hhas01

I didn’t go into Shortcuts as it has its own set of flaws: poor granularity, poor composability, excessively complex and expensive to extend. And it’s still not quite clear how Apple mean to position it so that it connects to users’ aspirations and needs. Within Siri? within Apps? In between? All fixable, but ultimately depends on Apple’s priorities and investment, not to mention how good a handle they have on the problem themselves.

What Shortcuts does undeniably have is youth, looks, and an established following; and never underestimate the value of those. AppleScript may be built on a better technical foundation, but that don’t mean squat if it can’t bums on seats. And the bottom fell out the AppleScript market a decade ago.

However, being an outside product is absolutely no disadvantage. I’ll rate a passionate team of third-party devs with a vision over in-house chair-warmers going through vague motions with zero direction or objective. Being within Apple can be a huge advantage in that it offers prime positioning within the OS itself; but that’s of no use if you’ve got no clue how to deliver a desirable product and sell it to customers in the first place (<cough>Soghoian</cough>).

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of their product, the Shortcuts team cut their teeth and proved themselves out in the real world. I don’t doubt Apple bought WorkflowHQ as much to get those people as their product. As change of blood goes that was badly overdue.

Yes I read your post, and yes it was poorly worded. Take the tip and move on.

Nailgun.

Not good, just “good enough”.

UX, like evolution, once it goes down one particular path, tends to get stuck there, fiddling with the details at best. Radical innovation becomes really hard to effect: in evolution’s case because any new feature can only extend/adapt what is already there; in UI’s case because users tend to reject anything that doesn’t fit into what they already know.

It’s the distinction between stability and stagnancy. Stability is good in that it’s predictable; its benefit vs cost ratio is known. Stagnancy is not so hot: that ratio cannot (or will not) improve. WIMP is both stable and stagnant; trapped by its own early success with no obvious path forward.

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Very relevant: after an early 8-bit dalliance I cut my adult teeth on Macs. Some of WIMP’s productivity gains were significant, but in other aspects it was just the same (or more!) drudge work in a cutsier skin. it wasn’t until I taught myself automation (via frustration and AppleScript) that I really put a decent dent in the latter.

And these were automations that built on my existing understanding of WIMP applications (unlike, say, the nix CLI which ignores all that knowledge and invents a whole new unrelated world entirely from scratch). All the Models were exactly the same; all my knowledge of how to manipulate my data in those apps was fully transferrable, not to mention all my existing documents. The only difference was the View-Controller I was using: RPC vs GUI. And whenever I got to a point in my workflow where it was easier/necessary to do something manually, I could freely switch back and forth between those two UIs.

Achieving 10x productivity gains over WIMP on frequent repetitive tasks is embarrassingly trivial* with even modest automations. The hard part is creating an automation UX that’s efficient and accessible to the large majority of less/non-technical users (AppleScript failed, but at least it tried).

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When will we see another attempt? Dog knows. Voice tech like Siri is obviously trying, but is starting from the hardest end of the problem and trying to work back from there.

I believe there’s much quicker, easier pickings to be had by revisiting the AppleScript strategy—“server” applications exposing multiple View-Controllers for different interaction modes, and a really simple, textual “client” command language along the lines of Papert’s Logo (which 8 year-olds could learn how to use and compose), combined with modern auto-suggest, auto-correct, auto-complete to provide the transparency and discoverability that traditional CLIs fail so hard at.

The written word has 10,000 years of learning and practice behind it. And the most powerful word in the world is the word that expresses exactly what you want to say, whenever you want to say it. If that’s not an opportunity for some smart young coders with a desire to make a better world for all, I don’t know what is. You just gotta know history is all.

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“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite

“You know what I meant”

No. I am not a mindreader. And “vaccines are injected into the bloodstream” is a standard antivax lie.

Yes there’s a risk in receiving a vaccine, just as there’s a risk in receiving any prophylactic/therapeutic treatment, but severe side-effects are closer to 1-in-100K to 1-in-a-million. Compared to a disease that is currently killing 2-in-100, with significant sequelae likely much higher.

I’m happy to accept that “bloodstream” was a slip of the tongue, but really try not to make those malignant lying bastards’ jobs any easier, when people die because of them.

“Which is why I'm so interested in the evidence behind these claims that I keep hearing that there was no vote fraud, or at least not enough to change the election.”

