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  1. ↪ Bret Victor: How can you call the web a publishing medium when your bookshelf can just vanish? URLs and HTTP are a disaster. Doesn't have to be this way.

    @worrydream “bookshelf” is completely the wrong mental model. A “list of links” is like a list of postal addresses of places (hence web “address”) as a physical analogy, or the contents of their authors brains as a human analogy. Complaining about their contents changing/disappearing is as complaining that space/time/humans are “a disaster” (which admittedly may broadly be true).

    “your bookshelf” is whatever personal archives you make of your favourite things (analogies: photos, notes, physical books), and therefore the solution is better personal archival tools. I’ve made a start — my website automatically takes an archive of every page I link to and stores it as HTML+HTTP headers in the filesystem, which has proven to be a quite robust format.

    Of course if you actually have a practical idea about how to improve on the infrastructure of the web, speak up and/or build it :)

    Edit: reflecting on this, “completely the wrong mental model” is incorrect, and better expressed as “a mental model which is inconsistent with reality”. There are no “wrong” mental models, only a variety of co-existing metaphors with varying levels and areas of consistency with reality.

  2. ↪ Ben Werdmüller: 21st century politician to watch: @stellacreasy (whose icon is her dressed as Boba Fett), v actively engaging on social media. The future.

    .@benwerd talked to any politicians about Known? I realised recently that politics is, broadly speaking, the battle for ideas, fought with language on the field of mass media. I’d much rather the field was platforms which belonged to citizens, rather than states or corporations. Social media is a start, but principals can go much further.

  8. ↪ Marcus Povey: This game looks fascinating... how accurate are the physics involved in terms of success? Do you have to hit escape velocity/learn orbital mechanics to rendezvous with the space station etc?

    Oops, sorry for not replying — I didn’t see your mention for some reason! Yep, KSP is an amazing game. You do indeed have to hit escape velocity, from a planet 1/10th the size of earth but with equivalent acceleration due to gravity, and yes you have to learn orbital mechanics to rendezvous, or get to other planets. Highly recommended, but watch out — there’s a steep learning curve but once you get it it sucks you in :)

    Oh, and the fan community is amazing. So many tutorials, fan videos and mods. Example:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I

  14. ↪ Kevin Marks: “We have a broad consensus on the need to decentralize the web; the question is how to do it.” @baconmeteor #indieweb http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm

    @baconmeteor @kevinmarks great talk! WRT automated submission of fake academic articles to journals, check this out: pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen plus press coverage theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/feb/26/how-computer-generated-fake-papers-flooding-academia here’s one of “mine” apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/51/scimakelatex.36700.Barnaby+Walters.html

  20. ↪ Stuart Langridge: @adactio ooh, that's cool. Why not just use pingback? I assume the answer is "XML-RPC, man, why", for which I apologise :)

    @sil @adactio fwiw, pingback was extremely valuable prior art for webmention, the first indieweb comment implementation used pingbacks, and some indieweb sites (my own included) support comments using pingback as the notification transport, often using webmention.io as a proxy