I like this mental exercise of representing data tables as physical tables and by extension, furniture. Tables, and more generally tabular data are a great representational layer for most people when we reason about data. This is probably because we have been indoctrinated early and it’s easy to grasp. Is it the end-all for modeling the world or even an organization? I think it has limits here but it is such an entrenched way to think about data that it makes it hard to distinguish the furniture from the house (frame). I think when realtors want to sell a house (reality) they call it staging (furniture). It sells the house! Ok I’ve taken this as far as I can …
Great read. Mixed model arts treats tables as one form of data, among many others (semi-structured, unstructured (text, images, etc), metadata, ML artifacts, and graphs). And across different use cases - apps, analytics, and ML/AI. So, I think tables are perfectly fine for most analytical use cases, as you indicate. And tables exist in many variations for analytics - olap database tables, spreadsheets, dataframes, etc. And now you can use Python (and I think typescript?) on Excel, so Excel is now an IDE
They're probably not well suited for many others, but that depends on what you're trying to do. The core of MMA is to open people's minds to the variety and use cases of data out there, as that's the world we live in.
Absolutely. Didn't mean to reduce MMA to tables, so much as to tap into the fact that table design elicits opinions / disgust to a greater degree, I think, than others types of data structures.
Furniture Theory is still nascent, so I tried to keep its applications tight, but it definitely extends beyond tables/data structures: Jira boards, Slack channels, doc templates are also digital furniture. TBD if I can flesh out the theory more. Maybe I can find some grant money.
I like this mental exercise of representing data tables as physical tables and by extension, furniture. Tables, and more generally tabular data are a great representational layer for most people when we reason about data. This is probably because we have been indoctrinated early and it’s easy to grasp. Is it the end-all for modeling the world or even an organization? I think it has limits here but it is such an entrenched way to think about data that it makes it hard to distinguish the furniture from the house (frame). I think when realtors want to sell a house (reality) they call it staging (furniture). It sells the house! Ok I’ve taken this as far as I can …
Great read. Mixed model arts treats tables as one form of data, among many others (semi-structured, unstructured (text, images, etc), metadata, ML artifacts, and graphs). And across different use cases - apps, analytics, and ML/AI. So, I think tables are perfectly fine for most analytical use cases, as you indicate. And tables exist in many variations for analytics - olap database tables, spreadsheets, dataframes, etc. And now you can use Python (and I think typescript?) on Excel, so Excel is now an IDE
They're probably not well suited for many others, but that depends on what you're trying to do. The core of MMA is to open people's minds to the variety and use cases of data out there, as that's the world we live in.
Absolutely. Didn't mean to reduce MMA to tables, so much as to tap into the fact that table design elicits opinions / disgust to a greater degree, I think, than others types of data structures.
Furniture Theory is still nascent, so I tried to keep its applications tight, but it definitely extends beyond tables/data structures: Jira boards, Slack channels, doc templates are also digital furniture. TBD if I can flesh out the theory more. Maybe I can find some grant money.
You’re a good guy Stephen. I like how you push ideas forward