I think people with objections to googles business model simply don’t join the company in the first place. We’re decades from Google+ and other various “oh maybe Google isn’t perfect” events, the advertising is a known entity.
There has been a shift, and people are reacting to it
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
Think about why he compares gypsies to wolves, and talks about "self-preservation".
You might want to be pedantic and try to say he's not comparing them to wolves. He is the one who put those two sentences next to each other. You can choose to ignore the thing that feels obvious to others.
I know a lot of people are decently close to DHH in their feelings on this issue. I think that being publicly loud about these opinions that most people keep to themselves simply leads to wondering what his _actual_ deep opinions are. Think about what you say in private compared to what you say in public, and consider that he is writing in public.
A sentiment being common or not is a bit besides the point about whether it's authoritarian or fascistic or whatever.
If you remove the context and the implication from his post, you can make the argument that it's "just" a post saying "enforce immigration laws".
The problem is that the context and the implications are part of his post. He is communicating who he is and what he believes, and for you it's mostly a question of whether you're going to listen to it.
This whole line of discussion is had about DHH in particular decently often, and I find it kinda funny because even beyond all of this I've always heard that he's just kind of a disagreeable person anyways. But I suppose this industry pulls in a certain kind of annoying person.
So in your mind there’s absolutely no subtextual message here in choosing wolves. It would have meant exactly the same thing if he’d chosen raccoons, or pigeons, or deer, or rabbits?
I think a lot of that is more "Tokyo" than "Japan" though. My general experience outside of the metropoolis (and even within Tokyo proper, there are good chunks that are properly dead beyond a certain time) is that the evenings are nice and dark.
This isn't even really limited to the countryside, plenty of decently large cities will have most all of their evening activity be focused on a handful of streets.
This is fine, of course! I do think a lot about how much of the image of Japan is mostly the image of Tokyo itself. Not the largest city in the world anymore but quite close.
Tokyo is def very cool though. Huge city that you can actually move around in easily enough means that no matter how microscopic of a subculture you belong to there'll be _some_ people out there in the same category. And very fun to walk around in. Really a great joy to just be able to walk in the middle of a street and not really worry about cars.
True although I think there’s too much of a correction whenever people bring up Tokyo vs Japan.
I’m grateful to live in Tokyo but if I didn’t live in Tokyo I wouldn’t live in Japan. I’m definitely open to a vacation home in the countryside.
I could see myself living in NYC (Manhattan specifically) but wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the US. Tokyo is big enough that you rarely have to leave and see the rest of the country. I don’t think we have to judge countries by their countrysides.
> I don’t think we have to judge countries by their countrysides.
My least favorite place in the US is Manhattan, and my least favorite place in Japan is Tokyo. If I couldn't judge a country by its countryside, I suspect I would hate most countries.
Yep, I live in Tokyo too and I love this city. However, one of the first things I did when I moved here was buy a car to travel and explore outside of Tokyo for the weekends.
> He talked about the desktop building blocks, basically the familiar WIMP model plus the desktop clipboard, as the way that users move data around. Expert users can move data around quickly, he said, but there's a problem: the desktop is stateless. He called this the curse of direct manipulation; there is no working memory to the desktop. ""If you copy a few too many things to the clipboard, oh sorry, it's gone"".
>
> Jenson theorized that the reason there are so many desktop environments, window managers, and Wayland compositors for Linux—as well as alternative clipboard managers—is because the desktop isn't quite working right for users. He thought it was really about working memory: ""How do I manage my data in such a way that I can remember it across all of these things and actually use it."" His perspective shifted to asking ""what would we do to working memory to improve the desktop UX?""
I feel this so much.
I think that there's a "better" windowing system where all of your stuff sticks around way more than it used to. Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task".
People have really leaned into coding harnesses + chat windows as a way of grouping together work. I think there's a more general idea in this space. Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me!
There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces (that I close out when I'm done). Desktop Environments that make this work nicely will be quite cool IMO
(A simple and dumb version of this is the BeOS "group various windows together, even though they aren't from the same application" stuff. Very cool stuff IMO
> Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task".
I feel this. When I first got to learn what a workspace was (in Eclipse, of all things), and I really drilled down into the English meaning of it (I'm Dutch), I thought about exactly what you're describing right now.
