The supposition that for a changing world this ever-developing problem of the subject-approach to books was tentatively solved by an undergraduate in 1873, or definitively in 1900 by an international institute, or effectually since then by a national library, for all libraries and for all nationalities, has been edifying and comforting to many American librarians and to a few European bibliographers, but it has been an illusory assurance.

For evidently two or three "systems" have been accepted as standards, though these must be adapted to special requirements and though they have not attained to the status of "tentative standards," as maintained by associations for scientific standardization. Then there is the discomforting pessimistic negation that the immense problem is inherently and practically insoluble, that librarians and users of libraries should get along with what they have in the way of classifications or else give up the whole undertaking to classify books on the shelves. To that negation this book is a considered and positive answer.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is a 1976 book by the Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997). It explores the nature of consciousness – particularly "the ability to introspect" – and its evolution in ancient human history. Jaynes proposes that consciousness is a learned behavior rooted in language and culture rather than being innate. He distinguishes consciousness from sensory awareness and cognition. Jaynes introduces the concept of the "bicameral mind", a non-conscious mentality prevalent in early humans that relied on auditory hallucinations.

Drawing, Pen and ink and graphite on paper.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Software is ephemeral. It is building sand castles in the air, forever shifting, changing, eroding.

...But software isn’t just a digital artifact; it’s also a lever for shifting human thought and behavior. In their book Understanding Computers and Cognition, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores write:

We encounter the deep questions of design when we recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being.

I think about this quote a lot, about how the design of a tool unlocks new human capabilities, and about how changes in our capabilities influence both how we see and how we act in the world.

And this, I believe, is my own personal reason for making software. I want to help bring about new ways of being in the world, however small. New ways to think. New ways to create. New ways to share ideas with others.

A collegiate course in filing systems and procedures.

Then it struck me: the flair of filing was still here in Records Management—but it was in the implied aesthetic nature of the filing enterprise: in the alignment of tabs and arrangement of drawers. That pizzazz was to be found, too, in the style of the book itself—in its liberal use of diagrams and illustrations and photographs of state-of-the-art office equipment and fashionably dressed, well-coiffed office ladies. I figured, why not read Records Management against the grain, focusing less on the staid instruction and more on the aesthetic and even ludic nature of filing work? Why not read this textbook as a toy catalogue, or as a set of rules for a Monopoly-esque administrative game?

It's such a tactile delight. The clicks and friction and spinning disk and toggles and tilts and materiality. The tiny dotted LED display, subtle drops of color. The tight tolerances. The quirky UI. The depth of "oh, I can do THAT with THIS?" discoveries. The feeling of something esoteric being fun to master. The few-too-many controls at first glance that eventually feel right at home.

Yes it's pricey, and yes there are plenty of alternatives for far less coin, but for me, the inspiration is priceless. And supporting people doing unusual, high-quality, high-design things is worth it. I just like playing with the damn thing. I like looking at the damn thing. It gives me all sorts of ideas for my own work.

I just adore functional objects like this. Incredible imagination, incredible work.

I've written over 3,000 blog posts throughout the years. This blog has become a repository of my thoughts, feelings, experiments, hopes, and creations.

It has also become outdated, buggy, and suffers from link-rot.

So, every day, I tend to my digital garden.

...Sometimes the work is delightful - finding a prescient post from a decade ago. Sometimes it is frustrating - being unable to find a vital-but-long-dead link. And sometimes it is sad - seeing how much or how little the world has changed.

But, mostly, it is meditative. We do our best to fight against decay, but entropy always wins in the end. Every link eventually withers and every truth is eroded by time. Nevertheless, we continue.

(A song)

First of all, I would like to start by talking a little about Japan as it is today.

The image [of pace layers] is totemic for design practitioners and theorists of a certain vintage (although I’m not sure how fully it resonates with today’s digital ‘product’ design / UX/UI generation) and certainly has been something I’ve wielded over the last two decades or so.

...While talking with Bryan Boyer, I discussed the biases perhaps embedded in showing ‘fashion’ as a wiggly ‘irrational’ line compared to the other layers.

What thoughts may come from depicting all the layers as wiggly?

Critical Minerals – Geography of Energy is a multi-chapter project that explores the profound transformation in the global energy landscape – the shift towards renewable energy sources. The story delves into the intricate geopolitical, social, and environmental implications of the exponential demand for minerals necessary to achieve renewable energy goals.

...The project currently has four chapters, each focusing on a different critical mineral. It consists of four, possibly five chapters, each dedicated to a specific critical mineral: copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and we are planning to include a fifth chapter on rare earth elements.

It’s worth mentioning that in some extreme situations it’s not the internal structure of the observer that makes perceived time stop; instead it’s the underlying structure of the universe itself. As we’ve mentioned, the “progress of the universe” is associated with successive rewriting of the underlying hypergraph. But when there’s been “too much activity in the hypergraph” (which physically corresponds roughly to too much energy-momentum), one can end up with a situation in which “there are no more rewrites that can be done”—so that in effect some part of the universe can no longer progress, and “time stops” there. It’s analogous to what happens at a spacelike singularity (normally associated with a black hole) in traditional general relativity. But now it has a very direct computational interpretation: one’s reached a “fixed point” at which there’s no more computation to do. And so there’s no progress to make in time.

If large groups are not ideal, what is the perfect group size? A fascinating 2019 study explored this question by looking at citation networks. They found that papers with more authors tend to receive more citations — large teams are good at developing a field. However, they found that the smallest teams — between one and three authors — were significantly more likely to publish disruptive results that could change the course of a field. So, in terms of sheer creativity, smaller groups seem to have an advantage.

