Sometimes I think the world wide web is flawed from a software architectural point of view: all readers of a web page have to access it on the same web server.
It's likely too late to change now, but history could have taken a different turn: we could have distributed pages (and other content) via something like Usenet or BitTorrent. Digital signatures could guarantee that the content hadn't been changed along the way.
I've been using Bash as my interactive shell since the dawn of Linux. Maybe earlier, I forget. I'm sometimes quite unhappy with it, as an interactive shell. What should I do?
(This is a non-binding referendum. The final option is equivalent to "I abstain but want to be notified of results when the poll ends".)
When some software offers you the choices "Yes" and "Maybe later", the developers of the software are showing that they do not care about your consent. This isn't just some amusing quirk, it's a conscious and deliberate attempt to reduce the agency you have in your own life.
I made a Debian installer named v-i. I need to edit files in the installer environment. No confusion will happen.
- "design" = "remove a sign"
- "remove" = "move again"
⇒ "design" = "move a sign again"
English is perfectly logical.
"AI will be smarter than humans" is equivalent in truth to "a fancy fountain pen writes better novels than humans". Both claims are false. Do not trust people making such claims. Any company making such claims is trying to fool you.
Computing should not be magic. It should also not exclude people from using it. This is a difficult dilemma.
I don't know. I will need to think about this. For once, I'm looking forward to replies.
5/5
I want to think usability is not a problem. But I wonder how much not understanding is necessary for usability. Maybe it'd be better for humanity's future if using technology required a little bit more understanding of the underlying principles and concepts than what currently happens.
4/5
We're at a point in history where powerful forces are trying to get humanity to rely on large language models for as many things as possible, and replace actual understanding with acceptance of what the computer tells them.
3/5
At the same time few people now actually understand the principles of devices work. I think this is partly why they have less agency and less freedom than people who do and who also have the means, skills, and energy to control their digital destiny. Most people are at the mercy of vendors, most of whom are unscrupulous
2/5
Disturbing thought: is computing usability an enemy of freedom and agency?
For decades the computer industry has made computing devices and technology (computers, phones, online services, etc) increasingly less skill and understanding to use. This helps them sell more.
1/5
It turns out that if you're already quite hungry, using a slow cooker may be a mistake. Cooking times of eight hours are not for fast food.
Sometimes people are unsure how to pronounce my last name. Here's a guide:
In Finnish, it's pronounced "Wirzenius".
In Swedish, "Wirzenius".
In English, "Wirzenius".
Easy! The differences are quite clear, and are due to how natives in those languages read the spelling.
In any language, any pronunciation is fine as long it's recognizable and not intentionally making fun of the name.
"Oops" was a nice name for a Rust error type in a prototype. But it's not a nice name for production code, alas.
The older I get, the more software I build, the more convinced I am that the best software is that which doesn't exist.
(Yes, I've been debugging stupid shit in my own code.)
What's the best place for the source code directories of projects you work on, while you work on them?
If you prefer an option not mentioned below, leave a comment please.
(This poll is for entertainment purposes only. There is no correct answer.)
If you're an open source contributor, please be kind to other contributors, especially volunteers, and try to avoid causing them even more work than they already have. Do not ever demand that volunteers do something, especially not to your schedule.
Other sources of complexity: having many stakeholders, many contributors, changing needs and wants, having many dependencies, persisting data, program or project lives for a long time, ...
All these mean that an innocuous change can result in seemingly unrelated things breaking.
This can be a threat, a challenge, a problem, and an opportunity, all at the same time.
The thing about developing software is that small things can be simple and elegant. For example, a command line program that compresses a file. It has one job, and doesn't need to worry about, say, integrating with various cloud services. It just runs, and it's done.
A lot of interesting software isn't as simple, or constrained. Once you start allowing more features, complexity explodes, and suddenly you need to worry about security, versioning schemes in different Linux distributions, ...
Any service where it takes weeks for them to remove my information when I close my account is just a shit service. Today's example, ebookers.
Any service that doesn't let you close your account is a really shit service. Hacker News is one.