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)

Andy Matuschak: Twitter is a water cooler (more)

2D BarCode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code (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

aka State Machine (more)

"A tiny little drawing (diagram) app." https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw (more)

I want some a variation of tldraw that lets me (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)

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)

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)

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)

The Markdown Web. You cannot replace the ’Web; Every Grand Scheme to Reinvent The ’Web just creates unpaid work for developers to boost another company’s profile. (more)