[Sees what you did there]

Did we mention bad-faith arguments? Yes. Yes, we did.

Firehosing also destroys trust. That’s its purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

The burden of proof rests on the claimant. There’s a reason US courts of law keep throwing out these claims of widespread fraud: because the claimants consistently fail to provide the widespread evidence to back their claims up.

What there is widespread evidence of, however, is bad-faith actors that are both highly active and plentiful.

Therefore I would suggest the few good-faith actors who find themselves unfairly suppressed first take it up with those dirty lying bastards for sullying ALL their reputations, and secondly ask themselves what they must do to fully disassociate themselves from the scum and rebuild their negative credibility to a level where people are willing to listen again.

Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. They can fix it or they can whine. And which they choose speaks volumes too.

File under: #WhyNotBoth?

Yes, the confiscation in itself is an attack on free speech rights.

But don’t think the high-stress weapons-drawn raid against a prominent whistleblower isn’t meant to send its own message clear and loud: keep your heads down or you could be next. Especially when combined with the twitchy trigger finger that US law enforcers are reputed to possess.

This is only a couple steps up from a banana republic death squad. And that too is no accident.

Please name a vaccine that is injected into your bloodstream.

“but the reality is worse: we have not seen a 10x boost due to all developments combined and in over 30 years”

[citation]?

“In my experience developers are very rational beings.”

Yeah, no. Stopped there. Vanity is rationalizing the belief that you’re any better at being rational than the rest of us inchoate apes.

There are many technical, logistical, and political arguments as to why improvement (in any sphere) is hard, but if you’re not going to start with “It’s Us, The People” then where usefully are you going to start?

So I should’ve phrased it as “You clearly didn’t read the article” then? Considering OP was transparently skating on the edge of Islamophobia, I think I was being kind.

See also: “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs”. Sure BUNCH had some really cool tech, but it was IBM who understood how to make great product.

Did you read the article? If you had, you might have noticed the phrase “Hindu-Arabic numerals“ being used. Shockingly, cultures do tend to build on the works of others.

The reason it is tagged “Islamic” is presumably because the golden age of Persian/Arabic science happened in unison with the early rise of Islam, along with a blooming of industry and culture in general. This may not have been coincidental. The early Islamic world was a lot more inquisitive and open-minded than the western world of the time. It wasn’t till a couple centuries later that reactionary religious conservatism gained the upper hand; and several centuries more before Europe would best its own reactionary religious conservatism in shape of the Renaissance.

Physicist Jim al-Khalili has written on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Pathfinders-Golden-Age-Arabic-Science...

(Also some documentaries if you want to search on Youtube.)

Blurry on standard-resolution monitors.

On hi-def monitors and laser-printed page, it is lovely both to read and to look at.

I mean, 4K (3840×2160) 23" displays nowadays start at $300, so if you’re still on hundred-buck 1920x1080 then you’re only getting what you paid for.

Going to all hi-def displays is the single best investment I ever made as a professional programmer, reading and writing text on screens daily.

https://media.tenor.com/images/f64390f36df99bc8d1891833c658e...

Doesn’t have the beautiful Display Postscript/LeX-esque typography that I want, and less said about Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses the better, but even 1980s tech was doing it better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

I think there are lessons to be had from the likes of Smalltalk and Logo too. Highly expressive without insane levels of cryptic inconsistent punctuation rules and UX man-traps.

I love text, and I love IPC.

I hate what 1970s terminal culture does to both.

Why can’t we have modern text-driven interfaces* that are both parsimonious and elegant? The mighty Knuth gave us TeX 40 years ago, and our hardware has long since passed the point where doing the job right demands a significant number of cycles (even with the clattery mess that is Unicode standard), so there really isn’t any excuse for such awful regressive primitivism now.

Because I don’t care that OP’s workflow works well for OP; I care about workflows that work better. For everyone.

/cynical idealist

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* Traditionally “text-driven interface” means keyboard-driven, but if you aren’t paying attention to the rise of spoken words then you’re missing the next great opportunity to open up computing to all 8Bn of your fellow humans.

“github didn’t stole your code, somebody else did and posted it at github”

And if you read the title very precisely, indeed it does say that. That said, it is baity AF with all sorts of rich, tasty read meat: “Corporate Internet”, “Github”, “stolen code”—all the things a good internet mob loves.

