kiawe_fire

I was set to be all libertarian about this, but your suggestion is probably more level headed.

There should be some common ground. Regulations that encourage innovation (perhaps even with timed financial incentives) while also ensuring that the best ideas are eventually freely adoptable across the board.

Seems like, as with most issues, people take one extreme or the other, when a common sense middle ground could be found with proper planning and forethought.

This comment is what leadership looks like.

Screenshots would have been fun to see - I'm always fascinated by projects like these that are part of an industry-wide transition to something new. Especially considering you probably didn't have much or any prior works to guide what you built.

Thanks for sharing the press releases!

Those are good questions.

I think the primary driver is DRM, which itself is driven by the content owners more so than service providers.

While the streaming services themselves surely want to protect their service from theft, they would largely benefit (with some caveats) from having a platform that's extensible and flexible as a competitive edge, similar to how a phone vendor wants to have a thriving third party app scene.

Meanwhile, the content owners still use misguided tactics that punish legitimate users in the hopes of stopping piracy. Piracy that always seems to find a way to continue.

This leads to some good questions around what kind of policy can be made to give content owners legal rights to their IP while also respecting user's rights to build and extend.

Because ultimately the core offering of these streaming services is their breadth of content and the license negotiations and library management they do. Their apps are just front-ends to that.

So, a "right to extend" initiative that pairs with the "right to repair" initiatives could be something interesting to explore.

That sounds like a fascinating thing on its own. Any chance you’ve written about that experience somewhere? If you ever did, I’d love to read it.

Too bad to see this go - this was the only API out of the modern streaming services that you could actually use to build something truly new.

The new Spotify API (along with others like Apple Music) basically allow you to do some of the things the official players offer for browsing and managing music, and give simplistic playback options - effectively, you can build a Fisher Price version of the official app, following the official app’s template, and that’s about it.

I get that it’s all DRM driven, but it really sucks - from Spotify to Netflix and everything in between, we have all these online services with great(ish?) content but terrible UI, bloated embedded browser-based apps and just all around bad user experiences. So much could happen to better these services if they offered open APIs to subscribers.

It’s frustrating that we have so many tools for building apps that run everywhere, yet everything seems so increasingly locked down.

This should be one of the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity, and yet it feels like it’s becoming one of the most restrictive times.

There’s an undeniable appeal with toys like these as a means to normalize and explore the world around you freely in miniaturized and simplified form.

So I hope the appeal of toys like these extends beyond just “seeing myself represented” - ideally, kids get to play with a variety of likenesses beyond just “the one that looks like me”.

(Aside: the final paragraph of the article is 100% unnecessary, corporate virtue signaling, with no relation to anything else in the article aside from being Barbie related.)

More than I wish I needed, but fewer than I seem to want.

1x Windows desktop for gaming

1x Dell XPS 13 laptop with Linux for development / work / personal

1x MacBook Pro for some development / work / personal

1x Intel NUC with Linux as an experimental / frequently reformatted sandbox for trying things out

And yet I find myself wanting an additional (smaller) gaming PC for travel / LAN parties, and a Mac Mini as the Mac version of my NUC for messing around with, and maybe a file server at some point.

And yet I also would love to just be able to have one single travel friendly laptop running Linux that I could work and game on.

We seem to be intentionally running away from what the author wants.

We already have Visual Basic and XCode’s Interface Builder, and the industry has rejected both in favor of reactive widget trees and hand written XML-like things.

But those were not low-code tools that helped non-developers string together basic preset actions - those were tools for developers, that helped produce full apps of virtually any complexity.

They required writing event handlers and model classes. Xcode allowed you to drag right from the button into the code editor to stub out a method and even helped you pick the right source widget to pass into it.

But we rejected all of that (in the case of Interface Builder) in favor of SwiftUI and a bunch of nested declarative widgets, or hand written XAML in the case of VB.

Were the tools of old perfect? No, they needed some updating.

They didn’t hit all of the author’s wants, but it doesn’t matter - the industry said it wanted hand written widget trees instead of a better visual editor, and so, for better or worse, that’s where we are.

And this is true in many sub-domains as well.

Even things like CSS frameworks.

