tommorris

Because I'm using my desktop for eight hours a day. I have media keys. I need to use the audio functionality on my computer (for phone calls/video calls etc.)

Also, because my laptop has a much more usable interface (keyboard and mouse) than my phone.

If you think about it as "bookmarking" - no, don't care. Bookmarking usually implies a manual, fragile process.

Being half way through on iOS, then being able to continue listening exactly at the same point on MacOS - yes. That's something iTunes and the iPod supported since day zero, and nobody else has yet properly replicated. And it's really useful if you listen to podcasts longer than about five minutes long.

> Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

There's an effort to try and build some standards for open web sharing at indieweb.org - cross-post comments, syndication to existing social networks. A few of those standards have now been given the W3C stamp (MicroPub, WebMention).

There's some services built on top of it like WithKnown, MicroBlog and people building on top of WordPress, building their own site and so on.

The founding principle of that community (build what fixes your problem, don't try and solve everyone's problems) keeps it quite well focussed.

Also, payment is very culturally specific.

In Brazil, Uber required drivers to accept cash payment having seen that it was successful in other countries like India. Suddenly carjackers realised that Uber cars were basically cash machines on wheels and so armed robbery, murder and mayhem ensued.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/brazils-love-affa...

The Apple Design Awards are a thing.

They just announced some 2017 ones recently.

https://developer.apple.com/design/awards/

Of course the point stands. Shareholders don't exactly care whether you win design awards unless it brings in cash money.

> And why would any site use the same URIs for API endpoints and frontend/view navigation places?

Because they are the same underlying thing...

Bitcoin doesn't solve the problem, because you then still need to solve the "how do you convince people to buy the Bitcoins when they can just use a credit/debit card" (you can get pre-paid MasterCards in convenience stores across the world) and the "how do you actually get people to buy the Bitcoins" problem - the answer to the latter currently seems to be (a) buying it off some slightly disreputable website that you find by asking on Reddit, or (b) localbitcoins, where you agree to meet some random person in a car park or shopping centre and exchange cash for BTC. Not shady at all.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency literally solves nothing in the app payment use case.

At one point, I heard Apple used to require you to fax a certified copy of legal documents relating to your company in order to open an App Store developer account.

Also, fax is still used for a lot of financial and legal stuff generally, especially in countries with less developed Internet infrastructure.

Sure, that is a potential issue with the argument. But the broader argument is that you can't make crypto go away by wishing. You can't unpublish bcrypt, libsodium, OTR, Signal Protocol, and you certainly can't unpublish the maths they are based on.

All you are really doing is making it inconvenient for normal, law-abiding folk to use strong crypto. A suitably motivated attacker (think ISIS, al-Qaeda etc.) could adapt to a world without crypto using some kind of steganographic approach (three poop emojis and a Miley Cyrus gif = blow the building up!). Every approach you take could be manipulated by the bad guys to their own advantage.

ISIS have already built their own chat application, allegedly, and distribute the APK privately. If the government ban e2e crypto in apps like WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram, expect to see more such apps from groups who politicians can't exactly summon into their offices for a chat.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/16/isis-app/

> What kind of democracy is that?

A poorly educated one. But still a democracy.

MediaWiki's original parser is a nasty pile of PHP and regex, but there's a new officially supported parser you can use called Parsoid. It's used extensively in production on Wikimedia sites and basically does MediaWiki wikitext to HTML roundtrip.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid

If I were parsing lots of MediaWiki wikitext, I'd put Parsoid at the top of the list as the rest seem incomplete or unsupported.

> Why build complicated native applications when a thinly wrapped SPA in Electron will be indistinguishable to the customer?

I just fired up Atom and various vim versions.

Atom uses 225.8 MB of RAM without any documents open.

MacVim uses 39.8 MB without any documents open.

Console vim uses 23.3 MB.

Console neovim uses 10.0 MB.

25x memory usage differences seem pretty distinguishable to me, especially in an application used to read and write plain text.

Things are a lot better now that you can do OSA scripting in JavaScript. I have a few OSA-JS scripts that are in my crontab. If I had to write AS rather than JS, I wouldn't bother.

I expect adding yet more lines of code will reduce vulnerabilities.

TextMate had (has?) a "Copy as RTF" format which I used to use to copy code into slides. But, yes, more editors doing this is handy.

For Wikipedia, if you aren't logged in (with an editor's account etc.) you are hitting a cache most of the time.

