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Phil Cockfield
@pjc
sys.crdt 🧫
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Rafi
@rafi
Reminds me of beautiful pre-Johhny Apple Time Machine interface but much cleaner. I love fading lines!
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Phil Cockfield
@pjc
Thanks Rafi! That's totally what it is (I did a little write up for @darrylyeo on what this module is as a harness view into a CRDT): https://warpcast.com/pjc/0xd5c44b86 To be (lightly) compared with early Apple UI is humbling & deeply appreciated! Gracias. 🙇🏻♀️ A book that influenced me early on was David Gelernter's "Machine Beauty" within which he summarised his "Lifestreams" design, intentionally put forward as an elegant alternative idiom to a "desktop" metaphor (as enshrined by Apple's adaptation of the PARC/GUI). When I saw that "lifestreams" interface turn up in the early Apple time-machine, I thought it was just magnificent. Although Gelernter's lifestreams was a complete system, where all data was structured, and accessed as a stream in time (💦), and leaned heavily on the mind's strength at locating things in rough temporal memory (like figuring how deep shit is in a pile of crap on the desktop might be based on how long ago you worked on it, for example). sys.ui.PageStack ↓
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Rafi
@rafi
> leaned heavily on the mind's strength at locating things in rough temporal memory Yes, it is a characteristic of our brain that produce ability for very good memory recollection and stable grounds for synthesizing long-term memory. I was ignorant of Lifestreams. I'm a comp sci amateur historian and love diving into topics like that!
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Phil Cockfield
@pjc
"I'm a comp sci amateur historian and love diving into topics like that!" Apologies for belated response...me too Rafi. I find it unbelievably fertile ground, early comp history (particularly that period in the 60's and 70's surrounding the ARPA community), as a creative source of clear thinking about so many of the things "not yet done." I was fortunate enough once to give Alan Kay a lift up to LAX from a chance meeting. The LA angels conspired with the gods and we hit a traffic jam, and so we had Alan for an hour trapped in a car, talking about all sorts. Upon leaving, Alan said to me "go study Engelbart, most of his stuff has never been done"....and I've carried that with me. There is so much gold from that period, the brains required to magic computing out of nothing, left so many conceptual riches...and it's do much easier for us now to harvest and make those ideas real. We don't also have the cold start problem of having to invent the bloody computers first! Appreciate your voice on FC, Rafi!
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Rafi
@rafi
You were talking in a car with Alan Kay? L-e-g-e-n-d. I can imagine this could be one of those experiences that defined your life to some degree. Maybe the cold start problem is the reason for great ideas to appear. The moment we start looking at painted canvas, our mind automatically drifts towards what is, rather than what is not; and our mind for ever become biased towards narrower path. No wonder then ideas come in cycles, getting rediscovered after few decades, coming and going like a tide!
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