Instadeq Blog

Alan's observations, especially in regards to Netscape and their lack of vision, make me morose for OpenDoc which did not deserve its untimely death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc Some good discussion from 2021: https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/why-opendoc-failed-and-then-failed-3-m… https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/OpenDoc (the links at the end are better than the page) https://www.wired.com/1997/03/closing-opendoc-a-great-leap-backward/

the payment and data integration services of instadeq[1] are implemented in clojure (component, immutant, bidi, cheshire). also the data integration backend (same stack as above), and it's frontend and an admin interface for users, groups and permissions for event fabric[2] (clojurescript, om.next, garden). just to be clear, backend and frontend of both product aren't clojure/clojurescript. [1] https://instadeq.com/ [2] https://event-fabric.com/

I need something which allows me to interactively re-arrange the date on-the-fly --- if you've never worked w/ Improv it's hard to express. There was the beginnings of an opensource implementation, Flexisheet, or see: https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv-spreadshe…

It's too bad that the pivot table is a poor approximation of a true multidimensional spreadsheet, for example Lotus Improv: https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv-spreadshe…

My point was that modifications to the higher up system (e.g., file mounts) could be isolated per process (and then trickled down to sub-processes). If the process corrupted the OS' function in any way, only that process would feel it, everything above it would be fine. I do agree that AI could be used as a rare reason to actually innovate in the OS space. > do files even matter anymore if you interact primarily via a chat box? Or is the only thing that matters recorded notes by/for the LLM which can then render whatever view of the user's knowledge base is appropriate? I'd say in an itemized OS with loads of links between items, AI would be more useful than in today's OSes. First, RAG would be faster as it wouldn't have to read everything, instead look for items that are relevant and traverse the tree of links, reading the nodes. Again, metadata. Apple has added stuff like automatic photo metadata (e.g., you snap a photo of a beach, and it automatically gets tagged with #beach; this is also being used by malware to exfil only documents) making AI even more useful. > Do apps even matter anymore, or can good enough logic be assembled and written on the fly to suit any request? A lot of reasons why various ideas did or didn't work were to do with business models, but the low cost of inferencing fundamentally changes what works there. This actually made me think of the secretary metaphor: Sure, a secretary can do a lot for you, but not everything. You still have the…

You might be interested in reading about the Japanese "Fifth Generation Computer Systems" project from 1982, which revolved around PROLOG. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems >The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS; Japanese: 第五世代コンピュータ, romanized: daigosedai konpyūta) was a 10-year initiative begun in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to create computers using massively parallel computing and logic programming. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and to provide a platform for future developments in artificial intelligence. FGCS was ahead of its time, and its excessive ambitions led to commercial failure. However, on a theoretical level, the project spurred the development of concurrent logic programming. >The term "fifth generation" was intended to convey the system as being advanced. In the history of computing hardware, there were four "generations" of computers. Computers using vacuum tubes were called the first generation; transistors and diodes, the second; integrated circuits, the third; and those using microprocessors, the fourth. Whereas previous computer generations had focused on increasing the number of logic elements in a single CPU, the fifth generation, it was widely believed at the time, would instead turn to massive numbers of CPUs to gain performance. [...] >Concurrent logic programming >In 1982, during a visit to the ICOT, Ehud Shapiro…