Furthermore, demanding (or even just assuming) that hosts can/should act as judges, juries, and executioners is itself an exceedingly slippery slope to hop on. I mean, just look at the Trump campaigns ongoing efforts to get Section 230 revoked because Twitter had the temerity to flag some of his posts as “may be disputed”. (Not even “liar, liar, pants on fire”, mind; merely “disputed”. Good Dog but that’s some thin skin.) Be careful what you wish for; laws of unintended consequences; roads to hell and the paving thereon; etc, etc, etc.

So this is not a “David vs Goliath” narrative, much as it might (accidentally or intentionally) resemble one from the OP’s take. It’s David vs another David, while Goliath very wisely—and legally—stays the hell out that particular boy-girl fight. See also:

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

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Now, whether OP actually needs a lawyer or just legally worded letter to activate the next stage in a DCMA takedown, I’m not sure because US Copyright Law’s not my bullpit either. But, yeah, when someone chooses to violate your copyright, then legal-nastygramming the swine once asking them nicely fails to do squat is entirely up to you.

Considering you can already get yourself template-generated contracts, wills, and other common legal documents online for little or no payment, personally I’d investigate that road first before going straight to the dramatic internet swoon. But that’s just me.

“HTML is pretty easy to edit”

Congratulations on so utterly missing the point. (Again.) 99% of web users do not want to edit HTML, because they have far better things to do with their lives. I don’t care how easy you find it, because you aren’t representative of any of them.

But since you mention it, HTML is reeking garbage. It has so many freaking rules, and special exceptions, and not-exceptions, and “<>”, and if you don’t get the punctuation just right then your actual content is going to get some degree of screwed up. Which, considering it’s the user content, not the machine markup, that is supposed to be the important part, is a thoroughly FUBARed set of UX priorities (or SOP for the nerdocracy).

But even if HTML was the very model of simplicity and clarity, very few end-users would want to type it themselves. I mean, what’s the fluency in Markdown outside of geek circles?

Oh, and let’s not forget that having broken the user out of her familiar web browser environment and, against all odds, somehow persuaded her to compose a correctly marked up HTML document in a text editor or something, she still has to get that document onto the web somehow, which means screwing with yet another obnoxious app and yet another arcane set of buttons and rules for using that app, all of which is almost entirely unlike their familiar web browser and how they use that.

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TL;DR: Computer nerds who arrogantly whine “well it’s easy for meeeee” put my back up like nothing else on Earth. So if you don’t wish to be burned to a crisp then don’t ever talk to me about “open web” when you’re the self-serving jackasses who closed it in the first place.

p.s. I am also very not interested in talking about dynamic menus and stuff, because of the billions of people who post their own content online via Twitbook every day, how much of that content includes custom codes they wrote?

“Just because other people don't understand you doesn't mean you are correct.”

True. Also true that it doesn’t mean you aren’t. Though it does at minimum strongly suggest that your attempts to explain yourself to others have thus far sucked.

I’m the world’s biggest idiot and I approve of this message.

“The only thing necessary for that to happen is for companies like Facebook and Google to make it possible to connect with things outside of their sites in meaningful ways.”

“Dear Facebook and Google, please toss away your trillion-dollar global business empires and do what we tell you. Signed, the Geekocracy.”

Honestly, I’ve met doorknobs with more common sense and understanding of how the real world works. And you all still wonder why nobody listens to you?

I’d shake my head, were it not already shaking so hard it’s damn near flying off.

You’d think, but alas too often cries of “open web” is just nerds virtue signalling to each other, longing for those Good Old Days when they controlled the world. The vast closed Twitbook silos of today, philosophical awful as they are, are still massively more empowering to the 99% than that old primitivist WWW where you really needed a technical degree just to publish at all.

This is not just me saying this: it’s the 99% saying it too. Because while they may not know how to express it in technical terms, they have already voted with their feet.

So say what you like about the horrors of Twitbook, but at least they managed to unify [their] publishing with [their] consumption, making one as easy and transparent as the other. And they managed to do it even within the crippled confines of the first, botched Web. Meanwhile the geekocracy does little past sit on its ass whining about how terribly unfair it all is. As if life was a game of cricket!

