enkiv2

Turnkey systems are a special case, because they specifically hide the configuration knobs that otherwise might be twiddled by even ordinary users (and thus keep the landscape from being a monoculture).

This idea that you have to hide everything a user isn't expected to need to understand until they prove they already understand it, which seems to have originated with the Mac, is stupid & gets in the way of gradual & natural mastery. Systems that present configurability while having reasonable default behavior invite users to explore them at their own pace, and inevitably lead to ostensibly "non-technical" users gaining whatever specific technical knowledge and skill benefits them directly. Even if they end up making a misconfig, a million random misconfigs is very different (in vulnerability terms) from a single unfixable configuration hole deployed to a million black boxes.

In both these cases, there's an entry level that people can get into without much skill, effort, or risk. (Running an email server, of course, is not part of the entry level: email is heavily gatekept.)

Most people who upload videos to youtube are going to have less than ten views total on those videos, which is fine, because why should they maximize views on a crappy phone video of their cat or something? Likewise, you can run lighttpd with little to no configuration in order to make some directory available, & nobody's likely to attack it even if it happens to be vulnerable, simply because most people are not hosting anything valuable enough to be worth exploiting.

The ideas we have of running a youtube channel or running a server are both affected by the hypervisible minority of highly polished professional versions: when we think of youtube videos, we're more likely to think of Hank Green than x_greenfan77_x, and when we think of web services, we're more likely to think of Facebook than we are to think of that python script we dashed off in ten minutes that's been working unobtrusively for eight years. The difference is that running a server has a mostly unearned reputation for a higher minimum technical skill involved: everybody knows that you can record a youtube video with no makeup & shitty lighting and sound, because everybody has seen amateur youtube videos, but not everybody knows that their torrent client is a server.

For background, the author of this post wrote Manyverse, one of the most popular mobile SSB clients.

Implicit in this post, but never explicitly mentioned, is that people "not wanting to run servers" is actually mostly a side effect of poor design -- because running servers is for "technical people" who can put up with high cognitive load and lots of sharp edges, we don't design our server software to be easy to set up & free from unnecessary gotchas, and so we end up unnecessarily competing with other high-cognitive-load tasks these folks would like to do -- and the alternative is to make something like Manyverse, which is a client-server but that is no more complex to use than any other social media app unless you want to dig deeper.

(Similarly, "most people will never be able to / want to learn to code" makes a lot more sense in the context of a language like java, where most of the code a beginner must read & write is boilerplate with complex & dubious justifications, than in a language like python where for simple tasks there's a very close connection between the intended behavior & every piece of the implementation. Frontloading necessary learning attracts lore nerds & people who want to boast about their leet skillz, but scares off people who would like to just get something done -- so the more theory is necessary to use some particular stack, the more its user base fills up with ineffectual theory-wankers. This is a problem when theory has a dramatic benefit, but there's no good excuse for, ex., the stupid amount of manual configuration necessary to deploy a new apache -- where the "theory" rarely generalizes beyond the specifics of apache's own internals, & under most circumstances, reasonable defaults could easily be supplied or guessed.)

"Most people will never want to run servers" is, much like "most people will never want to own their own computers", mostly a statement about antihuman design tendencies & the way that particular groups have insulated themselves from them. People don't want their own computers so long as they take up an entire building and require dedicated air conditioning and card punches, and people don't want to run their own servers so long as deploying a new server involves dealing with IANA, NATs, port forwarding, DNS propagation, poking holes in firewalls, and other hassles. But a lot of people used to run napster off their PCs, and a lot of people still run bittorrent, despite all p2p software essentially being 'server software'.

There's no site, so I don't know how this is related? SSB is a peer to peer protocol, and (aside from the UIs of most desktop implementations being electron) doesn't use webtech.

SSB is a store and forward network, so this is sort of built in. Basically, you only see posts that are within a configurable number of hops in the follow graph, and if you block somebody then you don't replicate any of their posts to your followers, so if everybody you follow has somebody blocked then you'll never see their stuff even if they are followed by somebody one hop further out.

(Default hops is 3, and most people use 3, so functionally this doesn't matter much. But if it was 5 or something, this would matter a lot. It's also sort of why people recommend unfollowing pubs once you've built up a network you trust -- because pubs will connect to anybody who requests it, so even users with no redeeming qualities who no human being would choose to follow, like dedicate griefer accounts, will end up being replicated by a pub.)

