One of the greatest movements in the 1990s was patterns (design patterns, architectural patterns, stereotypes, archetypes). Pioneers like the Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides), Martin Fowler, and Douglas Schmidt wrote books and wikis to capture patterns. The truth of a pattern was obvious. The explicit and precise specification in human language enables immediate affirmation, because the reader recognizes it as being not novel. The reader has seen it many times before, so the pattern communicates no new knowledge. This is a key characteristic. It is important to say a true thing that is obvious to everyone when expressed explicitly, especially when it has never been said explicitly before. The utility is that a pattern formalizes a term of art. It establishes a word or phrase as referring to a specification that details its meaning. Knowing the name of the pattern, the listener can immediately reify a mental model, and know that everyone hearing the same name will share that mental model. That is powerful. Through patterns, coders effectively changed natural language within the domain of software development to be "English as code". When communicating with English in other contexts, there is a high degree of imprecision. We have to account for ambiguity with more or less generous interpretations. However, with patterns we can be more confident in what we say and what we hear from others who speak in those terms. I feel like in our journey toward Humanity as Code to enable AI functions that can subsume human toil, we should be specifying patterns as formally as possible across all domains. Perhaps AI models can be doing exactly this on our behalf by distilling our writings into pattern specifications, which can then be verified and cleaned up. This would form a reliable repository of truth, which can then be used for training.

«Money is backed by purchasing power. That in turn is backed by productive capital.» I gained that insight today, so I share it with you. I feel like my superpower is distilling masses of cross-disciplinary information as a generalist into compact precise expressions that capture the essence. (Fewer words, more punch.) I feel like this skill is important toward being able to compactify knowledge into a tweet or a meme. I've said for decades: use simple messages. Now, as to the substance of the insight, I feel like the goldbugs got it wrong. Money backed by gold's intrinsic value can only be assured to hold up to the gold's utility value. My insight is obvious once said aloud, so I claim no brilliance to have said it. I am a little resentful that Austrians didn't say it ubiquitously before me, so that public discourse would not be filled with idiocy like "Bitcoin is backed by nothing" or even "fiat money is backed by nothing". Both statements can now be seen as untrue. A resource view (a non-monetary view) helps to understand the value of things, so that we are not confused by the obfuscation of value in monetary terms. Which seems strange if one purpose of money is as a unit of account for a common way to assess value across all domains. Where money fails in that purpose is in assessing itself.