It's not exactly a fair test for stylesheets since so many styles look similar but aren't actually boilerplate setup, but it does capture the Groundhog's Day feeling of frontend work.
That’s a good take and is underrated. It’s what has kept me from completely automating everything in favor of a semi-automated approach instead of doing the “spray and pray” approach of blasting everywhere.
Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.
I wish that were true but if ease of use is all that mattered, then micro.blog and other “Indieweb in a box” services would be as big as Bluesky, or maybe even at least as big as Mastodon.
The truth is that we’re social creatures and for social products, that means hanging out where other friends are already hanging out. It’s my personal thesis that no matter how matter how much we lower the bar to participate in the indieweb, fediverse, or other non-corporate platforms, it’s going to be inherently niche.
It's fine to be small, but we can still work on lowering the bar further and promoting the good parts.
Then, if there is a viable alternative to big social media, my thesis is that there might come a day when a critical mass has been fed up and finds a viable alternative that's still beautiful but no longer small.
Promoting the good parts is very worthwhile and there’s a thriving scene. A bunch of interesting people talk over zoom and IRL regularly because of events.indieweb.org and we just had our 3rd annual weekend camp here in San Diego a few weeks ago.
I don’t know about the rest of big social media switching away, so I’m personally just focused on appreciating the community that’s been built up already instead of evangelizing. Maybe I’m wrong and something open will go viral, like the new Loops video app.
I’ve been an Astro user for the last two years and I can’t recommend it. RSS support isn’t native, doesn’t support anything other than plain markdown, and all of the extra magic of MDX and their custom .Astro templates is wasted without feed syndication.
My big project for sometime this year is to switch to Eleventy.
Agreed. I love stacking the months like that and turning it into a never-ending river of days, looks like it'd be easier to estimate the length of time between two different months.
I was just about to post this same video. The trouble they had with the big generator at the field site was interesting. I imagine that like a Tesla it can charge from a 120VAC 15A (or euro/world 230-240V, 10A circuit) overnight, but it will be much, much slower to reach full capacity. It's good that they honestly state the limitations that it's best suited for flight training applications where it will always return to the same field.
Imagine trying to fly that thing from Perth to Adelaide in individual 50-minute hops between outback airfields... Impossible.
Yeah, the reality check in that video was eye opening. Clearly it’s a deliberate strategy to roll these things out at flight schools at first, so they’re always circling within landing range.
Electric planes will definitely graduate to short hop commutes eventually though and not just be niche training vehicles, especially when you consider how much safer they are than jet engines: they have way less moving parts, require less maintenance, and most importantly, they don’t stress the airframe nearly as much.
And that’s just with current airplane designs retrofitted for electric (which is essentially what these training planes are) instead of the upcoming designs that are built with many small electric motors and not the giant jet engines.
Lilium is an example of the new style of electric plane, with motors distributed through the wing:
Yep, and quiet electric motors is why air taxis could be a real thing again in major cities. E.g. Uber partnered with NASA to try to bring them to Los Angeles before the 2028 Olympics, with 18 heliports scattered around the county.
Can confirm. The founder of this site is actually a close personal friend that started teaching me about this stuff years ago, first in a more casual way when catching up and then recently much more in-depth as he started documenting his experience.
I'm still more of a prepper lurker that's reading up on this stuff while friends are starting to take it more seriously. I personally don't know if prepping is a fad like cold war-era nuclear bunkers, a potential lifesaver like a beefed up version of the red cross emergency kits, or somewhere in between as a useful hobby like hiking and camping, but my inner research nerd is having a great time learning more.
It helps that my YC team was a product review website and there's a lot of gear junkies in the survivalist crowd, so that's been my entry point into it, not so much the angle on being freaked out about the news.
I also liked the article's critique of Western philosophy as being too analytical and divorced from real life. Apparently that wasn't always the case in the ancient world and philosophy had more practical application, which probably explains the revival of Stoicism lately as well.
A good starter book on the Stoics that also reinterprets the ancient lessons for the modern age:
I wonder if Stoicism's rise is also related to organized religion's decline and society's increasing secularization, since both Stoicism and organized religion give concrete guidelines on how you go about your day-to-day.
Western philosophy has been divorced from real life for quite a while, and Stoicism's rise seems relatively young comparatively.
I've always thought that the revival of Stoicism is because 20th century philosophy messed with our heads to such an extent that we were left with an empty husk of our former selves, like ghosts floating in a meaningless world, and all we could do was laugh at ourselves to exhaustion lest we commit suicide.
No, I think it's a reaction against the new-agey types that pick up stuff so often from Eastern philosophical and religious traditions. Basically it's new-agey stuff for people that would never be willing to conceive of themselves as anything like a new-agey person.
Ugh, it's so much noise for your neighbor though. I worked next to someone with an old IBM keyboard for a year and was grumpy the entire time. Couldn't find headphones strong enough to cancel out what sounded like someone shooting an automatic weapon in the office.
I think there's a happy medium with the quieter cherry switches. But yeah, I don't use a mechanical keyboard in settings where I'm right next to other people.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html