Columbo, Rewrites and Making Tools
What makes people unique? Why does some art last?
There are, they say, two types of people in the world. Those who do and those who don’t. Those who stay and those who go. Those who will and those who won’t.
I have a soft spot for the silly construction of dividing the world like this. It’s more game than insight. Almost a little joke, where the punchline is where you place the dividing line. Those who drive and those who walk. Those who walk and those who run. Those who run and those who ran. I can do this all day (and there are those who can’t do this all day).
These distinctions reach for profundity: look at this fundamental distinction, this tiny idea standing for so much. Perhaps it would give us something if we could articulate the human condition in one neat bifurcation. Those who want to know, and those who want to believe. That’s Nietzsche. Those who are Don Quixote and those who are Hamlet. That’s Russian literary theorist Ivan Turgenev. The ones that entertain and the ones that observe. That’s Britney Spears.
With its formalised format and various variants, this construction leads to a slew of parodies:
There are two types of people: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.
Those who crave closure and those who…
Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
There are 10 types of people: those who can read binary and those who can’t.
There are three types of people: those who can count and those who can’t.
There are 10 types of people: those who can read binary, those who can’t and those who realised this joke was in base 3.
There’s one I found about hexadecimal, but I don’t think it really works. Eventually, these jokes become a maths syllabus.
I’ve come to believe these distinctions are not about people but about modes. They’re identifying a distinction in ideas. People don’t always want to believe or always want to know. They contain multitudes. They want to know some things and believe others. Sorry Nietzsche. Sometimes you are the entertainer and sometimes you are the observer. Even Britney watches TV sometimes.
This came to mind while I was thinking, as I often do, about the nature of software rewrites. A rewrite is making the same app again, something that must seem utterly bonkers to those not steeped in the software industry. After all the time and money and effort and blood and sweat and tears and tiers, why would you want to go through that again, just to recreate the same thing in a different way? And why, every few years, do all our tools change? From Backbone to Angular, to Vue, to Svelte, to React, to Meteor and so on, an infinite list of almost identical tools solving the same problems in slightly different ways. The Judean People’s Front of CRUD web app frameworks.
I wonder if one distinction between modes (not people) is toolmakers and tool users. And perhaps it is the tension in this distinction that causes the software industry to reinvent the wheel every few years (while reciting the mantra “don’t reinvent the wheel”). Software engineers are, at some level, in tool making mode: they make something that can be used to massively multiply effort. But they are also in tool-user mode - they use tools to make software. Is there, I wonder, a tension when you approach using tools with a making-tools mindset? Instead of progressing your aim, you think of ways to make it easier to progress that aim in future. You move from a specific mode to an abstract one. From making a button that says “Buy now” to the idea of making a system that makes it easier to make buttons. (“I’m developing a system to pass you arbitrary condiments,” the stick man in XKCD says when asked to pass the salt. The salt doesn’t get passed.)
Perhaps, then, there are two types of people after all: those who can move between modes and those are trapped in one, always toolmakers or always tool users. Always Hamlet or always Quixote. Always making new features or always rewriting.
Elsewhere
In the Age of A.I., What Makes People Unique? by Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker:
Recently, I got a haircut, and my barber and I started talking about A.I. “It’s incredible,” he told me. “I just used it to write a poem for my girl’s birthday. I told it what to say, but I can’t rhyme that well, so it did all the writing. When she read the poem, she actually cried! Then she showed it to her friend, who’s really smart, and I thought, Uh-oh, she’ll figure it out for sure.” Snip, snip, snip, snip. “She didn’t.”
It was Joseph Kennedy who realised he needed to get out of the stock market when he started getting stock tips from his shoe shiner. OpenAI supposedly could go bust in less than a year. The company loses money on every sale - but, as the old joke goes: “we make up for it in volume”.
This piece in the New Yorker is a run-down of a few recent books about AI. One of those books is A.I. Snake Oil, about which Rothman says:
They urge skepticism, and argue that the blanket term “A.I.” can serve as a kind of smoke screen for underperforming technologies.
Yet at the end of the article, Rothman remarks that although the authors are “deeply skeptical about today’s A.I. technology and what it can achieve. Perhaps they shouldn’t be.” His evidence for this is that someone who works in AI says “it might already make sense to talk about A.I.s that have emotions or subjective points of view”. Hold the front page of the Onion: Man who makes money from AI says AI is fantastic.
There is, I keep thinking, something about AI that makes usually intelligent people forget their scepticism and even the evidence of their own eyes. In a meeting the other day, someone was describing how incredible a certain AI service was at producing emails. “Did you use it to write the emails to plan this meeting?” I asked. “Oh no,” he said, “I couldn’t use what it wrote at all and had to completely rewrite it.” He then returned, without a beat, to talking about how incredible it was. I wonder if we’ve ever come across a technology before that was simultaneously so incredible and so useless.
What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last by Lincoln Michel in Counter Craft
Regular readers of this newsletter will spot some of my weird little obsessions. One of them is how much I dislike the prioritising of recent over good. If you go into a bookshop, there is always a pile of “latest releases”, but where is the pile of “best books”? Why would I want to read something just because it was printed recently? I understand that you can’t just have a self at the front with Proust and Joyce and Dostoevsky permanently on it, but I feel an elitist concept hiding obliquely: you’ll only be interested in these new books, because we expect you to have already read the old ones.
I could go on and on with examples of how art fades. Perhaps the most interesting question is what makes something endure. What makes a work speak through time to multiple eras and contexts? […] To offer a theory though, I think what lasts is almost always what has a dedicated following among one or more of the following: artists, geeks, academics, critics, and editors.
This doesn’t really solve the problem - it adds a different gatekeeper into the mix. But as with another preoccupation of mine, Michel is exploring what happens behind the curtain that drives our media, articulating the mechanics of something that goes unseen.
‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’ by JW McCormack in the New York Review of Books
I don’t know if I’ll ever tire of reading articles about Columbo. (I’ve linked to a couple before). This piece in the New York Review of Books has some lovely details and anecdotes - from the person who describes Columbo as “an unmade bed”, to Stephen Fry’s description of the appeal of the show (“it’s the pleasure of watching a cat go after a mouse”) to the titular description of the shabby detective: “an ass-backward Sherlock Holmes.”
This isn’t an uncritical journey through amusing lines and anecdotes. Over the series, Columbo:
deliberately produces a fake witness (“A Deadly State of Mind” [1975])…falsifies official police records (“A Friend in Deed” [1974]), pre-prepares a confession for a suspect to sign (“A Case of Immunity” [1975])…sanctions physical violence against a suspect to trick him into a confession (“Strange Bedfellows” [1995])…and even plants evidence (“Dagger of the Mind” [1972]).
Is Columbo an early precursor to the police-obsessed TV world we occupy (and the police-obsessed “blue lives matter” real world in which we live)? “Nearly every episode,” McCormack notes, “is built around entrapment.” It’s easy to miss that in this funny, silly little show, Columbo really is above the law he supposedly upholds, and the show encourages us to applaud that. Still, that rumpled charm though…
That’s all for today,
Simon