antigonemerlin
Budget cuts and the gutting of profitable newspapers by Alden Global Capital really destroyed a lot of journalism and turned it into "internet journalism", at which point, they are scarcely better than the average reader.
Learning how to read non-fiction books, as I discovered, is actually a skill that needs to be learned, as my historian friends who wolf down thirty books in a week will tell you (the trick is to read only the parts you need instead of reading cover to cover, though I am still learning how to learn).
And counterpoint to counterpoint: While fields in the humanities are 'book-based', CS is mostly 'article-based'. And furthermore, on the bleeding edge, textbooks don't exist yet, documentation is shoddy, and sometimes you have to read the original source code.
I think it is unreasonable to expect that hackers are expert assyriologists, material scientists, or sociologists, despite what we may think about ourselves. Some of us are fortunate enough to know many things and master a few more disciplines. Few of us have mastered everything.
I know that I'm a glorified glue monkey. On all other subjects, I am ignorant, and rely on the opinions of others.
After leaving reddit, I'm trying not to relapse into karma farming and speculating about topics which I have no expertise in, which just about leaves my own personal anecdotes about growing up Canadian. That, and asking the beginner's question. That's probably for the best for the health of the forum at large.
function process_item(item, action)
{
item[action]();
}
Probably not great code, but still.
Since there are no classes in JS and everything is an object, you technically have complete control over such 'classes' and 'methods'. This is probably why people keep trying on turning JS into a different and saner language, or better yet, are using another language entirely like TS. Which is a shame, because it's kind of fun to dynamically generate new functions on the fly and having complete freedom to do anything you want.
Though I can't recall of the top of my head, there are certainly more than a few inventions which were simply not practical to build before the invention of the lathe because the tolerances were not good enough with traditional techniques.
It's one of those ideas that spreads because you see other people doing it: You get the OG blogs still up with 90s styling, student blogs with like 2 posts, and longform explorations of trying to squeeze out every ms of performance from D3 by rewriting parts of it in WASM [1], which link to the posts that it was inspired by, an even crazier attempt which tries to turn off all its safeties.
It forms an entire ecosystem, to which Hackernews, Google, et etc, form a kind of gateway into the canopy of a blogosphere.
One more thing: can we do more linking? Like, have a section of our blogs that's basically, "here are the blogs of a bunch of people I find interesting"? Is there a reason why we don't do that (spam or harassment)?
1. https://cprimozic.net/blog/speeding-up-webcola-with-webassem...
Most of us have never seen a working example of democracy. We have just sort of tacitly accepted a kind of benevolent dictatorship in most institutions, from our workplace to open-source (and please correct me if I'm wrong here, I know that there is a kind of democracy in forking and collaboration, but as I understand it, voting democracy isn't really found anywhere.)
I was just watching Car 54 where are you? the other night, and in it, you can see the members of a fictional police union voting on absolutely everything, from union dues, to where to host the christmas dinner. People voted, made speeches, and ran for office, and all of this within like a tiny local. This kind of general participatory democracy seems as quaint as the black and white film it's played on.
My advice to you is to join something. There's a number of civics activists trying to push for some local issue, like transit, or housing, or raising funds for a local hospital; all else failing, you could always volunteer for your local party and get to know the candidate. It's a really good salve to that feeling of general powerlessness.
Then, instead of feeling powerless, you'll know you're mostly powerless, but at the very least, you won't be alone.
On the other hand, sites like reddit made it so easy to start a community that interesting people who would've built a forum instead hitched their wagon to reddit, like AskHistorians.
That number is proportional to %experts/%non-experts, and is inversely correlated with the size of a subreddit (though the AskHistorians subreddit remains an excellent exception), and is the reason why the NonCredibleDefense is usually more credible than the CredibleDefense.
I personally drifted to hackernews from reddit as a general "reddit", but I find it's probably wise to take with a grain of salt the legal/maths/physics/economics/"anything not related to computer science" opinions of the people here. It's probably a good general rule of thumb to only take advice from experts in their domains.
