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Reposted by Aleksey Skorobogaty

Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · Sep 12

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers are working backward — starting with the result to learn the rules behind it. @georgemusser.com, SFI’s 2025 Journalism Fellow, explores how this could reshape computation and self-organization in Quanta:

Self-Assembly Gets Automated in Reverse of ‘Game of Life’ | Quanta Magazine

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules.

www.quantamagazine.org

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Jul 19

Four responses to overload, by Woods and Hollnagel, summarized by @dobbse.bsky.social: burnout.wiki.do/view/four-re...

four responses to overload

burnout.wiki.do

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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · Jul 1

Cartoon by Ellis Rosen for The New Yorker.

Man being interviewed: His
"Philip K. Dick. Ray Bradbury. Like so many others in tech, I draw inspiration from completely misunderstanding those authors."

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Cameron @cameron.pfiffer.org · Jun 29

I love the Dijkstra quote:

> The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

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Coté @cote.io · Jun 25

A version of the m-dash that's purposefully human. www.theamdash.com

The Am Dash

www.theamdash.com

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Jan Van Ryswyck @janvanryswyck.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · Jun 6

“The way you work is as much a part of your product as the product itself” #dddeu

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Mathias Verraes @mathiasverraes.bsky.social · Jun 6

From an engineering perspective, software wants to be decoupled. From a business value perspective, software wants to be deeply interconnected. That's the fundamental friction that software design, and Domain-Driven Design specifically, attempts to address.

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

9/9:Platform eng. can scaffold a reliability mindset for product engineers by providing a causal understanding of systems _below the line_ and by helping connect the dots with systems _above the line_. A balanced and coherent view of boundaries gives confidence to evolve them in the right direction.

The black circle with a central dot evolves along a one-dimensional state space, representing three possible scenarios:
- > Long-loss: outcomes fall short, with a declining trajectory driven by incoherence penalties.
- > Short-win: maintains the status quo but drifts over time as the relevance landscape shifts.
- > Balanced: anticipates future states through consolidation of features, aiming for long-term coherence.

Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

8/9: Consideration of all three problem spaces gives us the ability to anticipate future states and evolve toward that target. It helps grasp boundaries and trace trajectories for better relevance.

Design for Tension empowers product teams to make the best possible decisions in the midst of change.

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

7/9: Domain modeling unfold data semantics and enables more reliable systems with greater affordances – more user actions in context. Product relevance guides us to explore and verify models against the evolving landscape, mostly found in the interconnections of data-flow.

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

6/9: Business or domain concern gives us a sense of data — causal relations and transactional boundaries. That knowledge can be used to relax our consistency model and enhance availability (through clear isolation), which is good for event-driven, cloud-native applications.

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

5/9: How exactly Design for Tension works:
I’m starting this thread with a data-flow perspective on purpose. It’s always a good way to figure out what’s going on in the middle of an incident by asking how data is stored and transferred between.
In the cloud we care about consistency and availability

www.reactiveprinciples.org

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

4/9: Platform eng. could help product t. design and build for Tension:
- observability 2.0 (wide: cloud, domain, product)
- components (event-driven foundation, reliability)
- causal understanding (atl toolchain for grasp semantics)
Design for Tension is a team sport. Activates platform eng. invest.

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

3/9: Tension arises when we try to model volatile semantics into strict syntax.
Tension here implies coherence: a proper domain data model reduces cloud concerns and amplifies product velocity.
A sweet spot for DORA uplift.

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

2/9: Infrastructure Gravity leads us to pay attention to cloud concerns: how data is stored, processed, and transferred between components.
Feature Lift is about product concerns — a field of relevance: how many opportunities for meaningful interaction the data allows us to realize.

The Excalidraw sketch illustrates the “Design for Tension” concept. A black circle with a central dot represents a bounded context that isolates the data-flow we care about. Three arcs around it depict distinct problem spaces: cloud, domain, and product. The circle sits in the tension field between infrastructure “Gravity” and “Feature Lift.” The vertical axis maps value creation, while the horizontal axis reflects rising tension.

