> He talked about the desktop building blocks, basically the familiar WIMP model plus the desktop clipboard, as the way that users move data around. Expert users can move data around quickly, he said, but there's a problem: the desktop is stateless. He called this the curse of direct manipulation; there is no working memory to the desktop. ""If you copy a few too many things to the clipboard, oh sorry, it's gone"".
>
> Jenson theorized that the reason there are so many desktop environments, window managers, and Wayland compositors for Linux—as well as alternative clipboard managers—is because the desktop isn't quite working right for users. He thought it was really about working memory: ""How do I manage my data in such a way that I can remember it across all of these things and actually use it."" His perspective shifted to asking ""what would we do to working memory to improve the desktop UX?""
I feel this so much.
I think that there's a "better" windowing system where all of your stuff sticks around way more than it used to. Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task".
People have really leaned into coding harnesses + chat windows as a way of grouping together work. I think there's a more general idea in this space. Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me!
There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces (that I close out when I'm done). Desktop Environments that make this work nicely will be quite cool IMO
(A simple and dumb version of this is the BeOS "group various windows together, even though they aren't from the same application" stuff. Very cool stuff IMO
> Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task".
I feel this. When I first got to learn what a workspace was (in Eclipse, of all things), and I really drilled down into the English meaning of it (I'm Dutch), I thought about exactly what you're describing right now.
There's also a thing of wanting "http referer"-style things but at the desktop. I want things that tell me _from where_ I clicked into a page in the browser (like "oh you got here from Slack (at this spot)"
Desktop history, clipboard history... all associated to certain contexts. Would be quite nice IMO
I don't know about the malleable software claim. Sure, people can build out their own thing. Malleable software in itself requires software that is designed to be malleable in the first place.
And perhaps people will not be willing to accept the initial friction that malleable software brings (see people who complain about Emacs or Salesforce or JIRA)... and end up just kinda churning indefinitely on re-implementing things over and over again.
"Internal IT teams" striking aback against SaaSes, perhaps. We'll see
I think it's an interesting thought experiment: could an LLM call be a "cheaper" grep?
Especially for deterministic activities it just feels impossible to imagine general LLM tech handling the problem better, despite everything being said.
But hey, tech is filled with "smashing the generalist hammer works better than the specialized tooling". Would be odd though!
I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)
I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
to be fair all CI providers I've had the pleasure of working with have gnarly performance profiles for the boxes they provide.
I don't think it's out of malice, but I do feel uncomfortable with the fact that the people who sell me the CI coordination software also sell me the minutes for the boxes that run the CI software. There's _some_ alignment of interests but not as much as I would want!
The same major memory makers got prosecuted for cartel behavior by the DoJ a little over 20 years ago[0].
One might say "well what specific law have they broken" and I don't know and I don't know if they have, but at the very least the power of the State _could_ be used to force behavioral changes in some ways or another.
This article linked back to the intercept's snowden archive articles [0], and while this article paints the Intercept in a bad light it lead me to reading a couple of these.
While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.
The Intercept was created for the purpose of publishing the Snowden archive. After a few articles, they decided they weren't going to do it any more, for reasons which are never entirely clear (Greenwald gave different justifications each time). And Greenwald was very aware of this:
> On 12 March Poitras was told on a telephone call with Greenwald and Wilson that Greenwald and Reed had decided to shut the archive, because it was no longer of value to The Intercept. On the same call, according to her account, Greenwald said the decision should not be made public because it would look bad for him and for The Intercept. Two days earlier the problem had been money, but now it was "value".
Speculation: the Intercept was a move by the NSA to shut down the last copy that hadn't already complied. Get a friendly billionaire acting as a concerned citizen, shower the key individuals with money, and once they're hooked make it clear that if the publication continue the money stops.
> In October 2013, tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar founded First Look Media (FLM), a New York nonprofit, as a collaboration with Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with a promised $250 million in funding. FLM's first publication, The Intercept, launched on 10 February 2014 with purpose to report the Snowden documents.
( ... )
> The Intercept paid its senior journalists well. FLM reported $1.6 million to Glenn Greenwald's company between 2014 and 2017; $349,826 in total compensation to Jeremy Scahill in 2015; $368,249 to Betsy Reed in 2017. Charles R. Davis, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that such figures "are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism."
negligence and incompetence can act as very good cover for malice. The same reporter that leaked Reality Winner's identity, Matthew Cole, has also been suspected by multiple other whistleblowers of exposing them as well.
On a tangential note, watching the documentary on her was the first time I viscerally understood that people with very different ideas about how to live can agree on some fundamental political principles, and don't have to stuff themselves into right/left boxes for easy manipulation. They went after her hard because a culturally-conservative, intelligent, hard-nosed soldier type who sticks to virtues that are not completely in-line with our warhawk doctrine is their worst nightmare.