I remember when that started taking off; it was honestly kind of a godsend because one of the laziest way of doing things suddenly became associated with professionalism. On the other hand, it's getting pretty bland as a consumer now that every site is doing it.
Compared to images as buttons of the 2000s, something adjacent to material design seriously cuts down on the number of graphical assets necessary for develop anything. Even games seem to follow that trend: compare Crusader Kings 2 vs Crusader Kings 3, with image buttons vs a general UI toolkit in the two games.
At the end of the day, people have to eat. We're going to have to pay people somehow, either by buying a product, buying merchandise, paying taxes / donating to fund grants, or through patreon or github sponsors. The topic is fairly broad, and so it's less one system than a bunch of different industries with their own funding models, so this is going to be speaking fairly generally. A lot of our present funding models are a hybrid of these systems. Some combination of ads, small dollar donations, institutional sponsorship, and public grants broadly help pay for anything from a new software library to webcomics. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's not, but there are alternative funding models to the present winner-take-all model of big publishing houses. It's good to recognize that a lot of open source can only exist because a lot of us work in high paying tech jobs, and that model will not work for traditional books, but that doesn't mean we should give up trying to find a better solution than the patchwork system we have today.
So, why don't we just subsidize authors?
Arguably, access to more information drives more technological growth, which benefits us all. How many discoveries have been delayed because journal articles are behind a paywall? How many wasted manhours were spent on that? Grad students make even less money and arguably spend even more time creating intellectual property. It's frankly ludicrous to gate scholarly articles behind a $20 paywall, because for one, the burden of payment in those cases tends to fall upon those least able to pay for it, who are students and researchers, while the publishers make all the money by extorting institutions who can pay, all while profiting off of publicly funded research. This is the least morally objectionable point, and probably why newer fields (especially in compsci) post all their articles for free on arXiv, or else host somewhere else, since the price of hosting is extremely cheap compared to the actual work.
Less arguably, art itself is the same kind of public good; We have PBS, for programs that one can broadly say is "enriching" because a bunch of people a hundred years ago said so; we surely recognize that Shakespeare ought to be publicly funded. Why not modern forms of entertainment?
Failing that, let's look at this purely from a cost perspective. We'll assume if we're paying 100% of a writer's salary, their work is in the public domain, and that counts as savings to consumers. Let's suppose we wanted to fund every single writer in America to do writing full time. Let's do some back of the envelope calculations here. Supposing I spent $40 on books per year, for the sake of argument. There are 330m people in the US, median income for writers is around $20k USD [1] (but those are poverty wages) to $50k USD [3] (I think those include industry), and there are anywhere from 50k to 200k active writers right now [2][3], depending on how you count. So, that's anywhere from $3.3 (probably add an extra few cents for admin costs) to $33 per person per year in additional taxes, if we literally subsidized every single writer in the US. I'm certain I spent more than $33 on books this year, though one could probably quibble on that. 'course, that's probably overkill, and it doesn't account for support staff, admin, editors, marketing etc, but evenly naively taken, it doesn't seem out of the realm of economic possibility.
Of course, we probably won't pursue such an extreme solution. So let's look at another one. Consider the question of the library. Surely every author would be against an institution distributing their work for free (even having paid the publisher for one copy). For sake of money, should Stephen King be removed from circulation of libraries? But that fails to recognize that physical libraries target a market segment that cannot afford to buy a book; when it is more convenient, people tend to want to buy books for themselves. Digital removes these inconvenient constraints and will require a renegotiation in this space as it shifts to much in the other direction; the internet archive's unilateral action is at best, controversial. Streaming services like spotify initially gave a lot of consumer surplus at the expense of the artists (and is now, like every platform, trying to claw that surplus to themselves). The library model may not work for digital. Consumers or publishers can capture all the surplus in this new shakeup, but some balance is probably the most acceptable/optimal solution to most people.
