Tanuj

“The bigger part of it is just in finding the right ways of thinking, finding the right representations of abstractions, so people can think thoughts that they couldn’t think before.“The example I like to give is back in the days of Roman numerals, basic multiplication was considered this incredibly technical concept that only official... See more

Names are excellent for creating larger chunks, since when done right, they pack lots of information into a single sentence.

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

The browser has historically been a thick platform for thin apps. The browser engine does most of the heavy lifting. It gives you a standard interaction model, standard affordances, standard accessibility features, standard tags, standard scripting environment. Things like Google can be built on top of the open web because everything is written... See more

Why put "expandable explanations" in your writing?1. The reader can get the background information they need – just-in-time, not just-in-case – all without: a) you re-explaining the basics for every article, or b) your reader breaking the flow of reading by clicking a link to yet another article.2. So your reader can tailor your article to their... See more

The computer can look at every word on the page, every phrase, name, quote, and section of text, and show me a "map" of the words and ideas behind which lay the most interesting ideas I might want to know about. Links are no longer lonesome strands precariously holding together a sparsely connected Web, but a booming choir of ephemeral connections... See more

If you’re trying to do impossible things, this effect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

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?

we should directly tie the success of our technologies to how much they enable our humanity (as in, our positive human characteristics), and use this criteria to evaluate past, present and future technologies.