I complained to a friend once that I couldn't focus.
that I couldn't make a to-do list, and do it,
that days were slipping by,
he was like, yeah.
that's how everyone is.
and this was an insight i wasn't ready for.
what day was it, 11 days ago?
what did you wear?
how many weeks until christmas?
... how do you even count weeks?
i have this fantasy
about approaching strangers
and asking them what day it is,
about approaching strangers
and asking them what day it is,
and seeing how many people know.
i never know what day it is.
ᓇᒡᒐᔾᔭᐅ ᐊᐃᑉᐱᖅ ᐱᖓᑦᓯᖅ ᓯᑕᒻᒥᖅ ᑕᓪᓕᕐᒥᖅ
It’s obvious, the way we mentally struggle with this,
that we are actually monkeys.
that we are actually monkeys.
we have barely-working brains,
and we are very similar to monkeys.
and we are very similar to monkeys.
monkeys can’t talk, and we can.
we shrug our shoulders,
weird! haha,
well... i can talk,
anyways, what was I saying -
- it's really the only thing we have that they don't.
we're the worst.
anyways...
oh ya - calendars -
Calendars are really the simplest thing that we cannot do,
and something we would do easily if we had normal brains.
- doing something in an hour -
yelling-forward to yourself is a very simple task that we cannot do.
In a way, habits are the deepest thinking -
maybe the smartest people are coaches, personal trainers,
and managers of large government programs.
the very time-aware people have a serious talent.
Paying attention to the time is like holding your breath.
there's a human limit.
An accountant can only do their job,
because they have taken a solemn promise,
like a doctor takes an oath,
to pay attention to the time.
to not let it slip.
because it slips on everyone else,
by /u/sand1pe.
On Venus, the clouds are so thick,
that life on the surface would never see the stars.
Carl Sagan once suggested that if life were on Venus,
they would not develop science.
what's our excuse?
why are we so bad?
isn't the universe basically clockwork?
is my rent actually more expensive in February, than other months?
no. that can't be right..
timezone king
and isn't this very important?
and aren't we serious people?
weeks of the year, by their month:
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
each year on new Years I google new years predictions
and read through things ravenously.
like - okay guys, what's the plan.
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sept
Oct
Nov
Dec
2020 in 12 equal parts
you only need to read a few reports on erowid.com -
everyone says the same thing
when people take drugs,
the 7-day-week slips-away on everybody
whoosh.
that's the thing -
all the philosophers obsessed about mathematics
and we worship it in school,
and consider it central to our lives.
-
yet most of us cannot remind ourselves to do something on Monday
without real stress.
or we'll use some free app?
there's no date-calculator.
next week is a fringe concept
and we cannot keep a new-years resolution by March.
and our lives are wrecks.
computers especially cannot be relied on to do something in an hour
we can't talk-forward,
-punt something up, onto a future date-
our computers are now-only,
- like dogs are now-only -
and this makes us insane and tired.
I think the anxiety young-people have, comes from this.
and all the productivity hacking
people put a post-it note on the bathroom mirror.
we cannot do the thing that grandfather clocks do.
UNIX time is a pure delight -
everyone should know of it.
it's a simple increment of milliseconds, and it's a perfect, beautiful thing.
1756601876832
by all accounts,
the UNIX creators were surprised nobody had created
a numeric time format before.
from what I can gather, it was an afterthought -
the operating system needed to schedule processes, and clear its caches.
- because things were happening in parallel -
so it made sense to count miliseconds upwards.
it was years before they realized they set it at the wrong timezone.
it was a full decade before they started asking if
my unix time is similar to yours
it's a bit confusing that the computer knows what time it is, at all:
maybe that's what threw-everyone about Y2k-
why did the computer give a fuck?
you computer doesn't go back in time, when you change the time.
it's also surprising that operating system updates are often
large amounts of timezone information.
all computers in the world download megabytes of data,
about uninhabited pacific islands,
and timekeeping decisions made arbitrarily in the 1920s.
(look in /usr/share/zoneinfo)
the point is that computers already do it all -
they are secretly perfect,
and it's something that we desperately need help with,
and we don't use this ability at all.
we're still habit-based -
fighting a very difficult fight with ourselves.
what i'm proposing is this -
a computer is a calendar.
we ditch the desktop metaphor
for a time log metaphor.
you can only do one thing at a time,
and you're always doing something,
why overthink it
(from Ben Zotto's perfect post)
Autosave has been one of the nicest software developments
to become widespread in this decade.
it's hard to remember how bad that used to be,
losing work was very common.
autosave though, means overwrite -
and in some ways, autosave is just dancing around the problem.
Steven Wolfram has a script that takes a screenshot of his computer every few minutes.
he can go back and see what he was doing last week at 2pm.
notably, he cannot click on it.
screenshots are like pretend software
a lot of people in software history have aimed to bring attention to this problem,
and it simply remains.
people joke about emailing `project.final.final2.doc`,
but the problem is actually a very deep one,
and I worry about our prospects of solving it.
a 'Universal Undo' was part of the Canon Cat, and the keyboard had an undo button.
but this made it really tricky to reason about which actions were 'undoable', and how they'd unravel.
it's one thing to undo a cursor movement, but a whole other thing to undo a deep heirarchy change, or a compute-heavy task, or in an action in a fast-moving videogame.
proper undo spills-over into a whole new, very-difficult way of writing software. And software is hard enough as it is.
Rich Hickey has been re-confusing people to this idea.
that's the reason why every application implements undo in a shitty half way.
it's a brutal problem
There was a big effort to bring this time-travel to websites in 2015,
which made websites outlandishly complicated to build, for a few years
simply,
our computers snarl whenever we ask them to log themselves
in a way we can also use -
our smartest people cannot figure it out
imagine you find a box in the attic of someones life,
wouldnt you want to know more?
imagine that box was of your life.
That’s the worst thing about computers now -
i know everything im doing now,
is going to get wrecked in the next few months
by some software change
Im here! Right now! I want to put my things in the box!
my life matters to me, and I want a record of the things i did
I want to be able to query it -
I’m sure all that is there somewhere -
we can't use the computer log.
it’s infuriating.
and maybe this is how it is, forever.
everyone should be infuriated, that we can't figure this out.
because computers are perfect clocks,
and we figured that out 50 years ago.
and there's something vaguely wrong,
with what we've been doing since.
lately a lot of big-picture software thinking
seems to be under the unspoken guise
of making everybody a more-diligent grad-student.
i don't want that.
it's all the montessori school.
i want people to know where they are in their lives -
That tomorrow is a comfortable thing that comes pretty soon,
and feeling prepared means feeling calm,
and calmness is a nice thing, that's possible for anyone,
and this computer helps that.
And while youre working, you're creating a meaningful log of actions.
Your work, and the decisions youre making are there,
and worth keeping a records of
a perfect computer
What you were feeling yesterday, and even what you were doing,
- that would be the greatest gift to give to people
- not a better Wikipedia, or a faster internet.
That would be like therapy.
It would be like dustin hoffman in i heart huckabees.
a perfect computer
The beautiful thing about e-readers is they never get tired waiting
they are the interface with no anxiety.
You could load an article, throw it in a landfill,
and in years it will still be showing it,
straight-up not caring.
we should put all our data into landfills
we should let our kids jump around on it.
let em sit in the sun all summer,
we could look on, bored, as our children jump around on our old files.
That’s what a computer should be.