> My guess is that this change has its roots in the move from physical media delivery of software to internet delivery.
> My instinct is that there is some general principle that relates “friction” and “quality”, although I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to describe it.
I think the principle is: the greater the impact of a mistake, the more effort you'll put in (up front) to avoiding one. The more friction, the greater the impact.
When software was distributed on physical media and users had no internet you basically had only one (1) chance to get it right. Buggy software would be buggy effectively forever. So (for instance) video game companies had insane QA testing of every release. After QA, it'd get burned onto an expensive cartridge and it'd be done. People would pay the 2025 equivalent of $100+ for it, and they'd be unhappy (to say the least) if it didn't even work.
Once users had internet and patching became possible, that slipped a little, then more. Eventually managers realized you could even get away with shipping an incomplete, not working product. You'd just fix it later in a patch.
Now, with software being delivered over the internet, often as SAAS, everything is in a constant state of flux. Sure they can fix bugs (if they chose too), but as they fix bugs they're constantly introducing new ones (and maybe even removing features you use).
Hi, we’ve never met but I dig the energy you put into your work that I’ve seen (books, dart etc). An idea I’ve had, but not brought to fruition, is that of using SmallTalk to produce a document of some kind — that is, the result of the work would be a portable executable image that could be read and interacted with and so on :)
If someone can please figure out how to integrate a purchase/payment system into a similar protocol we would love you forever :)
I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc — and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky style.
Patreon and Spotify already implement subscription-based podcasts, and I am positive they use RSS/Atom under the hood. So the tech is already out there, you just need to turn it into a self-hosted solution.
Indeed, Patreon has private feeds for patrons for exclusive content. That's a decent solution but it's platform-specific, which is both a bad thing (not easily used elsewhere) and good (backwards compatible with good old RSS).
Did not know Patreon's tech was lock-in. I subscribe to a podcast on Spotify and they give you a private URL that you can feed to any app. If you are worried about malicious customers sharing the URL you may likely enable some form of rate limiting (e.g. the server may only serve up to x MiB/month on this URL)
I think you almost have a point in that you seem to be advocating for something along the lines of unbiased input (questioning the presented information because it was constructed for presentation, suggesting that an AI could somehow assist, presumably to help ground your information in a wider context etc)
I think what you may be missing is the role of trust. There is much to say about that, but in this instance, a nice thing about RSS is that I can trust the algorithm it uses to generate my feed. It is very simple, and I, myself choose the sources it draws from.
With some other systems, this is not the case.
Thank you for almost granting me the capability of having a point. That is very nice of you.
I am not missing the role of trust. I have instead simply had that trust betrayed countless of times by now, so I'm seeking a little more. It would be a great first step, but far from the whole journey. And so I'm wary of people mistaking the latter for the former, intentionally or otherwise.
Betrayal of trust is indeed serious, and a hard lesson for many of us. Consider also that progress is made one step at a time, over a long time. While a desire for sudden, wholesale changes is understandable, it may be counterproductive. YMMV
That is not what I'm advocating for, nor are incremental steps something I'm advocating against.
What I'm advocating for is for people to not lose sight of the prize. And what I'm advocating against is misleading claims, which is what I consider the title and the proclaimed motivation of the post to be.
I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of controlled information" (which is how you seem to be interpreting it). Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency over what you select for consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I like about RSS.
> I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of controlled information" (which is how you seem to be interpreting it).
That's my issue, yes.
Now, I don't want to do the Twitter thing where I present my headcanon interpretation as some sort of deliberate messaging on your part, I 100% expect that this understanding of your words hasn't even crossed your mind, and maybe even reads like a gross twisting of what you intended to convey.
That is indeed how I read it though, even if I then recognized it as ambiguous (between those two). I then also made the guess that if I can take the "feeds of controlled information" interpretation away from this so easily, someone who's also as inattentive as me or perhaps even biased to interpret it that way, this may very well make them get the wrong idea. So I figured I should place it into the perspective this topic usually comes up in (and present it from the angle it usually comes up through).
> Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency over what you select for consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I like about RSS.
Yup, that much is all clear. Nothing to contest on that one. It just also didn't run explicitly contrary to the "feeds of controlled information", because, well, it legitimately just wasn't the perspective you were writing from then. I was coming from an angle where I was feeling the absence of such a clarification.
Understood! I know the onus for how the words are interpreted are primarily on the author, so that's all fair for you to raise and I'm glad for that feedback.
Perhaps you could stand up a small service on another host using headless chrome or similar to render, and fall back to client side if the service is down and you don’t already have the pre rendered result stored somewhere. I suggest this only because you mentioned not wanting to pollute your current server environment, and I enjoy seeing these kind of optimizations done :^)
Nice, then I don't need the mysterious aesthetics of some old thinker to project wisdom. I can live by what relates to me in a more experience-oriented sense.
Hi, I don’t fully disagree with you, but a gentle reminder that for many “contribution” is itself out of reach.
An aside: I remember when I was a child, my dad’s favorite coffee mug was black ceramic with a white monotype slogan “Life’s a bitch and then you die”. If that made you chuckle, maybe you’re in a pretty good spot :)
I’m not sure your assertion regarding ancient Egyptians’ feelings on art trends of their time can be tested :P
People create with what is at hand — this includes ideas, not just physical media. In my opinion, suggesting there is society-wide progress (or lack of it) in art is silly, like suggesting the same for fashion or cooking.
Exploration, technical evolution, yes. And progress in ideas, in society? Of course!