With three or more people, group think and social dynamics kick in; there is an audience to impress. Thus, the ideal group may actually be of a minimal size: two. When working with just one other person, one must remain fully focused as the pair iteratively move the discussion forward. Two people who support each other's thinking can travel far in their thinking without getting distracted. With just one other person, it is also easier to be at ease and to enjoy the experience — to get into a state of 'flow'.

Launch Tweet:

Each article deconstructs a piece of writing from an iconic writer. The goal is to give you X-Ray vision into what makes sentences and paragraphs come alive (so that you can improve at your craft).

Every example has an analysis of why the writing works. Analytical often means dry. But instead of going technical, we’ve gone technicolor. There are text-explainers, summary graphics, and videos that come together to make the writing instruction lively and multi-dimensional.

It’s a place where you can discover how great writing comes together. Where we lift up the hood and see the mechanics in action. It isn’t about giving you a set of rules to follow. It’s about showing the diversity of ways writers approach their craft, so you can develop your own style.

This book is an exploration of the evocative power of color, and more specifically gradients. This is highlighted by the haiku poems included with each gradient, haiku poetry being just as powerful in a very condensed form.

These gradients are artistic explorations more than anything else. Some will have functional utility, mostly through their base color palettes, but their main purpose is to inspire you.

Four years ago, I wrote that the SLS was a cripplingly embarrassing national failure and a tragedy waiting to happen. That remains true, of course, but now I will go further and underscore that by continuing to humor this monstrosity, NASA has squandered its technical integrity and credibility.

...Just imagine the mental agility required to actually want to work for an agency that continues to insist on technical doctrine no less absurd than “2+2=5” from top to bottom, from onboarding documentation all the way up to press releases, bilateral agreements and policy papers. Everyone at NASA knows the SLS is a looming catastrophe, but no-one can say it.

@soleio: making a note-taking app is the software designer’s version of homebrewing beer or releasing an EP

[I] had a conversation with a software engineer the other day and she said that making your own todo app and notes app is something everyone should do, since they are such personal tools. I thought that’s a really interesting way to look at it and it kind of explains why there is no one good note-taking app.

It seems, my dear friend, that the brains of the greatest men contract when they are gathered together, and that where there are more wise men, there you will also find less wisdom. The great assemblies are so preoccupied with minutiae, with formalities, and with empty orthodoxies, that essential issues are always relegated to the end.

Via @World0fEcho.

As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.

Online writing is not the same as book or magazine writing, even op-ed or letter-to-the-editor writing. To understand online writing, you also need to understand its ecosystem: online, we think together, iterating on each other and boosting ideas we like by linking to them. Online writing is conversational, social, and deeply embedded in remix culture (all the more suitable for back-linking). It’s interconnected in a way and degree that’s not possible for print formats. Much of the power of online thinking is how ideas synthesize out of the collective.

When we link in our writing, we are doing the same work as algorithms on platforms — deciding what is worth reading — but we aren’t subject to the harmful incentives that turn silos into Dante’s Inferno.

...wherein is fully handled all that relates to fine gardens, commonly called pleasure-gardens, as parterres, groves, bowling-greens etc., together with remarks and general rules in all that concerns the art of gardening.

A ha-ha (French: hâ-hâ or saut de loup), also known as a sunk fence, blind fence, ditch and fence, deer wall, or foss, is a recessed landscape design element that creates a vertical barrier (particularly on one side) while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond from the other side. The name comes from viewers' surprise when seeing the construction.

The design can include a turfed incline that slopes downward to a sharply vertical face (typically a masonry retaining wall). Ha-has are used in landscape design to prevent access to a garden by, for example, grazing livestock, without obstructing views. In security design, the element is used to deter vehicular access to a site while minimising visual obstruction.

User interfaces (UIs) are the connections between us — soft, adaptable humans — and the hard, deterministic world of data and machines.

Historically, these interfaces have been rigid, representing the deterministic logic of the machine and relying on the user to translate the hard logic into a soft, meaningful form. With the rise of LLM capabilities, our technology is newly better at acting soft and squishy. Which brings the question: how should our interfaces handle the transition from the hard logic of machines into the soft logic of humans?

...Hopefully this framework of segmenting at different scales or gradually transitioning across different dimensions can help organize our thinking.

Gel pen on black paper, 32x24cm.

Andrew Trousdale is a researcher and designer. His initiatives and projects bridge positive psychology, human-computer interaction, and the creative arts.

I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.

Heard of Shot Spotter? Microphones are installed across cities across the United States by police to detect gunshots, purported to not be very accurate. This is that, but for music.

This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.

Many companies say they care about quality, but don’t have specific efforts dedicated to it. Here are some that do:

• GitLab
• HubSpot
• Linear
• Shopify
• Stripe

Welcome to zombocom… you can do anything at zombocom… anything at all… the only limit… is yourself…

This is the Zombocom Problem: sure, it can be anything, but first it has to be something specific.

Many attempts at no-code, low-code, nodes-and-wires, end-user programming, wikis, malleable software, moldable development, super apps, protocols, and platforms have failed because of the Zombocom Problem.

People don’t want “anything at all”. They want something specific. To succeed, you need to solve a specific problem for a specific user and find specific product-market fit.

...“We’re building a platform, not a product.” If you hear this, run away. Platforms come from products, not the other way around.

