> that’s why I used the term western liberalism not “neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.”
the latter often cloaks itself as the former when asserting itself.
For example, in France (one of the "birthplaces" for, and current bastions of, western liberalism) there is a phrase often used as a blanket push back against almost any criticism of Israel's actions: "Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East!". It's so prevalent that academia has written an entire book around it: https://www.cairn.info/moyen-orient--9791031803364-page-113....
Depending on how often and how recently they have been encountering things like this (given current events) in their daily life, I can understand the other commenter mistaking your position as such.
For my part, I am unsure of exactly what would happen if we lift the oppressors' thumbs (starting with Israel, Hamas, and wealthy "western" neoliberal hegemony, namely, but the list doesn't stop there). I don't think that anyone knows, for that matter, as it's never happened in any historical circumstances that remotely resemble our own. I do think that if you want western liberalism as the concept, and avoid some of its historical failure modes like boom&bust cycles and exacerbated economic inequality paving the way for populist anti-democratic revolts, you need to aim for much higher than its current outcomes in terms of dignity and self-determination for all groups of peoples. To your point, I've read some reports that Rojava has deteriorated, especially post-US-withdrawal, to very much not be either "western liberalism" or a society I would want to live in.
There was (still is?) a French law that mandates the maximum sales price for soft-cover/paperback books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law (if you can read it, the French version of that wikipedia article is much more detailed). The intent behind the law being to attempt to keep "culture" accessible to all incomes, notably by preventing resellers from price-gouging books at the expense of the publisher(s).
This has resulted in many larger tomes being split up when translated to French - for example, the first 5 (English/Original) volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire are sold as 15 (translated to French) books in total : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Tr%C3%B4ne_de_fer#Publicati...
I am also very disappointed at how often French publishers seem to decide that they can chop up these stories willy-nilly without it degrading the quality of the art (re-)productions that they are selling us.
The price is fixed by the editor, there is no state mandated price.
The purpose of the law is to have the same price for a book in every bookshop (with a 5% discount possible). This was supposed to help small booksellers, who could not compete against big corporations. And it kinda worked, as there are more than 3500 independent bookshops in the country.
The split up is not linked to the uniform price, I think it's more a cultural thing.
I think I agree with the author's sentiment and final conclusions, but I very much disagree with some of the language used.
The author never defines "criminal". I can only hope they don't literally mean "someone who breaks a law". From jaywalking in Singapore to being gay in Iran, plenty of people meet that criteria, for reasons that don't necessarily mean any software they produce cannot (or should not) be trusted.
Whether or not you are a criminal is often political. To write off "criminals" in this way without even acknowledging any of this seems very counterproductive to the larger fight for rights the author is clamoring for. I am sure a simple "in the context of this article, I mean [this and that] when I use the term criminal" would be enough to clarify.
> Would you deem Mark an upstanding citizen or report his insidious behavior? His actions mirror a stalker’s obsession, yet he commands a virtual kingdom. Now, transpose this image onto the face of Big Tech, those companies that liken themselves to friendly community builders. Is it any less sinister?
It may not be any less sinister, but there is a qualitative difference between having a single person stalk you, and having an apparatus in place that automatically reacts to what it observes of your behavior. Stalkers often set up such apparatus, and that should be/remain illegal in that context. Yet I don't think taking shots at Sentry or haphazardly reducing them to privacy violations is useful. Nor is is useful to treat a system (largely digital) the same way you would treat a person.
> So why does the situation change when you’re talking about billion-dollar conglomerates in the tech industry? Why do we laugh it off or shrug when it’s technology that’s tracking us?
Technology on its own doesn't want anything, whereas stalkers do. Again, I suspect the author's intent here is to highlight that there is someone on the "other end" of this tech that is actually viewing and using the tracking data.
I just can't understand what this is being written for, in the end, unless it's mostly for the emotional release or catharsis. If it is the latter, then I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong here.
If this is intended to reach an audience and maybe push for change, however, it fails pretty flatly to me. It's a call-out of the unconvinced that ends up preaching to the choir more than anything else. As I would consider myself part of that choir, I don't find it that upsetting to read. At the same time, I don't get much from reading it, either.
<progress> requires some vendor-specific prefixes last time I tried theming it using CSS (unless you're using "theme" to mean host system/window mananger/browser - wide theme). There is no common subset (that I am aware of) of CSS properties shared amongst browsers that can be leveraged to even decently change the <progress> element's appearance. So I'm not sure that it is the best example.
I agree that many of the list _are_ themable enough to warrant investing the effort to wrangle their particular interfaces over reinventing them entirely with <div>s.
Agreed; it's very serendipitous that you can basically light up a room with the gravitational energy that the sun/earth pair radiate out into space.
Light up 1 room with an incandescent bulb, or your entire flat with LED bulbs nowadays. I would be very interested in seeing some napkin math, based on power efficiency progress and "rate of technological innovation", that attempted to project when we could feasibly run the equivalent of our present-day human civilization purely off of gravitational waves/radiation.
I don't know of any programming language that does that as a language-first primitive. But this is basically slapping a `#pragma openmp parallel for` before your C for loop. In Rust there is the crate `rayon` that takes advantage of the language-level trait system to "augment" any (existing) iterable with a `par_iter()` method that effectively does what you describe: when included in the same module you can simply `for foo in bar.par_iter()` in place of `for foo in bar.iter()` to parallelize your iterations.
