This article describes an infrastructure that supports the creation of interoperable systems while requiring only limited prior agreements about the specific forms of communication between these systems. Conceptually, our approach uses a set of “meta-interfaces”—agreements on how to exchange new behaviors necessary to achieve compatibility at runtime , rather than requiring that communication specifics be built in at development time —to allow devices on the network to interact with one another. While this approach to interoperability can remove many of the system-imposed constraints that prevent fluid, ad hoc use of devices now, it imposes its own limitations on the user experience of systems that use it. Most importantly, since devices may be expected to work with peers about which they have no detailed semantic knowledge, it is impossible to achieve the sort of tight semantic integration that can be obtained using other approaches today, despite the fact that these other approaches limit interoperability. Instead, under our model, users must be tasked with performing the sense-making and semantic arbitration necessary to determine how any set of devices will be used together. This article describes the motivation and details of our infrastructure, its implications on the user experience, and our experience in creating, deploying, and using applications built with it over a period of several years.
LLM Agents Are the Antidote to Walled Gardens
While the Internet's core infrastructure was designed to be open and universal, today's application layer is dominated by closed, proprietary platforms. Open and interoperable APIs require significant investment, and market leaders have little incentive to enable data exchange that could erode their user lock-in. We argue that LLM-based agents fundamentally disrupt this status quo. Agents can automatically translate between data formats and interact with interfaces designed for humans: this makes interoperability dramatically cheaper and effectively unavoidable. We name this shift universal interoperability: the ability for any two digital services to exchange data seamlessly using AI-mediated adapters. Universal interoperability undermines monopolistic behaviours and promotes data portability. However, it can also lead to new security risks and technical debt. Our position is that the ML community should embrace this development while building the appropriate frameworks to mitigate the downsides. By acting now, we can harness AI to restore user freedom and competitive markets without sacrificing security.
Plan B: an operating system for ubiquitous computing environments
The conventional approach for building pervasive environments relies on middleware to integrate different systems. Instead, we have built a system that can deal with these environments by exporting system resources through distributed virtual file systems. This requires no middleware, simplifies interoperation, and permits applying general purpose tools to any system resource. A constraint-based file system import mechanism allows the system to adapt to changes in the environment and permits users to customize the environment and tailor adaptation according to their needs. The system has been in use for over a year to carry out our daily work and is underlying the smart space that we built for our department
Brendan O'Brien (number 0) - Can Sync Be Network-optional?
Between Principle and Pragmatism: Reflections on Prototyping Computational Media with Webstrates
Computational media describes a vision of software, which, in contrast to application-centric software, is (1) malleable, so users can modify existing functionality, (2) computable, so users can run custom code, (3) distributable, so users can open documents across different devices, and (4) shareable, so users can easily share and collaborate on documents. Over the last ten years, the Webstrates and Codestrates projects aimed at realizing this vision of computational media. Webstrates is a server application that synchronizes the DOM of websites. Codestrates builds on top of Webstrates and adds an authoring environment, which blurs the use and development of applications. Grounded in a chronology of the development of Webstrates and Codestrates, we present eight tensions that we needed to balance during their development. We use these tensions as an analytical lens in three case studies and a game challenge in which participants created games using Codestrates. We discuss the results of the game challenge based on these tensions and present key takeaways for six of them. Finally, we present six lessons learned from our endeavor to realize the vision of computational media, demonstrating the balancing act of weighing the vision against the pragmatics of implementing a working system.
Haystack: A Platform for Authoring End User Semantic Web Applications
The Semantic Web promises to open innumerable opportunities for automation and information retrieval by standardizing the protocols for metadata exchange. However, just as the success of the World Wide Web can be attributed to the ease of use and ubiquity of Web browsers, we believe that the unfolding of the Semantic Web vision depends on users getting powerful but easy-to-use tools for managing their information. But unlike HTML, which can be easily edited in any text editor, RDF is more complicated to author and does not have an obvious presentation mechanism. Previous work has concentrated on the ideas of generic RDF graph visualization and RDF Schema-based form generation. In this paper, we present a comprehensive platform for constructing end user applications that create, manipulate, and visualize arbitrary RDF-encoded information, adding another layer to the abstraction cake. We discuss a programming environment specifically designed for manipulating RDF and introduce user interface concepts on top that allow the developer to quickly assemble applications that are based on RDF data models. Also, because user interface specifications and program logic are themselves describable in RDF, applications built upon our framework enjoy properties such as network updatability, extensibility, and end user customizability – all desirable characteristics in the spirit of the Semantic Web.
