Telos by Shrikant Kumar
Latest
  1. The Library in the Air
  2. A Factory for Other People’s Ideas
  3. The Blue Dot
  4. Paying a Stranger
  5. A Computer of One’s Own

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#Programming

How people tell machines what to do, and how that telling has changed.

5 products · latest update first

A grid of app tiles enclosed by a violet wall in a dark field, with a single narrow amber gate on the left side through which dozens of thin amber paths converge from scattered points outside.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1912 → 2026

App Stores and Platforms

The Walled Garden

33 min read Interface Design Ethics
A single amber line of commits runs across a dark field from left to right. Violet branches split off it, run alongside, sometimes merge back, and multiply towards the right until the field is crossed by many parallel lines.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1950s–1960s → 2025

Open Source Software

The Gift That Runs the World

36 min read Programming Open Standards
A dark grid of cells receding into the distance, with one amber cell at the centre glowing and thin violet lines of dependency running from it to dozens of other cells, which brighten as the change ripples outward.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1494 → 2023

Spreadsheets

The Machine for Asking What If

42 min read Productivity Tools Data
Horizontal strata of code, from binary digits at the bottom through assembly, FORTRAN, C, Java and Rust to an English sentence at the top, with a glowing lambda at the centre.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1951 → 2025

Programming Languages

Every Programming Language Is a Theory of the Programmer

38 min read Programming History of Computing
A pendulum hangs from the top centre, swinging between a server rack on the left and a browser window on the right, with faint earlier positions marked 1995, 2005, 2013 and 2021.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1993 → 2024

Web Frameworks

Where Should the Program Run?

25 min read Programming The Web

Often found together

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