2015 tweets

worrydream.com/oatmeal/maxwellian-models

Modern Programming in one screenshot (from swiftdoc.org).

Types: Array, AutoreleasingUnsafeMutablePointer, BidirectionalReverseView, Bit

At least in Siberia you no longer could see the revolution. mercurynews.com/ci_23592605/mo…

Engelbart spent years exiled from the revolution he helped launch. “I was sent to Siberia,” he
jokes, referring to the long stretch when he was ostracized from the research community.
His longtime friend, Paul Saffo, says Engelbart endured an even crueler fate. “At least in Siberia
you no longer could see the revolution. Doug drove past the revolution every day and wondered,
'Why?'”

Feb 03, 2015

A science book that you read by playing interactive simulations. A tour de force by @cgingold. earthprimer.com

Feb 03, 2015

(AKA -- finally, another "e-book" that actually deserves the "e". twitter.com/worrydream/sta… )

Feb 04, 2015

Feb 23, 2015

[1] [2]

Airport Firefighter Simulator
Woodcutter Simulator
Emergency Ambulance Simulator
Forklit Truck Simulator
Digger Simulator
Police Simulator
Train Simulator
Farming Simulator
Airport Simulator
Towing Simulator
Utilty Vehicle Simulator
Bus & Cable Simulator
Demolition Simulator
Construction Simulator
WORKMEN DOUBLE PACK
Road Construction Simulator
Woodcutter Simulator Anthology 2014
Simulation and its Discontents

Mar 03, 2015

The Seeing Spaces comic is now a jpg for your tiny rectangle, as well as a printable pdf. worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces

Read the comic (5' poster) or download the comic as a huge PDF for your poster printer.

Mar 20, 2015

Every step is so hard, so slow, like walking through mud, and the destination is so far away

Mar 24, 2015

In 1973, Carver Mead was publishing papers with embedded movies, in the form of flip-book animations in the margins. authors.library.caltech.edu/53664/1/01050376.pdf

Apr 03, 2015

"Will my work matter" is not just wrong question, but fatal question. You can't be realistic when trying to shift reality. Follow your heart

Apr 03, 2015

ridiculousness-driven development

Apr 03, 2015

I am currently building a computer out of gluestick and glitter and it is fabulous

Apr 13, 2015

Ok cool we'll pretty much go with that, except I think we'll order the spiritual direction from Edward Bernays instea

Saint-Simon, Comte de (1760-1825), French social reformer and philosopher; born Claude-Henri de Rouvroy. He argued that society should be organized by leaders of industry and given spiritual direction by scientists.

Apr 16, 2015

feeling this today youtube.com/watch?v=9kz1ZW…

Carver Mead: comments after Dave Johannsen's reminiscences: We had to debug the Gerber plotter. So here we were, making a VLSI chip, sitting on the floor with our scope and so forth, with cards on the extender, and the cards have discrete transistors on them. So we were using three-generations-old technology to do the next-generation technology. And that's a lesson that you learn all the time, that if you're doing something new, you're always doing it with the old tools, or the old thought processes, or the old languages, or whatever. And that persists, no matter what you're doing.

Apr 21, 2015

Pretty remarkable to read this in the context of "designing dynamic representations that draw on human capabilities". cabinetmagazine.org/issues/32/jasp…

May 06, 2015

In Maxwell's time, visualization algorithms were *performed*. You learned to feel them in your hands.

XI. On a Method of Drawing the Theoretical Forms of Faraday's Lines of Force without Calculation.

May 06, 2015

Also, 3D simulations.

XIV. On an Instrument to illustrate Poinsôt's Theory of Rotation.

May 06, 2015

140 years later, my E&M professor was still teaching how to hand-sketch electric fields, but I think we might have been the last

May 08, 2015

shinyverse.org/larryy/KokoChapter.html

The greatest advisory board. (from John Maxwell, "Tracing the Dynabook", p 170) tkbr.ccsp.sfu.ca/dynabook

[Alan Kay's Vivarium] project was as broad-based as it was ambitious; it boasted an advisory board composed of various luminaries from the world of cognitive science, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, and even Koko, the famous gorilla (at one point, the team was engaged in creating a computer interface for Koko).

