The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer,[1] who stated that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do".[2] It is used in systems theory, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can or should be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behaviour is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behaviour with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.
What Functional Programmers Get Wrong About Systems - Ian Duncan
Type systems verify properties of programs. Production correctness is a property of systems. The gap between these is where the interesting failures live.
Making the Case for Actionable Prosocial Design Research
Regulating harmful design is only half the equation — attention must also go toward how platforms can build prosocial design, and toward the research that shows them how.
Laws of Software Engineering
A collection of principles and patterns that shape software systems, teams, and decisions.
Stigmergy
Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent. Agents that respond to traces in the environment receive positive fitness benefits, reinforcing the likelihood of these behaviors becoming fixed within a population over time.
A programmer's loss of identity - ratfactor
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me. In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be. Everything I wrote there is still true, but amplified.
The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos
How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?
Methodology
In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bringing about a certain goal, like acquiring knowledge or verifying knowledge claims. This normally involves various steps, like choosing a sample, collecting data from this sample, and interpreting the data. The study of methods concerns a detailed description and analysis of these processes. It includes evaluative aspects by comparing different methods. This way, it is assessed what advantages and disadvantages they have and for what research goals they may be used. These descriptions and evaluations depend on philosophical background assumptions. Examples are how to conceptualize the studied phenomena and what constitutes evidence for or against them. When understood in the widest sense, methodology also includes the discussion of these more abstract issues.
Wir wollen doch nur spielen | Neue Narrative
Spielen macht uns neugierig, mutig und kreativ. Viele Organisationen setzen auf Punktesysteme oder Ranglisten – und greifen damit viel zu kurz. Denn echte Spielfreude wäre so viel wertvoller als oberflächliche Gamification.
Conway's Law | Laws of Software Engineering
Organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.
A practical guide to frontend System Design
Sam, a passionate frontend developer, had been in the job market for what felt like...
No Fork Required - Scott's Thoughts
What if another operating system isn't the solution to anything at all? What if device-level identity could tie into existing systems to help pull users out of walled gardens, rather than creating new gardens?
Machine-readable attitudes - Computational Semantics++
User intent declarations can be viewed as propositional attitudes (permission, prohibition, desire, intention, belief, etc.) over structured descriptions of data use. Treating them that way gives you composable building blocks from existing theory and lens-based translations between community vocabularies that make explicit what each translation cannot carry through.
User Intents as Living Data — A Descriptive Meta-Framework
A response to Bluesky's User Intents proposal: instead of prescribing a fixed set of intent categories, treat them as living data and use panproto lenses to map between the vocabularies that different communities will inevitably create.
Systems design 3: LLMs and the semantic revolution
Long ago in the 1990s when I was in high school, my chemistry+physics teacher pulled me aside. "Avery, you know how the Internet works, righ...
LS Punctuations
Let’s share our punctuation practices, how to details, comments, etc. DIVE IN! These might be made into “Punctuation Cards” What do we think makes something a punctuation? What is it? Definition? Add your thoughts here! It amplifies an LS principle or helps people relate to the purpose/goal of ...
Evaluations Are the Real Codebase - The Phoenix Architecture
Why behavior outlives implementations