Subconscious Blog

Hi all, I'm Eli Parra & I gave this talk at ReClojure 2022 in December 3, 2022. Very happy to see this here in HN! A bit of personal background of the talk: my work over the years has involved making internal tools for fast-moving, small organizations and that's how I fell in love with spreadsheets. They are the best canvas I know of to whip up custom, user-friendly interfaces in a couple of hours. These prototypes often then go on to be intensely used for months and even years with organic growth & minimal maintenance. Spreadsheets are often seen with condescension by technical people & they've grown a heavy patina of drudgery over the decades. But to me they represent creative freedom & the easiest interface to computation we've yet found, so successful it's nearly invisible. I gave this talk because I'm starting to find answers to what makes them so successful and have ideas of how they might evolve. My key points in the talk: * Spreadsheets matter. Used by billions of people, they're the main way to go beyond being a point-and-click user and start programming. I frame spreadsheets as level 2 in a scale for interfaces that Gordon Brander imagines in this essay: https://subconscious.substack.com/p/a-kardashev-scale-for-interfaces * Spreadsheets are changing. In 2022 Excel & Google Sheet got lambdas and reached level 3 in Brander's scale. The talk is a stab at what a level-4 spreadsheet might be, how you could translate QUOTE & EVAL into spreadsheets. * Spreadsheets…

OT, but via the UI design thread on HN, I just bumped into noosphere protocol, which claims to be just like what you describe here. https://subconscious.substack.com/p/noosphere-a-protocol-for-thought

Daniel Jackson's book https://subconscious.substack.com/p/concept-design-in-three-easy-steps I use it all the time after reading it for example they redesigned git into gitless using these methods to audit and find redundant or confusing features.

Gordon is the better founder to ask this question of. Alas, he does not dwell on Hacker News. I'm just the resident code monkey, but I'll offer you some of Gordon's topical blog posts for consideration: - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/compositionality - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/provoking-emergence-with-alphabets - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/coevolution-creates-living-complex… - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/simple-seeds Gordon and I are both always available to talk in real-time on our Discord, though.

Centralization is inevitable. - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/centralization-is-inevitable

It's a really interesting, and difficult, problem. Progress is slow but still visible: we really are "slouching toward Xanadu", as in https://subconscious.substack.com/p/block-reference-mechanisms.

Apple wants the iPad OS developer experience to be bad Their #1 focus is lock-in, preventing being commodified, and extracting value No apps that run operating systems, no apps with windowed environments, no app-store-like apps / third party app stores, no browser engines, no Flash, terrible mobile safari experience, no OS mods / jailbreaks, no desktop-style cursors, physical iPad keyboards lacking escape keys. Wanting 30% of all payments for digital goods that occur on an iPhone. Being able to eg "run Docker on your iPad" would go against all that. I think it's also a big part of why they charge $99/yr for being a developer - otherwise people would be able to sideload apps much more easily Nice article related to this: https://subconscious.substack.com/p/aggregators-arent-open-ended Hard to imagine just how different things might be right now if things were more open. iPhones are always on and connected to the internet - you could run servers from them! maybe mesh networking could actually be a thing? The mother of all demos would not be allowed on the app store. Squeak/smalltalk would not be allowed. Feels disrespectful to humanity that the most popular platform in the US is so locked down. Idk how things would change here without government intervention -- this all seems to be in shareholders' interests. Seems like a good time to be running a competitor. iOS being so locked down means they'll have lackluster support for the long tail of desired AI use cases. And…