benjaminjosephw
Joined 11 years ago
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351
Member since
Jun 27
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Tools are often objects that "exceed the average human's capabilities" in some respect or another but assigning the quality of intelligence to tool itself is like calling a hammer strong or a chisel brave. It maybe true in a metaphorical sense but it doesn't have any objective meaning.
Comment · 4 years ago
Would injustice exist in an alien society if that society didn't recognise it as such?
Comment · 4 years ago
Here's a Strange Loop talk where one of the authors covers some of the content of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxINoKFm-S4
Comment · 4 years ago
This project wraps `inotifywait`[0] which I didn't know about until just now. Really useful utility, thanks for sharing!
[0] - https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/inotifywait.1.html
Comment · 4 years ago
Ah, the boiling frog strategy. Effective but definitely evil.
Is "don't be evil" still part of the Google's official ethos?
Comment · 4 years ago
> langcc is general enough that the tool is self-hosting: that is, one can express the "language of languages" in the "language of languages" itself
There's something deeply satisfying about recursive tools who's inputs can include the definition of the tool itself. Brilliant.
Comment · 4 years ago
I think we're still in the experimental phase of lots of novel types of social information exchange.
Building in public is very much an experimental form of communication. It's a new way to think and operate and it's not something with a strong set of conventions and norms. That means that you have to think much more about how you're communicating, not just what you want to say.
Building in community means sharing information with a specific set of people who have a shared perspective. Conventions and norms do exist and you have a good sense of how people will interpret and understand your words. This is the kind of context where it is easier to be more authentic and less performative.
I think that a good chunk of people who build in public whould say that they are actually building in community. They get the sense of a shared perspective and the community has established some its own conventions and norms. I don't think there's always a clear seperation between these two concepts.
As an interesting example of how these two concepts overlap is in the Zig community[0]. The community is decentralized - does that mean they are building in community AND in public?
Comment · 4 years ago
So it turns out that when you outsource auth, you also outsource some of the governance on who can access your platform.
Isn't access control a set of patterns rather than a service? When did it stop being a core competency of web applications?
Comment · 4 years ago
Is ROI in this case a measure of comprehension? What about the enjoyment and playfulness of metaphor and expressive language - do these have a negative ROI if they aren't sufficiently terse?
How far do you take efficiency as a measure of communication quality?
Did Kevin have it right when he asks "why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?"[0]
Comment · 4 years ago
> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities.
Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce.
I've been searching for other examples of end-user programmmable tools beyond spreadsheets for inspiration. Anyone have suggestions of some other places these kinds of "folk interfaces" show up?
Comment · 4 years ago
> To comply with DNT, we pledge to delete user personal information such as IP addresses in server logs after no more than 10 days. We do this regardless of whether you set the DNT flag in your browser or not.
EthicalAds does not comply with the intent of a user who sends a DNT request. It's not obliged to, but it's a bit disingenuous to claim that the request has been honoured in some way.