You want to start with a problem or question when you’re reading. And again you want to read books together in groups, and you want one of the early books to make the whole thing real or emotionally vivid to you. If you travel to a place that’ll do it automatically, but if you’re not traveling you want the book to do it, so your early book choice... See more
Cosmic vertigo is how it feels to be overcome by all that is beyond the earth. But we forget about all that it means so quickly. We are stardust and the cosmos is our mother.
I think that’s what’s required to build great websites and teach the next generation of web folk. Ultimately we need to unthink of these things as tools for developers and see them for what they really are; a playground, a wellspring, for making websites.
These projects, Victor says, are just “nibbles around the edges” of his larger obsession: how the media in which we choose to represent our ideas shape (and too often, limit) what ideas we can have. “We have these things called computers, and we’re basically just using them as really fast paper emulators,” he says. “With the invention of the... See more
Disruptive innovations have weird metabolisms. They have a cost structure and product-market fit that are alien—even toxic—to incumbents, like blue-green algae eating sunlight and generating oxygen. Incumbent companies can’t adapt to it. It’s not in their DNA.
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?