May 09, 2015

May 13, 2015

modern goals recode.net/2015/05/12/a-m…

The built-in fitness app, which uses the metaphor of closing three colored rings each day as you make progress toward goals like movement and standing up,

May 13, 2015

vimeo.com/115154289 (54:08)

Dynamic Environments-To-Think-In: It's kind of obviously debilitating to sit at a desk all day. We've had to invent this very peculiar concept of artificial exercise to keep our bodies from atrophying. The solution is not Fitbits — it's inventing a new form of knowledge work which naturally incorporates the body, that draws on the strengths of the body, that uses the body in the way the body is meant to be used.

May 19, 2015

Gallery of Concept Visualization: conceptviz.github.io
Explorable Explanations Hub: explorableexplanations.com

May 24, 2015

Stuart Moulthrop's forward to @manjusrii's book is utterly amazing. I'm not sure he was fully awake when he wrote it. amazon.com/dp/0857280600

May 25, 2015

Alan Kay regarding Ted Nelson: "He's a nut. We need nuts like him."
Maybe sometimes the most valuable thing you can be is the needed nut.

May 25, 2015

The Web of Alexandria. worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria

May 27, 2015

Follow-up to "The Web of Alexandria". worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexan…

Creating a new field, don't look for people interested in it, but people "interestable" in it.
worrydream.com/refs/Licklider…

LICKLIDER: Of course, I realized I could not go give a professor at Irving an intelligence test, but I was just deliberately trying to get the best people I could find, those who were interestable in this area, into it.

A pretty amazing idea, but the musical claws are kind of freaking me out.

Okay, I'll make a guess: what tastes like oranges, and is analytic everywhere in the complex plane?

forbes.com/2009/10/21/hew…

Immensely beautiful. I could watch this every day for the rest of my life.

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Amalgamated Media. Sorry about that.

Jun 03, 2015

"3a. Provide a list of Benefits and Outcomes for the proposed Learning Activity."

Would you like to color?
Have Fun | Get Creative | Pass the Time | Reduce Your Stress
Brought to you by your friends at Mountain View Public Library

Jun 03, 2015

I'm attempting to parody this, but everything I think of is totally plausible. The world is beyond parody.

Would you like
to GO OUTSIDE?
Have Fun | See Things | Pass the Time | Reduce Your Stress

Jun 03, 2015

I mean I would totally expect to see this in ten years.

RESTROOM
Have Fun | Void your Bladder | Pass the Time | Reduce Your Stress

As an example of:

I wonder how many programming researchers today actually deeply understand Sussman's analogy and point here:

Gerald Jay Sussman: Robust Design through Diversity
A computational system is very much a dynamical system, with a very complicated state space, and a program is very much like a system of (differential or difference) dynamical equations, describing the incremental evolution of the state. One thing we have learned about dynamical systems over the past hundred years is that only limited insights can be gleaned by manipulation of the dynamical equations. We have learned that it is powerful to examine the geometry of the set of all possible trajectories, the phase portrait, and to understand how the phase portrait changes with variations of the parameters of the dynamical equations. This picture is not brittle: the knowledge we obtain is structurally stable.

Jun 05, 2015

To me, it's one of the most incisive observations I've ever read.

Jun 06, 2015

Hm.

Bill Atkinson took a leave of absence to invent HyperCard.
Richard Harming invented error-correcting codes at home in the evenings.
Harold Black invented the negative-feedback amplifier on the side while assigned to work on push-pull amplifiers.
Gary Starkweather inventing laser printing: “I was running my experiments in the back room behind a black curtain. I played with them when I could. [My boss] threatened to lay off my people if I didn't stop.”

Jul 27, 2015

Chuck House knows better. He was a Hewlett-Packard engineer in the 1960s, eager to build a large-screen display monitor, when company founder David Packard told him it was a stupid idea. House built it anyway. The device became a big hit with customers. Packard-swallowing his pride-eventually awarded House the Medal of Defiance, “in recognition of extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.”

Nov 16, 2015

just sort of happened

When Calvin Fuller was developing the diffusion method, he felt that the BTL management was not fully appreciative of the possibilities of diffusion. He wrote a letter to the Lab management [letter dated March 7, 1951, case 37939, Bell Laboratories], but received neither response nor bigger support for his work. When in 1954 Fuller's work resulted in the invention of the solar cell, which Bell Labs management highly publicized, he noted “It was very interesting because people like to speak of teamwork when they talk about research. The solar cell just sort of happened and had none of the aspects of team work.”