There's also a thing of wanting "http referer"-style things but at the desktop. I want things that tell me _from where_ I clicked into a page in the browser (like "oh you got here from Slack (at this spot)"
Desktop history, clipboard history... all associated to certain contexts. Would be quite nice IMO
Stateless desktop is a feature. Application state is something I have to mirror in my head to prevent applications from doing unwanted and surprising things.
IMO, even the clipboard metaphor is too much state. We already have the selection highlight, which has the nice benefit of being directly visible. This should be reduced to a single global selection highlight. Then copy and paste can be replaced by "duplicate highlighted selection here", eliminating the possibility of forgetting what's in the paste buffer.
Yeah I definitely understand the value of the stateless desktop.
I do think that, for example, the fact that browsers hold history is generally a useful thing, though, right? For me it's less about persisting the application state itself as it is about holding onto metadata for later inspection.
> Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me!
>
> There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces (that I close out when I'm done). Desktop Environments that make this work nicely will be quite cool IMO
>
> (A simple and dumb version of this is the BeOS "group various windows together, even though they aren't from the same application" stuff. Very cool stuff IMO
What you're describing sounds like it has been possible for a long time.
I've been doing it on my Linux desktop for decades. I throw things into workspaces which just ... stay open until I'm done with it. The same windows with the same layout and the same history and state, everything right where I left it. They stick around as long as they need to, which can be weeks, months, even years. I even have some desktops which have stuck around since the 1900s, though they do gradually change and evolve over time.
... and any windows from any program can be grouped together. Grouped into a desktop, or even grouped into a single window frame with tabs.
And nearly everything is automatically logged, so I have detailed history going back well into the past.
This stuff isn't in the big mainstream UIs, but it is at least possible with a bit of work to set it all up.
I don't know about the malleable software claim. Sure, people can build out their own thing. Malleable software in itself requires software that is designed to be malleable in the first place.
And perhaps people will not be willing to accept the initial friction that malleable software brings (see people who complain about Emacs or Salesforce or JIRA)... and end up just kinda churning indefinitely on re-implementing things over and over again.
"Internal IT teams" striking aback against SaaSes, perhaps. We'll see
I think it's an interesting thought experiment: could an LLM call be a "cheaper" grep?
Especially for deterministic activities it just feels impossible to imagine general LLM tech handling the problem better, despite everything being said.
But hey, tech is filled with "smashing the generalist hammer works better than the specialized tooling". Would be odd though!
One thing that's easy to miss about performance is that it depends on framing.
An example I like to give: optimizing a data processing program's runtime by 5x is obviously 5x speedup for everyone. But if, for some reason[0], this means it crashes and restarts more often, it stops looking like this to end users. If every restart means it needs to start from scratch, and it restarts 10 times on average now where it didn't restart before, the 5x speedup suddenly looks like 2x slowdown to end user.
In this sense, LLMs are already much more efficient than most CLI tools, by a combination of:
- User not having to remember the exact invocation, or even the name of the CLI tools
- LLM being able to run the CLI tools and chain them on its own
- LLM being able to self-correct in case it got things wrong, or when actual output show that user's idea was right, but the instructions were wrong
Prompting "okay, list those processes sorted by runtime and match them against these output files" is both faster to type than the actual commands, it also end-to-end completes much faster than doing it by hand.
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[0] - And I don't mean a bug. Say it's some batch processing run on a cluster with aggressive resource usage management; 5x speedup means it runs much hotter than before, which may put it on the top of "kill list" for when the cluster managing code needs to free up some resources.
I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)
I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
to be fair all CI providers I've had the pleasure of working with have gnarly performance profiles for the boxes they provide.
I don't think it's out of malice, but I do feel uncomfortable with the fact that the people who sell me the CI coordination software also sell me the minutes for the boxes that run the CI software. There's _some_ alignment of interests but not as much as I would want!
The same major memory makers got prosecuted for cartel behavior by the DoJ a little over 20 years ago[0].
One might say "well what specific law have they broken" and I don't know and I don't know if they have, but at the very least the power of the State _could_ be used to force behavioral changes in some ways or another.
I think people with objections to googles business model simply don’t join the company in the first place. We’re decades from Google+ and other various “oh maybe Google isn’t perfect” events, the advertising is a known entity.
There has been a shift, and people are reacting to it
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