(2020-09-14) Pereira Colliding Spatial Ideas

Jaron Pereira: Colliding spatial ideas. I don't beleive technology is arbitrary or commodotized. I think the choices we make around the tools and systems we use to build still exert an enormous force on what we build, and the values expressed through that

It provides a possibility space of actions that you can take. Somethings are easier or harder to do in a specific technologial context than others.

The genesis of Fathom, a project I spent years working on, was just the the qualities of Ethereum bumping up against the ideas and problems I was thinking about around education and learning.

I wasn't looking for ideas that would be useful for those problems. Ethereum was just interesting. The traits of the technology were new, and made possible things I didn't think were possible yet

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.

I've noticed this same thought pattern in my head lately around Cloudflare Workers. It's a product that lets you write code that executes in Cloudflare's edge datacenters, giving you extremely low latency almost worldwide. The even cooler part is Workers KV, distributed, eventually consistent Key-Value storage that you can access directly from your code.

*I almost can't help my brain trying to hunt around for a problem.

"A solution in search of a problem" is pretty much an insult at this point, but I think it's often pretty handy.*

The direction this seems to be going for me is some kind of tiny social notetaking tool with contextual backlinks. Making something that behaves well as a broadcast publishing system and still is fast and scalable enough to use a general purpose thought dump.

I can't resist here making some vague gestures at learning. Right now, the two most important spaces in [hyperlink.academy] are the forum and video calls. They're where all social interaction we're organizing actually happens, but both leave a lot to be desired as a social spaces.