Jun 10, 2015

I've overheard this exchange several times in the last week, regarding the thing I'm working on.

Jun 12, 2015

I'm happy my copy of Licklider's "Libraries of the Future" was apparently once a checklist for someone else's project

Jun 13, 2015

Future scientists will be bewildered by our disembodied brain-in-a-jar model of cognition. Descartes is our Aristotle.

Frank Wilson: The Hand
It is genuinely startling to read [Sir Charles Bell's 1833 treatise, The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design] now, because its singular message — that no serious account of human life can ignore the central importance of the human hand -- remains as trenchant as when it was first published. This message deserves vigorous renewal as an admonition to cognitive science. Indeed, I would go further: I would argue that any theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of hand and brain function, the historic origins of that relationship, or the impact of that history on developmental dynamics in modern humans, is grossly misleading and sterile.

Jun 13, 2015

That was amazon.com/dp/0679740473 but see also Tomasello! amazon.com/dp/0262515202

Jun 13, 2015

I've observed this as well.

Frank Wilson: The Hand
Since the Industrial Revolution, parents have expected that organized educational systems will tame and modernize their children and “prepare them for life.” Such is the theory. But education- ritualized, formal education, at least - is not an all-purpose solution to the problem of inexperience and mental immaturity among the young. I was completely unprepared for the frequency with which I heard the people whom I interviewed [musicians, puppeteers, woodworkers, others whose careers depended on unusually refined hand control] either dismiss or actively denounce the time they had spent in school. Most of my interview subjects, although I never asked them directly, said quite forcefully that they had clarified their own thinking and their lives as a result of what they were doing with their hands. Not only were most of them essentially self-taught, but a few had engineered their personally unique repertoire of skills and expertise in open retreat from painful experiences in a school system that had dictated the form and content of their education in order to prepare them for a life modeled on conventional norms of success.

Jun 16, 2015

I just backed the Library of Babel on @Kickstarter

Jun 16, 2015

I just backed the #Singularity on @Kickstarter

Jun 16, 2015

I just backed the #Anthropocene on @Kickstarter

Jun 19, 2015

You can always buy some wood and build a birdhouse, and the birds will like it as much as they ever did. No one can take that from you.

Jun 19, 2015

Remember when Grace Hopper started her HOPL keynote with "I'm appalled at you"?

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Grace Murray Hopper
Thank you very much. That gives me a nice opportunity to point out to the entire audience that the first large-scale digital computer in the United States was a Navy computer, operated by a Navy crew during World War II. There's a certain upstart service that tries to claim credit for computers nowadays, and they didn't even exist yet! [Applause]
Since this talk is being taped, I am forced therefore to remind you that nothing I say represents the plans and policies of the Department of the Navy or the Naval Service at large. Everything I say is purely the opinion of the speaker!
I'm appalled at you, in a way. You're all “Establishment.” And I think I spent 20 years fighting the “Establishment.” In the early years of programming languages, the most frequent phrase we heard was that the only way to program a computer was in octal. Of course a few years later a few people admitted that maybe you could use assembly language. But the entire establishment was firmly convinced that the only way to write an efficient program was in octal. They totally forgot what happened to me when I joined Eckert-Mauchly. They were building BINAC, a binary computer. We programmed it in octal. Thinking I was still a mathematician, I taught myself to add, subtract, and multiply, and even divide in octal. I was really good, until the end of the month, and then my checkbook didn't balance! [Laughter]

When we were starting CDG, Alan would say that he was looking forward to it being "fun". That seemed like such a strange word. ...

... We weren't doing this to have "fun". This was too important to be "fun". The desperate mission, the weight of the world...

... I'm coming to realize that, in this sort of work, fun is a requirement in order to get anywhere.

... If it's not fun in the moment, the despair will drag you down and eat you. Fun is the only short-term incentive.

@patrickc: Consistently reassured by the rigor and common sense of the security we insist on for the important things.

