Yyyep! That’s what this mind rot gets you!

Because the office is an awful thing in so many ways. Perhaps nice to visit occasionally. But to be forced to live there!? Fucking trash society.

EDIT: I’m agreeing with you here. My tone was probably confusingly aggressive. I just meant to add the idea that managers wouldn’t even know if WFH was good or bad let alone know whether you should keep your full pay.

How about we decide on what doing the job actually is, in a way that can reasonably be measured, and then see if we can do it better from home or the office?!

I’ve always felt that the elephant in the room on this is that remote work highlights the incompetence of management. And so instead of embracing the notion that remote work can work well provided the work force is well orchestrated, they’ve embraced fear mongering around uncontrolled labour.

I mean he’s walking right into this isn’t he!

Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.

Yea sure, we all know this. But we’re talking about software here. Not to be too snarky, but the part you actually use. The differences might not be worth it to you, or maybe you need a gaming PC, but for some, it’s just fine.

I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.

Yea … you can just use a Mac.

I switched … back in 2006 after being fed up with MS BS. Haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve had 2 laptops. That’s it.

The current one is getting old now, sadly, but part of the trick with Apple is timing your purchases for when they kinda nail the product in the particular design cycle. Don’t buy when they do something new for the first time, aim for near the end of a design cycle generally. And don’t get base specs, add RAM and disk space (perhaps through extended 3rd party devices). And their machines can be very useful for quite a while.

Of course there’s Linux, but you’ll know if you’re ready for that.

This development worries me far more than anything I’ve read about LLM advancements in quite some time.

Yea. Nice pickup.

Only thing I’ve seen that works for combatting AI slop take over is the idea that the value of doing some things is the doing itself, not the product. It seems to cut through the consumerism and metric driven capitalism that has gotten us here, while retaining an anti-bullshit-jobs position.

well the central site of the web ring could be searched for any particular page that’s part of the ring, and that search could be surfaced on any page that’s part of the ring.

The full set of pages could be decentralised and cached across all members for robustness, and even include each page’s own description and recommendations for every other page if they like.

And then, of course … rings of webrings with as many levels of aggregation as people are interested in maintaining, again with decentralised caches of pages, their links and descriptions (all human curated of course) that can all be searched whenever a member page or aggregating page opts into it.

Tech capabilities have advanced since the 90s enough now that basic text search in a web page over a small data set is not hard or too much to ask.

And nested rings of rings of rings are scalable because at each level the data will just be links (and descriptions or names if available) while it would be on the user to navigate the various layers however they wish until they find something they’re interested in.

Sorry … I don’t know what that is

I mean, the search doesn’t have to be centralised at all … basic search facilities could include the text search in the browser for any page, but made more user friendly and just for the webring you’re navigating or something.

It was never broke, why fix it?

Totally fair! I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about! I’m just riffing on what I suspect would work for me, but also motivated by what I feel is a relatively urgent need to create some robust and diverse human curation of the internet. So in a way I’m not really interested in remaking web rings, but more coming from the perspective of what else can be done with the same general idea along side webrings.

I’m aware of it (and while not being super enthused about it, I can my personal interest growing over time as the internet keeps tracking the way it is).

But how does it help with a page recommendation system? Is there a strong culture of that sort of thing on Gemini?

That seems interesting!

In the end, I’m wondering if all the pieces are here on something like the fediverse but just need to be connected. I haven’t thought about this at all until now (so I’m just riffing here) … but the essence of such a system seems to me:

1. Recommendations are human curated
2. Recommendations come from a single human (or well defined collective)
3. Reccommendations are organised in a navigable structure

Point 3 seems to be the unclear part. A “ring” is obviously a bunch of connections (not unlike a linked list). But other structures probably have a lot to provide here, especially if they’re amenable to some basic search facility.

The idea comes up again and again on the fediverse. It feels ripe for some app/platform to kinda nail it.

I’m not sure this is it or even something that does exactly the old web ring thing. I think a simple enough system for the human curation of web pages in a standardised way that can easily be consumed and aggregated would go a long way though. The fediverse feels like its close to something.

The number of people I’ve come across who also dislike the character limit, the number of platforms that don’t have it, the number of times people write long microblogging threads and the prior and continued existence of the “blogosphere” count against this defeatist pessimism IMO.

The truly dark take here, IMO, is that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a medium’s configuration to shape not just the content and culture on it (that’s obvious) but the way its users come to think.

Yep this.

It’s gotten to the point where a character limit is itself a seriously toxic part of big-social social media, up there with algorithms and shitty moderation choices. But all of the Twitter people don’t see it.

Sure there are threads through reply chains. No one reads the chain. The first post is all most will see. Context collapse and superficiality is inevitable with this simple constraint. The fediverse should move on. Sadly, mastodon is the only platform still dedicated to it and they’re 80% of the fediverse.

