Read I was building a new website for Post Apathy - until the petulant CEO of Ghost.org deleted my website (web.archive.org)
In July, I promised to begin a trial for fortnightly newsletters, as opposed to the monthly schedule from previously. Today was meant to be the day where the next newsletter was meant to be sent out, but I decided to delay it as I had been busy building a website via Ghost.org and I wanted to start posting there as soon as it was built, so there was minimum interruption in your access to Post Apathy content.
Read Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You by Steve Yegge (Medium)
God dammit, I didn’t want to blog again. I have so much stuff to do. Blogging takes time and energy and creativity that I could be putting…

Backwards compatibility keeps systems alive and relevant for decades. 

Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 10:50AM

In the Emacs world (and in many other domains, some of which we’ll explore below), when they make an API obsolete, they are basically saying: “You really shouldn’t use this approach, because even though it works, it suffers from various deficiencies which we enumerate here. But in the end it’s your call.” 

Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 10:57AM

Successful long-lived open systems owe their success to building decades-long micro-communities around extensions/plugins, also known as a marketplace. 

This could be said of most early web standards like HTML as well…
Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 10:58AM

It’s a sure sign, when there are four or five different coexisting subsystems for doing literally the same thing, that underlying it all is a commitment to backwards compatibility. Which in the Platforms world, is synonymous with commitment to your customers, and to your marketplace. 

This same sort of thing applies to WordPress for its backwards compatibility. Sometimes it’s annoying, but their adherence to backwards compatibility has kept them strong. They also have multiple ways of doing things, which is nice.

I wonder if there were some larger breaking changes in Drupal 7 and 8 that removed their backwards compatibility and thereby lost them some older websites?
Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 11:03AM

So let’s say Apple pulls a Guido and breaks compatibility. What do you think will happen? Well, maybe 80–90% of the developers will rewrite their software, if they’re lucky. Which is the same thing as saying, they’re going to lose 10–20% of their user base to some competing language, e.g. Flutter.Do that a few times, and you’ve lost half your user base. And like in sports, momentum in the programming world is everything. Anyone who shows up on the charts as “lost half their users in the past 5 years” is being flagged as a Big Fat Loser. You don’t want to be trending down in the Platforms world. But that’s exactly where deprecation — the “removing APIs” kind, not the “warning but permitting” kind — will get you, over time: Trending down. Because every time you shake loose some of your developers, you’ve (a) lost them for good, because they are angry at you for breaking your contract, and (b) given them to your competitors. 

Twitter is a good example of this, and they’ve just created a shiny new API in an apparent attempt to bring developers back…

Wonder if it’s going to be backwards compatible? (Probably not…)
Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 11:10AM

I’ve alluded to the deeply philosophical nature of this problem; in a sense, it’s politicized within the software communities. Some folks believe that platform developers should shoulder the costs of compatibility, and others believe that platform users (developers themselves) should bear the costs. It’s really that simple. And isn’t politics always about who has to shoulder costs for shared problems?So it’s political. And there will be angry responses to this rant. 

This idea/philosophy cuts across so many different disciplines. Is there a way to fix it? Mitigate it? An equation for maximizing it?
Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 11:14AM

Read [Notes] Timeful texts, Matuschak & Nielsen by Peter Hartree (Google Docs)
“To be transformed by a book, readers must do more than absorb information: they must bathe in the book’s ideas, relate those ideas to experiences in their lives over weeks and months, try on the book’s mental models like a new hat. Unfortunately, readers must drive that process for themselves. A...

I would like to have a one-click subscribe podcast feed that contains interviews with people I follow on Twitter — new releases and periodic highlights from the past. That’d be quite easy to build on top of the ListenNotes API. Anything to shift away from the “latest episodes” feed as the default, argh. Has someone done this? Breaker? 

You might be able to cobble something like this together with huffduffer.com using tags and some clever searches.

Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 11:04PM

Watched "The West Wing" The Warfare of Genghis Khan from Netflix
Directed by Bill D'Elia. A nuclear device is tested in the Indian Ocean, but none of the known nuclear powers will claim responsibility, leading to the possibility of a terrorist group holding missile tests. Vice President Russell, heretofore dismissed by west wing staff as a joke, a four-term congressman alleged to be securely in the pocket of a large Colorado mining company, recalls a junket he'd taken early in his ...
The infamous Chris Aldrich episode!
Watched "The West Wing" Slow News Day from Netflix
Directed by Julie Hébert. Toby awakens at 3 a.m. with an idea of how to save the social security program for future generations, leading him to meet in secret with the president and volunteer to "touch the third rail" of American politics. Toby meets with influential Republican senator Gaines about putting aside partisanship in the interest of preserving the critical safety net, and he gets a favorable response, but ...
Watched "The West Wing" Abu el Banat from Netflix
Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. The entire Bartlet family tries to gather for an early Christmas dinner at the White House, but inevitable delays occur as the president must deal with an overseas crisis. Ellie is held up at her lab, and five-year-old grandson Gus is having tantrums. In addition, Doug Westin (Jed and Abby's son-in-law) approaches Josh about running for an open congressional seat in his home district. Josh, Leo ...
Annotated Cookbooks may make good timeful texts by Andy Matuschak (Andyʼs working notes)
I don’t think the right answer is to use something like the Mnemonic medium to memorize a cookbook’s contents. I think a likelier model is: each time you see a recipe, there’s some chance it’ll trigger an actionable “ooh, I want to make this!”, dependent on seasonality, weather, what else you’ve been cooking recently, etc. A more effective cookbook might simply resurface recipes intermittently over time, creating more opportunities for a good match: e.g. a weekly email with 5-10 cooking ideas, perhaps with some accompanying narrative. Ideally, the cookbook would surface seasonally-appropriate recipes. Seasonality would make the experience of “reading” a cookbook extend over the course of a year—a Timeful text. 
Indigenous peoples not only used holidays and other time-based traditions as a means of spaced repetition, but they also did them for just this purpose of time-based need. Winter’s here and the harvest changes? Your inter-tribal rituals went over your memory palace for just those changes. Songs and dances recalled older dishes and recipes that hadn’t been made in months and brought them into a new rotation.

Anthropologists have collected examples of this specific to hunting seasons and preparations of the hunt in which people would prepare for the types of game they would encounter. Certainly they did this for feast times and seasonal diets as well. Indians in the Americas are documenting having done things like this for planting corn and keeping their corn varieties pure over hundreds of years.

Read This website is killing the planet (Steve Messer)
For a while I’ve been intending to make my website more sustainable, but I succumbed, as I often do, to the human trait of sloth. But this morning after reading Gerry McGovern’s post on webwaste, I thought I’d procrastinated long enough. So I ran a web page performance test and got some grim r...
Interesting piece about what one can do. It’s nice to advertise this sort of thing to bring awareness not only to this aspect, but to the larger problem. Be aware though that there are many more effective things one can do to help fix the problem than this particular approach.
Read Pluralistic: 12 Aug 2020 by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

Today's links

I didn’t know Cory had a separate linkblog like this, but should have suspected that he would have.