A bidireciton diagram might go in the other direction, mouse movements (actions) are mapped back to changes in data space.

Wow. I cannot unsee this now. Extremely interesting.

I'm so hyped for this. Exactly what I wanted from the latent interfaces meetup tbh.

I tend have the opposite take: merveilles.town/@akkartik/113755999123116123

The hard problem is not composing software. We are in the world we're in because of everyone's attempts to compose software. No, the hard problem is defining boundaries on composition that allow any piece of software to quickly and efficiently decide whom not to compose with. And that's a big unsolved problem.

I'm confused by the formatting. Are you quoting someone else?

In my world, software will be built in such a way that you will have fine-grained control over every significant call. If your errant app was a Frest app, you would be able to just redirect that call to do something different, or nothing at all.

What is the fine-grained control that is lacking atop today's platforms? It seems to me that every single platform in the history of the world has said, "here you go, green fields, rock out, compose away!" And mess inevitably ensues. Because lots of different people come and do things that don't compose with each other. Even if you as the platform don't prevent them in any way.

Look at the blog post I linked to above. Imagine your platform takes over the world like wildfire, and everyone is using it. All software is in Frest. How would such issues as in the blog post not arise?

It is perfectly reasonable to say it's not your problem. It's a hard problem! But this is why thinking of software as something composable fundamentally leads us astray.

I won’t necessarily make working out what is the problem any easier. But it does give you a fine-grained ability to intercept and change the dependencies of the software you’re using. Everything has an address, and you can drill into the set of calls that led to anything and change it for next time, copy it and make a “like that, except”, rewind and replay it if that makes sense.

So you would be able to replace the dependency of your app on the call that checks for the wifi with one that does nothing, or one that caches the wifi status and only actually checks once every ten minutes, or whatever you like.

I’ll be writing another blog post laying out how this works soon.

@Guyren Howe interesting stuff!

• Every piece of data has an address, but what you see at that address depends on who you are

• Everything you see always has a useful, relational, searchable UI

• Security isn't a bolt-on feature but emerges naturally from how things compose

• Functions are just relations waiting to be filled in

• Everything is a query, and every query can be changed

I am actually building in a similar direction. It won't be relational at the core, but relations can be built.

Excited to see what comes out of your work!

I like the manifesto overall, but this part makes me a little nervous:

Every piece of data has an address, but what you see at that address depends on who you are

If there's code running checks on my identity before returning the "data" at that address, I'm uncomfortable calling it "data". There's necessarily conditional code involved, which is as close to a hard distinction between "data" and "code" as you're likely to get. Meanwhile, the possible variants returned from that address don't themselves have separate addresses, so it's hard to say that "everything" has an address.

I think I know what you're going for and generally don't hate it (I have vaguely similar ideas), so maybe this is just a nitpicky request to be more careful about terminology. I feel it's fine if you just say something like all state is in a database, that can present different views to different principals if needed. And within each principal's view, everything they can access has an address.

It’s a simple and pragmatic idea: pervasive application of Row Level Security.

One of the main ideas is that any user of the system should be able to filter or change any input to any function that led to anything they have access to, and get a useful thing that way.

So if you are looking at a dashboard showing the sales in California with various charts and tables, you’ll be able to inspect a call graph of what functions were called with what values, and depending on your permissions, you can override any of the functions or values. Anything from changing the font to changing the chart drawing function. Or pull out the data and do something completely different with it.

I added a new debug tool which shows how my system is traversing the entities in search of a “focusable” entity that will properly handle the “Arrow Down” exit event. The first video is with broken behavior, where it can’t find an entity that can handle “focus” and the second video shows correct behavior.