It isn't just racism and racist stereotypes (DS halflings as "jungle primitives" as one example), but a history of extensive genocides, widespread cannibalism, pervasive oppression and slavery, systematic forced breeding to create the Mul player race...
All wrapped up in a very violent grim-meathook-future milieu.
Any one of these could be fixed without neutering the setting, but probably not all (or even most) of them at once. Even with the most respectful approach to the material, by the time you were done fixing, it just wouldn't be Dark Sun.
> Personally, I'd love to see more systems that are less "wargaming" oriented than D&D but with a focus on long term play and, where possible, player growth.
Did you actually mean player growth? I'm familiar with Player Character growth, but fostering the growth of the player (at least beyond simply a growing familiarity with the rules) is a new idea for me, although I'm not sure why the notion of helping players become more skillful at role-playing (if that was what you meant) was surprising to me.
> Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money.
This is actually the second-worst possible goal. Worse than the desire for money is the desire for power.
> Microsoft excel driving an astonishingly large number of business processes.
I'm not sure I agree. Google obviously felt that they needed an office suite (including a spreadsheet) in order to avoid being frozen out of some markets (so they bought one), but none of the other Big Tech players felt the same way, nor does the lack of one seem to have actually limited their growth, and the current crop of low-code and no-code tool entrants don't seem to be predicated on Excel as a starting point.
> I've seen programming newsgroups, those things from the 90's, with what can best be described as MITM attacks having taken place when coders have been looking for solutions to problems and the solutions have not been correct. Most newsgroups were never secure so vulnerable to MITM from day 1 and what is being reported today is just the latest variation in that attack process.
Well, that's also the side effect of taking Cunningham's Law to heart, which says "the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."
At some point cinder block construction will become it's own aesthetic (or an element of an aesthetic), perhaps something like the current 'industrial' trend or maybe an architectural equivalent of 'tactical' stylng.
> Whenever you see a wall being made of red clay bricks, that’s because the builder wants it to look nice.
There is a scene in Penny Dreadful (Which is set in a fictionalized Victorian London) where a character laments all the brick buildings that are being built, replacing wood buildings that have "character", because wood "holds its history" unlike bricks which are all the same, forever.
The main appeal of bricks is essentially nostalgic, similar to the appeal of low resolution 8-bit graphics. We call one 'traditional' and the other 'retro' but those labels are arbitrary.
> It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web.
Despite his failure to ship, Nelson's vision hasn't been particularly nebulous. Overambitious, somewhat srlf-referential and brittle, perhaps, but fairly clear.
And I definitely don't think the WWW is 'nearly indistinguishable'. A few features that are missing are (off the top of my head): bidirectional links, link referential integrity, versioning, annotations, transclusions with attribution and provenance, etc.
Now, none of that ever shipped. Little of it ever got as far as a PoC as part of Xanadu/Udanax. And it is pretty clear in hindsight that, if implemented, the spam problems created by many of those features could have dwarfed what we (or rather, search engines) have to deal with today (remember blog referer linkspam? That's what bidirectional links with server-enforced referential integrity leads to). Arguably, the WWW wasn't just the simplest thing that could work, but also flourished because TBL didn't attempt to implement many of Nelson's cherished features.
But that the web today falls far short of Nelson's vision, and that as visions go, his was fairly clear (If overly reliant on neologisms like enfilade etc. usually defined in terms of implementation details such as novel datastructures rather than formats or protocols), shouldn't be particularly controversial.
> How does the user benefit from having a phone built on top of open source software, that they cannot update a well known security vulnerability because the manufacturer can't bother to run a build with the last upstream version?
Well, depending on the incentives and restrictions involved, an ecosystem of 3rd-party builds is a potentially viable escape hatch for the user from the manufacturer's grip.
Of course the sticking point is the degree to which the hardware requires proprietary and opaque binary blobs in order to enable important user-facing features. But then, that isn't anything really new, as open source PC operating systems have been dealing with this issue since forever, with the caveat that PC hardware is mostly modular, so having or swapping in well-supported components is an option, whereas smartphones are an integrated slab of metal, plastic, and glass, with "no user serviceable parts inside" as the status quo.
But even that caveat has precedents, in non-PC devices such as consumer networking gear that only became well supported through aggressive GPL license enforcement actions that freed some of the necessary code.
Even without GraphQL, you can accommodate both sets of needs. I said as much. I'm also saying that the argument about the user-facing tech stack is bogus.
Okay this is a bit meta, but the whole cluster of "everything old is new again", "the pendulum of fashion has swung", "nothing new under the sun" takes is ignoring what tends to drive this sort of change: relative costs.
The allure of xmlhttprequest was that over connections much slower than today, and with much less powerful desktop computers, a user didn't have to wait for the whole page to redownload and re-render (one can argue that focusing on better HTTP caching on the server and client might have been smarter) after every single user interaction. This was also much of the draw of using frames (which were also attractive for some front-end design use-cases later re-solved with CSS).
As apps got more complex, clients got more compute, bandwidth grew, and as web audiences grew, offloadingl much of the page rendering to the client helped to both contain server-side costs and increase or maintain responsiveness to user interactions.
Now, as desktop client performance improvement slows down (this isn't just the slowing of computer speeds, computers are also replaced less frequently), average bandwidth continues to grow, app complexity and sophistication continues to grow, but as server compute cost falls faster than audience size grows, shifting rendering to HTML back to the server and sending more verbose pre-rendered HTML fragments over the wire can make sense as a way of giving users a better experience.
> More and more, you’ve got 2-3 frontends (web and cross-platform mobile, or explicitly web, iOS and Android), and you want to power them all with the same backend.
RESTful APIs serving up JSON works for all 3, as does GraphQL [...]. This however is totally web-specific - you’ll end up building REST APIs and mobile apps anyways, so the productivity gains end up way smaller, possibly even net negative.
I bet someone will produce a native client library that receives rendered SPA HTML fragments and pretends it's a JSON response. They might even name it something ironic like "Horror" or "Cringe".
That said, an ideal API for desktop web apps looks rather different than one for mobile web or native clients. Basically, for mobile you want to minimize the number of requests because of latency (so larger infodumps rather than many small updates) and minimize the size of responses due to bandwidth limitations and cost (so concise formats like Protocol Buffers rather than JSON).
It is definitely possible to accommodate both sets of requirements at the same API endpoint, but pretending that having a common endpoint implies anything else about the tech stack is rather disingenuous. If you want server-side rendering and an API that delivers HTML fragments instead of PB or JSON, that can be done too.
> And for actual ducts you'll want to use foil-tape because temperature changes wreck the adhesion of duct-tape, then the moisture leaks into the walls/ceiling which is $$$$ bad.
This strongly depends on the type of duct. Flex ducts that are a plastic skin over a wire coil don't work so well with aluminum tape.