If you’re doing something trivial, or solving a couple of specific use cases, then a framework full of CSS classes that give you Twitter-looking cards or a no code solution that helps you send an email every time a user clicks a “subscribe” button IS helpful.

But the problem is, once you’ve used the tool for that initial problem, you’re stuck with it. And inevitably, if your thing is successful at all, you will outgrow that tool quickly and need to start making bespoke things to keep up.

I say this not out of gate keeping either - I say this as an overworked full stack software developer who would LOVE to be able to provide a CSS framework or a visual editor to my co-workers and have them produce long term solutions.

But as soon as they find some tool and ask me to help adopt it, it works for them for a couple use cases, and then guess who’s stuck trying to make it work with all the fancy new things we need that then requires extending the tool or working around it entirely?

As someone who feels liberated when using {reactive framework}, and very much constrained when using {low-js-dom-manipulation framework}, there’s one aspect I keep seeing repeated that is a great misdiagnosis, IMO.

Which is this notion that somehow the backend has to be extra complicated or slow or somehow worse off when using a fancy reactive framework.

Indeed, one of the selling points of tools in the Laravel / PHP space is that “you don’t need to build an API” and can “just have normal controllers returning views”.

But this mindset takes several disparate things (the backend’s complexity, the amount of data it returns, the data format returned by the back end, and how the frontend works) and basically combines them into some mutually exclusive set of decisions.

But they aren’t. At least not the way most people talk about them.

Whether your server returns a blob of JSON or a blob of HTML should have absolutely no bearing on the complexities or capabilities of your back end.

If it does, then you’re probably coupling your back end work too tightly to its presentation, which will cause you pain eventually, no matter how your front end works.

But people have this notion that if you use a reactive framework that calls the back end, the back end not only has to return JSON, but it also needs to be this ideologically pure REST API that returns all the things you will ever need for the given objects being requested. Or that you need to build some complicated GraphQL model abstractions.

You don’t. If you previously had a route that returned the user’s full profile including their long Naruto fan fiction they posted when they were 13 years old when you only really needed the user’s name and profile pic, then you don’t have to switch to a full HTML page render to fix this. Just return what you need, but in JSON form.

And by doing this, you gain flexibility on the front end to use whatever framework you want, the ability to re-use these same routes for multiple clients like mobile apps (because if a page on the web only needs the user’s name and profile pic, then that’s probably all that the app needs when loading that route too!)

People seem to think that having a reactive framework calling an API means that you have to have a pure REST API, and that a REST API necessitates a crappy back end experience that returns the monkey, banana and entire jungle at once.

And then when they go back to {html-render with lite JS framework} they get to throw caution to the wind, write single use queries and page specific routes and suddenly anything and everything goes on the backend.

Either way, you need discipline and discretion on the back end. If you go straight HTML renders, you still want to have proper separation of concerns and reusable queries and lightweight controllers that don’t really care whether they are returning HTML or JSON or Bob’s Bit-flipped Binary Blobs.

And if you go for a reactive framework, you STILL want all of the above on your back end, but you also still need thoughtful route design that returns what you need for the thing you’re doing, and not much more.

It’s not all or nothing either way, but if you approach it like that, you will feel pain. Yes, even with plain old HTML.

It is frustrating when you want to do the right thing and pay for a product that you have great demand for, but which nobody is offering to you.

It might be unfair to generalize, because there are some shoddy fan translations out there, and I’m sure there are some studios / professionals that do great work.

But it can be jarring to see fan-translated versions put more care into preserving intent and readability in translations, and even preserve artwork like onomatopoeia while also providing context, only to see what appears to be sloppy disregard in the official release.

It feels like an industry where you as the customer never really know what you’re getting, because the standards are all over the place.

For all the legit criticisms, anime has at least generally evolved to have a minimum acceptable standard by which most studios operate, with considerable blow back when that doesn’t happen (see early Netflix dubs that they later re-dubbed based on complaints). The same can’t be said for manga, afaik.

As a manga reader, one of my biggest frustrations is with censorship.

10 years ago, Viz and Tokyopop dominated English published manga, yet they each had very spotty records with regards to translation quality, editorial decisions and censorship.

I didn’t want to read Full Metal Alchemist or Dragon Ball or Initial D knowing that random instances of blood would be erased or religious symbols replaced or weird editorial changes would change the tone. And unlike the edited anime airing on TV, there was no “uncut” version I could buy and even finding lists of changes was difficult.

