Cutting the Gordian Hairball
The author reflects on the completion of a long-overdue and challenging component of Intertwingler, an application server designed to combat link rot and improve information infrastructure. Intertwingler aims to enable dense hypermedia, allowing for more efficient communication and understanding by reducing redundant reading and writing. The project challenges current web conventions to create a system where small, reusable pieces of information are globally accessible and traceable.
- ▪Intertwingler is an application server created to address link rot and improve how information is structured and reused on the web.
- ▪The author describes the current web as 'sparse hypermedia,' which leads to information overload, redundancy, and obsolescence.
- ▪Dense hypermedia, the goal of Intertwingler, enables better business information infrastructure by reducing the need to read and write repetitive content.
- ▪The system emphasizes globally reusable, traceable information units to counteract the inefficiencies of current web practices.
- ▪AI-generated content is seen as worsening information quality by producing large volumes of unstructured and potentially misleading text.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
May 16, 2026 Cutting the Gordian Hairball A meditation on the close of a veritable odyssey, and how Intertwingler—the application server I'm creating—is actually a frontal assault on link rot. As I sit mere hours away from completing a task that I have known for years I would eventually have to do, which has been “urgent” since of August 1 of last year, which has been “critical” since around Christmas, and which has turned out to be by far some of the most surreptitiously punishing code I’ve had to write in ages, I figure the most on-brand thing I can possibly do is to halt all programming activity and write it up. This is the hairball in question: a dependency graph of most of the product work I’ve set out to do in the next while.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Buttondown.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Buttondown
