All this is true but mailing lists UI sucks. Please tell me how you navigate a tree of messages? It is not easy to tell who is this responding to and who responds to it. Yes, it can be figured out but why does the tree change as I navigate it? [0]
What if you're not subscribed? I don't usually care about the day to day of Linux kernel dev, but that one thread might be of interest to me. Actually, I might have something to contribute, but since I'm not subscribed the UX on that sucks too.
"Just use mutt" as a reply to "I want to read this one email thread" is rather missing the point. Plus the reality is most people neither use nor want mutt. Many people think the UX on mutt is horrible. Nice if it works for you, but it doesn't for many. So there's that.
There are tools to import mails into whichever email client you prefer, especially if the list is archived on a public-inbox instance, which is the best mailing list archiving system so far.
You can't seriously claim that this is good UX. And that's what this is about: not that it's impossible but that the UX is not good, especially for the casual user only interested in the occasional thread.
The web interface for the archive is for casual users and I believe most have clickable link for the subject that lists the email in a thread and a “previous/next in thread” button.
If you’re downloading mbox files, then you know how to handle them.
Spent some time on this a few years back and have a half-finished project for it. The thing that proved to be a huge roadblock was importing existing archives since many don't provide a good interface to it.
The https://lore.kernel.org site is actually fairly decent, but limited to Linux kernel stuff and some adjacent projects. Gmane was quite nice too, but now defunct (the web UI anyway).
It hasn't been done, because it's impossible. You might get the first 80%, maybe even the first 90% if you had enough money to hire top designers for several years, but you'll never reach Slack level polish.
In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.
I recently signed up for an annual subscription to Kagi on their Starter plan and I couldn't agree more. Search quality with them has been great so far, and I realize their small web search and exploration features too.
I've been slowly working to find other paid services as alternatives to the free ones that I'm currently using (next big one was shifting away from Gmail and onto a personal domain for mail using Fastmail). Migrated away from Notion and using Obsidian with Syncthing running on my unRAID server at home. Generally just trying to find alternatives that aren't in the data mining and user lock in sphere and more about maintaining a positive user experience without taking advantage of their users and their data.
This. Please can we go back to the days where I simply pay for services or items instead of being trapped inside a maze of buy now pay later, credits, coupons, bonuses, gifts, tiers, etc
I am sure there have never been such a time, but I long for it anyway.
> At this point, we have to be actively be against free services.
Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities, because the love of money is the root of all evil.
Linux is free as-in freedom. Linux is not zero-cost: it has taken tens of billions of dollars of investment from thousands of organisations over three decades - and countless volunteer hours - to make it what it is today; that the wider community gets Linux security patches and feature updates for free is a side-effect of the GPL license coupled with the low marginal cost of reproducing software once-written. I’m here to remind people that the bulk of Linux’ codebase was not written for free as an act of charity.
What I’m saying is that, hypothetically, if the entire business-world suddenly ditched Linux overnight and went back to IBM and Burrows like it’s the 1960s again again (and let’s pretend Android isn’t a thing either) then no-one would be funding significant Linux dev/eng work, and as much as we value the hacker-spirit of unpaid community/volunteer projects, I feel it isn’t enough to keep Linux viable and secure (especially in high-visibility, high-exposure scenarios like desktops and internet-facing services).
Eh, I heard lots of complaints from the Xen folks that the prevalence of RedHat in the kernel development community leads to double standards that makes their favourite product (KVM) get nicer and quicker reviews than the Xen related changes.
Creating an interactive UI with rapid development is a fundamentally difficult problem. Its no wonder that people spend billions on creating UI (collectively) and I haven't any good ones yet (performant, interactive, efficient).
Why not just drop the requirement altogether? All I want is an internet of links, images and texts? Whats so wrong with Facebook that looks like this website? Just a bunch of links and texts.
I don't give a shit if the button is a square or round. Why do you get to decide what is "best" for me anyway? Let the web be the web and the user decide how to present them.
I have no idea where to ask questions nowadays. Stackoverflow is way "too slow" (Go to website, write a nice well formatted thread, wait for answers). But there's way faster solutions now, namely from message groups.
