Pylimitics

Terry Goodier’s essay The Boring Internet is all about the low level protocols that underpin Internet services. He points out that there’s nothing pretty or easy about protocols. And he points it out in a visual essay that’s lovely to see. The form of the essay and the form of its subject are a contradiction.

The visual essay is an aesthetic work. But when it comes to protocols, there’s a way to look at them as aesthetic works too: engineering esthetics, which is also about beauty, but with different expression. Another contradiction.

I write about simplicity from time to time. I’ve mentioned that my favorite editing program, jedit, is one I wrote myself. It purposefully has very few features. If you saw it, you would conclude that it’s “simpler” than, say, Word. And yet consider the whole system required to for jedit to work, the complexity of the hardware, operating software, and all the subsystems and modules required. In that picture, jedit and Word are, to at least a first order approximation, equivalently complex. Or equivalently simple. Contradiction.

Think about an analog system to do about the same thing: pen and paper. I have a cheap (probably got it free somewhere) pen made of plastic and metal, manufactured to very close tolerances. It was probably made on another continent and shipped to me by an intricate transport chain. I can’t even guess how the ink is made. My paper is smooth, flawless, precisely cut to size and bound into a notebook. There are whole industries behind this “simplicity.” 

I might be able to use “simple” manual processes to make a system I could use to also make marks on a flexible sheet, but it would be a poor substitute. It would probably amount to a piece of charcoal and some birch bark. If you saw it, you would call it a very simple system— but it would be less simple to use than my pen and paper. I strongly suspect using it to do anything serious would be seriously complicated.

Why am I writing about contradictions? Because contradictions are inherently human. As humans we see Different kinds of beauty, and tour works strive for beauty in different ways. We can write specifications containing hundreds of pages of exhaustive detail, and also wrap eloquent meaning into a phrase as succinct as “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”.

In my experience with large language models, at least so far, the contradictions are missing. They certainly exist in the galaxy-class document that is an LLM. When you interact with one, you’re collaborating with everyone whose work comprised the training. But statistical operations normalize and regularize messy data. Statistics is all about smoothing over contradictions. Sanding off the rough-hewn human edges. Maybe that’s what makes LLM-generated content so immediately recognizable. The foolish consistency that’s the hobgoblin of little minds.