anon35

Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.

I would amend to: what Americans don't like to accept are what they see as preventable mistakes. The least American sentiment of all is "shit happens". Americans sometimes say that, but they don't mean it. What they really mean: "this shit shouldn't be allowed to happen". Hence the rules, and (in the extreme) the litigiousness.

Surely you can appreciate that if the next stop on the journey of technology can take over the process of improvement itself that would make it an awfully notable stop? Maybe not "destination", but maybe worth the "endless conversation"?

We’re either handicapping our brightest, or boosting our dumbest. One part is concerning, the other encouraging .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)

How does the author know that? Doesn't "not public" mean not visible, and therefore not countable?

So perhaps be less upset that Mom signed up; our DNA really isn't ours in the same way the documents on our hard drive. You were never going to be able to opt-out.

https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/why-cant-we-turn-all-the-empty...

There are fantastic, beautiful interactive experiences (for lack of a better word) that are obviously not documents (they can't be represented on paper, there is code running) but they're not really applications, either (they are fully offline, self-contained, state that's only evident on the page).

But they are, universally: dynamic.

Examples: - https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ - http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ - even : https://neal.fun/space-elevator/

This is what I think the future of textbooks and presentations should be. But I think part of the problem is that not only do we not have tools geared toward creating them, we don't even have a name for these things. If we say "document", they flunk the pdf test. If we say "web application", they are lumped into the same lumbering category as office docs and enterprise software.

Maybe Nota is a step in the right direction. But it'd be an even better step if it didn't call itself "21st century documents", if for no other reason than to defend against the valid criticism you levied against it.

As a first approximation, just think of the size of the destination audience:

- if it's a few people, the language will sound direct and casual

- if it's many thousands, millions (likely to include government, investors, customers) then it will sound formal, corporate, "PR"

Because we're more often likely to be in the 2nd category, we're used to hearing senior leaders sound like their words have been carefully edited.

But we shouldn't be surprised that when we get a glimpse of their comms in smaller settings, it sounds "just like us".

- it was slow

- it wasn't consistent; not unusual that thread replies would be out of order

- it was text only (essentially)

- posting and downloading binary files was even slower and cumbersome)

    sccs            1973    2000
    rcs             1982    2000
    cvs             1990    2004
    clearcase       1992    2004
    perforce        1995    2011
    subversion      2000    2015
    mercurial       2005    2015
    git             2005    present

But often time when I tell juinors that when they're my age, git will be distant a strange memory to them, they look at me funny. It's a wonderful tool and earned its success, but I'll be sad if it's our final take on the problem.

But really these kind of playgrounds are at least a cousin, if not a direct descendant, of the immediate feedback principle that underlies everything from a REPL to the kind of systems (Symbolics, etc) that allow you to edit running code. Their potential is beautifully illustrated in Brett Victor's famous 'Inventing on Principle' talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

Three areas that I'd love to see playgrounds mature beyond teaching beginners CSS:

1) Integrated directly into developer documentation. You can see some of that in systems that are documenting services -- for example, the Google Sheets API documentation has a 'Try this Method' box that lets you post a request to the service on the same page that describes it, but what I really want is something like that when I'm reading the man page of a destructive disk command, or a complex database query, or a low-level C graphics library. That'll require a playground wired to something as big as a VM, maybe.

2) Integrated into textbooks: for the last couple years the astonishing posts from Bartosz Ciechanowski ([Sound](https://ciechanow.ski/sound/), [Bicyle](https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/)) have demonstrated just how much better a textbook could be if you could interactively play with the concepts you're reading about. Unlike dev docs, the thing you're interacting with doesn't even have to be "real".

3) Most ambitiously: integrated into the input form of bug/issue tracking tools. This is the opposite of play: it means a running system would need to be in cahoots with a playground, so that mature apps could let you record and playback what you saw as a user, allow you to edit irrelevant parts of input and output out and submit a complete here-look-see-it-is-busted asset for analysis. A Stackoverflow of the future would be orders of magnitude more interesting if each question was posed as a broken playground.