Locking pliers, otherwise known as ‘Vise Grips”
“Get me a pair of vise grips.”
Why are they called a pair? I guess it’s the opposing faces of the grip. A pair in one tool.
“A pair of pliers”.
Or it’s something to do with language. You can’t say, “get me pliers” or “get me a pliers.” Just doesn’t sound right.
You can say “get me a hammer” or “get me some hammers”.
Really, you need more than one hammer? What are you a hammer drummer?
That’s all beside the point though.
What’s a tool for?
Vise grips are for grabbing.
What about software “tools’ though?
And what exactly went wrong, with regard to software, that we’re confused about this?
Confusion follows from lack of adequate tools, and lack of insight into the lack, by tool makers.
It’s not absolute. There’s a lot of great software. But sofware gets enough praise and attention and the industry’s big enough (haha) for some complaint, criticism…
There are omissions. Big gaps. Software that should exist but doesn’t.
There’s a lot of waste too. Too much software that’s over-used for increasingly counterproductive purposes.
There’s also mega-trending, wherein incomprehensible gobs of money pour into tool transformation, turning things to gobbledygook.
There’s also tremendous abundance of enshittification.
What’s the reason for all of that?
Who can say?
Well, many do actually say. Let me just say my piece on this by comparing. We show, what something is, by comparing to something else.
Look here:
A bit of an odd tool, the vise grip (or locking pliers) but very useful. I grew up in the US and I don’t know about now, but back in the day, “everyone” had these. So, for kids, as I remember, they were just around, so it was impossible not to be fascinated clamping these onto things and playing around with the mechanism.
I live in Sweden now and it seems like, along with pretzels (!), these are absent here. I don’t know if that’s generalizable across Sweden or if it’s the little sample I’m taking. The tool’s not in stores that would typically sell them (tool stores) either, so… I don’t know, it surprises me. But, I was surprised by the pretzels too.
I try to explain these to Swedes so, of course, what better than YouTube?
Hence the video above. But that one doesn’t really explain what the tool’s for. So, let’s see some more videos. This one popped up. It also doesn’t explain what a vise grip is for, but, oh well; interesting tangent.
Is this a sort of graveyard of tools? Or, a museum of tools?:
So many tools.
Interesting that you can still use them for their original purposes decades, even centuries, later. Many of them anyway. And you can re-sell them.
Interesting in both respects. Still useful, and, resalable.
Try that with software?
No.
To run old software you have to maintain matching old hardware too. Want to keep a hardware museum so you can run old software? Easier said than done. How many software and computer hardware museums have you seen?
How about a garage sale? Can you offload your old software to others who want it cheap?
Of course there are all kinds of barriers preventing this. Licensing, for one. But for more fundamental reasons it’s hardly doable.
It doesn’t work without the corresponding old hardware.
It was really lame and slow back then anyway.
It’s been commodified since then.
There are exceptions, some gems from the past. But mostly, software is made obsolete at a fast pace, and not because it’s advancing so much. In technical domains, like in architecture, engineering and construction, for decades already we all share the common understanding and frustration that software gets very very slightly less lousy, in some ways, year after year, decade after decade, while at the same time it gets lousier in other ways.
This is the uniqueness of software! 🤣
It’s never really very good. And it never really gets much better, even though it constantly and quickly makes itself obsolete.
It’s a perfect obsolescence machine!
Maybe that in fact is its true purpose: accelerated planned obsolescence.
We didn’t get to the purpose of the vise grip yet.
This video presented itself. Nice. I had no idea the vise grip has a known history. In this video you get the history of the tool, and some of the purpose. You also get socio-economic and political history background.
The whole story told by a bear:
More to it, then, than what we might have expected.
And so it is with software as well.
In 2024, everything said about software, obviously, is about ‘artifical intelligence’, AI, LLMs, AGI, etc.
Some current commentary I snagged from LinkedIn:
And,
Lacking fundamental components of intelligence?
Can large language models (#LLMs) exhibit the ability to generate abstract concepts based on training samples? In 1955, McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon suggested that their project might lead to blueprints for machines that could “form abstractions and concepts” [A proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence (1955)]. More than six decades later, #AI systems are still unable to overcome what Melanie Mitchell calls the “barrier” of understanding. [Artificial intelligence hits the barrier of meaning, Information 10 (2019) 51.]
With all due respect, if LLMs and AI experts had even an ounce of literary culture, they would know what any writer knows: being able to generalize from samples (i.e. being able to abstract) tells a lot about what it means to understand, and in so doing, what it means to think. Thinking is about abstracting from individual characteristics, and acquiring a degree of generality beyond singular samples. In this respect, and despite their incredible capabilities, LLMs are like “Funes the Memorious” portrayed by Jorge Luis Borges. After falling from a horse, Funes been left paralysed. Following this accident, Funes has miraculously come by an extraordinary photographic memory: “Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, to generalize, to make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” (Borges 1964, 93).
Massive training datasets may be the “gateway to powerful AI models”, but these models will never be anything other than huge photographic memories similar to Funes’, i.e. not “very capable of thought.” Knowing this, isn’t it time to rethink the whole paradigm of AI research? In this respect, I expect #intelligence and #thinking to be more than #memorizing and #regurgitating
Let’s face it: a lot of of what we call “intelligence” (whether “natural” or “artificial”) is nothing more than memory, and no question, LLMs are great memorizers. I don’t know what intelligence is, but I like to think that ours lies largely in our ability to “zoom out”, in other words, to abstract.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gilbertpaquet_llms-ai-intelligence-activity-7205593144917118977-DMfj
Bearing (pun intended) in mind the uniqueness of software, mentioned above: the general lousiness, the non-resalability, the accelerated planned obsolescence, the yet-inadequate fit to particular purpose… in general.
Now arrives the ultimate in this trend and its pièce de résistance, brushing aside all of that previous fit for purpose inadequacy, swooping in now, SWOOOOSH!!!, with general purpose software for artificial thinking (‘AI’).
It’s also grossly inadequate but who cares!
“It’s the future, bro!”
It’s expressed like this, critiqued by Jeffrey Funk:
Kurzweil’s “sunny scenario of our disembodied brains thriving hundreds of years from now in some kind of cloud consciousness.”
Get a grip?
Get me some vise grips!
You know, artificial intelligence (AI), actual intelligence, human intelligence, cat intelligence, they all have to do with getting a grip.
Well, all, apparently with the exception of artificial intelligence (AI) which evidently is about something else.
It’s the pièce de résistance, after all.
Natural intelligence (NI), human, animal, actual intelligence is about getting a grasp of things, getting a grip on reality which otherwise slips away.
Look, here’s how to use a tool for keeping things from slipping away.
For gripping.
Vise grips.
Now I’ve been writing a long time about software getting a grip, facilitating the engine of thought (human thought, HI, NI). And working on it too: https://tangerinefocus.com/tgn/earlier-media-innovations/
I discuss equipment for getting a grip (as a necessary component of the engine of thinking), in complex visual spatial digital environments, in articles here:
And here:
And looking at this in more depth here:
And here:
Are you ready to get a grip?
Or are you rather getting ready for the sunny scenario of your “disembodied brain thriving hundreds of years from now in some kind of cloud consciousness”?
If you want the vise grips, if you want to think things through, all the way through, join us here:
Contact me:
TGN is equipment for looking 
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