This term is well-suited for the sort of thing I was going for with S4/BYFOB.

@tomcritchlow's comment about being hobbled by CORS in his attempt to set up an app[1] that is capable of working with his Library JSON is relevant. With a BYFOB "relay" pretty much anyone can get around CORS restrictions (without the intervention of their server administrator). The mechanism of the relay is pretty deserving of the "autonomous" label—perhaps even moreso that Noel's original conception of what Autonomous Data really means...

1. https://library-json-node-2.tomcritchlow.repl.co/library?url=https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json

I'm confused by the continual references to the Replit. Once you have Replit-style power, you can do Mastodon interop—but it keeps you dependent on third-party SaaS. Continuing to violate the principle of least power isn't really any improvement. If you're going to shoot for displacing the status quo, it should be to enable public participation from people who have nothing more than a Neocities account or a static site published with GitHub Pages or one of the many other providers. Once you bring "live" backends into this (in contrast to "dead" media like RSS/Atom), you've pretty much compromised the whole thing.

There's nothing about this that requires Replit (or NodeJS, for that matter). The whole thing can be achieved by writing a program to run on the script engine that everyone already has access to—the one in the browser. No servers required.

A sort of "backend on the frontend".

A similar "BYFOB" design principle was the basis for a proposal to bring "Solid[-like] services for static sites" into existence. I submitted this proposal to NLnet in their call for applications for their user-operated Internet fund. It was not accepted.

Get rid of the networking, and make it more like the RSS/Atom model.

ActivityPub, for example, shouldn't really require active server support if you just want publish to the clear Web (i.e. have no use for DMs). Anyone, anywhere can add RSS/Atom "support" to their blog—it's just dumping another asset on their (possibly static!) site. Not so with something like Mastodon, which is unfortunate. It violates the Principle of Least Power at a fundamental level.

See also this thread with Noel De Martin, discussing a (Solid-based) organizer for your media library/watchlist: https://noeldemartin.social/@noeldemartin/105646436548899306

It shouldn't require Solid-level powers to run this. A design based upon "inert" data like RSS/Atom/JSON feeds (that don't require a smart backend to take on the role of an active participant in the protocol) would beat every attempt at Solid, ActivityPub, etc. that has been tried so far. "Inert"/"dead" media that works by just dumping some content on a Web-reachable endpoint somewhere, including a static site, is always going to be more accessible/approachable than something that requires either a server plug-in or a whole new backend to handle.

The litmus test for any new proposal for a social protocol should be, "If I can't join the conversation by thumping on my SSG to get it to produce the right kind of output—the way that it's possible with RSS/Atom—then the design is fundamentally flawed and needs to be fixed."

Before Keybase died, I had hopes that they would do something kind of like this. It'd work by installing worker services in the Keybase client and/or also allow you to connect to network-attached compute like AWS or DigitalOcean (or some Keybase-operated service) to seamlessly process worker requests when your laptop was offline. The main draw would be a friendly UI in the Keybase client for managing your workers. Too bad!

There was something like that, in HTML5's pre-history: Google Gears.

I've thought for a long time that someone should resurrect it (in spirit, that is) for the world's modern needs. Instead of running around getting everyone to install NodeJS and exhorting them to npm install && npm run, people can install the "Gears 2" browser extension which drastically expands the scope of the browser capabilities, and you can distribute app bundles that get installed "into" Gears.

Beaker (mentioned later in this post) was an interesting attempt. I followed them for awhile. But its maintainers didn't seem to appreciate the value of frictionless onboarding experience, which could have been made possible by e.g. working to allow people to continue using legacy Web browsers and distributing an optional plug-in, in the vein of what I just described about Gears.

A graphical JS interpreter? That's the browser! And it just so happens that it's already installed, too (everywhere; not just on Macs).

Nah. Just stop programming directly against NodeJS to start with!

The Web platform is a multi-vendor standardized effort involving broad agreement to implement a set of common interfaces. NodeJS is a single implementation of a set of APIs that seemed good (to the NodeJS developers) at the time, and that could change whenever the NodeJS project decides it makes sense to.

(Projects like WebRun which try to provide a shim to let people continue to program against NodeJS's APIs but run the result in the browser is a fool's errand. Incredibly tempting, but definitely the wrong way to go about tackling the problem.)

Agreed. NodeJS is developer tooling. It's well past the time where we should have started packaging up apps/utilities that are written in JS so that they can run directly in* the browser—instead of shamelessly targeting NodeJS's non-standard APIs (on the off-chance everyone in your audience is a technical user and/or already has it installed).

This is exactly the crusade I've been on (intermittently) when I've had the resources (time/opportunity) to work on it.

Eliminate implicit step zero from software development. Make your projects' meta-tooling accessible to all potential contributors.

