Matt Webb

Maybe it's a silly question, but what are you using the assistant for? I love the idea of voice interfaces. Matt Webb's thing about distinguishing data and instructions by addressing "Diane" (https://interconnected.org/home/2025/03/20/diane) to work through a more substantive task by talking has some magic in it. And yet I've rarely gotten more use out of these things than, you know – toggling lights, setting timers. Plugging them into more meaningful integration seems really interesting.

I found this wonderful page on the author's website: https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/24/unoffice_hours >For the past month or so, as an experiment, I’ve been opening my calendar each week for video calls with whoever books a time. It’s been amazing. Wednesday is now my favourite day. >I loved those open conversations over coffee in the Before Times. There’s an ostensible reason to connect, so you talk about work, or compare notes about an idea, or whatever. >But then the unexpected emerges. There are things in your head that you only know are there when you say them.

Great part is you can also style the rss feeds with with `.css` https://interconnected.org/home/feed https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-feed-v3.xs…

Excellent! I'd love to see a script that sends a list of "descriptions" (1-100 words) to ChatGPT and directly gives you back a ready-made (embedding vectors closeness) map in a (textual) graph/chart format (like your above map or your plot https://interconnected.org/more/2023/02/in_our_time-PCA-plot.html)

Great points about noise, and you really hit it on the nose with your final point—I've heard of a mental model of Twitter being likened to tapping a tuning fork and seeing who resonates (https://twitter.com/kevinakwok/status/1076967914580918277). The most fun (and probably best) self promotion is done with fun in mind—Tom Critchlow's post on small b blogging vs. content marketing comes to mind (https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/23/small-b-blogging/), and he extends his thought with this one (https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/03/12/strange-attraction/). I also liked Matt Webb's post on this (https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/10/streak). Please excuse me if I'm being pedantic, I'd change the "hope" point to "showing a person"—even if it's just an email to a friend, cold emailing someone who you quote, etc.

Ran into matt webb talking about Croquet metaverse recently: > Reading Alan Kay’s Wikipedia bio, after forays into Atari, Apple itself, and the One Laptop Per Child project, the great as-yet-not-mainstreamed invention that really stands out to me is Croquet. [1] > †Croquet is a software development kit (SDK) for use in developing collaborative virtual world applications.* [2] [1] https://interconnected.org/home/2022/04/25/kay [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_OS

As well as the associations with [1], this also made me think of one of my favourite essays, "Horsehistory study and the automated discovery of new areas of thought"[2] [1] https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/ [2] https://interconnected.org/home/2021/06/16/horsehistory

RSS onboarding is a struggle for new users. RSS, unlike commercial products, lacks a "front page" to explain the benefits and how to get started. Two things that can help: 1. Have a prettified RSS feed that tells new users what it is, rather than showing raw XML. For example here's mine: http://interconnected.org/home/feed 2. (plug) Link to https://aboutfeeds.com which is a one-pager RSS explainer site, providing links to newsreaders and simple instructions on how to subscribe.

I found most interesting the part of your story where you developed an intuitive sense of its location: > […] it’s a nice trick if you can do it, but it’s better when you can do it at any time, without an app. Which is what happened. > > First I got good at figuring out the ecliptic. That’s the flat disc of the Earth’s orbit (and the solar system). If you wave your arm along the path that the Sun makes across the sky, that’s the disc. > > Then I can’t remember how I would locate Sagittarius each day (it lies on the ecliptic) but I trained my intuition by checking the app each day. Over the weeks and months, I could follow how the position changed (at the same time each day as I caught the bus). First through the ground that way, then under the ground further that way, and so on. > > Eventually then I had this picture of myself, and the Earth, and the solar system, and the centre of the galaxy which had initially been whirling round me, and now it had flipped, I was turning around it. https://interconnected.org/home/2021/06/30/galaxy

