Ian Vanagas

I should be able to scroll through the history of my browsing as an enormous branching graph that I can annotate, travel around, share with others, and version.

What do people actually want from their interactive experiences? The first insight from the pandemic era is that most formal presentations should simply be abolished. The sad reality is that hardly anyone is listening, or for that matter should be.

Given these realities, I find the furthest extreme of the free and open source philosophy not only unethical in its own right in that it incentivizes wide-scale consumption over production and thus impoverishes the software world, but divorced from reality in that it misunderstands the economic forces responsible for the production of software (and... See more

The number of them that actually learn all the important stuff in under a month is zero. The number of them that have a self-guided strategy to learn what is relevant is almost zero.

1) What are the inputs to the function approximator?

A person with this perspective is one who witnessed the more orderly society functioning, yet did not witness the building of the more orderly society , and thus does not understand the mechanics of the more orderly society. In other words, this person has a distinctive blind spot —he knows what could be reaped from a more orderly society, yet not... See more

The personal computing revolution succeeded and we are all miserable. The dream of personal computing as augmentation for the intellect, and the joyful, radical counterculture that arose around the first PC’s has given way to our increasingly dismal present.