@patrickc As I understand it, a signature was never intended as authentication (e.g., you can make a witnessed "X" if you can't write) 1/3

@patrickc Forgery (like shoplifting) is not prevented by the mechanism itself, but by the fact that it's declared to be *illegal*. 2/3

@patrickc A signature is a symbol, made meaningful because it engages the social-legal apparatus. I think it's a clever hack. 3/3

@patrickc Yep. But I (always) worry when people want to replace these "hackable" social mechanisms with "secure" technical mechanisms...

@patrickc because I think the context-sensitive wiggle-room of social mechanisms (e.g. signing a spouse's signature on a check) is essential.

@patrickc The more we codify and lock down processes that used to be socially-mediated, the more "computer says no".

Jun 29, 2015

the virtual reality of dorian gray

what is the plural of manifesto

He's investing in AI and neuroscience research so humanity can merge with a superintelligence and he can upload himself into immortality...

... yet *I* feel like a crackpot for talking about spatial media and dynamic material?

Augmented Humility. Augmented Empathy. Representations for understanding other people by seeing the the larger systems they're embedded in.

@DanielleFong: People rarely understand the constraints that others are under, or take responsibility for their role in perpetuating them. Empathy matters

Real challenge: instead of seeing empathy as a personal virtue, design a medium that engenders empathy by default.

Empathy results from seeing and understanding the larger system that you and others are embedded in, seeing *why* others act as they do.

A medium can show context and connections. Without context, you assume ill intentions in others. WIth context, you can think systemically.

Narrative inherently embraces simple causes, personal agency, single perspective, limited context. A medium for empathy won't be stories.

@natematias I don't mean engendering empathy through emotional appeal! The opposite -- by seeing the bigger picture and many perspectives.

@ftrain Empathy or pity? All of those are "monsters vs victims" stories. True empathy would be understanding the monsters.

Jul 13, 2015

Alan Kay on Ted Nelson
youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=…
link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9…

An ancient proverb says that, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Robert Heinlein's version of this proverb is that, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is in for one hell of a rough time! My version is that, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed people run things and the two-eyed people are in for one hell of a rough time. That said, we owe much of civilization to the insights and suffering of the tiny number of two-eyed people. Ted Nelson was one of those few two-eyed people. We owe much to him, and this is being celebrated in this collection of essays.
A two-eyed person-Ted Nelson—comes up with a glorious symphony of how life will be so much deeper and richer if we just did X, but the regular world acts as a low-pass filter on the ideas. In the end, he is lucky to get a dial tone. The blind won't see it, and the one-eyed people will only catch a glimpse, but all of them think their sense or glimpse of the elephant is the whole thing. In our day and age, if they think money can be made from their glimpse, something will happen. They want to sell to the mass market of the blind so they will narrow the glimpse down even more.

Jul 14, 2015

Studying history as "a way of trying to make strange what is so familiar that we find it hard to think about."

Kieran Egan: Getting It Wrong from the Beginning
But this is not a work of history. I do consider some historical figures, but only because it is sometimes easier to disinter the ideas that have been loaded with layers of complexity over the years by looking at their earlier appearance and then seeing how they have gradually transmuted into today's presuppositions. It is a way of trying to make strange what is so familiar that we find it hard to think about.

Someday, futurists will recognize "tools for thought" (Engelbart etc) as an essential theme enabling all the others.

World Future is the annual conference of the World Future Society (WFS). For nearly fifty years, WFS conferences have brought together the smartest futurists and leaders in the world to explore the impact of current and future trends in society, business, government and technology.
Themes Include:
loT (Internet of Things) • Al. • Space • Mobile • Wearables & Embeddables • Drones • Machine Learning • Robotics • VR/AR • Healthcare • Energy • Climate • Makers • 3D & 4D Printing • Finance & Digital Currency • Biomaterials • Fashion • Transportation • Food & Agriculture • Government • Education

A.I. (as a "thing", an Other) gets the headlines. I.A. (as a medium that patterns your thinking) is often invisible. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellige…

Just look at how that (breathtaking) last sentence relegates "tech" to four words at the end. dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3…

AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT
I INTRODUCTION
A. GENERAL
By “augmenting human intellect” we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by “complex situations” we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

It takes an extraordinary futurist to recognize that the future lies with "hunches" and "the human feel for a situation"...