It’s all done with CSS animations [1]. The background specified in interconnected-2020.css [2] lines 8–9: background: #cdecff; /* lightest-blue */ animation: changingbg 600s infinite; Followed by the animation specified in lines 12–35: /* Calculated using https://www.joshwcomeau.com/gradient-generator/ in LRGB mode with precision=8 and linear easing Colors: #CDECFF #FFCDEC #FEECCD #9EEBCF #CDECFF */ @keyframes changingbg { from { background: hsl(203deg 100% 90%); } 8% { background: hsl(233deg 68% 92%); } 17% { background: hsl(293deg 52% 90%); } 25% { background: hsl(323deg 100% 90%); } 33% { background: hsl(344deg 98% 92%); } 42% { background: hsl(16deg 97% 92%); } 50% { background: hsl(38deg 96% 90%); } 58% { background: hsl(78deg 44% 87%); } 67% { background: hsl(137deg 50% 84%); } 75% { background: hsl(158deg 66% 77%); } 83% { background: hsl(185deg 62% 84%); } 92% { background: hsl(191deg 87% 84%); } to { background: hsl(203deg 100% 90%); } } [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Animations/Using_… [2]: https://interconnected.org/home/static/styles/interconnected-2020.css?…

I totally agree with this, and when Facebook launched it was clear to me that the restrictions it placed on customization of profile pages, and providing smart defaults for layout, don't, and color would make social more functional and valuable for most users. But I still appreciate Ze Frank's defense of ugly wrt MySpace democratizing design tools, and his observations that the fact that so many people were cutting, modifying, and pasting css was at the time weird and kind of wonderful. http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly > As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers. > > In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that "work" in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

It seems like this is a description: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

Matt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—Cursor Party: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.

Take a look at this feed: https://interconnected.org/home/feed You’ll see if you view source that it’s an RSS (XML) file that your browser doesn’t know how to render. But at the top, there is this: <?xml-stylesheet href="/home/static/styles/pretty-feed-v3.xsl" type="text/xsl"?> Your browser loads that XSLT and uses it to transcode the XML into HTML, which your browser can now render. The source is here: https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-feed-v3.xs…

Cool people: • https://tracydurnell.com • https://www.benkuhn.net • https://schmud.de • https://brandur.org • https://bytes.zone • https://cassidoo.co • https://www.chrbutler.com • https://sive.rs • https://fasterthanli.me • https://akkartik.name • https://www.todepond.com • https://blog.gingerbeardman.com • https://gwern.net • https://interconnected.org • https://jacobfilipp.com • https://johnnywebber.com • https://maggieappleton.com • https://bernsteinbear.com • https://pketh.org • https://rachsmith.com • https://sonnet.io • https://stevenscrawls.com • https://www.bookofjoe.com • https://winnielim.org --- Cool directories: • https://blogs.hn • https://ooh.directory • https://deadsimplesites.com • https://peopleandblogs.com • https://nownownow.com • https://blogroll.org • https://kagi.com/smallweb

There’s something charming about a website being tied to something physical like how this one requires sunny weather, reminds me of the blog post “I wish my web server were in the corner of my room” https://interconnected.org/home/2022/10/10/servers although if this site is truly meant to be environmentally friendly I feel like that’s completely negated by the fact it uses lithium ion batteries, switching to lithium for such a low power project just moves the environmental damage somewhere else

+1, and the OP mentions a wrapper to handle invalid JSON from GPT-3. I’d be interested in that too OP’s other write up: https://interconnected.org/home/2023/02/07/braggoscope

Related - here's a fun short sci-fi story about a savant ("the prompt whisperer") who is able to intuit the prompt that was used to generate things: https://interconnected.org/home/2022/08/03/whisperer

On a similar theme, perhaps: https://interconnected.org/home/2021/06/16/horsehistory

Interestingly, the background colour of this site seems to change over time very subtly, and it's done by CSS with no JavaScript: The "changingbg" parts in https://interconnected.org/home/static/styles/interconnected-2020.css?…

This is one of my favorite blogs that I read consistently. Some of my favorites: Micromorts: units to measure risk of death— https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/01/microcovids First words— https://interconnected.org/home/2020/10/12/first_words State sponsored fashion— https://interconnected.org/home/2022/08/16/fashion Speaking with dolphains— https://interconnected.org/home/2020/07/20/dolphins Bottling the overview effect— https://interconnected.org/home/2021/07/20/overview_effect

Here's the RSS for the blog of the aboutfeeds.com maintainer (genmon here on HN—including here in the comments to this submission): <https://interconnected.org/home/feed> If you wanted an informal list of people making use of this pretty-feed.xsl specifically, it would be possible to solicit that sort of thing through GitHub and see if others come out of the woodwork to identify themselves.

