I just started reading W. Ross Ashby’s An Introduction to Cybernetics last month. A friend of mine went deep into this rabbit-hole ~15 years ago, and it’s been in the back of my mind to dig into it somewhat since then.

I’m amazed to find that the operand, operator, transform and transformation concepts introduced right away in the book seem to encompass functional programming, relational database design and other fundamental concepts embedded deep into programming languages and systems, including machine learning.

I guess it makes sense! My understanding is that information theory and cybernetics drove a lot of early applied theory in computing, but I’m curious to learn more…

The premise of cybernetics is the study of complexity, especially the kind of emergent complexity of systems like a swarm of ants or the human brain. Why have
we resorted to “vibes”? There’s a well-reasoned approach to dealing with exactly the kind of complexity that emerges from ML systems…

Log March 2026