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Reposted by Raghav Agrawal @[email protected]

Tantacrul @tantacrul.bsky.social · 10d

Fun times. It's going to be a busy week 🙂

For those wondering, this is exactly the reason I wanted to soft-launch the branding: to give me time to deliver the feedback to the creators. Beyond that, I'm incredibly pleased by the reaction to my own team's work.

www.theverge.com/news/792368/...

If you can get past the terrible logo, Audacity 4 looks pretty great

Over 25 years Audacity has gone from simple audio editor, to a UX nightmare. If you can get past the terrible logo, version 4 looks like it might fix that.

www.theverge.com

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Reposted by Raghav Agrawal @[email protected]

Tantacrul @tantacrul.bsky.social · 12d

New video is OUT! - How We're Building Audacity 4

youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38?...

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 1d

Has anyone on the TL tried recreating a prototype from CHI papers via industry tools? (figma, framer, rive, vibecoding)

I want to figure out how to design this

Augmented Physics: Creating Interactive and Embedded Physics Simulations from Static Textbook Diagrams
arxiv.org/abs/2405.18614

Augmented Physics: Creating Interactive and Embedded Physics Simulations from Static Textbook Diagrams

We introduce Augmented Physics, a machine learning-integrated authoring tool designed for creating embedded interactive physics simulations from static textbook diagrams. Leveraging recent advancement...

arxiv.org

Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

Structured curiosity turning into collective, visible competence.

Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

Move to CALT, which generates a challenge: Design a tool that predicts ESG scores using open emission data. “Let me try this.”

Pair with someone on CoLearn, collaborate on a project together “Forecasting ESG Data for Social Impact Founders”, “Let’s build this together.”

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

A learner inside the ecosystem might:

Open Contours, type “climate fintech,” and see a compressed 3-5-20 map, the key ideas, algorithms, and open datasets that define that niche. “Now I know what matters.”

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

From endless scrolling and vague knowing to scoped exploration and visible comprehension

From learning that waits for authority to learning that self-orchestrates via feedback and peers

From conceptual abstraction to procedural embodiment

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

A learner feels both safe to experiment and clear about what’s next.

From curiosity that dissipates into chaos to curiosity that compounds through structure

From fear of starting without permission to freedom to start anywhere, with clarity about where it leads

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

So “permissionless cognition” is not free-for-all chaos, it’s bounded play: a carefully designed sandbox where a learner can start anywhere, explore safely, and always sense the edges of understanding.

A condition where curiosity operates inside a legible boundary.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

Mentorship matchmaking engine that pairs people by curiosity vector and helps them co-design micro-courses

Its essentially designing bounded curiosity systems, environments that maintain freedom within focus.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

Epistemic map of a domain that chunks exploration into 3 conceptual pillars, 5 main concepts, 20 line of inquiries of questions to explore them via different lenses

Adaptive hard-problem generator that curates challenges based on your current graph of skills/interests

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

This means designing tools that unbundle the university’s service of bounded scope, giving self-taught learners the compression, context, and collaborative rhythm of formal education without the hierarchy or exclusion.

Unbundling of a university's service of disciplined scoped learning with rigorous but playful experimentation with other people into three chunked products

1. Contours, a custom search engine client that inverts the paradigm of unlimited scrolling and instead helps in chunking people's explorations

Does this by helping identify core transformative ideas, concepts, questions of a domain to help know what to focus & to see the boundaries of where understanding something ends.

2. CALT (Curiosity aligned learning topologies)

A platform that creates and curates hard problems to solve for you based on your existing knowledge, skills, interests

Basically it creates contextualized problems for you to solve

3. CoLearn

A platform that matches mentors & mentees based on shared interests, goals, thinking styles, values to co-create lesson plans

A clean, minimalist table titled 2. How Each Tool Produces One Dimension of This State.”

It lists three learning tools — Contours, CALT, and CoLearn — across four columns: Tool, Function, Micro-Cognitive Effect, and Macro-Cognitive Outcome.

Contours: Function — builds epistemic boundaries to show what’s relevant versus noise. Micro-effect — gives a learner the sense of finitude (“I can see the map. I can stop exploring now.”). Macro-outcome — moves from overwhelm to Clarity.

CALT: Function — translates curiosity into deliberate challenges suited to capability. Micro-effect — converts passive knowing into procedural flow (“I can try this now.”). Macro-outcome — moves from paralysis to Momentum.

CoLearn: Function — creates reciprocal learning loops by matching mentors and peers. Micro-effect — makes learning socially mirrored (“My curiosity connects to others.”). Macro-outcome — moves from isolation to Belonging.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

Where no learner waits for permission to begin, no curiosity dissolves into chaos, and no knowledge stays locked behind prestige.

It means the removal of psychological and procedural friction between wanting to explore and being able to act.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

I want to work backwards from this desired cognitive state

Permissionless Cognition : A condition where individuals and small groups can grasp, scope, and act within any knowledge domain without institutional mediation.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

Each of them imagined interfaces for a world that didn’t exist yet.

They worked backward from a desired cognitive state

Engelbart: “collective intelligence,”
Kay: “kids as authors of media,”
Nelson: “freedom from paper metaphors.”

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

There’s a whole domain of knowledge in the minute-to-minute decisions teams make, unwritten, experiential, and vital for creating polished work fast.

Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

This minute by minute practical decisions that are only exposed to you when you work with people in a team, that is true expert knowledge. The efficiency involved in a workflow to create something polished fast in a tight workflow using a tool

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

Creation is the compression of system-level insight and craft-level fluency via real-time micro-decisions.

When both fuse, you get that rare architect–craftsman balance.

The person who not only sees the cathedral plan but can chisel the stone by hand.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

You can understand how everything connects at a macro level but still fail at the surface, the point of user contact because:

Systems knowledge is vertical and abstract.

Craft knowledge is horizontal and temporal, it unfolds moment by moment.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

How spacing feels between two components at 13-inch vs 27-inch viewports.

There’s a whole domain of knowledge in the minute-to-minute decisions teams make, unwritten, experiential, and vital for creating polished work fast.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

When you start building, you enter a domain of micro-decisions per minute that no system map can capture:

What to name this variable or frame.

Where to put the breakpoint in animation.

How to handle one ambiguous edge case.

Which tone fits the error message.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

But making it is procedural orchestration, hundreds of decisions that are not explicit in the system diagram, yet define its lived reality.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

When you understand the full stack : APIs, database models, UX flows, content hierarchy, infra, you’re seeing the semantic structure of a system. You understand what depends on what.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

System-level understanding has immense value, but bringing an idea to life requires a different kind of depth that lives in those countless micro-decisions.

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Raghav Agrawal @[email protected] @impactology.bsky.social · 2d

But making it right is different. Creation depends on thousands of small, precise decisions across design, algorithms, and content, each one shaping the outcome.

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