For an intelligent species, building a Dyson Sphere is a technological leap on a par with the discovery of fire for our ancestors. The transition from a planetary species to an interstellar species. It would usher in an age of exploration and expansion on a scale we can barely imagine.
[...] we simply begin with today's lightly hyperlinked documents, and let the reader's computer generate links on-demand. When I'm reading something and don't understand a particular word or want to know more about a quote, when I select it, my computer should search across everything I've read and some small high-quality subset of the Web to bring... 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.
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 feeling:... See more
You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense – the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.
Not a criticism of the demo! more a comment on the shortcomings of text as an interface. I want to be able to take some text and squish it to get a summary; smash two together to get some AI-inferred conclusions or list of disagreements. Text today is very opaque to most software
My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever ... See more