And it isn't so much for the bandwidth saving, more the saving in CPU time in rendering the page up from the Wikitext source, which can be substantial. Some very big pages used to take 2-3 minutes to render because Wikitext is a rather slow ugly programming language pretending to be a document format. (A lot has been sped up after a lot of the rendering guts got moved to Lua.)

That's just in the US though. There's a whole world out there that is not the United States.

The British Medical Association certainly claims to be a trade union.

https://www.bma.org.uk/about-us/bma-as-a-trade-union

And they have engaged in collective action - e.g. the junior doctors strike.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/01/what-you-nee...

> There is something called the Ballmer Peak

Wait, we're citing XKCD comics now as if they are peer-reviewed scientific journals?

I'm not sure it does make onboarding trivial. How do I join WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram with an iPad or iPod Touch? A laptop? A handheld gaming console like a PlayStation Vita? I can't sign up for any of these services without a phone and a phone number. Sorry, my phone number is a legacy communication layer that should just be replaced by the Internet.

When I went to Brazil last year, I switched the SIM in my phone from a UK one to a Brazilian pay-as-you-go SIM. WhatsApp said "oh, you've changed SIM, do you still want to use your existing (UK) number?" I guess that's okay behaviour. Does Signal do this? Does Telegram do this? I don't know. I have to keep track of what goes on when I change my SIM. That's a layer violation. The network I use to access the Internet shouldn't affect the behaviour of my messaging app. If I'm chatting to my friends, it shouldn't matter whether I have a UK SIM, a Brazilian SIM or no SIM at all.

What if I move from the UK to Brazil permanently and get a long-term mobile contract? Shall I still use my UK number for WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram or should I use a Brazilian one? Will I lose my contacts? Will they stop being able to talk to me because my number has changed? I don't know. That's pointless administrative overhead.

What if I let my pay-as-you-go number go stale? If you don't make a call or text for six months or so, the mobile network may disconnect your number. At some point, they'll reassign that number. Can that person now access my WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram? Okay, well, maybe we put a secondary password on it like Telegram to stop the account getting hacked if I lose access to the mobile number. Now the person who inherits my phone number can't set up their own Telegram account because I'm already "squatting" the old number.

This is ridiculous to me. It's like an Internet without DNS, where we have to manually keep track of each other's IP addresses. Nasty legacy phone network shit. Don't need it, don't want to deal with it.

> Better to move sensitive conversations to things like Signal, WhatsApp, or Wire

Just download an app that requires you to register with your phone number and then hand out your phone number to anyone you want to chat to. I mean, all the NSA-proof crypto is fantastic, but they didn't exactly test it with anyone who has had to worry about less theoretical non-state actors like, oh, jealous exes, abusive partners, creepy Tinder dates and so on.

Why do I need to give someone my phone number to use an IP-based chat service?

Then you need to switch to Dutch mode...

I've spoken to American friends about the Mail. They mostly read it for the celebrity/gossip stories rather than relying on it for serious news.

MailOnline is far less political and far more celebrity and gossip driven than the print edition.

Long podcast interview with Simon Tam that's well worth listening to if you are interested in IP law - http://openargs.com/oa33-interview-slants/

There's so much magical tech bullshit thinking embedded in "if people aren't donating via PayPal, switching to Bitcoin is going to make them donate even though Bitcoin is a lot fucking harder to use than PayPal".

Well, to be fair, as the spec notes, you can already fingerprint on speed by timing how long an AJAX call takes.

Also, "on a shit home DSL connection" doesn't really distinguish me from millions of other UK residents.

There is a proposed API for that.

https://wicg.github.io/netinfo/

And like most such APIs, it has been kicked around for a long time and it has only been adopted by Chromium on Android, ChromeOS and iOS. It'd be great if it were more widely adopted...

I'd suggest supplementing Russell's History. Russell is an engaging writer but he does have some pretty strong biases. Understand that Russell's history was written when he was short of time and money, having just been banned from lecturing at the City College of New York (on the grounds of morality).

Anthony Kenny's four volume history of philosophy is broader, though not without fault. The most authoritative history of Western philosophy is Frederick Copleston's nine volume series, but that might be a bit too much of a good thing for most people.

Do read Russell, but remember he has a whole sack of biases.

Berlin provides an excellent review of Russell's History: https://culturalapparatus.wordpress.com/a-history-of-western...

Meta-virtue signalling: signalling that you are smarter and better informed by everyone else by dismissing anything anybody else does, however well intentioned, as mere virtue signalling.

> You would need to express the semantic relationships within the data, like "comment-replied-to"

Like https://indieweb.org/in-reply-to ?