Many in this community already know the value of framing — thanks to thinkers like Paul Graham, or through direct startup experience. This essay builds on that idea, but pushes it further.
It asks: What if framing isn’t just the first step of building, but a kind of building in itself? What if ideas — when clarified — are a form of infrastructure?
I’ve spent years working at the intersection of engineering, strategy, and design. I’m now formalizing that practice under a new project called The Philosopher-Maker, where I write and consult around the idea that strategic clarity is a creative act, not just a prelude to one.
This first essay is an attempt to articulate that position — especially in a time when AI is reshaping what it means to execute, and when thinking well is arguably becoming the last real moat.
It’s not a manifesto. It’s a serious, long-form essay for people who care about the structure of ideas, not just the speed of shipping. If that sounds like you, I’d love your thoughts.
I’m looking for freelance work doing functional programming. I have long and deep experience with Elm, Erlang and Swift. Can also do C, Ruby and Haskell.
I’m located in Stockholm, Sweden and have worked in many different industries ranging from music, fintech, healthtech, logistics, edtech, etc. Prefer remote work. Very flexible with types and size of projects, as well as pricing.
The thing that amazed me the most with the presentation was that they never showed typing on a virtual keyboard. It seems like you need an actual physical keyboard to do any typing.
The keyboard was famously considered a make it or break it feature internally at Apple when developing the original iPhone. It is very telling that they haven’t managed to solve this basic HCI problem for the Vision. Steve Jobs would never have released this. I’m sad to say it, but this is not a “Pro” device. It’s a Prototype device.
Apple Vision Prototype
(And I’m sorry, but the eyes are creepy —- uncanny valley)
The dual-touchpad style VR keyboard like the original Vive has is probably the only usable virtual keyboard. Everything else is one by one, find and peck typing.
If you want to experience it, get a steam controller or a steam deck and use the trackpads on that keyboard. You get used to it very fast and you can get really usable typing speed.
It won't work for programming though because anything that needs more niche than basic punctuation would require chording or multiple inputs, which sucks.
Well, a private message sent via Messenger is not personal data (PII), so is not covered by GDPR. This is a very simple concept that critics of GDPR seems to ignore or get wrong over and over again.
It’s not about protecting all data. It’s about protecting personal data.
No, you are misinterpreting what the law is saying. The purpose of the law is to protect from the collection of data points (height, age, political opinions, etc.) about individuals. Sure, a private message between two individuals can contain such information in a way that can be associated with a specific individual. If Facebook would scan all private messages for such data and store it in unencrypted form, then yes, they would violate GDPR. But a simple text message between two individuals does not by default violate GDPR.
A very important aspect of GDPR is a consideration for the purpose of the processing of data. If your company is providing an international messaging service in order to harvest sensitive personal data from private messages, then yes that is very much illegal. But if the purpose is simply to provide a messaging service and you are taking the appropriate steps to secure the data of your users, then it is not illegal.
> your company is providing an international messaging service in order to harvest sensitive personal data from private messages, then yes that is very much illegal
The government hates competition. Only they should have the right to do that and force back doors on encryption standards…
If the message is really private (i.e. end-to-end encrypted) then Facebook can't see it , and if it can't see it, or process it in any way then the GDPR does not apply. And if Facebook does access the message and stores it on their servers in plaintext form then that's their (bad) choice, and they should be held responsible for it.
I tried to create a Twitter account for my new startup a couple of days ago. Wanted a business account to promote my app and get feedback from users. But it was simply impossible. The signup didn’t work. I gave up and went with Instagram instead. Much better experience. And I’ve already spent a big pot of money there on ads. Very happy with it.
Mobile and app development (Swift, ObjC, C/C++, iOS, watchOS, macOS, etc)
Design work. Typography. Interface design. Information architecture. Product design.
Web (html/css/js/node/rails/elm).
Backend. Erlang. Haskell. Kotlin. Java. Ruby. C. Typescript.
Have built almost everything over the years. From low level, high performance, scalable stuff, to user friendly and highly successful mobile apps and web apps. Part of founding team of a number of successful startups.
EXPERTISE
Sportstech
Fintech
Insuretech
Medtech
Media/streaming
Compilers
Distributed systems
20+ years of experience. Fairly low rates for what you get (negotiable). Mostly looking for part time remote work.
To further complicate the pancake taxonomy there is also the curiosity of “plättar”. Very small pancakes made in a special frying pan for more festive occasions. Not sure about their origin, but they are very common in Småland in the south of Sweden.
As a child we'd often have rice porridge one day, and if there were leftovers we'd have rislapper a day or two later.
You can make it in a regular pan, as the mix is thick enough it'll stay together, so just make them small.
(I strongly object, however, to the use of sour cream, jam and pistachio's to serve with them, and wonder what they'd been smoking - I prefer butter and a sprinkling of sugar)
Swedish cookery geek who loves visiting the Netherlands: poffertjes have depth, the pan has deep round-bottomed indents to hold batter. Swedish plättar are also made in a special pan (typically cast iron and from someone's granny) but the indents are circular and low, just maybe 3 mm deep. Lucky this is right after breakfast or I would be hungry now.
Improved error messages is great. But one area specifically that is in desperate need of some love is the type errors from Dialyzer. They are rarely helpful to identify what is actually wrong in the code. Typically the error message will point to something several layers up or down in the call stack and prints out a huge blob of unreadable and unhelpful type signatures. Most of the time the best you can do is to simply compile and run the system to figure out what is wrong with the types. The obscurity of the type errors remind me of C++ template errors.
Part of the problem here is that dialyzer is a quite ... spaghetti codebase, that noone really want to fund that work and that noone really knows how this stuff work that is interested in doing that work.
There is a lot of research work to do and noone to pay for it. That said, if you know of a company interested to fund this work, i am interested and would love to hear more about it.
Art schools that teach you visual art and craft is a thing. So I don’t see why it would be impossible to teach the art of building software. We just need to change our methods.