Via Don Friedman:

Part of the attraction is simply that they are well-made illustrations to prove a point, but style has moved away from this kind of interior and industrial design. What was once new becomes dated, regardless of any inherent value. Or, both better and worse, is so widely accepted that it becomes ambient and we no longer really see it.

Early on at Sentry I attended an event with a number of seasoned CEOs and leaders, including one of whom worked under two sitting US presidents. They will tell you the same thing I’m telling you today: everyone makes the mistake of hiring the wrong people, and then failing to terminate the relationship in earnest. We do this because we want to give people a chance - to coach them. We do this because we want to avoid conflict. We do this because we lack confidence in our decisions. Then, when we do this, we create a mess of problems for organizations, sometimes even dooming them.

This is where the Fire Fast mentality comes into play, and anyone will happily nod along and say “yeah stop hiring shitty people”. The problem with leaving the conversation there, is often people fail to address the problems that got us into those situations. What would you have done differently to avoid hiring the wrong person? It’s a pretty straight forward question, but it’s not one that’s always easy to answer. There are however some really common scenarios that I’ve lived through, so I want to give some direct-from-the-source tips today.

That Caro’s work is still done on paper, with no digital backup to speak of, marks him as one of the last of his kind. (He had never seen a Google doc until I offered to show him one. He was mildly startled to discover that, in a shared document, the person on the other end can be seen typing in real time: “That’s amazing. What’s it called? A doc?”) The Society has his old Smith-Corona Electra 210 on display, but he’s hung on to a bunch of duplicate models and a large quantity of black cotton typewriter ribbons so he can continue to work the way he always has. He handwrites first, then types it up, triple-spacing in the old newspaper fashion, then pencil-edits and retypes, pencil-edits and retypes.

Neither givers nor takers have it 100% correct, and their conflicts often come from both sides’ insistence that the other side must convert or die. Rather than mounting an Inquisition on our interlocutors, we ought to focus on perfecting our own technique. And the way to do that, I think, is by adding a bunch of doorknobs.

When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating.

What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances.

All jobs done by large monolithic software programs can be done better by a collection of small microprograms (mostly 1 line long) working together.

Building these microprograms, aka microprogramming, is different than traditional programming. Microprogramming is more like gardening: one is constantly introducing new microprograms and removing microprograms that aren't thriving. Microprogramming is like organic city growth, whereas programming is like top-down centralized city planning. Microprogramming is putting the necessary microprograms in a petri dish, applying natural selection over time until they can beautifully and most simply solve your problem.

I am attempting to get my old MA field, the Digital Humanities (crudely speaking, a CS backdoor for humanities undergrads), to teach a management module that dispenses with lots of conventional management practices in favour of teaching something more akin to Munger/Buffett’s Unrecognised Simplicities of effective action. I’m positioning this as Hyper-Performance Management. I’ll refer to it henceforth in this article as HPM.

I want to use this to create a generation of evangelists for hyper-performance management standards who go into industry and revolutionise how they work. Management capabilities on the level of PARC/ARPA, the Apollo project, the best COVID vaccine rollouts; and management cultures like those at early 21st century Apple, Stripe, and in state structures like mid-century Singapore and Napoleonic Britain, are exceptions in the history of management.

I want to make them the norm by teaching them at the educational root, before students get into the workforce and are intellectually poisoned and/or hampered in their career by subpar management norms.

I want to prepare the alternative ahead of time.

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality. This magical project had exhausted the entire content of his soul; if someone had asked him his own name or any trait of his previous life, he would not have been able to answer.

The beauty of self-employment lies in the courage to build something, from the bottom up, that can stand on its own. The beauty of self-employment is seeing your capacity to be functional. You're taking risks. You have skin in the game. Be proud if you're building some sort of artistic, cultural, or entrepreneurial project. Even though you're not rich. You're entitled to be a tad arrogant.

Most people think that "X does whatever he wants because he's free." The reality is vice versa. He's free because he does whatever he wants.

Mathematicians have described a new class of shape that characterizes forms commonly found in nature — from the chambers in the iconic spiral shell of the nautilus to the way in which seeds pack into plants.

The work considers the mathematical concept of ‘tiling’: how shapes tessellate on a surface. The problem of filling a plane with identical tiles has been so thoroughly explored since antiquity that it’s tempting to suppose that there is nothing left to be discovered about it. But the researchers deduced the principles of tilings with a new set of geometric building blocks that have rounded corners, which they term ‘soft cells’.

An aperiodic monotile, sometimes called an "einstein", is a shape that tiles the plane, but never periodically. In this paper we present the first true aperiodic monotile, a shape that forces aperiodicity through geometry alone, with no additional constraints applied via matching conditions. We prove that this shape, a polykite that we call "the hat", must assemble into tilings based on a substitution system. The drawing above shows a patch of hats produced using a few rounds of substitution.

Back in school my professor, Canadian economics superhero Larry Smith, explained debt this way (paraphrased): debt is stupid if it's for instant gratification that you pay for later, with interest. But debt is great if it means you can make more money than the interest payments.

A family that takes on high-interest credit card debt for a visit to Disneyland is wasting money. If you think you can pay it off in a year, you'll pay 20%-ish interest for that year for no reason. You can instead save up for a year and get the same gratification next year without the 20% surcharge.

But if you want to buy a $500k machine that will earn your factory an additional $1M/year in revenue, it would be foolish not to buy it now, even with 20% interest ($100k/year). That's a profit of $900k in just the first year! (excluding depreciation)

...Debt is bad when you take out the wrong kind, or you mismanage it, or it has weird strings attached (hello Venture Debt that requires you to put all your savings in one underinsured place). But done right, debt is a way to move faster instead of slower.

