Materiality: Feedback as Core Computation

This episode is about the paper Technical Dimensions of Feedback in Live Programming Systems by Josh Horowitz.

[THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK]

[SERIOUSLY, IF YOU WANT SOMETHING HERE, WRITE IT YOURSELF]

[NO PROMISES. MAKE IT GOOD]

It's a solid episode — that's my take. You should listen to it instead of reading about it. And then give us your take.

Links

$ Gang, I'm sorry this episode is months late. It was a real doozy! But also, the bonus episodes over on our Patreon have been getting wildly ambitious. I did an insanely edited 54-minute video about The Browser Company. We had William Taysom over to share a deep critical analysis of The Witness. Jimmy and I shared what we'd do with our lives if we weren't doing computer stuff. And most recently, we spilled the design tea on two recent projects we've been working on — Jimmy's Whiteboard visual programming system, and Tenfold from Ink & Switch. If you like the FoC podcast, you'll get so much more of it for $5/month at feelingoff.com.

• Audio Hijack — this is the program we use to record the podcast. It has "Canadian Juice", which is a joke only Lu will get, but Lu isn't going to read this. But you all know what "juice" is, right? It's what Andrew Blinn does better than anyone, and he IS reading this. He fucking better be. Am I narrowcasting?
• Jimmy mentioned Notes from the Underground. I haven't read it, so I can't add snark. Sorry.
• We're making backend changes! Stay tuned. The new website for this podcast will be feelingof.com. You should check out that website, cool stuff there, and they have a podcast.
• The Hest podcast, which Ivan has always self-hosted (so to speak), is, basically, 38 episodes of Ivan describing what he's devoting his life to, one episode about the combat loop of the video game Death Stranding, and one episode about getting smaller and smaller forever, but make it music and about Ivan's misspent youth. If you're reading this and you haven't listened to it, what the hell are you doing! You'll love it so much!
• PlayBook is the project that the Programmable Ink folks at Ink & Switch have been working on since January 2024. Ivan is one of those folks. I'm one of those Ivans. Specifically, this is "the show notes writing Ivan". Have you met? He writes the show notes. I commentate on his work.
• This… paper(!)… was originally presented as a talk at LIVE PROG — which is almost a FOUR FOUR — in 2024 as a talk called Definitions & Dimensions of Liveness. Jimmy and Lu and I were in the room! Maybe that's the last time we'll ever be in the room. (Did you listen to the free 2025 holiday spectacular?)
• You sat along the fire… you saw the light… you saw. You're Sigur Rós, you're so. Why am I crying?
• Inventing on Principle — do we need to link to this? If you're reading these show notes and you haven't watched this talk, email hello@feelingof.com and I'll give you a virtual hug because you're listening to our podcast without getting, like, any of the jokes?
• Observable — same snark as previous
• Projection Boxes — now this one, I hadn't heard of, but if you have heard of it reach out and tell me about it so that I can be in on our jokes.
• The Ostrogoths are not rats, but I'm ready for either of them to invade Alberta. (Aside for any Alberta-curious listeners: there's interesting political history / class warfare here)
• Quokka is an editor extension that gives you live evaluated values right in the context of your JS code. Seems super neat on paper, but Ivan didn't have much luck using it. (skill issue)
• Glamorous Toolkit is the shining example of a "moldable" development environment.
• PANE is an interesting node-wire programming environment by Josh Horowitz, which flips the usual format by making the nodes hold state and the wires represent transformations. Node? Wire? Junk? Pipe?
• Baby Died, one of the uncountably infinite classic bits from My Brother, My Brother, and Me.
• Sketch-n-Sketch is one of the all-time great bidirectional editing environments. There's even an FoC episode about it.
• Sculpin is an environment that lets you use the mouse to interact with JSON data and incrementally enrich it into a GUI. It's sick!
• Wisp is a whitespace-based Lisp. This is one of the coolest websites I've seen in a hot sec.
• The 2019 Mac Pro had a Xeon, and sucked, like a room full of alien eggs, really, any room full of alien eggs. The 2019 MacBook Pro did not have a Xeon, but ran stupidly hot and also sucked, but not in a way that involves alien eggs AFAIK.
• Imagine a material FPGA (Field-programmable gate array). NOT field-programmable gatorade. NOT FPGA stop making jokes everyone that's not why we're here. We're here to discuss two things: computers, and feelings, and I'm all out of feelings.
• Stop Drawing Dead Fish… I need like an autocomplete for stuff we reference in every second episode. Can you imagine if I linked to Clojure every time we talked about it?
• Here's a nice demo of Boxer, if you've never seen it.
• The title of Josh's paper was inspired by Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems, a work by longtime friends of FoC Joel Jakubovic, Jonathan Edwards and Tomas Petricek.
• There's a link I can't include because it would be a spoiler for… not the next episode (Grice), not the one after that (Papert), but the one after that (Plant). She'll be out eventually; sea—por favor—paciente; see you in July; Tiny Huge; the sort of looking back in hindsight you've come to expect at 40.

The Chorus:

• Daniel Tempkin
• chee rabbits
• Eli Mellen
• Brooklyn Zelenka
• Jack Rusher
• Arcade Wise
• Joshua Horowitz
• Taylor Troesh
• zuggamasta?
• Stuart Presnell
• Sam McDonald
• n
• Tobias
• babel (they/them) (oi oi, what's all this about, then?)
• Eric
• Paul C
• chris shank
• Scott McKinley Evans
• Corey Moran
• Lim
• Oliver
• Mahmoud H
• Samuel Durkin
• Harold Martin
• Duane
• ma3ke
• Ara Hacopian
• Cfiggers
• Siva Mahadevan
• Arcade but different and cooler
• asd
• Arlo
• Han

(if you see yourself in this list and would like a link to your website, let me know)

Music featured in this episode:

• Untitled #1 (Vaka) by Sigur Rós
• Phenomena by Akron/Family

! If you figure out all the secret clues lemme know, join the Feeling Of community, and here are the Means-to-Find I, and also J:

• I: 🐘 🦋 🌐
• J: 🐘 🦋 🌐

https://feelingof.com/episodes/080/

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