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Being able to take a break from social media is one of the nobler goals we started building Murmel (https://murmel.social) with. It’s not an easy process, and we are far from finished, but our customers have already reported positive results back to us. Rather than scrolling on Twitter for hours, they now let the best of their Twitter timeline arrive in their inboxes once a day. Like the morning newspaper reading routine, I am hoping that we would be able to provide people with the option to disengage from the downward spiral of doom-scrolling, and instead, get the gist of all there is to know in one daily email digest.

Sad to see another blog that has no RSS feed :(

People, please, I am begging you - turn those back on. It's the only way we can stay up-to-date with your amazing content.

Anyway, this is what I came to say. A great post, full of insights. We have discovered quite a few of them ourselves, while building https://murmel.social, and I envy the author a little for publishing the knowledge first. Next time ;)

It makes me so happy to see projects like this one get developed. A few months back, we started working on a pet project with a similar idea - to help people dissociate the good and honest writing on Twitter from all the links, threads, mentions, hashtags, and other engagement tactics. We called it BARE (https://bare.tw) and it offers an extremely spartan look over one's Twitter timeline. As TWiT's Leo Laporte called it "it shows you all the boring stuff."

I believe that with projects like SlowSocial and ours, we will help people find hidden gems among the "boring stuff."

Kudos, and will be happy to collaborate on further ideas.

What's next? Someone coming after you, because your have their IP in your server logs?

I understand the privacy sentiment, but I find this the opposite of how you beat a giant. The proper way for Germany and the rest of Europe should be the creation of a thriving environment of viable, privacy-aware FAANG competitors. Not putting barriers in every which way.

AroundAWorld was the first app I built using Phoenix LiveView in the middle of last year. It had its heyday during the second lockdown wave of 2020, then it became largely fogotten. I'd brought it down for a few months, but thought it'd be a cool idea to grab a new domain and put it back online at least during Christmas.

Happy holidays!

BARE grew out of the idea to reduce one's Twitter timeline to bare tweets - blog-post-like writings devoid of media, links, hashtags, or any social interaction mechanics. Once you sign up with BARE, it will continuously check your Twitter timeline and only show you the long-form text-based tweets in it. Like a good old blog reader.

But why do that, you may ask? What's the point?

Because, we believe that this is one of the easiest ways to discover people's true personality, beneath the chatter and and social media clickbait. It is also a naturally distraction-free method to keep oneself concentrated over the content without the urge to skim and keep scrolling down. One of the easiest ways to evoke concentration is to reduce the sources of distraction.

Is anybody actually writing such tweets? A lot of people. Check the tiny portion we follow here: https://bare.tw/ and discover the ones in your timeline by signing up.

It’s an insightful article, but I can’t get around the fact that almost every paragraph contains subtle typos. Makes me wonder, whether the author bothered to do a final pass on the text, or just dumped everything out of his mind, and hit Publish.

I know this will sound like a product pitch, but please, bear with me. One of the reasons we set out to create our service Murmel(https://murmel.social/) was because we were pissed off reading the same crappy story retold by ten different sources. On top of it all, each story tells you the version its author wants you to see, but rarely shows you all sides of the picture.

What we wanted to give people was a little bit more context. We wanted to abstract away from stories being distinctly left or right-wing. Instead, we simply ranked the stories that a large group of people on Twitter thinks we should be reading, and mashed the Twitter discussion into each story.

This way at least, you can tell from the discussion whether a story is worth reading: https://murmel.social/top

Elixir inspired me to try and replicate pipes in Go, using the upcoming generic type parameters

I know someone working on a sustainable alternative in this space. Still in the trying-to-figure-out-the-market-size phase, so any input is appreciated: https://tally.so/r/w54RP3

Great to hear! This only encourages me to continue writing my book on generic programming with Go (https://gumroad.com/l/generic-golang)

Four. Mostly, small ideas that I’m hoping would evolve into something bigger. I do agree thought that it leads to a lack of focus at times.

https://podradio.live https://networkd.eu https://arounda.world https://3by3.app

Until a few days ago, I hadn't touched PHP for nearly 10 years. I was surprised to see so many new things. There is no doubt that its ecosystem is still massive and will continue to be so for decades ahead. What I am wondering though, is whether some of the old "ghosts" plaguing the language have been removed or replaced with something better.

Anyone experienced enough to comment on that?

They are safer in many respects, as there is no “pointer arithmetic”, for example. Check this article out: https://dave.cheney.net/2014/03/17/pointers-in-go

> This short book will introduce novice and experienced Go programmers to the beautiful world of algorithmic art and computer graphics. If you are looking for new areas to apply your favorite language, check it out!

The TL;DR you should be looking for:

> all of this emphasises the fact that unless you have some super-niche use-case in mind, it's actually a better idea to choose your framework based upon ergonomics and features, rather than speed.

my TL;DR of the entire article:

> Although the evidence is sparse, I feel that you shouldn't start with microservices unless you have *reasonable experience of building a microservices system* in the team.

I took a temporary break from leisure-time coding, in order to finish writing my book on drawing algorithmic art with Go: https://leanpub.com/generative-art-in-golang

It's every other week, yeah.

Funny, the same word can actually mean both: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biweekly

Thanks! Point taken.

Subscribe for the first issue, or check out previous ones one my site: https://preslav.me/tag/this-week-in-elixir-and-erlang/

This looks promising. I would be interested to learn more about the experience you have had while building this service.

Yesterday, I released https://goart.netlify.app It's an experiment at using WASM-compiled Go code to create complex generative art drawings in the browser. Sounds cool, but I have had quite a few unexpected issues while building it. Especially, the part about having to use Web Workers to do the communication to and from the WASM instance.

In preparation for my upcoming book: https://preslav.me/generative-art-in-golang/ I have built this simple proof-of concept. The idea was to grab one of my sketch generators and export it to WASM, for use inside a Web browser.

Does it work? Kind of. Is it practical? Not really sure. While it does work, there are a few challenges that make it a second-tier solution, in my view. I’ll discuss all those in my book.

Here are three of mine:

- https://linqable.pro/ - https://podradio.live - https://arounda.world/

All three built in 2020 with the awesome Elixir Phoenix. Hopefully, at least one of them will take off in 2021.

> “[...] the very important never feels urgent. Instead, most things which feel urgent are important for someone else, not for you.”

What is the USP? Paying per file, instead of per hour of transcription / monthly subscription? Also, what are you using for the transcriptions - GCP, or AWS?

AROUNDAWORLD originated as a Phoenix LiveView demo app that we built over a couple of weekends. A simple idea with a compelling mission - get as many people people as possible to "walk" around the world, in the comfort of their homes. In a year plagued by pandemics, decaying democracy, and incessant lockdowns, we wanted to get people all around the world to roll their sleeves and work together again. Even in a challenge, as silly as this one.

Best of luck with the book! Will make sure to be on the line for when it comes out.