mkotowski

> the only reasons we are still relevant today is for three reasons

Then how we automate creation of the standards? Don’t get me wrong, but now we aren’t punching holes in cards. In the future, people probably won’t be doing a lot of things, which are now typical menial tasks too hard or cheap to automate. As long as an AI with capabilities of reasoning and abstract thought comparable to a human isn’t here, there always will be a layer of tasks that is impossible to automate for one reason or another. Then it was card punching, now it is gluing APIs together.

Automation is mostly useful when you have a very narrowly defined process/standard with little variation over time. Unfortunately, this also requires for the one requesting the automation to know exactly what they want to get at the end of the process. How would one automate creation of a tool fitted to the particular way some business is operating? Video game development? Fixing badly documented code? Granted, many parts of those processes can be, and probably already are, automated away. But there are almost always elements that require a higher level understanding of the whole context these projects exist in.

I would equate it more to a hairdresser having switched from using scissors solely to being able to use a hair clipper. Their work was partially automated by a machine, but the process still is overseen by a human being.

In the case of Ubuntu system with Gnome/Xfce4/KDE/LXDE: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ComposeKey

As for other distributions, unfortunately I have no idea, but I would hazard a guess the right settings (if present) should be in similar places relating to keyboard setup.

In my case (AltGr similarly reserved for (mostly) Polish specific letters), I set it to the right Ctrl key, though keys like CapsLock and Menu are also good candidates.

Actually, WinCompose started as an AHK script, so your conclusion isn't far off.

Compose key — and by extension WinCompose — is used as a mnemonic shortcut for various characters, both predefined and custom.

For example, I am using WinCompose right now: … ’ č ß ɐ ə ” « ʌ × þ ð n’t ď ɥ. All the characters inserted without leaving hands off keyboard.

As far as I know, there is no built-in keyboard on Windows with that kind of functionality (the emoji keyboard under `Win+.` coming close, but with no customization and more centered on inputting singular characters rather than blending in with normal keyboard usage).

Well, at least it wasn’t at the level of pain of getting any IME to work on Linux (not that Windows is much better in that regard…).

Okay, so then people will start to invest in gold. A cap on raw materials? Let’s keep a herd of cattle or two. And ad nauseam.

As someone from a post-communist country: when you put a limit on capital, another form of accumulating one will be created. Some people will be more able and motivated to get the new form of the value, others will be less able or simply not interested in it, some will inherit it over time. And we will end almost exactly where we had begun.

Limiting ways to accumulate wealth will not get rid of the desire to do so. Such a law will only force it to change the way it is manifesting.

> As in, to describe actual human slavery?

Sorry, but I do not understand the question. Do you mean as to distinguish slavery relationship in logical systems (as with databases) versus human relations? If so, that wasn’t my intention.

What I was talking about was more about a euphemism replacing an actual word, as with taboo avoidance:

> This terminology for the animal originated as a taboo avoidance term: proto-Germanic tribes replaced their original word for bear — arkto — with this euphemistic expression out of fear that speaking the animal's true name might cause it to appear. According to author Ralph Keyes, this is the oldest known euphemism. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear#Etymology

Having MathML being XML based plays rather nicely with both HTML and SVG. And I am saying that while not being exactly a fan of XML-based formats.

> The initial vision of MathML was that people would write it in a WYSIWYG editor (since it’s far too verbose to write by hand), but that grossly misjudged users’ preferences

To be honest, it probably depends heavily on a particular audience. I know people who barely wraps their heads around the concept of BBCode, and those (although a much smaller group) who would probably advocate for exchanging Microsoft Word for a LaTeX editor. Most people out here are probably completely content with a WYSIWYG editor and don’t care about the inner mechanism of its implementation as long as it gives an expected effect for them.

> As promised, after a short break, we have also renewed our work on upstreaming MathML-Core in Chromium. […] You can try these for yourself in Chrome canary by enabling experimental web platform features.

Finally! The lack of MathML support in Chromium based browsers was quite frustrating to me. Though, it will be probably still quite a lot of time before the libraries like MathJax and KaTeX became redundant for basic use cases.

