A technologist makes reason out of the messiness of the world, leverages their understanding to envision a different reality, and builds a pathway to make their vision happen. All three of these endeavors—to try to understand the world, to imagine something different, and to build something that fulfills that vision—are deeply human.
Another essay I've been procrastinating on: clocks and calendars are tools imposed by rulers (consider what "to rule" really means) to measure, manage and control the world. it's a way of colonizing time, which is in many ways even more insidious than colonizing space https://t.co/gbMX3PuPku
we should directly tie the success of our technologies to how much they enable our humanity (as in, our positive human characteristics), and use this criteria to evaluate past, present and future technologies.
Especially on the web, we are used to a a kind of a document metaphor that, the web is just built for, which is a kind of a vertically scrolling infinite page. Infinite canvases are essentially like a different document format. This idea of that there are two dimensions, or almost three. You know, you can move left, you can move right, you can move... See more
Now imagine: how many programs and services make us wait more than 100ms? I’d say more or less all of them, starting with almost every website, with a few exceptions. You don’t think about “requesting” Google when you type your search query and it auto-completes after each letter. But you do think about rebooting your computer. Or booting up your... See more