joshlemer (u/joshlemer)

joshlemer commented on Third places and neighborhood entrepreneurship (2024) nber.org/papers/w32604... · Posted by u/WasimBhai

azemetre · 2 months ago

It does when this is the same company that threatens employees who want to unionize.

Hard to extol the virtues of profit when it results in this. I'm sure the owner love it tho.

joshlemer · 2 months ago

Well, a union is a form of cartel, it's an anti competitive organization of market participants who are colluding to set prices and extract other concessions from labour buyers. They therefor undermine the ability of markets to maximize value for all participants.

joshlemer commented on Third places and neighborhood entrepreneurship (2024) nber.org/papers/w32604... · Posted by u/WasimBhai

barbazoo · 2 months ago

> "Reestablishing Starbucks as the community coffeehouse."

What a load of corporate bullshit. Unlike any other community coffee house, this one made almost $10b in profit last year. I wonder how much the "community" really benefits from this.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SBUX/financials/

joshlemer · 2 months ago

When a company makes a profit, that doesn't necessarily mean they made anyone else worse off. In general, when in a competitive environment, and dealing with customers who are responsible adults (which both hold in the case of the restaurant industry), we should presume that everyone is being made better off by the transactions, that it's a win-win situation.

joshlemer commented on YouTube's new anti-adblock measures iter.ca/post/yt-adblock/... · Posted by u/smitop

wat10000 · 2 months ago

I think that’s a rationalization. Most people just don’t like ads no matter what they are. And I can’t blame them, ads are terrible. But this is a case where they offer a nice subscription that takes them all away, so people ought to buy that instead.

joshlemer · 2 months ago

Well, I don't particularly enjoy ads on Reddit, Gmail, and, when I used them, Tiktok, Facebook, etc but I wasn't particularly pissed off by them either. On YT it seems just so in your way and in your face and egregious. It's like every couple minutes there's an other ad. You can't even chromecast videos to your tv to play in the background because you have to constantly babysit it or else it will load up an ad that goes on forever or 10 minutes until you come back to skip it.

joshlemer commented on Terpstra Keyboard terpstrakeyboard.com/web-... · Posted by u/xeonmc

joshlemer · 2 months ago

For those who haven't ever gotten into microtonal and other non-standard tuned music before, it's a really interesting space. I would highly recommend checking out Kyle Gann's album Hyperchromatica (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbT9oRbu3h8&list=PL1IsImnKxK...), which has a pretty wide variety of pieces/genres, showing the potential of nonstandard tuning. It takes a bit to get used to it but there are brand new colours and emotions that open up here IMO. Definitely worth checking out!

joshlemer commented on Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends pontus.granstrom.me/scrap... · Posted by u/8organicbits

sReinwald · 2 months ago

The core vision here is something I can absolutely get on board with, but the execution fundamentally seems to misunderstand why "home-cooked software" doesn't exist.

The target audience problem is immediately apparent: they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'. This demographic is approximately twenty-seven people.

More critically, they've confused the problem space, in my opinion. The barrier to personal software isn't the lack of drag-and-drop of JavaScript environments. It's that software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever. When I cook dinner for friends, I'm not on the hook when they're hungry again next Tuesday. When my grandma knits a home-made sweater, she's not expected to keep supporting it in case I want to add a hood.

When the attendance counter has a race condition and the venue goes over capacity, guess who's getting the angry call when the fire marshal shows up for an inspection?

The "redistributing the means of software production" rhetoric rings particularly hollow from what appears to be a proprietary SaaS in the making. You don't democratize software by creating another walled garden. And their claim about "owning your data" while simultaneously offering real-time sync is either technically naive or deliberately misleading. How is the attendee counter example's counter state shared between users, if the data lives in local storage? I don't see how you can have both without server infrastructure that they control.

The actual nearest thing to their vision already exists and has millions of users: Spreadsheets. Non-technical people build complex, business-critical "applications" in spreadsheets every day. No JS required, local-first, and everyone already knows how to use it. But "we made a worse Excel" doesn't sound as revolutionary, I suppose.