Interestingly enough, the syntax of this reinvented CSS reminds me of an old style sheet language proposal created by Bert Bos in March 1995 [0]:

``` […] id: !ID language: !LANG *target: !ID

! Create a default margin of 3 em ! HTML.leftindent: 3.0 HTML.justify: full […] ```

[0]: https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/archive/odur.let.rug.nl/~ber...

From the front page:

> We've decided to develop Assembler CSS as a reaction to the current state of the ecosystem, not just as a solution to our company's needs.

I cannot comment on the company’s internal needs but, to be honest, I would consider the need to reinvent the wheel with custom attributes for styling to be one of the problems with today’s JavaScript ecosystem. And having a styling framework that only works with JavaScript turned on seems like a bad idea, even for single page applications.

Which in this case is doubly ironic, because pirates and buccaneers were exactly the group that had kept the slave trade alive even after it was officially banned in many places, if my limited knowledge on the Atlantic slave trade is correct.

It would be quite ironic if, after all those changes, the words “primary” and “secondary” would simply become the synonyms of “master” and “slave”.

And it wouldn’t be even that improbable, in my opinion at least. In the end, in many languages the word “figuratively” was so overused as a stand in for “literally”, that it became it informal synonym (I know for sure that it is a thing in both English and Polish, but it is probably more widespread). If words of completely opposite meaning can be blurred that way, it wouldn’t be so strange for that effect to emerge as a case of euphemism.

To be fair, even if all the software would be open source, one can not simply have both time and mastery level required to improve the programs one uses.

Seems to be the deliberate choice to delay automatic update for now. From the release notes:

> Thunderbird version 91.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as an upgrade from Thunderbird version 78 or earlier. *A future release will provide updates from earlier versions.*

I sometimes wonder how much there could be done for people in need of an actual form of help if all that energy to change unrelated words because someone is triggered by them went into a more useful endeavor.

And beyond that, maybe it is because I am not a native speaker, but isn’t “primary” less clear than “master” in this context? `Master` suggest control/mastery over something, but `primary` rather focuses on importance/order of things, at least in my head.

I am trying to say that over eagerness in searching for a crime where there is none could cause more damage than it is worth. Those committing the crimes would quickly switch to other methods, but those innocent would be caught by accident.

I am also not saying that such people should be left free and unpunished, but that the method proposed could cause far more bad than good, in my humble opinion of course.

A legal system of some kind is obviously necessary, but using argument of thinking about `insert a group of people you should care about` can easily lead to abuse of the established laws.

I have no idea how it works in other countries, but in Poland there are publicly accessible `.csv` files with data about names and surnames in the PESEL system (the ID assigned to people with Polish citizenship) since its creation. A double surname would be marked as a separate entry. If something like this exists in other countries, checking the rarity of a combination of surnames would be quite easy.

Yes, I read the article. All I said is that while Bitcoin resolves some issues, its use presents many more.

> The risk she perceives with Apple is that they will falsely accuse people of crime.

In my country, there was not so long ago a case of a person wrongly accused of murder[0]. He spent 18 years in prison, despite there being no convincing evidence of him committing the crime. The people invested in the case wanted to have a scapegoat ASAP. Cases related to pedophilia are often very emotionally-charged, given the nature of the crimes. It can easily lead to hastily made decisions that can ruin many lives.

> Not to mention how infinitely unlikely it is that _several_ of your photos would be similar enough to known abusive material to be flagged.

Given enough time and enough attempts, there still is a possibility of something like that occurring. And this is with an assumption that the algorithm used will be correctly implemented with no false positives at all – something that I doubt even a manual analysis by humans would be able to achieve given the volume of data to check.

[0]: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawa_Tomasza_Komendy (in Polish)

On the other hand, using Bitcoin means that there is no realistic protection against theft and unavoidable mistakes. Maintaining a business without a way to correct mistakes and any kind of protection against scams seems to be hard to implement in practice.

