Footnotes
November 7, 2006. Adobe gifts 135,000 lines of code to Mozilla in the form of Project Tamarin, a Javascript Virtual Machine compliant with the still-not-fully-implemented ECMAScript 4. Mozilla would try a few times to incorporate Tamarin into Firefox, but would eventually abandon that idea for performance reasons. Still, it injected some enthusiasm into adopting more… Continue reading
I quoted from Interface Culture by Steven Johnson recently. He also once said this in an interview (emphasis mine) I suspect, I’ve been incredibly energized by all the grassroots Web 2.0 applications that have exploded over the past few years, most of them descendants of Firefly in one way or another. (Someone — and come to think… Continue reading
In Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig muses—among other things—about the intersection of art and technology, and what is lost when the two diverge and we seek out only the cold refuge of science. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense… Continue reading
Jamie Zawinski makes the case that enabling DRM in the browser was the open web’s original sin. When the W3c, and subsequently Mozilla, caved to pressure from commercial interests, it opened a crack in the founding ideology and spirit of the web and allowed a near endless commercial erosion of the open web. Fortunately, Zawinski… Continue reading
Some eerie echoes of today’s AI trends in the discourse around “agents” from the mid-90’s. Always with the same old promises. Swap out “personal AI assistant” for “agent” in this brief aside from a New York Times feature of a personal agent website created all the way back in 1996, and it’d be right at… Continue reading
Jamie Zawinski posted about Wikipedia and it’s representation as a source of truth, even when it isn’t. I followed a link to an interview with the author Emily St. John Mandel, who requested the interview simply for the purpose of going on record that she was divorced. Continue reading
Elan Ullendorff flips the premise on search engines entirely. We don’t need a better large search engine. Instead, we need to cultivate what I would call “folk search algorithms,” a set of tools and practices that, whether by chance or design, are not influential enough to move markets: As a search engine scale, Ullendorff argues,… Continue reading
Reading the original text of ‘Information Management: A Proposal’, the initial proposal from the internet’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, doesn’t really put you in the moment. Until now thanks to an insane quest by John Graham-Cumming to take the original file created by Berners-Lee and properly open it in today’s modern software terrain. When he discovered… Continue reading
In 2011, early Facebooker John Hammerbacher was quoted as saying: The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks Given Facebook (sorry, I mean Meta’s) latest statement about artificial general intelligence, an all the enthusiasm poured into AI by Microsoft and Google and others, I feel as… Continue reading
Today I’m looking at the work of Faruk Ates, who created the first version of Modernizr back in 2009. With the help of several other developers in a remarkably short period of time, Ate’s initial prototype transformed into a fully-featured library that empowered developers worldwide to utilize HTML5 and CSS3, accelerating the adoption of these… Continue reading
I am a bit distressed about the web. Sometimes, I panic about it. And it’s why I look back so often to try and capture the long view. But when I peak up to loo around a lot of what I see—or rather, what is surfaced to me by broken down algorithms that hides beneath the… Continue reading
It occurs to me that, much like the web, what’s absent from the next wave of AI tools are any sort of concept of transclusion. Translcusion would have the sources of data traveling along the same pipes as that data itself, and make attribution actually possible. Can you imagine if LLM were actually accountable for… Continue reading