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.”)

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.

Anyone trying to apply science via technology must reason through contingencies, constraints, and behavior in specific circumstances. Questions like What is most appropriate and desired in this context? arise. Science focuses on necessity and universality; technology focuses on contingencies and specificities. Thus, technology does not just follow ... See more

Knowing the name of this idea gives you a scaffolding to hang your mind on. The name triggers the example in your mind.

As you explore this document, imagine a world where we expect every claim to be accompanied by an explorable analysis, and every statistic to be linked to a primary source. Imagine collecting data and designing analyses in a collaborative wiki-like manner.

The darkness is the natural dual of the adtech web, the zone of extreme overactivity above the surface of the cozyweb, with businesses trying desperately to penetrate into private spaces past the open-to-private boundary marked by email.This makes poetic sense. The adtech world is neither utopian nor dystopian. It is pragmatically mehtopian. It’s t... See more

Designing for Feel: Feel is not something we talk much about as digital product designers. It’s difficult to quantify in metrics or even describe in words, so it tends to fall to the bottom of a priority list. But we know it’s important. [...] The industrial designers talked about contours that felt gratifying in the hand and actions that provided ... 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 creat... See more

This brings me to a problem that we've been noodling on for several years, and to my mind, it still a critical open question. So when you're trying to build these end-user extensible, digital document systems, there's a few desiderata that you want: You want to be very fast. You want to be safe, in the sense of, end users aren't going to be injecti... See more