Tanuj

The web is open-ended, and continues to produce plot twists. WebAssembly is one of these. It is a universal bytecode runtime, designed to run fast low-level code in a sandbox. Why does this matter?

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.

First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it way, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. Now, some things actually... See more

Why didn’t the web disrupt mobile?A computer that could go everywhere with you? This turned out to be a big deal. Mobile ate the world. It was a Great Oxidation Event.

Technology is not neutral. These tools, processes and systems favour some paths and necessarily disfavour others. The technology-maker decides what to value and endorse, helping to perpetuate some moral slant or system. Even if two technologies have the same ends, differing paths can generate divergent consequences — Facebook and Instagram might... See more

The best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is they're a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few simple stories.

And then there’s this 89-year-old grandmother, who got dressed nicely and put her paintings up for display at an art showing, and guess what? No one fucking came. Then she packed up her paintings and drove home, feeling “foolish.” You know what that is? It’s cluey as shit. Especially her choice of the word foolish in particular. I really don’t need... See more

Again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and when something is in the form of a story, often we remember it when we shouldn't.

It’s tempting to think ‘So what?’ and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that’s what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal... See more