Typst is unfairly good for doing systematic designs. I wrote a template system for a complex product catalog in a couple days. Then I modeled the clients products list (exported from their ERP) to the schema and generated a hundred pages catalog instantly with flawless layout. Traditional catalog design in InDesign is extremely prone to errors and inconsistencies, not to mention time consuming if done by hand and very brittle if done with the native automation, which does not handle tabular data very well, requiring arcane non-UTF8 encodings. With Typst, if done right and input data is properly treated once, you can wholly skip the review phase which is represents a massive cost reduction. IMO doing this kind of parametric design from a DSL, either for print or digital, is something massively underrated. Surely feels like cheating. Organizing the media files is a bit more time consuming, though, even with automation. But once you organize and standardize the media repo you’re set, as you just need to do the plumbing once.
There’s no conflict here. Using a tool to automate what you have validated to be the trivial parts of a production process is the proper use of the tool. Professional designers also use this bias. For instance, I might recognize that creating a custom font or illustration is not core to my solution, so I can employ an off the shelf font or illustration and focus, say, in the written content. Same principle. The problem is most people won’t even acknowledge or validate the essential aspects of the solution and just iterate mindlessly.
Balancing requirements to achieve something you care about is doing design. I take that by “design” here you mean perhaps a particular interface or media, and you reckon that such element is not critical to your solution. If that’s the case then there’s no conflict at all. By reaching that conclusion you isolated what’s important and are correctly applying energy where it matters. This happens a lot in design, where producing or perfecting media interfaces is not necessary.
The argument is not that only designers can design, nor that everyone should design like a designer. It’s to not confuse shopping for or generating generic solutions with the activity of problem solving. Per Alexander, trivial problems, those that can be solved without balancing interactions between conflicting requirements, are not design problems. So, don’t worry and just pick what you need and like!
On Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander defines design as the rationalization of the forces that define a problem. You’ll won’t find a better definition. But people tend to think design is the synthesis and its results. This misunderstanding of the role of design and the designer is responsible for all the unfit designs we encounter on a daily basis. Anyone equipped with a synthesis tool and feeling empowered to quickly and cheaply generate forms will almost inevitably become blind to the very nature of the underlying problems they set to solve. They’ll be fitting the problem to the available forms. They’ll skip the understanding, the conversations, the conflicts and disagreements, and happily and wrongly assume a design problem can be solved hermetically, in isolation. They’ll think quality is a factor of aesthetics, when in truth, aesthetics is an effect; nevertheless these effects is all they’ll have control over, as it’s all the tool can do. The tool will hinder their ability to be rational; to see the inner structures; to find the hidden but essential semantics; to create the ontologies that’ll support not only the immediate synthesis, but that will sustain the evolution of the design over its lifetime. They’ll be denied the enlightenment that comes with gradual, slow construction; the only place and moment where innovative ideas reveal themselves. They’ll be impoverished and confuse output with agency. I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of empty achievement.
Just a thought: The fact that the found kernel vulnerability went decades without a fix says nothing about the sophistication needed to find it. Just that nobody was looking. So it says nothing about the model’s capability. That LLMs can find vulnerabilities is a given and expected, considering they are trained on code. What worries me is the public buying the idea that it could in any way be a comprehensive security solution. Most likely outcome is that they’re as good at hacking as they’re at development: mediocre on average; untrustworthy at scale.
Maybe because there’s no critical and widely used software written by LLMs so far? Which says a lot about LLMs are failing to even approach the level of capabilities you would expect from all the hype? The goal has always been, even before LLMs, to find something smarter than our smarter humans. So far the success at that is really minuscule. Humans are still the benchmark, all things considered. Now they’re saying LLMs are going to be better than our best vulnerability researchers in a few months (literally what an Anthropic researcher said in a conference). Ok, that might happen. But the funny part is that the LLMs will definitely be the ones writing most of these vulnerabilities. So, to hedge against LLMs you must use LLMs. And that is gonna cost you more.
You’re absolutely right. But consider big brands make for a minor percentage of sites on the web. Also recall that all those big brands have standard profiles on social media and they share the very same layout as your local dog shelter. They have no problem with that.
