Links

What Pipes is

pipes.digital

Pipes is a spiritual successor to Yahoo! Pipes, but if you did not know that site, you can think of Pipes as a visual programing editor specialized on feeds, or a visual shell, or simply as a glorified feed configurator.

The Dying Computer Museum

ascii.textfiles.com

And for all I’d know, it was a museum. There’s no laws on what a thing can call itself regarding being a museum, exhibition, tour, or display. It’s against the law to take money to attend the museum and you get led to an empty lot, sure. But if something has the vestements and affectation of a museum, and you see the big sign saying Museum out front and you go in and there’s displays and staff and events and meetings, you would certainly think it was a museum.

Turns out it wasn’t.

Brent Simmons on computer freedom

inessential.com

Maybe because I lived through this — maybe because I’m a certain age — I believe that that freedom to use my computer exactly how I want to, to make it do any crazy thing I can think of — is the thing about computers.

[…]

Macs carry the flame for the revolution. They’re the computers we own, right? They’re the astounding, powerful machines that we get to master.

Except that lately, it feels more and more like we’re just renting Macs too, and they’re really Apple’s machines, not ours.

With every tightened screw we have less power than we had. And doing the things — unsanctioned, unplanned-for, often unwieldy and even unwise — that computers are so wonderful for becomes ever-harder.

Administrator explains how Oregon DMV accidentally registered people to vote

opb.org

We’ve made significant changes to the user interface that our staff sees when they are choosing those documents. So we’ve changed the dropdown menu to make it more difficult to choose a U.S. passport or a U.S. birth certificate. In that system, we are requiring that staff enter the state and county of birth for a birth certificate document in the U.S. and made some other changes like that. In addition to the system changes, we’ve now done intensive training with staff about the mechanics of the entry and also the importance of getting this right every single time. There have been multiple trainings already — and that training is ongoing and will continue to be ongoing into the future.

There’s never enough money and time for good design until there has to be.

Framing collapse

ranprieur.com

September 30

[…]

When it comes to climate change and collapse, I think it’s just that hard crashes (for Americans) will happen in poor states and far-flung places. For example, whole communities in Louisiana are still recovering from hurricanes in the past few years and it’s not big news. Homes are being abandoned or lived in despite not passing inspection. I think that sort of thing will become more frequent, and for the people in those places it will be a hard crash. They’ll have to pick up and move.

I predict that if we don’t radically reorganize in the US then a day will come when FEMA is largely incapable of responding to, say, a Fort Myers/Hurricane Ian event. I say that based on the fact that billion-dollar disasters have been on the rise. At some point, we won’t be able cover a new one because we’re still responding to the last one. The fallout will always be unequal, with rich people fleeing ahead and poor people being managed in (eventually) UN Disaster Camps.

This is my new way of framing collapse: 1) Dumb history will blame it on the biggest most obvious thing, just like the fall of Rome is blamed on barbarians. 2) Smart history will understand that a robust system could have dealt with that thing, but that the system was already declining for many complex reasons. 3) The propaganda of collapsing systems will continue to insist that they’re strong, while basing that statement on a decreasing range of regions and people.

Hypercard in the World

dynamicland.org

A key point here is that there is no longer code in a “filesystem”, no Finder windows, no directories to “ls”. All code and data is attached to spatially-located objects, which you can read casually by walking by and looking, and edit by laser-pointing while in the Inspector.

I was able to create this program by thinking about it as code attached to a physical object, operating on a physical object, instead of virtual files in a virtual filesystem drawing to a virtual window.

This is the sort of research that I’d like to see more of. Who else is working in this space?