plans within plans within plans

Hurray for the internet, the big geek connector! :...

2011-09-14T18:24:31.305+02:00

Hurray for the internet, the big geek connector! :-)

It is pretty amazing to follow a train of thought ...

2011-09-13T20:58:50.763+02:00

It is pretty amazing to follow a train of thought offline, and then have that train of thought mirrored perfectly in blog posts. P2P git webapps. Awesome.

If that sounds like gibberish to you, you...

2011-05-25T01:23:13.178+02:00

If that sounds like gibberish to you, you obviously haven't read a lot of Bucky's writings ;)

That is quite a find. It seems gibberish or nonsen...

2011-05-21T12:38:16.876+02:00

That is quite a find. It seems gibberish or nonsense at first, but after several re-readings the meaning and depth emerge. Something like the abstract essence of a Glass Bead Game.

It's already happening.

Potentially liberating innit? And now get off my ...

2011-02-24T18:40:34.636+01:00

Potentially liberating innit?

And now get off my lawn.

Piffle.

2011-02-24T11:01:54.560+01:00

Piffle.

Don't ever expect to get clear terminology in ...

2011-02-20T12:01:09.111+01:00

Don't ever expect to get clear terminology in this area!

Personally, I don't think of your philosophy as agnosticism (but then see my previous sentence). Judging from what you wrote on this page, I think you're religious, only not mainstream Western religious.

What you are has a lot in common with some Eastern religions, and with some forms of "liberal" Christianity. You'd probably like the book "Honest to God" by John Robinson.

What does a tablet not do in the home for most fam...

2010-12-22T11:00:06.759+01:00

What does a tablet not do in the home for most families that a netbook does? If anything I see one-netbook families buying two or three tablets for home and not bothering to buy a new netbook. Home will, I think, become post-PC.

The office is fairly safe though there are plenty of work spaces that would be better off with tablets. e.g. front-of-office service areas or wherever it is better to be walking around with a tablet than having to go back to a counter to check the laptop/desktop PC.

Yep. See Web Design is 95% Typography - I think the same holds for GUI design in general, especially on small screens.

Can you clarify? Typographical? Do you mean a lack...

2010-10-21T17:35:00.536+02:00

Can you clarify? Typographical? Do you mean a lack of rounded corners, gradients and transparent overlays?

I am waiting for that crap to look dated. It is so painful.

But does it not also give us the very medium and p...

2010-09-11T14:57:09.040+02:00

But does it not also give us the very medium and power with which to meet that challenge?

And militant athiesm is the purest and most stride...

2010-09-09T06:54:01.265+02:00

And militant athiesm is the purest and most strident kind of moral clarity — they're at least as emphatic about gaining converts as any religion.

Agnosticism is a disbelief that any such clarity is real or good.

if you have to “jailbreak” your device in order...

2010-09-09T06:47:37.824+02:00
if you have to “jailbreak” your device in order to get the software you want, maybe you are using the wrong device to begin with

Except that this is true of nearly all Android devices too, given the proclivities of the manufacturers and carriers to pursue synergy at the expense of basic sanity.

Also, Android's growth is completely localized to the US (mostly Verizon giving them away), and MeeGo is growing nowhere, not even northern Europe.

WebOS is the best of the platforms: cleverly designed, shipping upstream open source, wide open to hacking, with the source code to their proprietary stuff right there on the device. It's a hell of a lot more Linux than Android is (vanilla kernel, normal power management, useful GNU userland) but not to the idiotic degree that MeeGo is (no GTK or Qt, much less transitioning from one to the other!). Hopefully HP ships good hardware for it.

We need to get these applications down the perfect...

2010-09-09T04:20:42.606+02:00
We need to get these applications down the perfect competition commodity level.

I need to walk up to any webhost, get a domain name and boom get a tonne of apps installed.

Everyone other webhost has to be able to offer these services too.

If we make a VPS server distro this can happen. VPS providers provide differing levels of service but a VPS server distro would allow us as consumers to be responsible for our own data.

It has to be so simple that grandpa can plug in his credit card, get an email address, a domain name, and his social networking up.

Ha!

2010-09-08T00:23:34.633+02:00
Ha!

How about mapreduce or Mapreduce? Both sound like ...

2010-09-07T23:43:59.930+02:00
How about mapreduce or Mapreduce? Both sound like "My prejudice."

@Harrison In Smalltalk, the meta-level is reified ...

2010-08-22T21:36:29.845+02:00
@Harrison In Smalltalk, the meta-level is reified in level 0, and I don't think that's possible ITRW ;) It's a faith thing, so writing about it is hard.

You don't need god or religion to commit sins ...

2010-08-22T16:23:21.584+02:00
You don't need god or religion to commit sins against humanity.

Some philosophers have argued all you need is some idea of moral clarity. They are argue very rarely are people out to do evil, instead they seek to do good and with their version of morality their good turns evil.

In Canada no one wanted to produce a system of schools that raped aboriginal children, yet it happened. Why? Because they thought it was moral to "westernize" the children to give them a better future. They didn't plan to rape all those children, but they did.

Being sure that you're right can make you do terrible things or produce terrible systems where terrible things are prone to happen.

> God is a good name for the meta-level Like s...

2010-08-21T19:38:26.794+02:00
> God is a good name for the meta-level

Like some kind of Smalltalk thing?

Software people are intellectually rooted in the early 20th century, the 1920s and 1930s: Turing, Church, the Vienna Circle, ... so one should perhaps expect a sense of 'what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence'.

No, it's emphatically not a troll post.

2010-08-19T19:26:06.858+02:00
No, it's emphatically not a troll post.

Is this a troll post? Considering what has been d...

2010-08-19T09:03:12.446+02:00
Is this a troll post?

Considering what has been done in the name of God(s) I doubt you want the meta-level associated with it.

"Because what would it mean to be atheist? We...

2010-08-19T06:56:55.394+02:00
"Because what would it mean to be atheist? We believes in nothing?"

nope, that's nihilism for you.

what it means to be an atheist? not believing in supernatural mumbo-jumbo. simple.

Yes this is very familiar to me, you sound like th...

2010-06-19T17:14:29.467+02:00
Yes this is very familiar to me, you sound like the AntiApple and Gruber is the Apple apologist.

@Nerdie: You're right, of course. I was ever-s...

2010-06-18T23:43:15.767+02:00
@Nerdie: You're right, of course. I was ever-so-slightly hyperbolic. Still, there are times when Steve will boil my blood with an outrageous policy or action and Gruber defends it as though it were the best thing since sliced bread. He's definitely lost touch. He's got a lot of insight, I respect him and that's why he's still in my RSS feed. As for Gizmodo, they are the tabloid journalism of the tech world. I read them, even though I shouldn't...