The real unsolved problem isn't making it easier to create small apps - I build small tools for myself all the time. It's making them sustainable without creating permanent maintenance burdens. And that is not something you can solve with a new framework or SaaS - it's at it's core, a social issue.

joshlemer · 2 months ago

> they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'

There's an enormous gap in complexity, required skill, etc between creating these Scrappy applications and building the whole app in React, and then getting it deployed, complete with real time syncing, authorization (as they've implemented with their "frames" and everything. It's at least an order of magnitude greater in effort.

> software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever

I don't think it always has to. It tends to be that way because so far, the lift to create a functioning cross-device multi user application has been high enough that the economics of it requires centralized teams of specialists to build an application for many hundreds of people.

If you lower the stakes really low to the point where the app is as serious as a spreadsheet, then compare it to spreadsheets. Almost everyone has dozens of really casual spreadsheets, many households have shared google sheets for particular, short-lived or casual or constantly changing use-cases. When you slap together a spreadsheet with your partner, you aren't making a promise about long term support and compatibility with the spreadsheet.

Or an other similar thing would just be paper and pen and tape, up on a whiteboard. All kinds of little "hand made" "applications" like this exist in households and in offices. Kanban boards are an example of this but there's and endless different kinds of "board-based physical apps" like chore charts and weekly meal plans. When someone writes on their fridge a list of chores and starts tallying who does what, that is not an eternal promise to maintain the piece of paper with chores and tally marks protocol/system.

The comments about being a SAAS, walled garden, and about the specific implementation here wrt where data's stored etc, this is just a prototype. A POC.

joshlemer commented on Why old games never die, but new ones do pleromanonx86.wordpress.c... · Posted by u/airhangerf15

999900000999 · 3 months ago

I want FOSS alternatives for every genre.

I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.

Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.

I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server

joshlemer · 3 months ago

I agree. I feel pretty discouraged from investing the amount of time it would take to get really involved and proficient in a game, if that game is ultimately not owned by me fully and can be paywalled. There's something more satisfying and timeless about a game like Chess or Go which partly I feel is due to them being owned by everyone/nobody (I mean, yes they're also centuries/millenia old but still).

joshlemer commented on ClojureScript 1.12.42 clojurescript.org/news/20... · Posted by u/Borkdude

rockyj · 3 months ago

I did. But for Cherry the first introductory line says - "this is experimental" and has been the same state for 2 years (IIRC). Squint is also "under development" and is more "mutable" by nature. Also, both of them are maintained (largely) by the same person (who is really good btw) but I am also confused why there are 2 experimental projects of the same nature by the same devs. Anyways, all this does not fill me with confidence where I can say that "hey lets try to build something serious with this tech stack".

joshlemer · 3 months ago

I agree, these are highly experimental projects, more like POC's and not something to actually use for important work. I don't know why people are so often recommending all these myriad different Clojure/Script runtimes/interpreters, many of which are not fully baked.

joshlemer commented on ClojureScript 1.12.42 clojurescript.org/news/20... · Posted by u/Borkdude

Kratacoa · 3 months ago

There are babashka and GraalVM as alternative backends for Clojure, who aim to be much lighter than JVM.

joshlemer · 3 months ago

But they don't support the full Clojure language, they're more like alternative dialects.

joshlemer commented on Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders fastcompany.com/91323835/... · Posted by u/jmpfrog

alistairSH · 4 months ago

No, they aren’t. The big brands’ sell limited e-bikes, but there’s a massive market for unlimited e-bikes that are basically electric motorbikes with nominal pedals to try and pass as bikes.

joshlemer · 4 months ago

Well I mean, in Canada, Europe and the US these would be illegal if they're able to go more than 32, 25, and 40 km/h respectively. That doesn't mean there aren't illegal ebikes out there but I think the vast majority of e-bikes on the road comply with the legal limits.

joshlemer commented on Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders fastcompany.com/91323835/... · Posted by u/jmpfrog

margorczynski · 4 months ago

I think a general speed limit for all vehicles would be a good idea. If you want it removed then your vehicle can't travel public roads, any kind of modification of it in secret would be a crime.

Not sure about the US but in Europe (at least the EU) 150km/h max would be fine, at least it would make life harder for some sociopaths that treat public roads as a racing track.

joshlemer · 4 months ago

It really is so obviously reasonable it makes you wonder why this isn't already in place. For instance e-bikes are all speed and power limited, why aren't cars?