Rosano / Journal

354 entries from "Brasilia"

Thursday, March 11, 2021

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

[Contemporary utopia is resistance against entities claiming that history is over, that we should accept things as we are, that there are no alternatives.]

Sunday, March 7, 2021

Saturday, March 6, 2021

Friday, March 5, 2021

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Nature is abundant. Nature does not imagine.

[End-user programming languages are more motivating to learn when they are task-oriented: instead of making available only smaller primitives, provide higher-level abstractions that actually do the complete job.]

[Spreadsheet arithmetic is approachable not because most people know how to add and subtract, but because that's what accountants and business people do]

[Go beyond 'easy to use' and prioritize early success within a few hours of use to increase motivation.]

[Avoid 'having to know everything to do anything']

[Spreadsheets obviate the need for control structures or variable names.]

Part of Bonnie A. Nardi: A Small Matter of Programming.

Monday, March 1, 2021

Sunday, February 28, 2021

Onboarding with Jane Portman

[Start out by not letting anyone touch it without being there to show how it works. First give a demo to let them see what they can do with the product, then guide them while they try it for themselves.]

[Help provide context and help them understand why they should care.]

10 Years of Open-Source Visualization

[Maximize your impact by making teaching central to your strategy, ideally material that can be consumed without you being present.]

[Have lots of examples.]

[Answering questions is more than altruism, it's a chance to learn.]

[If you're complaining on the Internet, think of the practical impact of your words.]

Saturday, February 27, 2021

[Focus on laying a perfect brick everyday and eventually you'll look up and there will be a wall.]

[Conversational language is a poor medium of HCI because computers lack the context that we constantly refer to, as well as the ability to interpret context to derive meaning.]

[Deterministic outcomes from a computer and so prefer formal languages because conversation is naturally open-ended and not specific.]

Part of Bonnie A. Nardi: A Small Matter of Programming.

Friday, February 26, 2021

Thursday, February 25, 2021

Bitcoin = Death Processors

[Cache and cash sound similar because our concept of storing value comes from nature, squirrels keeping a stock of acorns in such a way to avoid it being eaten by someone else.]

[People die because we give numbers in machines more resources, attention, and care than living beings.]

[The Kwakiutl call their money objects 'bad things', like dead bodies or intestines, and in potlatch money-destruction ceremonies they 'wipe the shame off their body'.]

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Songs vs Grooves

[A groove is a cell that repeats. A song is a collection of cells that are organized linearly to have a beginning, middle, and end.]

[Making a groove longer is trivial, a song not so.]

[Songs lend themselves to be covered and arranged. Grooves lend themselves to be remixed and sampled.]

Sunday, February 21, 2021