So much to shun, so little time.

internet, AI, intelligent agents, neural networks, tablet computers, virtual reality… The 1990s are here!

Achievement unlocked. 6 countries, 43 hours of train/bus

"mail or fax this form to NeXT Technical Services"

This is fantastic. @trts.bsky.social revived an app I wrote 20 years ago and got it running on modern macOS. Impressive work!! Code sometimes lives a lot longer than you'd think.

OMG

"Only unpickle data you trust."

YT recommended this remake of the Civ 4 intro to me: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Cb.... It was fun to compare it to the original. But it becomes clear that humanity has no better idea of The Future than escaping Earth and living in outer space.

As a kid, I learned to program in HyperCard, a fantastic thing from Apple in the 1990s which empowered normal people to make homemade software. Last fall @pontus.granstrom.me started exploring and reinterpreting these ideas for 2025. Excited to share our writeup: pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/

Bret Victor: Instagram on every phone is like McDonald's on every street corner www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixP...

this was not obvious at all. posting for others. "You need an adult to buy this. / We can't send a request for this one, so you'll have to ask another way" Solution: go to account.microsoft.com/family/, the child's account > Spending, and temporarily turn off "Require approval for every purchase".

www.reddit.com/r/programmin... the top comment suggests EC2 was invented after Amazon bought a ton of HW to deal with non-performant microservices (lol), though the timeframe mentioned is Q3 2006, which is already when EC2 is announced. Hmm

@pontus.granstrom.me here's the thesis behind the (now defunct) Icelandic startup doing "graphical recipe" software: skemman.is/bitstream/19...

I just want to enter a date in 2029, but it won't let me type; I have to click. And the click target keeps moving. If & when you mess up, it resets to the current month. (Also in this locale, the first weekday should be Monday.) Why pay €€€ to build this, instead of using a native widget? Sigh.

Someday

I had a blast reading the Computer History Museum's interview of Bertrand Serlet, the "father of Mac OS X". I learned some things that surprised me: Bertrand thought Objective C was getting outdated and pushed to get rid of it, …cont'd www.computerhistory.org/collections/...

Microsoft announced that Skype will be "retiring" in May. My immediate thought: "Retiring" sounds nice! I worked at Skype from eBay to Microsoft. Of course it's sad to see Skype go from becoming a verb (up there with Xerox, Kleenex, Band-Aid) to a has-been within a handful of years. Thoughts: 🧵

Ok, I got nerd sniped. I used to play Infocom games, and this has been a blast. Well-written, thoughtfully designed. Highly recommend.

Audience q: "We've had Smalltalk, Squeak for a really long time, and these are shown off as, "Look, it's a great prototype of"… what? What's the business model, what's the development model? You've got some buttons, you push them, they go beep. That's great. But … what is it you hope people build?"

Next up: Neko

People seemed to have stopped complaining about the EU bottle caps.

Just went to a wonderful performance of Appalachian Spring and Rhapsody in Blue at Berwaldhallen. Hearing these two creative masterworks back to back—Copland's expansive themes and Gershwin's energetic, beautiful dissonance—made me proud to be an American again. Need to hang onto that feeling.

Take yourself back to 1981… Q. What are personal computers for? A. They are tools to do five things: Think, Organize, Communicate, Learn, and Play. From Jean-Louis Gassée's book www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...

It should feel like a creative tool for humans, not a development environment for programmers

✅ local-first 👏 with cloud sync @localfirstconf.com

Pomodoro timer

Table stakes

more buttons

What if HyperCard and VisiCalc had a baby?

hey what's this button do?

I just want to make a button that does X

Ahoy, world!