Matt Webb

What I like about multiplayer cursors, cursor chat, and shared highlighting is that it’s like the opposite of a feature...

It’s not differentiation. It wouldn’t dilute me if you did it too. (But it shouldn’t be a browser feature, it’s part of the site, it’s me designing the vibe for this particular place.)

It doesn’t stand out. If there’s nobody else on this site you wouldn’t even notice.

It should be everywhere. It’s how the web should be.

• we’re beginning to visualise the previously invisible deep structure of text
• comparatively
• in real-time
• and then we’re learning how to manipulate text based on these hidden features.

I’m reminded of that famous series of photographs, The Horse in Motion, from 1878.

Until that moment, neither scientists nor the public knew whether or not all four of a horse’s hooves came off the ground when it runs. Imagine! It was a controversy!

The camera was a new instrument that showed what was already present, but inaccessible to the human eye.

But the camera isn’t just a scientific instrument like the, I don’t know, Large Hadron Collider. By the Saturday Evening Post, here are 5 Unintended Consequences of Photography (2022):

Photography Decided Elections
Photography Created Compassion
Photography Liberated Art
Photography Shaped How Americans Look
Photography Gave Us an Appreciation of Time

So the camera doesn’t just observe and record, it changes us.

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Text is becoming something new, that’s what I mean.

We’re inventing the camera and Photoshop simultaneously, and all their cultural repercussions, and to begin with this means new apps with new user interfaces, and where it goes after that I have no idea.

Given there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?

Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but

neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.

Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.

Lynch puts forward five primitive elements: paths (e.g. streets); edges (e.g. uncrossable rivers); districts; nodes (e.g. street corners); landmarks (e.g. a recognisable building). Each element has an intuitive way to sketch it, as if on the back of a napkin.

...Lynch’s five primitives comprise a notation.

It’s composable. A small number of simple elements can be combined, according to their own grammar, for more complex descriptions. There’s no cap on complexity; this isn’t paint by numbers. The city map can be infinitely large.

Compositions are shareable. And what’s more, they’re degradable: a partial map still functions as a map; one re-drawn from memory on a whiteboard still carries the gist. So shareable, and pragmatically shareable.

Not only are maps in this notation functional for communication, but it’s possible to look at a sketched city map and deconstruct it into its primitive elements (without knowing Lynch’s system) and see how to use those elements to extend or correct the map, or create a whole new one. So the notation is learnable.

As soon as I make something, I think of the 100 things I want to have next. That’s why prototyping is good. You don’t need to have much imagination, you just listen to what the prototype tells you.

It’s a green floating arrow that always points to the middle of the Milky Way.

i.e. 26,000 light years towards the supermassive central black hole, Sagittarius A*.

Hyperlinks should look different if it’s busy at the other end. Like: maybe they should be noisy, or glow, or have a yellow halo that gets bigger and bigger

I’ve found myself looking at architecture to pick up hints on designing multiplayer apps. Or rather: the coming ecosystem of multiplayer apps.

The web is social in lots of ways. Zoom calls are high-bandwidth group video; Google Docs are low-bandwidth group presence and chat. Discord has at-my-own-pace group interaction and live voice channels.

These islands of social interaction are joining up. Increasingly the web is going multiplayer (and yes yes the metaverse too) and we step between them – desktop to Slack to Zoom to Figma.

BUT – how should it feel to move between them?

1. I want it to feel intuitive
2. I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs.

And the second of those is weird, right? It’s like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick.

That’s platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together.

In the early 1980s in Japan, a movement called mini-FM blossomed: a thousand tiny radio stations broadcast over just half a mile each.

One of the first stations was Radio Home Run, broadcast by Tetsuo Kogawa and his students from 1983–1996 in the Shimokitazawa neighbourhood of Tokyo.

...The intention was to change broadcast: The area that a one-watt transmitter covers is within walking or bicycling distance.

And so that early station Radio Home Run became a collective experience:

Radio Home Run transformed listeners into producers by inviting people tuning in to physically travel to the station’s nearby studio.

• The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
• Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
• Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.

It’s been 19 years since Pixar released Monsters, Inc. with all that CGI hair. Where are my hairy icons? Ones that get all long and knotted as the notifications number goes up.

Why can’t I feel my phone? I found that paper from 2010 (when I was complaining about keyboards) about using precision electrostatics to make artificial textures on touchscreens.

I should be able to run my thumb over my phone while it’s in my pocket and feel bumps for apps that want my attention. Touching an active element should feel rough. A scrollbar should *slip. Imagine the accessibility gains. But honestly I don’t even care if it’s useful: 1.5 billion smartphone screens are manufactured every year. For that number, I expect bells. I expect whistles.

