moses.md

A reflection on outsourcing ourselves.

In 1962, computers were widely viewed as calculation engines—tools for automation.

Learning to program used to be like learning to play the saxophone.

"Sovereign" comes from Vulgar Latin *superanus , meaning "chief, principal."

Obsidian is around the state of the art of a philosophy of software and what it could be.

Unix today is a trademark.

There are two kinds of privacy in software: privacy by policy, and privacy by architecture.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix at Bell Labs in 1969.

Unix is the nearest common ancestor of modern computing.

Notion is a marvel.

Composability is a phenomenon with a scope.

Disruption is defined in retrospect: disruptive innovations are those that disrupted.

Two ways to interface with software:

Though programmatic interfaces are generally more powerful than GUIs, they also have a steeper learning curve.

Software engineers often prefer programmatic interfaces because they offer greater control.

A design provocation is a prompt that stimulates you to explore novel areas of solution space.

The Unix file and the intermodal container both represent format-agnostic, standardized interfaces that enabled revolutionary levels of interoperability.

Unix was a scene .

A scene is a social-cultural formation around some shared interest/practice/aesthetic.

Unix was an operating system created at Bell Labs in the late 60s and early 70s.

Two different philosophies for building systems with large capabilities.

Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.

The local-first computing movement arose as a corrective to cloud dependence.