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
To the extent that the web has been difficult to kill, it is because it is evolvable. The web started as a way for scientists to share papers, and then evolved into new niches, including e-commerce, wikis, flash games, blogs, web apps, streaming video, social media, office suites, chat apps, design tools... It keeps finding new fits, and changing... See more
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
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.
In the introduction to his “Kill Math” project — actually a quite benign, if broadly ambitious, attempt to reimagine mathematical notation in more intuitive and visual terms — Victor declares that “the power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract... See more
I think these are symptoms of chronic, pervasive problems with the way we develop and interact with software. Messing up my formatting upon copy-and-paste is a data-corruption bug, but we don’t think of it this way. Imagine if every time you copied something, half the letters would just come out randomly scrambled.
If you have more categories, you can categorise things better. I think building these categories is worthwhile. Having a common name for a situation is a chunk you can unpack when needed. That’s what all adages, aphorisms, and proverbs are.