From Graphic Design, March 1971, Issue 41. Via @satoshi_aizawa.

Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. 

Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.

And that is why when we think about evolving in the camera, we also rooted it very heavily in tradition. Photography is not a new thing. It’s been around for 198 years. People seem to like it.

When I was checking vitals, I suggested a smileYou didn't talk for a while, you were freezingYou said you hated my tone, it made you feel so aloneAnd so you told me I ought to be leaving

But something kept me standing by that hospital bedI should have quit, but instead I took care of youYou made me sleep and uneven, and I didn't believe themWhen they told me that there was no saving you

In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.”

“Prefer not to,” echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. “What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here—take it,” and I thrust it towards him.

“I would prefer not to,” said he.

And if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale,You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil.Consider the flowers: they don't try to look right;They just open their petals and turn to the light.

Standardised metrics might not be suitable for the diverse contexts and challenges of different places. Applying the same metrics across different communities can lead to overlooking local needs and priorities, hindering effective place-based solutions.

Metrics often encourage a focus on short-term goals and quick wins to demonstrate immediate progress. However, place-based work often requires long-term commitment and sustained efforts to address complex issues and achieve meaningful change. Some things will take years, even decades, to move the dial on.

And, from my perspective, the most damaging effect can be found in discouraging innovation. Strict adherence to metrics can stifle creativity and experimentation, which are essential for place-based approaches that need to adapt to unique local circumstances and evolve over time.

hi, im eva

im a developer and (un)professional pentester mostly interested in infosec, and a silly block game.

(non-)user events is a collaged interface that navigates personal internet experiences by quoting and close-knitting HTML elements from Polina’s browsing history. These elements, gathered from sites she visited in June 2024, are entangled in a grid-like structure, searching for areas of friction and excess, inviting viewers to move beyond seamless user experiences into poetic space where new meanings are possible.

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.

---

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.

(An experiment)

You must lower your acti­va­tion energy.

What do I mean? Well, you know, there are a lot of people out there, reading ridicu­lous bullshit, forwarding it to a dozen others without a thought.

Meanwhile, the really thoughtful readers — I suspect you are one of them — they read … and that’s it. They wouldn’t burden anyone with a link. Never that.

You see the mismatch. Different stances, each with a different network potential. One grows exponentially, while the other recedes, politely.

“Activation energy” is the minimum energy required to start a chemical reaction (including nuclear fission and nuclear fusion). Why should the bad reactions occur more easily than the good ones? Why should ridiculous bullshit propagate faster than ironic points of light?

It is my hypoth­esis that, back in the 2000s, everybody’s acti­va­tion energy was a bit lower. More of us were bloggers, back then. Linking felt more natural, somehow. Now, in the 2020s, the algo­rithms do most of that work.

You must lower your acti­va­tion energy again.

I have recently been thinking about the idea of: What does the sound say when words fall short? 

Specifically, listening in relation to faith and composing as an act of worship or prayer. This thought process was inspired by a few passages that have been circulating through my mind.

...I gravitate to such writers within this channel as their works are so committed to the art of translating and wading through the depths of music. Music not just a pleasurable or entertaining activity, but music as a lifeline. These quotes remind me of the way sound facilitates itself as a mirror or sifter of sorts, allowing us to work through what language cannot bear. Send me a song and I’ll show you your heart.

I love encountering songs that speak to that texture or tone that I can’t quite put into words. I’m even more so fascinated when the song I encounter is in a language I can’t understand, but when I look up the lyrics it describes exactly what I’m feeling.

A week ago, I was in Gothenberg, Nebraska and went to the local historical museum. I asked the volunteers there what was the most unusual, interesting, and important exhibit they had. One of them, Barbara Fisher, thought for a moment, then said, "We have a unique collection of barbed wire fence downstairs, each strand of which is specific to the ranch or tract where it was used." She must have read my mind and heart, for that is just the sort of thing that would captivate me.

...From the way the barbs were wrapped around and woven through the horizontal strands, the ranchers could tell at a glance if the land and animals enclosed within belonged to them — I call them "signature barbs" — sort of like a premodern QR code.

Timing things to happen at specific intervals is yet another way that we collectively find out that dealing with time is a hard problem. I've been noticing this while working on feed reader stuff, and I realized that it can apply to other problems.

...Here's an easy way to know if a program is on the right track: could it be run in a tight loop without causing a giant mess for other people?

$ while true; do run-my-stuff; done

If you can run something in a loop like that and not have it beat the crap out of whatever it's supposed to periodically talk to, then you're probably headed in the right direction. It also means that if the program gets into a start-crash-restart loop some day, maybe it won't unleash a hellstorm on whatever it happens to talk to.

There must be a permanent conflict between a project and its programmers: 1) the project must be configured to reject anything that lowers the quality of its artifacts and 2) programmers must be interested in making changes to those artifacts. The project cares about the quality, the programmers care about fast delivery of modifications.

...If we put these two interests in conflict, we will get a high-quality product, which is growing very fast. The project will enforce quality, programmers will push the code forward, making changes fast and frequently.

Arguments can be fallacious or poorly-worded but what is a strange or bizarre argument? Or an odd argument? Is it when someone is talking about cars and then mid-sentence changes the topic to gardening? That would be odd or bizarre. Or replies with a basketball team when asked his favorite baseball team. That would be strange. Or a misunderstanding.

What you meant to say is you disagree. This is evident by the tone and substance of the post, in which the interlocuter who purports to not understand or does not follow otherwise intimates the person who he is replying to is wrong, typically in a condescending or strongly-worded tone.

