No-code businesses are fundamentally about lock-in. If it’s easy to move your business to a more scalable solution as soon as your needs start to grow, they’ll lose all their whales and be out of business.
That isn’t the call. OP simply wants you to have the ability to grow your no code tool as you grow. Build features the original engineers didn’t. It’s kind of reminiscent of Guy Steele’s talk on growing a language.
The lock-in observation is somewhat accurate though, the trick is to offer favorable terms so that you’d rather be locked into this thing than that thing (basically you’d need a persuasive enough economic system so that people choose to migrate from the current one where it makes sense to lie, steal and manipulate to a different one where it makes sense to share, teach and cooperate).
It’s super weird to wake up to silent downvotes. Idk what I am doing that is so terribly wrong.
Aha, that is totally fair. Usually you’d flag as spam then (this is an option in the UI and iirc last time I was flagged for something I was shown the reason).
I am also willing to discuss things with people… However, my patience for talking to the void has worn thin.
The idea of no-code is to trigger behaviours in the computer with minimal “programming” so ideally you are interacting with some kind of GUI. The tala.saman idea is to index behaviours into menus that can have human readable descriptions of the expected thing to happen if you trigger the selected option. However there are many behaviours to index and organizing them is a kind of visual programming.. Who wants to organize all this stuff though? I don’t think “semantic web” is just a UX problem, it is also an incentive problem, hence economics matter and it would be cool to pay people for legitimate improvements to the index of behaviours (i.e. the internet) but no one can be trusted to assess what constitutes a legitimate improvement so we all get to have our own opinion and the space of opinion that emerges may actually converge into consensus in some cases, which is like finality in blockchain things, i.e. you can pay people for arguing on the internet (the ones who argue in good faith will preserve trust and will actually get paid).
Honestly the whole idea of “visual programming” is a bit sus imo, it’s all programming.. the key is just to make it simple for people to participate in said programming; whether they are documenting observed behaviours, just supplying parameters or actually organizing the computations that take place on the machine (i.e. “programming”). We’ll always need to make this game accessible in a ‘continuous’ manner so that people can unpeel the layers of abstraction or create new abstractions (names), it’s about being able to see what is going on and drawing trust boundaries around important resources that you want to protect from “automatic updates”. Having a universal abstraction makes it much easier to reason about how that is supposed to work and bigraphs are that abstraction to a large extent. Statebox has already built some nice interfaces for working with them but we still don’t have integrations with every-day tasks. Eventually the whole data-interchange-graph of your computer should be interactively editable.
Did you read the article? his sub-headings after motivating the problem are:
Extensibility
Interoperability through good APIs and Webhooks
Dropping down to code when needed
Open-source, at the limit
Evolvability
Version Control
Observability
Tala.saman is about how to practically achieve that, if my explanation is not clear then I am willing to continue the discussion once you point out what rankles you.
Maybe it is the “visual” part of “visual programming” that I didn’t go deep enough into? The “data-interchange-graph” is a visual representation of how data moves around your computer (being passed between programs), the visual programming part is what statebox has done with their bigraph and string diagram editors… also, since the data being passed around needs to be meaningful we need a name system which is what this tala.saman thing is supposed to be.
I understood his article, but the docs I found for talasaman didn’t explain how the software addresses that need. Or even what it is. The only thing I was able to take away was “kinda datalisp I guess?”
Yeah, I know, sorry, I don’t have much written down yet.. but still I think that takeaway is less than what you’d get from not following any links and just reading my comment above.
What I am imagining is roughly:
Reproducible builds & FOSS OS
Theoretically sound data interchange format
Economically sound name system
The names are referencing contexts for giving data meaning. The data is version controlled and assessed, trusted data is allowed to make causal effects on the OS.
Economic soundness is just w.r.t. the user of the system. Since the problem of not knowing what to trust is symmetric in the p2p model I just need to motivate a user to share their beliefs.
The difference between collective vs artificial intelligence is that you don’t need a perfect assessment with collective intelligence, you can preempt the infinite recursion by delegating to the human, but I think the only way to know if it works is to build the software.
I’ve described some interfaces to make the UX of this system tolerable but that isn’t really the focus for proving that this thing will work. However in the end it kindof is all about the UX (for the CI vs AI reasons mentioned in previous paragraph) so that should maybe be a more prominent focus in any explanation?
Anyway, I suggest being less dismissive and more cooperative if you are actually interested in learning what others are thinking. I’m not sure how to help you understand me given your communication so far.
