epiphanatic » technology|vision

intelligent software, stupid software, and Unix-philosophy software

Posted on 03.02.08 by jstoner @ 1:23 am

I had some experiences with some spectacularly bad software over the past few weeks. BMC Software markets this confusing ball of stuff, with some internal boundaries I don’t understand well. My interface to it at work is called Remedy–it’s how I make requests for stuff like a server to run software on, or an account on a new system.

It has some intelligence, or tries to. There are ways to route requests. How do I get this thing I need from the Company? Well, it comes from some part of the company, and the software assumes you don’t know where that part is, and it gives you a few abstracted ways to specify that. Sometimes it grabs it out of your description of the problem you want to solve.

Or, you know, tries to. In practice, you do know where things come from, or have ways of finding out, so you make your request, you email the relevant person with the request number, they go in and correct whatever mistakes you or the system made so the wrong people don’t receive it and cancel it and they get credit for the work, and then they get to work.

Anyway, I was struck by how poorly this works, and I reflected on my experiences with using intelligent software. There seems to be a continuum of intelligence:

Highly intelligent software: Google is the example that comes to mind. It spell-checks my most obscure searches, and can tell if I want to do a search or convert between units. Its intelligence makes it easy to use, like having an assistant. It also gives me the option of bypassing its intelligence.

Stupid software: the BMC example above seems to fall in this category. As does Clippy, Microsoft’s intrusive office assistant thing that popped up and annoyed you, before Microsoft woke up and killed it. As does Microsoft Word’s document formatting, which I find infuriating. I often spend more time battling it than I do writing my damn document.

Unix-philosophy software: software that relies on the intelligence of the user. It’s not trying to be intelligent. It assumes you are, and gives you tools to do what you wanna do without getting in your way.

The Unix command line is the canonical example. Unix tools like grep, find, and sed are examples of tools that do particular things, do them reliably and predictably. They put a burden of expertise on the user, but they make sense. The boundaries between what grep and find do make sense. The way they talk to each other makes sense.

As complex as they may be, they serve a powerful philosophy: simple tools that work together to accomplish complex things. Pieces of a puzzle that has a sensibility behind it. A consistency that allows you to make predictions about how they work, even if you don’t know their function exhaustively.

They eschew intelligence, by design. Grep knows what you can tell it, on what terms, in what language. Grep knows what you do tell it when you invoke it. It knows what the end of a line of text in its input looks like. It knows little else.

Wikis probably belong in the same category. They are simpler than Unix command-line tools, arguably better designed, but they do exactly what you tell them to. And you can integrate them with other tools in all kinds of interesting ways.

The intelligence here is also in the designer: not just in anticipating my needs, but also in an appreciation of the limits of their understanding, and the thought to give me power in flexibility.

Google, on the other hand, knows a great deal. Google sits on one of the biggest piles of data, if not the biggest, in human history. Google is actively analyzing that data, pulling intelligence out of it, making it useful.

And Microsoft? When Microsoft Word screws up the formatting of my spec, once more, there’s no way for it to learn from my frustration. There’s no accumulation of information. It thinks it knows what I want, and it’s usually wrong, and there’s no way to train it. Which is why I hate using it.

So we see a distinction between software that is stupid and software designed with no pretense of intelligence in the first place. And we see what it takes to make software that is intelligent: software that can collect information and learn from it. Whether or not it is using a process behind the scenes that humans would describe as ‘intelligent,’ the effect is the same.

It’s awfully hard to do that well–Google spends billions on making and keeping their one-line entry tool smart. It’s also difficult to make intelligently designed, powerful yet simple tools, that talk to each other in useful ways. I don’t know how much Microsoft spends making their document formatting engine, but I have a feeling most of it is wasted.

Filed under: computer and technology|vision
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rethinking my TV

Posted on 03.15.04 by jstoner @ 11:36 pm

I come home from work, I flop on the couch, and I grab the remote, and I start surfing. Nothing captures my attention for more than a few minutes. I watch a little, a commercial comes, I surf on. There’s nothing I really want to see. But I keep channel-flipping.

And I hate it. I’m not a disciplined person, and I hate having that box in the house, because it’s so tempting to flop on the couch and just watch. I waste so much time that way. It’s a primary source of self-loathing.

I’d like to be more active in my community. I’d like to read more and pursue more interesting technology. I’d like to spend more of my time in a useful way.

I’ve lived TV-free, and I liked it. But there are things on TV I want to see. Not that many things, and I want to be disciplined with my time. But I do enjoy The Sopranos occasionally. And I like Angel, though the series is ending.

If you could design a home entertainment system around your values and intended lifestyle, what would it look like? How could you build it out of commercially available parts?

I want a TV interface designed around the way I want to live. An intentional entertainment source, not a festering distractiion. Here are some ideas:

no receiver. Get a DVD player, get a monitor, and watch only DVDs. No antenna, no cable. Get news from NPR and the Net, the way I do now anyway. Only watch things I’m willing to pay to see.
The pay-as-you go plan creates a nice artiificial scarcity. I would have to spend the money and the time to get the DVDs, so I’d need to be motivated. I’d be less inclined to waste time watching things I don’t care about seeing. This could dovetail nicely with services like Netflix.

The minus is, this solution does not give me all the shows I want to see. I could get some of my favorite shows on DVD, but I couldn’t get some of the best up-to-date shows this way, like the Daily Show, and I couldn’t get sporting events, though the ones I really want to see are few and far between.
A PVR without the “channel” abstraction. That is, TV not organized into streams of video content that you can move through sequentially. Only recorded shows, no live viewing. No surfing, only a database of upcoming shows, with times and short descriptions. This makes finding new shows more of an intentional act. You would still see ads for other shows, but you wouldn’t get caught up in something you didn’t intend to see in the first place. Could be an interesting open-source project.
The minus is, you can still watch enough content to eat arbitrary amounts of your time. It deals with an important source of distraction, but not the volume.
A PVR without “Season Pass” functionality. There are some of these available. You can record as much as you want, but the PVR can’t automatically accumulate episodes of a particular show for you. This could give you more control of the level of distraction.
My experience with my roommate’s TiVos is that you get this huge backlog of stuff you do want to see, and you can blow a whole afternoon easily. But if I didn’t get around to seeing it for a while, how badly did I want to see it in the first place? Procrastination can betray my true priorities.

The minus is, you can still watch enough content to eat arbitrary amounts of your time, just by acquiring bad habits. And some shows have excellent hooks to keep you watching: Alias comes to mind. It helps with the volume of distraction, but it doesn’t deal with it effectively.
Video from the Net. The current solutions are not too bad. If you want to download over a broadband connection, store and display on your TV, there are a number of systems out there. The user interfaces for finding and browsing Internet video content from a couch are not yet mature, but that’s not a bad thing.
Some resources are streaming-oriented, and they seem less convenient for home-theater watching. The Daily Show is an example, the website has streams embedded in the web page. How am I supposed to go full screen with that? I don’t want to watch TV at my desk.

Anyway, I don’t have it sorted out completely. I’ll probably go wiith the monitor/DVD thing at first, and if there’s enough interest in a limited PVR, and I have time, I might pursue an open-source project, perhaps a fork of Freevo or MythTV.

Filed under: technology|vision
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