Glimpses of the future
I have a bunch of half-finished articles I’m working on right now, none of which are ready for publication. Instead, enjoy a few inspirational links I’ve come across in the last two weeks!
Glimpses of the Future
Tools for Thought Rocks October meeting is happening on Friday, October 29th @ 10:30am PT. As always, it should be fun!
- Rosano is giving a talk entitled ‘The wetware of writing and doing’ about his own homegrown publishing and productivity tools.
I always love a deep dive on other people’s productivity workflows, especially if, like Rosano, they have spent time heavily customizing them.
Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer makes a muddy term specific and clarifies how the future of computing intersect. The whole series is worth a skim, specifically how he organizes the topics around enablers: what are the key advances that need to be made in order to enable the Metaverse? While I disagreed with some of his observations and quibbled over a few conclusions, the categories were tremendously helpful for creating a map of the territory.
One thing he nails is the importance of standards, protocols, and interchange formats to the development of a metaverse:
Yet interchange standards and tools — a broadly-defined category that includes various technical solutions, protocols, formats, and services which enable interoperability — are perhaps the most important aspect of this essay. Without them, there will be no Metaverse — only a more virtual and immersive version of today’s mobile internet and app stores. What’s more, this pale imitation will be far less lucrative, dynamic, and healthy.
We talk about interchange and standards a lot at the Tools for Thought Rocks monthly meetings. It’s important! Essentially, the internet itself was enabled by a series of protocols well-designed and adopted (TCP, IP, SMTP, HTTP, etc). The Metaverse will be no different.
Research is just learning that pushes past the edges of human knowledge was a fun insight from Kanjun Qiu’s essay Research as Understanding. From the essay:
Novel discovery is just a side effect. You don’t make novel discoveries by trying to make novel discoveries. Instead, research is simply a continuation of something we already naturally do: learning.
- Learning happens when you understand something that someone else already understands.
- Research happens when you understand something that nobody else understands yet.
Steve Krouse has been tweeting links to different platforms, libraries, and companies that solve various parts of a “serverless database/backend aggregator. I’ve discovered some new things through his links.