So, I kind of learned to avoid buying North American manga. Only recently have I started buying some releases from publishers like Kodansha and Dark Horse that, from what I can tell, have a better track record.

But ultimately that’s the problem - you shouldn’t make a customer guess what they’re getting. I want to collect way more manga than I do, but my confidence in the industry was shaken very early on, and that’s hard to gain back.

Loved the post and the art.

This is genuinely going to be helpful for me to share this with my colleagues and management.

> From an engineer point of view, this may sound trivial, but the truth is that your career depends heavily on how your manager, and their peers, perceive your impact and your work.

> I have to admit my track record of convincing management about the importance of my work based on this particular idiom has been… spotty at best. I still believe in the concept, though.

The above are from “diagonal contributions” but to me also apply to rake collecting.

But I have to wonder, why is this the case in software engineering?

We go through K-12 school being told to make the world a better place and have a positive impact. Most religious teachings impart the idea of helping others.

In nearly every profession or job role from waiting tables to building houses, a common complaint is when someone doesn’t “help out” when needed.

So why in software engineering is the expectation warped such that “collecting rakes” to make sure others have a better chance at successful contributions often seen as rabbit-holing, or procrastinating, or just flat out wasteful?

And especially so when done diagonally across teams? Why am I expected to only own my own pieces and not improve others?

And most importantly, why does it feel like my reputation and career still hinges on the quality of my work and how it interacts with others’ work, if I then feel I need to ask for forgiveness every time I collect rakes or work diagonally?

Something feels culturally wrong about this.

I think this actually points out a great common ground between the two notions this article is comparing.

If one aspect is education and mindset, but the other aspect is having the financial empowerment required for the education and mindset to be fruitful, then giving assistance that takes away the burden of "getting by" while still empowering the recipient to make her own choices (along with proper education to do so) seems like a great melding of solutions.

One of my examples related to means testing. I have many more not related at all to means testing.

Many were bait-and-switches. "This program will cover all of your costs for {x}", and then months later, "sorry, the program actually doesn't cover {x.1} or {x.2}, so you owe money and penalties now".

Other programs were of the more indirect, but still very consequential, "we're incentivizing or mandating people to do {x} to help those without means" only for the businesses with means to easily absorb the costs or penalties while the freelancers (as I was at one time) or people working for small businesses (as I did and continue to do) are put in situations in which they cannot.

Whether its healthcare mandates or regulations, used car or appliance buy-back programs, mortgage assistance programs, aggressive minimum insurance liabilities, they are all sold on the notion of helping the less fortunate at the expense of the more fortunate, yet I can trace so many of them to situations that directly impacted my family and lead us to facing homelessness multiple times.

If I gave the impression that means testing was the core impediment, then I can say it was only but one of many.

That said, I agree that means testing just adds a burden to the recipient and a means manipulating the recipient. I don't view this as partisan, though, and there are plenty on the left happy to use assistance as a form of social behavior manipulation as well.

To do this honestly and properly, we would need to remove ALL means testing.

I have no doubt that they have helped some people, and I'm genuinely glad they helped you.

They unequivocally made my life worse off than without them, and I know I'm not alone.

Us both being willing to accept that our respective experiences are polar opposites, but still valid and worth consideration, is key to making sure neither you nor I are so dedicated to supporting something for the sake of supporting it that we lose sight of why we're supporting it.

Just because it helped you doesn't mean something similar that you're supporting today can't also harm others. Likewise, just because I was harmed by something doesn't mean I should be closed off to the notion that something similar could help others.

If we can keep this in mind when dealing with people of opposing viewpoints, and acknowledge how individual experiences of otherwise similar things can be very different, then I think we'd reach better, less judgmental and vitriolic conclusions on how to solve these problems.

> The solution is not to throw one's hands up and declare "Government doesn't work, I'm a libertarian now!" The solution is to stop electing asshats whose purpose in life is to dismantle institutions and hurt the poor. It's not like these politicians are hiding their views. They proudly talk about things like "means testing" and "promoting market-based solutions (transparent code for sabotaging institutions)". Astonishingly, in many States, the poor tend to favor this team and vote for them, (presumably) knowing they are voting for politicians who are against the very things that would help them.

