Useful suggestion, thank you.
744 karma · joined August 6, 2012
That said I dislike JS as a language and the environment is restrictive. The only way to support debugging is console messages or through Safari web inspector. I’d love to do better.
How would something like Fennel work in this context as a replacement for JS & the bridge?
You’ve struggled to make things work on your own and the good news is it’s incredibly hard to do so, it’s not you.
I think it’s worth either broadening your skill set beyond development or looking for partners who complement you.
I’d also recommend exercises in strategic positioning and value proposition design to help target viable markets with a desirable product. Pointers available on request.
I would agree with the authors assertion that Roam is well suited to write-once/read-maybe. I certainly spend far less time reviewing notes than I ever imagined I would (that might be related to Roam's poor search/explore experience). Where I diverge from the author is that I find the Daily Notes page answers the question of where do I put this?
I have a daily notes template that includes headings:
TODO
Talking With
Found This
Thinking About
Working On
Completed
Every day a new slate, but ordered around the same core principles. At each heading I use tags, for example under [[Talking With]] might come a heading [[Some one]] & [[Someone else]] from [[Foo Corp]] and then proceed to take notes under that. If I can I will [[topic]] things but if the notes are contemporaneous that can be difficult. Under [[Thinking About]] are any of a set of headings I am current musing on, along with a fragmentary thought I just had. If I ever do review I most likely jump off from the [[Thinking About]] tag.
This allows me not to worry about where to put things but, for example, I can usually find notes of sessions with clients quite easily and branch out from there if I want to follow a train of thought.
As time has gone by I've found the product remains useful although my hope for it and the company is not high.
>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.
As I have mentioned in several other comments, there is nothing wrong with RSS2.0 the protocol (at least nothing that wasn't also wrong with it in 2003).
Without being funny about it, perspective is important.
In 2003/4 publishing via RSS was a nascent thing. Blogs did it, but blogging was still in it's infancy. Some corporations were starting to do it, and were being encouraged to share value through RSS feeds.
There were aggregators (we built one, but there were several) that were starting to show what you could do by bringing these disparate content streams together. We were also having a little susccess in persuading companies to encourage their employees at all levels to blog and to create internal aggregators.
But, over time, applications like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord have taken the momentum. Facebook, to pick one example, has at present 2.85 billion active users, many of them posting content which is not available outside Facebook. Twitter had RSS feeds but discontinued them. (Additionally, many blogs which do provide RSS feeds only provide excerpts of the content intended to draw you to their website & adverts).
You can't aggregate this content. These systems are also closed over creating, you use the tools they provide or you don't play. Want to do an experiment with how you create Facebook content? You can't. Facebook/Twitter reserve that to themselves.
If you try and start a project now you will struggle with the fact that a huge % of your potential userbase are already in Facebook, Twitter, etc… and captured there.
So while RSS still works and, yes, my blog still has an RSS feed, and you can read it in your RSS reader of choice, this is not the same situation as it was back then. And the futures that seemed possible from there do not seem possible from here.
I don't know, perhaps it's only with the perspective of being there that this feels this way.
It's also worth remembering that they are a relatively new phenomenon developed in response to the snooping. There was a long period where companies like Facebook had it all their own way. And this is the period in which the damage was mostly done.
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.
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 saw amazing possibilities arising out of individuals publishing their content, increasing use of micro-formats to add semantic information, and layering of services. That future didn't happen.
That's what I am sad about.
Alas, most of my email archive from that period disappeared in the intervening years. I'd love to be reminded of what we were talking about.
m@t
I've put this in other comments but, briefly, it's not the protocol RSS that has a problem. It's the RSS-enabled future that we imagined back in the early 00's that didn't happen. Those opportunities for connecting things together via content (esp. around the RSS micro-formats work that was going on) disappeared when content got swallowed by advserisers.
The RSS protocol works as well as it ever did. I'm not mourning the protocol. And yes there are sites that do publish feeds, some even full-feeds but many just excerpts.
What I am mourning is the future where people published for themselves and shared content via RSS. But companies that depend upon advertising are inimical to that future and they won (at least for now).
It's that future that I mourn for.
In 2003/4 which is the period I was writing about there was no Facebook or Twitter and online advertising was not the business it is now. Although publishing via RSS was still relatively new and not well adopted it seemed like a viable way of plugging content together.
Now so much content is in silo's. There are no usable feeds from anyone who cares about advertising because they don't want you to have their content, they want to capture you.
That's what I am getting at. Not whether you can still read some sites that continue to support RSS in a reader.
Reading what you've written I wonder if this is about configuration rather than the nature of a library starting a process per se.
In my case there is no configuration, the agent state is a pure-counter, I think firing it off is harmless as other users of the library would just bump the counter value. Your point about testing is a subtle one, I'm not 100% sure I have the right mental picture yet (something I struggle with most of the time anyway).
What I think you are getting at is a library starting a process that does have configuration around how it works, should be less automatic giving the user a chance to make choices about how it works.
Do I have that right?
My understand is not yet sophisticated enough to follow your point about "not being able to start mutiple copies of the dependency with different configurations".
Do you have any explanatory examples that could help me (and presumably others like me)? Thanks. m@t
In other langauges (even in Clojure, where I have a lot more experience) there are mutable global variables that you can use for these purposes. Unless I missed them then in Elixir/Erlang there are not.
Elixir/Erlangs approach to mutable state is the process. It doesn't matter what your specific application of shared mutable state happens to be.
We could discuss how any specific use case is more-or-less performant, but I would conjecture that someone who cared signficantly more about low-level performance over other things (e.g. systemic robustness) probably doesn't start with a BEAM language.
I assumed that, with Elixir macro support, someone could implement protocols with full pattern matching. Just way above my current pay grade!
That said, now I've dug in and really used it for solving some problems I am finding it an elegant and enjoyable experience.
I'd happily use either although I think Elixir has a particular fit to web applications.
I too found the "." syntax for anonymous functions a bit jarring at first. Why treat them differently? In practice I don't even notice it now. It's never been confusing, it's just a wart.
Also, I found the one-struct-per-module thing a bit odd to begin with but in practice it makes a lot of sense. Also since you can put modules inside modules it's no encumberance if you want to declare a number of related structs. Again, once I was used to it I apprecitated the simplicity.
I disagree with your characterisation: I perceive no "class-based"'ness about Elixir. Do you have some examples? Perhaps there is somethign I have missed. So far, given that it's not exposing a class based system underneath, Elixir has seemed even further from this than Clojure.
And I have, in general, found the tooling support friendlier for Elixir. The only thing that I really gripe about is the inability to communicate between editor and REPL.