The Resonant Computing Manifesto
32 points
3 hours ago
| 7 comments
| resonantcomputing.org
| HN
Twey
1 hour ago
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It's a lovely idea, but so far all software personalization I can think of (in the sense of software adapting to the individual, rather than the individual adapting their software à la malleable software) has been weaponized against the user rather than used to support them. Occasional attempts in the other direction like adaptive user interfaces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface) tend to fail because they break habit formation (c.f. Raskin)
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qrian
1 hour ago
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My understanding was that Christopher Alexander called the quality without a name "wholeness" later in their life. Does it mean a different thing than the "resonance" in this article?
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wasabi991011
2 hours ago
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Conceptually nice, but I don't know what this looks like in practice. An "examples" section is sorely needed.
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GMoromisato
2 hours ago
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I think manifestos are useless without a concrete, real-world example for people to follow and add on to. It's easy to wish for puppies and rainbows, but trying to deliver is hard.

For example, Linear has a useful manifesto (https://linear.app/method) because they have a product that attempts to follows it. I have much more respect for a manifesto that is informed by contact with reality.

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patcon
1 hour ago
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I agree, but I always assume manifestos are distillations from experience.

Is it that you want to be able to inspect the experience that informs it side-by-side, in case-studies or product or something?

I take it for granted that you're not sceptical of the authors experience, because lord knows there's some experience behind the contributors and signatories :)

Maggie Appleton Samuel Arbesman Daniel Barcay Rob Hardy Aishwarya Khanduja Alex Komoroske Geoffrey Litt Michael Masnick Brendan McCord Bernhard Seefeld Ivan Vendrov Amelia Wattenberger Zoe Weinberg Simon Willison

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swiftcoder
2 hours ago
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I’m a fan of the goal here, would be interested to see what initiatives folks are envisioning to get us there, as it were
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Jazamat
2 hours ago
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This seems a tad ambiguous and fails to touch upon some key issues. What does it mean for software to "respond fluidly". What does "technology that adapts itself" mean?. This manifesto paints a negative picture of the current "software environment" or "technological landscape", clearly with social media in mind, but then attempts to solve the situation with "ai will solve it bro, dont worry about it, just as long as theres rainbows and we all care for each other maaaan" :)
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daveguy
1 hour ago
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Glad to see this getting another round of discussion. It was barely discussed when it was released ~2+ months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163347

Simon Willison is a cosigner, and posted on his blog the day it was released:

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/5/resonant-computing/

Something has to change from the advertising centric, attention hijacking drain that current technology is circling. I agree with one of the other posts here that some examples of software that adhere to these principles would be a welcome addition. I think that list would include a lot of open source software and not a lot of social media software.

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