What the hell is pu?

Pu is the first word of the mirdan philosophy.

It is the word for everything we do not know or understand.

Imagine you do not know the meaning of life, then that will be pu for you.
Or you do not know what you want to do this afternoon, also pu.

More examples of pu are:

• You want to do something different with your life, but you do not know what
• You have a yet unknown disease
• You are in the supermarket and you do not know anymore how much milk you have in the fridge.

Pu is a collection of big and small unknowns, it can be philosophical or very practical.

Friction

In my experience as a software engineer I have often encountered a gap.
Computers are very fit to automate what is orderly and understandable.
But where such a system touches reality, friction arises.

Whether they are weather prediction models, or an adminstration system.
They have a hard time to deal with the unpredictability of reality.
Weather modules cannot overcome the fundamental unpredictability of the chaos theory.
Administation system can hardly handle the exceptions of exceptions that the law maker creates.
Where people are often in a situation which does not fit in the system.

© Tim Unwin

Computer systems can not handle boundaries, can not handle unpredictability.
Computer systems can not handle pu.

I think it is because during construction the software architect only looked at predictionable and knowlable systems.

Space for pu

I am convinced that software systems can make space for pu.
Systems could be created to store knowledge about border cases.
Daily users could track in which cases the system does not work properly.

The more dependent we become on computer software, the more important it is they can handle the unpredictability and situations that fall outside the system.

It gets more and more important that software learns to handle pu.