- Jul 2022
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www.jwz.org www.jwz.org
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People only really contribute when they get something out of it. When someone is first beginning to contribute, they especially need to see some kind of payback, some kind of positive reinforcement, right away. For example, if someone were running a web browser, then stopped, added a simple new command to the source, recompiled, and had that same web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to do this again, and possibly to tackle even larger projects.
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media.museapp.com media.museapp.com
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@18:52:
I wanna also dig a little more into the kind of... dynamism, ease-of-making-changes thing, because I think there's actually two ways to look at the ease of making changes when you solve a problem with software. One way is to make software sufficiency sophisticated so that you can swap any arbitrary part out and you can keep making changes. The other is to make the software so simple that it's easy to rewrite and you can just rewrite it when the constraints change.
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scattered-thoughts.net scattered-thoughts.net
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Free as in ...? Points out that freedoms afforded by foss software to the average computer user are effectively the same as proprietary software, because it's too difficult to even find the source and build it, let alone make any changes. Advocates the foss developers should not think only about the things that users are not legally prevented from doing, but about what things they are realistically empowered and supported in doing.
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- May 2022
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thedailywtf.com thedailywtf.com
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we couldn't actually replace the built-in table designer (that not being part of the add-in model)
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- Apr 2022
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buttondown.email buttondown.email
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To some extent this is understandable. We don’t know how to design things in such a way that they are easily customizable by everyone.
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www.colbyrussell.com www.colbyrussell.com
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except its codebase is completely incomprehensible to anyone except the original maintainer. Or maybe no one can seem to get it to build, not for lack of trying but just due to sheer esotericism. It meets the definition of free software, but how useful is it to the user if it doesn't already do what they want it to, and they have no way to make it do so?
Kartik made a similar remark in an older version of his mission page:
Open source would more fully deliver on its promise; are the sources truly open if they take too long to grok, so nobody makes the effort?
https://web.archive.org/web/20140903010656/http://akkartik.name/about
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www.donnelly-house.net www.donnelly-house.net
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CSP is taking away too much of the user's power and control over their browser use
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- Jul 2021
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unhosted.org unhosted.org
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The world could benefit from a curated set of bookmarklets in the style of Smalltalk ("doIt", "printIt", etc buttons) that you can place in your bookmarks bar (or copy into a bookmarks document and open in it in your browser), where the purpose would be to allow you to:
- access a new scratch area (about:blank) for experimentation
- make it editable, or make any given element on a page editable
- let you evaluate any code written into the scratch space
scratch.js aims for something something similar, and though laudable it falls short of what I actually crave (and what I imagine would be be most beneficial/appreciated by the public).
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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something called federated wiki which was by ward cunningham if anyone knows the details behind that or how we got these sliding panes in the first place i'm always interested
it looks like my comment got moderated out, and I didn't save a copy. Not going to retype it here, but the gist is that:
- Ward invented the wiki, not just the sliding panes concept.
- Sliding panes are a riff on Miller columns, invented by Mark S. Miller
- Miller columns are like a visual analog of UNIX pipes
- One obvious use case for Miller columns is in web development tools, but (surprisingly) none of the teams working on browsers' built-in devtools at this point have have managed to get this right!
Some screenshots of a prototype inspector that I was working on once upon a time which allowed you to infinitely drill down on any arbitrary data structures:
Addendum (not mentioned my original comment): the closest "production-quality" system we have that does permit this sort of thing is Glamorous Toolkit https://gtoolkit.com/.
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The inhabitants are able to modify their environment
See also: woodworkers
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