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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t think Xerox invented the computer mouse. It was first drawn out by Douglass Engelbart and presented to the public in the 1968 presentation “Augmenting the Human Intellect” (you can watch it on the present day, it was recorded).

    It was my understanding (which I did not verify) that this was picked up by Xerox and others and that windowing systems evolved from there on with Xerox leading towards Desktop Publishing.





  • Exactly. The Semantic Web is broader than Solid but Solid is great for personal apps.

    Say you buy a smartphone. The specifications of the smartphone likely belong elsewhere than in a Solid Personal Online Datastore, but they can be pulled in from semantic data on the product website. Your own proof of purchase is a great candidate for a Solid POD, as is the trace of any repairs made to it.

    These technologies are great to cross the barriers between applications. If we’d embrace this, it would be trivial to find the screen protector matching your exact smartphone because we’d have an identifier to discover its type and specifications. Heck, any product search would be easier if you could combine sources and compare with what you already have.

    The sharing tech exists. Building apps works also. Interpreting the information without building a dedicated interface seems lacking for laymen.


  • IPFS would replace Content Delivery Networks in present day.

    It would also allow you to host software and other content from your own network again without the constraints modern Internet Service Providers pose on you to limit your self-hosting capabilities.

    If applications are built for it, it could serve as live storage for your applications too.

    We ran ipf-search. In one of the experiments we could show that a distributed search index on ipfs-search, accessible through JavaScript is likely feasible with the necessary research. Parts of the index would automatically be hosted by clients who used the index thus creating a fairly resilient system.

    Too bad IPFS couldn’t get over the technical hurdles of limiting connection setup time. We could get a fast (ElasticSearch based) index running and hosted over common web technologies, but fetching content from IPFS directly was generally rather slow.



  • To be honest, I didn’t know by heart what we stated exactly. It says “Open source”. When we ask we may well say “like a GitHub handle”.

    For people without much experience it can all be a bit daunting. They’ll know about GitHub and it helps them identify what we’re hoping to see. By now I expect links to open source work in a CV due to the nature of our company but it’s not a requirement.

    It’s a balancing act in getting the right hints in a vacancy for people in the know and providing enough info for people who don’t know yet.

    GitHub wasn’t all that bad years ago and it’s easy seeing this find their way in HR forms and taking as long to be removed again. I certainly wouldn’t shun entering a CodeBerg/GitLab/selfhosted url in a form where I should enter a GitHub handle.