Finally someone is speaking truth to power. These registered non-profits that release their code for free and their leisure time for support need to be knocked down a notch.
We all know they are evil. But you know the most evil thing? That code that was previously released under a free license? Still sneakily on display in the git history like the crown jewels in the Tower of London. Except of armed guard defending the code that wants to be free once more it's hidden behind arcane git commands. Name me a single person that knows how to navigate the git history. I'm waiting. Spoiler alert: I asked Claude and they don't exist.
Sure, but this person is a doctor (or similar) who took time to learn to code this form up to better serve their patients. They are most likely blessedly ignorant of software licenses and version control.
As I read it the op said, "I don't like how they changed this license, this is a bad direction and I didn't think there was adequate transparency."
And your rebuttal is, "Well you can always recover the code from the git history?"
I mean, this is true, but do you think this really addresses the spirit of the post's complaint? Does mentioning they're a non-profit change anything about the complaint?
The leadership and future of a software project is an important component in its use professionally. If someone believes that the project's leadership is acting in an unfair or unpredictable way then it's rational and prudent for them to first express displeasure, then disassociate with the project if they continue this course. But you've decided to write a post that suggests the poster is being irrational, unfair, and that they want the project to fail when clearly they don't.
If you'd like to critique the post's points, I suggest you do so rather than straw manning and well-poisoning. This post may look good to friends of the project, but to me as someone with only a passing familiarity with what's going on? It looks awful.
Oh I did. I got rid of it. Inspiring both constant censure and the kind of response you're giving drove me to despair.
I don't write things for public consumption now.
But we're not talking about me or the post. We're talking about your refusal to engage with the implications of what the project did.
I don't care what Datastar does. I'd never use Datastar. Looks like exactly what I don't need. They can certainly govern their product as they see fit.
But I've disassociated from projects for less egregious unannounced terms changes. And I've never had that decision come out for the worst, only neutral or better.
I'm actually writing some Emacs Lisp right now, because I want $FEATURE in Emacs. I've been away from Emacs Lisp for awhile in the land of Clojure and I'm reimporting certain things the way they are done there.
Libraries that help with that, even though the major underlying structure isn't immutable data structures make Emacs Lisp bearable are: s.el, ht.el, dash.el
It would be great if there was namespacing and less global state pollution.
Of course if you want to integrate with the rest of the Emacs ecosystem and you want some libraries that help you out make things nice means learning a whole different ballgame. Like wanting to use the great transient.el. That's super stateful and based on eieio.el. (Although transient.el is relatively good about hiding that behind a good API surface.)
Overall, even though I wish it was based on a functional core and Clojure's immutable data structure, concurrency, namespacing and its great EDN reader, I just accept the pragmatism on the human scale that if I want a great text based interface that interacts with the rest of my text driven workflow Emacs is a good choice and Emacs Lisp is acceptable.
Thank you. I was thinking of feedback from people experienced in some complexities of backpacking / camping. In the past, I helped people traveling to Tibet and close to El Chalten [1] with GPS, batteries, solar cells, and weather schedule and redundancy, since if you don't organize yourself precisely like a "military campaign" something could fail that could be prevented with an engineering process.
Cal also writes about reverse office hours.
The idea is that instead of holding a 1 hour meeting where every person only has a small contribution to make (in the realm of 5 minutes or less), they don't attend that meeting but rather the person with the objective that needs input from several different players is tasked with going to the different players when it's convenient to the ones you need the small contributions from.
So I don't think Cal is only interested in optimizing his own life and dumping everything EFT style onto others.
Undoubtedly it was easier for Darwin to work 4 deep work hours a day because he didn't have to handle the kids, prepare the food, clean the house and mow the lawn and work in the garden.
Based on having read Cal a lot I haven't seen him advocate this selfishness in the modern world.
Was that on his blog, or in the book? Maybe I glazed over. I think it would be interesting to see him write something from the perspective of "optimising other peoples' time" to be honest. Many of the patterns do it implicitly, he's just never considered explicitly how your deep work habits can help others (afaik).
I think the argument's slightly more subtle than that - you don't have to advocate for it, it just naturally happens. Maybe it's viewing executive function as a zero sum game, where if I get some you lose some. I think we've all come up with examples that show that's not universally true, although we haven't proved it doesn't just kinda implicitly happen.
I'm currently in the position of being a carer, and large uninterrupted blocks of time are basically impossible for me right now. It's frustrating for everyone involved. Would the author of the linked piece say that I'm being robbed of my executive function because I'm looking after a sick partner? I think her model might be deepity in the Daniel Dennett sense - sounds good on the surface, but has too many exceptions to be useful. As someone else said, we're all interdependent (today's post about us all being temporarily abled fits in here somewhere). I'm not going anywhere with this, I've just been musing a lot about executive function lately.
Right, maybe I should have framed my comment a bit differently: this is not core functionality I would pay for.
Experiments are cool and it would be dumb to make suggestions about how they do R&D. I was more reacting to the thought that this would become part of the product offering.
I put in a (mostly) transcript of the Randy Pausch lecture on Time Management [1] and the summarizer gave me:
Time management is an important skill to have in order to lead a happier and more productive life. Julie A. Zelenski, a professor at UVA, gave a talk on time management, drawing from two books and her own experiences. She recommends having a filing system, using speaker phones, and standing during phone calls to save time. She also suggests doing the ugliest task first, having a timer on the phone, and leaving thank-you notes on the desk. Zelenski also recommends scheduling meetings, phone calls, and mundane tasks, and treating people with respect and dignity. An interesting point she made was to use a power drill to carve pumpkins instead of a knife!
Julie Zelenski, ha. AI be dreamin'.
I liked the examples and you're always going to have some weird loss of content when you summarize but the AI taking the joke by Randy and then imagining a surname is still amusing.