From my own experience: search for blogs of favorite writers, observe aggregate sites like Hacker News and Reddit for authors with a style that resonates with you (subreddits of niche topics are often surprisingly rich in a good content), search for niche topics that are of interest to you, ask friends about any interesting content.

Ironically, I think that in this case, an RSS reader being an electron app wouldn’t be so unreasonable. Especially if the content is on the more interactive side. Although, a bigger focus on security would be required toward the scripted content.

For websites without an RSS feed, you can try to generate one using self-hosting RSS Bridge[1]. There are some instances with open access, though supposedly some may work more reliably than others.

[1]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

To be honest, I am still missing the point of the article. Let's compare emails and RSS: both are protocols, and both depend on the additional tools to make them more use-friendly (at least, I doubt if anybody reads raw RSS feeds). The similarity also doesn’t end here: both are regularly announced as dead and antiquated, but both somehow still stand strong.

> What is dead, or at least like Arthur, waiting for the right moment to come back is the idea of RSS as a system for connecting content streams together and building higher order services on top.

The closest to it is the situation with the podcast ecosystem, which if I recall correctly depends heavily on RSS feeds to propagate podcasts’ playlists.

> When too much thought & conversation is captured inside Facebook, Twitter, Slack and all these other services who depend upon owning you & your content, the RSS system cannot thrive.

I agree that information capture by various social media is quite troubling. I am currently worried the most about all development-related discussion in many minor projects and communities (not only programming-related) switching over to Discord, of all things.

Despite this, I disagree with the assessment that it is a major bottleneck for the RSS ecosystem. I have never used Google Reader, so I don’t have any kind of before and after perspective, but in my humble opinion RSS is a standard that is in quite a good condition overall. Despite social medias’ walled garden approach and greater focus on instant messaging than blogging, I rarely stumble upon a website with content of episodic nature without any kind of RSS feed. The only significant exceptions are YouTube and Twitter.

> I saw amazing possibilities arising out of individuals publishing their content, […], and layering of services. That future didn't happen.

The thing you describe reminds me more of something akin to Mastodon and ActivityPub (albeit I never used any platform depending on it). From what I remember about ActivityPub was that it was designed from ground-up as both a protocol and an extendable system to plug into as a clear alternative to walled-garden design. From what I gather, RSS was never meant to be that.

How such a system based on RSS only would even look like?

> […] increasing use of micro-formats to add semantic information, […]

Isn’t it basically what JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa do? With a bonus of not being tied to any walled garden (that I am aware of). Though I suppose having a way to use them in a more automatic way would be nice.

> When I hear other people get common but foreign names […] wrong, I grimace too.

To be honest, this seems as one of the worst ways to handle such situations. Feeling distraught over an imprecise pronunciation feels like something to get rid of rather than accepting as a norm.

And I am saying this as someone with a slight speech impediment using one of the more consonant cluster-rich languages on the continent. I would have to be delusional to expect someone from an English-speaking country to pronounce names such as Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz on first or even second try.

Also, how do you decide which names are common? Not trying to be rude, but this can easily depend on from where someone is coming from and their age/generation. Names popular in the generation of my grandparents sometimes are completely absent from my own and rarely written down.

This all also comes with the prerequisite that a person in question still uses the original pronunciation and not one adapted to the dominant language in the region.

Less common than it used to be, but still happens. Mostly when writing in a hurry (of course without auto-correction turned on) or interacting with older systems and applications. Also, it is so rare to use Polish letters in a URL, that if you were to dictate one based on a Polish word(s) most people would simply spell it without them (ł → l, ą → a, etc.).

By the way, never try to use Polish letters in a Windows username. It works, but every once in a while something third-party or rarely used breaks unexpectedly.

I wouldn't be so strict with it to be honest — it is still a rule that is internally consistent, and as far as I know it lacks any significant exceptions.

It is quite funny, because when I was learning English, it was so bizarre that the first-person pronoun was only one letter (putting aside the required capitalization). On the other hand, having to write and instead of i still seems quite unwieldy to me.