Read.me
- You: What kind of a page is this?
Me: It's a personal page.
You: So it is supposed to tell me something about you?
Me: Yes, some things. - You: What's with the "you" and "me?"
Me: Well, I am assuming you are here curious and wanting to know more - right? A dialogue is a natural way to answer questions.
You: I see, ok... - You: What's this written in?
Me: ELM with bootstrap and some custom css.
You: But ELM is a pretty heavy framework that deals with complex data flow, state etc. You could have just done all this in simple html?
Me: Yes, but it is also a nice framework and, moreover, I've been thinking about stateful systems and typed functional programming languages for a bit. Building different applications in ELM has been natural. It also leads to clean code, and a way to avoid the usual JS debugging/errors (`Undefined Has No Properties...` etc).
You: But isn't this overkill?
You: Yes and no. - You: What's the deal with the squares?
Me: They are visual symbols that are easy to manipulate, display, and organize. You can think of them as building blocks that make up a language (even if we are just talking about a simple page here).
You: What do you mean?
Me: We can think of languages as a systems of hierarchical symbolic objects some of which can be atomic (such as say letters, or words) and some of which can be composites. These objects can also have inner-relations, be representatives of the same category etc. And out of such systems you can build models of interaction between the recipient (reader) and creater (writer).
You: [sleepy...]
Me: So in the case of this simple website, we have squares that represent collections of other squares, text objects, like this modal you are reading, or are themselves atomic. They group together naturally by colors as well... I've been thinking about symbolic systems and the like for the last while, because you can build interesting interactive dynamics starting with languages...
You: But they still are just squares you can click on, right?
Me: Yes.
You: So is this like AI?
You: [seen flying out of a 5th floor window] - [All icons in this site c/o The Noun Project.]
Film
- You: You are producing a film?
Me: Yes. While trying to get an education in computing I began to see a deep divergence of the status quo from the visions of pioneers in the field.
You: People like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates?
Me: No. Jobs and Gates were marketers, amazing sales people, but they were not inventors. They did not create the technologies we use today, at best they synthesized them. The people I am referring to here, and those who are the focus of the documentary, are the men and women who worked at MIT, Stanford Research Group, Xerox PARC and Bell Labs during the 1960s and 1970s.
You: What is the film about?
Me: This documentary explores the history of personal computing and the visions of the pioneers in the field. What is clear is that the individuals most responsible for bringing computing to its current state sought a very different world than the one we have today. Moreover, so little has happened qualitatively in computing since the late 1970s and so many of the core ideas, and richness, of the early day tech has been lost in the noise.
The film aims to interview as many of these people as possible, while they are still with us, and tell this story through their words. - You: Where can I learn about the film?
Me: The film is a collaboration with Eric Gade andi Matt Rocker. Please take a look.
Dk
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Daniel Krasner
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Re
Read.me
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