"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist."
There’s no skill called “being right,” there is only error correction. If you focus on finding where you’re wrong and correcting it, you have a chance at being right; if you seek out places where you’re right, you will find only what you have achieved by accident.
Oliver
Our document structures typically give us one or at best two dimensions, so we analyse our problems with one (black-white, left-right) or at best two (political compass) degrees of freedom. Thus, our view of the world is artificial, created by throwing out relevant information.
Oliver
My favourite things are non-linear and/or multi-dimensional: literary references, great music, strange physics. Usually, however, our most common modes of communication give us just two dimensions: in documents, linear order and hierarchy, and in tables, up-down and left-right.
Oliver
Dawkins said that the value of a theory = what it explains divided by what it assumes. For innovations, I say: value = the freedom offered divided by the number and strength of new handcuffs they bring: proprietary data structures, incompatibility, and limitations on imagination.
Oliver
The technology of communication should be open source and interoperable, and we should pay for it in obvious ways.
Oliver
Be well, enjoy 2021, and illegitimi non carborundum.
Oliver
The idea that certain things are “geeky” is an accidental agreement on the part of certain geeks and non-geeks to keep the rest of us from looking behind the curtain. Of course, sometimes there’s nothing interesting there, but you can only tell by looking.
Oliver
“If the button is not shaped like the thought, the thought will end up shaped like the button.”—Ted Nelson
Oliver
The most important future conflicts for freedom will be fought via information technology, and many already have. This means that any statement in the form, “I don’t understand: IT, computers, technology,” risks being synonymous with, “I don’t understand freedom.”
Oliver
By 2030, more people will follow independent writers who, 1. publish material on their own domains and 2. use their feeds aggregated together so as to provide features similar to those of Twitter and Medium, than they follow via the aforementioned platforms.
Oliver