notarobot123

The idea that the internet transcends material and social realities and that nations are now irrelevant seems like a pretty old-fashioned idea at this point.

Not as old-fashioned as the idea of "legacy states" for sure but perhaps less able to withstand the test of time.

The law is about information asymmetry. That doesn't prevent negotiation, it just changes the dynamics and power balance.

But asking yourself "can I trust this information?" is the baseline amount of cognitive load added to the interaction.

Depending on the level of trust or importance of the decision this may already be a fairly high bar to clear before being able to claim any overall reductions in the interactions itself.

It's a protest vote. Anti-fascist eco-fascism isn't a viable basis for the coherent governance of anything larger than an ecovilliage.

That said, it seems neither pragmatism nor ideological coherence is really necessary to hold power these days.

also in the UK

I am fully sympathetic with the struggle of universities but perhaps they shouldn't be spared the need to be more responsive to the political and economic climate.

Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" describes a world in which the academy is entirely sheltered from the real world and develops a culture of dependence, detachment and indifference. Do we want that world?

If we throw money at universities to keep doing what they've always done, we'll create institutions that exist only for their own sake and without any real purpose or value outside of a hedonistic pursuit of knowledge.

We should fund universities to serve the people, like the free university places in Scotland. We should fund research and innovation. We should fund the moral and cultural development of citizens and those invested in the future of the country.

But we should be careful we don't accidentally create a system that can't survive in a competitive and changing world.

Universities get a significant portion of their income from international students. Perhaps making them pay a little more for the externalities they create is fair.

I don't know... LLMs, drones, culture wars, nostalgia for monarchical rule - we're only really missing the replicators and nano-engineering at this point.

you forgot to add "no mistakes"

...and they are not using LLMs to help speed up design and analysis?

I'm no booster but this is most of what I currently spend tokens on so it's maybe not as absurd as it sounds. Maybe those gains are possible and without having to sacrifice serious code reviews too.

it's proposer-optimal but the receivers gets the best of those who haven't already found a better match

It's funny, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard fame) made PhotoCard - a very similar app around the same time:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-legend-bill-at...

I can't wait for the autotune remix of this.

Imagine if companies exposed access to their services via a discoverable uniform interface.

Each company would determine the range of actions a customer could perform in response to their request and current circumstances. A representation of state could be transferred between the company's server and whatever client the customer chooses to use. The customer would be free to interact with any of these services in a way that suited them via their chosen client.

Either that or we could kludge something together with MCP.

Similarly, programming is also a precise language of communication. Initially, we focused on direct machine behavior but every abstraction above the hardware (including assembly) has been to make that behavior legible to humans.

Developed notations and shared procedural abstractions have made thinking about computation more intentionally human and source control has established a protocol for conversing with other humans in the language of a program and changes to that program.

The moment just now feels like a neglecting of the idea of communication being central. If the program is a compile target but not sufficiently legible or if the conversation moves too quickly for us to keep up then we retain the effects of computation but loose its meaning as communication. We loose the understanding and the ability to develop and evolve further shared abstractions.

Open source programs could be more like motivated explanations of computation. For open source to survive, maybe we should start to make the distinction between free product distribution and programming as communication and community building.

...so lack of attention to detail as evidence of a focus on meaningful quality?

More generously: someone who resists new technologies due to their perceived harmful effects (economic but also social and environmental)

> vako-poku-piki-sino-dumi-wigo-bumo-subu-kuwu-suju-joku-wuru-libi-bafa-modu-pabu-zuro-kiva-givo-liju-pomu-ra

I like it. It feels like learning a magical incantation from some ancient lost language.

The browser-standards-or-bust moment has past, hasn't it?

If you want your app to work the same way across platforms, using browser defaults is not the way to achieve that.

If you want users to have a consistent experience within their browser across the web, I get it, but that's not how the Web has worked for a long long time.

I know when they say "such that ..."

Sounds good. They're encouraging others to join in but it'd be great to hear if this actually has an impact so far and how its worked out for HTMX. I imagine there are some interesting anecdotes about what actually happens when teams do this.

[Edit] just seen that OP is pitching this rather than practicing it. I wonder if any team actually do have a practice like this...

I assume by "orchestrated" you mean intended by the people involved in making them happen. Humans act in the world. Some people have power and influence that they bring to bear on their activities and desired outcomes. It's true.

That said, there's a tendency (that I think increases as we age) to want to explain everything in terms of order, control and power. Explaining away the world's complexities seems to be a pretty strong human trait.

Maybe the idea of a complex and uncertain world is just too uncomfortable for us to accept.

> sticky defaults... makes client authors the kingmakers.

Isn't this true of any protocol (to a greater or lesser degree)?

You may have developed the capacity for independent thought in that period.

perhaps themselves driven by global consumers culture that doesn't care how or where something was made as long as it's slightly cheaper.

The suffering of the slave isn't the only evil of slavery. What it does to the master is to alienate them from the creative process and turns them into a dependent consumer of the work of others. The master becomes detached from productive work and therefore dependent and less free themselves.

Digital homesteading is the essence of the IndieWeb. Building things with one's own resources and know-how is part of it's DNA, whether or not that is acknowledged.

Because it's anti-platform and pro-ownership, content is secondary to the means of distribution. It's why it is bound to be a tech-heavy sub-culture and never a real alternative to big platforms.

Sure, but code isn't the only barrier that's been lowered. A competent entrepreneurial team can also scale their sales, marketing and customer success workflows with AI.

I'm not saying business is easy now. I'm saying that a small team of smart people can do a whole lot more with the tools available to them. You still need strategy and vision (or the ability to copy someone else's playbook) but execution is a lot cheaper.

The risk for SaaS isn't that customers will build their own but that the barrier to entry for competitors is lower.

The Chorleywood process created mega bakeries that displaced regular bakeries because they changed the economics. AI is doing the same and fundamentally changing the economics of production. What used to take years and huge teams to build can be built by much smaller teams much faster.

SaaS isn't going to sublimate straight into consumer built tools but the boiling point for competition has gotten a lot lower.

What about design, build, marketing etc.?

I don't get why the maker market complains so much about the idea of businesses selling products at a healthy markup. Just because you know how the sausage was made doesn't mean that the logic of operating a business is any different to how it works in the consumer world.

If you're skilled and motivated enough to make it yourself, you might save some money. You'd loose a lot of time though and that's worth something too (perhaps a lot more).