Tanuj

You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense – the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.

Outsiders manipulate us using stories, and we all like to think advertising only works on the other guy, but that's not how it is. Advertising works on all of us, so if you're too attached to stories, what will happen is people selling products come along, and they will bundle their product with a story. You're like, "Hey, a free story," and you... See more

“Blockchains have been around for a while,” some will say, “but so many web3 concepts are brand new!” Bullshit, I say to that. Cryptocurrency exchanges have been around for ages—the infamous Mt. Gox launched in 2010. Stablecoins and NFTs have been around since 2014. One of the first well-known DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) was... See more

When I take a screenshot, it feels like a tiny rejection of the logic of the contemporary corporate internet. Instead of offering up fragments of my photographic life to the computer gods, the screenshot feels like I’m stealing something back from the computational world for my own uses, removing it from the networked flow (sure, some of these... See more

[...] 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

But size is not the most troubling concept we have to deal with. It's time, or, more precisely, the time we have. If you're lucky enough to live to one hundred, you have five thousand two hundred weeks at your disposal.

One element you touched on there Steve, which also, I think, fits in with the multimedia side as well, as you talked about the elements. You know, we call them cards in Muse just because I think that works for us visually, and particularly with the touch screen. It feels like an index card moving around on a desk or something. […] There might be... See more

But instead of designing interfaces and exploring use cases for tomorrow’s glass-screened gadgets, Victor’s “forty-years-out vision” concerns nothing less than redesigning computing itself — not as a product or service, but “as a medium of thought.”

Why is it that most changes are marginal, but a few, like the Great Oxidation Event, are deeply disruptive? The answer is in asymmetry.When we think of competition, we usually picture symmetric competition. Trees compete on height for sunlight, businesses on price for customers. But you can only grow so tall, or lower prices so much. Competition... See more