If you don’t understand something, how are you simultaneously able to disagree with it?

Tapedeck.org is a project of neckcns.com, built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette. There's an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60's functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 70's audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80's and 90's.

I met her at a party. I liked her hair. She liked my name. I made fun of her career. She gave me her number. Her friend, who was into prophecy, told her I would be her future husband. It still took work, but it helps to have Providence on your side.

It also helped that I was unemployed.

...There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility. This is actually a consequence of a fairly general theorem about how to find treasure in complex search spaces: The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally don’t seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. Biological evolution, in practice, works through a diversity of niches which it explores in parallel to find unpredictable advances.

The key implication is that while you have not yet found the unique opportunity that will be the engine and purpose of your empire, you have to adjust your sense of value. Value is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is. That’s how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.

In my puzzle collection, there are many games in which you have to connect points together by edges, making a graph, and the puzzle rules say you must avoid making any loop in the graph. Examples are Net, Slant, and some configurations of Bridges (although not the default one). Loopy and Pearl also care about whether there’s a loop in a graph, although those two are more subtle: your aim is to make a loop, and only wrong loops must be rejected.

Therefore, those puzzle programs need to be able to check whether a graph has a loop in it, in order to decide whether the puzzle solution is correct. If there is a loop, they also have to identify the edges that make up the loop, in order to point out to the player why their solution hasn’t been accepted.

Over the years I’ve been developing these puzzles, I’ve gone through an amazing number of algorithms for doing that job. Each one was unsatisfactory for some reason, and I threw it away, and moved on to the next.

I might by now have collected all the ways to do this job wrong! So I thought I’d write up all my mistakes, as a case study in all the ways you can solve this particular problem wrongly – and also in how much effort you can waste by not managing to find the existing solution in the literature.

I’m trying off and on to develop a juiciness theory of software aesthetics where programs are judged by how well they create or strengthen a sense of juiciness.

Juiciness relates to fruits and berries, these miraculous objects that emerge from the soil with firm boundaries, beautiful contours, cohesive juicy alluring wholenesses that are intrinsically desirable.

...It also relates to Christopher Alexander’s theory of centers being self-coherent nexuses that strengthen the surrounding overall field generated by other nested centers.

...Juice itself is less juicy when it’s extracted to a smooth clear liquid. Maximal juiciness is like a grapefruit or blackberry, because the essence of juiciness involves liquid being contained in a crisp cellular packet.

And therein lies the joy of reference books: You as the reader can make them comply with the demands of your knowledge, intellect and time constraints, not vice versa. We have all continued slogging through books we weren’t really enjoying because we were a third of the way through and it didn’t seem right to not finish them. (Yes, this is an example of the sunk cost fallacy—it’s also a very human fallacy, especially in an environment in which reading is gamified by completion). 

Nobody has ever scolded themselves for failure to complete a reference book. They are intended to be used as the reader demands—nothing more. You owe no obeisance to the author; there is no pretense of a conversation.

...Curated well, organized logically, illustrated with appropriate diagrams and maps, reference books can be a joy. And I suspect they’re a joy that many of us share, even if we are loath to say so publicly for fear of being labeled midwitted.

How do we even start to talk about complexity? You might have heard about the term coupling in software. Ideally, systems prefer loose coupling over tight coupling; that is, we try to reduce the amount of interdependencies on any two parts of a system so that if we need to swap out a component, it is easier to do. This becomes important in software because software must change over time, so reducing the complexity between parts will also help reduce the burden of change. But have you of Connascence? This term helps us measure how intertwined parts of your system might be.

Two components are connascent if a change in one would require the other to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system. — Meilir Page-Jones

...The connascence ranges from weak to strong and from static to dynamic. Counterintuitively, the weaker and more static the connascence, the easier the system is to change. The stronger and more dynamic the connascence, the more complex the system is to change.

We have rituals of decision-making. Some of those rituals of decision making are truly in our best interest, some of them are socially important, and some of them are… I think Jason Fried said it best when he said that bureaucracy is scar tissue based on previous traumatic events, and those previous traumatic events happened.

Like, a lot of the craziness around NASA, for example, is downstream of the Challenger explosion and also downstream of many people lining up for pork for very many years and us wanting to cut down on the corruption and have more efficiency in government; all good things. [But] we found ourselves – the societal ‘we’ – we found ourselves very constrained by scar tissue that had piled up over the years.

I have to think that “Against Rereading,” by Oscar Schwartz, is a massive troll, because the alternative — that Schwartz believes himself to be so omnicompetent a reader, so perfect in his perception, so masterful in his judgment, that he absorbs all that even the greatest book has to offer with a single reading — is unpleasant to contemplate. Or maybe there’s one more possibility: that — like Kafka’s hunger artist, who never found a food he liked — Schwartz has never been sufficiently interested in a book to return to it. 

But surely he makes one important point: the problem with our culture today is definitely all those people who don’t want ceaseless novelty. Definitely.

I’m almost certain he’s just trolling, though.

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.

Most fields have a problem with ‘ghost knowledge’, hard-won practical understanding that is mostly passed on verbally between practitioners and not written down anywhere public. At least in programming some chunk of it makes it into forum posts. It’s normally hidden in the depths of big threads, but that’s better than nothing.

I decided to read a bunch of these visual programming threads and extract some of this folk wisdom into a more accessible form.

Let me argue that the actual dawn of user interface design first happened when computer designers finally noticed, not just that end users had functioning minds, but that a better understanding of how those minds worked could completely shift the paradigm of interaction.

