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Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

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Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#21
The group of 35 people working to gather ideas, discuss, annotate, combine and edit, then send off to the printers to be typeset overnight, then repeating the process is a fascinating detail of how the US Constitution was built that I really, really wish they had taught in school.

I always think of it as this old fashioned scroll thing with the weird letter S in it.

Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#23

Every time Alan Kay speaks, I get smarter. And I don't mean "smarter" in a ted talk way.

He lost me when he started going on about “what’s wrong with our brains”.

I have not given Alan Kay permission to declare me broken.

His computing skills are legend, but he’s not a god.

Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#24
post #2

These notion articles are quite nice imo.

Devon Zuegel is a great thinker in a large breath of subjects ->

On Urbanism:

Her podcast Order without Design [0] where she interviews the Bertaud couple

Fields note on Miami [1] (with beautiful pictures)

Metamuse interview on cities [2]

and a lot more on her blog

On tech :

She was the PM for Github sponsors (and I believe other open-source friendly projects), great interview of her by the changelog [4]

The Pioneer series (of which this interview is an episod), favorites are Louis Pouzing and roundtable about Hamming [5]

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/order-without-design-h...

[1] https://devonzuegel.com/post/field-notes-miami

[2] https://museapp.com/podcast/33-cities/

[3] https://changelog.com/podcast/370

[4] https://www.notion.so/blog/topic/pioneers

Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#25
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I adore notion and will unironically shill it for them at any appropriate moment. so, er, yeah. GET NOTION.

I enjoyed notion but stopped using it mainly due to the bad offline functionality (and occasionally getting randomly logged out). Has this been improved yet? (Desktop|IOS App)

You should really look at Anytype[1]. It is basically a better version of Notion[2] that uses IPFS and your social network to back up your data.

[1]: https://anytype.io

[2]: because it is offline-first and has things like named relations, so you can connect information in any custom way that you like.

Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#26
Was this interview edited? If so, it seems to have been badly edited. Listening to the recording, I noticed one part in particular, where he's talking about catalysts in inorganic chemical reactions, and then he's talking about non-trivial engineering artifacts. If you listen closely, it sounds like a bad edit. This is at about 41:48.

Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#27

> They're all about this idea, which most programmers have that's wrong, is that you're going to write the program the right way. Nothing's going to be wrong. The whole idea is to make a fucking mess. I think he's great and I've learned a lot from him, but this is where I immediately disagreed. But it got me thinking and I realized it's because the stuff I work on is mostly a solved problem. So I think people that re…

steve yeggie's politican axis of software development comes hard to mind. https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150

at work yeah, we all naturally want a very defensive, safe, territory. we dont want volatility & risk in our running, cash making systems.

it might be helpful to reflect on thr lifecycles of software development. Pioneers, settlers, & town planners comes to mind as a useful model, of the changing approaches as software established itself over time.

https://mobile.twitter.com/swardley/status/10875115450918993...

i'm really really warmed to hear that you were able to put yourself in the shoes of those who came before, those who were charged with building something out of nothing. most of us join fairly established entities, and we do not see the drive-to-make through the strong, powerful point of view of those trying to get create, those trying to get started.

when Alan Kay &all talk about personal computing, to me, it is much more a domain of will & creation & whimsy than the controlled, regularized, predictable processes we aim for when we professionals are building & elaborating our paid, industrial computing work.

Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#28

Such a great interview! Or rather, pontification: > See, what I'm doing here is I'm not conversing. I really can't converse very well at my age because I've lost my patience. So, what I do is pontificate, which is the same as giving you something like it's written. > This is why experienced programmers have big multiple screens. They're working on something where the result is going to be fit on one screen, but you h…

[deleted]

Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#29

The group of 35 people working to gather ideas, discuss, annotate, combine and edit, then send off to the printers to be typeset overnight, then repeating the process is a fascinating detail of how the US Constitution was built that I really, really wish they had taught in school. I always think of it as this old fashioned scroll thing with the weird letter S in it.

I love it because it reframes the process to be as high-tech and as ultra-modern as they could make it at the time.

Re: Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing

#30
> There are so many more rabbit holes I would have liked to go down, but I think we're at our time now. So, thank you so much Alan for coming on the show. This was really fun.

If Alan Kay willing to keep talking, why not keep him talking? You could turn it into a two-parter for whatever the show format is.

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