Bookmarks

Color cyling

This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.

Chesterton’s Fence

A principle to not remove something until you understand it:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Kintsugi

Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in relation to UI and how utopian everything out there feels.

Ambsheets

In our Ambsheets project, we are exploring a small extension to the spreadsheet: what if a single cell could hold multiple values at once?

Inspired by the research Ink & Switch are doing, here and everywhere.

Stefania Druga

Almost every conversation I have about AI resolves to me citing Stefania’s work. I love her optimistic take, especially on educating the next generation on LLMs.