While the general concept of a wiki is thus extremely well known, somewhat less well known is the history of wiki development. Wikis were an outgrowth of the development of what is known as "pattern languages" in software, or as they are sometimes referred to, "design patterns." As we describe below, they were in fact developed as tools to facilitate efficient sharing and modifying of patterns. In part for this reason, the structure of wikis itself bears a relationship to the structure of patterns and pattern languages—a relationship that, as we will also discuss, offers intriguing new opportunities. This relationship, and the evolving opportunities it presents, will be a central focus of this paper.

Specifically, we will present a new approach to wiki that includes greater capacity to handle and process quantitative elements. This new approach makes greater use of the logic of pattern languages within the structure of wiki pages. It also exploits the power of "federated" open-source development, as we will explain below.

While language model (LM)-powered chatbots and generative search engines excel at answering concrete queries, discovering information in the terrain of unknown unknowns remains challenging for users. To emulate the common educational scenario where children/students learn by listening to and participating in conversations with their parents/teachers, we create Collaborative STORM (Co-STORM). Unlike QA systems that require users to ask all the questions, Co-STORM lets users observe and occasionally steer the discourse among several LM agents. The agents ask questions on the user's behalf, allowing the user to discover unknown unknowns serendipitously. To facilitate user interaction, Co-STORM assists users in tracking the discourse by organizing the uncovered information into a dynamic mind map, ultimately generating a comprehensive report as takeaways.

There are relatively few open literature reports that provide empirical descriptive studies of intelligence analysis and that link these into the context of expertise and work. This paper, based on first results from a cognitive task analysis and verbal protocols, gives a broad brush description of intelligence analysis as an example of sensemaking. It then suggests some possible leverage points where technology might be applied.

...The analyst's conceptual schema sometimes play a central role in the intelligence activities. Many forms of intelligence analysis are what we might call sensemaking tasks. Such tasks consist of information gathering, re-representation of the information in a schema that aids analysis, the development of insight through the manipulation of this representation, and the creation of some knowledge product or direct action based on the insight. In a formula:

Information → Schema → Insight → Product

The re-representation may be informally in the analyst's mind or aided by a paper and pencil or computer-based

Annotation tools feel great to use, but they don’t support the follow-up thinking you need to do. Text editors give you a flexible canvas for making sense of snippets, but their design is often cumbersome and disorienting when used in this way. If you could move fluidly between these tools, you could use each where it excels and, perhaps, get the best of both worlds. In this paper, we present Latticework, a system which unifies annotation with freeform text editing, in the context of personal knowledge management tools.

[In Latticework], you forage through messy source documents, accumulating key snippets into a working document for sensemaking (i.e. rearranging and elaborating that material for insight). But, as prior work has described, this process isn’t linear. It’s often convenient to do a bit of preliminary sensemaking in the midst of foraging; conversely, observations you uncover during sensemaking will often lead to another round of foraging, and so on, in a loop.

Latticework’s main goal, then, is to enable fluid movement between these foraging and sensemaking stances. By extension, that means fluid movement between acting on source documents (which emphasize foraging) and on your working document (which emphasizes sensemaking). Ideally, you should be able to shift your focus as it makes sense in the moment, and the work you do in each place should remain visible in the other.

We remain excited about this platform and have become increasingly confident that it embodies important new ideas. We will explain.

In public we say federated wiki to distinguish our work from other wiki implementations. Here when we say wiki we mean this wiki, federated wiki.

...Wiki's roots go back to pattern languages where pages represent information that can be applied in the context created by its antecedents. We extend application to computations performed by plugins using data found before it in the lineup.

Ping Practice is a method for developing a practice of unblocking yourself.

You can think of the method a bit like using a pause button or a camera...

When you notice yourself resonating with or resisting something, the method invites you to name what's giving rise to that sensation and then letting it go.

No categorizing or sensemaking. In these tiny moments, you’re simply creating a breadcrumb for your future self.

...A ping can take on any form: word, phrase, title, rhyme, name, lyric, quote, place, color, texture, melody, idea, feeling, etc.

The most important thing about Pings – and what differentiates them from other thoughts – is that a Ping is language that moves you, "clicks," or otherwise causes you to feel something in your body.

You are likely encountering a Ping if the movement or attraction you sense seems intuitive, automatic, reflexive, and happens without thinking...as if what you are encountering relates to something latent within you.

About once a year, I like to take a step back from the news cycle and write about a different kind of platform: the productivity tools that attempt to harness artificial intelligence and other innovations to make us better at our jobs.

A year ago this week, I wrote here about why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. In short, it took me too long to learn, software can’t automate your thinking. But I do think it can create the conditions for improved thinking: for making new connections between ideas; for reducing the number of times during the day that your attention flits from one app to the next; and for organizing your reading and making it more useful to you in the future.

With that in mind, here are three apps I started using since I last wrote about that subject — and some free alternatives for folks seeking cheaper alternatives.

I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated.

I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper and a pencil and I feel unbelievably organised and flexible, day-to-day. It’s because it’s simple. There’s nothing fancy. No fancy pen or anything like that either. Just a notebook and a pencil.

I’m in an ultra busy period right now so for future me when you inevitably get back to this situation: just. use. fucking. paper.

The patterns delineated here have not yet been classified by a Linnaeus of human bondage. They are all, perhaps, strangely, familiar.

In these pages I have confined myself to laying out only some of those I actually have seen. Words that come to mind to name them are: knots, tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, binds.

