Natales

Slack

Before microservices were a thing, I had the chance to work on a couple of telecom systems written in Erlang/OTP, but it wasn't until years later that I realized we were already doing most of the things people were using microservices for, with the single exception of being polyglot (although Elixir and Gleam are starting to challenge that).

Small teams were dealing with specific functionality, and they were largely autonomous as long as we agree upon the API, which was all done via Erlang's very elegant message passing system. Scalability was automatic, part of the runtime. We had system-wide visibility and anyone could test anything even on their own computers. We didn't have to practice defensive programming thanks to OTP, and any systemic failure was easier to detect and fix. Updates could be applied in hot, while the system was running, one of the nicest features of the BEAM, that microservices try to address.

All the complexity associated with microservices, or even Kubernetes and service meshes, are ultimately a way to achieve some sort of "polyglot BEAM". But I question if it's really worth it for all use cases. A lot of the "old" technology has kept evolving nicely, and I'd be perfectly fine using it to achieve the required business outcomes.

Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going to change everything.

I ran IPFS nodes, I was on cjdns (Hyperborea network), I joined all alt sites trying to disrupt FB and whatnot (Diaspora, Friendica, Mastodon). I paid a lot more to my ISP to have no bandwidth caps (a key blocker for dweb technologies).

In the end, nobody came. Nobody else cared. The huge time sink that was necessary only to maintain these technologies was eating either on my work or my personal life. I wasn't even capable of convincing family members in 3 countries to use Signal or Wire instead of WhatsApp. So I gave up.

Every once in a while I take a peek into the dweb world, because I just love the technologies, but I see little to no movement. Outside folks like archive.org, few others have serious, production-quality systems based on dweb techs.

When I was a product lead, the most important question was "why". What problems are you trying to solve. And the problems need to be so clear, obvious and powerful that customers would be willing to pay to solve them.

As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.

Don't judge the author too harshly. Ingrid presents an overall perspective of the entire field. Yes, some definitions are somewhat skewed, but I'm sure many people see things the same way. In a way, the fact the author wrote the article and we're all reading all these comments, is because we all care about this and we want to see a truly distributed web succeed. So it's ok to try to reason how we get there.

In all honestly, I've had very similar thoughts. As someone who started with BITNET before the Internet, I always believed "the Net" was supposed to level the field, and we no longer have to be "consumers" but rather willing participants capable of innovation, on our own right. I know, how naive.

Where I disagree is in the solution. It's not political. Whenever you think about the Internet, you MUST think global. I've had the chance to visit around 35 countries, and I've seen first hand how governments don't work for people, for the most part.

It comes down to this: we (geeks and nerds) need to get out of our comfort zone and think in terms of user experience. We CAN create amazing things. But we must think about the people using these solutions. People use Dropbox because it's easy, not because it's good. Same for Gmail and other services. If we are not creating solutions that can be used by anyone, in an easy and straightforward fashion, we're not doing our job. If companies don't see value in what we are creating when it could help them tremendously (i.e. IPFS) then WE are doing something wrong.

I think it all comes down to UX.

I started writing blog-like text entries in my .plan file in the mid 80s, so others could use finger in UNIX and read what I was thinking.

I later learnt HTML just so I could keep writing my thoughts. I lost content, I got spam, I had to learn to defend myself when the Internet became aggressive. It wasn't like that early on. We believed it was for the betterment of humankind. I know, how naive.

I went through the "Wordpress phase", the static phase (Pelican, then Hugo) but I ultimately decided to define what I wanted to share, and I realized few people really cared about long writings, but rather, the nitty gritty. So I chose to use the Zettlekasten model where I focus on specifics, narrow, single-topic. I chose TiddlyWiki (the Drift distribution specifically), and I have two files, one public, one private. As simple as that. My default is public. If I have a thought, learning, recipe, experience, anything that could be useful to anyone else, I put it on the public file. Otherwise, it goes in the private. As simple as that.

And thanks to CloudFlare's JS compression, the whole thing works great for me. https://ramirosalas.com

I find Althea [1] a lot more interesting than Helium, where their crypto is used basically as an incentive model for bandwidth, with no proprietary hardware or software in the mix.

