my visual cortex loves the point-symmetric "tunnel visions" from 1:50<br /> aka: visual cortex form constants, resonance between external and internal patterns<br /> this is also why kids in school are forced to write on "lined paper" aka "ruled paper"...

• Title
  • Is carbon tunnel vision real?

• author Martin Daniel

• This article introduces the concept of Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) as a way to validate if carbon tunnel vision is real

This is where I think Glitch goes wrong. Why such a focus on apps (and esp. pushing the same practices and overcomplicated architecture as people on GitHub trying to emulate the trendiest devops shovelware)?

"Web" is a red herring here. Make the Web more accessible for app creation, sure, but what about making it more accessible (and therefore simpler) for sharing simple stuff (like documents comprising the written word), too? Glitch doesn't do well at this at all. It feels less like a place for the uninitiated and more like a place for the cool kids who are already slinging/pushing Modern Best Practices hang out—not unlike societal elites who feign to tether themself to the mast of helping the downtrodden but really use the whole charade as machine for converting attention into prestige and personal wealth. Their prices, for example, reflect that. Where's the "give us, like 20 bucks a year and we'll give you better alternative to emailing Microsoft Office documents around (that isn't Google Sheets)" plan?

Good example of developer tunnel vision and something akin to the consultant effect or Pournelle's Iron Law—the opposite of disintermediation.

That's the problem—thinking about this in terms of "wanting software". It's wanting to publish. Tech workers have an especially hard time understanding this.

You're probably not under the impression that when the last person you heard of who got their book published finally pulled it off, they did it as a matter of wanting, say, an InDesign workflow versus something else. Because they weren't, and it didn't factor into their motivations at all—not even a little bit.

The problem almost certainly starts with the conception of what we're doing as "building websites".

When we do so, we mindset of working on systems

If your systems work compromises the artifacts then it's not good work

This is part of a broader phenomenon, which is that when computers are involved with absolutely anything people seem to lose their minds good sensibilities just go out the window

low expectations from everyone everyone is so used to excusing bad work

sui generis medium

violates the principle of least power

what we should be doing when grappling with the online publishing problem—which is what this is; that's all it is—is, instead of thinking in terms of working on systems, thinking about this stuff in such a way that we never lose sight of the basics; the thing that we aspire to do when we want to put together a website is to deal in

documents and their issuing authority

That is, a piece of content and its name (the name is a qualified name that we recognize as valid only when the publisher has the relevant authority for that name, determined by its prefix; URLs)

that's it that's all a Web site is

anything else is auxiliary

really not a lot different from what goes on when you publish a book take a manuscript through final revisions for publication and then get an ISBN issued for it

so the problem comes from the industry

people "building websites" like politicians doing bad work and then their constituents not holding them accountable because that's not how politics works you don't get held accountable for doing bad work

so the thing to do is to recognize that if we're thinking about "websites" from any other position things that technical people try to steer us in the direction of like selecting a particular system and then propping it up and how to interact with a given system to convince it to do the thing we want it to do— then we're doing it wrong

we're creating content and then giving it a name

Still a problem.

Still a problem.

Around 1:45:50

"Code is open source, but who cares? Nobody can understand it."

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Yeah, and it's useful. Like: people do stuff with it, but as soon as you run into problems with a library, it's just like... looking into the code is a mess... There's just a huge number of problems with it.

From the commentary in the video "Workflow: Universal project folder structure"

"I can intuit that this has something to do with[...]"

"I look at this folder[...] and I get some sense[...]"

"It's got this package dot bin thing, oh okay, so that means there's also a special command that I can run with this[...] you understand there is a command here"

Points to a short-sightedness and tunnel vision in sections of media. Taking a focussed view on a very narrow area of a field, as opposed to a "world view" as advocated by the author.