1. “…the very act of building information technologies is also the act of creating specific moral systems”

    “Information technologists may therefore be in the business of creating moral systems whether they know it or not and whether or not they want that responsibility.”

    Information Technology and Moral Values, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. demonstrates poor voter turnout not solved by fancy technology (to “engage the young people”) but by giving people a choice that they feel empowered by.

    Update: more electronic voting skepticism in this report (warning: PDF), also has interesting data on gender in voting.

  3. I’m getting too used to (puredata.info) — I just right-clicked a python class and expected a hypermedia “help” option with params, example usage etc.

    Jetbrains PyCharm does have an inline documentation feature, which (when invoked via a complex keyboard “shortcut”), produces this gem:

    Even when this feature does work, it shows code “documentation” in a monospace font, typically with no usage example or links to other relevant documentation, as is standard in puredata.

    Our tools are inadequate.

    Update: added puredata documentation for comparison:

    In case it’s not clear from the screenshot, that usage example is live code — it can be interacted with, changed, copied and pasted, played with, experimented with. We typically can’t do that with existing text-based code, let alone mere usage examples.

    More thoughts I want to add to this, but I will write them up as a full article.

  4. : bitcoin is simply a random number generator. In every other alternate reality, it went wrong and was de-bunked almost immediately, but we’re in the one where the random numbers always match our expectations, providing the illusion of causality.

  5. Remote filesystem autocomplete in the terminal never fails to feel a little like the sort of seamless magical consistency across physically separate systems which is so lacking in tech.

  6. Wow, I think I just got my first recruiter spam. They asked me to check out their website but gave no link. This is a tech industry rite of passage, right?

  7. A 2003 iSight sitting on top of a 2012 iPad:

    The iSight was built to work with a great many products, and as a result is extensible. The lead is a standard Apple firewire lead nested inside an adapter which can fit onto many different attachments. On the attachment, there’s a thumbscrew, so that same clear plastic hook can join onto items of many different thicknesses (such as the iPad). That’s four levels of modularity.

    The iPad was built to be useful for two years, tops, before being replaced. Its dock connector is already out of date. Its case is incompatible with the previous model.

    Which is better designed? Which will retain its value longer?

  8. I’m loving the feedback loop of using the things I build.

    Wasn’t blogging much → improved typography, design → want to write more and better.

    Started using my tune stream → discovered a bunch of problems → fixed them, now I can practise more effectively.

    Lessons?

    1. Hacking on stuff does have a wider beneficial effect on life, provided you’re making stuff which matters.
    2. Stuff which matters doesn’t have to be life changing in order to matter
  9. Joel Stewart: @BarnabyWalters All musical instruments?

    @joelestewart hm, I suppose so. Instruments are mostly one-way though, with a performer transmitting culture to an audience — even if you consider composer to performer, that’s not so much through the instrument.

    Whereas computers are direction-agnostic — one or multiple people can use them simultaneously to consume and create culture. I wonder if that’s one of the reasons why they don’t look like what they do.

  10. Has there ever been a device other than modern computers which is simulataneously used for creation and consumption of culture?

  11. When dealing with character encoding issues I repeatedly get this feeling that we need to throw away computing and programming and redesign it all in a way which prevents stupid, hard-to-debug problems from happening live in trees and eat pita bread all day