Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
Technologies are always coming out of networks that require other related ideas to have the next one. The fact that we have simultaneous independent invention as a norm works against the idea of the heroic inventor, that we’re dependent on them for inventions. These things will come when all the other pieces are ready.
This is something we’ve learned at Clearleft—you can’t create a design system for an organisation, hand it over to them, and expect it to be maintained.
You can’t just hire an agency to create a design system and expect that the system alone will solve something. It won’t do much before the people in the organization align on this idea as well, believe in it, invest in it, and create a culture of collaboration around it.
The people who will be living with the design system must be (co-)creators of it. That’s very much the area we work in now.
A bit of web history reacted by Paravel: the Microsoft homepage from 1994. View source to see some ooooold-school markup.
Ah, memories!
Recreations of movie stills at filming locations around the world (like I did in Sydney for The Matrix). There’s something quite addictive about looking through these.
What would Google+, YouTube and Facebook have looked like in 1997?
A beautiful dose of perspective from Frank.
In the spirit of my Matrix recreations from Sydney, here's a photo set recreating shots from Amélie.
The story of Professor Myers' foiled attempt to see the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled.
An interesting take on the recent round of acquisitions by Yahoo.
You can now create podcasts on Odeo. This is going to be huge.