Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social

The only getting started instructions for your project should be in a file named README.html, and it should be a sentence that says, "To build this thing, drag and drop the source directory to anywhere on this page".

hypothesis #2: new popular stances against lurking and lurking behavior (e.g. "not approving follow requests from accounts without a bio"), is partly responsible for (or at least has a common cause with) what we perceive to be the tendency to toxicity associated with social media; people are selecting for strong ego and (over)confidence—and selecting against meekness and thoughtfulness

@akkartik strong opinions on software reuse/dependencies: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32643344>

They're pretty generous terms, and it's not exactly hard to understand, but people still get this wrong.

If your development toolchain is bungling things, that's not really an excuse. If you can't work out how to follow the terms of the license, then don't use the code. The obligation is yours.

A reminder, esp. to Web devs: the MIT License is not a public domain dedication.

When you use MIT licensed code, you have to tell people that's what's going on behind the scenes. Specifically, the license stipulates that you must include the upstream project's copyright notices and the license text explaining these terms.

I'm a big fan of the saying that Jon Ousterhout is a big fan of that goes "The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working"

<https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php>

... implications abound, e.g. for both on software performance (concerning yourself with efficient hardware utilization) and on the topic of onerous build processes.

@akkartik: excellent piece on convivial tooling, commodity browsers, and the role of abstraction:

<https://cristobal.space/writing/folk>

@paul @akkartik: Bummed about Inform7, having dug in a little bit. Most of the criticisms re Knuth doing it Wrong seem to apply.

It's the authoring tools that are usually lacking. Where's the Inkscape of office software—i.e. the writer app that uses the interoperable, W3C-/WHATWG-compatible form as its native format (and not merely one of several one-way export options)?

Self-contained HTML is an acceptable office file format.

If it would be acceptable to tell someone (as a prereq so they can run some tool) to go install NodeJS, for example, then you could just as easily tell them "Go install rvm" (or "Android SDK" or "tools for .NET").

NPMers' workstyle isn't automatically worse than those others by that criteria, but it's not better, either.

The perversion of the mainstream JS ecosystem to have regressed from batteries-included workflow back to lame SDK install+config—exactly my point:

<https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html>

> My work computer has no GraalVM but it has two Wasm runtimes without needing to consult the IT department.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29872288>

s/GraalVM for most almost any development/runtime dependency or toolchain, and it remains true. The NPM ecosystem's hype crowd doesn't seem to realize that the indictment includes them; they don't get a pass just because they're browser-adjacent.

The only getting started instructions for your project should be in a file named README.html, and it should be a sentence that says, "To build this thing, drag and drop the source directory to anywhere on this page".

Most developer tools perform simple batch jobs—read in multiple inputs, process it, and output one thing—albeit, this might be an aggregated/composite output. (And the tools that don't probably should.)

Web browsers have been able to do this for years; we don't need new filesystem access APIs and complex security policies. Ordinary file inputs, drag and drop..? These work. Heck, you could use a textarea that accepts the hexdump of a ZIP. Cumbersome, but still not worse than the status quo.

(NB: Cloud IDEs are a misguided attempt to tackle this issue. I just want to be able to swap in my web browser, which is *already* capable of running JS, as a replacement for Node—or /usr/bin/python, for that matter.)

Animats on avoiding NodeJS completely:

> Firefox has a "packager" for putting together add-ons. It uses "node.js". All it really does is apply "zip" to some files. I tried to install the "packager" on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It had several hundred dependencies, and wouldn't run[...] Mozilla support suggested upgrading the operating system on the development machine.¶ I wrote a one-line shell script which zipped up the proper file types into one file to package the add-on.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495646>

Too few projects are willing to truly leverage the ubiquity of the World Wide Wruntime. Not even NodeJS programmers get it right—all their favorite tooling demands the setup and configuration of a _separate_ JS toolchain (incl. a runtime outside the browser) in order to get anything to run.

I wrote about this in some detail going on 3 years ago <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html>.

—I still think there's room for JS to be the thing that displaces the silliness that has emerged from the NodeJS culture...

Aliens, presented with the opportunity to make contact with humans or not:

"So when they put their books on shelves, they always stand them up and you have to turn your head like that? And these are shelves specifically made for books that we're talking about? Let's get the fuck out of here, Quiiblort."

Surprised that with the proliferation of new TLDs, .everything is not one of them.

echoing @matt here: "Journalism isn't dead, it just takes too damn long to read."

Digital distribution made it practical to buy individual songs rather than entire records. It's interesting that the publishing industry hasn't adopted a similar model.

I often don't want to read a book. I want a pamphlet or a blog post that gets the idea across succinctly, but with the *option* of following the writer's work, should they continue to explore the topic in a series.

Books are already made of chapters. Could it be a good idea to treat chapters like pamphlets?

Shouldn't we have engineered grass into a staple foodcrop by now? The byproduct of a freshly cut pasture/lawn should be something fit for human consumption, not something left on the ground.