Terminal Digest

A weekly reading digest on computing's past and future.

  1. A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design worrydream.com ↗

    Bret Victor's takedown of 'pictures under glass' and a plea to design interfaces for capable hands, not just one numb fingertip.

  2. As We May Think - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org ↗

    Bush's 1945 memex sketched hypertext, associative trails, and the personal knowledge machine decades before the hardware to build one existed.

  3. Attention Is All You Need arxiv.org ↗

    The 2017 paper that threw out recurrence for pure attention and became the architecture underneath every large language model since.

  4. Beating the Averages paulgraham.com ↗

    Graham's Blub paradox and the case that a more powerful language was Viaweb's real competitive weapon against better-funded rivals.

  5. Cloudflare Workers AI developers.cloudflare.com ↗

    Cloudflare's pitch for running model inference at the edge, next to your users instead of in one distant datacenter, and why latency is the product.

  6. Computer latency: 1977-2017 danluu.com ↗

    Dan Luu measures keystroke-to-screen latency across decades and finds a 1977 Apple II beating most modern machines, worse-is-better made empirical.