Nice episode. It seems that he’s slowly moving away from the craft-it-yourself ethos of Emacs towards something that is up-and-running (but still free).
It was inevitable, but disappointing nonetheless.
p until a few years ago, I used to feel good when sharing Twitter links. Compared to the other handful of websites that now make up our entire lives, it was the best option:
Not a walled garden like Facebook or Instagram where you either don’t see any content at all or are bombarded with “sign up to continue” popups after scrolling down more than ten pixels.
Not horribly confusing and overwhelming for people that don’t use it regularly like Reddit, be it the old or the bad design.
Mostly clean and straightforward links.
None of that is true anymore. As a user that isn’t logged in you’re now bombarded with the same engagement nonsense as anywhere else.
Latest set by Daniel Myer. So good.
Nice. I’ve only recently become acquainted with Telemann after reading “Music in the Castle of Heaven” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17883941-bach
Engineering alone can’t fix what’s wrong with the internet - a short reflection on the lessons we learn by caring for the software we create.
I tried it out yesterday. Not a great first impression as opposed to something like Metafilter. Is communities.win seeing an exodus?
Hi gurlic! Has anyone here visited communities.win? What was your opinion of it? Are you still a member or did you leave?
I seem to be missing the part where Martin leverages the homoiconic nature of Clojure. I do see how writing in a language that uses s-expressions makes it easier to parse the code. It makes it easier than ensuring balanced brackets (Java) or spacing (Python). But that’s not about homoiconicity. What am I missing here?
At work we’ve been using feature flags to roll out various changes of the product. Most recently the rebrand from Icebreaker to Gatheround. This allowed us to continuously ship small pieces and review and improve these on their own pace without creating two vastly different branches of changes.
With the rebrand work in particular there were lots of places where we needed relatively small, local differentiations between the old and the new appearance. Oftentimes just applying a different set of classes to a DOM element. Less often, up to swapping entire components.
Overall this approach seemed to work really well and we shipped the rebrand without significant delays and at a level of quality that made everyone happy. What we’re left with now is some 250+ conditionals involving our
use-new-brand?feature flag.This tells the story of how we got rid of those.
Dig it. Plus - that’s a setup that would make Keith Emerson a little envious.
I feel there is a prominence of “property ownership and profitability” this this space. At best it reads as a reasonable response to the communal utopians who wrote the first chapter of the WWW (Stewart Brand, Barlow, etc…).
At worst I feel like it ignores the history of currency, technology, and the arts to promise another utopia. Capital will always be captured by those who value it most. Artists and others will be left to argue about what’s left. Then we’re back to the exact same collective action problem the first communal utopians were attempting to solve. :(
Every ten years or so, there’s a paradigm shift with the Internet. First, it was the transition from portal sites to Google. In the 2010s, social networks not only flipped how we interacted with each other, but how we consumed content. Could cryptomedia and NFTs indicate the next wave of how we consider and use the Internet? One where everyone, not just artists, stand to benefit as far as property ownership and profitability are concerned?