* And I do mean "in the browser"—not "on a server somewhere that you are able to use your browser to access, à la modern SaaS/PaaS"

Why require Node?

Everything that this script does could be better accomplished (read: be made more accessible to a wider audience) if it weren't implemented by programming against NodeJS's non-standard APIs and it were meant to run in the browser instead.

All in all, despite its own flaws, I think this piece hints at a useful ontology for understanding the nuanced, difficult-to-name, POLP-violating design flaws in stuff like Mastodon/ActivityPub—and why BYFOB/S4 is a better fit, esp. for non-technical people.

https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22black+and+dead+is+all+you+need%22+user:mrcolbyrussell

But you're not! When you wield PHP like this, there is no URL for the piece of code per se—only its (potentially fleeting) output—unless you take special care to make that piece of code available as content otherwise. PHP snippets are just as deserving of a minted identifier issued for them as, say, JS and CSS resources are—perhaps even just as deserving as the content being served up on the site, but PHP actually discourages this.

Agreed, but a it's a very ironic remark, given the author's own position...

I argue that PHP is not reasonable here. The only appropriate thing for this use case is (unminified) JS—or some other program text encoded as a document resource permitting introspection and that the user agent just happens to be able to execute/simulate.*

• Just like the advocates of "a little jQuery", author here doesn't seem to realize that the use of PHP was the first step towards what is widely acknowledged to be messed up about the "modern" Web. People can pine for the days of simple server-side rendering, but there's no use denying that today's Web is the natural result of an outgrowth that began with abuses of the fundamental mechanisms underpinning the Web—abuses that first took root with PHP.

* Refer to the fourth and sixth laws of "Sane Personal Computing, esp. re "reveals purpose"

Controversial opinion: this is actually closer to doing the Web the way that it should be done, taking the intent of its design into account. NB: this is not exculpatory of minified JS bundles (where "megabyte" is the appropriate unit order of magnitude for measuring their weight) or anything about "modern" SPAs that thumb their nose at graceful degradation.

"an URL"? C'mon.

I dunno how sound this conclusion is. Even for static sites, there are lower friction ways to do them, but people usually opt for the higher friction paths...

Hey, look, it's an actually good example of the "steep learning curve".

(I never understood why people insist that referring to it as a steep curve is wrong; clearly the decisions about your axes are going to have an impact on the thing. It seems that everyone who brings this up is insisting on laying out their graph the wrong way and implicitly arguing that other people need to take responsibility for it.)

That makes them constitute separate editions. It makes things messy.

Unnecessary violation of the Principle of Least Power.

No active server component is necessary for this. It can be handled by the user agent's content negotiation.

Should we lean into that? Maybe some sort of "server BASIC" is what we need.

NB: need not (read: "should not") actually be a BASIC; moreso a shared spirit (see also: Hypercard)

My argument for the use of the Web as a medium for publishing the procedures by which the documents from a given authority are themselves published shares something in common with the argument for exploiting Lisp's homoiconicity to represent a program as a data structure that is expressed like any other list.

There are traces here as well from the influence of the von Neumann computational model, where programs and data are not "typed" such that they belong to different "classes" of storage—they are one and the same.

It's not nearly as timeless as a person might have themselves believe, though. (That's the "predilection" for certain technologies and doing things in a certain way creeping in and exerting its influence over what should otherwise be clear and sober unbiased thought.)

There's basically one timeless API, and that means written procedures capable of being carried out by a human if/when everything else inevitably fails. The best format that we have for conveying the content comprising those procedures are the formats native to the Web browser—esp. HTML. Really. Nothing else even comes close. (NB: pixel-perfect reproduction à la PDF is out of scope, and PDF makes a bunch of tradeoffs to try to achieve that kind of fidelity which turns out to make it unsuitable/unacceptable in a way that HTML is not, if you're being honest with your criteria, which is something that most people who advocate for PDF's benefits are not—usually having deceived even themselves.)

Given that Web browsers also expose a programming environment, the next logical step involves making sure these procedures are written to exploit that environment as a means of automation—for doing the drudge work in the here and now (i.e., in the meantime, when things haven't yet fallen apart).

Answer: it's hosted under the same auspices as the main content. The "editor" is first-class content (in the vein of ANPD); it's really just another document describing detailed procedures for how the site gets updated.

This would be a much better name than "blank nodes"...

Uh, it's the last element, though, not the first—right?

Bad idea to introduce this notation here at the same time as the (unexplained) use of square brackets to group a list of objects.

Lame.

Were parens taken?

Terrible choice for a name.

What was wrong with some variation of "anonymous"?

But this one did. Or rather, it used to be resolvable as http://infomesh.net/2001/08/swtips/ (note the trailing slash), but now that returns 404 and is only available as http://infomesh.net/2001/08/swtips (no trailing slash).

