Intentful Computation

Last week, I was introduced to the world of <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gacha-life/id1440430680" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Gacha Life</a>. Bear with me. It’s a place where a dedicated community of grade, middle, and early-high schoolers spend an exorbitant amount of time using anime characters, stickers, and graphics to create … well … anything they can think of. I was genuinely impressed at the dexterity of my 15-year-old guide as she walked me through one of the community’s routines: creating GIFs from scenes generated using the app’s content. At lightning speed, she jumped from app to app, capturing screenshots, assembling them in a GIF generator, exporting them, editing them again, and sharing them to all the necessary locations. It was quite a production pipeline. I was impressed on many levels — with the depth and complexity of this community, as well as the creative skills of my guide. However, something about the process tickled my sensibilities as a systems engineer. There was something odd about it. The very next day was WWDC. I, along with the rest of the world, was too distracted by Apple’s vision for “Spatial Computation” to think much more about my Gacha-gotcha moment. However, somewhere during Allessandra McGinnis’ demo justifying the headset’s existence in the office, I had the same feeling again. This time, we were watching a screen lift up and away from a MacBook — something akin to a very expensive and not-so-remote desktop — and into the air. The hypothetical office worker was trying to use an application that ran on their MacBook, but not on the headset. Again, something didn’t quite seem right. Recently, I spent an hour or two working on some scripts for a personal analytics system. (I might be writing about it, soon, so I’ll spare the details). I was trying to automatically capture some data that I had been collecting at my day job manually, over the last couple of weeks. There didn’t seem to be an existing system that did everything I wanted, so I decided to just build it. It collected information from sources on my local machine, parsed them into spreadsheet rows, and stored them in Google Sheets for later analysis. Somewhere in the process, I remembered both of my confusions from the week prior. <a href="https://betterprogramming.pub/intentful-computation-e502db996ce1">Visit Now</a>