The Interfaces With Which We Think
The concepts in modern operating systems — apps, windows, desktops, notifications, and so on — have so permeated our understanding of personal computing, it’s hard to imagine anything else, let alone believe there could be anything better.
Peter van Hardenberg - Ink and Switch, Automerge
Protocols and Power
If "context" is king, we need to ensure it remains fluid and accessible by third-party developers
Mirai Labs: Frontier On-Device AI Lab
Models, runtime & infrastructure to make on-device AI interactive, ambient & continuous.
Causal Islands
CID (Content IDentifier)
Self-describing content-addressed identifiers for distributed systems
A Robust Decentralized Infrastructure for Trust-Aware Open Knowledge Sharing [DRAFT]
Semantic technologies and models have matured and become very powerful tools to increase the power and accuracy of recent AI approaches. However, we currently lack channels where semantically structured knowledge can be reliably published and queried, both by humans as well as AI agents. Here we show how this gap can be filled by a global ecosystem that aligns with the original Semantic Web vision with respect to openness, decentralization, and formal semantics, but also targets trust and redundancy. Our approach is based on the concept and technology of nanopublications with content-addressed identifiers and a layered peer-to-peer network of publishing services, query services, and user applications. It applies a trust algorithm from links that are published as nanopublications themselves. We present a novel trust propagation algorithm IDEBT and prove its properties of being robust, efficient to compute, and reproducible. We evaluate the ecosystem on a multi-node test deployment running a synthetic publish/query workload under two coverage configurations, complemented by a descriptive analysis of the live deployed trust network. Our positive results show that a such a decentralized network of services based on nanopublications has the capacity and potential to serve as a universal and globally integrated knowledge sharing platform.
Designing and Programming Malleable Software
User needs for software features and interfaces are diverse and changing, motivating the goal of making it as easy as possible for users themselves to change software, or to have it changed on their behalf in response to their developing needs. However, in my opinion, current approaches do not address this issue adequately: software engineering promotes flexible code, but in practice this does not help end-users effect change in their software. End-user and live programming systems help users customize their interfaces by accessing and modifying the underlying source code. I take a different approach, seeking to maximize the kinds of modifications that can take place through regular interactions, e.g. direct manipulation of interface elements. I call this approach malleable software. To understand contemporary needs for and barriers to modifying software, I study how it is produced, maintained, adopted, and appropriated in a network of communities working with biodiversity data. I find that the mode of software production, i.e. the technologies and economic relations that produce software, is biased towards centralized, one-size-fits-all systems. This leads me to propose a long-term, interdisciplinary research program in reforming the tools of software development to create infrastructures for plurality. These tools should help multiple communities collaborate without forcing them to consolidate around identical interfaces or data representations. Malleable software is one such infrastructure, in which interactive systems are dynamic constellations of interfaces, devices, and programs assembled at the site of use. My technological contribution is a reconstruction of the programming mechanisms used to create interactive behavior. I generalize existing control structures for interaction as entanglements, and develop a higher-order control structure, entanglers, which produces entanglements when particular pre-conditions, called co-occurrences, are met. Entanglers cause interactions to be assembled dynamically as system components come and go. I develop these mechanisms in Tangler, a prototype environment for building malleable interactive software. I demonstrate how Tangler supports malleability through a set of benchmark cases illustrating how users can modify systems by themselves or with programmer assistance. This thesis is an early step towards a paradigm for programming and designing malleable software that can keep up with human diversity.
Exploring interoperability & composability for local-first software | grjte
Check out the project at https://github.com/grjte/groundmist-syncCross-posted to https://baincapitalcrypto.com/atproto-for-local-first-interoperability/ This is the third exploration connecting local-first software with the AT Protocol (atproto). Previously, I explored how atproto can enable new fu...
Alright, this is still a VERY early version of this idea. But presenting atmOS: a retro web-based "operating system" for interacting with AT Protocol atmos.smol.farm
atmOS
atmos.smol.farm