Saturday Morning Coffee
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Were four days away from what is the most consequential Presidential vote in my lifetime, perhaps the country’s lifetime.
Voting is the most important thing you can do to save our democracy.
I’ll leave it at that. I hope you enjoy the links.
Donald Trump may be a known quantity. He’s been a public figure for decades, a television star, and president from 2017-2021. But a second Trump term would present something the United States has never experienced before. Not a would-be authoritarian in the White House—that was Trump’s first term—but a would-be authoritarian who could actually accomplish the task of transforming the federal government into a tool of political repression.
Don’t vote for this man. He’ll destroy our country as we know it and turn it into a hellscape.
High school students who came up with ‘impossible’ proof of Pythagorean theorem discover 9 more solutions to the problem
I love that a couple of high school kids figured these proofs out. Good for them!
I’m searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There’s no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it.
I have thoughts around this as well that are built around Dave’s desire to use RSS to populate the various services. It deserves a blog post all its own. Maybe I’ll have enough gumption to do that someday. 😃
Over the years, Flutter has attracted millions of developers who built user interfaces across every platform. Flutter began as a UI toolkit for mobile - iOS and Android, only. Then Flutter added support for web. Finally, Flutter expanded to Mac, Windows, and Linux. Across this massive expansion of scope and responsibility, the Flutter team has only marginally increased its size. To help expand Flutter’s available labor, and accelerate development, we’re creating a fork of Flutter, called Flock.
This feels extremely ambitious to me and I fear it’ll fail. Hopefully it doesn’t cause a mess in the community.
Sidney Blumenthal • The Guardian
Donald Trump keeps saying that if he is elected to a second term he will prosecute his political opponents, “the enemies within”. On 22 October he stated, once again, that as president he would use “extreme power … We can’t play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people … an enemy from within.”
This man is a menace and must be defeated once and for all. Kick him to the curb so, hopefully, he’ll get the idea he’s not wanted and go play golf for the rest of his miserable life.
Drivers passing through San Francisco have a new roadside distraction to consider: billboards calling out businesses that don’t cough up for the open source code that they use.
Some open source projects thrive and some struggle. If more companies would dedicate some resources to these projects it would be better for everyone involved. We don’t need more incidents like the person who snuck a back door into an open source project or just see them abandoned and left to bit rot.
Currently, the CSS Working Group (CSSWG) is discussing whether to include masonry as part of CSS grid, or as a new layout module?
I like this, especially if the author(s) of masonry agree with the idea.
I wish there were more browsers, and I wish they were more unique. I appreciate that Arc attempted to innovate, but their ego and hubris are a little frustrating. They believe their product is so great that everyone should use it, including their own family and friends. However, when they don’t, they are left feeling perplexed.
I know lots of folks at work using Arc and they love it! I’m skeptical of it. Not because it’s different but because it’s built on Chromium and I don’t trust Google.
A Google engineer presented a proposal to the official standardization committee that would split JavaScript into two languages, a core to be implemented by runtime engines and a more capable variant which depends on tools that compile it down to that core.
I thought the idea of a core was Web Assembly? Maybe that’s too broad? I’d like to know more about what this proposal implies and how would it affect developers.
Michael Miszczak • Just a Pack
A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of caffeinated inspiration/despair, I sat down and wrote a long Facebook post as to why we were ditching Google and switching to DuckDuckGo. Today I want to dive even deeper into this topic, and give you a first-hand account of how Google is killing hundreds of thousands of blogs and small publishers.
Blogs were never really meant to be monetized but enterprising folks have figured out a way to do it.
Unfortunately relying on an advertising company’s search engine to surface your blog to users is risky, as the article points out.
My blog is for me and the ten folks who read it. It’s an outlet. Thankfully I don’t have to make a living from it. I’d starve.
Though Dorsey’s message didn’t specify how many employees would be laid off, sources told Fortune that it could be around 100 employees — or about a quarter of Tidal’s remaining staff. Tidal cut 10 percent of its workers last December, and Dorsey reportedly considered a major reorganization at Block in July.
A few years back, during COVID summer, I tried Tidal, Spotify, and Apple Music. Tidal isn’t bad at all. It’s another competitor in the big music service scene. Granted, it’s the smaller of the three, but the user experience at the time was perfectly fine and the music sounded just fine.
I landed on Apple Music, which has the worst user experience, because it is bundled as part of Apple One. It’s fine.
