Ironically, his own blog includes a screen reader that appears whenever you select some text. Don't blind people already have good screen readers? I select text to remind me the place I'm up to, and get annoyed when little buttons pop up.
Do One Thing
81–90 of 136 posts
Re: Do One Thing
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd date the actual, functional takeover somewhat later than that, but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble. I'm not sure I would say I want to go back to it, exactly, but there sure is a lot that I miss.
Eh, there is a lot to be missed from the 'net, yes; but from the web? Like what? I mean, even when we're generous, 'pre-dotcom-bubble' is 'pre-2000' - the web was crap back then.
- It was much lighter; entire websites used to weight less than a single JS file today. We've increased the size of pages by an order of magnitude (and processing expense by at least two) for no real reason except laziness.
- The SaaS/cloud model wasn't so popular, which means trying to lock you in by stealing your data, or doing absolutely ridiculous things like IoT does, wasn't something you saw.
Re: Do One Thing
#83I had two thoughts while reading this. 1 - The need for the web to be profitable in some way makes 'single tools' hard to build. You have to grow users, add features, etc, etc. So even if you have an API or something useful it likely won't scale economically. Unless it's government supported or behind a foundation of some sort. The Twitter API comes to mind here. 2 - This is tricky because for the web to meet the UNI…
> Once again, capitalism ruins everything fun And creates everything fun.
Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.
Re: Do One Thing
#84I'm definitely guilty of holding onto a philosophy and thinking it applies universally, so I can't blame people that hold onto the Unix philosophy extremely strongly. But I can't help but think that the world requires a hell of a lot more pragmatism than the Unix philosophy can provide. The first problem I see is that "One Thing" is really subjective. Some people might see Postgres as doing one thing really well (It…
> Who would ever want just the text aspect of their notes synchronized across devices, but not their photos that they took of powerpoint slides, their data tables, their diagrams, their emails, etc.?
That's one thing I don't get. Dropbox could have made a decent markdown or (please, pretty please) org-mode editor and would have blown everyone out the water. Editor over Dropbox is a perfect thing - unlike every other butt solution out there, including Google Drive, it doesn't limit you to your butt provider. Files on Dropbox are still your files, in your own filesystem, and you can do whatever the fuck you want with them. A simple editor for people who don't like (or don't want to, on a particular device) playing with file juggling, and it would be a perfect note taking solution.
Re: Do One Thing
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we need some sort of unix on the web.
More of a fun experiment than anything else, but the Pig Shell is worth playing with: http://pigshell.com/
It's cool, but I always found such things to be cargo-culting and going in the completly wrong direction. You don't want to make a web shell, you want to use normal shell for web.
For a proper "Web UNIX" we need:
- websites talking in structured data (not just plain text)
- less propertiary bullshit (hint: keep sales & marketing people away from APIs)
- ability to conveniently pipe them together anywhere (not on a third-party, complexity-hiding, feature-limiting site like IFTTT)
When I can start typing things like these in my own, local shell:
@twitter.com/me/tweets/latest | sort > tweets.log
echo tweets.log | @facebook.com/me/post/new --activity "Feeling: Happy" --photo /tmp/HN.jpg
then we'll have a web UNIX.
Re: Do One Thing
#86> The first person to create a tool that can pipe a table from a browser into a spreadsheet...
Wait a minute. This is called the clipboard. Try it -- you can just copy and paste the table into a Google Doc and it Just Works. What's missing?
Re: Do One Thing
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Once again, capitalism ruins everything fun And creates everything fun.
Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.
What's the Internet you envision sans profit motive?
Re: Do One Thing
#88I had two thoughts while reading this. 1 - The need for the web to be profitable in some way makes 'single tools' hard to build. You have to grow users, add features, etc, etc. So even if you have an API or something useful it likely won't scale economically. Unless it's government supported or behind a foundation of some sort. The Twitter API comes to mind here. 2 - This is tricky because for the web to meet the UNI…
Capitalism ruins everything fun? Not sure I follow. There are so many amazing APIs available now, which aren't as frictionless as using Unix tools -- but why would they be? Unix tools are installed locally and don't fall under the same constraints as communicating with an external system. It's apples and oranges.
I was just using an API the other day to validate addresses. It's an amazing thing, being able to hit an endpoint and not worry about the myriad of complex processes that must happen for that validation. If that's capitalism, I'd say it's pretty good.
Re: Do One Thing
#89> The first person to create a tool that can pipe a table from a browser into a spreadsheet... Wait a minute. This is called the clipboard. Try it -- you can just copy and paste the table into a Google Doc and it Just Works. What's missing?
It's missing the ability to build an automated process. Clipboard operations are designed to be manual.
Re: Do One Thing
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.
What's the Internet you envision sans profit motive?
The one with free knowledge and kittens and no ads and SaaS bullshit.