Olivier Forget @teleclimber@social.tchncs.de

@teleclimber a chunk of the problems with IP law online is that it’s the most powerful tool in the legal toolkit, so everything becomes a clumsy IP metaphor: I think lots of people will be using the GDPR to litigate that aren’t about data protection. Worse: those who might usually rein in that excess are going to be much more reticent to tie privacy law’s hands than they were to critique intellectual property

Seeing two used rockets landing in perfect synchronisation is beautiful!
Really inspirational works of engineering. Congratulations to everyone in the SpaceX team.
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In case you missed it live—video of the two rocket boosters that carried a ship into space, safely arriving home.
https://twitter.com/mariachong/status/960986272842969088

I permanently deleted my facebook account today.

Wow, that was an exceedingly creepy experience.

People are funneled into "deactivation", as account deletion doesn't actually appear in any menus. The interface is constructed to deliberately talk about account deactivation AFTER DEATH (as opposed to at will).

Even for deactivation, people are presented with a random selection of their facebook friends and the text "X will miss you" right next to their profile picture.

Funny thing.

I remember "inventing Uber" over dinner with my dad, when pondering the intersection of Google maps, Android phones, and lame public transport.

A few years, Uber was all over the news. This was not the first time I've had that kind of experience.

Moral of the story: I'm so smart!

No wait. That's not it. The real moral of the story: ideas are not special. Thoughtful experts in any particular field will tend to invent similar things.

Execution, and luck, make all the difference.

"Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/technology/facebook-news-feed.html

This is the worst idea. Letting people vote on what's fact and what isn't has worked so well in the past hasn't it.

Husband: Are you mad at me? You look angry.

Me: I'm working in CSS.

Husband: Oh! Ok. That explains that then.

📝 Wrote something about CPUs and Web Components https://daverupert.com/2018/01/bad-month-for-the-main-thread/

@mayel @alanz @cykros @Framasoft @ebel @gracie

If we're going to make headway, we need to (1) develop suites of software that are well-designed & well-maintained & ideally have push-button setups and updates and (2) pay just as much attention to designing and managing the social systems and infrastructure around the so that people know what they're getting into and why it's valuable.

Unfortunately, all of that takes (lots of) money and time.

@gracie @ebel @Framasoft @cykros @alanz @mayel

Part of the problem is that modern software development is more than just posting code somewhere. You really want to have some kind of forum, an issue tracker, a wiki, integrations with build systems etc. etc. It's annoying to have to set up, run and monitor each of those things piecemeal. Similarly, it's often unrealistic to tell people to run their own instances of X. Not everyone wants that kind of responsibility.

I don't understand people who think that self-improving artificial intelligence will solve all of humanity's problems. We've already got self-improving natural intelligence and all it does is shitpost and be depressed

I've been thinking a lot about "Endless Content" https://daverupert.com/2018/01/endless-content/

Sunday CSS Grid: The Pale Blue Dot 🌌 https://codepen.io/somelaniesaid/full/BJmOyM/

(P.S. I didn’t bother with a fancy layout for narrower breakpoints, if it looks pretty reg on your phone)

Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day, teach them to fish and you feed them for a lifetime, but sell them a license for fishing software and they will forever depend on you for their fish because they never learned to make their own fishing software and the software and hardware architecture of contemporary computers is so complex that to learn to automate something in them is an incredibly lengthy process.

Note I write this from the perspective of someone who had 8k followers on Twitter and hung out with lots of other "influencers" in my own little niche community (webdev). But this is just my perspective.

1. FOMO. You really do miss out on "what everybody's talking about." Even if what you're missing is just some hot drama, often a result of Twitter's UI decisions themselves goading people into fights/harassment/outrage/dogpiles/etc. It still feels bad to "miss" it.

An interesting counterpoint to the old adage 'it's not about ideas, ideas are cheap, it's about execution'.

http://www.markchadbourn.co.uk/2018/01/its-not-actually-about-the-writing/