tag · Tools
21 piecesthe threshold
Software isn't real until you stop noticing it. Almost there is the worst place to be.
a thing to make another thing
In 1773 James Boswell wrote down a definition of a human being: an animal that makes “a thing, by means of which he can make another …
how to audit an argument you didn't make
Nine steps, all in a public repo, that let anyone check a math fight without trusting either side.
paint is a physics engine
Wiremod and Dreams both work, and almost nobody is fluent in both. That split is not a fact about people.
we gave it a shell
The first thing anyone did with a machine that could act was hand it a terminal. It wasn't nostalgia.
the multi-organization problem
A person belongs to many organizations at once. Every tool assumes one, every method assumes a task.
the room that forgot what it was for
Forty years of research built a place for each context and a memory of what it was for. Only the place shipped.
a root to stand on
Every multi-organization tool ships a switcher, not a root. So I built the root Paperclip shipped without.
no process control block
The kernel's context switch is cheap because it saves state first. Ours has no block to save to.
name it after the paper
A tickler file is office furniture. An accordion of folders — thirty-one for the days of the month, twelve for the months of the year — and the only …
the unremade
The remake business is the cleanest natural experiment games have ever run. Almost nobody reads the results.
you can't paste a gesture into a bug report
The terminal produces a transcript. The GUI produces nothing. Give that a decade.
one character, one night
The pipe is the most consequential character in computing because it knows nothing.
the layer with no name
There is a layer between your shell and your terminal, and the protocols have no words for it.
forty terminals
The terminal is fine. The problem is the fortieth one — and no protocol can name the layer that would fix it.
eighty columns
Nearly every arbitrary thing about the terminal is the frozen shape of a machine that no longer exists.
the inverse of the hammer
A tool shapes what you see. The shell has no shape to impose, which makes it a different kind of thing.
Chessbrief
What it is Point it at a Chess.com account and it pulls the whole archive — five thousand games across three and a half years, in the case above — and …
Tickler
What it is Paperclip is an open-source control plane for running agents as a company — roles, budgets, issues, heartbeats — and a single deployment …
zsh_custom
What it is Ten zsh files that load in numeric order, about 3,650 lines, sitting inside the home lab toolkit. The entire thing exists to answer one …
mattermost rocks; a self-hosted web-based chat.
Mattermost is a self-hosted, fully-developed #slack alternative. Own your data, and don’t be locked in to a vendor. It’s real-time, and …