Some Ideas for Better User Interfaces

I thought I'd throw out some ideas here for anyone interested, and indeed anyone who's not interested, because maybe you are the problem!

I have a lot of related projects all on the go, and maybe one day I will need to do unrelated projects for the purpose of getting money, but I hope not. These different projects all use various editors and apps opened on certain files and terminal windows in certain directories, and certain apps running in the background. The apps also may have certain privileges. Some of these projects may get left for weeks without my even looking at them and when I go back, I have forgotten what are the relevant files in the relevant directories, if I even remember the project exists, ... often I just forget I was doing it and I only rediscover the idea when I see a weirdly familiar filename somewhere and look at it and realise that I was doing that thing about graph reduction machines in ARM assembler once, ... And then I remember there were some papers I read about that time, and I can go and dig around in the web browser history, if I use the date on the file stamp, and after searching through a few days worth of totally unrelated activity I might find a URL for the paper I read, and maybe the URL is still live and I can download the paper, ... But maybe the file was on a machine that got stolen ten years ago, ... and someone had that machine, and probably connected it to the Internet, but they understandably didn't send me an email offering to upload the disk contents so that I could carry on my work.

So, if people really mattered, then what would practical computing actually be like?

Well, we would have personal identities that included all the data we had assembled and generated and all the discussions we'd had with other people, and we wouldn't need ten thousand accounts and ten thousand cookies set by online Internet services, many of whose identities are so fluid as to barely justify the noun. There is no reason why that data should not be permanent and available anywhere we are.

See Solène's Patreon post today for an idea of the scope of the issues: https://www.patreon.com/c/user/posts?u=23274526.

I just found a video to illustrate the problem, and show how severe it is!

 
Subscribe to Osho.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Live Science - Leonardo da Vinci's Ancestry

Image
... and his posterity too? See  On Communication in Linear Time And Hypertext And The Gospel of Sophia . So it looks like El Cielo of the cistine [sic!😂] chapel is not the limit anymore.  I think I just met one of his descendents. A guy called Versailles Toledo who is from Chiapas. That might explain the murals I mention in my recent untitled post , just before the post mentioning this video. I also just took this photo of Rafael Gonzales, born here in Tecate, B.C., who told me about a spring near here called Agua Fría , half way from Tecate to Loma Tova , where, a few decades ago, people used to go to have barbecues and stuff, but now he thinks it may be private land. If someone reading this has a Facebook account, please write a link to this post onto his FB page. To see why I took the photo, look at his T-shirt and the horse-shoes and ponder this: Subscribe to BeatrizER and her video(s?) about mathematical logic, ... Sounds like Edith (II) Rix has been online all the time, ...
Read more

David Turner Obituary by Sarah Nicholas Fri 24 Nov 2023

Image
This was in The Guardian: David Turner obituary , only eight days after I posted  David Turner Talking About Sixty Years of Functional Programming History : This talk was given in London in 2017: See  Turner, D. A. "Some History of Functional Programming Languages" also  John Hughes - Why Functional Programming Matters  and David MacQueen's talk at ICFP 2015 in  Numberphile - Sophie Maclean on the Catalan Numbers . At 10:30 This whole discussion abut combinator reduction is especially interesting. I didn't know Arthur Norman had tried building hardware for combinator machines. I'll look that up: maybe start here A.C. Norman  Faster combinator reduction using stock hardware  in LFP '88: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming. At 26:25 on the ISWIM virtual machine implemented in the PAL compacting garbage collector?! This work Reynolds and others did was at MIT in Masecheusetts and Argonne National Laboratory Illinois. Did
Read more