You know, this was really supposed to be a survey for his mailing list subscribers. He never said explicitly not to share it around, but posting it to orange website is a great way to flood him with low-quality submissions.

If writing actually improves your mental state, then you are not in the group of people I am criticizing.

I haven't read it, though I've read some Byron (and Polidori's ripoff).

Perhaps. It seems awfully counterproductive though, even so.

Other fields (even ones that benefit from or effectively require in-person guidance -- like mathematics, or martial arts) have books aimed at more advanced practitioners. Theoretically, some writing advice books are aimed at more advanced practitioners.

This essay was spawned by my experience reading a book that was literally intended as the textbook for an undergraduate creative writing workshop (i.e., a class for juniors and seniors who are english majors with a focus in creative writing). Surely twenty-five year olds who have already spent three years dedicated to the craft of creative writing are in the same position as their peers who have majored in mathematics, and do not need to be assigned the english equivalent of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Calculus".

I've read a number of other writing guides, only one of which was aimed at folks who did not self-identify as writers, and they all had at least one chapter on navigating ego hangups -- even the ones called things like "Creating Engaging Character Arcs" and "Promoting Audiobooks on Kindle" that you'd expect to be highly technical and specifically aimed at professionals.

The article doesn't claim that these descriptions have no place, but merely laments that they form the vast majority of writing advice.

Writing is powerful and involves a lot of responsibility. Torturing yourself does not necessarily improve your ability to wield this tool responsibly.

Good writing often contains some piece of the author's soul and that's always a risk to take.

Ego risk or reputational risk should not be treated the same way as risk to others. It's also easy to avoid.

Very few writers are so monumentally important that the world would mourn for them having never published -- and most of those who would have been were, of course, never published. My advice to people is that if writing feels like self-harm, you're better off not doing it & the world probably won't notice. Folks who have something so important to say (or who are so desperate to say anything at all) that they ignore my advice have made their choice :)

If someone wanted to "cancel" me, I have greater sins than having accurately summarized other writers' descriptions of their emotional relationship with the craft. Since I am taking umbrage at exactly these descriptions, I don't see the grounds.

As somebody who writes and codes, I am certainly not typically in a good mood for the entirety of my problem-focused period. Somebody could say that I "hate coding but love having coded", but it's actually very different from the other states we would describe this way. For instance, I code for fun in my free time, instead of only coding for money and prestige, and so I'm getting some kind of intrinsic enjoyment out of it -- even if it's simply the catharsis of solving a difficult problem. I feel almost exactly the same way about writing (although I find writing a lot easier than coding most of the time).

There are a lot of writers (mostly young naifs and beginners) who have fallen in love with the romantic ideal of the tortured artist, and have the completely unrealistic expectation that if they suffer for their art they will inevitably be rewarded with prestige. It's a common, and toxic, mentality. Failing to distinguish the teeth-grinding dubious pleasure of working at the edge of your ability (something familiar not just to programmers and writers but to athletes, gamers, and craftspeople) from egocentric paranoia is problematic, because it risks supporting the former tendency instead of the latter.

This is not to say that writing can't be difficult, but writing is also something that almost definitely does not pay enough to justify doing it despite genuinely hating it! I think if you describe writing as your "passion", then you're coming to it from the right perspective -- plus, you're a skilled enough writer that it's clear you put the work in long before it became profitable. As they say in the Dwarf Fortress community, "failing is fun".

Folks who hate writing but love "being a Writer" -- the crowd who post bookstagram shots of their color-coded shelves -- are not setting themselves up for a fun time on the other hand. You've gotta have a little bit of masochism to survive in any 'creative' job, but if you're spending all day doing something you genuinely hate, only extrinsic rewards like money and the warm embrace of your fans are keeping you afloat. Extrinsic rewards are mercurial.

Of course, I've got a pretty casual perspective on writing. I do some freelance when it interests me, but most of my writing is done for communication first with profit a very minor concern. But my day job is my other passion. The nature of day jobs is that you're required to do a lot of stuff that's boring, stupid, and offensive to your sensibilities. If coding was not a passion, I would have burnt out far harder far sooner.

I could use some help with this!

Currently, my IPFS daemon is taking literally 60% of my CPU because people are browsing it. So, please pin some (or all) of these hashes!

I am fetching from various gateways in order to get their caches to take the load, but some gateways don't cache.

