chipotle_coyote (u/chipotle_coyote)

chipotle_coyote commented on Typepad is shutting down everything.typepad.com/bl... · Posted by u/gmcharlt

throw0101a · 3 days ago

> very enterprise-ish $499/yr model

$500 ÷ 12 = 41.67 per month.

For a personal/fun publishing platform that might be a bit pricey, but that's less than what many people pay for their cell phone plan.

chipotle_coyote · 3 days ago

That’s fair; it just makes it pretty steep at the low end compared to many other hosted solutions like Ghost, WordPress, or Squarespace. It gives the strong impression that they’re not looking for new customers as much as trying to keep existing commercial ones on board for as long as possible.

chipotle_coyote commented on Typepad is shutting down everything.typepad.com/bl... · Posted by u/gmcharlt

Alex3917 · 3 days ago

I have no doubt that it wasn't vc profitable, but my assumption (without any inside info) is that the real issue is that they were using some hacked up version of Movable Type that they couldn't upgrade.

It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.

chipotle_coyote · 3 days ago

Movable Type is, perhaps shockingly, still being actively developed; version 9 is coming out later this year. I’m not sure who the customer base is at this point—some years ago, they dropped the open source version and personal pricing and went to a very enterprise-ish $499/yr model—but I guess somebody is still giving them money.

chipotle_coyote commented on I Prefer RST to Markdown (2024) buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/shlomo_z

bluGill · 13 days ago

My only problem with rst is that several useful the extentions are not updated. I have some great rst documentation, but part of that is I importing doxygen, dolphin, and other extentions that are useful but saddly not updated on the same schedule as the main tool. I end up many versions back just because it is all that is compatible.

still markdown just isn't powerful enough for anything non trivial.

chipotle_coyote · 13 days ago

> still markdown just isn’t powerful enough for anything non trivial

I see this sentiment a lot, and my reaction is always, “Sure it is, with asterisks.” In the past decade I was the primary author of the RethinkDB documentation, a senior technical writer on Bixby’s developer documentation, and am now a contractor working on Minecraft’s developer docs. All of them were large, decidedly non-trivial, and Markdown. Microsoft’s entire learning portal, AFAICT, is in Markdown.

And the thing is, each of those systems used a different Markdown processor. My own blog uses one that’s different from all of those. According to HN, I should be spending virtually all my time fighting with all those weird differences and edge cases, but I’m not. I swear. The thing about edge cases is they’re edge cases. I saw a “Markdown torture” document the other day which contained a structure like this:

    [foo[bar(http://bar.com)](http://foo.com)

and proudly proclaimed that different Markdown processors interpret that construct differently. Yes, okay, and? Tell me a use case for that beyond “I want to see how my Markdown processor breaks on that.”

The asterisk is that almost any big docs (or even blogging) system built on Markdown has extensions in it, which are usually a function of the template system. Is that part of Markdown? Obviously not. Is it somehow “cheating”? I mean, maybe? At the end of the day, 99% of what I’m writing is still Markdown. I just know that for certain specific constructs I’m going use {{brace-enclosed shortcodes}}, or begin an otherwise-typical Markdown block quote with a special tag like “%tip%” to make it into a tip block. Every system that proclaims it’s better than Markdown because it allows for extensions, well, if you take advantage of that capability, look at you adding site-specific customization just like I’m doing with (checks notes) Markdown.

If reStructured Text works better for you, or AsciiDoc, or Org Mode, great! Hell, do it all in DITA, if you’re a masochist. But this whole “this is obviously technically superior to Markdown, which surely no one would ever do real work in, pish tosh” nonsense? We do. It works fine. Sorry.

chipotle_coyote commented on Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widens theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/c420

atonse · a month ago

Is this just a result of a strong market since most of their “wealth” is in stocks, driving up the perceived gap and resulting in such shocking sounding stats?

I am not defending inequality but how is stock-based wealth taking away from lower income workers? Is it a taxation issue?

Does the number of billionaires impact the overall cost of living of a whole metro area? If so, how?

I don’t quite understand the comparison. Genuinely asking.

chipotle_coyote · a month ago

A lot of the compensation is in stocks, sure, but a lot of compensation is also, well, in compensation. HN users have been posting -- for years -- about salaries and cash (or cash equivalent) bonuses for starting level software engineering positions at some companies exceeding $250K annually. The salary inflation in Silicon Valley's tech fields has far outpaced both general inflation and wage increases of non-tech workers in the area, so even if you're seeing San Jose Panda Express locations paying $20/hr, it's just not closing or even maintaining the gap. (And we're setting aside how many of those sorts of positions aren't actually full-time.)