This reads a lot like the kind of condescension I mentioned receiving from my wealthier friends and family growing up. Well intentioned, but people usually privileged enough to only know what they knew about poverty and assistance programs from magazines, research journals and politicians selling compassion. Rarely were they the people who experienced the consequences of what they were advocating for themselves, giving them a comfortable perch from which to preach what felt helpful and moral, but never knowing what it meant to be wrong about the results firsthand.

If it's true that these programs can be done the right way and are being deliberately sabotaged (with which I tend to agree), then they are being sabotaged by more than just the "means testing" and "market-based solutions" crowd. I know firsthand, because some of the most destructive of these initiatives in my life have come directly from undivided Congresses made of the politicians telling us that "we can't afford not to go all in".

But somehow when one of the supposedly non-hamstrung programs still comes with impossible red tape, unintended consequences, or otherwise leaves the recipient worse off than when she started, even the "all in" programs that make it through via unchallenged bills or executive action, somehow end up being criticized in retrospect for not being "all in" enough. "We just didn't commit enough. We need to double down."

Failing that, it's always the fault of "those other politicians" and when all other excuses fail, then it always falls back to victim blaming. "They just don't know what's good for them" or "they just don't know how these things work". Yes, both the "change your attitude and work ethic" crowd and the "government assistance" crowd blame the victim, if you know how to spot it.

I'm certainly not arguing that you're wrong in the assertion that many of these institutions are designed to fail, but I do think, for anyone committed to actually solving problems, that taking honest account of how these institutions are failing beyond just "they need more money and fewer restrictions" is among the necessary first steps.

Confronting the problem by dedicating yourself to the results rather than dedicating yourself to the politicians who say nice things and then shrug their shoulders when their solutions don't work, even (especially?) when that means coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that the "team" you trust may not have earned that trust beyond words.

Or the uncomfortable conclusion that the people supporting the other "team" are doing so not out of ignorance or deception but out of a reaction informed by genuine personal experience that you may not have had. That those people, still in need of solutions not being provided by either team, are turning to the devil they know and can manage, rather than the one they cannot.

The good news is that these first steps are unifying and results oriented. The bad news is that it requires people to confront their own biases that they think of as mutually exclusive postulates to be accepted and instead turn them into non-absolute theories to be tested and refined. It likely means realizing that our "teams" don't matter so much, and that spotting the good from the bad on both sides is harder than it seems.

This is a good point that isn't given enough attention by either side.

I grew up in poverty and faced homelessness many times, and my experience anytime a public/government program was offered to help people like me specifically, it only made things worse, either directly or indirectly. Every single time.

Extra policing meant more poor people pulled over in their raggedy cars and ticketed for vain things. Food assistance meant lots of forms being filled out, and the risk that your inconsistent income might go just above the threshold next month and kick you off for the whole year when your income drops immediately thereafter. Healthcare assistance meant even more forms, confusing jargon, and always started with "don't worry, we'll take care of it" and ended with "you now owe $5000". I could write posts full of examples.

Even worse, once I identified this, I could then be labeled "too stupid to know what was best for me" or "just sticking up for the rich" when I expressed my concern for this around (mostly more privileged) friends.

Naturally I tend toward libertarian hands-off opinions on things like this now as a result, but not because I don't think food assistance or satiation of basic healthcare needs could be helpful. Quite the contrary, they could make a huge difference if done in the right balance and the right way.

But given the realities of how these things work, and have worked my entire life, the institutions creating and promoting these things are either incompetent or corrupt, or both. If all of these caring researchers and think tanks put more effort into retrospectively finding out what is going wrong with these programs as they exist today, and found a way to restore competence and trust to the programs and the institutions behind them -- if everyone could be honest about the actual results of their efforts rather than just patting themselves on the back for doing what felt good while ignoring the people they caused to suffer -- then I'd likely feel differently.

It makes me wonder if my problem growing up weren't the supposed "safety nets" that blew up in my face each time, but rather the institutions behind them, and that they should be the first problem solved before we move on to the assistance itself.

I’ve been the same. I came from MacOS into Linux in the last couple of years, but gave Pop_os! a try early on with its tiling wm.

I found myself constantly planning layouts and positioning things. Nothing ever ended up feeling right, and it was exhausting.

