Daily Bread

Visual diary of what kids eat in different parts of the world.

Observations on 6 years of journaling

["Rubber-ducking" is a programming term referring to people solving their own block by explaining it to another person; the lister can be replaced with a rubber duck.]

my journal is my rubber duck.

It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now

[Artists on Spotify are paid from a common fund divided in proportion to their number of streams in each payment period. Audiobooks are also sharing from the same pool. Scammers can flood the platform with fake plays that reduces the payout from all the others.]

[Anyone can upload tracks to even verified pages for independent artists because there isn't much vetting on the distributor or platform side and the cost is almost negligible.]

[One dark practice is creating songs from royalty-free loops and setting the date as early as possible in order to block any usage of them via Content ID; this is also not vetted by distributors or streaming platforms.]

Slow social media

the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce.

pagination is more humane than infinite-scroll since it gives users a natural breathing point where they can decide whether they want to keep going

The Left looks for traitors, the Right looks for converts.

How I coined the term 'open source'

I am the originator of the term "open source software" and came up with it while executive director at Foresight Institute. Not a software developer like the rest, I thank Linux programmer Todd Anderson for supporting the term and proposing it to the group.

I said little, but was looking for an opportunity to introduce the proposed term. I felt that it wouldn't work for me to just blurt out, "All you technical people should start using my new term." Most of those attending didn't know me, and for all I knew, they might not even agree that a new term was greatly needed, or even somewhat desirable.

Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive—a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic—just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

[The term "barefoot developers" is a riff on the Mao government's 1960s "barefoot doctors" initiative to train people from rural villages so they can serve as healthcare providers in their undeserved communities.]

[Barefoot developers] are technically savvy and interested in solving problems for themselves and people around them, but don’t want to become fully-fledged programmers. They still live within the world of end-user-facing applications.

they rely on low and no-code tools. And they do wildly complex things within them, pushing these apps to their limits.

This describes my technical capacities well. Though sometimes I can surmount the "command line wall", I almost always prefer other ways.

Vance is Worse

[If the thought of him dying pleases you] because you think it will end our present horror, you are the problem.

Have you heard the expression self-defeating prophecy? It's a prediction that prevents what it predicts by predicting it.

You no longer need JavaScript

CSS can do nesting now!