I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.
The latter applied to many US (and historically British empire wars, from where the US learned).
Greenwald had a Rumble contract for daily videos during the Biden years, so I think it would be fair to say he was a Trump influencer.
He also has many enemies in Brazil (e.g.. Supreme Judge Moraes), so that video could have come from anywhere.
But yes, he could also have been threatened over the Snowden files earlier.
> I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.
The Russian government literally finances Mearsheimer's books. It's written on the title page. Doesn't get any closer to government propaganda than that.
Valdai financing in 2023 does look bad. But his 2015 talk "Why Ukraine is the West's fault" does not appear to have any financing and says the same already.
In 1993 he advocated for Ukraine to keep nuclear weapons:
I found the debate with Sikorski very illuminating. Sikorski is the foreign minister of Poland, with a long and distinguished career in the US (scholar) and EU (MEP) in addition to Poland. He's been in the dirt too, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an on-location reporter in the 1980s. During the debate, Mearsheimer tried to lecture him about things that went on at diplomatic gatherings where Sikorski was present (and led a delegation) and Mearsheimer was not.
He's a total hack and his brand of "realism" has nothing to do with reality. Dude can't even read Russian, yet thinks he's an expert on Russia. The only reason we're discussing him here right now is because Russian troll army has been promoting him hard; like most charlatans, he has the appearance of someone who knows what they're talking about.
Mearsheimer says that there's no evidence Putin had imperial ambitions before 24 Feb 2022; that the war has forced him into this. Some of the closest people to Putin say that he told them fucking 20 years ago what he was going to do with Ukraine.
Mearsheimer is weird. His book "Israel lobby and US foreign policy" is outstanding. But when he speaks about many other things it feels like he's improvising all the time.
Suppose that I grant you that the Ukraine war was "provoked by the US" - which I most certainly don't. But suppose.
It might still be the case that something is true AND propaganda. Good propaganda has a grain of truth. The key for identifying propaganda isn't "is a statement false?" but "is one of the sides pushing the statement, because it's benefitial for them". In this sense, "the Ukraine war was provoked by the US" would be propaganda even if it were true - which it's not.
That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
> That said, I think you have to be proficient at mental gymnastics to believe that the aggressor is actually the victim.
That is a fine example of propaganda: All people, including historians who evaluate different possibilities, surely want to paint Russia as the victim!
I've known people involved in the creation of the Intercept. It wasn't funded with the purpose to report the Snowden documents, but rather that came along as an opportunity that they thought would create a big splash for the launch of a new news platform that would shake up the industry. The billionaire involved didn't anticipate the fury from the authorities (i.e. receiving personal, serious phone calls from various govt. figures and agencies) and they quickly came to regret everything and adjusted course. I know this is a "trust me bro" comment but it's worth sharing.
Makes sense. OP is leaning I to conspiracional adhoc reasoning. I’m sure Pierre would rather keep his Hawaiian island than to field questions from the agencies
the comments are really not high-quality. There's a lot of words in places where only a few would be much clearer.
This isn't to say it's impossible to guide good context-aware commenting style from.an AI, but there would be much terser/usable comments on all of the weapons source for example.
The biggest problem with this stuff is, as usual, that the people guiding the AI don't know what "good" decomps etc look like IMO. AI tool usage tends to reflect ones own tastes and understanding.
Can't really decipher what line 21 is saying so I concede there could be some slop in there. But the comments on lines 27-30 seem to be informative and give some context that the code doesn't have.
Granted, I'm not an expert on RE4's source code, but the comments look helpful enough.
I didn't say they were wrong, I said they were not high-quality.
Every company works in their own way, but I highly doubt the original source would have a big paragraph at the top instead of a more "structured" comment. Or maybe even nothing at all!
Here's a "counterexample": the pistol code for half life 2[0]. Comments are pretty sparse because it's all relatively self explanatory. The comments that are present are to point out things that are not so.
You end up with something that's easy to work with and where you're not trying to read a paragraph of text that enumerates a bunch of properties of the code in the file in no particular order.
Some things are important context for the whole file. Some things are important context for a fragment of code. Some things ... are simply not that important to note.
I really like a small or larger comment above each function and more, even if people often say "less is more" - I disagree. Comment everything! It won't hurt. And people who don't like it can remove them and feel mighty.
I feel this so much.
I think that there's a "better" windowing system where all of your stuff sticks around way more than it used to. Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task".
People have really leaned into coding harnesses + chat windows as a way of grouping together work. I think there's a more general idea in this space. Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me!
There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces (that I close out when I'm done). Desktop Environments that make this work nicely will be quite cool IMO
(A simple and dumb version of this is the BeOS "group various windows together, even though they aren't from the same application" stuff. Very cool stuff IMO
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