But Semantic Web Tips http://infomesh.net/2001/08/swtips/ is returning 404...

There's an unnecessary dichotomy here between uses JS and page is served as HTML. There's a middle ground, where the JS can do the same thing that it does now, but it only does so at edit time—in the post author's own browser, but not in others'. Once the post author is ready to publish an update, the client-side generated content is captured as plain HTML, and then they upload that. It still "uses JS", but crucially it doesn't require the visitor to have their browser do it (and for it to be repeated N times, once per page visit)...

A great case study in how the chest-puffing associated with the certain folks in certain segments of the compiled languages crowd can be cover for some truly embarrassing blunders.

(Also a great antidote against a frequent argument by self-taught "full stack" devs; understanding the runtime complexity of your program is important.)

I dunno. Was the wiki software in question MediaWiki?

I always thought it was weird when people would set up a wiki and'd go for something that wasn't MediaWiki (even though I have my own quibbles with it). MediaWiki was always the clear winner to me, even in 2012 without the benefit of another 10 years of hindsight.

This could/should be part of Zonelets itself.

This is less than ideal. Besides non-technical people needing to wade into the middle of (what very well might appear to them to be a blob of) JS to update their site, here are some things that Zonelets depends on JS for:

1. The entire contents of the post archives page
2. The footer
3. The page title

This has real consequences for e.g. the archivability for a Zonelets site.

The JS-editing problem itself could be partially ameliorated by with something like the polyglot trick used on flems.io and/or the way triple scripts do runtime feature detection using shunting. When the script is sourced via script element from another page, it behaves as JS, but when visited directly as the browser destination it is treated like HTML and has its own DOM tree for the script itself to make the necessary modifications easier. Instead of requiring the user to edit it as freeform text, provide a structured editing interface, so e.g. adding a new post is as simple as clicking the synthesized "+" button in the list of posts, copying the URL of the post in question, and then pasting it in—to a form field. The Zonelets script itself should take care of munging it into the appropriate format upon form "submission". It can also, right there, take care of the escaping issue described in the FAQ—allow the user to preview the generated post title and fix it up if need be.

Additionally, the archives page need not by dynamically generated by the client—or rather, it can be dynamically filled in exactly once per update—on the author's machine, and then be reified into static HTML, with the user being instructed to save it and overwrite the served version. This gets too unwieldy for next/prev links in the footer, but (a) those are non-essential, and don't even get displayed for no-JS users right now, anyway; and (b) can be seen to violate the entire "UNPROFESSIONAL" etthos.

Alternatively, the entire editing experience can be complimented with bookmarklets.

Should contributing to your project—or even merely using it—really require your collaborators to perform some preliminary ritual like downloading and configuring additional software packages?

That should be "big and professional like gnu".

This is how to open source something. "Open source" means that it's published under an open source license. That's it. There's nothing else required.

There are a few ways to interpret this, one being in an unintuitive way: that is, it is actually acceptable for a given bytestream to have multiple blobs that look like the end of central directory record (having the right signature and size/shape), but only the nth one is actually an end of central directory record. The requirement that a ZIP have only one meaning that all but the nth one aren't actually end of central directory records, but are nonetheless free to appear in the bytestream, because their not being an end of central directory record implies their existence doesn't violate spec.

Yes, and that's just one of the reasons why scanning from the front is invalid. There's nothing special about the signature in file records—it's just a four-byte sequence that might make its way into the resulting ZIP without any intent to denote a file record. If you scan from the front and assume that encountering the signature means a file exists there without cross-referencing the central directory, it means your implementation treats junk bytes as meaningful to the structure of the file, which is not a good idea.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that it's valid to treat the existence of those bytes as if that file is still "in" the ZIP. They should be treated exactly as any other blob that just happens to have some bytes that match the shape of the what a file record would look like if there were actually supposed to be a file there.

"there"

This is, I think, the only legitimate criticism here so far. All the others that amount to questions of "back-to-front or front-to-back?" can be answered: back-to-front.

This particular issue, however, can be worked around by padding the central directory one byte (or four) so that its not at offset 1,247,093,766. Even then, the flexibility in the format and this easy solution means that even this criticism is mostly defanged.

Although the generated code is very useful...

This is wrong. It treats the ZIP format as if (à la PNG) it's a concatenated series of records/chunks marked by ZIP's characteristic, "PK" off-set, 4-byte magic numbers. It isn't. The only way to read a ZIP bytestream is to start from the end, look for the signature that denotes the possibility of the presence at the current byte offset the record containing the central directory metadata, proceeding to validate* the file based on that, and then operating on it appropriately. (* If validation fails, you can continue scanning backwards from the offset that was thought to be the signature.)