It’s such an eternal cognitive location, night driving.

Different thoughts come when you access that state.

Like writing PowerPoint in hotel lobbies.

...I think you access something other and special when you escape time, escape selfhood, whether that’s driving in the dark or sitting in a hotel lobby or walking, that’s another one.

It does a disservice to this cognitive state to believe that it can be found only with psychedelics or meditation or whatever, whereas there are mundane apertures too.

The tech am I digging recently is a software framework called LangChain which does something pretty straightforward: it makes it easy to call OpenAI’s GPT, say, a dozen times in a loop to answer a single question, and mix in queries to Wikipedia and other databases.

This is a big deal because of a technique called ReAct...[which] looks innocuous but here’s the deal: instead of asking GPT to simply do smart-autocomplete on your text, you prompt it to respond in a thought/act/observation loop.

My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help.

There’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”

A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:

• With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
• With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.

We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.

In April, Nat Friedman posted on X:

Instead of leaf blowers, I want a quiet little robot that picks leaves up one at a time and puts them in a bag, at night while I’m sleeping.

By August, a small team had made it.

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Look, you lazy trillionaires.

Give me a robot that can defrag my home.

Let me point at any object and say where it should be instead.

That toy should be upstairs. Those shoes should be in the tub. Move any used crockery to where the dishwasher is. All t-shirts older than X years should be gathered for recycling.

Overnight, and while we’re out, the domestic defrag robot moves all the things to other rooms, upstairs and downstairs, and stacks like objects neatly.

It doesn’t move at all if anyone is present.

It doesn’t matter how unhurried it is. It has all the time in the world.

Use feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place.

Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. And you get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the feed.

You just need a special app called a newsreader.

This site explains how to get started.

The Codex Justinianus (534 AD), being the book of law for ancient Rome at that time, banned magicians and, in doing so, itemised the types:

• A haruspex is one who prognosticates from sacrificed animals and their internal organs;
• a mathematicus, one who reads the course of the stars;
• a hariolus, a soothsayer, inhaling vapors, as at Delphi;
• augurs, who read the future by the flight and sound of birds;
• a vates, an inspired person - prophet;
• chaldeans and magus are general names for magicians;
• maleficus means an enchanter or poisoner.

I happen to have spent my career in a number of fields that promise to have some kind of claim to supernatural powers: design, innovation, startups…

It’s not hard to run through a few archetypes of the people in those worlds, and map them onto types of ancient magician.

• Those like Steve Jobs (with his famous Reality Distortion Field) who can convincingly tell a story of the future, and by doing so, bring it about by getting others to follow them – prophets.
• Inhaling the vapours and pronouncing gnomic truths? You’ll find all the thought leaders you want in Delphi, sorry, on LinkedIn.
• Those with a good intuition about the future who bring it to life with theatre, and putting people in a state of great excitement so they respond – ad planners. Haruspex.
• Those who have the golden mane of charisma: enchanters. Startup founders.
• People with a great aptitude for systems and numbers, who can tell by intuition what will happen, from systems that stump the rest of us. We call them analysts now. MBAs. Perhaps the same aptitude drew them to read the stars before? Mathematicus.

To use slightly different terms, mutual appreciation is a healthy jealousy without envy – a drive to achieve the same but without wanting to take it from the other.

My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home.

Ternary plots seem to promote asking: well what if we could move slightly over there? Where are the tipping points, what’s the terrain? How would we explore this unmapped region?

150, Dunbar’s number, is the natural size of human social groups. Robin Dunbar’s 1993 paper, where he put forward this hypothesis, is a great read – it’s got twists and turns, so much more in it than just the 150 number.

It’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash.

It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this.

The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you.

Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be:

• In a video call
• In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others
• In a doc together
• On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around

And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.

Is code synesthesia a thing? If so mine is visceral, kinaesthetic.

Maybe really great engineers have a totally different way of seeing code, in the same way that great chess players feel patterns and potential fields on the board?

Maybe the design of my code editor should learn from great engineers and amplify whatever synesthetic intuitions they might have: inner loops should appear crisper on the screen; editing compound conditionals should wobble just enough to make you seasick.

I like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths.

Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain.

So because I’d like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, I’m putting them here.

Storm Doris
Mimecom
Cloudbleed
Athleisure
Cromwell
H7N9
Trappist-1
... (+448)

There’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. A micromort is "a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." For example:

• skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump
• running a marathon: 26 micromorts
• 1 micromort: walking 17 miles, or driving 230 miles

Generally being alive averages out at 24 micromorts/day.