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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Rich Hickey
from Jankiness
  • Jankiness is powerful. I learned this lesson from the fate of the Lisp Machine, a computing environment built by hackers for hackers in which everything was guided by a powerful and minimal esthetic. This very particular quality is beloved by those who experience it, but elusive. Lisp Machine should have taken over the world, but instead they are historical curiosities, buried by their Worse is Better competitors. Whereas Lisp was beautiful, the janky Unix/C software was hardy. Ted Nelson's vision of hypertext was beautiful, the real-world internet is layers of jank. In both its architecture and uses.
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Worse Is Better

30 Oct 2021 - 17 Jun 2023
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    • Worse is Better, a famous paper by Richard Gabriel, one of the rare breed of hacker-poets.
    • Hard lesson to learn, and I feel like in some ways I am still learning it, it's a continual process to learn to chop your dreams down to where they fit reality.
    • The problem is that any good hacker is in some sense driven by a vision of The Right Thing, an idea that practically demands to be made into reality.