Steven Wolfram Is Probably Busying Figuring Out How To Turn A Cellular Automata Into Blogging Platform

This issue touches on practical web design (clever 404 pages using Levenshtein distance algorithms), nostalgia for the film Contact, and a speculative dive into whether Jeff Bezos acquired the Washington Post as a tech platform rather than a news outlet—which spirals into a playful riff on whether CMSes are fundamental to the universe and whether Steven Wolfram might be building a blogging platform from cellular automata. The underlying thread connecting these pieces is a fascination with tools, systems, and infrastructure: how they reveal user intent, how they shape what gets made and distributed, and the absurdist possibilities when you start treating everyday objects (blogging platforms, news organizations) as abstract computational systems.

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0.0 Context Setting

It's Wednesday, July 6, 2022 in Portland, Oregon, and I am just starting to recover from a family camping trip.

For those keeping track, I did ask the hitch-installation people to show me how to stick the bike rack on, and they did show me, and we had a great time biking.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Helpful 404 pages for Jekyll (and Github Pages) uses Javascript on the 404 page to suggest similar URLs, based on the shortest Levenshtein distance. Caught my attention because: new/interesting/different/useful 404 pages are always fun to find, and a way to think about and understand what your users want or need. Plus I just realized you could use the Levenshtein distance in cracking Wordles. (Via Simon Willison)
An oral history of Contact on New York Magazine's Vulture, which if you read this, you're probably a fan of the film. Caught my attention because: well, it's a good film. Also that bit with the mirror shot. (Via Metafilter)
In the Washington Monthly, Bezos didn't just necessarily buy the Washington Post for its news influence, but also to get a toehold into, er, newstech? As a sort of AWS-for-news? Caught my attention because: are CMSes just one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe (probably?), in fact, if the universe is information, then clearly it's content, in which case Steven Wolfram is probably busy trying to figure out how to turn a cellular automata into a blogging platform (via Tech Won't Save Us)

Three things today. That's it!

After about a gazillion years of procrastinating and prevaricating, I finally ordered a new Mac to replace my 2016 MacBook "Touch of Death" Pro. It took about a million years to be custom-option ordered, but yesterday it arrived and I started using it today. M1 Macs are terrific, I don't know why I waited so long.

How are you doing? I'm tired!

Best,

Dan