I hate this timeline so much

Like AI companies care about business ethics

only a tool

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological”

Every tool contains within it a philosophy — a particular way of seeing the world.

But especially digital technologies… they give the developer the ability to embed their values into the tools. Like, is DoorDash just a tool?

Lemme share the tea for anyone who isn’t aware:

• Owl house is a show by Dana Terrace that ran on Disney
• It slowly developed into big pro-LGBTQ themes
• Disney panicked, cancelled the show, claimed it was unpopular despite excellent ratings
• Dana Terrace left with a bunch of others to form an independent studio
• Their first show (Knights of Guinevere) features a floating amusement park that rains garbage all over the workers below, and robots that have orbs on their heads that produce a silhouette strikingly similar to that of Mickey Mouse

To solve climate change, we need two fundamental beliefs:

• There is an urgent problem
• We are capable of taking meaningful action

This graph proves that we can take meaningful action. That proof is essential to our success.

I don’t understand the people who insist that while there is an urgent problem, we have never done anything to address it, we’re currently doing nothing to address, and we will never do anything to address it.

What is the point of that belief?

Perhaps the certainty of failure is more comforting than the vulnerability of working towards a success that isn’t guaranteed.

Those additional requests will reuse the existing connection, so they’ll have more bandwidth at that point.

Feels more like a home manager thing to me

I see what you’re saying, but the fact that it can be ambiguous is actually what makes it so useful to fascist organizers.

They thrive on phrases that allow them to wink at each other when they want to, but claim innocence if someone calls them out.

14kB club: “Amateurs!!!”

https://dev.to/shadowfaxrodeo/why-your-website-should-be-under-14kb-in-size-398n

a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.

This is because of the TCP slow start algorithm. This article will cover what that is, how it works, and why you should care.

The original source was much more sensible.

The comparison makes sense for evaluating whether you’re over-invested in something. Like, if Nvidia suddenly poofed out of existence, would it seriously be worth 16% of everything the whole country makes in a year to get it back?

Owning a car that’s worth 16% of your yearly income sounds reasonable, no matter what your actual income is. A Pokemon card collection that’s 16% of your income is probably too risky, no matter what your actual income is.

Also, GDP is a decent scale to use for charting investment in a productivity tool, because if GDP ramped up at the same time as investment then it looks less like a bubble, even if they both ramp up quickly.

But that’s not what we see. We see a sudden and volatile shift, nothing like the normal pattern before the hype.

I think maybe the biggest conceptual mistake in computer science was calling them “tests”.

That word has all sorts of incorrect connotations to it:

• That they should be made after the implementation
• That they’re only useful if you’re unsure of the implementation
• That they should be looking for deviations from intention, instead of giving you a richer palette with which to paint your intention

You get this notion of running off to apply a ruler and a level to some structure that’s already built, adding notes to a clipboard about what’s wrong with it.

You should think of it as a pencil and paper — a place where you can be abstract, not worry about the nitty-gritty details (unless you want to), and focus on what would be right about an implementation that adheres to this design.

Like “I don’t care how it does it, but if you unmount and remount this component it should show the previous state without waiting for an HTTP request”.

Very different mindset from “Okay, I implemented this caching system, now I’m gonna write tests to see if there are any off-by-one errors when retrieving indexed data”.

I think that, very often, writing tests after the impl is worse than not writing tests at all. Cuz unless you’re some sort of wizard, you probably didn’t write the impl with enough flexibility for your tests to be flexible too. So you end up with brittle tests that break for bad reasons and reproduce all of the same assumptions that the impl has.

You spent extra time on the task, and the result is that when you have to come back and change the impl you’ll have to spend extra time changing the tests too. Instead of the tests helping you write the code faster in the first place, and helping you limit your tests to only what you actually care about keeping the same long-term.

No apps, no code, just intent and execution.

So the only problems you’re left with are:

• Making a precise description of what you want, at high and low levels of detail with consistent terminology
• Verifying that the system is behaving as you expect, by exercising specific parts of it in isolation
• The ability to make small incremental steps from one complete working state to the next complete working state, so you don’t get stuck by painting yourself into a corner

Problems which… code is much better than English at handling.

And always will be.

Almost like there’s a reason code exists other than just “Idk let’s make it hard so normies can’t do it mwahaha”.

Jimmy Wales: Libertarian that ended up creating perhaps the most successful collectivist project of all time.

It’s the problem, but also the strength. That fragmentation allows room to experiment.

It also puts pressure on the underlying protocols/specs to be air-tight. If you have just one implementation to support, you can do whatever. If you have to support 15, all with different goals and constraints, you gotta be pretty damn careful.

So in the end, we get foundational systems that are able to evolve over time instead of needing a breaking-change, ground-up rewrite every 2 years.

This is basically what the Luddites were fighting against:

A world where labor has no opportunity to develop skills or use them, no authority over the machinery which dictates the nature of what is made and how, chasing fewer and fewer jobs for less and less pay.

Their solution was to take sledgehammers to the factories. The owners, of course, hired thugs to shoot them. And the politicians ruled that the machines were sort of the property of the crown, and therefore destruction of these machines should be punishable by public execution.

Funny enough, data centers today are considered strategic assets under the protection of DHS. Which is a fancy way of saying: still owned by the crown, still gonna shoot you if you try to negotiate via sledgehammer.

It’s not all bad

Its supposedly open source??

NPM users: “…and?”

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”

Powerful words.

Small question: Why are you giving these horrible platforms more leverage over their digital captives instead of just banning them or outlawing the worst parts of their business models?

Linux god’s

Linux god’s what?