fasterandworse

Another video / audio / thread from me

This time it's about products that are marketed with purposes they can't be optimised for.

In the production of a tech product an "edge case" is seen as a hindrance to delivering on the core purpose of the product.

For marketing an "edge case" can be seen as an opportunity to exploit a purpose that the product was not designed for and will never be optimised to satisfy.

When a general purpose product uses an edge case as the subject of its marketing it ignores the other aspects of the product which, for that niche purpose, will be on a spectrum from irrelevance to interference.

A product capable of servicing a niche purpose is not the same as a product designed to specifically satisfy that niche purpose.

Only the latter will be developed with continual effort to further satisfy the purpose as effectively as possible.

The more general purpose a product is, the more perceived edge cases it has.

Every edge case is a candidate for edge-case marketing which exploits the virtues of serving that niche in order to sell the entire product along with everything else it includes.

I didn't think this is techtakesworthy, nor is it a sneer, more a airing of perspective, as wanky as that sounds

The gist: Software, or generally computation, can be categorised as a type of building material rather than a type of product in itself.

This framing opens up the view that design within the software industry begins with an assumption that software was the best means for the supposed purpose.

Foundationally, design is the deliberation over the best means to satisfy a given purpose. In reality most design projects begin with limitations to the means available.

Regardless, the knowledge that software is one of many possible means should not be ignored.

To accept "software is eating the world" as a positive movement is to skip the most important choice of any design process. The means that best satisfies the given purpose at that point in time.

The same ignorance of that choice led to plastic eating the world as well.

The means for satisfying a purpose are not limited to building materials. It can be any effort that influences a situation rather than building a thing, physical or virtual.

The goal is to have as open a design process as possible to allow for the most appropriate means to be discovered.

Also audio available here: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/63b3904b/software-as-material

vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbw1GlyzNu4

audio only/podcast version: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/6d394145/do-less-products

I talk about an idea I've been throwing around for a while for a "typewriter OS" which boots an old laptop into text editor (as a starting project to hopefully lead to a [insert single purpose] OS)

It's a difficult thing to pitch because it's very easy to say "that's just X running Y" type of answers. But it's something I see as a ground up build by design.

Anyway, sharing to see if it piques anyone's interest

invidious link https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=OkfzjmY9cF8

He has sample photos starting around 12 minute mark - the colour tone he's getting is amazing

Example:

Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.

On top of it all, that is such a low-ball number from Microsoft

The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company.

A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective

There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.

Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

I found that the SerenityOS project also has a web browser with a completely new set of engines. It looks reasonably capable too.

Both LibWeb and LibJS are novel engines. I have a personal history with the Qt and WebKit projects, so there’s some inspiration from them throughout, but all the code is new. Not to mention, hundreds of people have worked on the codebase since I started it, all adding their own personal influences, so it’s definitely its own thing.

Edit: Here's a recent interview with the creator Andreas Kling talking to Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell about the browser https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird

Edit 2: Here’s their August 2023 update video of the browser https://youtu.be/OEsRW3UFjA0

Edit 3: Looks like the project was recently sponsored $100k USD from Shopify https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-ladybird-sponsor

It’s quite impressive!

Note: I don't know anything about the politics of the SerenityOS project or the people behind it.

Laravel creator Taylor Otwell learned PHP in 2008

and then

There were a few model-view-controller frameworks for PHP, some of which aimed to provide a "Rails-like" experience. But none was as comprehensive as Otwell wanted. So he built his own and released the first version in 2011.

Taylor Otwell seems like someone who gets design. I've used Laravel a little bit and I know what they mean when they say "opinionated" - but I think the word doesn't do justice to his confidence in his design.

Anyway, this article came up in my twitter feed yesterday and it made me happy to hear Laravel is going strong.