Very good analysis! I generally agree, especially about patents being the most abused. Even still, I wouldn't completely get rid of them without some kind of replacement, they've made a fair amount of tech possible. Trademarks are downright useful and justified. I'm neutral about whether the grandkids get a free ride. I see artistic expression as the most worthy of some kind of protection, I just think intellectual property is not a great framing for the concept.
Stackoverflow was still arguably the best offering at what it provided, but what it provided became obsolete. The need for a repository service is only growing.
It is not clear to me that Github's service has degraded due to incompetence, it also seems possible that they are just struggling to meet demand as the source code backbone of an internet in a critical moment of evolution. I'm not sure any single provider would fare any better.
The very concept of IP was a mistake. I understand it helped make a lot of work possible. But virtually nothing useful came from nothing, and the reservoir of human knowledge belongs to all of us. Unless you are Isaac Newton, you took a good idea and made it better or more applicable. Pretending like you own it is just dishonest.
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
The reality that individuals and cultures create can be a dark and confining place. Empiricism is our only window to a universe full of possibility and light. Humanity is like a child, standing on our toes to peer through and wonder.
I've been using Claude Design to make animated SVGs, and I've learned a thing or two about its limits and how to get around them for that narrow purpose.
One thing I've learned is that you have to ask it to first come up with a robust way to define the geometry and then apply that to an SVG. Without that first step, it just guesses at where everything should be that isn't directly connected with a node, and it is hilariously bad. But with that first step it is capable of creating some incredible geometry algorithmically from detailed instructions.
The other thing is that whatever tool prepares the svg for export will strip the animations as part of a sanitizing process, it won't even see that has occurred. You have to ask it to export to a different file type like my-animation.svg.txt, and then obviously you want to inspect it because svg can carry exploits not related to animation.
Its ability to generate these designs is part toddler with a crayon, part savant. It won't be able to create any quality organic figures without reference material, but its ability to create intricate and mathematically correct design and animate it is promising. I haven't used it extensively so I'd be very interested to hear other observations and advice.
My rule of thumb is that animations need a purpose, otherwise you are just showing off and it gets tedious. This animation carries more purpose than most, conceptually you might understand which orientation will be next but it takes your brain a second to validate, and it is much simpler if you can see the path that it took.
If you think of the world as the activity of people and nations, I can understand that reaction.
If you think of the world as everything it is possible to see and experience, learning about the world won't bring torture, it will bring freedom from it.
I find it kind of funny that we've been low-key suffocating the higher order function of our brains ever since we started building structures to live in with very little awareness of it. My mom is one of those people who complains that the air is getting stale and opens a window, the hero we needed.
The article describes several actual inventions that are still the foundation of modern fire departments. It goes without saying that they didn't come up with the idea of organized firefighting.
To put a finer point on it, I recognize there are a lot of good creators on YouTube and I'm glad it can support their work. But the overall trend has been for the worse, at least for the target audience I belong to. The change in the average title card tells a story. I believe it would be fantastic if there was a competitor that captured the original motivation.
I believe I heard that reddit has started a different kind of feed to replace r/all and it does introduce some kind of algorithm that "suggests" content differently from the straightforward upvote system. Although the popularity contest aspect of it was always somewhat regrettable, I liked that it was a really simple algorithm that supported an entirely human driven curation of content, so it seems like a regression.
As someone who usually shows up to the thread after most of the energy has moved on, it is always a little disappointing. It seems open for some kind of innovation that could keep the conversation alive and give it the longevity that comment trees generally lack. I always try to reply to these straggler replies to my own comments.
Companies who want to use this data should gather it themselves, and transparently. Insurance companies do this, my dad had a little tracking unit in his car that I assume allowed him to pay a lower rate.
It is not gathering or using the data that is a problem, it is gathering or sharing it without awareness and consent. To be fair, even sharing/selling it would be fine assuming it happens with awareness and consent. Not buried in some ToS, but active consent.
I agree that fighting the movement is generally futile, but I think there is a lot still to understand about where it comes from and better ways to respond. I think it is a lot of small factors that work together. It seems like our education system is phoning it in, not so much on the level of teachers but culturally. As someone who has spent a large part of my life in academia, I see problems there too that contribute to mistrust. I think the growing divide in our culture has resulted in fewer conservative voices within that sphere of influence, and they quite understandably feel shut out and uninvested.
The superfluous content I was thinking about is all the extra content besides the discussion. Forum signatures and gratuitous UI layouts that take up a significant part of the screen. I think the minimalism of the comment tree is partly why it works so well.
What I'm hearing from you and the other people who prefer the old format is appreciation of a tighter knit community and a thread of conversation that lasts more than a day. I can appreciate that too.
The idea behind the quote most likely came from T.S. Eliot: Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.