Daily Journal 📓

Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.

8:00am

  • 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.

8:00am

  • 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.

8:00am

  • 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!

8:00am

8:00am

  • 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?

8:00am

  • Many are more familiar with the Chrome DevTools console than they are with a Unix command-line prompt. More familiar with WebSockets than BSD sockets, MDN than man pages. Bash and Zsh scripts calling into native code will never go away. But JavaScript and TypeScript scripts calling into WebAssembly code will be increasingly common. Many developers, we think, prefer web-first abstraction layers.

    — Announcing the Deno Company

  • The people behind the Deno programming language announce a commercial company with venture investment.

  • Not pursuing open core, full MIT License for the language.

  • People noticed the NodeJS bashing going on.

  • Also Deno Deploy:

  • Deno Deploy is a distributed system that runs JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly at the edge, worldwide. The service deeply integrates the V8 JavaScript runtime with a high performance asynchronous web server to provide optimal performance without unnecessary intermediate abstractions.

8:00am

  • @levelsio writes about how you can’t really contact him, on purpose.

  • Reading public tweets sent to me, and replying. People behave much better in public messages than in direct messages, so that’s also nice. And the message length limit really helps keep things efficient.

  • This is really not how I’m wired. I like meeting people and getting on calls with them. But, I already do mostly answer things publicly, work on my digital garden here, and blog so I can share the same answer multiple times.

  • Also makes me think about Derek Sivers You Don’t Have to Be Local https://sive.rs/local

  • I have been in global mode again for a couple of years, and I see that continuing … except I do go “local” when I travel, eg the folks I know in Berlin.

8:00am

8:00am

  • I’m finding it pleasant to flesh out Moa Party pages on the website.

  • It’s small, and it’s a constrained area of knowledge. The notes graph is fun to look at.

  • I worked on the Pleroma and ActivityPub pages, which was fun learning a bit more about those two things and gathering links and descriptions.

8:00am

  • Kevin Drum: Why have blog audiences declined over the past decade? #blogging

  • Short (theoretical) answer: RSS impacts the insertion of advertising.

  • You can’t separate the software from the community that built it. Therefore, true openness must dictate how that community is formed and run. We are what we choose to tolerate; in the same way that free software communities do not tolerate proprietary lock-in, they should not tolerate exclusionary social practices that lock people out.

— Ben Werdmuller Equitable Community Software

  • Computers and Creativity, Molly Mielke:

  • “Computers and Creativity” asks: How can we utilize the full potential of creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation?

In fewer words: How can we make computers better bicycles of the creative mind? — @mollyfmielke

8:00am

8:00am

  • The American Dream is Going Digital

  • Naturally, the mom-and-pop businesses of today are YouTubers, Twitch streamers, Shopify dropshippers, webcomic artists, podcast hosts, Tik Tok stars, OnlyFans creators, indie game developers, streetwear resellers, Etsy store owners, Clubhouse hosts, Substack writers, and many, many more. Deploying on top of the distribution railroad tracks that have been competitively laid by internet platforms over the past decades, addressable online customers have never been more abundant.

  • via (and by) @cpaik

8:00am

  • The High Blogging Era, defined by Robin Sloan as mid-2000s. Hmmm. I was there and was a part of it, and RSS and blogs was all there was, before Twitter and Facebook etcetera that then became labeled as social media.
  • Google Reader removed social features in 2011, and was shut down in 2013. I think the “high” era more properly is the mid 2000s until the fall of Reader. When many people were blogging, not just the early few. Maybe 8 years? A good run.
  • But everyone will have their own nostalgia tinged view.
  • Are we at the beginning of digital gardens and Second Brains? Will this be looked back on as the High Era? I’m more interested in getting it into the hands of everyone. Hmmm. Has Nora Young done a segment on Spark yet? I should attempt to get on a CBC Radio morning or afternoon show to talk about it.
  • via Robin Rendle, Blogging and Dimly Lit Bars.
  • via @jamescham, need to read The Man Who Lied to his Laptop #HCI

8:00am

8:00am

(a thread on why)

8:00am

  • Set up #Gitlab Service Desk for Moa Party, including forwarding email from Google Domains.

  • It’s really interesting to have a shared email inbox included in the service for free. Will be interesting to see how many people use it.

8:00am

  • The presentation I gave to the #IPFS Local Offline Collab group is on Hackernews

8:00am

  • I find most of the tension between the recently labeled content web vs app web.
  • The people who complain about unreadable pages bloated with JS to read a blog post are right.
  • The people who want to build local first, browser-centric apps are right.
  • From a discussion in the wikilinks Matrix channel with @karlicoss

8:00am

8:00am