The roads I take...

The philosophy of IDIC or Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations has kept my mind going around quite much recently.

Well, if we want to go by the book, IDIC is actually seen as the basis of a philosophy, specifically that of Star Trek's Vulcan species, it's "native language" name is Kol-Ut-Shan, and it's symbolized by that really nice-looking jewel that has a triangle/pyramid with a marked point/ball on top and a circle around it (see image). That said, it ends up culminating Gene Roddenberry's philosophy behind a lot of what Star Trek depicts, and the philosophy that even 50 years (to this exact day) after the show first aired is still largely shared by the fans of the franchise (including myself).

What IDIC centers around is to increase and heavily embrace diversity in all things - and that can be applied to and give thought inspiration to many things.
Everything of course starts with Gene's vision of a lead crew as diverse as the mid-1960s would allow it, a United Federation of Planets that is a utopian in-between of UN and US in a galactic dimension, to other figures than white mean being in leadership positions in various incarnations of the franchise, and preserving diversity of life forms beyond the two-legged variety in various stories as well (if you like deeply digging into messages and philosophy of Star Trek episodes, the Mission Log Podcast may be something for you).
I like looking beyond Star Trek when it comes to this philosophy though. Take for example the genomes of life forms we know (in reality, on this planet) - no two life forms have the exact same genes, not even twins. Nature shows that "infinite" diversity (created from seemingly infinite combinations of very few elements) not because it's fun, or because our design sucks, or it's Vulcan, of course. It gives life an ingenious robustness by making it hard for attacks to affect large amounts of different individuals and species, it makes life forms complement each other to cover different environments, and adaptive to react to different circumstances.
And from all I hear from studies and see in practice, when we put together diverse groups of people, they usually excel in creativity and putting up different ideas, they are harder to control by a single bad influence, they develop more respect for other humans, higher sensitivity towards the needs of other people, deeper understanding of and respect for different persons - at least in comparison to many groups of people very similar to each other. Fun fact on the side, the crowd I see at Star Trek conventions is probably one of the most diverse group of "geeks" you can find (across gender, race, age, profession, and other criteria) - thanks to the role models and the philosophy put front and center in that franchise. That kind of diversity is something I want to see in many more areas of my life and around me. The more we get different people to sit down or stand together, the more we create and show role models of diversity enriching life, the more we get people to respect other people, no matter who they are, and the more we create a better world - and universe.

Now, what about things other than life forms? What for example about computer systems? About software?
There's a lot of people advocating for hardware, operating systems, software packages that are exactly the same for everyone, so it's easy to verify that they haven't been modified unduly, and that software updates are easier to apply. And that surely has merit in a number of dimensions, and reproducible builds, Flatpak and Snap, even reducing "fingerprintability" on the Web and quite a few other mechanisms exist to reduce differences between our systems.
But then, we as users of those computers and that software are all different. We want our systems to be personalized and therefore to be different from anyone else's system. We install different add-ons into our Firefox, different apps or applications on our computers and smartphones, log into different accounts on different websites, we want our system to be uniquely ours, or at least feel like it is that. So at some level, we as users want "infinite" diversity of computers. Different people may even want different screen numbers and sizes, have different focus on what is important for them that their computer does, desire different set-ups of the hardware on their home and/or work desks. And there are security reasons to put randomization (like ASLR and other RoP defense mechanisms) into our computer (runtime) setups in some cases. Would a higher degree of diversity on software make it harder for attacks to break a large amount of systems? Maybe, I don't know which benefits outweigh the others there.

It's clear that's a principle which works pretty decently in nature at a low level, and for groups of people at a high level, and we definitely should embrace it there. At which layers of our software and hardware it's useful or detrimental is not always entirely clear, but it has to work in personalizing our computer systems to our requirements, desires and wishes as we are all different and that diversity needs to end up being reflected so we can use its strength to work together and improve this world.

Thanks to Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek in general for giving me something interesting to think about - and Happy 50th Birthday Star Trek!