The first passed validation attempt carried out in this manner (from back to front) "wins"—there may be more than one validation passes beginning at various offsets that succeed, but only the one that appears nearest to the end of the bytestream is authoritative. If one or more validation attempts fail resulting in no successes, the file may be corrupt, and the implementation may attempt to "repair" it (not necessarily by making on-disk modifications, but merely by being generous with its interpretation of the bytestream—perhaps presenting several different options to the user), or, alternatively, it may be the case that the file is simply not a ZIP archive.

This is because a ZIP file is permitted to have its records be little embedded "data islands" (in a sea of unrelated bytes). This is what allows spanned/multi-disk archives and for the ZIP to be modified by updating the bytestream in an append-only way (or selectively rubbing out parts of the existing central directory and updating the pointers/offsets in-place). It's also what allows self-extracting archives to be self-extracting: foremost, they conform to the binary executable format and include code for being able to open the very same executable, process the records embedded within it, and write them to disk.

should be "directory"

Lame. Hopefully it's at least checking the content type and returning an appropriate status code with a helpful message, at least.

(PS: it wouldn't be multipart/form-data, anyway; the default is application/x-www-form-urlencoded.)

This post is filled with programming/debugging missteps that are the result of nothing other than overlooking what's already right in front of the person who's writing.

Sounds like a good use case for an expansion to the jsmirrors API.

I haven't read the original source.

Is it possible that this has to do with stricter enforcement of existing laws (or even new ones that criminalize previously "acceptable" behavior, like drunk driving)? Today, being arrested is a pretty big deal—a black mark for sure. Subjectively, it seems that on the whole people of the WWII, Korean War, and Vietnam War eras were more rambunctious and society was more tolerant of it (since it was a lot more common, any of the potentially aggrieved parties would have likely engaged in similar stuff themselves).

Almost every time I've used FedEx's "Print and Go" for a PDF I've created by "printing" e.g. HTML (and that I've verified looks good when previewing it on-screen), it comes out mangled when actually printed to paper.

Okay, I stuck it out like the author here requested but I'm still left wondering what any of this is in reference to.

Huh? You sure about that?

Is "humble" the most overused word of the 21st century so far?

Standard Ebooks's search needs to incorporate alternate titles. I tried searching first for "the underground man" (my fault) but then I tried "notes from the underground", which turned up nothing. i then began to try searching for Dostoyevsky, but stopped myself when I realized the fruitlessness, because even being unsure if search worked across author names, I knew that I had no idea which transliteration Standard Ebooks was using.

Why is Standard Ebooks sending content-security-policy: default-src 'self';? This is not an appropriate use. (And it keeps things like the Hypothesis sidebar from loading.)

This is way too long. (And when I try saving the page, Firefox stops me because the suggested file name—derived from the title—is too long. NB: that's a bug in both standardebooks.org and Firefox.)

You can also "reply" by annotating the standalone (/a/...) page for a given annotation.

It's also just annoying when trying to get at the original resource (or its URL for reference).

Look, jQuery is not lightweight.* It's how we got into this mess.

* Does it require half a gigabyte of dev dependencies and regular dependencies to create a Hello, World application? No, but it's still not lightweight.

It would be great if these tools were also authored to be a book—a comprehensive, machine-executable runbook.

Should be "inscrutable".

There's way too much excuse-making in this post.

They're books. If there's any defensible* reason for making the technical decision to go with "inert" media, then a bunch of books has to be it.

* Even this framing is wrong. There's a clear and obvious impedance mismatch between the Web platform as designed and the junk that people squirt down the tubes at people. If there's anyone who should be coming up with excuses to justify what they're doing, that burden should rest upon the people perverting the vision of the Web and treating it unlike the way it's supposed to be used—not folks like acabal and amitp who are doing the right thing...

How about removing the "rendering" completely and make it a static site?

even in their own personal spaces

But your blog post on my screen is not in your personal space any more than your book/pamphlet/whatever lying open on my desk is (which is to say: not at all)... it's my space.

thinking they’re simply querying texts.

Huh?

The internet has made defensive writers of us all

How to nerf all the inherent advantages of the things just described.

don't say that

This is perverse (i.e. an instance of Morissette's false irony).

"Megamodules"?: * http://i.stanford.edu/pub/gio/1992/cacm-final.ps * https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/138844.138853

"How much of your love of chocolate has to do with your designs for life that are informed by your religious creed? Is it incidental or essential?"

What are Republicans worrying about when they self-censor? Being perceived as too far right and trying to appear more moderate, or catching criticism from their political peers if they were to express skepticism about some of the goofiest positions that Republicans are associated with at the moment?

Belief, or professed belief? Probably both, but how much of this is conscious/strategic versus happening in the background?