If you like short funny quips and shit posts, that’s fine, there’s no character minimum! With long character limits, short quips still abound. Instead, when necessary, you can opt in to longer form text when necessary.

Maybe the better analogy is that with vim and nano, we see many text editors and IDEs with GUIs.

Interesting. I’m not so sure about the divide you draw between vim/nano and GUI IDEs. Historically vim and nano were basically the GUIs of their time. Preceding vim was ex and ed, which were basically CLI text editing tools build for the actually printed on paper typewriter interfaces computers like PDPs used to run. If you’re not familiar, and you think vim can be obscure … try running ed MYFILE! It’s basically a sort of grep and sed REPL for editing text (where, interestingly, historically tools like grep actually came out of ed not the other way round). Vim can be used in a sort of ed mode with vim -e (AFAIU it’s actually ex mode, which is a more advanced version of ed).

So I’d say vim is more like any sort of GUI/TUI or text editor plugin for git and git is like the old ancient CLI equivalent ed that no one knows about or uses anymore because having a visual mode just makes too much sense.

And this is basically where I fall … I think a vgit should exist, that provides a terminal TUI of some sort, and that as with vim and ed it should totally supplant git while also having a CLI mode too. That this hasn’t happened, back to my original point, is a problem and honestly a little strange.

Ha yea … who’s also been using his own customised emacs from an ancient 90s version for ages.

yea this all generally tracks.

The kind of “polish” I’m talking about is the sort that a good UI/UX/GUI dev would do by tracking common user behaviours and needs or having testing users run the app through its paces. All of these confusing instances where better terminology, commands and error messages would come up through a process like that.

Now, one could say that this is a dev tool which shouldn’t need to go through that process. That developers should be expected to understand the tool’s inner workings and conceptual model well enough to not need any of that. But that gets back to my initial point. Git is so popular and basically ubiquitous now that that policy makes little sense. Many devs who use or are expected to use git are not capable of getting to terms with git’s internals to the point of never having difficulty with the UI, either because of a lack of time, capacity or skill. Moreover, the time required to get familiar with git enough to never find the UI frustrating should not be underestimated … it’s not just conceptual but technical and specific to git’s implementation details to the point of just knowing how the UI/CLI has been implemented.

If you want to trash such developers … go ahead … but they’re still developer’s doing work and it’s to the industry’s benefit to have a standardised and powerful VCS … which means that at some point it’s worth thinking about meeting developers where they are.

Beyond all of that … one could also say “fuck that” and talk about how being popular and “the standard” requires being better. Git’s centrality to the dev workflow as at text-editor levels. But while text editors have a portable format (IE “plain text” and character encodings) and so enjoy pretty healthy competition (vim, emacs, sublime, VSCode, Jetbrains … etc) … VCSs, AFAICT, don’t have the same portability and neither the competition. I’m actually curious now … are there drop in replacements for git that provide complete compatibility but are completely different implementations?.

It’s interesting, IMO, to think about why/how this has come to be, but in the end, it means that there’s a lot on git’s shoulders here. Even a little bit of an improvement can go a long way, and so being critical (rather than cultishly defensive), I’d argue, is the correct aspect here on utilitarian grounds.

As for why git is in its current situation (without having really thought about it before) … I’d actually speculate that there’s something insidious here regarding it’s imperfect/confusing UI. Namely that it has a monopolising force. Once it’s gained critical mass, and once there are enough devs out there who have deep and experienced understanding of the tool, and enough internet content capturing that expertise, then moving off to another tool which doesn’t have the same established expertise is prohibitively difficult. Comparing here VCS to text editing and programming languages may be part of it, where the basic difficulty of doing VCS (at least in so far as the complexity is exposed to the user) is likely somewhere between that of a text-editor and a programming language. In a similar vein, the solution space for VCSs is probably relatively small while text-editors and languages enjoy a good deal of design variety. And so, there’s little interest or inventive or even capacity to come up with interesting alternatives for what is a relatively difficult/complex kind of tool, which gives any established VCS a good amount of competitive protection and inertia.

Keep in mind though, I’m not talking about the UI here, but the core functionality. That many GUIs exist shows that the UI is a relatively open design space. But that git itself has hardly explored that space on their own is my critique (where comparing to text editors like vim/nvim and emacs and the built-in features they have might be informative here).

Yea, I think they’re all different. Alternative shells are about more than polishing a UI, and in many ways so are distros. And text editors are basically platforms and have been for a while, though it is interesting to single out git as being more like something like vim compared to other CLIs (as you say, it’s different). But even so, it’s not nearly a platform like a test editor, most apps for it a UI wrappers that don’t alter its core utility/function, to my point.