Nov 02: #monosyllablipo - How to see all the things you waste time on at a glance

[citronhoneytea]

Here's a cute thing I saw on a blog the other day: a way to fit more stuff on your screen.

These days we all spend time on sites that let you scroll as long as you want---there's just more and more posts as you go down the list. (I can't name the big sites like these, 'cause their names are too long, but they come in three shades of blue.)

Is it not a shame that, while there's no end to the stuff on these sites, the frame through which we look at them can only fit a few posts at a time? And might it not be that that's just what makes them so hard to quit—in the back of our minds, we feel that if we only looked at one or two more posts we'd be done?

This is not hard to fix though, if we just use some math. The real fault here is that these sites are drawn on the dull old flat plane, ℝ². This is tech from old Greece, so it makes no sense that we still use it. We should draw things on the big plane, the one that Klein et al. came up with. Here's what it could look like:

As you can see, one can still scroll past the posts, but at the same time they all fit on the screen at once.

By the way, the real world is not flat: at long scales, space is shaped just like this. If we had this God's view of things, we'd be sure to make more wise use of our time. We would not get mad and tweet mean stuff, when we should join hands and go forth to heal the earth and (in due time) reach the stars.

[hugovk]

Good stuff! (An "Instead" and "anyway" slipped in.)

[eseyffarth]

Cool stuff! and I know just what sites you meant: Book - Bird - Tumb 😁

[citronhoneytea]

Good stuff! (An "Instead" and "anyway" slipped in.)

Thank you! I changed the text a bit to fix this.