[1] https://althea.net/

There have been several posts in recent weeks on this topic, and every time I have the same reaction: how can they all just ignore TiddlyWiki [0], that has been out there since 2004 and has evolved nicely over the years to deliver most of the same outcomes? Is it that folks just ignore prior art? or they just gravitate to the latest more sexy software? (honest question).

I've been using TiddlyWiki on and off for many years, but 2-3 years ago I moved heavily into it (the Drift [1] distribution), and I haven't looked back. To me, it has become less about the tool and more about the information, and ensuring I have complete access to it, even 20 years from now. That includes data, metadata and even the software itself, regardless of the platform or OS.

[0] https://tiddlywiki.com/

[1] https://akhater.github.io/drift/

Let's not be hypocritical. What we really want to know is: did you find/preserve intact DNA? If the answer is yes, I'm not even going to speculate what happens next. We just know it.

Although as a non-expert, the methodology of the study seems sound to me, I find its conclusion depressing.

I know it wasn't their intent to attempt to provide solutions, but it bothers me having absolutely no idea how to even begin to solve this problem at scale, in a world where it's becoming easier and cheaper to influence such large amounts of people. Every single idea I've thought can either be defeated, exploited, or ignored, and I haven't seen a project or effort that seems strong enough to go to battle for.

Has anyone here seen something worth exploring?

After years of being beaten by customers with stories like these, I learnt to treat InfoSec and Compliance teams as finite state machines, particularly at banks and other financial institutions. Learn not to question the sacred spreadsheet, or debate the merits of a request. It's pointless, and you keep rolling your eyes will only end up with you at the optometrist.

Instead, treat compliance like part of your API. Ensure your product delivers on the expected answer, while continuously improving the security of your products in the parts that are not directly visible.

Yes indeed. I had the pleasure to work for Ascend Communications for 4 years. The bulk of our business was the Ascend Max TNT that could terminate dozens of PRI lines into hundreds of digital modems. They were the bread and butter for early ISPs. For BRI lines, there was the Pipeline 50, remarkable little box with a BRI input and Ethernet output. Good times.

True. I visited Medellin a couple of times between 97 and 2006 when I was doing business in LATAM, and I recall clearly that many locals had tremendous admiration for Escobar, constantly praising all he did for the city and the community, while de-emphasizing, and sometimes justifying, the true nature and methods of his business.

I find fascinating how many folks, typically on the younger side, gravitate to proprietary (and expensive!) software like Roam Research and others, in search for personal knowledge management solutions, without seriously considering TW.

Coupled with the proper plugins, I find TW to be the most comprehensive, flexible and powerful solution, guaranteed to work 20 years from now, all self-contained in a single file. Seriously, how amazing is that when you think about it!

I talked to one of them recently, and he said it wasn't appealing because the name "wiki" sounded old school. Another beef was the use of JavaScript (yet, he'd find it cool if it were WASM. Go figure).

The only legitimate criticism he mentioned was the lack of efficient image/file embedding or linking, which I don't find much of an issue with the [img[<file>]] syntax, provided you are well organized. I keep dozens of images (mostly food recipes) linked that way on my site [0] with 107 tiddlers currently, extremely snappy, and properly cached and compressed with CloudFlare, all with no issues whatsoever. My personal TW file (combined personal and work) has over 2,000 tiddlers and I feel no difference.

Seriously, more people should give TW a try, just for a week or so, and see how can it change the way you retain, search and manage information.

[0] https://ramirosalas.com

Property taxes in CA punish the newcomers and reward old money. When I bought in Mill Valley in 2001, I was literally paying 13X more taxes than my neighbor, a masseuse who inherited the property and kept the same tax rate her parents paid in the 70s. And as a very liberal town, every new tax initiative always passed, which again hit us harder.

If at least Prop 13 benefits could not be passed as inheritance, that would go a long way to balance things.

I'm happy I moved to WA now where my property taxes do get reassessed every year, but it balances out with no state income taxes.

