Observable transitions to paid plan for private notebooks
observablehq.com
observablehq.com
I suppose that is exactly the reason that they offer educational programs, but for my class size and the resources available for my classes I'm not sure that is available to me.
When I completed my degree and got the eventual one year look back survey, I actually called out the explosion in faculty electing to use third party services which weren’t vetted by or supported by the university. One of my chief complaints was that students had no recourse other than to agree to arbitrary terms and sometimes pay arbitrary amounts to companies that were clearly monetizing our data.
(Although that last part isn’t as much a concern here.)
I can imagine if I was required to use something that made my coursework public, I would have simply gone to the CISO Office or the Student Ombudsman if not offered an alternative.
We mostly use a locally-hosted jupyterhub, but for JS work often used other environments. For JS, we made the switch to observable from iodide (after it was wound down) and I think I will re-evaluate platforms again, including JS kernels in Jupyter.
The usernames don't have to respond to a specific user on repl.it so I guess there's no violations as long as students don't use their real names.
If the terms of that program aren’t workable, they can lose you. But freeloading is almost by definition precarious business.
I realize there's a lot of interesting ethics boundaries on public software projects during education. I've always been "pro-open science" that more student projects should be open source/allowed to be open source as "teaching tools in the round", but am sympathetic also to how easily that can be abused for cheating or plagiarizing. I think it is an interesting discussion with no easy answers.
More expensive credit means less free offers attempting to lure customers in.
These are documents; what we're talking about is something that you can prepare on your own machine and then ship off to somewhere else when it's time to share—whether that's by dumping it onto your own Web space, or attaching to an email.
It should have never been the case that e.g. classrooms, etc. were standardizing on a single service provider to handle this problem in the first place.
this resonated with me deeply. use =/= pay for, and that distinction wasn't clear for me at first until I had my first taste of saas ownership.
That stuff will still exist as competition for any startup.
Although having used OneNote quite a lot, I think free is still too high a price to pay for it.
Of course there's no desktop version for Linux or BSD so I'm stuck with the web one.
The only reason I use it is it comes for 'free' with Office 365.
I wish there was something open source like it. Most open source notebook options are markdown and I don't like that (because it's not wysiwyg) and electron.
Also, I'm not very familiar with markdown, it seems to be really popular with developers. I guessbecause GitHub uses it for readme pages. But I have no attachment to it at all. It feels like an extra hurdle to learn.
I really liked the old tomboy but the development stalled and the later reincarnations didn't have the snappiness of the original. And not having pictures is annoying.
- Pluto.jl (Julia)
- Clerk (Clojure)
- Polynote (Scala, Python?)
- Percival (Datalog + JavaScript)
As for Observable, note the runtime is open source. I don't know any perfectly polished alternatives that use it, but for now there's Starboard.gg (which if I'm not mistaken uses Observable's runtime, but someone else said it doesn't), and this VSCode extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GordonSm...
I'd love to see more alternatives in this space, specifically of reactive notebooks or similar environments.
But of course it is not a social/collaborative platform like Observable (though I believe you can host your compiled notebooks on your own server). But the developer of Clerk and some others also created a platform for Clojure-based reactive notebooks that seems especially great for learners and teaching: https://www.maria.cloud It has a picture language, evaluation of sub-forms, basic structural editing and is really beginner-friendly.
Q: With live public notebooks, is there a way to stage edits before making them public?
[...]
For Free users, we also recommend that they fork the notebook (which would be public), make the edits and merge the changes back.
Although the forked notebooks would be public, it would be a temporary notebook which could be deleted once merged.
Like fine, kneecap your free product if you really need to force people to fork over cash. But Observable purports to be a platform that is trying to democratise data analysis and visualisation for the masses. Feels a bit like Wikipedia adding its own paid tier.
It is for profit
I wouldn't put it past them... "Subscribe to Wikipedia Pro today, to see the most up to date articles (the free tier only gets to see 2 year old articles)."
Wikipedia does have a paid tier! It's a way that very large companies which consume Wikipedia data can query it more efficiently: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/22/23178245/google-paying-wi...
Doesn’t seem to me to be a big deal and a relatively normal way to differentiate free and paid accounts for such a service/SaaS.
Anyone have insights on the broader implications though? Business is struggling? Are they being outcompeted by other “notebook” offerings? I’d guess their integration with cloud services would be subpar given that they themselves, last I heard, ran on Heroku and so may never have seen cloud integration as a priority. Is the visualisation and JS focus not paying off in data analytics or data science at least for enterprise? It wouldn’t surprise me (though I have no idea) that they got VC with big goals but would have been better off as a small boutique company.
I'm not steeped in the Observable ecosystem either, but it's worth thinking clearly about what "public" means to not conflate things that are not by their nature inherently joined. If a notebook has to be public because your account is on the free tier, then that alone is maybe not so bad. But what Observable seems to have adopted, just like many others, is a forced social layer indexed by actor on top of their hosted notebook editor/depository.
For a notebook to be "public", by reasonable inference that involves the ability for anyone who comes across it to be able to view it (and in the case here, probably easily fork it). So far, no big deal. Observable, however, just like GitHub until fairly recently, indexes all of your work and then makes that public, too. That's what not having access to private notebooks really means—not being able exercise control over the social aggregator to stop it from putting things in the public graph it makes available to everyone whether you asked to do that or not. It's a little bit creepy how we've just taken this as a given without really noticing the distinction.
The example I always use to make the distinction clear is that when I'm at the post office or the grocery store or wherever, then I'm in public. Those are public places; if you see me around, fine. But what's not happening is that there's not an omnipresent observer following me around to keep a record: "First they went to the grocery store, and then they went to the post office, and then they went back home and stayed there for 6 hours, and then[...]" And it doesn't then take those records and casually publish it for anyone who asks for it. Because that would be fucking creepy, right?
See <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>
Or you’d be Google Maps…
1. You can turn off Location History if you want. (It should perhaps not be turned on by default, but the option to turn it off is there, at least.)
2. The data that is collected by Android devices is private—Google isn't actually making it available to "anyone who asks". In that regard it's a personal aid akin to your browser history and rather unlike your profile on social networking sites like GitHub—who only (frighteningly recently) just began to allow you to change your privacy settings to prevent them from publishing a public index of your activity across their site.
In the meantime the completely free model for using it seemed overly generous given that. Hence we've reached plan B.
I was hoping for at least a limited number of private notebooks, or at least unlisted notebooks, since that would make it a bit easier to use for prototyping private stuff...
It's free, so I can't complain.
Personally I think what happened is that the DOM-manipulating and animation parts of d3 (but not the utility libraries) became existentially threatened by the rise of the component-based reactive JS frameworks, and the d3 authors made the reasonable decision to accept that, explicitly target a data science and academic audience, and create a for-profit company aligned with it. Maintaining docs targeting both use cases would have been expensive, and would have threatened the quality of the docs associated with their primary focus (observable), so they made the decision to accept that the docs would now be quite awkward for the traditional web app use case.
In that case, I will not be able to use Observable any longer. I am not ready to have my half-baked ideas, ongoing research and sketches floating around in public space; this would be very confusing to anyone on my profile and some of them contain private data I don’t want to share. But I also cannot afford to pay for another subscription, there is just so much these days that keeps adding up.
Observable has been a great experience, especially when I was focussing more on JS and data visualization and I enjoyed doing explorative work on the platform. I don’t like that privacy and “local-first” these days are considered features instead of defaults. There are many other things that provide enough value for people to pay for and I am very disappointed that Observable decided to force free users into sharing everything.