For full disclosure, when I was working in Silicon Valley as a tech writer a few years ago, I was making over $200K in salary and bonuses, no stock options. Now I'm working remotely in Florida, contracting with a "managed services" company who's placed me with a much bigger tech company (one you've definitely heard of) which uses this structure to keep salaries down, and I'm making $35/hr -- and the company only pays for benefits in the most technical sense, e.g., I can buy health insurance with pre-tax money but they don't contribute any of it, there's a 401(k) but it effectively has no corporate matching, I get 10 days of PTO a year, etc.).

chipotle_coyote commented on Cosmoe: BeOS Class Library on Top of Wayland cosmoe.org/index.html... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

imchillyb · 2 months ago

“There are several sample applications included which demonstrate what it is capable of.”

This was the mantra of BeOs. Here’s a technology preview. Watch videos on a cube, now a sphere!

The OS was sold as a technology preview that was easy and accessible and the users only needed to wait for developers…

…that never showed up.

Similar occurrence with Microsoft phones and lack of developers. Pebble watch and lack of developers…

What these projects all lack are meaningful engagement instead of a few ‘oh wow’ moments.

chipotle_coyote · 2 months ago

I mean, I get that argument, but I actually ran BeOS full-time for over a year. It had a great Works-style office suite (GoBe Productive) written by the people who wrote ClarisWorks, a few good graphics programs including an amazing competitor to Macromedia Fireworks (e-Picture), a solid BBEdit-like programming editor (Pe), a few music programs that did things that I’m not sure I’ve seen other systems do to this day like SoundPlay’s wacky ability to act as a mixer, with speed control, between multiple MP3 files or ObjektSynth’s…object-oriented synthesizer (it’s very hard to describe). There was a stage control system for live performances whose name I forget now—the company is still around, as far as I know—that was used, running on BeOS, for several Broadway shows and Circue de Soleil installations. And an animation program that started on BeOS, Moho, is still around today.

The engagement was certainly starting, and I think there’s a chance—a small one, to be sure, but a chance—that if Be, Inc., hadn’t clearly decided that carving out a comfortable niche just wasn’t enough, BeOS might have succeeded. (Instead they decided to go all-in on “Internet Appliances,” which ended up dealing them the death blow rather than a big success. Ironically, I think that market effectively succeeded a decade later, but in the form of the iPad.)

chipotle_coyote commented on Redesigned Swift.org is now live swift.org/... · Posted by u/lawgimenez

reaperducer · 3 months ago

I'm not a Swiftie, but there's this if you're already on a Mac:

https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/pixelfoundry/pixelfo...

chipotle_coyote · 3 months ago

I think if you were already on a Mac and wanted to use Panic Nova, you'd be better off using Icaras:

https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/panic/panic.Icarus/

The one you linked to looks like it's just syntax highlighting; Icarus has that, but also has LSP, building, and debugging support.

chipotle_coyote commented on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/minimaxir

handfuloflight · 3 months ago

How do you propose you would train it to know what you want? Besides a versioned system prompt that you (or the AI) would have to continually adjust.

chipotle_coyote · 3 months ago

If it gathers enough data on you, it can theoretically figure that out. Siri "Suggestions" have been around for years, and if you go to the same place frequently on certain days/times (e.g., your workplace, a friend you visit every Saturday, places you often go to lunch) or use the same apps at similar days/times (e.g., pulling up Callsheet in the evening when you're watching TV shows or movies to do TMDB lookups), those suggestions will show up. All of those examples are real ones I've experienced. The quality is certainly variable, but it's decent.

(Of course, it's "non-LLM" AI, which isn't particularly fashionable right now, but if we really want smarter AI agents we need to stop treating all problems as solvable with large language models.)

chipotle_coyote commented on Compute's Gazette Magazine Returns After 35 Yrs, Will Focus on Retro Computing computesgazette.com/... · Posted by u/dbelson

jnagle78641 · 5 months ago

It's not all AI slop, I assure you.

chipotle_coyote · 5 months ago

I think you might be better off getting rid of the "AI slop" entirely. Without getting into the whole ethical debate (it's worth having, but not here), putting it front and center on the website for a new retrocomputing magazine is kind of like putting an article about new features in Microsoft Word front and center on a website for mechanical typewriter enthusiasts.

chipotle_coyote commented on Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015) culture.pl/en/article/phi... · Posted by u/m-hodges

csours · 5 months ago

Are those even his titles? Authors generally don't make up the title themselves. Sometimes they can help pick one from a list created by a title editor.

chipotle_coyote · 5 months ago

In the fiction publishing world, authors generally do make up their own titles. The editors at the publishing house might exercise veto power and/or make their own suggestions, but I don't think I've ever heard of novelists and short story authors not being allowed to title their own work, with the exception of work-for-hire jobs, e.g., writing a book in a series whose "author" is actually a pseudonym or writing for a book packager.