I've been using Wire for a few years and the experience is solid. No need for phone numbers anymore, just @handle, and it does multi-device encryption and backup. Its search is very fast, even for large number of messages. Good support for attachments and superb audio and video.

On the flip side, it's not very customizable and doesn't have a lot of the more "modern" UX goodies like emoji reactions or threads. But it's overall very good and I see no reason to change.

I keep two TiddlyWiki [0] files, one public, one private.

If I feel that a certain note can become its own piece of knowledge in a Zettlekasten fashion and can have any value for someone else, I put it in my public file and I run a script that will copy it to my hosting provider. My public site is a single file! [1].

[0] https://tiddlywiki.com/

[1] https://ramirosalas.com/

I like the idea of daily notes even better when you combine them with your todo lists at the same time. That concept is called interstitial notes [0], and it's used in several software tools like Roam Research [1]. I use Drift [2] which has a interstitial notes plugin which has proven to work very well for me.

[0] https://nesslabs.com/interstitial-journaling

[1] https://roamresearch.com/

[2] https://akhater.github.io/drift/

I do something similar with Drift [0], a customized distribution of TiddlyWiki [1]. I capture as many thoughts and ideas as I can using the Zettlekasten methodology [2]. If it can be distilled to a single piece of knowledge, I assess, should this be private for me? or it can be useful to anyone else? if b, then I publish add it as a Tiddler on my public TiddlyWiki file, and I run an update that will upload it to my web site [3]. If private, I keep it in my private file.

TiddlyWiki has been around for a very long time, and it keeps evolving. My personal file has over 3,000 Tiddlers and it keeps growing. It's unbelievable all you can do in a single file with just HTML and JavaScript. As long as those standards exist in 20-30 years, I can be sure my files, all tags and all relationships are still available and highly usable.

[0] https://akhater.github.io/drift/

[1] https://tiddlywiki.com/

[2] https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

[3] https://ramirosalas.com

I would also encourage everyone to read what this loss means to the local communities in Puerto Rico [0], and most particularly, to the young kids who fell inspired by it.

"Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a physics student and aspiring astronomer at the University of Puerto Rico, said in an email that it had always been his dream to work at Arecibo.

Now he said, “It feels like the rug has been pulled out from under us and our dreams to work in astronomy in Puerto Rico has vanished.”"

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/science/arecibo-observato...

I was thinking of Contact actually.

True. But the amount of people who care about that is tiny compared with the masses. For music for example, I'm a happy Qobuz customer because I appreciate hi-res quality and I have the gear to enjoy it, but I know plenty of folks who are just fine with Pandora or Spotify. Same with this. I'd be willing to bet a huge percentage of folks will watch these movies in their mobile.

No doubt. But how many scientific tools also become cultural icons? in an era where we need more young people becoming passionate about science and space, the loss of Arecibo feels like the loss of the Challenger to many.

I see why it can be confusing. The funny thing is that you can edit posts, but you can't save them on the server. In fact, you can save a local copy of a site built with TW, but it becomes your own copy. You can go to the settings and hide the save button. Not sure if you can totally disable it thou.

What I like about this model vs. others is that it's entirely self-contained in a single file. As long as you have a browser that supports Javascript, you can work with it. And as much as I like modern tools like Obsidian, TW pretty much guarantees me that if I save 1,000 tiddlers on a file (up to 100K are known to be possible), 20-30 years from now, as long as HTML and Javascript are still capable of being ran somewhere, my entire knowledge base will be there.

Heck, other than some Unicode issues I have, my entire site is happily in archive.org as a single, snappy file right now...

Thank you for sharing this. I read the article and I started feeling depressed (I'm turning 53 soon).

Your parents show it doesn't have to be that way! Hats off to them. They're an inspiration.

For having been around for so long in its most basic form, it's pretty exciting to see an entire renascence of knowledge tools and methodologies.

Every few years I get bitten by the bug and I go on a hunt of what's out there. Most recently, some colleagues were very excited about Roam Research [0], so I took another look, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that, among many great tools, the good old TittlyWiki [1] had evolved with the times, and now you have "distributions" tailored to apply the Zettelkasten methodologies.

