primitur

I love my electric moped. Riding it around my European big-city, it just feels so comforting. Its so quiet, it doesn't scare ducks.

Scooters are taking over - Vienna is a green city that has had time to refine its transportation culture over a millenia. Parts of it were built for horses.

When I'm on my electric moped, I ride it like a horse. No need to over-do it and speed, or whatever, just pace along at a trot. There's a harmonic spot where the curves and corners of the city suddenly become super-fluid, and I even get all the green lights .. I'm pretty sure its because the physical geometry is designed for horses, and the electric moped drive train can approximate that.

Anyway, I can't wait until all the cars disappear. Europe is going to be even more beautiful.

When the state of the world becomes untenable, the best thing to do is create a new one, right on top.

There is a part of the Internet where ads cannot/have not gone. Just use that. (Or the next one..)

    while sleep 900 ; do .. done

all their libraries, all their dependencies?

Well, you see ... I happen to think that you can use a lot of tools to cover your ass, and .. the fact that this one slipped in is as much a comment on the crud that is promulgating the wild and woolly Node/JS ecosystem as it is anything else. In point of fact, this kind of bollocks is why I eschew Node/JS and use other things [1], instead.

I do believe there are tools and ecosystems which make this sort of thing less likely. I can't recall a Linux easter egg .. nor a Golang one ..

Should people write their own web servers instead? Their own frameworks? Their own operating systems?

One should at least, audit. As much as possible. It doesn't take much for a competent dev to 'grep -ir "easter egg $CODEBLASE' or, whatever .. not that its an expectation.

But yeah, if you have to have government-level 5-nines on all services, then I would say - fair play. The responsibility for an audit of such things should definitely have been in the requirements. I've seen such expectations for lesser projects, personally, where .. indeed .. code audit and ownership were tightly .. and properly .. managed.

[1] - I don't know for sure, but I think its harder to slip in such an easter egg on a production golang system. I guess I'll tune into that if/when it happens/has happened..

Actually this 'very different' aspect is a broken piece of modern development - its a bug, not a feature. There are methodologies which could have caught this entire stack issue and nobody would have lost their jobs - its just that the ethics of "developer who has control over everything else, or else" versus that of "proper operations and support engineering management (i.e. fire burns upwards..)" are out of skew.

We've been putting up with live fixes and direct "developer"-"production system" style methodologies for a long time; only ethically. It just happens to be 'accepted practice' to fold some gargantuan code-base into ones own environment, without a line-for-line proper review. "Its impossible", say the bean counters. "Who would pay for that?"

Technically there is no good reason for the easter egg to have occurred, had someone done a proper code-review, observed full test reports, respected code-coverage rules and principles, and so on.

The easter egg proved that someone wasn't doing their job.

The physical conditions of the city are a manifestation of the destitution of its people. I've lived in many cities around the world that were utterly poor - yet, the people kept the streets clean. Things were orderly and maintained.

I firmly believe its a matter of the principles of the society. In a progressive, wealthy nation such as exist in Europe, recycling is a thing. People don't want to live in trash - they use it for energy, or recycle it as much as possible. Those who sort trash, promote a cleaner eco-system .. those who eschew the waste anyway, as 'responsible consumers', also help a great deal. These are cultural phenomenon you don't find widely promoted in various civic contingencies around the western world; corruption persists in environments which support its ill-gained prosperity.

In Europe, at least, we can find as many good as bad examples of this. I think its clear, the same cannot be said of other of the western nations ..

I wonder if they could make a direct air-powered vibrator so that one doesn't have to torture their lips.

This fact is, imho, a motivating principle behind the genesis of various synthesizer designs and concepts. We synthesists wish we could do this stuff with our mouths, but the LFO's and the VCO's and the various and sundry other oscillating things represented in the electronic musical instrument world, can't blow a farts worth in comparison to a good trumpeter...

ATDT42

(Coz 42 is Gods phone #, duh...)