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 19

The article has connected some dots in my notes. Therefore, a thread🧵: filling the gap between “gravity” and “feature lift,” and how to empower product teams to make better decisions.

Where domain eng. brings advantages, and how platform eng. could fit in.

A story thro a data-flow perspective.

Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 17

Excellent article on positioning domain engineering between product engineering and infrastructure engineering. I fully agree with the financial model section. However, I prefer to call it ‘platform engineering: the hard parts,’ simply because in the middle, we face more volatile semantics.

Infrastructure Gravity & Domain Engineering | Jack Danger

The following is an excerpt from Executive Engineering. “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in The Little Prince Each company draws its own ...

jackdanger.com

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 17

I like these visuals. Linked lists and B-trees are exactly how I represent remodeling in my mind. When you’ve worked with a domain for a long time, you start remodelling it to better fit concurrent product streams and to ‘activate’ their velocity.

Linked list on the left side means unconsolidated features with O(n) time complexity. B-tree on the right side means consolidated features with O(log(n)) time complexity

Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 17

Excellent article on positioning domain engineering between product engineering and infrastructure engineering. I fully agree with the financial model section. However, I prefer to call it ‘platform engineering: the hard parts,’ simply because in the middle, we face more volatile semantics.

Infrastructure Gravity & Domain Engineering | Jack Danger

The following is an excerpt from Executive Engineering. “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in The Little Prince Each company draws its own ...

jackdanger.com

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · May 13

An unfolding is by its nature personal, and requires human input and human feeling from the people doing the work, as an essential part of its contribution to the formation of the environment.

From “What is an unfolding?”

Building Living Neighborhoods --What is an Unfolding

www.livingneighborhoods.org

Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · Mar 17

Every piece of technology is also a coordination problem

Coté @cote.io · Mar 17

"[R]ather than removing human dependencies, automation often shifts and amplifies them." matthewreinbold.com/2025/03/13/I...

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Aleksey Skorobogaty @desmount.bsky.social · Jan 20

«The most effective response to cynicism isn’t to argue against it. It’s to build things that make it obsolete. Want to prove systems can work? Build better systems. Think people are fundamentally corrupt? Create incentive structures that reward cooperation and long-term thinking.»

We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.

Cynicism is the cheap seats. It’s the fast food of intellectual positions. Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or…

medium.com

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Michael Gray @mikegraycodes.bsky.social · Jan 9

Organisations that take advantage of this fear to squeeze more out of their people might see short-term gains but will ultimately be left behind.

Now is the time to double-down and invest in fostering trust, encouraging challenge, and creating a culture of safety.

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Nick Sousanis @nsousanis.bsky.social · Dec 31

While yes, on one hand things fall apart, entropy rules. On the other, life - and all of us, are momentary reversals where things become more ordered. In this brief time in the stream, we all have the opportunity to send something uniquely our own against the flow spinweaveandcut.com/sketching-en...

A single page comic about entropy and what flows against it (life). It begins with regimented grid of panels reading typical left to right - showing time running out of an hourglass, omelettes not turning back into eggs, laundry not picking itself up, mountains crumbling, and coffee and the universe growing cold. It then turns into a spiraling composition that ultimately. reads right to left and bottom to top wherein it shows how swirls form stars, other swirls form life, as it loops back out of the spirals - and then shows a person putting her hand in the downward stream - creating swirls of her own as the text reads "reach in to send up something uniquely our own against the flow."

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Dec 15

“How do you live a digital life whose primary byproduct isn’t resentment? The most straightforward way: you stop posting. You leave the party.”

Posting Less

Everyone's Doing It

annehelen.substack.com

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Quanta Magazine @quantamagazine.bsky.social · Dec 13

The second law of thermodynamics states that a quantity called entropy is on the rise, indicating that the universe is predisposed to disorder. But the idea of entropy is evolving. www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entr...

What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know. | Quanta Magazine

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world th...

www.quantamagazine.org

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