Week 6: March/04 → Post Office Hours Conclusions // Defining architecture and society within it
I’m trying update my map or logic system on meaningful work, personal data, artificial intelligence and economics considering what I’ve learnt in Connected Devices.
Thinking isn’t linear and neither is this succession of ideas. Might even be that the big conclusion is ommitted due to being to fundamental, visceral and obvious and triggering another idea. And another.
The future of computing is personal. What does that mean for hardware and custom controllers?
It’s me being able to centralize everything I’ve ever wanted at ines.systems and eventually ines.tools. Connect my home, my thoughts, give meaning to my data and proper use cases.
Different workspaces, different universes and interfaces for different projects and tasks on any given day. With different looks and tools. Similar ethos to the Nothing Phone.
Building this won’t get you any accolades because someone has already built open source dashboards for home IoT DIY, that even connects to your printer via WLAN.
BUT it does give your life excitement and privacy and control.
If someone has already open sourced it and in a world of Claude+Person joint GitHub commits, how can I personally contribute towards feelings of ownership?
Notion has leveraged ownership through customization for non-technical people very well, creating almost a love / hate relationship.
Perhaps it’s that Notion customization (and that era of personal wiki software) got so painful that people pivotted to stickers and other forms of exchange and computing customization.
There’s an art / ritual exchange project hiding here 💡
Paperclip opensourced today.
Notion x Claude Code with a demo published today for visual vibe coding and versioning.
Market is validating my thoughts faster than I can create - what to do about it; what’s a good honest fun USEFUL goal to have, that will make me happy and give me enough money to buy eletronics from Adafruit directly? lol
What if instead of corporate apps on our computers, we had projects with custom interfaces organized by function?
And that is what I’m spinning up. Right now, the primary interface is that I click app first.
But actually brain works with intention first.
The way I ended up with 849 Safari tabs open on my computer was that I’d have intentions, something to figure out and kick start the process with a search and leave it there to come back later.
Closing that tab means I’ve lost that intention.
Moving that intention onto dedicated software is currently awful.
Old: App/Media type first
VS Code
Google Chrome Tab with pinout
Mixed projects, working on 3 things at the same time
New: Function based
Image of pinout
Window with my code
Terminal to jump through
Human-AI Interaction ⭐️ 😮 Human-Computer Interaction ❌
Perhaps the new human-AI interface is me writing a free form text à la Morning Pages from the Artists Way and have that spin up answers with its own context and workspace.
Why this works
- Each idea and thought I have has 4 different branching thoughts
- My fingers are slower than my brain, which allows for thinking and developing thought.
- Growing fear
- Essay quality for AI native teenagers is declining. We want humans to learn. 40% of genZ struggling with handwritten communication.
I always find answers to my own questions by writing or speaking out loud.
Are we going to have masters programs called HAI (Human AI interaction) instead of HCI?
If we live in this speculative future where corporate apps are no longer the primary way to interact with the world.
Is the way to monetize this interest (i.e. a job or entrepreneurship) and not do a PhD - custom controllers? Are these the single purpose devices that I was talking about in my ITP application? They are. A tear sheds as I realize. Unclear if it’s from happiness from confirming my stances or sadness that I spent all this time away following the unknowns purely because they’re unknowns.
Great. I start a section in my notes app called ITP Lessons. The 3rd one. I realize I’ve learnt this before. My computing world is a dependency filled chaos.
On PhDs and what to do with my life
Tom mentioned being too deep in Electrical Engineering, as I stare at an Arduino Nano 33 IoT broken antenna and one from Seeed Studio and wonder what they do differently.
And then that I could do a PhD on these topics.
Subtext being that I should be either prioritizing other parts of the project OR commit to the bit and acknowledge that how I choose to spend my time doesn’t align with any capitalistic goals I may have.
AAAAAA
Yesterday, I spent 4 hours helping a classmate on his project. He apologized profusely for taking my time. Indeed my time was taken, but I really enjoyed it (teaching).
In fact, I find myself not doing my own work to help someone with theirs very often.
Is this human nature, procrastination, fear of hard work or a genuine passion for passing on knowledge and empowering others?
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAA
Fabri and I discussed “If anyone can 3D print their clothes, does that mean everyone’s clothes are suddenly more unique or more homogenous?” My answer is that it’s not about the options, but rather how many processes one has to stitch components together.
[ Reference: Kim Kardashian: Hollywood]
so putting these 3 things together…..
Entrepreneurship is what people do when they have a strong vision for how the world should work, new ideas frequently but no time to pursue them. So they delegate. Et voilá, this could be the dictionary definition of a company.
PhD is what people do when they wonder and have questions. And when they enjoy teaching the result of that search.
Googling is what people do when they wonder; and someone has already figured it out.
Book (writing) is what you do when you have a lot to say and want to explore it in detail.
It does take time. Which is why you typically do it to document a PhD.
Full time job is what you do if you want peace of mind and to be eligible to purchase a home in Portugal.
This is novel for me because thus far my personal philosophy on teaching is that you shouldn’t do it if that’s the only career outcome because that’s effectively perpetuating a Ponzi scheme. But what about when it feels like the only choice out of enjoyment? How does one distinguish?
I’d like to be heading towards organized systems for personal data that are private.
BUT much like in Fabri’s 3D clothing example, the thing that makes a tool exciting to use is the fact that I built it. So is customizing a dashboard enough for someone to feel ownership? Or do you need to be knowledgable on the inner workings to be able to cut data together?