Nice analogy with movies, but essentially it’s a category error. Movies are media, not interfaces. You consume movies, but _use_ websites. A movie is immutable. A website is dynamic. As a matter of fact, even movies follow a very common structure, from narrative, to format specs and credits. Directors and actors fit their performance to these constraints. Movies are arguably way more standard than websites.
It could work if it makes production and distribution of content easier and cheaper. All social media sites without exception have standard layout and usability. There, brands encode their aesthetics through media, and brands are much more alive in these channels than on their own websites, which often lags behind their own platform profiles. Company websites are expensive to build, maintain and update. Even for a design company, say Pentagram, it’s much better to follow their work on the standard architecture of Instagram than on their own handcrafted and “beautiful” website. The relevance of corporate websites as a means to retrieve essential information is decaying. Economic factors ultimately drive decisions. If something like this existed in a solid form, it would be hard to justify spending thousands of dollars on a website. As a matter of personal opinion, UI should never be a place to express creativity. Media is a much better substrate to express personality than through user interface affordances. Nowadays all my corporate clients develop websites on the expectation that they will grant them legitimacy, and they don’t actually expect anyone to actually use or read them. As a user, I actually do prefer when a supplier has an Instagram page because their sites, if they even have one, are 100% going to be awful to read and navigate, not to mention they’ll almost certainly be outdated. The greatest barrier to something like this is simply tradition. The general idea is perfectly defensible and logical. We should be reminded that standard websites are never going away, so this is not to be a replacement, but could open the doors for small businesses and non-profits to spread rich structured information in a cheap and sovereign manner. The argument that businesses are averse to being scrapped is only true for elitist corporations. Most businesses stand to gain tremendously from having their data highly accessible from anywhere. And it’s damn easy to convince them of the benefits. Even more so considering that, if they want, they also could have their handcrafted website, which by the way would be simply a thematic structure over the very same API. You could argue that this is inevitable long term. But regarding the OPs prescribed timeline of couple years, I think it’s just naive. For this to become mainstream it would take at least a decade, if not more. Just writing the specs and tools for this would take years, easily.
As it stands, most if not all institutional and journalistic research around this topic I would consider compromised because they’re in some way or another financially interested in this becoming the next big thing. Aravolta included. That’s why most articles will counter each hard constraint with a handful of hopeful speculations.
As for pure scientific analysis, like the Scott Manley one, they tend to entertain themselves too much with the physics and mathematics and forget the economics behind it all.
Take Google’s own paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468) that estimates that launch costs, just to roughly match data center energy costs on earth, would need to reach 200USD/kg, which requires a 10 fold cost reduction relative to the current launch costs of Falcon 9. And that is to launch a _disposable_ server into orbit, that will disintegrate after a few years and likely have hardware failures well before that.
And these servers are not anything like a “data center”, and they won’t run the applications that we are already scrambling to find demand in earth. No, these would theoretically run some ultra-niche, highly experimental workloads maybe for NASA or the military. That alone can’t possibly justify the investment, at least not for the retail investor that actually expects a positive ROI. Nevertheless the tech elite and their pet journalists are more than happy to sell this fantasy to the average people.
Hell, I’m still waiting for Project Natick to materialize, Microsoft’s data center on the ocean, which makes far, far more sense than data centers on frigging space. Still they didn’t manage to make that one work in any meaningful sense.
> Money raised from a public offering would most likely help SpaceX finance its long-term goals of launching artificial intelligence data centers into orbit, creating a colony on the moon and getting humans to Mars. These are expensive and unproven endeavors that may take years and billions of dollars to achieve.
Oh my god. When a journalist writes like any of this is remotely plausible within “years” and “billions” of dollars it really downplays the near impossibility of these events happening.
Which is a synonym for impossible. As far as the latest serious analyses have
shown, data centers in space are a pipe dream. Starlink’s total addressable
market was also shown to be way smaller than expected. The IPO in this case
just signals they’re desperate for liquidity and with no clear path to
profitability, if you discount unlikely, major breakthroughs happening very
soon. They’re changing the rules of stock indexes just to shove SpaceX in.
It goes to show how far the establishment is willing to go to save face. Elon’s
company going under would poke an unpatchable hole in the US entrepreneurial mythology. They can’t afford that right now and they rather crash the whole economy.
