A quipu, or knot-record (also called khipu), was a method used by the Incas and other ancient Andean cultures to keep records and communicate information. In the absence of an alphabetic writing system...
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Nathan DeGruchy (degruchy.org)TL;DR: This long, rambling post can be summed up by saying: I love the IndieWeb, but man it can be hard to get into if you’re kind of a control freak, like me.
Also: I don’t have time right now to pepper in links, I’ll get to it later..
Chatting on IRC is something that I’ve often rediscovered in different times in life. Being able to talk with the developers of software or just really smart people, who also like the things you like is really cathartic. In this recent rediscovery of IRC, I joined up with folks from the IndieWeb movement. As above, there are some incredibly talented people, from all walks of life, who all share a passion for the open web and the inter-connectedness that it brings.
For me, though. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
"We are devastated to report that Big Basin State Park, as we have known it, loved it, and cherished it for generations, is gone," Sempervirens Fund, an organization dedicated to redwoods protection, wrote in a Twitter post Thursday afternoon.
Series Navigation: The P.A.R.A. MethodPARA Part 2: Operations Manual >> Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. One that supported and enhanced the work you do, telling you exactly where to put a piece of information, and exactly where to find it when you needed it. This system would have to be: universal, encompassing ... Read more
Maybe some interesting ideas hiding in here subtly? Not sure if I agree with the framing entirely. Bringing things to a more concrete and actionable level is the intriguing idea here, particularly between “project” and “area of responsibility”.
Ron Meyer, the former vice chairman of NBCUniversal, was the second mogul embroiled in a sex scandal with Charlotte Kirk to be toppled in less than two years.
Joining the Indie Web, One Step at a Time | Tracy Durnell
Tracy Durnell (Cascadia Inspired)There are lots of things to be excited about in joining the Indie Web, like supporting a more human-centered version of the web and connecting better with others across the web. Joining the Indie Web involves a few steps to … Continue reading →
This is my digital garden, so you might something you didn’t expect from time to time. ❧
another example of a digital garden/commonplace book
Leaked documents detail law enforcement trainings in lie detection techniques that have been discredited by scientists.
Missing stair is a metaphor for a person within a social group who many people know is untrustworthy or otherwise has to be "managed", but who they work around by trying to quietly warn others rather than deal with openly. The reference is to a dangerous structural fault such as a missing stair in a home, which residents have become used to and accepting of, and which is not fixed or signposted, but which (most) newcomers are warned about.
Many people have been using quarantine as a time to perfect their bread or coffee making skills, but I personally have taken this as an opportunity to make increasingly unsettling eggs pic.twitter.com/7mefhS5ffB
— Anna Hughes (@AnnaGHughes) August 14, 2020
Black workers at the Free Library of Philadelphia have penned an open letter about racism in the workplace. The letter by the Concerned Black Workers of the Free Library of Philadelphia, which was posted online but not delivered directly to management, says Black staff are bearing the brunt of COVID...
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.
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
“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
$2.5m-a-year CEO set to take a pay cut, so that's all right, then