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If “open web” geeks really truly want to change the world, they need to start by recognizing where FANG(T) are ahead, and why they got ahead like that, and then figure how to generalize and commoditize what FANG(T) got right, and build that back into the basic building blocks of the Web—blocks which nobody owns, and which nobody can own. 30 years late, admittedly, but still better late than never.

And the first step of that has to be the full and seamless unification of web-read and web-write. Because until the fundamental read and write functionality works right, there isn’t even any point in trying to fix the broken discovery (search) and the broken interop (content negotiation) and all the other brokenness that subsequently evolved on top of that. Because without simple seamless zero-effort read+write in place, no-one except the geeks will be able (or want) to use it. And Web 1.0 already did that, and look where it got us.

So there are really only two things that prevent such a reboot: geeks who cannot imagine a Web that works so fundamentally unlike everything they’ve learned and grown accustomed to, and geeks who cannot imagine a Web over which they have no more control than anyone else. And nobody can fix that problem but the geeks themselves.

“You mention fixing Apache”

I used Apache as an example because 1. it is ancient, and as such rudimentary remains of early write support (e.g. PUT, DELETE) might still be found in its architecture, like leg bones in a whale; and 2. because it is nearly ubiquitous on the web.

That said, Apache is a horrific bloated mess in general UX terms and end-user usability in particular, so wouldn’t be my first choice on which to refound a modern open web. Lessons can be learnt, the whole lot can be done better.

“does that mean every Apache server must accept edits from every anonymous contributor?”

I assume this is a rhetorical flourish and not actually a serious question. Even Apache, awful as its UI is, knows how to mediate read and/or write access for both individuals and groups. Look at how Dropbox manages access permissions and sharing. Now imagine achieving the same without Dropbox as middleman.

“Seems odd to blame the browser if it's really the server side that is what needs to be overhauled, to revive the open web.”

It has to be both. Done together. Because if they don’t talk fluently and seamlessly with each other, ordinary people are not going to use it and then we’re back to an elite technocracy and a mass pool of everyone else; precisely the conditions that gave rise to FANG(T) in the first place.

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But perhaps instead of describing an Open Web in terms of its technology, we should try to describe it in terms of its people? Model how its users both want and need to interact with one another, and then describe the technology to fit and facilitate that.

Yes, I’m quite aware that Mozilla used to have a crappy HTML editor strapped on as an afterthought. Treating editing as a second-/third-class citizen and not as a first- is exactly what led to this mess in the first place.

Again, see Tim Berners-Lee and the first, second, and third web browsers ever released, and notice what changed along the way.

If you cannot edit and save a web document as easily as you can read it, the system has already failed. If you have to switch mental or environment modes to do so, the system has already failed. If you have to switch to a different tool to complete the write operation (e.g. FTP client), the system has already failed. If you have to fiddle with individual files instead of discrete documents, the system has already failed. If you have to manage local copies vs remote copies of your documents, the system has already failed. And so on.

It doesn’t matter how important something is, if you make it hard (or even just harder) to do, 99% of people will not do it. That’s not on them as the users; it’s on you as the product developers.

Making a read-write web work as a mass end-user product means eliminating ALL the user-facing distinctions between web-browsing for reading and web-browsing for writing. Those distinctions are completely contrived and unnecessary—not to mention ultimately harmful—and the only reason it ever existed in the first place is ’cos Tim Berners-Lee was a lazy ass who couldn’t be bothered to port the authoring part of WorldWideWeb to Windows, and in doing so destroyed the very Open Web that he himself invented.

Talk about Laws of Unintended Consequences.

Like I say, think of MS Word (not an ideal example in terms of ease of use, but it is ubiquitous and an interaction model everyone understands), only instead of reading and writing to file paths reads and writes to URLs. That is the basic UX an open web requires. Anything else is just the geeks playing with themselves (again), which the marketers and money men will make into their own (again).

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I mean, it should not be hard to grasp (I am a BoVLB, so if I can see it…), yet so many dyed-in-the-wool geeks utterly fail to grasp it. Maybe that’s because they’re so inured to the current imbalanced system that they cannot imagine it being any other way? Perhaps because they themselves are a deeply integrated part of that system and, on the inside looking out, cannot see what all the fuss is about when that imbalance already works in their favor.

