MiniBSD laptop computer | Hackaday.io https://hackaday.io/project/643-minibsd-laptop-computer

Hotter take: ‘ambient computing’, ‘internet of things’, and ‘ubiquitous computing’ all pale in comparison to my favorite goofy term for this tech: ‘everyware’

Hot take: ambient computing is actually a cool & good idea, as long as no for-profit entities are involved in it. It only becomes horrible when you add business.

Computers Reading Computers’ Writing http://zachwhalen.net/pg/pres/elo18/

Announcing a Competition for Ethics in Computer Science, with up to $3.5 Million in Prizes - The Mozilla Blog https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/10/10/announcing-a-competition-for-ethics-in-computer-science-with-up-to-3-5-million-in-prizes/

Pet peeve: on my work computer, 80% of my lobste.rs comments double-post because of some kind of missing deduplication logic. Then, I have to periodically go through all my threads to delete the duplicates. Sometimes one copy of the post will have 2 upvotes & the other 3.

Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer. - The Boston Globe https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/

David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Software Languages - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/hardware/david-patterson-says-its-time-for-new-computer-architectures-and-software-languages

Book idea (high effort, dunno if I’ll do it): a survey of alternative computing systems in the style of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. What should I include other than smalltalk, colorforth, oberon, templeos, and menuet?

Computability theory but for telos:↵* What can be achieved with certain overarching goals like Survive, Understand, and Profit?↵* How would a society balance them to get off this rock?↵* And how would you deal with something like Profit emerging?

PoundArt – about Random Computer Comics http://www.poundart.com/art/randcomix/about.html

This is a very hot take and also not a new one but here we go: the goal of a properly functioning software engineer is to obviate themselves, not by solving the customer’s specific problems but by blurring the line between using a computer and programming one to the point where users can solve their own problems.

Decentralising the web: Maintaining the momentum https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3036546/decentralising-the-web-maintaining-the-momentum

Video: Grand Central’s Hidden Sub-Basement Has A 102-Year-Old Computer: Gothamist http://gothamist.com/2015/10/15/grand_central_computer_video.php

story idea: after computing the cenusus, an unexpected conclusion – about 10% of the population is gone, with no explanation

Hot take: the ‘with AI’ part of the ‘Making X do Y with AI’ is redundant when X is a computing device and Y is a task associated with intelligence, since anything doing that would be called AI

Hot take: the big problem in generative art is not that computers aren’t creative but that computers don’t have taste. We’ve solved that problem by building taste into the mechanisms of generation instead of building filters.

Computers/Commuters - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw_h2KOMQFk

BBC Computer Literacy Project Archive https://computer-literacy-project.pilots.bbcconnectedstudio.co.uk/

The Texas Instruments 99/4: World’s First 16-Bit Home Computer - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/the-texas-instruments-994-worlds-first-16bit-computer

Building the Commodore that should have existed, an interview with Stefany Allaire - SnapEDA Blog http://blog.snapeda.com/2018/06/06/building-the-commodore-computer-that-should-have-existed-an-interview-with-stefany-allaire/

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Quantum computing for policymakers and philosopher-novelists https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3848

The constant freezing gale from the night side forces most life on the edge into well-lit wind shadows, but also powers mills, musical instruments, even computers based on Kármán vortex logic

Why reliable, unchanging, boring, mechanical interfaces are important in big-computing contexts: https://medium.com/@caseorganic/why-do-we-keep-building-cars-with-touchscreens-alt-the-hidden-lives-of-touchscreens-55faf92799bf

Alan Kay Thesis: The Reactive Engine http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/pdfs/kay.htm

Sound Blaster: How Sound Cards Took Over Computing https://tedium.co/2018/05/10/sound-blaster-history/

Vintage Computer Festival East – Vintage Computer Federation http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-east/

Oracle’s Network Computer: Larry Ellison’s Too-Early Idea https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-history/

Observations on Modern Computing (The Last 10 Years Were a Misstep) – ~ajroach42.com – I’m Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This… http://ajroach42.com/observations-on-modern-computing-the-last-10-years-were-a-misstep/

Band name of the day: cosmetic computing

Gerry Sussman - We Really Don’t Know How to Compute! - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU

Bad idea of the day: a program that computes the degree to which the response to a query meets gricean maxims and, if beyond a threshhold, produces potential implicatures, on a synthetic logic-based language and an ontology

Loper OS » Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284

Yeah, this is almost exactly what I did too: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/7/27/16035508/diy-wearable-computer-google-glass-raspberry-pi-instructions

Remembering the ’70s activist group that tried to save us from the tech industry | The Outline https://theoutline.com/post/4029/computer-people-for-peace-history

TL;DR version of my ‘big and small computing’ essay: amateur & pro can & should coexist, and we should expand the amateur while making sure the stuff that matters is done by pros.

Big and small computing – Rococo Modem Basilisk – Medium https://medium.com/@/big-and-small-computing-73dc49901b9a

The Quest for a Universal Translator for Old, Obsolete Computer Files - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-open-old-computer-files

Joe Armstrong - Keynote: The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science - Code BEAM SF 2018 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ

SXSW 2018: A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tech-history/silicon-revolution/sxsw-2018-a-look-back-at-the-1960s-plato-computing-system

Portable Computer Pre-History: Portable Before Laptops https://tedium.co/2018/03/15/early-portable-computer-history/

RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing by Joe Duf… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k

Blame the Computer | Corey Pein https://thebaffler.com/salvos/blame-the-computer-pein

Man-Computer Symbiosis https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

Bad idea of the day: an extension that runs term extraction on whatever web page you’re viewing and then increases the size and contrast of words based on their computed importance ranking

Bad idea of the day: a captcha system that shows you something that should be upsetting and then determines if you’re humane by checking your computer for signs of whether or not you were upset by it

Rather than sending advertisements into outer space, it would be really nice if we made it so that Facebook and Twitter would run reasonably on six month old mid-market desktop computers. These JS timeouts are annoying.

Bad idea of the day: set your voice assistant’s wake word to ‘OK computer’

It’s not that computers are awful on some general axis, but that we spend more effort than necessary getting less out of them than we easily could out of myopia, greed, and laziness.

📚 Finished reading What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (The MIT Press) by Ed Finn