Den Delimarsky

https://den.dev Entirely static site built with Hugo. Blogging for a bit more than a decade now.

I'm saying that it's well worth taking a step back from the tree-level view, e.g. celebrating and being inspired by the intellectual and technical details of a smart industrious individual attempt to reasonable degree insulate themselves from the abuses of surveillance capital, and consider the forest-level view, that while few were paying much attention, our society in general, and the industry most HN readers contribute to in specific–in some cases, very very directly–is now profoundly, all but irredeemably broken, wrong, amoral, and bad, pick a word. Articles of this type and fandom and advocacy of this or that open source solution to a tiny piece of the surveillance capitalism nightmare, are in small way part of the problem; they normalize the experience well sketched here: https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/ But that article only approaches some sides of the problem. The political and philosophical ones, which are implicit but not blown out, are deep, real, and corrosive. The subtext, which is not so subterranean, is that readers here who are cashing a pay check accelerating total information awareness, dark patterns, and the abuse of users in exchange for calculatedly seductive or addictive services whose fine print all know no one ever reads, are culpable, and that damage is real, and the costs real. And they should do better.

"Be a property owner and not a renter on the Internet" <https://den.dev/blog/be-a-property-owner-not-a-renter-on-the-internet/… HN discussion: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlcDHlK_RoY> If you keep working on Maggie's Farm, you'll keep encountering Maggie's rules. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie%27s_Farm> Rely on YouTube for distribution, for now, but build a home base (or bases) elsewhere which you can fall back on.

I didn't say anything about web frameworks or chasing latest trends. Developing a cross-platform app that uses native interface elements is extremely time intensive and sometimes laughably complicated[1]. With design system I meant that designers create a spec how the UI should look like and behave (eg. the primary button in Firefox) and then engineers implement that in a reusable way. Designers can then use their own specs to create new surfaces and engineers can use their reusable components to make the specs real. This is a lot more efficient than either maintaining three code paths for the whole UI or building and maintaining a complex abstraction framework for native surfaces. That's what XUL was. That's the reason why there are barely any UI-heavy cross-platform apps and a lot of web-apps. [1]https://den.dev/blog/windows-priority-shuffle/

Why do I get redirected to https://den.dev/ukraine? This isn't a good idea. edit: https://archive.ph/q8ayE

Thanks for reply and for have shared your project first! > I think we can refresh some the things that make it powerful with a fresh coat of paint, to make it more accessible to a “younger generation.” That's what scare me, again in general: I see regular small complaint of modern absurdity, posts like: - https://tiramisu.bearblog.dev/your-desktop-is-not-a-destination/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838697 - https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61535.html - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/epitaph-to-laptops/ - https://rsapkf.org/weblog/q2z/ - https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/04/21/new-rss/ - https://jfm.carcosa.net/blog/computing/usenet/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510169 - https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28363453 - https://github.com/akkartik/teliva - https://akiflow.com/ - https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui-doesnt-wo… - https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/ - https://www.charlieharrington.com/smart-phone-dumb-terminal/ - https://mattmower.com/2021/08/02/what-we-lost/ and COUNTLESS others, similarly many "new stuff"/innovations appear and are actually partial, limited and limiting solutions to problems already solved decades ago in a more broad and superior way. Emacs itself is a bit horrific in the sense that it's codebase is hard to be kept up by modern developers who have troubles knowing it, but at least represent the classic…