I’ve spent years thinking about these systems, never realizing I myself was empowered to build them. And now that knowledge is compounding, and I have interesting ideas every 30 minutes which I feel the need to capture, natural language processing/AI + data structures can genuinely be an answer. Plus devices in the home to store + consume.
Is building that capture system a valid life choice? Is this a hobby or do I attempt to make tools around this into a career? DATA → Embedded Furniture and Wearables → How to build ownership and a collectivistic mindset in Fashion Tech → Personal Networks → Distributed knowledge → Centralized World Map → Data Infrastructures (but for a specific application)
Additionally, how much should I stick to my European Union values? How much AI should I use in my own building workflow?
To discuss with Tom
If future of computing is personal,
Each of us can too make their own controllers and devices.
But it’s expensive.
Either because you don’t know what you’re doing so you buy boards with more capabilities than you need or because you’re buying brand name components from places like Adafruit, with tutorials, good documentation, community oversight, forum monitoring.
Expensive is a barrier.
The open source mindset is to remove barriers for participation (in society) (and play?).
The way to make it cheap is to buy components from China / Ali Express ect.
To make custom controllers at a competitive price, eventually that’s the way. Although there is an american pcb manufacturer, for ex. But innovation + cheaper components is certainly happening there.
Maybe this is the mechanism inflation comes down once and for all. Is this line of thinking rooted in macro-economics?
So how
What’s Tom’s opinion about future of hardware and the kind of making that we’ve seen happening at ITP?
Society should reward with the available mechanisms the people who advanced it.
What do we consider advancement? Are the chinese people who took an italian + american open source innovation and made it cheaper (=accessible) also advancing society? Or is this an unwanted externality from open source?
How do I square these values with EU competitiveness strategy?
If we vote with our dollars, then I should be buying from Adafruit or manufacturer’s site. Speak (and buy) your futures into existence.
#TODO Would be fun to set up an eletronics library on the street / like community fridge or Little Books OOOOOOR community server with a devboard with all kinds of sensors where the data is stored locally but neighbours can SSH into it!
(I like SSH as a concept bc I like the terminal but realistically this is what a web served dashboard is, so actually this doesn’t make sense).
If…………………. hardware is cheapest (and most innovative) coming from China by 2 to 10x multiples;
……………..research in unis is defunded;
………… software is dead as a new career choice;
Then………………… ????????????????????????????
Feels like ITP students have the profile and skill set that global systems are begging for; yet past and current generations feel directionless and poorly compensated.
Lines between roles are getting blurred (referencing Harvard paper on people doing more work with AI, not less), and in a program where they were blurred to begin with, and that brands itself on end of career outcomes, there’s definitely something to be figured out. And the entrepreneurship solution unfortunately definitionally doesn’t work for ITP students unless you go really big.
To quote Jeff Feddersen, we just make art and study ethics. But what’s the feasible solution for 98% of society? and 100% of ITP Students?
Full Stack Builder
Microsoft’s solution: the Full Stack Builder role combining those of product teams (product manager, designer, front end engineer, backend engineer) & Fusion Software Development.
“To make full-stack development a reality inside any given organization, Microsoft has said that there will need to be a degree of initial investment into engineering systems and context. This, then, would be the scaffolding. Redmond suggests that new applications will emerge that are architected to support natural language development, augmentation and modification.”
My criticism to this is that a team brings diverse perspectives; people to question if this is what we should even be building; and less burnout / enjoyment of work through collaboration.
Not to mention the economic impacts of running small businesses person companies. Who’s the customer for all of them? Wouldn’t they be duplicated? And if something is widely available, it loses economic value. If it loses economic value → no profit. No profit → no jobs. No jobs → who’s paying AI tokens? (Current answer: big enterprise contracts; individual consumers at 20$ supply training data).
But in this scenario big enterprises are no longer so big (see layoffs & average hiring age being 45). Therefore, question remains open.
→ People would then rally around industries / specific challenges organized locally, perhaps, even though work can be done globally. But it’s unclear to me whether there are actually enough challenges to go around and that people outside of technology are empowered to pursue them.
I see the (architectural) light 🕯️
- My VPS can host my data; JSON or a DB.
- Make that data available through an API.
- FastAPI ! :D
- Opposite to microcontroller/device data (bc hard to upload firmware) - in a VPS, data structure should be handled on DB side.
- That’s the architecture that fulfills AI / Agentic spirit. The way the (sad) future of creating our own tools with AI becomes a semi happy reality.
- Have a database with an API that has the personal data you need for any given project; fetch it and build front end with Claude Code + Figma MCP or Figma Make project into Claude Code or Claude Code /design skill.
- The front end can be hosted through Vercel as a client side only application. Free.
- HTTP GET /fetch/table_name/new bla ID
- Any physical devices can fetch that when connected to a network with WiFi.
I now see that in trying to “simplify” and have my own computer not be a part of the architecture at all, I did something fun but that’s not scalable giving $$ Digital Ocean limits. Web Servers can be hosted for free. Waste of resources to do it inside a VPS.
Therefore, the premise of the question of how to preview web server code when editing VPS files doesn’t make much sense. WHICH IS WHY WE NEED PROJECT/FUNCTION BASED OS INTERFACES. Because I can’t remember every tool I used for a given task.
Apple is probably already building this. Is there a point in trying?
Architecture for Tab Graveyard project: Electron or SwiftUI app? Connected to a central server?
Yep but also doesn’t matter.
The tab list should be uploaded directly onto VPS and served from there.