@robdaemon @theruran

It really bugs me that mobile touchscreen systems are actually much more opaque than 1990s desktops used to be. So many hidden, non-discoverable gestures.

I'm sure whoever has been in charge of very expensive and very scientific data-driven UX development for the last 10 years did not intend for that to be the outcome.

But that was the outcome regardless.

@theruran

"Why are programmers -- particularly the ones who talk a lot about Constant Refactoring -- so bad at refactoring the languages, editors and operating systems they use, to make them more humane?" is a question that endlessly fascinates me.

Up there with "why does Computer Science / Data Processing / Information Technology as a field seem really bad at keeping track of its own history?"

@humanetech @robdaemon @theruran

Ooh! I really like this idea of "design for users with overloaded executive function".

I think that's what I've been feeling myself for years. Trying to get back into "flow state" is my goal.

@humanetech @robdaemon @theruran

(after reading the Mercury description)

Well, I like the idea of grouping things into activities rather than applications. Like that very much.

I'm not especially sold on the Macintosh interface for it, because I'm not a Mac person and I've always found the Mac desktop super unintuitive.

I already feel confused about the difference between Modules and Spaces.

I want a text version of this I think?

But otherwise, it's a good beginning.

@humanetech @robdaemon @theruran

Yep, Bret Victor both interests and disappoints me.

I was really excited about his Light Table debugger.... and then he threw it all away to chase the Dynamicland concept, which is super expensive and indulgent in that you have to have a purpose-built room for it. Real estate is the most expensive thing right now!

I guess if he's getting funded to do very expensive experiments he finds fun, that's cool for him?

But something very important was lost, imo.

@0303

Yep! It's an obvious assumption to make.

Though, arguably the existence of cheap cellphone video is leading to things like protests against police brutality, because it's very easy to make and post a video that enrages huge numbers of people.

Downside: It's also very easy to make and post many other kinds of videos on many other subjects that enrage huge numbers of people.

I feel like a safe reading is that "there is both good and bad coming from mass connectivity". At the same time.

@0303

I believe we will get a more loving human race, eventually.

I have a spiritual philosophy which points me in that direction.

But, that philosophy also suggests that it will be a rocky time getting to that point. All the darkness that's already inside our collective subconscious needs to surface so it can be addressed at the conscious level.

Would be much better if we could do that without the pain of wars and disasters, but it will happen either way.

@baslow

"we can, collectively, decide to use them better. "

I guess the question is *how exactly* do "we" "collectively" "decide" something?

By what mechanism does a group establish

a) who is "we" and who isn't "we"

b) what is to be decided and what isn't to be decided

c) what the decision was, and that the decision made did in fact reflect the desires of the entire "we" in question

d) how to reflect back on whether the decision, even if desired by the group, was in fact the right one

@clacke

Heh, Adam Curtis and Adam Conover might be fun to put together in a mock documentary!

But it'd have to have Ken Burns too.

ok so the Asian Crisis, right, definitely connectable to right-wing economics, yes, but now we're back to Monica Lewinsky, which is connected to Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden.......... how again?

Remember, the Lewinsky crisis is what created MoveOn Dot Org and a whole tsunami of Democratic Party online organizations and also probably what got George W Bush elected, arguably the start of political polarization and online fragmentation, so big enough, but I'm not sure that that's what Adam Curtis has in mind here, I'm still waiting for the point about how Ayn Rand's love affairs have something to do with the influence of Objectivism on US economic policy in the 1990s.

Greenspan cutting interest rates in 2001, sure, but,

we still opened up the Monica Lewinsky thread and it went nowhere and why? why even mention that? why?

what's your POINT Adam?

WHAT now we're suddenly doing 9/11 why

what does THIS have to do with Silicon Valley ....?

Cos we've now jumped US Presidents entirely, and we're focusing just on Alan Greenspan?

I guess because Curtis' thesis is that "presidents don't matter" BUT GEORGE W BUSH IS A CLASSIC COUNTEREXAMPLE OF HOW THEY DO!

Good grief.

Man Adam Curtis is a hard watch for me. He.... wanders a lot.

I'm 38 minutes into Machines of Loving Grace and I still don't really get what his point is.

I know what his point *wants* to be but, he's wandering, he's not sticking to the point.

Like okay we're somehow talking about Clinton's affairs and about the Asian Crisis and ALSO, about Suharto in Indonesia, and we're not talking about Suharto being a fascist mass murderer, but something about currency controls? what is the POINT here

@allenstenhaus

I sure thought in 2010 that Facebook's real-names policy - and if not Facebook, then actual politicians, journalists and scientists betting their real-life reputations on Twitter - would make people more civil to each other than in anonymous forums. Because of the reputational costs of being uncivil.

Boy was I wrong about that.

What happened instead - and *fast* - was that perfomative hyper-aggressiveness toward a designated out-group became normative mainstream behaviour.

@mara_th

The mass behaviour of other people under the influence of a global technocratic information and influence feedback system *isn't* up to me though

but it's still going to affect my life

In much the same way that a hurricane is going to affect my life regardless of the personal choices that I, an individual water drop, make

I might be the smartest and kindest water drop in the atmosphere and still get hurt

The problem I have with the Internet today is that, in the 1980s, I thought (hoped) that massive access to a) personal computing and b) networking would be a force that (slowly, perhaps, but inevitably over time) made us all smarter and kinder.

Instead I fear that networked computing is making us all dumber and crueller. And the dumbing and the cruelling is accelerating.

That's maybe too simplistic an analysis: it probably always had the potential to do both, and it probably *is* doing both.

@pulkomandy @TerryHancock @ajroach42

StreamWeaver looks like exactly the sort of thing I was imagining that, eg, OS/2 or Windows NT would provide circa 1990, yes.

I figured "well *obviously* a GUI OS wouldn't ship without a GUI Shell of some kind, smart people must be working on this"

and imagine my shock when the smart people weren't.

BeOS doing it shows that it's possible; the idea just didn't ever seem to get interest or buy-in or any kind of traction, even after Linux.

Beats me why.

@TerryHancock @ajroach42

I think this would be cool too!

The whole "Reactive" paradigm in web apps seems very much inspired by flow-based / functional-reactive programming, but I'm sure there's a much tinier programming model trying to claw its way out of the current big reactive mess.

A node would be a function; the tricky part I think is how you nail down timing/signalling and what Elm calls "FoldT" (fold over time).

I haven't yet seen a clear, tiny explanation of how to do this.