- milestones from the year
- ^e39dbc ↗
- how has my purpose / the way i describe my mission evolved?
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- artefacts as creating promises ↗
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- ”* Interesting to see how often liberal arts are paired with “save the world”-esque questions that grapple with the state of humanity and ask themselves, what can poetry do? Why is this never done for computing? or when it is done, you see a corrupted version (or people automatically assume that Silicon Valley -> Venture Capitalists -> Facebook -> Bad).” ↗
- ”* I’m thinking about the poetry of computing as I read Upstream
- she writes about an elemental poetry that concerns the spiritual condition of the body. It refers to a wakefulness, an awareness, an attitude towards the world.
- #research/questions What is the equivalent of this sort of attitude towards computing? I think it is right to categorize agentic attitudes towards computing under this, but there’s something else beyond agency, where you look at computing and the internet as a medium for beautiful things. Is it that you look at the people and the emergent, natural phenomenon that come from it? This is a bit different (and maybe dangerous?) compared to the way you would look at the natural world because it is, after all, not natural. It is a product of man, and by power-hungry corporations and militant nations, no less. It is poetic to bear witness to and honor the very human, poetic parts of the web, but we also need to remember and work to correct the flawed bases upon which these come from.” ↗
- “The main things he talked about were sensemaking, collective decision-making, and ultimately, communal self-determination. These often involve putting formal structures in place such that people can feel the trust necessary to do these things. He wants to create sweeping changes that involve empowering people to “future.” I also care fundamentally and deeply about empowering people to “future” but I focus my efforts on participatory experiences such that people get practice doing this sort of futuring, imagining, and collective creation that shows them not only that it’s possible but that it’s important. I focus instead on the “small” and extremely emergent, and my thesis is that the upswell will create the dramatic change that I care about. ” ↗
- “We had to imagine computers as personal machines.” ↗
- recurring theme on reimagining computers / devices as sites of communal play that produces agency
- “epic sense of agency from being able to carry around and modify this personal, digital tool” ↗
- my art purpose “I’m thinking now about what is an even more accessible level of art and something inviting play and contemplation, and of course, I think of Nintendo. One could consider Nintendo’s products a form of interactive sculpture. A handheld piece of art that captures the room for those who notice it. ” ↗
- an articulation about playhtml’s purpose ” - I’m excited for the potential of this to start an entirely open, public “social media” (tiny social networks) in the interactions that naturally evolve. This kind of thing feels like elemental material, in that it offers so much for people to insert their own personalities into the meaning of the actions. That’s the problem with a lot of existing social media sites, where the actions become so prescripted that there’s no room left for people to invent their own language.” ↗
- ” Lev Manovich presaged over two decades ago that the database—by which he meant navigable hypermedia environment—would be the principal medium of the 21st century, in the way that film was the medium of the 20th."" ↗
- wrote about my my purpose in july ↗
- “I think my unique capability is the combination of an imaginative design attitude towards imagining products and interfaces and the generalist ability to make those what-ifs reality. I’m not the absolute best programmer and I certainly won’t be the best specialist in a certain area of programming, but I can imagine something end-to-end that will make people feel something and enable them to do something they couldn’t do before. I think I’m also good at gathering people together. I am an optimist and a believer in people, and I fight for dreams I have that feel compelling even as they have no active incentive for someone to work on them. I think that’s what makes people feel drawn towards and safe sharing their dreams with me. I hold their dreams with gentle care. ” ↗
- “I value things that resonate to me and to other people who are not in the art world. I especially value things that resonate to (or provoke) people who would never expect to “like art.”
- Watching the dia beacon video of robert irwin explaining his philosophy around the design of the museum, he explains that he “instigates, responding to a situation like responding to a question"" ↗
- ” true testament to her ability to make her pieces accessible is that people have apparently left things form their pockets with her exhibit as sorts of offerings.” ↗
- creating “infrastructure to cultivate these emotional tupperware you care about.” ↗
- projects that support the emotional context they emerged from
- “maybe thats what i care about and want to enable. the infrastructure for human imagination and resilience” ↗
- ""if you’re a good artist, you may have one good idea, if you’re a genius you may have two.” What is the singular “good idea” that I want to work my life towards finding?” ↗
- on the act of programming / how it becomes something that people can tinker with
- ” * ”The core of Functional Programming is thinking about data-flow rather than control-flow."" ↗
- “The biggest motivation of a new “database” is the ease of interfacing, creating, actively shaping it as you are starting out.” ↗
- ideas to revisit
- “-#ideas/software bag of tools ^ffb5e2” ↗
- “*#ideas/software make a simple iphone app that is the app-version of my i love living practice? it could function as a tiny social network site in of itself, where you could see the logs of people nearby. or some global feed of it all happening? ^f542f9” ↗
- can actually do this now / combine with the missed connections app
- “*#ideas/website a plant shop for your website where it gives you a plant that grows over time without requiring any state management of ur own using a seed date and an L-system and an interval specification. you have to “prune” it by updating the url it pulls from with a new seed date” ↗
- ” - > “For a few years now I’ve had an idea for a little app where you can get a QR code and stick it in a book and it acts as a little guestbook for all of the owners of “that exact copy” of that book. So it ties physical space to digital space. I love that it shows the “history” of a physical object and encourages people to pass books on after reading. I think I still have many questions around what are the most interesting ways for people to express themselves in that sort of medium. (It reminds me a bit of geocaching as well as there is mystery and you never really know when you would uncover one of these spaces when you get an old book from a second hand bookstore, etc).”” ↗
- “*#ideas/writing i should write as some point about how to set up participatory / communal websites that handle moderation easily ^185537
- my coda moderation combo is really nice but i need to figure out some way to make this scale in the data layer (an actual database that feeds into coda and then coda is the final source of truth..?). This only works because it’s append-only. ” ↗
- lol / moments of doubt
- ”* BARISTAING IS HARD AND NOT CONDUCIVE TO RESEARCH TIL” ↗
- ”* SO MANY APPLICATIONS SEND HELP HOLY SHIT” ↗
- ”Conclusions: SO MANY THINGS I WANT TO DO AHH” ↗
- ”- was feeling very restless and existential today and wondering what amounts of my work mattered. what am i doing with my life anyway??” ↗
- on ”dream lists rather than todo lists.” ↗
- how can this be tied into the messaging for gather
- gather can now accomplish something similar to ↗
- reminders to myself
- “I’m reminded of how to judge the success of my independent moments: every day should feel like fun and a gift. I should feel love, curiosity, wonder, gratitude, and excitement all come to me easily. I should feel like I’m living each day true to myself.” ↗
- ” i think im realizing that i need to develop much much stronger taste and higher standards for what is worth my time. The reason I’m so restless and overwhelmed is that I am keeping tabs on a million projects that i think are interesting and cool and I can’t focus on any one of them fully. I’m not some god that can churn out projects every few days (especially not if im still thinking about all of them at once). I need to figure out ways to put things into a box that I revisit every week rather than keeping tabs on them.” ↗