And like it or not, with AI, artists will be devalued, even if that work isn't done. Amazon is already killing traditional publishing houses with its own platform. While we're having a debate on copyright, the market is going to shift even more in favor of consumers and less in favor of authors. We're going to have to address these issues anyways, like it or not, because we're already on this path, so we might as well figure out a more robust solution now. Failing everything, why not have a national system of grants for writers to produce public domain works?
(And yes, I know this naive solution probably has many holes in it. I'd be delighted to be corrected, even more so with another solution. But at the very least, shouldn't we at least try something else than the endless morass of DRM and copyright?)
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/books/authors-pay-writer....
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/572476/number-writers-au...
Redundancy is also an underrated design feature. In Word, if you want to copy/paste, there are at least 3 ways (I'm sure I'm missing some obscure way).
- menu->edit->copy
- right click->context menu->copy
- ctrl-c
And it's a great way of transitioning users from new mode to expert mode. A hotkey is just about useless if you don't know it exists, whereas the menu is slow. So, beginner users start using the menu, then transition as they memorize the particular hotkeys for this software as they become expert users. Somebody put thought into this design.
Also taking this opportunity to shamelessly plug the nested tooltips in Crusader Kings III. As far as learning context in-situ without breaking flow, it is amazing, though sadly not generalizable to all applications. Seriously, whoever designed that needs another raise; I have yet to see a minor UI component receive any mention at all, let alone praise, save this one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/comments/102gtm8/nest...
And they use bullet points! Bullet points!
Edit: Not AP News, or at least not the front facing site. Either they have redesigned it, or I can't find it anymore, but I swear to god there was a news agency site which published stories with bullet points.
In my relatively short experience developing an open source browser extension, Firefox users are far more active than Chrome users, which makes sense given that for most users, Chrome is a default, while Firefox is a choice. They're much harder to please, but the analogy that comes to mind is that in terms of submitting tickets and issues, they're like the linux of browsers.
Building on your analogy, it'd be like if in the real world your local pub mates and your business friends met. These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.
>I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.
I think this is exactly what you're seeing. Of all the different social media models, personally, it's reddit and discord that won out for me, along with a smattering of more niche like Hacker News and the discussions page on Github.
You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.
Murphy (of Murphy's law fame) notes that you're not really thinking if you don't write the thought down: you just think that you're thinking.
Funnily enough, personally, I can handle badly designed projects as long as I was part of the team designing it. At least then I understand it enough that changing things isn't too much of a pain, and I can pretend my refactors will eventually make the codebase look good (or if that fails, I can write enough documentation to at least mitigate the problem). It's a pain in the ass for new maintainers though.
But goddamn, working in a good established project where other people have done the hard work of figuring out non-coding project management stuff is a fricken breeze. No arguments there.
As it turns out, social media short-circuited traditional methods of organizing. Those traditional methods of organizing, ie, actually knocking on doors and talking with your neighbours, were also the social glue that formed civic groups which did stuff after the protest ended, like voter drives or lobbying politicians, political tactics which actually worked.
At the end of the day, writing isn't scratching graphite onto paper. It's putting ideas into words, and it's the ideas part that form the main bottleneck for me.
As it turns out, having interesting life experiences and or insightful analysis is hard. The former can only be gained by doing stuff in the real world, while the latter can only be gained by staring at a blank page really hard for a while, and or flashes of insight that seem almost random to me.
Writing is thinking. Programming is thinking. Thinking is hard. Procrastination is easy.
I find what helps is to keep a notebook. Ideas come. I jot them down before they disappear. Now I have much more to say, much more work to do, and procrastination is still easy, but at least that's one problem ameliorated.
It's very hard for people to swallow their pride and admit humility, to say "I don't know" and listen to the experts. I have an immense amount of respect for anybody who does, and it is an example I try to live by (though not always successfully).
One thing that's fairly interesting is how the British did not allow their monarch to become an Emperor, because of the traditional liberties associated with English monarchy and parliament.
When Queen Victoria became Empress of India, parliament only consented to her becoming a Queen-Empress, not an Empress-Queen, to emphasize the fact that Britain was still a kingdom.