Alas, we do seem to be two cultures separated by a common language here, so help me understand how to explain it in a way y’all can understand.

Wordpress is a brilliant example of Inner Platform Effect[1] in all its hideous misbegotten architecture-iness, and symbolic of (and literally) everything wrong with the web we now have today.

A newer example of that same effect is Dropbox, which allows users to read and write files to web-based storage and share with others. Great for Dropbox Inc; piss all use to an open web.

First Rule of Open Web: Shoot all the Middlemen. Because they are the first indicator that you’ve done it wrong.

And if you still can’t see the red flag these “middlewares” represent then shoot yourself too, because you’re part of very the same problem. Nerds love complexity, and they love devising complex solutions to problems they’ve created themselves.

That you so completely missed the point without even trying sadly demonstrates that we have a very very long way to go.

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[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect

The “open web” withered and died the moment Berners-Lee decided he’d cut some corners for convenience and released a web browser that was read-only.

Mosaic took that interpretation and ran with it, and a global information platform that should’ve been as easy for anyone to read and write as opening, editing, and saving a file in MS Word became the plaything of the technocratic elite while the ign’ant plebs looked on none the wiser of how they were robbed.

Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. That’s what happens when you create gatekeepers and single points of failure.

“Just techie on techie.”

Oh bless your heart, child.

Once again, it was the techies who created this mess—and were perfectly happy with it too while they were the ones in charge. So until technies accept and acknowledge that they are the root of the whole problem, they’re not going to do a thing to usefully change it. ’Cos right now they’re one gang of children trying (futilely) to grab back a prized toy from another gang of children, to have all for themselves.

But as long as someone controls the read and write, the conditions that enable these vast walled gardens to take root and thrive will continue to exist. The only way to change that is by restructuring the platform at a fundamental level so that everyone controls their own read and write, and no-one else can just take that from them.

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Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. And then go sort out the stagnant mess that is Apache et al so that they actually speak HTTP right, and provide that client with the “distributed filesystem” it needs to read and write to.

Read-write-publish-share. Simple foundational mechanics, and there’s no reason nor excuse why it shouldn’t all work correctly.

(Plus, Firefox desperately needs to differentiate itself from the Chrome/WebKit hegemony if wants to justify why it should continue to exist. Well, there’s a reason—and opportunity—right there.)

If geeks can make that bit work correctly then they might have a chance at resetting the balance of powr. It’s not a complete solution: there’s still the problems of document search (currently owned by Google) and name ownership (for he who owns your name owns you, and right now all our names are owned by the quasi-libertarian shakedown artists of DNS registrars and squatters), and others. And then there’s the questions of how do you sell it (and Dog knows most geeks couldn’t sell ice cream to Arabs). But it is the first step in the right direction: putting the control into the hands of the Users. All of them, this time.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/

You think that’s abuse? Go and read stories of Domestic Violence, where the victims are too terrified to leave for the completely justified fear of being murdered.

Gust chose to take management’s shit. He chose to take their shit for money. He chose to make himself a “victim”, when he could have walked out of that toxic environment at any time with no repercussion.

Yeah, the management are excretable scum wholly deserving of strychnine in their guacamole, and let’s hope they all go to prison someday for dirty double-dealing, but the only power they had over Gust was whatever power Gust gave them. Now I’ve got sympathy for that, cos I know all about bad judgement born from loss of perspective, and the mistakes and damage we can do to ourselves from that.

But then Gust chose to recruit his personal army for revenge, dragging others into his mess, and that is wrong.

So, sorry, but sympathy seeking self-martyrdom is up there with the messianic martinetism and barely concealed resentments in the grand hall of nerd dysfunctions and follies. Maybe if y’all got a broader experience of real life and all its people you might develop a more balanced sense of perspective. Because if you cannot tell if you’re being abusive yourself—which is what Gust was by the time OP wrote about it—then you’re part of the problem as well. And I can speak from first-hand there as well.

Gust wants to believe he’s the wronged party, and you want to believe that as well, because weaving that narrative suits you both. But the only truly wronged people I see here are OP and those OSS project developers, who Gust is now using and abusing just as his [belatedly] ex-management used and abused him; to serve himself.

Rule #1 of being a good person: knowing when you’re being a bad person yourself.