Matt Webb writes about software, product design, AI, and the web, with experiments in voice interfaces and personal computing.
HN commenters link it for ideas like the voice assistant Diane, unoffice hours, styled RSS feeds, and mapping text with embeddings.
Mark Weiser was my friend and mentor at the University of Maryland, so I've posted some stuff about his work and life here in the past.
As usual, I've checked and updated the broken links to archive.org. (One of my favorites is the 1995 Computer Chronicals video at the end with a profile of Mark's band, Severe Tire Damage, the first band to ever perform live over the internet, who upstaged the Rolling Stones over MBone, using up half the bandwidth of the internet on Friday, November 18, 1994!)
History of the Internet - Severe Tire Damage, The Internet’s First Live Band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZn0HW9OHD4
Mark Weiser passed away on April 27, 1999, from liver cancer.
====
There's this related article:
Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense (interconnected.org)
https://interconnected.org/home/2021/08/27/data_sense
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330031
To which I posted this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28351064
Natalie Jeremijenko: LiveWire, Dangling String; Mark Weiser: Calm Technology, Ubiquitous Computing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology
>Calm Technology
>History
>The phrase "calm technology" was first published in the article "Designing Calm Technology", written by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in 1995.[1] The concept had developed amongst researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in addition to the concept of ubiquitous computing.[3]
>Weiser introduced the concept of calm technology…
Matt Webb (interconnected.org) has persistently been one of my favorite people and it would be a pleasure to sing some praises, mention some of his super interesting thoughtful projects.
A long time ago (12+ years) was Little Printer, an internet connected/social little thermal printer, with the Berg group. There's a loving open source effort maintaining the systems ? Which I haven't gotten around to installing on my own off the shelf printer). https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/
Matt's current effort is the Poem/A1 rhyming poetry AI clock. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/genmon/poem-1-the-ai-poetry-clock
A submission got popular - Product Innovation is sometimes the Supply - and mentions the excellent very old Machine Supply, a tweeting vending machine selling books and notebooks. https://www.actsnotfacts.com/made/machine-supply https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/27/distribution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41709429
Matt's blog is extremely longstanding & excellent. His work always finds playfulness & creativity, embodies that rich interesting Splime sci-fi internet that seemed so full of open potential when I was growing up in the 90's & 00's. Thank you Matt Webb for adding so much to my life! I highly recommend adding Matt to your blogrolls, & checking out his deep & prolific archives.
It’s all done with CSS animations [1].
The background specified in interconnected-2020.css [2] lines 8–9:
background: #cdecff; /* lightest-blue */
animation: changingbg 600s infinite;
Followed by the animation specified in lines 12–35:
/* Calculated using
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/gradient-generator/
in LRGB mode with precision=8 and linear easing
Colors: #CDECFF #FFCDEC #FEECCD #9EEBCF #CDECFF
*/
@keyframes changingbg
{
from
{
background: hsl(203deg 100% 90%);
}
8%
{ background: hsl(233deg 68% 92%); }
17%
{ background: hsl(293deg 52% 90%); }
25%
{ background: hsl(323deg 100% 90%); }
33%
{ background: hsl(344deg 98% 92%); }
42%
{ background: hsl(16deg 97% 92%); }
50%
{ background: hsl(38deg 96% 90%); }
58%
{ background: hsl(78deg 44% 87%); }
67%
{ background: hsl(137deg 50% 84%); }
75%
{ background: hsl(158deg 66% 77%); }
83%
{ background: hsl(185deg 62% 84%); }
92%
{ background: hsl(191deg 87% 84%); }
to
{
background: hsl(203deg 100% 90%);
}
}
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Animations/Using_CSS_animations
[2]: https://interconnected.org/home/static/styles/interconnected-2020.css?v=7
I found most interesting the part of your story where you developed an intuitive sense of its location:
> […] it’s a nice trick if you can do it, but it’s better when you can do it at any time, without an app. Which is what happened. > > First I got good at figuring out the ecliptic. That’s the flat disc of the Earth’s orbit (and the solar system). If you wave your arm along the path that the Sun makes across the sky, that’s the disc. > > Then I can’t remember how I would locate Sagittarius each day (it lies on the ecliptic) but I trained my intuition by checking the app each day. Over the weeks and months, I could follow how the position changed (at the same time each day as I caught the bus). First through the ground that way, then under the ground further that way, and so on. > > Eventually then I had this picture of myself, and the Earth, and the solar system, and the centre of the galaxy which had initially been whirling round me, and now it had flipped, I was turning around it.
https://interconnected.org/home/2021/06/30/galaxy
I totally agree with this, and when Facebook launched it was clear to me that the restrictions it placed on customization of profile pages, and providing smart defaults for layout, don't, and color would make social more functional and valuable for most users.
But I still appreciate Ze Frank's defense of ugly wrt MySpace democratizing design tools, and his observations that the fact that so many people were cutting, modifying, and pasting css was at the time weird and kind of wonderful.
http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly
> As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers.
>
> In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that "work" in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.
Cool people:
• https://tracydurnell.com
• https://www.benkuhn.net
• https://schmud.de
• https://brandur.org
• https://bytes.zone
• https://cassidoo.co
• https://www.chrbutler.com
• https://sive.rs
• https://fasterthanli.me
• https://akkartik.name
• https://www.todepond.com
• https://blog.gingerbeardman.com
• https://gwern.net
• https://interconnected.org
• https://jacobfilipp.com
• https://johnnywebber.com
• https://maggieappleton.com
• https://bernsteinbear.com
• https://pketh.org
• https://rachsmith.com
• https://sonnet.io
• https://stevenscrawls.com
• https://www.bookofjoe.com
• https://winnielim.org
---
Cool directories:
• https://blogs.hn
• https://ooh.directory
• https://deadsimplesites.com
• https://peopleandblogs.com
• https://nownownow.com
• https://blogroll.org
• https://kagi.com/smallweb