Andy Matuschak: Some quick notes following Apple’s 2023-06-05 Vision Pro announcement. I’m mainly interested in the user interface and the computing paradigm. What does Apple imagine we’ll be doing with these devices, and how will we do it? (more)
XHTML/MicroFormat version of VCard (more)
Maggie Appleton: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers. This is a talk I presented at the Local-first Conference in Berlin, May 2024. For the last ~year I've been keeping a close eye on how language models capabilities meaningfully change the speed, ease, and accessibility of software development. The slightly bold theory I put forward in this talk is that we're on a verge of a golden age of local, home-cooked software and a new kind of developer – what I've called the barefoot developer. (more)
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is a book by James Scott critical of a system of beliefs he calls authoritarian high modernism, that centers around confidence in the ability to design and operate society in accordance with scientific laws.[1][2] It was released in March 1998, with a paperback version in February 1999. The book catalogues schemes which states impose upon populaces that are convenient for the state since they make societies "legible", but are not necessarily good for the people. For example, census data, standardized weights and measures, and uniform languages make it easier to tax and control the population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State ISBN:978-0-30007016-3; see Legibility (more)
I'm going to make a habit of joining Ward Cunningham''s FederatedWiki calls, and just make some cross-ref notes here about things being worked on. (more)
like a Personal Server/hosted server, but made up of mesh of functions running in various parts of the cloud. cf serverless (more)
Steve Yegge on what makes great software systems (Platform). The big realization I had, sometime in the last month or so, is that all of the common properties of my favorite software systems can be derived from a single Root Cause: one property, or design principle, that if present will cause software to take on the right characteristics automatically. What are my favorite software systems? Here are a few of the very best: UNIX. WinXP. MacOs X. EMacs. MsExcel. FireFox. Ruby On Rails. Python. Ruby. Scheme. Common Lisp. LP-Muds (MUD). The Java Virtual Machine (JVM). A few more that just barely make the cut, for now: MsWord. OmniGraffle Pro. JavaScript. Per Force. Some that I think would make the cut if I learned how to use them effectively: The GIMP. Mathematica. VIM. Lua. MsIE.... I won't keep you in suspense. I think the most important principle in all of software design is this: Systems should never Re Boot. If you design a system so that it never needs to reboot, then you will eventually, even if it's by a very roundabout path, arrive at a system that will live forever.... I think the second most important design principle, really a corollary to the first, is that systems must be able to grow without rebooting... First (essential feature): every great system has a command shell (Command Line)... Great systems also have advice. There's no universally accepted name for this feature. Sometimes it's called hooks, or filters, or Aspect Oriented Programming... World-class software systems always have an extension language and a PlugIn system... The last big feature I'll enumerate today, and it's just as important as the rest, is that great software systems are Intro Spective. You can poke around and examine them at runtime, and ideally they poke around and examine themselves as well... Introspection can (and should) take many different forms, not just health monitoring. (aliveness? turing-complete?) (more)
A MUD (/mʌd/; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain)[1][2] is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online live chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon
"A tiny little drawing (diagram) app." https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw (more)
WikiEngine I built for my WikiLog and later PrivateWiki. Turned into FluxGarden service. (more)
zettelkasten/digital garden writer https://writingslowly.com named Richard.
Andy Matuschak: Exorcising us of the Primer. If you want to make an educational technologist’s eyes sparkle, just mention “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”. (more)
Evan Armstrong: A New Book of the Startup Bible. The average business book is a blog post stretched to 250 pages by an underpaid ghost writer who hates what their life has become. That said, there are some that really do matter (more)
Roger Martin: The Five Deadliest Strategy Myths. I started out trying to order them from most to least damaging, but in the end, it is hard to make a case that one is definitively deadlier than the next. I would encourage you to take them collectively as the five myths you should reject and should not let control your life or that of your company. (Business Strategy) (more)
WritingSlowly reviews A System for Writing by Bob Doto. Another ‘Zettelkasten primer’ won’t be needed for some time, since this one is direct, concise, thorough and strongly practical. (more)
This is the publicly-readable WikiLog Digital Garden (20k pages, starting from 2002) of Bill Seitz (a Product Manager and CTO). (You can get your own pair of garden/note-taking spaces from FluxGarden.)
My Calling: Reality Hacking to accelerate Evolution by increasing Freedom, Agency, and Leverage of Free Agents and smaller groups (SmallWorld) via D And D of Thinking Tools (software and Games To Play).
See Intro Page for space-related goals, status, etc.; or Wiki Node for more terse summary info.
Beware the War On The Net!
Current:
- head of product for an early-stage boot-strapped company
- founder FluxGarden for Digital Garden hosting
- wrote Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook Getting Things Done And Other Systems ASIN:B00HHJA5JS
My Coding for fun.
Past:
- Director Product Managment, NCSA Sports
- CTO/Product Manager at a series of startups: MedScape, then Axiom Legal, then Living Independently, then DailyLit, then AEP...
- founded Family Financial Future, personal-financial-planning nagware for parents
- consulting
- founded Teamflux.com, a hosting service for wiki-based collaboration spaces.
- founded Wikilogs.com, a hosting service for WikiLog-s (wiki-based weblogs).
Agile Product Development, Product Management from MVP to Product-Market Fit, Adding Product To Your Startup Team, Agility, Context, and Team Agency, (2022-10-12) Accidental Learnings of a Journeyman Product Manager
Oligarchy; Big Levers, Theory of Change, Change the World, (2020-06-27) Ways To Nudge Future; Network Enlightenment, Optimistic Near Future Vision; Huge Invention; Alternatives To A College Degree; Credit Crisis 2008; Economic Transition; Network Economy; Making A Living; Varieties Of Info Technology Jobs; Generative Schooling; Product Oriented Unschooling; Reality Hacker; A 20th Century Economic Theory
FluxGarden; Network Enlightenment Ecosystem; ThinkingTools Interaction as Medium; Hypermedia Pattern Language; Everyone Needs Their Own ThinkingSpace; Digital Garden; Virtual ThinkingSpace; Thinking Tools Companies; Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts; My CollaborationWare History; Wiki Proliferation; Portal Collaboration Roadmap; Wiki For GroupWare, Overlapping Scopes Of Collaboration, Email Discussion Beside Wiki, Wiki For CollaborationWare, Collaboration Roadmap; Sister Sites; Wiki Hack
Personal Cloud; 2018-11-29-NextOpenInfrastructure, 2018-11-15-BooksVsTweets; Stream/Flow Vs Garden/Stock
Social Warrens; Culture War; 2017-02-15-MindmapCultureWarSocialMediaEconomy; Cultural Pluralism
Fractally Generative Pattern Language, Small Tribe, SimplestThing, Becoming A Reality Hacker, Less-Bullshit Living, The Craft; Games To Play; Evolution, Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook, Getting Things Done, And Other Systems
Digital Therapeutics, (2021-05-26) Pondering a Mental Health space, CoachBot; Inside-Out Markov Chain