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glroyal

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unfrozen caveman programmer

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Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.

Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over time.

Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes over them.

Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues, church congregations and political movements, all of which are subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.

If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable of preserving it indefinitely.

In other words, forking punishes poorly managed projects by depriving them of some fraction of their developers, users, and mindshare, and that's fascism?

Let me get this straight: the author is angry that Disney didn't release a series of shitty Roger Rabbit sequels, prequels, and shared cinematic universe pictures with Pixar and Marvel, so he's re-taking his copyright in order to sell it to another studio who will exploit and debase his creative works more rapaciously?

Resurrect the Old Web 10 months ago

BREAKING NEWS: the "Old Web" was far, far more than just blogs and feeds. It was full of bulletin boards and chat systems and listservs and other such "social" software artifacts inherited from BBSes and commercial timesharing systems popular for decades before the World Wide Web was even invented.

Blogging died IMO because its authors felt (and still feel) entitled to compensation for practicing a hobby, and started forcing advertising down their reader's throats as a means to extort them for money.

Meta succeeded in cloning Twitter only because it picked up engineers who were let go after Musk acquired the company.

Dead weight, albeit dead weight who understood how Twitter works under the hood (the timeline data structure has confounded every would-be Twitter competitor until now, which is circumstantial but probable cause that the former engineers have transferred Twitter's fundamental trade secrets to Zuckerberg).

In find it interesting that Wirth would accept needless complexity as jihad, and then put an object oriented programming language at the heart of his "back to basics" workstation Oberon.

Sweeping complexity under the rug isn't the same thing as removing it.

I would add that frameworks:

* promote helplessness by abstracting away fundamental but tedious tasks one ought to know how to do,

* erode the capacity for innovation by making it difficult to contemplate or impossible to implement solutions outside the framework's feature set,

* achieve an equilibrium I call 'mutually assured mediocrity' in which a programmer or organization necessarily vows to remain at the same low level of technology as their competitors.