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Chapter Two: Foundations of the digital (discrete) revolution

"...here,Ā transmission through spaceĀ (typically signaling), is the same asĀ transmission through time(typically storage)..."

This, to me, seems an incredibly bold claim- not so much that I think it's not feasible, or well thought out, but the conflation of the nature of the two doesn't sit right with me:

While he probably does not intend transmission (through space) to be thought of as a synonym for movement, in the context of a solid object, however data (a collection of datum) does quite literally travel though Euclidean space, a set of 3 axes, whereas transmission through time (storage), implies a lack of movement for the data in Euclidean space- a lack of non-negligible movement at least, if you think about electrons proper.

When data is moved it is often transformed into a format (read: mapped 1:1 onto an equivalent (isomorphic), but not identical structure), more suitable for movement- this implies that data at rest is literally not the same data once it becomes in transit, even though the information (theĀ shannons) may not change at all.

Does time move through data, or does data move through time?

I mean the answer is both, with movement through time being foundational, as data doesn't have to change, but time is fundamentally change, which data is subject to...wait- this is borderline getting into Information Theory & Co because data is just a structured representation of information.

"In making a movie or a TV program, you are making not so much a thing...as you are organizing information"

This is just facts, though I think we very much forget that when we deal with things,Ā or perhapsĀ it's just a necessary concession to reality, because if we try to treat TV shows like the organization of information that they are, then we lose the ability to trade in this information with ease.

It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand.

Getting peter-thiel vibes from this, it sounds like theĀ take of the Agricultural revolution- I feel like there were definitely people who tried to build horse drawn carriages on Model-T style assembly lines, and that we've never heard of them probably because it was a monumental disaster.

"The more complex the designed system, the more field maintenance must be central to the final design..."

Prior to this, Hamming states that field maintenance tends to dominate all expenses in the long run, which brings to mind technical debt. Perhaps all technical debt is a result of not making field maintenance central to the design of the software- it certainly seems like things that occur in the field (in the wild, we call it, or production), that can't be readily remediated, tend to be one of the most common sources of technical debt, though this draws from my somewhat limited personal experience.

"...computers are now often an essential component of good design."

CAD seems to agree, as a whole field that validates this.

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Referenced in

Chapter Two: Foundations of the digital (discrete) revolution