3, G4, or G5 mac, please have a go :) i'd love to know what it will/won't run on.

Download here:
(complete with homepage built with macromedia dreamweaver and fireworks MX 😆 )

https://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256/another_world/