hannah arendt
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism
the future computers
there are two types of computers, general and customized. both laptops and severs belong to the former. phones, washing machines, microwave, even cars belong to the latter. you are either a user or a programmer, or both. there are an obvious gap between users and programmers. the question here is if we could remove that gap?
take Excel, the successful spreadsheet application, as an example. it shows you its results as soon as you click to open it. the changes you make show up immediately. you hardly notice that you are a programmer as a user because of its immediate feedback and the hiding of programming related parts. can future computers blur the distinction between a user and a programmer like Excel as an application software?
from stanislav in 2010, “the distinction between ‘user’ and ‘programmer’ is an artifact of our presently barely-programmable and barely-usable computing systems. I would like to use the neutral word ‘operator’ instead.”
20250906: i realized that these ai buzz were all about blurring the line between ‘user’ and ‘programmer’ but in a wrong direction. the problem is like all the software became bloated in an unprecedented scale. so much computation power and so much energy are wasted. ai should not be aimed at general solutions, but some very specific problems.
20250911: A convivial tool can be bent entirely to your will, made your own, used creatively, and mastered. A pen, pencil, or brush is convivial; a word processing program, less so. A handsaw – or a bandsaw! – is convivial; an assembly line is not. Anything you might describe as a black box is by its nature not convivial.
20250914: In The World Is Not a Desktop, Marc Weisner, the principal scientist and manager of the computer science laboratory at Xerox PARC, stated that, “a good tool is an invisible tool.” Weisner cited eyeglasses as an ideal technology because with spectacles, he argued, “you look at the world, not the eyeglasses.” Through repetition, and by design, technologies blend into our lives. While technologies, and communications technologies in particular, have a powerful mediating impact, many of the most pervasive effects are taken for granted by most users. When technology works smoothly, its nature and effects are invisible. But technologies do not always work smoothly. A tiny fracture or a smudge on a lens renders glasses quite visible to the wearer.