I settled on Drift [2], and over a weekend, I moved hundreds of notes I had spread in several formats over to a small set of Drift files. I even moved my entire personal web site (mostly audio and foodie geeky stuff) into it, with close to 80 tiddlers by now [3].

Porting was phase 1. The fun part where the methodology becomes really powerful, is breaking down the monoliths, just like you would do with app modernization into microservices. Taking longer blog posts and decomposing them into discrete, reusable components that can hold meaning under different contexts. The more I looked at them, the more I could find I could break them down into more discrete ideas. And I'm sure I'm not done.

Several weeks into it, I've become more organized than I had been in years, and I realize it helps me structure my thinking, and how to connect ideas.

Regardless of what tool you choose (and there are plenty) it's a great moment to look at what this methodology can do for you.

[0] https://roamresearch.com/

[1] https://tiddlywiki.com/

[2] https://akhater.github.io/drift/

[3] https://ramirosalas.com

It does exist. I work for a ~30K software company, and they have a detailed pay multiplier scale depending on where you live. Furthermore, they will adjust your salary if you move from one area to another, and the rates are not insignificant.

Back in 2011 I was going through a period where I felt I wanted to be really outspoken about my atheism, and I heard Richard Dawkins [0] was going to talk at this conference, so I booked a ticket and I attended.

It was the TAM 2011 conference [1] in Las Vegas. I had no idea what was it about. I had never attended a 'skeptics' conference before, only tech stuff. That night at the reception, I met all sorts of interesting characters.

Then this old guy with a cane came up, with a long beard like ZZ Top. I asked him 'who are you'? and he said 'I'm James. I'm a magician'. We chatted completely normally for like two minutes and we both moved on to other people. He was completely natural, absolutely not offended that I didn't know who he was, even if he was the force behind the conference. He was genuinely interested in what were my reasons for attending and my personal story.

I did get to meet many of my heroes in person during those days, and I even scored some 1:1s with them, Richard Dawkins, Neil Degrass Tyson, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss and Bill Nye. But after all this time, my fondest memories are those minutes with Mr. Randi. If I had to make an analogy, he's the most Yoda-like person I've ever met.

His life will continue to be an inspiration many. Me included.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Meeting

My CTO has been researching this (large 30K emp. software company) and the current consensus seems to indicate that ~60% of the workforce is expected to continue to work remote. Offices will be redesigned as collaboration spaces, where (when it becomes safe) people will converge from time to time for specific activities, but the follow-up and rest of the work will be remote.

I fully support this, and I to a degree, I've been doing it for 6 years already, and I find it extremely effective.

And no, I would not take a pay cut. Companies pay for what I bring to the table. As long as they get what they want from me, it should be irrelevant where am I.

I've been working remotely for 6 years now, and 5 of those was at Pivotal, a culture famous for pairing. I love it, and I have turned down offers that cannot guarantee me a similar situation post COVID.

We used Zoom since ~2015 regularly, and Hangouts before that, and given that the company had many offices around the world, and the majority of teams were distributed (largely optimizing for the same timezones), being home office-bound was no different that being on another office. We constantly experimented with the latest tools and practices to be more productive at a distance. For example, some pairs were connected on video all day, in addition to keyboard/screen. It wasn't easy for everyone, but ended up achieving the goals.

Post COVID, my current company is in the process of re-imagining office work, more towards intense collaboration spaces. Most of the work can still be done remotely, getting together for specific activities every once in a while. I really believe this model could represent the future for this type of work in tech.

If the company culture is such that remote employees are not second class citizens and HR has set rules to back that up, anything is possible.

This makes me sad. I hope this doesn't mean the demise of Firefox, my personal browser from before it was called "Firefox".

I know many of us will pay for privacy, and even help subsidize those who can't, but they have to be alive first.

At work, I replaced Chrome with Brave, but I still trust FF as the browser for my personal life (in addition to, of course, Pi-Hole, Algo VPN, and a number of plugins; or QubesOS + Whonix when things are really serious).