jpgleeson

Robin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Each of these did indeed spawn tests. I used to work there and at the time there were over a thousand ranging from humdrum to David Blaine skydiving. They’re a crowd who really put a focus on good engineering

Breakfasts aren’t provided as a form of babysitting. The prevalence of breakfast clubs in schools in low income areas should be a hint as to why they’re instituted. After school activities are more babysitting adjacent, but if parents can’t afford after school minding but really need to hold down a job, it seems like a great idea that also gets kids into sports or chess or whatever.

These are the sort of issues that Nix <https://nixos.org/> solves quite well. Pinning dependencies to specific versions so the only time dependencies change is when you explicitly do it - and the only packages present in your images are ones you specifically request, or dependencies of those packages. It also gives you local dev environments using the ~same dependencies by typing `nix develop`.

Once you get past the bear that is the language, it's a great tool.

Even giving people the single family housing they want, there’s ways to increase the density massively that aren’t being utilised right now. Bringing back terraced houses in the US would be a great first step, and is only an improvement over the insanity that is the Bay Area’s houses in every back and side garden while still enforcing setbacks.

I used to work in architecture, and I think that's where something like an iPad really shines. It was possible to have all the drawing sets on the iPad, and mark them up on the job site to send back to the office for revisions. Being able to annotate them with photographs of the site conditions and redlining as you talk with the foreman is excellent, it makes things a lot more seamless.

Yes, you weren't going to do any actual CAD work and still need a workstation in the office, but as a digital notebook, it's excellent.

+1 to this. I made some websites for hire in my earlier days and really enjoyed using Kirby. It was simple to setup, simple to host, and then simple to teach the clients how to update the content themselves. I just checked there and one of them is still going strong nearly 10 years later.

Probably Staxel. Bartwe works on that and is active in FNA, a cross platform XNA reimplementation.

Speak of the devil. I was just talking with someone about Neptune's Pride a few weeks ago and looked it up to see if it was still going. I really enjoyed that when it came out.

Have you ever written about the architecture of that and Blight anywhere?

Take measurements, draw/model it. There’s a real art in being able to recreate something accurately.

For something like this, use a contour gauge at certain offsets from a set point will give you a set of curves you could model through.

Grasshopper, which Dynamo is really trying to compete against, is in wide use in the architecture world.

I think it’s just endemic to the industry. Even on high budget work with full time project managers we’ll find the subs on site working from an ancient drawing superceded months ago, or a sketch made on a wall by people discussing an issue. A good foreman is worth their weight in gold.

There are a number of companies operating in the space. Matterport is one some people in my work have been exploring for documenting projects in various stages of construction. There are definitely still a bunch of rough edges, but the results so far even just using a phone to capture the spaces have been acceptable to good.

This has been happening, just not really on the web. It’s more located on protocols like gopher[0] or Gemini[1].

Gemini in particular has quite a large amount of projects hosted on sourcehut, and sourcehut even serves pages on its new pages service to Gemini.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Good read. Amos used to be the most visible/active developer on itch and his twitter was interesting to read. He also has a lot of other pieces like this that really dig into how and why you go wrong when working with something that is unfamiliar to you.

I really enjoyed this one:

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-am-a-java-csharp-c-or-cpl...

The price definitely seems great for the size of the display, but it might be worth looking at the Waveshare e-paper displays if you want to do something a bit more DIY.

I worked on a house where the previously built extension to the rear had been built over a soil pipe that let out into the ground, over the ~20 years since it had been built, it had tipped further and further and started to pull away from the house as the ground was eroded until we had to come in and knock it.

You might be surprised, and horrified, to find out a not insignificant number of still standing buildings were built with no foundations. On a wing and a prayer, if you will.

https://thefogwatch.com/the-miracle-of-salisbury-cathedral/

My ~750ish one to split the difference.

https://sr.ht/~jpgleeson/piaine/

I do think this is one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever done.

Motion Twin are a worker's co-op in France that have worked like this for the past 20 years. They are back down to 6 people now but had been a bit bigger until recently when a group spun off to make a more commercial structure to support their big game. http://motion-twin.com/en/

New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions. Brasilia is a good example of the sort of planned city that would be built. Widespread availability of cars positioned them as the symbols of modernity and so the city was designed around the car, resulting in an entirely unwalkable city that segregates the classes. See also Chandigarh. Barcelona is the main counter example that springs to mind for me.

Every time this is brought up I fail to understand how people think that this time would be any different. Cities are agglomerations of patterns at every scale and the emergent beauty that arises is absolutely impossible to design in any sort of masterplan way. Organic cities are resilient in ways that we can't every really understand, and that's the important element in making a place that is livable for the longer term.

Tech deed I

piaine is a small static site generator I have been working on for the past few days. It runs on .net Core and uses no dependencies outside of the System library.

The project implements two very basic parsers that generate html from a given template and a separate content file. The parsers are the main point of interest for me in the project, mainly using Bob Nystrom's excellent Crafting Interpreters book.

Loop support for the indexing page is the next feature to be added, but other than that, the project already does 99% of what I need it to do, and it has been a hugely satisfying itch to scratch.

I am not a professional programmer, this has been done on lunch breaks and before/after work over the past few days, so any critique would be very much appreciated.