The Big Picture

You can only see at a high-resolution in a fairly small area, and even that has a big fat blind spot right exactly in the middle, but you still walk around thinking you have a ultra-high resolution panoramic view of everything. Why? Because your eyes move really fast, and, under ordinary circumstances, they are happy to jump instantly to wherever you need them to jump to. And your mind provides this really complete abstraction, providing you with the illusion of complete vision when all you really have is a very small area of high res vision, a large area of extremely low-res vision, and the ability to page-fault-in anything you want to see—so quickly that you walk around all day thinking you have the whole picture projected internally in a little theatre in your brain.

AI implications for attention models; letting the bot sample the whole world, but only a small focal point gets most of the detail.

[Open Source is] really good at Itch Scratching features. I need a command line argument for EBCDIC, so I’ll add it and send in the code. But when you have an app that doesn’t do anything yet, nobody finds it itchy. They’re not using it. So you don’t get volunteers.

Chandler hired developers without having an exact specification of what it was meant to do.

Chandler was meant to have "no silos" meaning all of your day planning and communication notes would go in one program and be sorted however desired.

Chandler was marketed as being neat, but the exact examples were old hat or not very concrete.

The project's failure was documented in the book Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg.