Bookmate VS TermKit

Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see...The model is as recursive as it is simple. There is nothing preventing a list of bookmarks from linking to another list of bookmarks...The creation of a bookmark list is a surprisingly fun project.

I agree. I've often thought of people publishing a list of bookmarks in a way that everyone can see. I even created DownloadNet originally based on this idea. I wanted a way to publish one of my bookmark folders as a server for people.

But then, as so often happens, the simple idea evolved, and I got carried away by who knows what (technical challenges? I don't know) and ended up creating a personal archive and search engine with only a scant integration with bookmarks.

This article is a good reminder of what originally seemed to me a good idea. Perhaps I should add it there. Also, perhaps p2p could be an easy way to federate these things? Not everyone can just create their own server, nor do they want to host it on big providers always.

I've been tossing around the idea of p2p as a way to "solve" this, but it's still rather formless: new and vague. Over the last 3 days I created a p2p blog (and again, got carried away -- perhaps with technical challenges -- and added p2p chat). But I think there's something there.

Perhaps I should listen to that idea that keeps recurring for me. To that first version of it anyway.

Something simple, that unifies, publishing a bookmark folder (I have some chrome bookmark reading code^0), over p2p (I have janus^1), and possibly uses either the popularity of DownloadNet, or even some of the search/archiving stuff -- without getting carried away -- to assist in delivery or marketing.

I don't know. A clear synthesis right now escapes me, but that's OK. I think there's something there: bookmarks (maybe a special bookmark folder, something referential, like "/var/www/html"), into which bookmarks go and then become public; a lightweight p2p server (that perhaps in some limit future could be federates effortlessly for p2p discovery, but who knows how?). Ugh...still too complex perhaps.

Bookmark folder + p2p + transitive (my bookmark folder includes a link to another person's bookmark folder ~~ somehow).

So it's like that article recently on the homepage "We need webrings" or sth. I didn't think that was particularly a good idea, but now I see at least a partial appeal.

The "link" to another person's p2p bookmark "folder" will instead be a normal www hyperlink that links to the "signalling access point" where you can do the ritual to make the connection.

People may think the weirdness, unavailability (you have to be running the little service in your terminal or as a daemon), and difficulty makes it a non-starter. But I think these "backward" elements, could be a paradoxical strength.

I don't know. I think there's something there. I definitely want to keep pushing in this direction, anyhow.

0: https://github.com/00000o1/Bookmate

First time I saw an idea like this was with termkit [1], which I thought was great and was sad to see it didn't get continued development.

I really feel like we overlook the ways in which we limit ourselves by having our CLI interfaces be tied to a thing that emulates a terminal from the 80s.

The composability, scriptability, history, etc. of CLIs is great, but why should that preclude us from being able to quickly show a PNG or graph a function?

Maybe it's an idea whose time has come.

[1] https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

I'm impressed by this blog every time I see it, both visually and content-wise.

I agree with this. It's hard to nail down why Victor's talks are so compelling, when each of these items separately are much more mundane but are still quite well explored areas.

* "What if" feedback loops/direct manipulation

Victor's vision abstractly seems to be trying to predict/explore the consequence of some action in programming, and in specific demonstration seems to be using small widgets to allow easy manipulation of inputs to get an intuitive understanding of outputs. This could be boiled down to different goals: "Allow a program to be more easily tweaked" and "Explore a concept to get intuition of a different viewpoint". The more cynical/pragmatic interpretations for these are "make a GUI for your program" and "use interactive demos when teaching certain topics".

The first interpretation is almost comical, but we can maybe expand this to be "when you make a GUI, think about how your interface is being interpreted intuitively and this can help make your app more usable". This can maybe understood more easily when taken with the fact that Bret Victor helped design the interface for the first iPhone - famously intuitive to use. This also leads to its limitations - only concepts that have another more intuitive viewpoint can be represented. I can add a colour wheel to my WYSIWYG editor rather than hex values, but I can't easily create a GUI that lets me express that I want to validate, strip the whitespace from an email address and put it into lowercase.

The second interpretation leads to explorable explanations, which Victor has made a few of himself [0,1], but I would also cite Nicki Case [2] and unconed [3] as being other good examples. Again, this is only afforded to specific topics that have scope for exploration.

* Making logic feel more geometric/concrete

This can be seen in things like Labview (made in 1986), Apache NiFi (made in 2006) among others, e.g. SAS. In a sense, this has existed in the form of UNIX pipelines and functional programming since the first LISP was made. There is a further point which is "there currently aren't tools like this that are suitable for a non-programming audience", which is what 'Low Code' and 'No Code' is trying to achieve, but unfortunately in practice as soon as you hit a limitation of the framework then you're back to needing an engineer again.

* Human Interfaces

Sort of addressed in 'feedback loops' point above, but the DynamicLand is an interesting demo of what he's trying to get to. I think this speaks more to me with internet of things. I have friends who have set up full smart-home heating systems and can move music between rooms which are all very much seen the same as adjusting a physical thermostat rather than 'programming' or similar.

There is definitely a lot that can be explored here for certain applications, but there probably isn't direct utility in arranging pieces of paper with coloured dots on it in order to set the path of a robot. I can see this in a more consulting/capture sense of presenting certain input parameters in a more physical format, but again this is deviating from the OP's notion that this is a whole programming environment.

[0] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

[1] http://worrydream.com/KillMath/

[2] https://ncase.me

[3] https://acko.net

Just a ref: https://acko.net/

Cool, Steven Wittens is behind this. The header at https://acko.net/ is one of the first examples of WebGL I remember seeing in the wild, and still one of the cleanest. Looking forward to seeing where this goes!