my app doesn’t need a login system. It doesn’t need an interface to create and manage contacts. It already knows exactly who’s using it. (This makes me think about an old blog post by Clay Shirky: “Situated software, by contrast, doesn’t need to be personalized — it is personal from its inception.”)
Instead of being at the mercy of the “big tech” companies like Amazon and Google that monopolize the traditional way of doing things on the web, you are now at the mercy of a few other tech companies that are rapidly monopolizing the blockchain way of doing things.
The joy of using a kind of web based canvas, of rendering stuff using the web, although that sounds like such a bad idea to render things in HTML and CSS, but it really does give you the ability to just put anything that can be in a browser on the canvas and interact with it.
For without trust in a technology or platform, how can we be expected to commit? When the stewards of our systems don’t feel fully invested, how can we be expected to fully back them?
A technology that depends on a wasteful use of finite resources can hardly be permanent. This is why a radical reduction of that wastefulness is a major concern to us: maximize the hardware lifespans, minimize the energy use. And this is not just about a set of technical problems to be fixed – the attitudes also need a radical turn.
For an intelligent species, building a Dyson Sphere is a technological leap on a par with the discovery of fire for our ancestors. The transition from a planetary species to an interstellar species. It would usher in an age of exploration and expansion on a scale we can barely imagine.
[...] we simply begin with today's lightly hyperlinked documents, and let the reader's computer generate links on-demand. When I'm reading something and don't understand a particular word or want to know more about a quote, when I select it, my computer should search across everything I've read and some small high-quality subset of the Web to bring... See more