I have actually used that technique of watching myself perform a task when trying to improve my workflow for other things, like learning to draw and paint.
I never applied it to programming before but in hindsight it's really obvious, because it's incredibly effective. I use a tool [0] to record a timelapse of the desktop, because after a while watching the recordings in real time slows me down more than it helps. I find that usually when I focus on the task at hand I tend to lose track of time and of what I'm doing and when I get stuck I end up wasting a ton of time doing trial & error instead of taking a break to think things through properly, or switching to something else. This kind of stuff really adds up in the long term.
this literate programming is really cool.
Thinking about the caveats at the end, I wonder if anyone's ever implemented something like this on top of git or similar?
seems like the iterations of the evolving code across the tutorial could be mapped to commits or branches
He already claims to hire freelancers from places where the USD is more expensive, so I don't see why he hasn't considered just allocating his art budget into hiring one person from these places? Personally I can tell you that there are many places where 40k is more than enough to live very comfortably for way over 20 months.
I'm guessing the logistics of hiring someone internationally make that unfeasible? Maybe some sort of partnership could work? I'm not familiar enough with the legal caveats there
If you hire a full-timer, you damn well better be able to keep them busy 40 hours a week for 48-50 weeks a year. Not only that, but your need needs to be relatively constant, because you've committed to getting 40 hours out of each individual week.
The likelihood of that actually matching well to his needs seems vanishingly small to me. More likely, his needs are wildly variable in time: He wants to get most the art together at a specific point in the development process, and then, after that, only needs bits and pieces as he notices the need. Working with contractors gives him that kind of flexibility.
Even if he could rearrange how he does things to make it meet a full-timer's needs, that doesn't make it a good idea. Now he's turned collaborating with that person into a daily task, which might play hell with the rest of his creative process. Especially if, like most of us introverted creatives, he works best with long blocks of uninterrupted concentration.
Given the numbers he threw around, he's talking about paying $2000/month, or $24k/year, for art. Finding someone capable of providing the art direction people seem to think he needs, as well as delivering all the art by themselves, seems unrealistic in any country.
>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”.
Wouldn't this happen as well if the instance my account was created in shuts down?
It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list. It's not perfect, because although you can keep your followee list, your followers don't have an automatic way of knowing where your new presence may have moved to.
Also, the stuff that has already been tooted lives on in the fediverse in other servers, so it's not like the toots also disappear from other servers after an extinction event, just like an email server going down doesn't delete the email from everyone else's inbox.
It would and it has. In Mastodon-speak, this is called an "extinction event", and I have seen a few of those. Mastodon, however, has already implemented take-out feature where you can download all of your data at any time, including your friend list.
How about backing up accounts in other servers? These could be encrypted with a key which only the user controls. Or perhaps the backup could be done encrypted in cloud storage like S3 (this would involve a paid account, obviously) so the user's presence could be resurrected in a different server?
It might also be dandy to have "failover" agreements, where one server can agree ahead of time to failover users for another server, in case of failure.
Yes I think the next step to avoid that is to own your own domain name.
If you own your domain name you can have a provider die, and you'll still be able to re import your data on a new provider, assuming you're able to set up a DNS
And that's where you lose most non technical users I guess?
Mastodon (and I suppose ActivityPub in general) conflates hosting location with username. If I have a username like @bob@mastodon.social, then my stuff has to be accessible at mastodon.social's IP address (the A record).
Compare to email, where the MX record provides a layer of indirection. ActivityPub technically has a feature like this using a .well-known file, but it leaks into the user interface n unpleasant ways.
I was thinking that federation still leaves unsolved the issue of knowing the single source of truth for identities, and when instances go down, you can't reference anything to know who/where people are.
Couldn't Keybase.io solve this? It could track your identities on these servers, and it would exist outside of any instances or federation, but be the source of identity that would go along with any federated instances you are a part of
Isn't keybase.io just a way of storing public keys? If they go down, and you still have the private key, you can just sign a message saying "No, really! It's me!"
The issue with distributed systems that rely on public keys is the lack of options to turn to if the keys are lost or compromised. And yes, people will lose keys. Systems that rely on keys for identity need to figure out what options people have at that point to re-establish their identity.
>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers.
Maybe my way of using Twitter is particularly weird, but I'd be more disappointed if I'd lose the thematic lists of interesting Twitter accounts that I have collected over several years at this point than if I'd lose my followers.
The above is also the main reason my pasts attempts to switch from Twitter to Mastodon have failed. There's quite much people and content in the Fediverse now, but still not enough that matches my particular combination of interests.
Then your account is gone, but your friends on other servers are still where they were. With backup/import tools you can reconnect with them from a new account easily.
It's always a risk. However, I'll take my chances on something that's already paying for itself (the instances I use) over something that's going to collapse the moment easy capital dries up in the next market crash.
That said, it's wise to maintain a backup account on a different instance. Right now one of my instances is down for unknown reasons, but almost everyone who follows me there also follows my other account.
IMO the solution to this is one instance, one domain, and one IP per person with some kind of financial sustainability (i.e. you pay for it) but it's very difficult for people to swallow.
Somehow it seems like none of these so-called Disqus alternatives cover the use case of people with static websites that don't wan't or can't host the comments themselves.
So are there specs for the Book anywhere? If I can replace my notebook + wacom intuos setup with one of those, It'd be wonderful. A helluva lot more travel-friendly.
I never applied it to programming before but in hindsight it's really obvious, because it's incredibly effective. I use a tool [0] to record a timelapse of the desktop, because after a while watching the recordings in real time slows me down more than it helps. I find that usually when I focus on the task at hand I tend to lose track of time and of what I'm doing and when I get stuck I end up wasting a ton of time doing trial & error instead of taking a break to think things through properly, or switching to something else. This kind of stuff really adds up in the long term.
[0] https://www.lomakescomics.com/cafe/