“I’ll have my browser window take the full height and half the width over here. Then I’ll put my code editor over on the right, half high, then my Terminal below it.

No wait, that’s not enough height for the code editor, so let’s shrink the Terminal down… except now the terminal’s uncomfortably short.

Well, maybe the browser can be split with the Terminal and the code editor can be full height.

Except now the code editor feels too narrow and I don’t really need it this tall, it would be really nice if I could have the browser window full height instead.”

And then I’m back where I started.

And if I finally get used to a layout and whatever shortcut keys I have for jumping around, then !!! A wild Slack message appears!

Now I need to open a PDF viewer along with Slack along with my code editor but don’t need my browser but maybe need my Terminal, and I’m back to the layout drawing board for the next task.

With overlapping windows, every window can be the exact size and shape it needs to be.

I’m open to the likelihood that I’m just doing it wrong. I would also bet this is less of an issue if I were using multiple large, unscaled 4K monitors.

So I’ll try it again someday with a different setup, but for now I’m mostly happy with my 1440p monitor(s), and overlapping windows.

I don’t think it’s so much “everyone is a {whatever party I hate}” (which changes with your frame of reference). It’s more “everyone is part of the elites against the people”. The party labels are pretty meaningless, which itself is a bit shattering for those who come to realize it late.

But you’re right, there are a few left that seem to be fighting for the people. Some are effective and others are naive but well meaning.

But they are clearly the minority. They’re fighting bombastic partisan media coverage on both sides, they’re often fighting people within their parties, they’re often struggling just to earn their place.

At first, you get excited at the prospect of holding police accountable when Rand Paul introduces laws against knockless warrants, or you hope for the prospect of a real, sustainable income plan from Yang or Gabbard.

And then you watch as they get maligned and lied about on Fox News and CNN alike. You think, “this plan they’re advocating for will surely attract support from the rest of their party” and then you watch in awe as both sides warp, twist, or outright attack their plans.

You watch with weary eyes as someone like AOC who appears to come from the outside with a background similar to your own gets taken in by people like Pelosi, and you hope against the odds that she will remain true to her ideals, but you know that so many before her did not. After all, at one point Pelosi herself was fighting for the freedom of the internet, yet look at her now.

At some point, you get tired of putting hope into the good ones. You get frustrated every time they seem to make progress only to be struck down. You get sick of seeing them naively fall for the notion that their colleagues are as genuine as they are.

At some point, you just find it easier, both for the sake of conversation but also your own peace of mind, to wrap it all up into the same package of “they’re all bad” and just stop wasting your emotional energy on it.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Likely not the very business owners that would benefit from UBI the most.

Thereby likely forcing those business owners to rely on UBI entirely for income, thus removing their upward mobility.

This is perhaps the oddest point the article makes.

They argue that JavaScript is still available for its “originally intended” purpose of light scripting, but that using less JS on the front end somehow frees you to use whatever you want on the back end.

But there is nothing inherent to SPAs that would force anyone to use JS on the back end.

And if “diversity is our strength” then I see no reason that wouldn’t be equally true when building JS-heavy SPAs.

Funny enough, those niche strategy games are, IMO, a great example of middle ground that I think is missing in the industry.

We have a thriving indie scene full of pixel art action platformers, RPGs, and rogue-likes, often built by a couple dozen developers at most. And we have the AAA scene that is expected to eke out every bit of performance and effects out of your RTX 3080, often developed by hundreds of people.

What about something in between?

Some of the newer strategy games have great, polished visuals with some modern sensibilities, but they aren't super high budget productions with infinitely detailed high res textures and countless objects filling every scene. But neither are they going for some C&C or Dune 2 inspired pixel retro look.

And the player base is just fine with that. As long as there is a certain sense of polish and creative direction to the art, then the most important part is "is the game fun?", "does it have solid gameplay systems", "is it balanced", those sorts of things.

This space doesn't really exist much for first person shooters or third person action games. There have been a couple of examples (Yooka-Laylie, A Hat in Time, Pumpkin Jack?) and certainly some rogue-likes like Strafe or Ziggurat that come close, but the market seems small and spotty. I'd argue in part because player expectations don't allow for this as much in the FPS space as they do in the strategy space.

