Your computer always wanted to be a place
Namespace
Joined February 2025
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Axiomatic Systems retweeted
We can give you referential transparency for the cache invalidation problem. Naming things is still hard, though.
Rad to see what @hastuc_dibtux is coming up with at @axsyscorp on the subject.
The ambient capture of surveillance capitalism is not about revenue. Every corporation that takes your name becomes its keeper, and the keeping is the product, since the asset is the fact that they hold it and you cannot make them stop.
In Shrine nothing is issued, registered, or held on your behalf. The name follows from its content by arithmetic, not as a service anyone provides.
Naming goes back to being something you do rather than something done to you.
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
we must choose to end the dark age we're currently in
Storage is cheap and the industry knows it, which is why the case for erasure was never about cost. It was about keeping the authority to revise the past, and every system that forgets by default is protecting it.
Shrine keeps every state addressable, because a present that can lose its ground, and a future that can lose its record, is indistinguishable from a living fiction.
We would rather live in reality.
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
The future is neither CLI nor GUI, but the collapse of the distinction between them. What is needed instead is something we call Concrescent UI.
In Shrine, our namespace rendering environment, software is not a static appliance but a real-time event. You describe a task, and language, data, and visual form co-emerge into a bespoke experience.
Because the underlying namespace absorbs the structural friction (authentication, persistence, orchestration, and operations) the distance between intent and execution collapses. Text, code, and pixels are just different stages of the exact same entity becoming concrete.
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
The transition from traditional cloud infrastructure to Shrine is a geotraumatic shift from meteorology to geology.
The drifting amnesiac vapor petrifies into the reanimating lithosphere.
Memories of Mars land in the strata of Earth.
The world finally remembers everything.
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
at the very least, we need explicit environments and side effects, predictable composition of both functions and functionality, and above all, immutability, reproducibility, and universal ability to roll back. orthogonal persistence is probably necessary too.
not "good git and manifest discipline", but enforced and enabled everywhere by the OS.
there's almost certainly more, especially on the GUI/human side, but if we achieve this, it'll be much easier to see and build the next steps.
the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market.
like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer.
the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions.
that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous.
you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all.
this all leads to some interesting questions:
- what is a file when the system understands context?
- what is an app when intent can route itself?
- what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents?
- what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember?
- what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all.
the old computer assumed navigation.
the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency.
we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors.
the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
The root failure of the modern software stack is duplicated context. Every layer reconstructs reality from fragments, until screenshots become a disconnected sign language between systems.
We built Shrine, a namespace OS, around a different premise: every interaction should operate on the same underlying reality.
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
@axsyscorp is building it
Nearly every day I learn a new way that computers today are a shadow of what was imagined in the 80s
This week's pill is datalog
Our entire world runs on SQL and arcane 25-30 year old C++ databases—many of them needlessly running as servers with bespoke configuration that only experts understand
And yet, we've worked out much more elegant and powerful ways to work with data and build databases
Array languages (APL/K/Q), datalog—separate worlds, divided by academic departments and industries, quietly building vastly more beautiful systems than a database ORM in Python, or wiring together three separate database products developed by startups
Why, in the last 15 years, did it feet like a *revolution* to write software as glue code between dozens of managed services based on 60s and 70s ideas?
I think it's entirely possible to reject all of this and build new systems that bring all the best ideas together, in ways that make most problems in software magically disappear
When you start thinking this way, you start to see a world where computers become an artistic medium—a means of directly shaping information, relationships, and media—a true "tool for thought"
Murail is one existence proof
Another near-existence proof is how the GPU became a general computing platform. It took us so long to discover deep learning in part because GPUs were "for graphics." Hacks and unintuitive ways of thinking were required for general workloads.
Real-time computing is one of the most difficult and arcane areas of software. Sure, it keeps people employed, but it requires rare insane individuals or well-capitalized teams over decades to realize a new idea. Power consolidates in corporations that become entrenched and too big to fail, like Unreal Engine, Ableton Live, Touch Designer, Pro Tools, NVIDIA Isaac, SuperCollider.
This is not a law of the universe. You can build systems that just solve the entire problem domain.
q/kdb+ did this for time series in hedge funds. Mathematica did this for mathematics and physics. Erlang/BEAM did this for communications. But much has been learned since those systems were conceived.
The challenge of our time is to build systems like this and make them predictable, composable, and growable like the Python and JavaScript ecosystems demonstrated is possible
Rust is a great example—already more than a decade old—and quickly becoming a new foundation. But it's already being contested.
I want to see systems that work for all levels—for business and of creative expression—and leverage the intuitions people learn in school, but have no skill ceiling, no expression ceiling, and no make-work
I think we can do it
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
An operating system that treats persistence, concurrency, and virtualization as primitives has already failed to account for the conditions under which anything can persist, interleave, or be virtualized.
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
- that this functional minimum has implications for neuroscience, AI, and political science
- that this functional minimum is our product, Shrine
- that the scarcity model of informational capitalism (eyeballs, data) is currently imploding
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
Axiomatic Systems, I believe they're called.
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
In case you’ve been wondering what we have been up to notion.so/Building-the-Post-…
Axiomatic Systems retweeted
This Innovative New Startup is Coming for You, Personally — and Investors Say There's No Point in Running