... and that concepts, notation, methods, and "tech" are all just means to that end. Everything but the tech tends to be invisible.

Jul 23, 2015

It's 1600 words. Estimated reading time, 8 minutes.

there's an article about that which we really like, if you're up for reading it (it's LONG): worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTh...
can't really read all of it, but I like the general notion. I think touch controls do have uses, but they're misused
yeah, understandable, we read it in like 3 or 4 chunks. ^^' And yeah. They have their uses, but aren't a universal solution.

Jul 30, 2015

I know that everybody likes the "Probably not", but I think my favorite abstract is Gosper's "CONTRARY TO EVERYBODY". perl.plover.com/yak/cftalk/INF…

Aug 03, 2015

"Administration of Research in a Research Corporation" gave Engelbart the idea for his "conceptual framework" paper. worrydream.com/refs/Kennedy…

Aug 03, 2015

It wasn't freely available on the web, so I made a nice HTML version for you.

Aug 04, 2015

Found the citation for that: worrydream.com/quotes/#doug-e… I AM NOT CLAIMING THIS TO BE RELEVANT TO MY CURRENT SITUATION NOT AT ALL

I saw the best minds of my etc. vox.com/2015/8/10/9124…

In the beginning, EA [Effective Altruism] was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it's becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence-provoked apocalypse.

Worrying about sentient AI as the ice caps melt is like standing on the tracks as the train rushes in, worrying about being hit by lightning

If you really must go contain an AI, why not the "AI" of corporations+consumerism currently melting those ice caps. omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostil…

i miss u, ice caps

And if ice caps aren't your thing, well, we've got eight more genuine existential threats for you to work on! wired.com/2012/03/when-t…

If any "founders" out there want to "disrupt" our 401 ppm atmospheric CO2, or "moonshot" ocean acidification, that would be cool

"minimum viable planet"

Enlightened Imagination For Citizens, by Alan Kay. worrydream.com/EnlightenedImaginationForCitizens

In our world, we have enough power to topple our most important systems, but not the power to restore most of them.

Aug 26, 2015

"Here in 2015, the primary form of public communication is an archive of all the dumb things you've blurted out at 2 in the morning."

Aug 28, 2015

Hope is necessary but not sufficient.

Aug 30, 2015

yo internet I heard u like curated news & media, so I put curated news & media in ur curated news & media so u can fiddle while rome burns

Sep 01, 2015

self-driving bicycle for the mind

Sep 09, 2015

Things we prototyped years and years ago at Apple continue to trickle out.

Sep 09, 2015

The amount of work required between planting the seeds and harvesting the crop is almost unimaginable.

Sep 09, 2015

@jasonbrennan @andy_matuschak Sometimes you have to skate to where the puck has been lying motionless for forty years

Sep 10, 2015

A fine line between locating someone on an ideological map and cramming them into an ideological filing cabinet.

Wilson's book presents an argument for the unity of knowledge, as the subtitle properly indicates. His argument is ontologically realist, epistemologically empiricist, and methodologically reductionist.

Oct 02, 2015

From an email I got today. Not inactive, just keeping quiet for a bit.

Oct 02, 2015

The reports of my inactivity have been greatly etc

Oct 05, 2015

Apparatus is a dynamic drawing tool by @mandy3284. A beautiful and important piece of work. aprt.us youtube.com/watch?v=i3Xack…

Oct 05, 2015

Pay particular attention to how direct manipulation works by backsolving for variable values with numerical minimization.

Oct 05, 2015

I called DDV vimeo.com/66085662 the "Fortran" of dynamic drawing. Apparatus is more "Hypercard meets Datalog". (Very much a step up!)

Oct 12, 2015

"Caveat": a writing platform like "Medium" but you annotate every sentence you write with context, hedging, exceptions, "it's not that simple"

@mayli: I wish Siri would listen for people who say thank you and then say you're welcome. Feels like we're enforcing bad habits.

@mayli kinda wish Siri would go in the opposite direction. I think the most dangerous habit is thinking of an algorithm as a human being.

@mayli: right, so making it sound even less human-like than now? One or the other. The worst is "like a human you can treat badly"

@mayli many people seem interested in AI because they want servants. "Slavery without the guilt." I find it all kind of gross...

