Whether your app is local-first or more traditional, collaborative text editing is a tricky problem that requires advanced algorithms. Or does it? In this talk, I will describe a simple approach to collaborative text editing based on intuitive “insert after” operations. By using these operations in a general-purpose collaborative architecture (server reconciliation), you can implement text editing without CRDTs or OT. I will also discuss nuanced conflict resolution and decentralized variants.

Text version: https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html

via: https://www.localfirst.fm/14

Soon, we’ll feed requirements to AI and get working software without writing code. But when cars replaced horses, the horses never had to debug the cars.

Building open-source alternatives to proprietary tools often requires breaking certain assumptions that we hold about how tools ought to be built. It is not enough to make your open-source tools self-hostable, but make them scalable enough so you can offer them yourself for free.

Yoel is joined by a mysterious pseudonymous duo called Slime Mold Time Mold, who are proposing a new paradigm for psychology based on principles from cybernetics. This means thinking of the behavior as the result of “governors” (think drives) that are trying to reduce the distance between a set point and the state of the world by motivating you to do stuff. So when you are thirsty, you are highly motivated to drink, and when you need to pee, you are highly motivated to find a toilet. Those are simple examples, but can we use the same principles to explain more complex phenomena like emotion, motivation, personality, mental illness, and more? That is what my guests on this episode are proposing.

A reimplementation in Go of Mk, a make successor from Plan 9. There’s some good points in there.

A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision

Adding a bit of systems rigor to the notion “why don’t you see it my way.”

Why do facts bounce off some people? It’s not about logic; it’s about structure. Your worldview isn’t a list of opinions—it’s a living network. And right now, it’s at war.

When you are arguing with someone who is deeply embedded in a different belief graph, you’re not just trying to change one opinion. You’re engaging with a network of ideas that is stabilized by powerful psychological mechanisms.

Although we at the Topos Institute spend much of our days applying category theory, underlying our activities is a philosophy around the activity of science and engineering that is not explicitly category-theoretic in nature. In this blog post, we lay out some of the core ideas of this philosophy, and tie them in to current and future research developments at Topos.

Today we’re excited to announce the first pre-alpha release of our new software CatColab 0.1: Hummingbird. CatColab is software for making models of the world together.

A build system that claims to compete with Make, but all I can see is a basic task runner with little configurability. However, its premises resonate, so maybe it just need a harder look.

Our conceptions are fuzzy by design

Simple laws for building cost-aware, sustainable, and modern architectures

Written by Amazon’s CTO. What I always like about stuff like this is taking it out of its current context and applying the philosophy more generally to systems.

Keynote by Christine Lemmer-Webber (@cwebber@social.coop, @dustyweb.bsky.social) at FediForum June 2025.More info: https://fediforum.org/2025-06