This comment makes the classic mistake of mixing up the universal quantifier ("for all X") and the existential quantifier ("there exists [at least one] X"), when (although neither are used), the only thing implied is the latter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_quantification

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_quantification

What the average teen is like doesn't compromise Stallman's position. If one "gamer" (is that a taxonomic class?) follows through, then that's perfectly in line with Stallman's mission and the previously avowed position that "Saying No to unjust computing even once is help".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/saying-no-even-once.html

"the C standard [... is] tremendously complicated, and tremendously hard to use [...] full of wrinkles and [...] complex rules"

Should it? This effectively outlaws a certain type of good: the ability to purchase a computer of that sort, even if that's what you actually want.

Perhaps instead it should be illegal to offer those types of computers for sale if the same computer without restrictions on installation aren't also available.

my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility.

GIMP needs an MSPaint "persona".

In his response, Shirky responds that he was unable to keep up with overhead of running a WordPress blog, so it fell into disrepair and eventually disappeared.

Is this proof, from one of the biggest social critics on the topic of crowdsourcing (known for taking a favorable stance on it), that it doesn't work? Separately, is the promise of the Web itself a false one?

I'm not going to say "yes", but I will say—and have said before—that the "New Social" era of the 2010s saw a change of environment from when Here Comes Everybody was written. I think it highlights a weakness of counter-institutional organization—by definition the results aren't "sticky"—that's the purview of institutions. What's more, even institutions aren't purely cumulative.

Did you really, though? Probably there was a need for a feed data source that was as easy to work with as parsing a JSON object, I'm betting. And I'd wager that there was no real obstacle to writing a FeedDataSource that would ingest the Atom feed and then allow you to call toString("application/json") to achieve the same effect.

Devops-heavy software changes this. Is GitHub standard fare the way it is because developers are knowingly or unknowingly trying to keep themselves employed—like the old canard/conspiracy theory about how doctors aren't interested in healing anyone, because they want them sick?

To drive this point home:

I sometimes get people who balk at my characterization of GitHub-style anti-wikis as being inferior to, you know, actual wikis. "You can just use the GitHub UI to edit the files", they'll sometimes say.

A case study: a couple days ago, I noticed that the lone link in the current README for Jeff Zucker's solid-rest project is a 404. I made a note of it. Just now, I reset my GitLab password, logged in to solid/chat, and notified Jeff https://gitter.im/solid/chat?at=611976c009a1c273827b3bd1. Jeff's response was, "I'll change it".

This case is rich with examples of what makes unwikis so goddamn inefficient to work with. First, my thought upon finding the broken link was to take note of it (i.e. so that it can eventually be taken care of) rather than fixing it immediately, as would have been the case with a wiki. More on this in a bit. Secondly, my eventual action was still not something that directly addressed the problem—it was to notify someone else† of the problem so that it might be fixed by them, due to the unwiki nature of piles of Git-managed markdown. Thirdly, even Jeff's reflex is not to immediately change it—much like my reaction, his is to note the need for a fix himself and then to tell me he's going to change it, which he will presumably eventually do. Tons of rigamarole just to get a link fixed‡ that remains broken even after having gone through all this.

† Any attempt to point the finger at me here (i.e. coming up short from having taken the wrong action—notifying somebody rather than doing it myself) would be getting it wrong. First, the fact that I can't just make an edit without taking into account the myriad privacy issues that GitHub presents is materially relevant! Secondly, even if I had been willing to ignore that thorn (or jump through the necessary hoops to work around it) and had used the GitHub web UI as prescribed, it still would have ended up as a request for someone else to actually take action on, because I don't control the project.

‡ Any attempt to quibble here that I'm talking about changing a README and not (what GitHub considers) a wiki page gets it wrong. We're here precisely because GitHub's unwikis are a bunch of files of markdown. The experience of changing an unwiki page would be rife with the same problems as encountered here.

Contribution: make it a wiki. (An actual wiki, not GitHub-style anti-wikis.)

Oops.

Nah, dude. That's not a wiki.

Meta note: I always have difficulty reading Linus Lee. I don't know what it is. Typography? Choices in composition (that is, writing)? Other things to do with composition (that is, visually)?

Disagree. JS is popular because its tooling was easy to get started with (i.e. did have merit)—but that's not really the case any more.

I find the tendency of people to frame their thinking in terms of other people's involvement in the projects in question being to make money (as with GitHubbers "contributing"/participating by filing issues only because they're trying to help themselves on some blocker they ran into at work) pretty annoying.

The comments here boil down to, "You say it should be rewarding? Yeah, well, if you're getting paid for it, you shouldn't have any expectations that the the act itself will be rewarding."

