Bartosz Ciechanowski

I appreciate your reply, as you clearly have more experience than me with this topic, but bear with me if I push back on some of your points.

> Wikipedia is a tiny part of the picture; we also have YouTube (with millions of creators from all cultures/languages/fields), Khan Academy, the Internet Archive, your local library, and countless other resources

That's precisely my point. YouTube is audiovisual, something we've had since the dawn of television. Sure, the content has exploded in diversity (which has its own problems of curation), but it's still a fundamentally consumption based, one way, zero interaction, learning experience.

Khan Academy and other MOOCs are also audiovisual and text based, and at best, have communication capabilities with the instructor and other students. This is attempting to bring the traditional school experience to the virtual world, and is hardly revolutionary.

The Internet Archive, while vast in content, is still only audiovisual, and has the same consumption and curation problems.

If we settle for computers being a mere portal to traditional resources, then, yes, there is vast knowledge to be acquired. And this has been invaluable for many people, myself included.

But computers are capable of so much more if we step outside the boundaries of traditional teaching. They allow content to be interactive, linked, remixed and experimented with in ways that weren't possible before. For the developing mind of a child, this allows entirely new…

The site indeed is trying to be an artistic treatise, as opposed to being a clear, easy-to-read manifesto. It touches many themes I have read about many times, so I skimmed most of the content. It came to the expected indie-web conclusions and recommendations.

Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiring manager when your candidacy is considered for another job.

Some people are fine with that, and just enjoy the process of producing content, and seeing it published. They are a minority. Most people come to consume more than to produce, and to get quick feedback.

The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web, like Reddit, or Xitter, or, well, HN. A few dozen people will bookmark it, or subscribe to the RSS feed. Sites that are true works of art and craft, like https://ciechanow.ski/, will get remembered more widely, but true works of art are rare.

It is, definitely, very possible to build a rhizome of small indie sites, along the lines of Web 1.0. But they would also benefit from a thoughtful symbiosis with the "big bad" giants of the modern Web.

It was a real problem. I used to keep hundreds of bookmarks I felt forced to check out, tag and archive. It was mentally draining and time consuming. I was never satisfied with the way I sorted them and I would often move them around, trying new categories and labeling strategies. Overall, I likely spent more time managing bookmarks than reading their content. It wasn't sustainable and I ended up deleting most of them.

Now I keep it to the bare minimum:

1) Favorites bar: up to 10 websites I visit on daily basis.

2) Inspiration folder: where I put things I like. 330 as of today. Website layouts, painters, dev blogs, Youtube videos, anything that has good vibes. That's the only criteria. I make it an effort not to add any subfolder. The only exception is "Favorite projects" which is my little Hall of Fame for quality content. https://ciechanow.ski/ is up there.

3) Trashcan folder: where I place temporary bookmarks I don't care about and will delete in the next few days.

I periodically export my bookmarks so I don't feel guilty when I delete entries from the browser. You could do the same. Put the exported files in a usb stick and forget about them.

I did a quick Google. Play with some keywords, especially searching for images: drawbar steering-angle turntable dolly Ackerman train

The usual design is to use mechanical linkages to steer the wheels, with varying levels of complexity that have different compromises. A complicated double Ackermann example (scroll down for plan view): https://planindustrie.de/en/products/industrial-heavy-duty-drawbar-trailer/ackermann-steering/type-60/ and look at other products of theirs from the menu for simpler linkage examples.

Academic papers are about the design of linkages and turning paths, with consideration for tyre slippage, obstacle avoidance, following, etcetera. The more mathematical papers use an idealised world on a flat surface (ignoring: surface tilts; terrain elevation changes/steps; slippery or soft surfaces especially if variable). Some modern systems use computer controlled power and steering to wheels to help avoid the errors in reality of idealised systems. It is a huge industry, but we need a https://ciechanow.ski/ type person to give us a nice model to play with.

Author here.

Woah! This kinda exploded, thank you so much for the kind words!

Lately, I'm trying to add more interactivity to my posts. Mainly inspired by amazing work of Bartosz Ciechanowski [1].

I started drawing with code a few years and completely fell in love with it. Problems like this one scratch my itch for creative programming.

I hope some of my posts will inspire people to try making pictures using code, just for the sake of it. Programming should be fun :)

[1] https://ciechanow.ski/

I remember being 13 and buying these magazines. In depth reviews and explanations of technologies.

Stuff like Byte was both deep, entertaining, well written and forward looking.

Internet media never got to the same heights as printed media did when it comes to editing and packaging quality.

That's not to say there haven't been great heights on the net too, as it allowed for new ways to communicate about technology (think https://ciechanow.ski/ great content and many more).