LAN the Internet Again
Metadata
Highlights
- Some stubbornly kept their little hypertext gardens but doing so was a radical act rather than the norm. We, as citizens of the internet, have lost our ability to shape it and make it a home. (View Highlight)
- It seems that we’ve reached the inevitable conclusion of optimizing “connecting with each other” to the extreme. With no feedback system for users to have a say or improve the conditions, the web is quickly spiralling into something that doesn’t do all that good of a job. The thing that the web originally was meant to do – enable people to meaningfully meet and worth with each other – is harder than ever. Perhaps we might carve out a bit of space for those again? (View Highlight)
- Agentic software embodies a Hundertwasser flavour of design where:
• The resident has access to the same tools as the architect.
• Everything is writeable, everything is rewriteable.
• People can solve their own problems. (View Highlight)
- I spent a lot of time around university-aged students first learning software engineering and there is a really large gap between how easy it is to get a static website on the web and how difficult it is to add a database to it. This, for most people, is where they decide that software is too difficult and give up.
It has become so difficult to learn that it has almost killed software’s viability as a tool for expression. Imagine if, every time you cooked a meal for your friends or family, world-class critics came in to judge and prod at your food. Or if, every time you wanted to write a letter to your partner, the postal service would refuse to send it if it contained even a single grammatical error. (View Highlight)
- Maybe we bring back the philosophy of LANs, but rather than networks be based on closeness in physical distance bounded by routers, what about LANs in social and trust space?
The internet is a network of networks. This is true at the level of hardware and infrastructure, but less so for the applications we depend so heavily on. What if we also made the web a network of networks? And users could be a part of multiple networks at once? (View Highlight)
- A safe small space of people we trust, where we can go and rest, a safe harbour from the multi-billion-person internet for when we want to feel cozy and safe. (View Highlight)