when-life-gives-you-lemons

green_awning_in_morning::grocers_take_warning

Labels are meaningless
 We aren't what we say we are
 Things aren't what they say they are

Actions are meaningful
 We are what we do
 Things are the effect they have on others

Appearance is meaningful
 We are the collection of our projections
 Things are the union of their forms

I've been learning about lemons lately. A specific one really, Yoneda's.

 Statement:

 Let C be a locally small category, A an object in C, and F: C → Set a functor from C to the category of sets. Then there is a natural bijection:

 Nat(Hom_C(A, -), F) ~= F(A)

 where:
 - Nat denotes the set of natural transformations
 - Hom_C(A, -) is the covariant hom-functor (also written as h^A or y(A))
 - The bijection is natural in both A and F

 The Bijection: 

 The bijection works as follows:

 Forward direction (Φ): Given a natural transformation α: Hom_C(A, -) → F, we get an element of F(A) by:

 Phi(Alpha) = Alpha_A(id_A)

 Reverse direction (Φ^{-1}): Given an element x ∈ F(A), we construct a natural transformation by:

 Ph^-1(x)_B(f: A to B) = F(f)(x)

 Key Consequences:

 1. Yoneda Embedding
 The functor y: C → [C^op, Set] defined by y(A) = Hom_C(A, -) is fully faithful, meaning:

 HomC(A,B) ~= Nat(HomC(A, -), Hom_C(B, -))

 This shows that every category embeds into a category of functors.

 2. Objects are Determined by Morphisms
 An object is completely determined (up to isomorphism) by the morphisms into it or out of it.

 3. Representable Functors
 If F ≅ Hom_C(A, -) for some object A, we say F is representable by A. Yoneda's lemma tells us that representations are essentially unique.

I had no idea what that meant either, but I was talking with a goose about how I do systems engineering. About how I build things.

And then I did.

Things aren't what they say they are. Things are the actual attributes they have, and we know them by their effects on the world.

These things are isomorphic. The abstraction is pure.

the_only_thing_with_any_colour_in_my_field_of_vision_are_a_pair_of_giant_red_balls

It's a weird time of year, Kingsville in the early winter. A farm laid to rest for the winter.

Decked out in her brightest colours, the down decorated a week before Christmas.

Yet bleak, the salted paths and roads a pale shade of their summer depth. Everything that washed out grey, the cost of winter driving. Even the cars, not a single one has been but blue, white, grey or black in what feels like hours.

Colourful cars a thing of sport.

Seeing a thing for what it is, not for what it says it is also means not for what you think it should be. It requires you to put aside what you know of an object and listen to it. Use it, form it, shape it. See what it becomes when you poke it.

Yoneda says to know something is to poke it.

I practice that with my cat when she's sleeping and she starts snoring.

[or because heaven forbid her dish had a mild glint of silver at the bottom of all the rest of the kibble at 4am and she felt a bit peckish - and a 4pm cat nap is about to be rudely disturbed]

To know something is to love it too. To really know the shape of something, to understand it is to love it.

You can't help it.

It can be a hard way to go through life if you let it. I choose not to. The ugliness comes from pain, there is beauty beneath if you look hard enough.

With understanding comes the ability to make that choice and that's what I'm doing at work. I'm recognizing capability.

For the last 10 years I've been building away at what's now called a developer platform, it just seemed the natural way to go about doing things. Work with your developers, find out about their applications; what they do, what they depend on, how they're built and why they are the way they are.

Team by team, ticket by ticket. And I'm lazy, institutionally so, so I really hate doing things twice. Each ticket an opportunity to find the transform, the new piece of functionality, a lever, gate or sometimes entire new machine to integrate into what became a factory.

What resulted was a compiler. Intent to reality through the medium of Turing complete YAML which is what it really became, as long as your intent was deploy applications and services supporting one of the planet's largest academic research platforms throughout their end to end life cycle.

It's a very specific thing to want. I'm a very particular person.

sometimes_when_you_put_the_rabbit_in_the_hat_nothing_comes_out::theyre_still_in_there_having_carrots::lovely_picnic

I read a book years ago written by a man named William Sleator - The Boy Who Reversed Himself. It was about a boy who had learned to move laterally through the fourth dimension and the girl who loved him. The premise was that if you weren't careful, you might accidentally get flipped over in 4D space and return a projection of your former self.

