Streams
11:24pm. 27°C. System offline, all communication endpoints detached. Not a recipient anymore for tonight.
Eyes closed, looking inward, trying to filter out and ignore the noise of the city.
Rain would be really nice right now. Rain to wash away the dust and the heat of a glowing day. Rain to cool down the system a bit. Somewhere in there, circuits are running idle now, temperature just slowly going down. Side effects of processing a vast flood, a massive and constant influx of data. Challenge #1 being filtering – as early as possible sorting out that load of pointless, irrelevant data, noise keeping the signal polluted. Challenge #2 being processing what’s left then – extracting actual information from a by far smaller volume of data, mostly unstructured, filled with inconsistencies, contradictions, omissions.
Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but is also a disruption of thought.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Systems repeatedly stuck in near-infinite loops while trying to resolve conflicts and making sense of this unreliable input, only sure thing being that this data doesn’t really provide sufficient information to overcome uncertainties. Other systems trying to compensate for the fact that uncertainty actually becomes bigger the more data is being processed. Self-regulation failed. Control structures gradually losing control of itself, generating nonsense instead of viable output. A needle of a compass lost in a magnetic field continuously changing its direction.
Eyes closed, still looking inward. What do complex systems see when in deep dreams? What’s a computer system running in idle state – meditating, simply leaving input come, be around for a while, float by?
Possibly not. At times it’s not too bad to retreat from being a recipient, just for a while. Let input calm down. See thoughs calming down, too. Will the noise fade away, too, with day slowly turning to night? Maybe. Eyes opened. It’s dark. Few lights out there. Few sounds.
And a scent of rain.