I thought it was very interesting about how Alan Kay and Bjarne Stroustrup may have been applying wisdom from their old fields of expertise and how that affected their philosophy.
There is an appeal to building complexity through Emergence, where you design several small self-contained pieces that have rich interactions with each other and through those rich interactions you can accomplish more complex things. Its how the universe seems to work.
But I also think that the kinds of tools that we have make designing things like this largely impossible. Emergence tends to result in things that we dont expect, and for precise computation and engineering, it feels like we are not close to accomplishing this.
So the idea that we need a sense of 'omniscience' for designing programs on individual systems feels like it is the right way to go.
I am always fascinated by the kind of tech that Bret Victor works on. While I can grasp a lot of the things and how to apply them from his previous work (like 'Stop Drawing Dead Fish' etc) this newest stuff is beyond my understanding.
I would love to know more about how this whole system works and why it is so much easier to work with. Code and computation is generally so reliant on the specifics and the details, so this approach seems to be touching on something that has a fundamentally different design, and it is just really fascinating.
I have an fairly underpowered phone (Samsung Galaxy M01 Core). I got it mostly because it's the size that I like.
I also use most sites in browser as opposed to app.
It turns out a lot of these sites and services are a lot less addictive when they're slow and the animations are lagging out, and I don't get sucked in any more.
Also ends up increasing battery life due to lack of use.
I also have access to the main apps that I do need - whatsapp, gpay, maps etc.
This is an interesting idea. The way I see it, there is a lot of really high quality content that does rise to the top of YouTube. But also the feed has a lot of recency bias. So a great creator who puts out things once every many months, ends up having their stuff at the top of the pile for just a week or two.
So as time passes, high quality quickly gets buried by the mediocre barrage of content.
So an interesting feed would have some dimension of time-indepedence.
There is an appeal to building complexity through Emergence, where you design several small self-contained pieces that have rich interactions with each other and through those rich interactions you can accomplish more complex things. Its how the universe seems to work. But I also think that the kinds of tools that we have make designing things like this largely impossible. Emergence tends to result in things that we dont expect, and for precise computation and engineering, it feels like we are not close to accomplishing this.
So the idea that we need a sense of 'omniscience' for designing programs on individual systems feels like it is the right way to go.