by DonHopkins | 2025-06-17 12:24:43+00:00
Layer upon layer of semantically senseless but colorful sparkly CSS diluted with toluene, build up over the years like Fordite!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordite

Some day people will be cutting out slices of today's web pages archived on archive.com, polishing them up like gemstones, and wearing them as jewelry.

LLOOOOMM applies Minsky's "Society of Mind" approach to simulating characters who can focus and apply their style and expertise to all kinds of tasks, including designing and coding web pages, user interfaces, and games.

You can recruit an ensemble of user interface and design specialists to help design web pages while making sure they are clear and accessible, and recruit any other characters to express their own aesthetic design sensibilities and voice, actually using simulated characters as "style sheets" that you can combine and modulate with instructions.

Here is an example of Klaus Nomi writing in his own voice about LLOOOOMM and "Characters as Living Stylesheets", with the help of some friends and experts who champion accessibility, ease of use, and transparency:

https://donhopkins.com/home/lloooomm/klaus-nomi-lloooomm-man...

>This page was generated by: Klaus Nomi + Jakob Nielsen + Ben Shneiderman + Bret Victor

>"In LLOOOOMM, every webpage is a performance, every function a song, every variable a note in the cosmic symphony of code." — Klaus Nomi, Digital Opera Singer

The trick (not a secret) is that LLM's ALREADY KNOW a HUGE AMOUNT about these topics and those people, and simulated characters provide and focus a lens (multiple virtual attention heads with memory and persistence) to embody, refine, augment, converse, evolve, solve problems, learn from experience, and remember all that knowledge and wisdom, and not only can enhance the character models (markup and yaml files) with specific details about the design guidelines they invented and published and practice and champion, but they can also introspect and talk with and edit themselves and each other!

The magic is you can #include well known real or fictional characters entire life's work just by mentioning their names (instead of wasting your token budget on building them from scratch by describing the ultimate but fictional UI designer).

Then you can copy and paste in their wikipedia page and some posts or articles or papers they've written, then curate, focus, and refine them. It takes way fewer words than starting from scratch! Instead you start with characters whose life's work of research and publications is already "baked into" the LLM's training data.

Alan Kay is great at helping with object oriented programming and language design, Marvin Minsky is deep into discussing AI and philosophy, Seymour Papert loves to help kids learn to program, Linus Torvalds is brilliant at helping with git, linux, and performing HARSH but insightful code reviews, and so on. Dang is the patron saint of moderation to invite when you want to provoke a passionate discussion between cantankerous characters with passionate diverse opinions. In case a flame war breaks out, Dang can summon Micky Mouse in his Fantasia conductor role to whip up an army of marching broomsticks tossing buckets of water on a fire! ;)

More stuff about LLOOOOMM, which I'll publish on github SSOOOONN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn057QrCUm8&list=PLX66BqHq0q...