This really reminds me of what Plan 9 was aiming for — breaking out of the 'box' by making everything a file, using per-process namespaces, and cleanly exposing system and network resources with proper permissions. It had that same idea: your environment shouldn't be a prison, it should be a flexible, composable space. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs) (https://fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html)
You Are in a Box
11–20 of 138 posts
Re: You Are in a Box
#12I feel this the most on mobile platforms where the phone really should be acting as your agent but instead we're stuck with all these apps.
There's an additional factor on the phone and increasingly the computer: mutual distrust.
All the apps are carefully sandboxed, because left unattended they will steal your data. The new category of AI largely works by sending your data to a server in the US where it can be surveilled. It would be great to have interoperability but first the user has to have confidence that it's not going to be weaponized against them.
Re: You Are in a Box
#13Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?
I definitely find it difficult, cognitively, for long-form writing. It's also the second time recently I've seen all-lowercase blog-post-length content, after previously having never seen it, so I wonder if something is happening culturally to pull text-message style formatting up into the rank of published content.
Re: You Are in a Box
#14Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?
i hate this writing style so much. i have to do extra work fighting autocorrect to make it seem like i just rolled out of bed and typed it out on my phone. i am so smart, see, i don't care about Big Establishment Grammar, my ideas are so good it will pierce through
Re: You Are in a Box
#15I feel this the most on mobile platforms where the phone really should be acting as your agent but instead we're stuck with all these apps.
It is worse on phones, but most desktop computing feels like this too, at least when you're not at a command line. I've been trying to puzzle out what I'd like computing to look like instead, but I don't get far beyond a concept of "objects" and "actions" as fundamental building blocks. How to actually expose this... yeah, it's tough.
There's a tension between the bash economy which is too simple but pleasantly terse and the powershell economy which has a richer data structure but feels painfully verbose.
Re: You Are in a Box
#16This really reminds me of what Plan 9 was aiming for — breaking out of the 'box' by making everything a file, using per-process namespaces, and cleanly exposing system and network resources with proper permissions. It had that same idea: your environment shouldn't be a prison, it should be a flexible, composable space. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs ) ( https://fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html )
Cool idea. Seems like it would require an entirely new philosophy vs our present one on security.
Re: You Are in a Box
#17Computers are boxes, therefore all software is literally (and figuratively) "in a box", are they not? This might seem like a frivolous jest, but it is not. For example, the author points out that clojure, java, kotlin can interoperate, but notes they are stuck in the same jvm 'box'. This generalizes and recurses, so you must find a specific place to stop, and then motivate that.
One likely place to stop is at "processes". But this must be motivated since ultimately processes are as synthetic a convention as a language thread - it's just that the runtime is called a "kernel" instead of a "runtime".
Ultimately I think what the author is getting at is a data problem, not a code problem. Or rather, it's yearning toward a world where data and code are strongly decoupled, conventions around data are standardized, so that processes written in disparate tooling can successfully interoperate locally. However I doubt there is much appetite for a "model of everything" registry (such things have been tried, and failed, in the past). That said we might take another stab at this, since LLMs make likely that software will become more dynamic in terms of translating data structures at runtime such that one program can examine a peer program and its data structures, and how to map them to local data structures, thus achieving interoperability without a centralized agreement on representation.
Re: You Are in a Box
#18Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?
I definitely find it difficult, cognitively, for long-form writing. It's also the second time recently I've seen all-lowercase blog-post-length content, after previously having never seen it, so I wonder if something is happening culturally to pull text-message style formatting up into the rank of published content.
My guess is it’s meant to come off as more authentic and conversational, like an informal chat.
Re: You Are in a Box
#19Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?
Agreed. Honestly - life's too short to read a text the author couldn't even be bothered to capitalize correctly.
Re: You Are in a Box
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is worse on phones, but most desktop computing feels like this too, at least when you're not at a command line. I've been trying to puzzle out what I'd like computing to look like instead, but I don't get far beyond a concept of "objects" and "actions" as fundamental building blocks. How to actually expose this... yeah, it's tough.
have you seen https://pharo.org/ by chance? it's a smalltalk IDE built in smalltalk, which means that the whole thing is editable at runtime. it's hard to describe before you see it, https://pharo.org/features has some demos.
I tried pharo, its an interesting thing but I don't see it as a particularly practical solution.
Yes its editable in runtime, but not the whole thing and not reliably so: I remember changing some low level array methods that broke the whole image.
Even in pharo your data has to be organised in some way and if you add new code to existing image you have to know how to reach the data you need.
And the biggest downside to productivity and stability is it doesn't have a type system and every action can fail because the receiver doesn't support a particular message.