Some of this exists in open source projects, where you'll see non-coders or novice coders demand that their most wanted bug be fixed, and they'll storm around the Github issues harassing people for not prioritizing their needs over the project as a whole.

But in general, yes, there is an heir of entitlement in the gaming space right now.

The most harmful, IMO, is the knee-jerk visual shaming of every game. We can criticize the devs and publishers for focusing on graphics over fun, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem. When every game trailer or demo is immediately torn apart for "not looking amazing enough", and every non-critical visual bug of a player model's hair clipping into her face is turned into a meme, it shouldn't be a surprise that the focus is on screenshot worthy visuals first, and gameplay can be "fixed later".

It is a hits driven industry, but the stakes for making that hit are high, and often times the things you need to do to get buzz before release is mutually exclusive with the things it takes to keep the player base after release.

There's also the reactive demands to "just give me this game mode" or "just nerf this weapon" without realizing how much work goes into implementing things in a balanced and fun way. If you've never sat down with a game idea and coded a demo with stick figures before, then you've probably never had that moment where you realize the idea you had in your head just doesn't work when implemented. Or, conversely, how you can then tweak a couple variables and make it unexpectedly fun in ways you never would have thought of otherwise.

That said, I would LOVE a return to modding and more open source extensibility to gaming to converge the two.

That's fair. If the question is "would I use Tailwind primarily for layouts and little else" then the answer would be "no". I would definitely use CSS variables along with grid or flexbox, because its essentially the same end with less complexity.

I would also point out that Tailwind only makes sense to me when I'm also breaking up each individual UI element like cards or buttons into reusable components, either using a reactive framework like React or Vue, or a server-side template system. I'm not sure the maintainability of Tailwind survives with more monolithic HTML pages.

The gaming sector has already been struggling with a (relative) lack of AAA content and incomplete releases with quality issues.

I can’t help but wonder if we’re in for a rough couple of years in the market with all of the additional tumult.

Granted much of the tumult is a direct result of the conditions that caused quality issues in the first place.

I’ve often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable. (Not that I mean to excuse poor management as a leading factor).

Perhaps we’ll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?

Elementary OS is in a strange place for me.

Coming from MacOS, it does so many things right and Danielle and the other contributors have such a great mindset focusing on accessibility and platform building.

With their dev conference, they’re doing great work encouraging people towards native app development with an eye to performance and HIG.

Everything looks so good.

And yet, as a daily driver for development, it’s just never quite there. The edge cases stand out enough that I always want to reach for Manjaro or Zorin or the like instead.

But I love their approach and think it’s ultimately “the right one”, so even when I’m not using it, I can only support them and cheer them on.

I am personally, for a couple of reasons.

(1) Tailwind uses utility classes that feel like syntactic sugar over full CSS, so I don't feel like I'm "using Tailwind for layouts" as much as "using useful CSS grid presets"

(2) Much like with margins and paddings, text sizes, and colors, Tailwind helps me "pare down" the number of different values available to me. Much like having preset "m-1", "m-2", etc. values helps me be more consistent, having preset grid columns and gap spacing helps me stay consistent and not go too crazy.

(3) Because I'm using something closer to CSS-wrapped-in-classes rather than a set of components built by someone else, and because tailwind gives both a naming convention and an easy mechanism for adding my own classes that fit right in to Tailwind's, if Tailwind doesn't give me the exact values I want for grid spacing, then I can modify theirs. If I need to add a couple new presets in addition to Tailwind's, then I can do so easily.

(4) Early on when CSS Grid was new, I got bit by some bad layout bugs that were very hard to find, and impossible to fix (they were browser bugs). So, while I'm sure the bugs I encountered have since been fixed, I'm a bit gun shy on grids. I occasionally use Grid when it makes sense (via Tailwind), but more often than not I find it easier, more flexible, and safer to just use nested flexbox cols and rows. For which I also use Tailwind, if the project is of suitable size.

To sum it all up better, I view Tailwind more as syntactic sugar over CSS that helps me build my own design system. So, I would totally use vanilla CSS for small projects that don't need a design system. But for anything more than that, I like Tailwind for the same reason I like using web frameworks on the back end: it helps me keep things structured and consistent and more maintainable, even if I could do it all on my own without the framework.