Tanuj

Sometimes you don’t want a website that you’ll have to maintain. You have other things to do. Why not consider your website a beautiful rock with a unique shape which you spent hours finding, only to throw it into the water until it hits the ocean floor? You will never know when it hits the floor, and you won’t care.

Precisely because a technology is a reusable, low-resistance path, when a piece of technology catches on widely, it tends to exponentially scale the type of behavior that it makes easier. When TVs exploded in popularity in America, it exponentially scaled the behavior of zoning out in front of a screen, hypnotized by constant visual stimulation. So... See more

When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? and what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I'm telling you it's the stories that you like the most, that you find the most rewarding, the most inspiring. The stories that don't focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended consequences of human action, because that very of... See more

Victor practices what he preaches: he doesn’t use computers to build better mousetraps, but to explore and communicate ideas in a way that uniquely exploits the properties and possibilities of a programmable, dynamic, interactive medium.

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I ... See more

Information will not be pushed to the user unless they intentionally ask for it. Mercury’s intention-as-context architecture vaccinates the user against the unintentional consumption of information.

In the words of MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle: computers empowered their users, making them feel smart[er], “in control”, and “more fully participant in the future”.