scroot

Man, I would love an up to date version of Cyberdog!

This comes on the heels of the AHA and other parties in the suit against the government posting the video depositions of some of the DOGE people to youtube [1], which are fascinating to watch.

Justin Fox not being able to say what DEI is really tells you everything you need to know about how grants were cancelled.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@historiansorg

I didn't mean "like hypercard" so literally in this manner. What I meant was, a computing environment that seems to blend seamlessly into the wider operating system, and that is able to sufficiently blur the line between end users and "programmers" (here called "authors"). Critical to this capability was the ability to "pop the hood" easily and mess with what was going on underneath.

All of today's computing is fundamentally based on a strong division between programmers and users. That division has only grown more stark with time. The dominance of Unix is partly to blame, in my view.

I knew I could get Don Hopkins to show up!

Imagine if computing had continued down the path laid by systems like HyperCard

It's the "no stopping it at this point" that always sticks out to me in these discussions. Why is there no stopping it, exactly? At this juncture these systems require massive physical infrastructure and loads of energy. It's possible to shut it all down. What's lacking is the political will.

These posts claiming that "we will review the output" etc., and that claim software engineers will still need to apply their expertise and wisdom to generated outputs, never seem to think this all the way through. Those who write such articles might indeed have enough experience and deep knowledge to evaluate AI outputs. What of subsequent generations of engineers? What about the forthcoming wave of people who may never attain the (required) deep knowledge, because they've been dependent on these generation tools during the course of their own education?

The structures of our culture combined with what generative AI necessarily is means that expertise will fade generationally. I don't see a way around that, and I see almost no discussion of ameliorating the issue.

treating the economic world as a gross external thing

Well, a _specific_ kind of economic world in this case. Is it not a matter of fact that big tech companies largely guide how computing is used a developed, and that they are beholden to ever-expected increases in value to their shareholders? You have still have an "economic world" that doesn't operate that way.

I would be _very_ surprised if any 18Fers were a part of the "national design studio." It is, at the very least, Doge affiliated, and Doge is who killed 18F.

For those of us in civic tech, this is a higher priority. At the federal level especially, there are laws on the books about website accessibility compliance -- even if, at present, the powers that be are ignoring them.

I have found the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [1] to be especially useful when thinking through what I need to implement and why.

It is _impossible_ to thoroughly test any of your accessibility concerns only with automated tooling. You will need to have an experienced user of screenreaders go through your site, especially if it contains complex JS enabled controls and other dynamic updates. This is because the habits of individual users and the combination of a particular screenreader application / browser can often produce different results. It's important to know what the common "patterns of use" are for, say, a JAWS user vs a VoiceOver user.

Last thing I'll recommend is that if you are testing a11y yourself on a Mac using VoiceOver, do all your a11y testing in Safari. In our research, most VO users on Macs/iOS use Safari because it has the best screenreader integration on that platform, and other browsers miss basic things.

[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

As an elder millennial, I just don't know what to say. That a once in a generation allocation of capital should go towards...whatever this all will be, is certainly tragic given current state of the world and its problems. Can't help but see it as the latest in a lifelong series of baffling high stakes decisions of dubious social benefit that have necessarily global consequences.

Thanks for posting, I hadn't even heard of this

Whenever I'm using Guix I enjoy the simplicity of Shepherd [1]

[1] https://shepherding.services/manual/html_node/Introduction.h...

The writing system is not syllabic. It uses ideograms, logograms, and yes syllables all together. It's also not one singular "writing system," as the set of symbols varied and changed in the context it was used (language or region) and over the two thousand years that people wrote in this style.

All the glamour seems nice until you're in a country of continental expanse, with territories from the pacific islands to the caribbean, and with equal citizens living in areas with low-bandwidth internet access.

The guides have been archived on the "18F in exile" site for continued reliable public access [0][1]

[0] https://guides.18f.org/

[1] https://18f.org

It's not an improvement.

Oof, take a look under the hood. Definitely vibecoded.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/waldo.net/post/3lx6sfupkbk2o

When I was about 12 or 13, I was hanging out in my local Egghead so much playing Rebel Assault on the demo machine that the guy who worked there gave me a free mousepad just to leave the store.

Sure. Doesn't affect what I said.

These guys are going to spend 6 months and millions of dollars slowly discovering that USWDS exists

I recommend Havelock's Preface to Plato and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy

To add: one of the main arguments in Gordon's tome is that many if the most impactful innovations dealt with "networking the house" (gas, electricity, plumbing, and communications) and could _only happen once_. It's actually kind of sobering to read.

Even if all the countries in the world agree to ban AI, its not based on something with actual scarcity (like purified uranium, or gold) so someone somewhere will keep moving this tech forward...

However, this is the crux of the matter! At issue is whether or not one believes people (individually and/or socially) have the ability to make large decisions about what should or should not be acceptable. Worse -- a culture with _assumed_ inevitability concerning some trend might well bring forth that trend _merely by the assumed inevitability and nothing else_.

It is obvious that the scales required to make LLM-style AI effective require extremely large capital investments and infrastructure, and that at the same time there is potentially a lot of money to be made. Both of those aspects -- to me -- point to a lot of "assumed inevitability," in particular when you look at who is making the most boisterous statements and for what reasons.

Yeah I hear that on TV a lot also, but no one who has spent any time in the Harvard of the Blue Ridge would say it that way

It’s no different from how most people who drive cars can’t work on them

What if instead of cars and driving, we use reading and writing as the metaphor for the kind of media/utility computing can have. I'd argue it them changes the whole nature of the argument.

Have you heard about ufork? I find it very promising

https://github.com/organix/uFork

Lead?

Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA

No, 18F is gone. All of the staff were fired and the organization no longer exists within TTS.

I had the same experience the other day. Had to slum it on some other machine with Google. Borderline unusable