I suspect making the models more verbose is also a source of inflation. You’d expect an advanced model to nail down the problem succinctly, rather than spawning a swarm of agents that brute force something resembling an answer. Biggest scam ever.
You provided a great example of using the conscious choice to seed as a way to signal an upvote. What better way to promote something other than the commitment to redistribute the content? In the context of P2P, it occurred to me that it's also possible to design a fully decentralized comment system using a naming convention. Each comment would be a torrent named after a given scheme, making it possible to track and discover comments related to another torrent. Since seeding means upvoting, then the best comments would be the most seeded ones.
PDF is a print format that evolved to support some modern features like links, forms, etc, but at its heart, it's still a fixed-layout document, and I think having a responsive static multimedia document is a massive advantage in a world dominated by heterogeneous devices
You just need to rethink the form, which is also an inheritance from print media, as a possibly fuzzy dialogue. Incorporating multimodal input, extracting information from uploads, etc., is a huge accessibility win. This is totally achievable right now, it’s just a matter of viewing the "form" as an interaction designed to fulfill a predetermined goal. What actually complicates forms is handling conditions, state tracking, and synchronization, which can become arbitrarily complex. This sort of dynamic behavior can never be fully standardized. So special cases are always going to need special solutions.
> Hierarchical tree, Categories, tags and search.
I think it's important to highlight the distinction between exploration and retrieval. Tags and categories are perfect for powering indices and lists, enabling opinionated exploration interfaces. However, when it comes to open-ended retrieval, arbitrary conventions don't really help. Retrieval requires the searcher to have some prior information on patterns, which are media dependent.
To make the retrieval problem more manageable, information needs to be structured in a predictable manner. Patterns are powerful tools for enabling and enforcing memorization. For example, if I want to retrieve a specific academic paper, my search model will align with the typical information pattern of academic papers. This pattern encourages me to memorize key metadata, such as the publication year, author names, institutional affiliations, and keywords in the title. These elements form the standard metadata body for this type of content.
> come up with a JSON metadata schema that can be dropped in directory of multimedia. Then have JavaScript to render it
Well, you're damn right! That's almost exactly what I did with my research! Perhaps to your displeasure, it's not JSON, it's something else, I needed something easy to write by hand. Plus I wanted to be have composability and a lot of other traits. Basically it's a novel data structure.
P.S. Just to be clear, if a given information model has stable constructive and reproductive characters it can be considered media. And if it's multidimensional and multimedia it can be considered hypermedia (by definition), so doing what you suggested and guaranteeing the mentioned properties is precisely what "inventing hypermedia" entails. There's not only one possible hypermedia, it's an open concept, category. You can have as much renditions of it as you're capable to invent.
I’m not at all suggesting replacing HTML; it's a treasure we have.
I think you're failing to see the point. Having hypermedia documents follow a file system model does not imply that you would need to basically give up hypertext protocols. I'm sure you’ve at least once visited an Apache directory index on the web. Heck, just type file:///Users/ianburrell in your browser, and you'll have a hypermedia document modeled after the file system. Take that concept to its ultimate conclusion, and you'll see that a dead-simple hypermedia document can be built without resorting to any new technology or infrastructure.
Let me give a use case where an offline-first hypermedia document model would be useful. I used to work as an instructional designer, making art and photography courses. This sort of material requires a lot of media, practically of all kinds. You either have to know how to code or use some platform to build that kind of thing. In either case, there'll be friction between reconciling the data source and the final document/volume. If you use a managed solution like a platform, you'll be locking away the content on their servers. Exporting the raw data does nothing because it'll lose all structure—that's basically what happens when you try to export from Notion, from instance. Yes, you can export, but it's lossy, because available offline formats, even markdown, cannot express the structure and ergonomics available within the authoring environment. There's a disconnect between source and presentation. You'll be left with a scattered set of files. The other option is not much better: coding it yourself. You'll need a CMS, and your data will be either JSON, MD, XML, or worse, tabular within an SQL database. Then you'll have to develop a build system or make some sort of SPA. And you'll need to setup a webserver and configure it to distribute the content. This is absurdly complex. It makes producing such materials very expensive. You just can't distribute your course offline. You can't back it up easily, either.
