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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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  • The new version has a more complicated treatement of visibility/invisibility, but does not use the term "abstraction", which seems unfortunate, so I'll write about that in Protocols/Abstraction.

Protocols/Abstraction

11 Jan 2026 - 11 Jan 2026
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    • One key idea from the Protocol Community is the Whitehead advance, based on this quote:
      • It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Alfred North Whitehead - Wikiquote)
    • Another name for this is abstraction in the computational sense. A computational abstraction is some kind of high-level operation that is implemented by low-level operations, in such a way that consumers of the operation don't have to be aware of the low-level implementation. See Abstraction (computer science) - Wikipedia)
    • For instance, a programming language like Python is a (relatively) high-level abstraction. It provides structures like objects, strings, dictionaries, conditionals, which a compiler translates into lower-level machine instructions (which are themselves an abstraction for the underlying hardware, which is a chunk of physical electronic circuitry.)

    • Institutions as API Boundaries