If I remember it right I think the acme text editor had a similar mechanism to select text and click that as a command

Somehow it never occurred to me that his aphorism could apply both ways. It's possible to invent the wrong future if you are working within the wrong contexts - https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-behind-Alan-Kay-s-quote-Point-of-view-is-worth-80-IQ-points - "Similarly, the earlier “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” doesn’t say anything about what kind of future. People in power often invent terrible futures and make them happen (again, just take a look at unnecessary disasters over history, especially recently)."

And this applies to more than just futures of computing...

The thing I like this 'minimum wage' approach is that it fills a gap in traditional funding models, where ordinarily you have to prove to someone else - maybe a government bureaucrat, maybe a tenured professor, maybe Y Combinator, maybe randos on KickStarter, depending - that your idea is a good one. And if your idea doesn't involve making a profit or publishing a peer-reviewed academic paper whilst earning a PhD, most of your options disappear.

But often people with good ideas (as well as bad ideas, mind you) believe in something a lot but they don't know how to articulate the idea to others. So I would propose that if you've got an idea, you should be able to work on it, at least for some period of time, without first proving its merits in a grant application. You need only prove, somehow, that you are doing work and not playing video games or whatever.

It would probably work best if there is some minimum experience level (e.g. Master's degree or 2 years industry experience) so that the worker isn't clueless, and a sort of coach or mentor who is paid at market rate to facilitate - to make sure each worker is aware of prior art to avoid duplication, to connect workers with each other if they could logically work together, to provide moral support... and the fact that the pay is low should discourage participation of 'normal' people, who will invariably choose to work in industry instead. This is good - I don't expect much from normal people, and low pay implies more workers can share the same pile of cash.

But there's no way I can get Musk to read this. P.S. there's little reason to restrict the fund to software developers, but hardware engineers, chemists etc. presumably need extra money for equipment.

Now, back to work making blanket claims about how my affordances will improve people's cognitions 😜

Congrats to Will Crichton!

My initial reaction was "this is wack". Then I felt sheepish about being so negative, so I read a bit further. Once I got to the first two use cases, I rescinded my sheepishness. It's wack!

(This appraisal is admittedly a personal thing, and I probably should have phrased it that way. But it triggers my "computers representing (and thus surveilling) users rather than acting as passive tools" distaste really pointedly.)

yeah "fear" and "surveillance" on the same sentence is not that great of an idea

I think more in line with "personal diary", were some sort of classification of emotional state seems useful (quantified self, etc.)

Theia is a clone of VS Code, and VS Code is built around the easily-embeddable https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/. Maybe that could work for you?

yeah! i've actually been using monaco so far, and it works great, i just want a bunch of the facilities that you get from all the rest of the vscode/theia system like find in project or a bunch the language servers being wired up already

its tricky business

Chris Martens Are you familiar with Ursula Franklin's dichotomy of holistic vs prescriptive technologies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_society

I'm currently listening to https://archive.org/details/the-real-world-of-technology and reminded of competitive vs complementary artifacts.

when I listen in to that (real world of technology) Kartik Agaram I am reminded of a review that I read about the book team human https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40180066-team-human

Here is a snippet of that comment:

the presented Thoughts are inspiring, cool, disturbing and unsettling:

• We don't use technology as a Tool, but as an Environment, which we use to perceive other humans and our "real" environment/nature.

  Such that we as humans only can function in this technology environment.

  • We replace the perception of humans with machine related Terms and Algorithms. Not only do we treat machines like humans, but also humans like machines.

  • technology by itself has no agenda. Only the model of operation in which we use the technology created that directed influence.

  Most of the technologies today are used in a market oriented model with the goal to enable growth.

All models of operation like markets, national states, education and science/academia are created by ourselves - so it follows that we are also able to change them again.

It is our Obligation as humans to ensure that all models of operations serve our well being

I do think Rushkoff make it a bit easy for himself ( and thus us) here

I see a couple of Problems:

• humans tend to like to create things, starting from scratch, but it is WAY harder to change existing things that to start something new
• our cultural evolution has become so complex that it is not simply possible to change one thing without creating unknown problems somewhere else
• the monopolies that were created through our cultural evolution created very problematic behaviour in our population, this in combination with a evermore capable technology ( nuclear , gene editing , digital tech etc..) created the potential for catastrophic events to be much more likely

Now while this does sounds very negative I did found some projects that do give me some hope

IIRC, they specifically called out Bret's Drawing Dynamic Visualizations as an inspiration when announcing Charticulator.