I am constantly frustrated with the inadequacies of the computer systems we have so far achieved, and I am unconvinced that our current approaches to designing them will get us to a better situation. Yet I am devoting almost none of my time to improving the situation — even on the most personal level of coming up with a reasonable individual email system.
I want to fix this. I want to write a computing system that provides a reasonable self-hosted development environment for the kinds of things I want to work on, allowing me to use the unbelievably huge existing free software ecosystem without being limited by it. I found out two days ago that not one but two of my coworkers at Satellogic have already done this, to one extent or another, with Smalltalk. Juan reports that his system, Cuis, is only about eighty thousand lines of code. Richie’s system, Bee, may be bigger or smaller, but it’s more to my taste.
It seems clear that the issue is that I’m not treating the self-sufficient computing environment project as a priority, in part because of Satellogic. If I’m going to make progress on it, I need to spend time on it each day, probably instead of Twitter or some shit like that.
A thing that would really help a lot with that would be some kind of ability to use the iPhone to make progress on it while I’m in transit — a little ratchet of progress.
I think a reasonable target might be the “100,000 words” of a 300-page novel, say, 600 kilobytes or so. At five “words” per “line”, that would be the same “20,000 lines” of the STEPS project.