How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.
— Alexander Pope
Now that I have much more flexibility over my work/life cadence working solo (and with a healthier sleep schedule), it seems like I'm settling into a pretty consistent schedule of:
- Early morning / before meetings on deep work, building, writing, thinking
- Meetings in the early afternoon
- After lunch / evening on reading, research, gathering raw materials and letting them simmer
and it feels good. It lets me "end the day" whenever I feel tired or ready to end the day, without having to rush to complete something, and it seems like my mind is clearest and most ready to work after I wake up when my mind is clear. I'm trying to stick with it.
Future (desktop) operating systems — a collection of inspirations
- Artifacts, which is interesting for its document-focused design, the way it implements transclusion ("Links with context"), and a horizontal arrangement of documents as a way to organize workflows.
- Mercury OS, which has a striking visual design and showcases what a workflow and information-focused design for productivity could look like.
- Desktop Neo, which has a nice implementation of horizontally scrolling panes that connect apps together into workflows.
- Alexander Obenauer's Itemized OS, which reimagines personal computers to be more focused on information and open metadata to allow apps to extend each other around the information that matters, rather than organize into walled gardens.
What would this look like in 500 years?
Whenever I'm thinking about the long future of some technology or problem, like the future of AI and the nature of computation, there's a thought-experiment format I like to use to think more openly. It goes like this:
What would X looks like 500/1000 years into the future of humanity?
In the case of that blog, the question was, "What would computing hardware for AI look like in year 2500?"
I think this kind of thinking helps avoid the status-quo bias that's so easy to fall into when we try to imagine the future projecting out from current technology.
- If we project out from the current computing landscape, it's easy to think that binary logic gates on silicon wafers is the right computing substrate for nearly everything we'd want to do. But would humanity still be using silicon wafers to run intelligent, conversational, omnipresent computers five centuries from now?
- It's easy to get sucked into the allure of gene editing in the next few decades and century, but what capabilities over biological processes will humanity have in a thousand years? Surely, we won't just be adding and splicing DNA. Surely, the long future of dominion over the biological source code is something much more expansive, perhaps the equivalent of "software engineering" for biological processes, perhaps a world where there are more artificial life forms in the universe than organically evolved ones.
3 phases of creative production — a hypothesis about the structure of a creative process
Gathering raw materials
- Through reading and consuming media, listening to others, thinking aloud in conversations, or just pure contemplation, we gather a bundle of ideas and related experiences that start to point to some insight or further idea.
- A lot of creative value comes from this very unstructured stage of creation where ideas are gathered without any goal directed work. I call this "simmering".
Active thinking
- In the active thinking phase, the we look at the gathered raw materials and try to form structure out of them to produce something that's coherent and clear and perhaps even actionable.
- This implies and requires a "sense-making" process, of going from unstructured information to emerging a structure out of it.
- In the process of active thinking, we might find the need to collect even more raw materials. But this time, we're looking for information in a more goal-directed way. Information may also be discarded or deemed no longer relevant.
Production/drafting
- For us to create some creative work/output from ideas or insights gathered during active thinking, we need to crystallize it into a form that can facilitate communication. I call this "drafting" or "production".
- This stage is about serializing thought into media. Production may often also serve the role of communicating with ourselves, i.e. when taking notes for my future self, to remember my past thoughts.
See also: Creative shadow-casting
Resilient creative processes
Sometimes when I have a dozen tabs open (which is far too many compared to my normal amount of 2-3) and a bunch of stuff lined up to read, I wonder: if I miss these ideas that are open before me this time around — like, if I forget about what I read, forget to read them, or misunderstand them — would I encounter these ideas again? If I don't cross paths with these ideas and the ideas they will lead to now, will those ideas cross paths with me again in the future?
Obviously, this varies on the type of information and topic, but I think it's an interesting idea to entertain, that I'm calling the resilience of a creative process.
In a resilient creative process, similar ideas emerge in dense, connected forests over and over again, so missing any single idea once doesn't influence the general path I take through my idea maze.
In a brittle creative process, connections between ideas are sparse, but ideas could cover a wider ground together. The cost of this breadth is that missing an idea somewhere might mean you don't hit upon that one insight that you need to complete the next step in your work.
Recognizing this spectrum, it might be interesting to intentionally try to make a creative process more resilient or more sparse, depending on the subject matter.
Reading through "A meta-layer for notes" by Julian Lehr, one idea that really stuck out to me was this passage about sticky notes and notes in context of their referent
Apart from helping you find important passages in a book later on, sticky note bookmarks also allow you to add additional context to the section you highlighted (e.g. why you bookmarked a particular section or thoughts you had about it).
You could write down notes like this in a separate notebook, but then you’d lose the connection to the source they are based on. What makes post-it notes so interesting is the spatial relationship between the notes and their respective context.
It’s this spatial relationship that also make post-it notes great reminders.
We really don't have anything equivalent to sticky notes' versatility in its ability to be placed in context of the ideas or objects it annotates. It almost seems like the way software is built these days makes most software impervious to this kind of rich annotation. I wonder how we can break this constraint?
"View source" for the full stack
While browsing Hacker News (as one does) today I came across this PHP snippet, as highlighted by this comment.
<?php
if (isset($_GET['source'])) {
highlight_file(__FILE__);
exit;
}When placed in a PHP script, it lets you pass a ?source query parameter in the URL to see the complete, syntax-highlighted PHP program that's currently running. See https://lucb1e.com/randomprojects/php/funnip.php?source for an example.
This strikes me as the simplest implementation of a "View source" for the backend that I've seen, and I wonder if this kind of direct exposure of the full-stack source of a web app could be possible even for more complex applications. I remember Vercel (back when they were called Zeit) used to expose the full source of open-source JavaScript applications under a special URI path (I think /_src/, but I'm not certain).
Building as a reflection of beliefs
I started building side projects as a high school sophomore. Back then, I was mostly learning. Learning how to build, how to stay motivated, how to get other people to care about what I had to say. And then I started building for utility, building tools that I wanted to exist so I could use them in my own life, to improve my day to day.
This year, I found myself and my public work at a strange place, where I'm building for the same reasons, but also as a way of acting on and representing my beliefs about a different kind of relationship humans can have with software and computers than what most of us live with. Indeed, this is a lot of what we discuss on a recent podcast I did with the Muse team. As much as I'm building things like a personal search engine for me to use, I'm also building these things and talking about them to let others know that they can build these things too, and that we can rethink the power dynamics and relationships we have with our software tools and ecosystems.
I'm not the only one doing this, of course -- other similar "building as a representation of belief" projects include Rasmus Andersson's Playbit and Hundred Rabbits. But nonetheless, I think it's an interesting place to be for a person who makes things: not only to make them for the sake of the end products, but as a form of speech about the very act of building.
TBH I made this website so I could shitpost away from the prying eyes of Twitter, and it's turned into something even more formal than Twitter. So this update is to give me some space to shitpost directly to the Stream. Nowhere is safe my friends.