I wonder if there is anything unique about this that might make it interesting to use in a sampler or a synthesizer or something .. maybe some random noises that could be generated by stroking the core, or some such things ..

you don't go from relatively simple cave paintings to insanely complex languages, forms of government and far-fetched empires just by snapping a finger twice

See, thats the fascinating thing about crackpot archeology/anthropology/sociology/etc. Eventually, its just a bunch of words - an ontology - with which to describe a complex system.

The idea that the root nature of the language is expressible in human-ideal objects, and that this ontology can persist across 10's of thousands of years of human activity (mostly destructive) as a cultural artifact with a message .. yes, this is difficult to conceive. Or, is it really?

"Far-fetched empires": literally what it means to consider what such an empire, were it in existence 65,000 years ago, would have looked like. Like, literally, its a far-fetched idea to look at a piece of dirt, and then paint a deep picture of what happened to it.

Without such imagination, speculation doesn't begin, and without speculation followed up by careful inspection, the relics would still just be out there, being ignored.

This erosion of responsibility over time is some sort of back force from a wave of generational disillusionment.

We don't want to go back to doing email like our parents did (except we do) so its time to use the cool new shit. Ah, Big Vendor with cool new shit, is cool with the kids. In slips the mickey, and the rest is devolutionary disco.

We really do need to return to using email properly. All these social networks were already there; we just forgot how to build them ourselves, and a return to using email for ones contacts, strictly, can be an immensely rewarding experience, or at least a lot of anecdotal evidence seems to support this theory.

Simply learning how to send and use email, the bcc:, the cc:, the x-headers:, etc. If we'd put a bit of effort into this, we'd have a fallback replacement for the behemoth maw, threatening to swallow us all in its dark abyss.

Wow, the more time goes on, the more "Behold!! The Protong!" ( * ) seems to be an accurate assessment of things. He specifically targetted this artifact as an example of evidence that ancient civilizations were a lot more lucid than we thought.

Szukalski had some crack-pot ideas (Zermatism, Protong), but the idea that humans hadn't gotten quite the right perspective on ancient art is one of his most endearing claims.

(* - https://www.amazon.com/Behold-Protong-Robert-Williams/dp/086... - a fascinating book, if only for the art lover who wants a perspective not usually proferred by the mainstream..)

I have similar fond memories of doing amazing code editing with strange character sets in PC-Write:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-Write

Which had ways to load in alternative charsets ..

Tight game-loops can be a battery drain, and especially if there are local 'go-lang' things running, inevitably, alongside the SDL bridge. I'd put it in as a clever and educated 'packages may damage your battery' fair-warning, myself.

Its turtles, all the way down. All users of computers must deal with the abstraction handles and layers for which they are comfortable - and which produce results. Not just data-science people. Pretty much a user maxim.

Yes, it is.

But, you know: billions.

They've got my email. They can send me an email notification.

Methinks they don't want to do that because lawyers.

Racial Purity

Impose Interbreeding

Sorry, too extreme for me. I do not subscribe to your reasoning that any form of racism is acceptable - "because scientific purity".

If you can't see what it is with 'racial cleanliness', I suggest you go have a look at the places its been happening for, say .. the last 300 years. You'll see plenty of reasons why there should not be any kind of racial policies, enabled by science, that allow "cleansing of so-called undesirables".

I mean this sincerely, humans cannot be trusted with their own race.

I guess this is going to be a much better upgrade from my current non-Apple/-cloud music-player, VLC ..

Those are all perfectly appealing reasons to step one iota closer to the reality described, which is that we should promote the DNA-privileged forward on the sexual reproduction stack.

Which is something, I think, a little different to all the nice, shiny new things we're getting from CRISPR, et al., sure. Its the dangerous, vile things I care about: opening the door for selective breeding and clones, racial purism, etc.

The technology is one thing; the ethics another tube entirely. Somethings things go boom, othertimes BOOM.

I'm really glad they chose C-language for this, personally. The reason is, I've been solving the mobile dilemna for the last few years by focusing on one policy: Lua is the platform.

So as soon as I can access a Libre-phone, I'll put my favourite Lua-based engines on this thing, work out a toll-free-bridge for any of the nice OS things, and put all my apps on it as a target platform.