Compare that with print media. Want to make a memo? Fire whatever word processor, write it down, export to PDF, share anywhere. Done. If hypermedia was easy like this, do you have any doubt that people would put it to good use? Do you realize how PDF might be overused simply because of the durability, simplicity and fidelity traits it has?
It's not a law of nature that hypermedia should exist only in the context of browsers. Neither that it has to use HTML, CSS and JS.
> If you think that file system is a viable approach to web site, how would implement Hacker News?
Hacker news is a web application, with a client-server architecture. Indeed would be impractical to replicate with the file system model.
Still, I think it would be useful to have standardized hypermedia documents. It would allow for content that's naturally multimedia to be much more easily handled and distributed. I find it super weird that we need to create a 'website' just to have a multimedia, responsive document. It practically must be hosted on a server because nobody sends HTML around. Mind you that I used the file system just as a metaphor for what an offline-first hypermedia document model could look like.
Doesn't that prove it absolutely failed? I mean, you have to abstract it so much that, like you said, it's a compiler target at this point! That's precisely my reasoning when I said about needing a second system in the article. And, mind you, not only a second system, most of the time also a third or more! Might as well write a game engine with the budget needed for an HTML WYSIWYG editor.
> I'm curious. Are you saying the boxes are helping you author/publish (in which case, please say more!), or am I wildly misunderstanding?
Not the boxes, per se. I'm refering to the general approach of having independent elements that can be composed with no rigour or planning. This UI came out this way cause I ported the code for the data structure editor, which, for accessibility reasons, had a full-blown cursor around each element, that's why it retained the borders. It's obious that there should be a read mode with less clutter. But honestly, It does not worry me too much, for a proof of concept it was not worth to sweat every detail.
> And just having a pre-defined structure doesn't give meaning in general. You'll need to conform to it
Beautifully said. It's for precisely this fact (if you accept Peirce semiotics) that it becomes a cultural factor. You are compelled to think the way the medium demands you to think. And this is completely dystopian but also absolutely real, and serious! That's why design decisions in authoring interfaces are undeniably political. The abysm indeed looks back. One of the main reasons I started this research was to find a way to express myself in a more forgiving way, that better reflected my thought structure: loose. I can't bear the typewriter model, it drains all my energy and creativity, it smells of formalism and grandeur. Now, when I chat with people, my mind is free, I type at the speed of thought. So that influenced the whole design. I trust you can see it.
> I agree that adding an "array" style of directory to our file systems would be really cool.
I think this is sort of a low-hanging fruit people have slept on. We've proved list-based systems are extremely versatile for data structures (s-expr) and programming (lisps). What about for media in general? Everywhere I look I just see lists, with very minor stylistic distinctions between them. Of course there're abysmal infrastructural differences between chats, feeds and what not, but it does not invalidate a universal list-based frontend, similar to what you developed in your comment.
> It is fairly trivial to create basic HTML files. SSG + MD have removed a lot of the remaining obstacles
These are advanced computer skills IMO
> It doesn't just magically "arise from the structure", as much as I wish it did. The web site is a clear example - the lack of understanding how humans consume info, and what helps/hinders, leads to odd boxes around each paragraph
I appreciate the criticism. It's impossible to please everyone in terms of design, and I think your antipathy towards this particular style agrees with the general premises.
Regarding if disposition arising from structure is desirable or not, I think it's a matter of culture and habit. The time and complexity savings for authoring and publishing afforded by this model, for me, satisfactorily offsets whatever could be said that it misses in the aesthetic or funcional department, which can always be patched and improved. The positive feedback I had from interested users, all of them tech-illiterate, is what gave me the confidence to pursue investing in the research, and also made me realize that my insecurities towards its acceptability, which stemmed from sentiments quite similar to what you put forth as criticism, were mere whims. As far as experience and perceptions can be trusted, I believe serial multimedia has been proved as a viable format.
> And hierarchies alone are insufficient.
Not disputing that. The fact the document model is hierarchical does not mean the document system has to be. In fact it was never planned to be. There are many mechanisms in place affording hypernavigation, down to the design of the in-memory representation. Just haven't been implemented for lack of resources.
> you're getting a very rough first draft, sorry :)
I'd love to hear more. Feel free to ping me anytime if this is a subject you find exciting to discuss!