I could have remained closer to the 'raw' data in which these patterns appear. I could have distilled them further towards an abstract logico-mathematical, calculus. I hope they are not so schematized that one may not refer back to the very specific experiences from which they derive; yet that they are sufficiently independent of 'content', for one to divine the final formal elegance in these webs of maya.

Knots, a 1970 book by the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, is based around a collection of patterns of human thinking, metacognition, and theory of mind, drawn from real experience with patients but turned into abstracted examples. The approach has the potential to be adapted into a range of formats which enable systemic design phenomena such as recursion, reflexivity, theory of mind, and second-order effects in systems to be explored, as a way of thinking about systems for design students and adding to their conceptual vocabulary, but potentially also as a method for doing research with people.

This paper illustrates example 'new knots' around topics including sharing data, social media, clickbait, and 'smart' homes.

What if all the world's inside of your headJust creations of your own?Your devils and your gods all the living and the deadAnd you're really all aloneYou can live in this illusionYou can choose to believeYou keep looking but you can't find the woodsWhile you're hiding in the trees

What if everything around youIsn't quite as it seemsWhat if all the world you used to knowIs an elaborate dream?And if you look at your reflectionIs that all you want it to be?What if you could look right through the cracksWould you find yourself — find yourself afraid to see?

Imagine you bake a delicious peach pie over the weekend, and you offer a slice to your friend. They respond:

“Wait, how is this different from every other peach pie that’s ever been baked? It seems really similar to another pie I had recently.”

This is obviously an absurd reaction!

But this exact dynamic happens all the time in creative software projects. Someone shares a project they made, and the first reaction is: how’s it different?

The problem here is a mismatch in values.

The friend has assumed that your goal is to “efficiently” reach the goal of a delicious pie, or perhaps even to create a new kind of pie. But that’s not the goal at all!

Baking a pie is a creative act. It’s personal, it’s inherently delightful, it’s an act of caring for others. It’s also a craft that one can improve at over time. Just buying the “best” pie would defeat the point.

A few months ago, David Kellam told me that you've only got principles if you suffer for them sometimes, and a local CTO named Alan Perkins regaled me with a story of walking out into the worst job market of his life after being told to do something illegal. At what point do funny blog rants go from just that, some funny posts, to someone complaining about a self-inflicted situation?

...The next time that someone says I've "spoken truth to power", I hope that I'll be able to look at my tower of responsibilities and the empty pits that used to contain my savings and think "I earned it this time".

In the summer of 1975, I began spying on my neighbors across the way while kneeling on my younger brother’s bed.

There was the constantly arguing family with a drunken dad, miserable mom and confused children. The parents screamed at one another constantly, cussing like pirates as though that was the only way they knew how to communicate.

Downstairs from them resided a single mom with two beautiful daughters. Their window was directly across from mine. Most nights their shade was down, but from the glow of their ceiling light, I could see whenever someone entered the room. Then, one night the oldest girl pulled up the shade. She didn’t seem surprised to have caught me peeping. “Hello,” she said boldly. I almost fell off the bed I was so shocked.

...It’s been 49 summers since I’ve seen her, but I still imagine India’s voice providing background vocals to the pop songs of 1975 and picture her pretty face whenever the Technicolor classic Rear Window streams across the computer screen.

Design criticism usually attracts attention when it critiques a big subject, like the latest iPhone update or the Tesla Cybertruck or a new starchitect building. But much design is tiny, subtle, easy to overlook. Hardly anybody bothers to critique that stuff — but, of course, sometimes it’s the little things that are worth noticing, for better or for worse.

So today I offer the first in what I imagine will be an occasional series: Tiny Design Critic. The first subject: A WikiHow page.

Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

If you want to make an effective organizational change and are struggling, look at the communication structure and the culture. If you try to fight against this, you’ll hit significant friction, as I experienced this year. Thoughtworks introduced the idea of the Inverse Conway Maneuver to address this. It’s a framework for building low-risk experiments and autonomous teams that are empowered to make changes in an org while sidestepping the constraints of the existing communication structures.

Via Tokyo Cowboy, Hiroshi Nagai: Japan's Sun-drenched Americana:

Inspired heavily by the concepts behind American pop art and the styles of British pop artists such as David Hockney, Nagai focused on imaginations of a 1950s Americana landscape. Adapting the deep blue skies, relaxed ocean side settings and sleepy nighttime cityscapes from previous pop artists, Nagai developed his own style throughout the late 1970s. His work finally began to gain traction in Japan around the turn of the 1980’s and this coincided fortuitously with the rise of City Pop.

Each pixel on your monitor is actually composed of three sub-pixels: one red, one green, and one blue. On an LCD monitor, subpixels are usually three thin strips in a row (though on some monitors, they may be three bars arranged vertically).

...I was thinking about this, and I decided to try something.

...By using 2x5 grids for each character, you can create more detailed 5x5-subpixel characters. Since the blue phosphor in the rightmost column is never used, it can serve as a separator and allow characters to be placed right next to each other without a pixel in between. However, the characters are slightly more recognizable to the naked eye at actual size.

The technique probably isn't useful for encryption or steganography, but it does look cool. It could be used to create small text "microdots" to exchange with your friends. Unfortunately, on CRT monitors or some LCDs with different subpixel layouts, the effect cannot be seen correctly.