@mayli: So true! The underlying mentality that "things are in this world for me to use or use up" is so prevalent and so broken.

@mayli Tools can have an AI posture ("servant") or an IA posture ("superpower"). I say IA, and stop pretending to have conversations with tools.

Nov 01, 2015

i apologize in advance

Nov 03, 2015

hello and welcome to Neil Postman's tumblr of reaction GIFs

Nov 03, 2015

Neil's Face When he sees this page: medium.com/@MattBors/the-…

*hugs*

To conclude this introduction, some sobering thoughts. Geometric algebra has been with us in applicable form for about 15 to 20 years now, with general application software available for the last 10 years. There have been tutorial books written for increasingly applied audiences, migrating the results from mathematics to physics, to engineering and to computer science. Still, a conference on applications (like the one in Amsterdam) only draws about 50 people, just like it did 10 years ago. This is not compensated by integrated use and acceptance in other fields such as computer vision (which would obviate the need for such a specialized geometric algebra based gathering; after all, few in computer vision would go to a dedicated linear algebra conference even though everybody uses it in their algorithms). So if the field is growing, it is doing so slowly.

wait I got it, I'll just slip it in here and all the kids will come flocking in no time

move fast and don't break things into vector components

(a · b) + (a ∧ b) = minimum viable product
e^(-iθ/2) a e^(iθ/2) = pivot

Nov 17, 2015

boy oh boy do I have a thanksgiving gift for you

Nov 20, 2015

See you Tuesday.

Nov 23, 2015

Here's a preface for tomorrow's essay. worrydream.com/2015-11-23

Nov 24, 2015

★ What Can A Technologist Do About Climate Change? (A Personal View) worrydream.com/ClimateChange

Nov 29, 2015

you can and must worrydream.com/PolluterLibCleanMachines

Dec 03, 2015

clean energy R&D funding

Dec 05, 2015

"Hey Carver, any plans for your 81st birthday?" "Oh you know, overturn general relativity, maybe grab a burrito youtube.com/watch?v=XdiG6Z…

Dec 05, 2015

John Cramer's summary: npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw180.ht…

Dec 07, 2015

Bret: "complex global problems".
Mac dictation: "complex Google problems".

Dec 08, 2015

[1] [2]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the best minds of my generation destroyed by the best minds of my

GPU and is fully anti-aliased. Internally our code looks a lot like a browser side a browser; we have our own DOM, our own compositor, our own text layout engine, and we're thinking about adding a render tree just like the one browsers use to render HTML.

Dec 11, 2015

Mutually Assured Dehumanization

Dec 08, 2015

How do you learn to build a computer with newfangled transistors? First try a shift register... then a multiplier...

F1g・ 2. Steps in the Lincoln TX-2 Development Program

Dec 13, 2015

worrydream.com/EngelbartStreetArt

Pretty impressed by some of the internal dev tools that Apple is choosing to release.

SK8 Multimedia Authoring Environment
SK8 (pronounced “skate”) is a multimedia authoring environment developed at Apple. SK8 has been a testbed for advanced research into authoring tools and their use, as well as a tool to prototype new ideas and products. The goal of SK8 has been to enable productivity gains for software developers by reducing implementation time, facilitating rapid prototyping, supporting cross platform development and providing output to multiple runtime environments.
Fully dynamic, top to bottom
SK8 features a fully dynamic prototype-based object system, an English-like scripting language, a general containment- and renderer-based graphic system, and a full-featured development interface. SK8 is designed to reduce the time to build multimedia titles, reduce the time to build derivative tools, and provide a rapid prototyping environment for the development of applications, tools and titles.
Rapid prototyping and development
Current SK8 developers have created projects in a matter of hours which would have taken days or months using other authoring tools. SK8 can be used to create tools designed to address specific needs. For example, media producers could create projects with time-based, event-driven and interactive book/movie sections thus adding depth and richness not available in today's authoring tools.

Dec 24, 2015

peak cognitive dissonance
"Our virtual tools are permabroken and enraging."
"Our entirely virtual future will be awesome!"

-WIP- but mixed reality streaming is going
to be nuuuuuuts!
attempting to update Unity has succesfully enraged me

Dec 24, 2015