rabble on Nostr: I was at a dinner a couple nights ago with brian.behlendorf.com & Kevin Kelly who ...
I was at a dinner a couple nights ago with brian.behlendorf.com & Kevin Kelly who both helped start Wired Magazine, and a bunch of other interesting folks.
Brian made this point that when it comes to complex software systems worse is better. Referring to the essay on the subject from the early 90’s:
https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.htmlThe idea is that simpler systems that are easier to evolve tend to win over top down strongly architectured systems that tend to be inflexible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_betterNostr has the characteristics of the “worse” technologies that often win. HTML is worse than XML and Hypertext. JavaScript is worse than Java. TCP/IP is worse than OSI! We don’t remember that TCP/IP was the scrappy underdog protocol that the government tried to kill because they wanted their properly designed OSI protocols for the internet!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_WarsTwitter itself was worse, it’s a kind of minimalist thing which was powerfully extensible. The original Twitter api docs were a single page long. The original oauth spec was 6 pages long.
Worse is a better way to build technology to change the world.
Published at
2024-08-15 15:40:12Event JSON
{
"id": "a02191e50287c8ce9a36c88fa3bda8ace85958587379a63b640992422435a876",
"pubkey": "76c71aae3a491f1d9eec47cba17e229cda4113a0bbb6e6ae1776d7643e29cafa",
"created_at": 1723736412,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"23cc9f513c106250de406780e301793bcf4855f403d5d47c2d90ee4302f38ae1",
"wss://nostr.sebastix.dev",
"root"
],
[
"p",
"06639a386c9c1014217622ccbcf40908c4f1a0c33e23f8d6d68f4abf655f8f71"
]
],
"content": "I was at a dinner a couple nights ago with brian.behlendorf.com \u0026 Kevin Kelly who both helped start Wired Magazine, and a bunch of other interesting folks. \n\nBrian made this point that when it comes to complex software systems worse is better. Referring to the essay on the subject from the early 90’s: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html\n\nThe idea is that simpler systems that are easier to evolve tend to win over top down strongly architectured systems that tend to be inflexible. \n\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better\n\nNostr has the characteristics of the “worse” technologies that often win. HTML is worse than XML and Hypertext. JavaScript is worse than Java. TCP/IP is worse than OSI! We don’t remember that TCP/IP was the scrappy underdog protocol that the government tried to kill because they wanted their properly designed OSI protocols for the internet! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars\n\nTwitter itself was worse, it’s a kind of minimalist thing which was powerfully extensible. The original Twitter api docs were a single page long. The original oauth spec was 6 pages long. \n\nWorse is a better way to build technology to change the world.",
"sig": "dfffebfe6c42c98195ad143bfcba017b0b67c5f05372d559c1614ee092b194c8bc9b62526fe33446f8347232d3f51905cc3dda1701dc06516468d257c3843b69"
}