Daily Journal 📓 April 2021

Shorter dated entries, links, and microblogs, plus GitHub & Tangled stars.

Apr 20219:39am

⭐️ vale-cli/vale :pencil: A markup-aware linter for prose built with speed and extensibility in mind.

Semble

Apr 20211:00am
  • Athens Research announces a $1.9M seed round:

    • We raised $1.9M to invest in our vision of building a second brain and a second internet using knowledge graphs and bidirectional links.

  • “Second Internet” and their open source roots is very interesting. WNDB can fit in as a backend layer on top of IPFS. IPLD should be referenced here too
  • atJSON as interchange format is still interesting but sort of a different layer than the graph itself.
Apr 20211:00am

  • Green vs Brown Programming Languages:

  • but I distinctly remember Ruby being the hottest language back in 2007, and although it does have more competition today, Ruby is a better language now than it was then. Yet now it is dreaded. Part of the difference, it seems to me, is that now people have 14 years’ worth of rails apps to maintain. That makes Ruby is a lot less fun than when it was all new projects. So watch out Rust and Kotlin and Julia and Go: you too will eventually lose your halo.

  • TLDR — older programming languages are more likely to have older codebase (brown) which are less fun to work on. Newer languages means new projects that are about building new stuff which is fun, rather than maintenance.

Apr 20214:36pm

⭐️ bugout-dev/humbug Get usage metrics and crash reports for your API, library, or command line tool.

Semble

Apr 20219:33am

⭐️ bluelinklabs/ctzn [DEPRECATED] An open social network built on the Hypercore Protocol data mesh.

Semble

Apr 20211:00am

  • Thanks to a tip from Jacob, I’m registered for my first dose of vaccine using TeleHippo.

  • Apparently they partnered with BC Pharmacies and got this done.

  • The form filling worked and got me a booking, so I’m glad it exists. But I shook my head at the “phone numbers only no spaces or dashes” and the two incompatible ways of entering in birthdates.

  • Along with limited open data and collection timing by the PHO here in BC after 13 months, I really do wish we could have better government digital services.

  • Meanwhile in California, a volunteer team is working to pull together vaccine availability. Simon Willison just joined the team and talked about porting from Airtable to Django. 40M population vs our little 4M population province. Volunteers doing a great job. But still — volunteers!

Apr 20213:07pm

⭐️ literal-io/literal Literal augments your online reading experience; capture annotations, sources, and knowledge.

Semble

Apr 20215:33pm

⭐️ tonsky/datascript Immutable database and Datalog query engine for Clojure, ClojureScript and JS

Semble

Apr 20219:36pm

⭐️ microdotblog/sunlit Publish photos to your own blog — hosted by Micro.blog or compatible blogs using WordPress or Micropub — and discover beautiful photos from other users.

Semble

Apr 20211:00am
  • Peter Clark @plc asks:

    I really want a simple, thoughtfully private, not owned by a tech conglomerate, photo sharing app that is really nicely designed. like instagram in 2010. does this exist?

    • I answered with links to Micro.blog and the Sunlit client and ActivityPub powered Pixelfed.
    • I think Pixelfed is probably the strongest foundation, with the bonus that you could pull in Mastodon and other ActivityPub content that included photos for a broader network.
    • I’ve talked to some artists and for them it’s about other inspiring artists on the platform and… people who buy the work they post.
    • Some social networks — like art or styles of photos — simply aren’t niche, so where do network effects come from? How do we get started?