mathnmusic

Blinkist and similar tools are a good enough solution for this. But those are locked up behind a paywall. I've been importing links to book summaries (along with authors' TED talks, podcasts etc) in LearnAwesome.org (my open-source project) so that when looking up a book, user can easily discover summaries,interviews,talks covering the same ideas in a more preferable format.

Is Zulip Chat close to what you have in mind?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you own > 50% and get the ability to reverse transactions, it can still go undetected. So it's possible to hurt others without hurting yourself.

Why create a new app instead of simply running a matrix.org server instance?

I'm not sure it will be as secure as captchas though. Browsers will probably allow dummy platform authenticators for ease of development, which can be used by bots as well.

Webauthn may make it easy because it supports platform authenticators like Touch ID / Face ID. Two good demos are at http://webauthn.me/ and https://webauthn.io/

It's now supported in all major browsers but platform authenticators are likely not supported on all OS yet.

And what about when browsers (like Brave) start supporting IPFS natively, and gateways are not needed any more?

The parent was complaining about being forced to use OS X. So, the "walled garden" is intended for the underlying hardware.

> Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment.

Energy will become cheap even for malicious actors, so bitcoin hash difficulty will have to go up in order to keep it costly for them to fake transactions. Which means energy usage goes up too. There's no way to avoid "work" in a proof-of-work scheme.

Internet has some amazing learning resources these days. Not just articles like these and videos, but also interactive explorables. Even my 7yo was able to understand basic aspects of game theory and complex systems with the help of explorables made by NickyCase, MeltingAsphalt etc. Most recently, I taught myself to not just solve 4x4 Rubik's cube but understand its connections to ideas in abstract algebra such as commutators. I feel extreme gratitude for all the people who create such enlightening material and offer it freely, without asking for a paid subscription to their Udemy course.

It inspired me enough that I started creating a DMOZ-style catalog of learning resources as a FOSS project: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn

Apple is not affiliate, it's a gatekeeper. Affiliate increase discovery to something that was already reachable through other means. If you already know me and trust me, you still can't install my app without paying the gatekeeping fee. Apple does play the role of a payment gateway where the standard fee is around 3%, so they definitely are entitled to that much.

This may also be applicable to Steam, Sony and others.

It's because we could never get users to care about open-source software. Users continue to lap up closed-source software and that's what leads to billions for these companies.

I built a Rails app with exactly that set up: sharding, dynamic switching of read/write queries across multiple slaves 10 years ago. It wasn't hard at all. Ruby's full dynamic nature makes many things easy.

Nassim Taleb also argues this in his "Minority rule". That all it takes a stubborn minority to bring along changes. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.

Retailers do not operate as marketplaces or storefront services though, do they?

I prefer the open-source equivalent https://responsively.app/ which is improving much faster due to community contributions.

Any phone that has speakers, must be having an on-device DAC, even if there's no headphone jack.

Flutter+Dart is a good choice for this because they already have a goal of supporting 5 platforms with a single codebase: Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Linux and MacOS.

I was disappointed how Gitbook, after going the SaaS way with v3, has broken compatibility with their own v2 cli. If you export markdown files from gitbook.io, gitbook-cli v2 is unable to import them and turn into static HTML files because Gitbook now uses custom liquid tags which are not open-source.

Yesterday, this youtuber exhorted its viewers to submit at least 20 PRs in not-so-popular repos so that at least 4 remain unmarked as "invalid" to qualify for free t-shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas

He has 670K subscribers on Youtube, and he insisted that not a single t-shirt should remain unclaimed after 1st October.

Anger aside, it was DO's job to think of poor incentive alignments and loopholes, because at the Internet scale, every loophole gets exploited sooner or later. Maintainers have been telling them of the spam issue for years.

For urgent action, DO should try to get that YouTuber to create a follow-up video to ask people to stop spamming Github. Even canceling the HacktoberFest and restarting it with new rules would be better than just giving up (as Matt Cowley seems to be indicating here: https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311594424049307649 )

And eventually, invest in educating these new developers about a responsible way of participating in open-source.

Why would lint/tests fail when docs or README are sabotaged?

One of the best features of Gitter is that it can be embedded on webpages which reduces a lot of friction for public communities. Please keep that feature and perhaps, even replicate it in Matrix. This can be a unique value prop for both over the proprietary ones. Plus, it enriches the Web as opposed to moving all things into app silos.

There is kind of a mania going on for teaching coding to kids - at least around me - fueled by the "edtech" industry.

Manipulative marketing and sales tactics to get parents to buy expensive courses which use nothing but MIT's free Scratch language (or nocode tools) combined with terrible instruction. This user on Twitter has been documenting some of these: https://twitter.com/whiteHatSnr

I find it very disturbing. For my 5yo kid, I had used many free resources such as Harvey Mudd College's free course on edX and more constrained apps like LightBot and found them to work spectacularly well. To help other parents, I wrote down this sequence in which these ideas can be introduced.

Disclaimer: LearnAwesome is my open-source project for lifelong learning to build syllabuses exactly like these.

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Look at the kind of ads these edtech companies - in which Mark Zuckerberg is an investor - have been using:

1: https://the-ken.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/whitehatjr-97...

2: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EhLBJMYUMAE3C2a?format=jpg&name=...

It would be helpful to have some examples of what is meant by "interactive audio-visual shows". Is a streaming session on OBS such a show? What interactions are supported? How does MIDI get involved here?

I could understand only after seeing this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jcelerie/status/1303674506951757824

Code from main.js: https://www.patatap.com/src/main.js

Enjoyed playing with it. It would be nice to see some WebMIDI support so it can be triggered with a MIDI keyboard.

On the same topic, I found Google's Oboe project really interesting. It's a C++ library for audio that works on both Chrome (via WASM) and Android (with AAudio). This talk from Google I/O 2019 gave a demo/walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GaD0RCp-Q0

> shift this burden to the medium

This is beautifully expressed. Knowledge consists of connections across concepts but those connections are rarely shown explicitly in textbooks. Even wikipedia, while allowing you to traverse the connections back and forth easily, does not do a great job of giving you the bird's eye view of a subject or a field. Check out this "map" of mathematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y Every subject needs a similar map.

Besides visualizing the connections, we'd also need interactivity to the topic that helps with forming new mental models - which is the core aspect of learning. Jupyter notebooks, ObservableHQ, Mathigon are some of the good projects working on this aspect.

Disclaimer: I am building the open-source project https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/ which is attempting to build the complete map of knowledge/skills. So I too am biased against books and in favor of digital/interactive tools.

I'd argue that banning apps from non-free and non-open economies encourages a free and open internet by aligning incentives.

Really, reciprocity (and the paradox of intolerance) is an implicit expectation in many situations and we need to talk about how to deal with it.

Because there are too many users on SMTP/Email, but not many PGP users to worry about interoperating? I mean, Hey.com shows that people still like SMTP/Email.

Most attempts to "fix open-source funding" - such as GitHub sponsors or OpenCollective are misguided. Bulk of the value of FOSS is being taken by corporates, not individuals. So expecting individuals to support the creation/maintenance of FOSS is futile. And corporates are RoI-driven. Charity will only go so far.

To improve the discovery of better alternatives to popular products and services, some of us are building a browser extension. It uses an in-page pop-up based on URL patterns to make community-curated suggestions: https://github.com/nileshtrivedi/better

Another great source for discovering FOSS projects is https://opensource.builders