I actually agree with this perspective. It's the basis of my comments in Nobody wants to work on infrastructure that "if you get an infusion of cash that leaves you with a source of funding for your project[...] then the absolute first thing you should start throwing money at is making sure all the boring stuff that [no] one wants to work". I just don't think it's particularly relevant to what Kartik is arguing for here.

Open source means that apps are home-cooked meals. Some people get paid to cook, but most people don't. Imagine, though, if the state of home cooking were such that it took far more than one hour's effort (say several days, or a week) before we could reap an appreciable reward—tonight's dinner—and that this were true, by and large, for almost every one of your meals. That's not the case with home cooking, fortunately, but that is what open source is like. The existence of professional chefs doesn't change that. There's still something wrong that could stand to be fixed.

In other words, "allow me to go on and recontextualize this to the point of irrelevancy to the original purpose of this piece of writing".

I find that hard to believe. It could be true—I might be wrong—but it's pretty odd if so and still far from the norm.

The very fact that this "year of payment after a year of effort" probably really means "an annual salary of c$100k per year (for some c > 1), paid fractionally every two weeks" pretty much undermines this bad attempt at a retort.

The other commenter talks about a typical sw.eng. approach to visualization (flame graphs), but I want programs visualized as a manufacturing/packing/assembly line on a factory floor. Almost like node editors like Unreal's Blueprints, but in three dimensions, and shit visibly moving around between tools on the line in a way that you can actually perceive. Run the testcase on a loop, so you have a constant stream of "shit visibly moving around", and it runs at fractional speed so the whole process takes, say 10 seconds from front-to-back instead of near instantaneously like it normally would (and allow the person who's debugging to control the time scaling, of course). You find bugs by walking the line and seeing, "oh, man, this purple shit is supposed to be a flanged green gewgaw at this point in the line", so you walk over and fix it.

(This is what I want VR to really be used for, instead of what's capturing people's attention today—games and lame substitutes for real world interaction like Zuckerberg is advocating for.)

marktani asks (not unreasonably):

what is an hour of reward?

Kartik's response[1] is adequate, I feel.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041447

NB: This piece has been through many revisions (or, rather, many different pieces have been published with this identifier).

Check it out with the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://akkartik.name/about

I don't think so. I think it's rather the opposite. Churn is one of the biggest causes for what makes modifying software difficult. I agree, however, with the later remarks about making it easy to delete code where it's no longer useful.

I don't think you can get this with anything other than a sandbox, cf Web browsers.

I'm not sure I understand what it means to say that programs must "tell the truth about their side effects". What if they don't? (How do you make sure what they're telling is the truth?)

The "Edit" button should morph into a "Save" button instead.

In honor of Haketilo's original name, Hachette, bags might be called "sachets" instead.

No. Again, this is exactly what I don't want. (I don't mean as an author—e.g. burdened with hand-coding my own website—I mean as a person whose eyes will land on the pages that other people have authored with far more frequency than I do look at my own content.)

As I mentioned—not just in my earlier responses to this piece, but elsewhere—the constant hammering on about how much control personal homepages give the author over the final product is absolutely the wrong way to appeal to people. In the first place, it only appeals to probably about a tenth of as many people as the people advocating think it does. In the second place, the results can and usually are not good, cf MySpace.

The best thing about Facebook, Twitter, etc? Finally getting people to separate content from presentation. Hand-coded CSS doesn't get you there alone. That's basically a talisman (false shibboleth). Facebook content is in a database somewhere. The presentation gets layered on through subsequent transformations into different HTML+CSS views.

As I've said elsewhere about the fediverse: a funny thing to me is that Mastodon, while architecturally guilty of the same sort of things as the big social networks outlined in this post (centralization around nodes instead of small, personal, digital homes), is often touted as being able to deliver a lot of the same benefits, but I don't see them. For one thing, start a webring and get to know your virtual neighbors sounds a lot like "you get to pick your own instance". But secondly, and most relevant to the passage here, is that the types of people I run across in the fediverse for the most part all seem to be of a certain "type". As someone who doesn't use Twitter, joining Mastodon put me in contact with a lot more toxicity than not. I don't see how followthrough on the grand vision here—which will certainly almost exclusively be undertaken by the same sorts of people you find in the fediverse (with this piece, the author shows they know their audience and go right in on the pandering)—won't result in much difference from what you can get on any typical Mastodon instance—i.e. exactly the sort of thing that's basically the template for pieces like this one.

While the precondition is true, there is an ahistorical suggestion/understanding of the history of the Web at play here.

About half the touted benefits of the approach this piece advocates for could be better achieved by instead convincing people to be more forthcoming with making themselves available for contact by e-mail.