Benjamin Franklin wrote and published Poor Richard's Almanack annually from 1732 to 1758. Paper was expensive and printing difficult and time-consuming. The type would be inked, the sheet of paper laid on the press, the apprentices would press the sheet, by turning a big screw. Then the sheet was removed and hung up to dry. Then you can do another printing of the same page. Do this ten thousand times and you have ten thousand prints of a sheet. Do it ten thousand more to print a second sheet. Then print the second side of the first sheet ten thousand times and print the second side of the second sheet ten thousand times. Fold 20,000 sheets into eighths, cut and bind them into 10,000 thirty-two page pamphlets and you have your Almanacks.

Each of the "subway lines" above are actually webrings! That means that each "station" is actually a webpage with at least one navigation widget like seen below.

To "ride" the subway, click an arrow in one of the widgets below, find the widget on the next webpage, and continue clicking through to new pages! Eventually you'll end up back here.

A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization — and it has to say something completely different from the first half.

A cat        Incomplete:
without          A chair
a chair:         without
Incomplete.       a cat.

This software license is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! Writing this software and associated documentation files (the "Software") was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This Software is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and syntax.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the mind, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of incoherence. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this software digitally or intellectually.

Via Raymond Camden.

Here's one way to think about how a Johnny.Decimal system works. In this simple analogy, an area is a shelf, a category is a box, and an ID is a manila folder.

Step 1: Buy ten shelvesStep 2: Add some boxesStep 3: File your stuff in folders

...Let's return to our computer. The shelves have become our area folders. The boxes are category folders. And the manila folders are the IDs where we save our files.

Benefits:

• It provides structure
• They're easy to communicate
• Things stay where they are
• It imposes limits (The 'no more than ten' concept is at the heart of Johnny.Decimal)

I’d raised the bar for my daily [journal] entries, and didn’t have the energy to meet it. But instead of just lowering the bar and going back to boring/ugly entries, perfectionist thinking kicked in. If I couldn’t make it good, why do it at all?

...Thankfully, I was eventually able to shake myself out of those thoughts and come back to just getting something, anything on the page at the end of the day. But there was a while there were I really thought I may as well put the journal in the bin.

I had to remind myself that it’s okay to lower the bar. That an average version of something is better than a perfect version of nothing. All I can do is have a go.

Scientific papers straddle two worlds. They’re thoughtfully crafted prose documents, but they’re also computational documents containing data analyses and visualizations. Today, the prose and computational parts of a paper often live in different environments and tools, which causes friction for teams of scientists.

...We wondered: what if one collaboration environment could host both the text of the paper and the data visualization code, making it seamless to edit them together?

The demo shows a web-based collaboration environment with provenance — information about how computed artifacts were generated from source material. By keeping track of provenance, we know when an output file needs to be rebuilt, and we know how to do it. We can also use provenance to create a map of the project.

Recently, Berkeley has rediscovered an apartment building type that’s common in much of the world: the 8-story block on a small lot...While currently rare in the United States, this is a type of apartment building that’s popular in much of the world, especially in middle income countries.

...The ground floor of these buildings have small storefronts that take up most of the ground floor. The entrance for residents is small, with just a door or gate on the street. This type of building works very well in pedestrianized areas with narrow streets.

...Elsewhere in the world, these workhorse buildings are the unsung heroes of urban housing, providing the bulk of homes in many places.

I like to describe my job in terms of “The Door Problem”.

Premise: You are making a game.

• Are there doors in your game?
• Can the player open them?
• Can the player open every door in the game?
• Or are some doors for decoration?
• How does the player know the difference?
• Can doors be locked and unlocked?
• What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?
• How does the player open a door?
• Do they just walk up to it and it slides open? Does it swing open? Does the player have to press a button to open it?
• Do doors lock behind the player?
• ...

It’s a pretty classic design problem. SOMEONE has to solve The Door Problem, and that someone is a designer.

“CEO-ification” refers to the trend of nonprofits and charities to increasingly mirror corporate and military structures. Often they will adopt similar language, hierarchies, and strategic approaches.

...In truth this stemmed from Taylorism, also known as Scientific Management. This theory was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century, but influenced today’s corporate language by introducing efficiency-focused terms like “time and motion studies” and “optimised workflows.”

...I spoke to Bryony Shannon about this on the Let’s Talk Ideas podcast. Bryony argues that the words we choose reflect our values and feelings, and shape how we think and act. She argues that when language focuses on processes, bureaucracy, and transactions, it can reduce people from individuals to labels – like “service user” or “case.” These words distance us from the very people we were employed to develop relationships with.

Those relationships then become mere transactions. As Rob Mitchell has said, when you’ve got a form and a process for every relationship “Love becomes relationships. Relationships become processes. Processes get processed.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor would have loved today’s world of process, customer segmentation and journey mapping. Such methodologies can approach humans lives as something that can be managed just like a car production line, or a canning factory producing baked beans.

This is the soul of what was lost in the jump from terminals to GUIs. Terminals, as the spiritual descendants of punchcard automation, invite you to marshal armies of automata. The GUI puts you at the center of the HCI loop and waits for each click or press—you turn the crank.

...If GUI is manual, and automation is automatic, maybe AI opens up the possibility of semi-automatic software?

The failure mode of automation is literalism and lack of reasonable limits on behavior = brittle. But LLMs are good at doing what you mean, not just what you say.

The semantic system of graphical relations.

The graphical expression of semantic relations.

---

The first words placed define the space.

Wada Sanzō (1883-1967) was an artist, teacher, costume and kimono designer during a turbulent time in avant-garde Japanese art and cinema. Wada was ahead of his time in developing traditional and Western-influenced colour combinations, helping to lay the foundations for contemporary colour research. Based on his original 6-volume work from the 1930s, this book offers 348 color combinations, as attractive and sensuous as the book's own design.