Heh, I'm not actually sure whether Nathaniel meant to invoke Eric Raymond's hacker emblem on the book cover or not. The grid is there, and the glider orientation is right, but the cells are squares and not circles. That orientation of the glider is kinda canonical, independent of the hacker emblem -- e.g., it's the phase that shows up in the "glider" LifeWiki article.
I emailed back and forth a little bit with Eric Raymond when the hacker-emblem proposal first came out, but I don't remember that I had anything very interesting to say. Mostly I was hoping to get the Life Lexicon factoid about the unix oscillator into the "Anticipations" section on the official Hacker Emblem page --
Unix: ... The name derives from the fact that it was for some time the mascot of the Unix lab of the mathematics faculty at the University of Waterloo.
The mistake Adobe made was in canceling Flash instead of open sourcing it. Publish a spec and the let browsers implement the client side, then you can keep selling tools to make animations without everyone having to deal with the bug-riddled proprietary player Adobe clearly had no interest in properly maintaining to begin with.
It's kind of astonishing that all these years later we still don't have something equivalent in browsers. In theory they're Turing-complete and you can do whatever you want, but where's the thing that makes it that easy?
What makes you think people want easy? /s I mean, clearly that would be best for creativity, for cultural robustness, for accessibility. Unfortunately, there are a lot of incumbents in all the spaces Flash touched who were ecstatic (if in a schadenfreude-esque sense) to see the ladder pulled up after them. When you make it difficult or impossible for the peons to create, you make it difficult or impossible for them to bypass the professionals and the gatekeepers; when they can't tell their stories, their stories get told for them. Again, the professionals and the gatekeepers (and, now, the propagandists) find this ideal.
Suffice it to say, there are a lot of people who worked very hard to make sure that the 1998-2012ish period of openness and open-access and democratization was an anomaly. You got to see a mini-echo of this with the rollout and rollback of pandemic-era accessibility.
At the time I saw the repo link posted on HN, it had 1.6k stars/16 hours. What channel/platform are people subscribed to to star it so quickly? Discord? I'm not implying any nefariousness, mind you, I'm only wondering where all the stargazers were referred from so fast and in such volume.
Agreed. This was evocative and emotional, beautifully capturing the existential despair and FUD of the LLM apparatus. It makes me happy to have near certainty that a human wrote this piece- even if were to be AI assisted!
The Engineering Communication course at my university had a public speaking requirement. Talking in front of a small group was difficult for a large percentage of students.
Senior projects (group work) where workload is- intentionally or unintentionally- asymmetrical.
I think the author is generally correct that all data should be provided in a single request. And to take it a step further, you should be able to change your accept header to JSON to serve an API. API/dumb-frontend aren't mutually exclusive.
In fact, this is what both GitLab and GitHub do. Try it out!
That was very in depth! As far as Pijul as a tool goes, I'm not seeing a git compatibility layer? So I think it's a neat project, but I probably won't try it because nearly all code is rooted squarely in git. Even if Pijul is perfect, you'd need to convince everyone else to use it.
The corpo-web, I really like that term, it perfectly encapsulates the soullessness of the modern web. Is that term from something or did you come up with it yourself?
To be honest: I have no idea. It may be that i have read it in some cyberpunk story or in some gopherhole... but i have it in use for the last couple of years, so who knows? ;-)