Hand-coding websites (something that I actually for myself) does not inherently presage the sorts of things the author thinks that it does. It could be true that we would be just as well off—if not better—if everyone were to go out and sign up for Owlstown and treat it like a content depository.

Anti-vax positions are the product of anonymity? Pretty sure the harbinger of the anti-vax nonsense are groups of Facebook moms...

I'm not sure that modern conventions have resulted in heightened use (and abuse) of anonymity. The trend seems to be in the opposite direction. Most major social networks, incl. Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub, either require/favor use of real names or manage to cultivate a sense of obligation from most of their users to do so. Reddit is more old-style Web than any of the others, and anonymity is by far the norm. It's actually very, very weird to go on Reddit and use your real name unless you're a public figure doing an AMA, and it's only slightly less uncommon to post under a pseudonym but have your real-life identity divulged elsewhere, out-of-band. Staying anonymous on Reddit is almost treated as sacred.

Likewise in the actual old Web, during the age of instant messengers and GeoCities, people pretty much did everything behind a "screen name".

This appeal would have a greater effect if it weren't itself published in a format that exhibits so much of what was less desirable of the pre-modern Web—fixed layouts that show no concern for how I'm viewing this page and causes horizontal scrollbars, overly stylized MySpace-ish presentation, and a general imposition of the author's preferences and affinity for kitsch above all else—all things that we don't want.

I say this as someone who is not a fan of the trends in the modern Web. Responsive layouts and legible typography are not casualties of the modern Web, however. Rather, they exhibit the best parts of its maturation. If we can move the Web out of adolescence and get rid of the troublesome aspects, we'd be doing pretty good.

Corollary: nobody wants janky project infrastructure to be a roadblack to getting work done. It should not take weeks or days of unrewarded effort in the unfamiliar codebase of a familiar program before a user is confident enough to make changes of their own

I used to use the phrase 48-hour competency. Kartik says "an hour (or three)". Yesterday I riffed on the idea that "you have 20 seconds to compile". I think all of these are reasonable metrics for a new rubric for software practice.

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

CuteDepravity asks:

With minimal initial funding (ex: $10k) How would you go about making 1 million dollars in a year ?

My response is as follows:

Buy $10k of precious metals (or pick your preferred funge, e.g. cryptocurrency), and then turn around and sell it for a net loss of $1. Repeat this 100 more times, using the sale price of your last sale as the capital for your next purchase and selling it for a $1 net loss over the purchase price. A year should give you enough time to make 202 trades. Your last trade should take you from under a million to just over a million in revenue—from $994,950 to $1,004,849 and with your balance at EOY being $9,899. Deduct your losses from the reward you collect from whomever you made this million dollar bet with. (Hopefully the wager was for greater than $101 and whatever this does to your taxes.)

Likewise, a program being written (especially one being written anew instead of by adapting an existing one) should be written in terms of capabilities from the underlying system that make sense for the needs of the greater program, and not by programming directly against the platform APIs. In the former case, you end up with a readable program (that is also often portable), whereas in the latter case, what you end up writing amounts to a bunch of glue between existing system component that may not work together in any comprehensible way to half the audience who is not already intimately familiar with the platform in question, but no less capable of making meaningful contributions.

I often think about how many things like Spectre/Meltdown are undiscovered because of how esoteric and unapproachable the associated infrastructure is that might otherwise better allow someone with a solid lead to follow through on their investigation.

Ousterhout says:

The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working

https://hypothes.is/a/yfo-zAB-EeyUTqcA1iAC2g#https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php

This is insufficiently explained.

I.

In You can't tell people anything, Chip Morningstar recalls, 'People loved it, but nobody got it. Nobody. We provided lots of explanation. We had pictures. We had scenarios, little stories that told what it would be like. People would ask astonishing questions, like “who’s going to pay to make all those links?”'

II.

Ted's vision for Xanadu was that all things connected would be shown to be connected.

III.

The people we're supposed to laugh at—the ones asking who's going to create all the links—had it right. There's just no way to enforce Ted's vision—no way for all links to be knowable and visible. That's because Ted's vision is fundamentally at odds with reality, just like the idea of unbreakable DRM. The ability of two people to whisper to one another in the corner of a cozy pub about a presentation you gave to the team during work hours, without your ever knowing that commentary is being exchanged (or even the existence of the pub meeting where it happens), is Xanadu's analog hole.

Prisencolinensinainciusol is probably more appropriate.

Empirically, this appears to be untrue.

But TBL is talking about "finding out about" the Web by experiencing it, which is not the same thing as understanding it. As the personal reflection in that this post opened up with showed, people are capable of experiencing the Web without understanding it.

You need to be in the triplescripts.org group to see this annotation.

Membership is semi-private, but only as a consequence of current limitations of the Hypothes.is service. Anyone can join the group.