Good point about Microsoft, too bad they aren't in the acronym. I think Facebook still fits though, if not for political reasons. EDIT: Maybe "trillies" would have been a better word. https://interconnected.org/home/2021/06/28/trillies

I wondered the same thing. Turns out, there's a whole language for XML stylesheets: XSLT[1]. The stylesheet used to style that page is http://interconnected.org/home/static/styles/pretty-feed-v2.xsl (will probably want to view source). [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XSLT

This reminds me of Matt Webb's piece titled "Instagram as an island economy"[1] where he writes about the concept of encoded labour: "Every "user" of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos -- this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or "likes," the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes." [1] http://interconnected.org/home/2012/04/11/instagram_as_an_island_econo…

While having nothing to do with "existentialism", you might appreciate this. It's the introduction to a book originally published in France in the late 70s, but that might just serve as a world wide web manifesto... http://interconnected.org/home/more/2005/06/1000Plateaus00Rhizome.pdf (You seem philosophically-minded)

Here's a even more beautiful variation I've seen : http://interconnected.org/home/more/lightcone/ It takes a birth date and tells you when your personal light cone passes nearby stars.

I use a text based wiki synced via git. The advantage for me to use a text based system is that I can access it from different text editors, without the pain of custom vendors formats. For example I'm currently using textmate with this plugin: http://interconnected.org/home/more/2007/05/textmate-wiki/ but you can find macros for all the major text editors.

Matt Webb (interconnected.org) has persistently been one of my favorite people and it would be a pleasure to sing some praises, mention some of his super interesting thoughtful projects. A long time ago (12+ years) was Little Printer, an internet connected/social little thermal printer, with the Berg group. There's a loving open source effort maintaining the systems ? Which I haven't gotten around to installing on my own off the shelf printer). https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/ Matt's current effort is the Poem/A1 rhyming poetry AI clock. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/genmon/poem-1-the-ai-poetry-clock A submission got popular - Product Innovation is sometimes the Supply - and mentions the excellent very old Machine Supply, a tweeting vending machine selling books and notebooks. https://www.actsnotfacts.com/made/machine-supply https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/27/distribution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41709429 Matt's blog is extremely longstanding & excellent. His work always finds playfulness & creativity, embodies that rich interesting Splime sci-fi internet that seemed so full of open potential when I was growing up in the 90's & 00's. Thank you Matt Webb for adding so much to my life! I highly recommend adding Matt to your blogrolls, & checking out his deep & prolific archives.

Mark Weiser was my friend and mentor at the University of Maryland, so I've posted some stuff about his work and life here in the past. As usual, I've checked and updated the broken links to archive.org. (One of my favorites is the 1995 Computer Chronicals video at the end with a profile of Mark's band, Severe Tire Damage, the first band to ever perform live over the internet, who upstaged the Rolling Stones over MBone, using up half the bandwidth of the internet on Friday, November 18, 1994!) History of the Internet - Severe Tire Damage, The Internet’s First Live Band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZn0HW9OHD4 Mark Weiser passed away on April 27, 1999, from liver cancer. ==== There's this related article: Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense (interconnected.org) https://interconnected.org/home/2021/08/27/data_sense https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330031 To which I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28351064 Natalie Jeremijenko: LiveWire, Dangling String; Mark Weiser: Calm Technology, Ubiquitous Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology >Calm Technology >History >The phrase "calm technology" was first published in the article "Designing Calm Technology", written by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in 1995.[1] The concept had developed amongst researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in addition to the concept of ubiquitous computing.[3] >Weiser introduced the concept of calm technology…