The list itself is mirrored on IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZ1cGyzQNXhdAzqpkk1qatr98TLMYqKTkJBqrd...

I live about 3 miles from my office (suburbs with 25 mile per hour speed limits the whole way), but because of restrictions on eating at my desk, for the past few years I had been driving home for lunch every day -- in other words, spending 40 minutes a day commuting because the 10-minute drive was repeated 4 times. (I used to occasionally walk into the office & skip lunch, but that was very dependent on the weather, & I couldn't manage that more than twice in a week because I'd get blisters.)

Since the work-from-home order came down, I've gone from driving 40 minutes every weekday to driving perhaps three minutes a week, and rather than refilling my gas tank every two weeks, I haven't had to fill it in about a month and a half.

I've had to go into the office a few times since the coronavirus began -- due to power outages, VPN problems, etc. Most of those times, I walked in.

Note that I'm talking about defeat in the rhetorical arena here. It's important to make it clear that Nazis are not merely bad people but also wrong & stupid -- otherwise, people who don't mind being bad so long as it benefits them will keep becoming Nazis.

It doesn't really exist -- public funding (which drove blue sky research in both these places along with funding the Arpanet work done at BBN & elsewhere, PLATO, etc) dried up in the late 70s. No company can (or has the incentives to) invest in undirected research the way Bell did with Bell Labs (though RCA was a peer of Bell's at the time), because nobody has a government-granted nationwide monopoly on communications infrastructure peered with a legitimate fear that their monopoly position will be lost forever due to sudden changes in the whims of legislators.

Some ex-PARC folks tried to continue in the spirit of PARC's work at the Viewpoints Research Institute (after Kay tried and failed to do it in the private sector at Apple and Atari). Ex-Bell Labs folks (at least in computing) seem to end up at Google or at Microsoft Research, but it seems like they're only given the leeway they have because they already have clout from Bell Labs...

Microsoft, Facebook, and Google all have skunkworks departments doing blue-sky research, but they all seem to have a lot more oversight & pressure to productize. Over in academia, the MIT Media Lab was trying to be their equivalent of PARC, but the emphasis on creating demos to wow tech journalists has just reproduced the worst parts of SV pitch culture.

If it's horrifying and completely wrong, then it needs to be defeated. (Ex., it's a moral imperative to punch nazis.)

If it's completely wrong but basically harmless, then there's no point in defeating it. (Ex., you don't need to worry about people who believe in ghosts.)

Beelzebub's Tales was intentionally boring for the first 50 pages in order to scare people off. Gurdjieff famously wanted only the first 50 pages pre-cut (this was during the period when new books would have their pages stuck together & the reader would use a book-knife to separate them) in order to encourage people who were turned off by the beginning to return it. He did a lot of stuff to try to weed out insufficiently dedicated people.

Vallee is fantastic, and I would strongly recommend his books on UFOs as well. He's the kind of serious & careful researcher we need when it comes to studying complex problems that less serious people deny even exist, & his work stands out as reasonable and of excellent quality even compared to folks like Keel.

Like Keel, Vallee gets attacked by people who don't read him on two sides: by the people who are quite sure that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, and by the people who are equally quite sure that UFOs are the lies of con artists and the delusions of madmen. Neither explanation holds up to serious scrutiny.

Reading HN has nothing to do with being a hacker.

Based on who posts, this site seems to mostly be used by 'non-technical founders' (i.e., borderline scam artists & naifs who have not yet had their first serious collision with the realities of global capital). But, there are also some regulars who have serious technical chops & are part of actual hacker culture.

strawberries first? sure.

I make about $5-$10 a month on Medium (and occasionally have made several times that). In comparison, I ran a blogger blog actively from 2006-2013 with adsense monetization, & adsense has made me less than ten dollars in total over the entire thirteen years that I've been using it -- eight of those dollars coming in a single six-month period.

Did anybody ask Ted if he would approve of this? He's pretty picky, & would probably get awfully mad if an IETF standard claimed he approved of something that he actually disliked.

(In particular, links here don't seem nearly as granular as they would be in a xanalogical system -- no byte-level indexing -- and seem to be embedded.)

Remarkably similar to a client I wrote a while back (http://github.com/enkiv2/fern)

Bruce Sterling has consistently been 5-15 years ahead of his time in terms of the direction of popular culture since the late 70s. That is a very good run. He's not hyper-technical, but if you want to know what people will care about & how people will think in a decade, listen to what Bruce is saying now.