I have learnt to abandon such attempts of adaptation fairly quickly, and to start the design of a new program according to my own ideas and standards

Oberon is a better example of this than UNIX. Internally, the typical UNIX program (written in C) uses function calls and shared access to in-memory "objects", but must use a different mechanism entirely (file descriptors) for programs to communicate.

Do we?

Explain clipboard macros as one use case for bookmarklets. E.g.:

navigator.clipboard.writeText(`Hey there.  We don't support custom domains right now, but we intend to allow that in the future.`)

Explain that they can be parameterized, too. E.g.:

let name = String(window.getSelection());
navigator.clipboard.writeText(`Hey, ${name}...`);

They can create a menu of bookmarklets for commonly used snippets.

Too late! We're already doing that to post the key during the handshake...

Feature request (implement something that allows the following): 1. From any page containing a bookmarklet, invoke the user-stored bookmarklet בB 2. Click the bookmarklet on the page that you wish to be able to edit in the Bookmarklet Creator 3. From the window that opens up, navigate to a stored version of the Bookmarklet Creator 4. Invoke bookmarklet בB a second time from within the Bookmarklet Creator

Expected results:

The bookmarklet from step #2 is decoded and populates the Bookmarklet Creator's input.

To discriminate between invocation type II (from step #2) and invocation type IV (from step #4), the Bookmarklet Creator can use an appropriate class (e.g. https://w3id.example.org/bookmarklets/protocol/#code-input) or a meta-based pragma or link relation.

We should perhaps include a rel=canonical or rel=alternate here. But what are the implications for shares and remixes? This also perhaps exposes a shortcoming in Hypothes.is's resource equivalence scheme, cf:

• https://web.hypothes.is/blog/cross-format-annotation/
• https://web.hypothes.is/help/how-to-establish-or-avoid-document-equivalence-in-the-hypothesis-system/

Maybe the document itself, when the application "wakes up" should check the basics and then insert them as appropriate?

This should use the registered control service pattern (or something). It's too hard to override this behavior. For example, I could remix the page and remove it, but I should also be able to write a bookmarklet that achieves the same effect.

I had a similar feeling in 2016 after a recruitment attempt matching exactly the process described in theogravity's comment on this post. After first coming into contact at the grocery store, exchanged numbers, and met up at a coffee shop (a meeting that was arranged via text message within a couple days/weeks). I was surprised to find out that it was a MLM something-or-other, then I made it clear that I wasn't interested (and subtly made him feel that he should leave while I stayed and finished the hot cider I ordered). But for weeks afterward, I felt embarrassed and insulted that I must have been giving off some vibe as easily dupable. I couldn't reconcile it with the fact that in our first "chance" meeting, I mentioned that I'd left Samsung a few weeks earlier and didn't exactly have any concrete work plans and wasn't especially worried about it. Somehow, though, I guess I was perceived as being susceptible to some get-rich-quick nonsense...?

Having said that—the author here recounts four meetings and still no revelation about the specifics of what their agenda was. That doesn't sound like "easy" prey to me. That's a pretty involved trap, assuming it is one.

Maybe they were Fourth Dimensionists. (NB: Not actually a book I can recommend.)

Worth noting that one of these is concrete (and concretely bad) and avoidable, the other one less so. It even permits claims that are unfalsifiabie.

should be "tenant"

It doesn't look like it; seems that Covey actually wrote "motives", not "intentions", and the maxim is not original to him https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/19/judge-others/

wat

Mmm… no, it just takes moderately less effort than clicking. And it doesn't apply to mouseless form factors.

What can triples do that you couldn't do with pairs?

This is a spam account

This is a spam account.

wat

Fails if the page is already bookmarked.

wat

This is where things really go off the rails. There is no legitimate use case for this regime no matter how much people have looked for a reason to justify it or use sleight of hand to make it seem appropriate.

In addition to the note above about this being susceptible to sites that deny execution of inline scripts, this also isn't really solving the problem. At this point, these are effectively GreaseMonkey scripts (not bookmarklets), except initialized in a really roundabout way...

Bookmarklets and the JS console seem to be the workaround.

For very large customizations, you may run into browser limits on the effective length of the bookmarklet URI. For a subset of well-formed programs, there is a way to store program parts in multiple bookmarklets, possibly loaded with the assistance of a separate bookmarklet "bootloader", although this would be tedious. The alternative is to use the JS console.

In FIrefox, you can open a given script that you've stored on your computer by pressing Ctrl+O/Cmd+O, selecting the file as you would in any other program, and then pressing Enter. (Note that this means you might need to press Enter twice, since opening the file in question merely puts its contents into the console input and does not automatically execute it—sort of a hybrid clipboard thing.) I have not tested the limits of the console input for e.g. input size.