In a world of one dimensional ants doomed forever to walk east along their one dimensional lives, anyone who dares explore the higher dimension may return reversed, doomed to walk forever alone

An interesting thought for a young man.

An interesting thought for one at this point in his life.

Sometimes when you travel through the looking glass, what comes out the other side sees life differently.

It's happened a few times in my life it turns out.

I have a very poor history with formalized education. The label "never lives up to potential" means little to a boy whose grades say otherwise. Not all ADHD comes with the label "boy who can't sit still", especially not in rural Ontario in the 1980s and 90s.

Failing out of University left me with lifelong imposter syndrome. I couldn't formalize what I could do, just do it. No one else could explain what I do, so it must just be "Graeme stuff". I couldn't apply my hyperlexic understanding - two graphs, equally valuable, ne'er shall meet - well enough to explain it, so that's where it lay. Fully capable but mislabeled.

Again with a failed enterprise, I'd grown a Warehouse Management platform from scratch, almost overnight because I'd been procrastinating on it so long. Data driven, web based (Vaadin was a godsend back then). And yes, EJBs :) I loved them.

Vaadin Web Component > Facade > Service > Service > Data - sound familar?

We'd grown it to a fairly decent company, we were doing enough turn over to have about 40 people employed in the US, a similar amount in the UK. National advertising campaigns, all that fun stuff that happens when traditional retail people met the early 2010s web.

We'd built our business on Amazon's market place.

They changed the rules.

It nearly ruined me.

And again this summer, a Lemony Snickety one, but as all good literature must, one that provided a happy ending.

[yes I said must]

An identity.

I know myself by the effects I have on those around me.

nypd_blue_she_says::on_a_sick_day_she_says::actually_not_a_bad_idea::thanks_mom

I have an episodic past. There are very much story arcs where one Graeme's severed hand, floating captured in the Tardis of his mind has given life to the next iteration.

How many lives this Doctor has, is yet to be determined.

I hope this is the last one, I really like it here.

And that's left me without any real sense of identity. There's never really been a point in my life where I can point to where I can really say "that's me, that's who I am as a person". Because there hasn't really been a point in my life that I can point to where I've been that person. Masking robs you of the ability to know yourself, your mind too busy running the transformers on the edge - the cognitive empathy required to survive in a world you don't even know you're not prepared for - to power the core.

Edge computing has the same issues across domains.

F : LossOfCoherence(MeshComputing) -> LossOfCoherence(MaskingInducedIdentityCrisis)

But through the looking glass, with new understanding a tool guiding reflection, a pattern emerges.

The collection of things one remembers most are those that they hold most dear. Mine are memories of verbs. Things said and heard. Actions performed and impact felt.

We know a thing by the effects it has on the world, as we know ourselves.

Embodiment means a different thing for someone like me. Worth not in the feature set delivered with my model. But I'm a functor factory, so I found a transformation. An isomorphic way of showing myself my value.

By giving it to others.

But on my terms this time. Training, teaching, the gift of growth.

Which brings us back to capability, and where it comes from and what it provides.

I have an engineer on my team that struggles, a junior on-boarded in a remote office at a time when we desperately needed help and the constraints a near complete counter to our want.

This is definitely the way to make a baby in a month -- all my project managers ever as they stuff the ninth pregnant women into a small jar

I was about ready to agree to a PiP a while ago, after another outage due to copy pasta mistakes, carelessness in other words. I can tolerate mistakes, but not lack of care. Mistakes educate, a lack of care prevents the education from occurring when the inevitible mistake is made. But by then I'd started building Wanderland, and I'd started thinking more. Thinking begets understanding, understanding begets wisdom (though that particular effect is gated by maturity and I'm not sure I'm there yet... eh🪿?)

I've started showing how to use the system in our one-on-one sessions. I started with the basics, just a simple markdown file that explained how to create a copy of itself, with some code embedded that produces a report. Viral softare, literally.

Point CoPilot at it and it understands the pattern well enough to replicate. A proto-intent to reality compiler.

My jam really.

And now he builds reports.

And his Jira commits are meaningful, AI generated sure, but full of verifiable, factual information while the down home organic folk are still gardening their flock of "fixed it" updates.

And the phrase "I'll get with you later about the design..." came out his mouth at standup.

That's value I can see.

That's value I can feel.

That's what happens when you see the capability of something, of someone, and provide it with the substrate on which to act.