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 's Posts
The technology of communication should be open source and interoperable, and we should pay for it in obvious ways.
Happy New Year
Be well, enjoy 2021, and illegitimi non carborundum.
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.
“If the button is not shaped like the thought, the thought will end up shaped like the button.”—Ted Nelson
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.”
By 2030, Independent Publishing Will Eclipse Publishing via Platforms like Twitter and Medium
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.
The Kindness Game: A Review of “Kind Words”
Kind Words is not a meditation game, but a kindness game for which meditation is the optimal strategy.
Emergence is nature playing a positive-sum game with itself.
Which technology will prove to be “Lindy” over centuries? Unix, “sed” and “grep” are from the 70s and remain popular. Will our descendants look back, as we do to the ruins of Pompeii and find serving spoons like those we use today, and say, “Ah, they used sed back then, too.”