Here is a tweet thread summary of the post: Information organized in tabular format can be found as early as 2600 B.C. where people used it to record the credits/debits people they owed in the community. Here’s Nippur tablet from circa 1400–1100 B.C.
We collaborated with @nilenso in an open-ended research project rethinking the fundamentals of spreadsheet design. Here’s a blog post tracing the historical evolution of the spreadsheet interface from ancient clay tablets to its modern instantiation: https://t.co/A0PoOGLXuD
Starting off, we considered the interaction of referencing a cell.
The user selects a cell [noun] and then drags it to the target cell to create a reference [verb]. To use Jef Raskin's terms, this is a noun-verb construction.
Read more at: https://t.co/5r4fv481Dr
We worked closely with @nilenso on an open-ended design research project where we attempted to rethink the fundamentals of the spreadsheet interface. Slowly starting to document and roll out the work we did with them.
Check it out! https://t.co/Ehh2P5jkna
Negarchy is this political theory concept that I learnt in somewhere around 2023 that explains so much dynamics around me. It translates roughly into a gridlock because of mutual constraints imposed by the power struggle of competing/cooperating agents: https://t.co/IrKqFqrPbm
Book discovery of the day: Ancient Knowledge Networks — A free access book by Assyriologist by Eleanor Robson on how “networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to adapt over the course of 5 world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC.”!
Researching the history of spreadsheets these days and ran across two rather niche books that talk about the evolution of the table/grid structure.
The Grid Book by Hannah Higgins: https://t.co/ZFAILXrxH7
TIL about the psychological equivalent of Conway’s Law for organizations — neurotic styles of top executives as determining the nature of organizational dysfunctions! Curious to learn this hierarchy of clusters A/B/C of personality disorders maps onto the organization level.
Two books that I found during my spelunking into the computer history lore recently.
1/ The Friendly Orange Glow: How the lesser known PLATO computers from 1960s revolutionized computing: https://t.co/9VELEs2DqV
Curious to learn they introduced public/private discussion forums.
Finished reading Geist in the Machine by @deontologistics. It is a pretty good essay that provides a synopsis of the kind of concepts that are conflated in debates about AI and outlines his position on how to develop the discourse.
Was looking through some @joeerl tweets — it is amazing how much timeless wisdom his words hold — and came across this Niklaus Wirth paper on keeping the software’s footprints low. Feel it is a key paper in today’s time with all the AI slop bloat: https://t.co/MNbQxyq3rf
This might sound paradoxical, but I think it is more dangerous to suppress one’s hatred by putting on a nice guy mask than letting the hate flow through you. The realization is dawning on me that it might not be a problem of you being an outlet for hatred to flow through.
Why would anyone want to have such ‘research’ databases they haven’t spent the effort to understand? A main idea of researching is to widen your attention into the sources and then apply discernment in curating the relevant bits. What’s the point of a machine doing it for you?
“I feel like your problem is you are trying to judge all these things in the abstract before you do them.”
This advice from Ira Glass on how to find your line of work goes hard.