Holy hell, how much time I had on my hands back then!

I think some computer scientists/philosophers call this "the frame problem". In short, the problem with computers is that they can only work upon and with structured symbols which we call "information", and not everything is reducible to that. For example spatial structures can be described as information, e.g. a wheel can be seen as a disc expressed in polar coordinates. But take other concepts, like, say, friendship, and you'll find out in short order that even the most advanced AI will have trouble describing it. Because it can't relate to it, 'cause simply put, you can't be friends with a computer, no matter how much you'll try.

I guess it's a bit of an irony that I eventually reverted to Wordpress as the solution to that commenting thing, but either way, I don't really have any plans to move away from this in the next two decades or so.

This article makes too much of an effort to overload this term, in the same vein as that guy.

We is a satire of Taylorism, the same ideology that was employed, say, by Ford in the West, and also by the Soviets in the East, to "scientifically manage" the affairs of people from the top down, and in this context, the "Science Fiction" label makes the work all the more lulzy. But it's also what I suspect has made it publishable in the USSR: the Soviets thought that he was busting Henry Ford's balls, while my younger self reading this in 2016 saw all the marks of centrally-planned USSR -- or current-day EU, since we're discussing Soviets.

But the centralization of power doesn't have all that much to do with socialism. For example, Richelieu also contributed to the centralization of power in late Medieval France, but claiming that was a socialist affair is a bad joke.

And to this coda we may add that from this particular perspective, the whole notion of "open society" -- which, yes, is an neoimperial idea spawned by the West -- is utter nonsense and one of the greatest failure modes that our age could muster. Sure, Soros, however pragmatic a man he may be (or have been), thought that by the time his "vision" i.e. ideology would be put into full practice, everyone would speak English.

One may imagine a similar Soros, but this time of Roman descent, sometime at the beginning of our current calendaristic era, envisioning how everyone in the world would eventually speak Latin. And his vision came true by and large, except by the time everyone in, say, the territory marked by the Roman province Dacia Felix, came to use Latin in their daily affairs, every other aspect that made up the Roman Empire and its subsequent versions had very little in common with the initial Republic of Rome. The very same is the case with the US and the West today: whatever English, French or German there may remain in global public affairs for the rest of this century, they'll be had on Chinese terms.

Sad or not, 'tis the present.

My problem isn't that academics do that, it's that some, maybe the large majority thereof, do it with nothing to show for it. Seriously, I don't remember reading any relevant paper from a Thomson-endorsed journal or conference in the last decade, and trust me, I've read quite a lot of them in the first half of it. Maybe it's just my bias towards the computing sciences and they're doing quite fine in natural sciences or the various fields of engineering, I don't know.

The (perhaps honest) counter to this would be that likely institutions such as ACM and IEEE have already been corrupted by idiots -- frankly, I myself think that's just how these things usually go. On the other hand, I've met a few IEEE fellows in my field who for the better or worse manage to move things, albeit slowly. The alternative to so-called standards is everybody rolling their own and no one getting to talk to anyone else, which is (IMO) way worse.

Nah, marketing was always, and it remains today the exploitation of human need for the purpose of profit. That some "need" is in fact a predilection towards sin -- not in the sense of "upsetting God", but in that of self-debasement -- is not in the least the marketer's fault. Remember what they used to say back in the day: caveat emptor. This applies to pretty much any product on the so-called market, that goes beyond a certain level of complexity.

I can understand, today as I did back a decade ago, how the mechanism was employed to keep a certain type of engine running, with the side-effect of producing a long list of profiles ready to be harvested by the intelligence machines. I acknowledge the fact that in the end this produces slaves, but well, what of that? History is full of such examples, and this one's not in any particular way special, save for the technological means.

By that definition of "Unix-philosophy inspired", the more naïve software engineer would be led to believe that every piece of software on this earth lies in the same category -- for example, did you ever try accessing a path containing the backslash character under Windows? That yielded some pretty lulzy results last time I tried.

So at the end of the day, whether "engineering" is a null concept or not is entirely besides the point. The point is rather, that attempting to specify things and matters exhaustively, especially of the "general-purpose" kind, is an exercise in madness. And since the sane approach is to work on partial specifications, at some point you'll necessarily run into a hole somewhere which will break your machine -- yes, this discussion can be extended to bridges or whatever have you, this is also besides the point.

So once you run into the proverbial hole, the cheapest approach is to work around it, which is how you get today's mess, and that's pretty much the whole story.