For example, I was wondering if its okay to move my home directory to a different filesystem altogether and create a symlink from /home/. Where do I ask such questions? The freaking ZFS mailing list? SO? It was just a passerby question, and what I wanted more than the answer is the sense of community.
The only place that I know that have a wide enough range of interest, with many people that each know some of these stuff quite deep, is public, is easily accessible is unironically 4chan /g/.
I would rather go there then Discord where humanity's knowledge will be piped to /dev/null.
Reddit was a place until the API changes were made. Discord is another at the cost of public discoverability. Barring that, man pages and groking the sources.
Lets be honest, the world needs these unpaid labors for it to properly function. Had he not have them the past few decades, we would be living in proprietary hell and productivity would drop significantly.
The way I see OSS funding situation is something like this: My Ferrari is broke so I was languishing on the side of the road when a poor mechanic with shabby clothes was walking by. He fixed my car and when I asked for a payment, he said "Its all good!". "Oh really!?" I said, as I turn of my voice recorder and drive off into the sunset.
Of course I am completely in the right here, he did say he didn't need any compensation and it was all recorded (or in writing). But I can't help but feel some humanity is missing here.
In my experience having worked on some popular OSS projects, the scene actually ends with the Ferrari owner flipping off the mechanic before peeling out and splattering him with mud.
The part you are missing here, is where you have insulated yourself financially and legally; and they don't have the means to.
Maybe they are an undocumented immigrant, but happy to help others. Maybe they think they will be sued by someone with money if they take any money for the job (and create a larger mechanical issue).
Wikis may have become complex beasts, but in the original 1995 design they were pretty much just finding CamelCasedWords and turning them into hyperlinks; minimal wikis could be a dozen lines of code...
I wish Obsidian used git instead of its own sync protocol and service. I've used it, and it wasn't bad, but I didn't feel comfortable using a third party proprietary and undocumented protocol for notes that I felt were important.
I thought it'd be okay to use the community-maintained Obsidian git plugin, but as fate would have it, my original fears actually came to pass. I lost over a month of notes due to how badly behaved its git merge heuristics are. It force pushes and rewrites history and will step on other machines with different updates. It took me a little while to catch on to the fact my notes were disappearing, and there was nothing I could do to recover.
I ultimately threw up my hands and abandoned Obsidian outright.
I've hit that "git plugin is crap" problem with obsidian too. You've just made me think I should try unison. Also been thinking about a SSG backed with obsidian, sooooo...
It's its own beast to maintain. A lot is hiding behind your "just".
If the use case is single user wiki and the user is technical enough, MediaWiki requires more resources and is also more work than Git + Markdown + a static site generator if you are already comfortable with static site generators. No specific web server config, no tricky configuration files, no database to maintain, not difficulties to upgrade the server…
Now, one could argue that "single user wiki" just means "regular website" because the essence of the wiki is gone. Wiki means "quick" (friction-less?) edits by multiple users, possibly anonymous [1]). What the author of the post did is convenient handling of internal links. Which is still a good idea, but I would do it differently: I would not create a <a href="..."> tag for missing pages, that not very nice to users. If you do this, you are intentionally creating broken links that can only be distinguished with styling, which is not very accessible. Red links are useful in an actual wiki where users can actually create the page, but on a regular website, I'd use something like <span class="missing" title="Dedicated page coming"> or so (+ whatever is needed for the title text to be accessible).
C is peak C for me. I think you can better modularize in C than in C++ because with APIs build around incomplete struct types the implementation stays in the C file and does not leak into the header as with classes.
This gives a simple to understand API with clearly defined boundary, has a stable ABI, preserves fast compilation times, avoids instruction bloat, etc. One could do this in C++ too, but what would be the point of using C++ then...
For me the only truly compelling C++ features are RAII and generics (not classes or virtual functions), and those are compelling enough for me to not consider C when I can choose C++. From what I can tell, the Rust designers seem to have felt the same way.
It has always been possible to do this kind of things (we have C, C++, Java) but I don't think people have been this semi-successful with reimplementing a bunch of common tools. Where are all the X re-implemented in C/C++/Java?
[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/7/103