No-code businesses are fundamentally about lock-in. If it’s easy to move your business to a more scalable solution as soon as your needs start to grow, they’ll lose all their whales and be out of business.
That isn’t the call. OP simply wants you to have the ability to grow your no code tool as you grow. Build features the original engineers didn’t. It’s kind of reminiscent of Guy Steele’s talk on growing a language.
The lock-in observation is somewhat accurate though, the trick is to offer favorable terms so that you’d rather be locked into this thing than that thing (basically you’d need a persuasive enough economic system so that people choose to migrate from the current one where it makes sense to lie, steal and manipulate to a different one where it makes sense to share, teach and cooperate).
It’s super weird to wake up to silent downvotes. Idk what I am doing that is so terribly wrong.
I think it’s because you didn’t explain what
tala.samanis or how it relates to the OP, so it just looks like spam.Aha, that is totally fair. Usually you’d flag as spam then (this is an option in the UI and iirc last time I was flagged for something I was shown the reason).
I am also willing to discuss things with people… However, my patience for talking to the void has worn thin.
Super long. Statebox-y things are the future, bijection between code and GUI tools.. proper models of what it is you are doing etc.
Shameless sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman
I didn’t understand how
tala.samanis relevant here.Cool, I can explain!
The idea of no-code is to trigger behaviours in the computer with minimal “programming” so ideally you are interacting with some kind of GUI. The tala.saman idea is to index behaviours into menus that can have human readable descriptions of the expected thing to happen if you trigger the selected option. However there are many behaviours to index and organizing them is a kind of visual programming.. Who wants to organize all this stuff though? I don’t think “semantic web” is just a UX problem, it is also an incentive problem, hence economics matter and it would be cool to pay people for legitimate improvements to the index of behaviours (i.e. the internet) but no one can be trusted to assess what constitutes a legitimate improvement so we all get to have our own opinion and the space of opinion that emerges may actually converge into consensus in some cases, which is like finality in blockchain things, i.e. you can pay people for arguing on the internet (the ones who argue in good faith will preserve trust and will actually get paid).
Honestly the whole idea of “visual programming” is a bit sus imo, it’s all programming.. the key is just to make it simple for people to participate in said programming; whether they are documenting observed behaviours, just supplying parameters or actually organizing the computations that take place on the machine (i.e. “programming”). We’ll always need to make this game accessible in a ‘continuous’ manner so that people can unpeel the layers of abstraction or create new abstractions (names), it’s about being able to see what is going on and drawing trust boundaries around important resources that you want to protect from “automatic updates”. Having a universal abstraction makes it much easier to reason about how that is supposed to work and bigraphs are that abstraction to a large extent. Statebox has already built some nice interfaces for working with them but we still don’t have integrations with every-day tasks. Eventually the whole data-interchange-graph of your computer should be interactively editable.
So I think I understand your point, but not what Tala.saman has to do with it
Did you read the article? his sub-headings after motivating the problem are:
Tala.saman is about how to practically achieve that, if my explanation is not clear then I am willing to continue the discussion once you point out what rankles you.
Maybe it is the “visual” part of “visual programming” that I didn’t go deep enough into? The “data-interchange-graph” is a visual representation of how data moves around your computer (being passed between programs), the visual programming part is what statebox has done with their bigraph and string diagram editors… also, since the data being passed around needs to be meaningful we need a name system which is what this tala.saman thing is supposed to be.
I understood his article, but the docs I found for talasaman didn’t explain how the software addresses that need. Or even what it is. The only thing I was able to take away was “kinda datalisp I guess?”
Yeah, I know, sorry, I don’t have much written down yet.. but still I think that takeaway is less than what you’d get from not following any links and just reading my comment above.
What I am imagining is roughly:
The names are referencing contexts for giving data meaning. The data is version controlled and assessed, trusted data is allowed to make causal effects on the OS.
Economic soundness is just w.r.t. the user of the system. Since the problem of not knowing what to trust is symmetric in the p2p model I just need to motivate a user to share their beliefs.
The difference between collective vs artificial intelligence is that you don’t need a perfect assessment with collective intelligence, you can preempt the infinite recursion by delegating to the human, but I think the only way to know if it works is to build the software.
I’ve described some interfaces to make the UX of this system tolerable but that isn’t really the focus for proving that this thing will work. However in the end it kindof is all about the UX (for the CI vs AI reasons mentioned in previous paragraph) so that should maybe be a more prominent focus in any explanation?
Anyway, I suggest being less dismissive and more cooperative if you are actually interested in learning what others are thinking. I’m not sure how to help you understand me given your communication so far.