I suspect any language wanting to offer this as the default behavior for `for` loops will end up being a language like Java, Erlang, or SmallTalk - the language spec includes a "virtual" runtime that allows it to assume such flexibility in behavior, and capacity to "create/run threads/processes" that otherwise requires an OS (as in, you start leaving the perimeter of a programming language).
Very interesting! I'm especially curious on how the live-coding experience plays out.
I wish there was an example of a moderately-complex scrapbook, so that I could see what the code looks like when you start mixing several scraps and need a minimum of scaffolding.
I would temper your message with the caveat that the data is still accessible to the user; one click to open devtools, and another to switch to the "Storage" tab, and you have all your persisted data visible to the user.
You can copy and/or edit said data from that view as well!
Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today).
That's likely just a keyhole view into your data though.
Eg take web forums (not this one since there's weird lisp stuff down there and I don't know how it works, but the average web forum).
On the app (server) side they have access to everything, all of your posts in nice beautiful structured SQL.
On the user side you have access to none of that, just HTML soup and maybe some cached stuff in the "Storage" tab, or maybe not.
> Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today).
I really like your use of "convention" and "presume" here, because I think that's the essential lens to view these things through. It's absolutely possible for an app to provide all of a user's data in a nice structured form in IndexedDB, that will just be rare because it's not the convention.
Good to see public sharing not only of such a problem, but also how to fix it in your own code.
I am a bit disconcerted that something that apparently is warned against in the docs, is done across several "big" packages that use Hyper. Maybe with a more appropriate name exposed by the library, for example `to_bytes_unchecked`, such "bad" uses would be less wide-spread.
An interesting read. Near the end I started to feel like what the author is describing is very similar to the general approach I've coalesced on, over the years.
I've always deleted the snippet(s) in question after implementing the full behavior, however - or, more accurately, absorbed them into the final implementation piece-by-piece.
More recently, my team at work has started committing a logbook into our project repo for similar reasons of recording technical musings for posterity. Also similar to what the author describes, only in our case we are effectively _starting_ from the readme files and introducing code snippets where we feel the need. We're also maintaining the log as a single file - the plan is to archive 3- or 6-month chunks at a time as separate files once they reach a certain age.
This logbook experience makes me very curious as to how the author manages their snippets in practice. I wish they had gone into more detail than
> if you're able to keep on top of things [...] it mandates discipline
The baked-in chronological component of the logbook makes it straightforward to look topcis up by roughly _when_ they were deliberated on, but it's not great at guaranteeing a valid code snippet exists that encapsulates any given deliberation.
Conversely, snippets that
> should not even be conceptually aware of another snippet's existence
and be treated
> as a fully self-sufficient standalone program
seem to force me to incur a substantial obscuring of how any given musing or deliberation builds on what came before. At the least, many snippets will start with 10-20 boilerplate setup lines and class definitions.
Perhaps I am just wishing the author had explicitly mentioned if they import existing modules, functions, classes, etc as needed to keep the snippets short. If that is indeed an implicit assumption, then overall I don't have much to critique. If not, I am very curious as to what snippet-driven development for "framework-heavy" frontend code (eg React apps) looks like.
Thank you for all the valuable feedback. And thank you for the insight on how your team organizes a logbook. I'll try to expand on the process of the snippet organization itself when I have time for it (there's a newsletter on my website you may want to subscribe to).
Addressing the "fully self-sufficient program" - no, the imports are limited to minimum, at least from the owned codebase. 3rd party libraries are okay - the point is to limit the system coupling, and also to provide a fresh and unburdened look onto the functionality piece. Think github gists - you find them via google, they solve some pain point of yours, and they also serve as an "etude" for their authors.
After all, this development approach is a very psychological thing (and I would say, every approach is). It also aims to solve the issue of developer's burnout, the fear of an extremely big-scoped work, and gives possibility to ship as often as physically possible. Having a lot of snippets is way better than having something in development for weeks without any insight on what is being worked on. And when you've accumulated quite a lot of snippets, the task of gluing those together becomes a rather playful quasi-snippet in itself.
Speaking of the "framework-heavy" stuff, React included, - yes, it would definitely be harder to implement this strategy compared to, say, backend development, - you gotta have a lot of boilerplate just to make the snippet run (after all, it should be at least viewable in browser, which is already a lot.) But you still can use this way of development with a moderate success (and depending on your managerial skill or self-control): the front-end developer would have to accommodate and internalize the fact, that snippets are to be written with more boilerplate, and after all, React is component based, and components are already snippets per se.
> that’s why I used the term western liberalism not “neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.”
the latter often cloaks itself as the former when asserting itself.
For example, in France (one of the "birthplaces" for, and current bastions of, western liberalism) there is a phrase often used as a blanket push back against almost any criticism of Israel's actions: "Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East!". It's so prevalent that academia has written an entire book around it: https://www.cairn.info/moyen-orient--9791031803364-page-113....
Depending on how often and how recently they have been encountering things like this (given current events) in their daily life, I can understand the other commenter mistaking your position as such.
For my part, I am unsure of exactly what would happen if we lift the oppressors' thumbs (starting with Israel, Hamas, and wealthy "western" neoliberal hegemony, namely, but the list doesn't stop there). I don't think that anyone knows, for that matter, as it's never happened in any historical circumstances that remotely resemble our own. I do think that if you want western liberalism as the concept, and avoid some of its historical failure modes like boom&bust cycles and exacerbated economic inequality paving the way for populist anti-democratic revolts, you need to aim for much higher than its current outcomes in terms of dignity and self-determination for all groups of peoples. To your point, I've read some reports that Rojava has deteriorated, especially post-US-withdrawal, to very much not be either "western liberalism" or a society I would want to live in.