Just a matter of having the hardware.

(That said, there is absolutely no reason one could not do the same thing: use your language-of-choice, with a bridging layer. The use of C makes this a lot more tenable than, say, other systems languages.. at least in terms of tooling and methodology.)

Isn't the point that we wouldn't need app vendors to present these things, if the OS were a little more intelligently exposed to the user, who is expected to own it and not just use it?

I think there is something about a "Linux phone" which makes apps like WhatsApp, and so on .. quite obsolete. These apps fix holes in iOS/Android - they extend the features of what should be, operating system functions.

I find it repugnant that I have, for example, ~15 apps that basically do the same thing, organized in a folder, and which I maintain as a common suite of messaging inboxes.

This, to me, indicates that the OS is not doing something it should be doing, intrinsically. Yes, it means eventually deleting all those competing protocols - and independently weak sources of dataleak - and putting it all back under the users control.

With a Linux-based phone/communications device, isn't it going to be the case that the open nature of Linux ecosystems is going to have that sort of effect? i.e. - the user really is in control of their machine, and thus their own personal data.

I predict that there will be an IPFS'ish revolution on Libre, when it gets out there, which will mean that the one place vendors should set up shop, is the ol' SMS gateway.

'ipfs pubsub sub fridaynightcrew && ipfs pubsub pub fridaynightcrew "wheres the party?"' is but a gateway from being accessible by existing users, of the aforementioned ~15 messaging apps ..

success == expansion is a capitalist

Well, is it capitalist really, or is it something that capitalists are guilty of propagating as a means of control?

I mean, it could be said that 'success == expansion' is more of a natural law, which can be applied to any 'ism and used, either to contract agency, or .. grow it.

argue for some eugenics and advantage high IQ people for reproduction

See .. I find this line of thinking heinous. Why do you not instantly trip up when you type this?

A friend of mine agrees with your position and has built a business out of crossing this great divide between print and the web and actually I think his toolset is exactly the kind of 'DevTool for Designers' that this article is calling for .. so I'd be quite intrigued what other designers think of it.

Shameless plug: http://h5mag.com/

(I'm just a friend of the founder of h5mag, and would love to know what isn't DevTools'y about h5mag, from a developers perspective. Disclaimer: I'm a developer...)

Nice! Looks like it could be the base of a new PopcornTime-style app, as well .. definitely a cool way to learn Flutter - thanks for sharing! :)

I have found a way around all this, which nevertheless requires a thin layer of interaction with the walled garden, and this to put everything in a VM, expose only the things that need to be exposed from the host OS, and run a common framework across all possible platforms.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of these kinds of projects out there, mostly obscure, probably by necessity because in fact it is a lot of work to maintain such a system. But, due to the abhorrent nature of the OS vendors, sleeping at the wheel, there is no choice other than to build another, OS-like, system on top.

And where that is always happening, and still will for quite a while I hope, is in the games engine department. Sooner or later, games engines become operating systems, become hosts for spreadsheets and collaboration and other such nonsense...

All this is to say, I have my xcode builds running in a VMWare container, they're safely backed up and replaceable, etc., and all they do anyway is build the target hosts: android, ios, linux, windows, macos, etc. for the .. separated through an abstraction layer .. application.

The use of Lua, I think, is a good example. Lua on all the mobile platforms, would deflate the whole thing...

cuttlefish suits

Thankfully, this sort of thing is exactly what the Internet was designed for ..

I started to wonder about this, but then I realized that what we're really witnessing right now is the birth of the primordial Grey Goo. I mean, omnipresent super-observation states may be one angle of Our Future Dystopia, but I think energy-harvesting super computers that can reproduce is right around the corner on this one ..

Whats great is when seemingly intelligent apps adopt the Touchbar koolaid, such as .. iTerm. So yeah, now I'm greated with the very nice side-effect of having a massive row of blinking crud all over my vision, just because iTerm wants to show me what command is running, what keys I could use to kill the process, blink back to the shell, oh .. another app is running in the shell, better update the touchbar ..

Man, its just .. like .. such an 80's feeling.