I have a sort of loose collection of books I'm 'in the middle of' or 'planning to read' at any given time. Generally, I'll pick up a book that I've started that I'm in the mood for, but if something I haven't started is more exciting, then I'll start it.

Stuff that's not engaging me stays in the pile, and anything I've started but haven't picked up in a few months migrates back to the shelf. Sometimes this is because it's a bad book & not actually worth reading, but more often, it's because the place I'm at in my life is getting in the way of enjoying it (for instance, it's too dense right now because work stress is eating up all my cycles & I need to stick to something breezy, or it engages with topics that hit too close to home right now & I'm too emotionally drained to deal with it at the moment, or I really need to read a different book first in order to make sense of it).

Ebooks work the same way for me, but I read them under different circumstances. The ebooks I have on my phone get read during breaks at work or during mandatory social events -- situations where I don't have reliable internet or access to my bookshelf but also am liable to be quite bored. The ebooks I have on my computer at home get read when I'm sitting at my computer but would rather read them than twitter or something (which is unusual, but this still happens whenever I do a periodic social media fast, which I have to do every few months for a week or two for the sake of my sanity).

I've always had a pretty good memory for things I read so long as they're nonfiction, and while I can't remember fiction narratives to save my life, I don't think that's the purpose of fiction. (I can recite the first five or six pages of Neuromancer, having read it hundreds of times in high school, but I can barely tell you a plot synopsis because my brain just doesn't work that way: narratives are an alien thing, and they wash out of my memory like rain off a duck's back.) This means that I can generally pick up a nonfiction book after not touching it for five or ten years & have no problem continuing it, but that I have to read fiction in one sitting if the plot matters at all to the enjoyment. (This basically means that I only end up finishing works of fiction that are enjoyable for their stylistic qualities -- novelists who are secretly poets or humorists, like Gibson, Stephenson, Dellio, Eco, or Wilson. I have read a lot of PKD, but it's always a struggle.)

One reason I might remember nonfiction so well is that, by habit, when I read I'm constantly summarizing & rephrasing in my head. This slows me down a lot when I start shouting at the author in my head instead! But, it means that I have at least connected what the author's saying to other things I know & integrated it into some kind of ontology.

<1mbps is still broadband.

Folks are stuck with 24.4k still, over noisy radio signals or unmaintained copper lines.

On a slow connection (and particularly, a slow & unreliable connection), a couple meg file can take hours to download completely. This is a problem with the internet, not with the web. And, that's if you get the right binary in the first place (rather than needing to redownload a different version due to version-specific dependencies).

A lot of places still have pretty slow/unreliable internet. Developing countries often end up being basically mobile-only because it requires less infrastructure, but mobile-only doesn't mean 4G in such places. Other times, relatively rich countries will have spotty internet access because of geography: New Zealand famously had very poor internet service for a while because of the complexity around getting cables there, and Australia has such a big difference in population density between urban and rural areas that wiring infrastructure in the sticks is tough. Even in the united states, a surprising number of people are still using dial-up internet because broadband is not available.

Another concern is embedded platforms. If rust can't produce meaningful code that's under a megabyte, then it can't be used to write elevator controllers or microwave oven displays or to program pacemakers -- and as regular computers get more RAM to try to make up for the end of Moore's law, a larger and larger percentage of cases where it makes sense to use a compiled systems language over a JITed scripting language will be embedded ones. To some people, if a compiler can't produce 1k binaries, it's worthless because it forces you to substitute in a beefier machine.

There's also general performance and security concerns: any unnecessary code adds to both vulnerability surface & footprint. If you work your system really hard & you're always a meg or two short of running out of RAM, then saving a meg or two of code size matters a whole lot. (This applies less to desktops & more to applications where you might process lots of data on off-the-shelf hardware: if you're clever & take advantage of parallelism, you can process many TB of data on a machine with less than a gig of ram in a relatively short time, and you can cut it down further if you can run more copies of your application, which you can do better if your memory footprint is smaller.)

Finally, I don't think it's safe to overestimate what percentage of machines are less than eleven years old. Ever since Moore's Law ended, the case for upgrading hardware has been a lot weaker, and even when it was running strong folks often went a decade without doing so.

Bloat doesn't necessarily translate into usability, and usability doesn't necessarily transfer between users. There are a lot of folks for whom a 5mb app is, necessarily, unusable.