Tanuj

But contemporary technologists cannot rely only on definitions made by those who are not engaged in the practice of technological creation. Instead, we must define technology for ourselves.

It can be dizzying when you think about the size of the universe compared to yourself. Or the fact that everything that keeps you alive hangs in perfect balance, based on our planet’s position. Perhaps you look at the stars at night and feel like you are being sucked toward them. Like you are being consumed by the expanse around you. [That... See more

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

This is because the Desktop was originally designed in 1973 to suit a very different need in computation—the need to mirror digital content with its physical equivalent (WYSIWYG, anyone?). But in a post-Internet world (at the cusp of 5G and the AI singularity, I might add), the way we consume and produce content has largely moved away from the... See more

Chatting with @camwiese today about his New World's Fair (which hopes to paint an optimistic, definite vision of the future), I noticed how these projects so often turn to *retro*futurism in art direction. What would a now-rooted, forward-facing hopepunk aesthetic look like?

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.... See more

Viewing a technology as a purely neutral object is ignoring the human intention designed into it, the meaning that humans give to the technology we interact with, and the incredible agency involved in a technologist’s work.

But regardless of missing features, the biggest disappointment of all developer tools in every browser is the unanswered question that lies at the very heart of them all: what about the fun? Because today I see DevTools as merely a command line for the web (the web developers won whilst the cypher punks and the dark web hacker dweebs lost). There’s... See more

An Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, is an app used by programmers to develop software. [...] IDEs provide a kind of augmented cognition for programmers. They reduce the cognitive capacity needed for software development by automating some of the work. This is freeing: it allows programmers to think less about coding, and more about... See more