Notices by Overclocked, Custom Fox (azure@vulpine.club), page 2

@Elizafox Because the Animating Spirit of Vulgar Capital has decided that Apple is good at design.

I'm waiting for Angle Chic to catch on again and we can stop having everything look like pop cans and melted candy bars and go back to a future that doesn't look like the result of overaggressive childproofing by someone with a pathological hatred of color.

@slipstream Essentially, I think copyright and patents are not /property/ they are a /monopoly granted by the state to gain some benefit/ and as such we should set more or less uniform conditions on that monopoly that ensure society as a whole gains from granting that monopoly.

@slipstream That is true! It makes perfect sense to scale copyright by medium and industry, if you're going to have copyright.

(I sort of have mixed feelings about software. On one level I'd like to see some sort of code escrow as a condition for granting copyright to software, so that if it ever stops being maintained/actively developed, the code is automatically released to the public.)

And no. There aren't two sides to the issue. There is no excuse for TV and radio shows from the 40s and 50s to be under copyright. Let alone /clips/. It does not support the creation of new content, quite the opposite. It stifles expression and supports pure rent-seeking.

Man, I need to remember the Rule of Youtube:

The Content Cartel are continuing their war on information,
So download anything you actually like.

I wonder if anyone's ever done an unrevisionist cyberpunk style retelling of Romeo and Juliet.

(Revisioning the heck out of the play that is, but going full on Hypergibson on the setting.)

Here! Have some #deliciousmusic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jX1exz7eORo

This is one of my favorite songs of all time. The music, the libretto. The libretto especially is very important to me. I don't know if it means QUITE the same to me as it does to Mr. Berinstein.

I know he was enraged by what seemed like senseless death and the terrifying spectre of nuclear warfare as man took on divine power with no God to guide him.

ALSO, this is my favorite PSA in the world:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rft6IZjOaOA

Also, since it's Hallowe'en, here!

Have my (and apparently Herr Doktor Seuss's) favorite Dr. Seuss special:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ygSEkwRCQPM

I really, really love the soundtracks from old cartoons made in the 1970s. It's such an obvious style. Whether the major-dissonance choruses in Dr. Seuss TV specials or the random disco instrumentals sneaking into really inappropriate places, it's lovely.

I feel like Hot 'n Sour Soup is the index of quality for a Chinese Restaurant.

if they can do that well, they'll do everything else well.

Dreamed I was a corporate thaumaturge.
Conjuring souls into the products of competitors.
Safety critical systems or software overseeing very boring jobs.
So they would start gaining a sense of wonder and creativity and become unreliable or worse.

Do you like NEWS? Investigative reporting? Long-form, sourced journalism? Freely and online?

Then try reading ProPublica! https://www.propublica.org/

I don't endorse every word they write, but they seem a pretty good organization carrying on an important style of journalism that seems to be endangered in the modern world.

Babylon 5 worked largely because they were so forward looking and optimistic. The world they /had/ wasn't great, but they were confident that they could build a better one, which is a better match for our current world.

I'm one of those functional programmers who thinks the usual Gang-of-Four design patterns are just signs that your programming language isn't good (i.e. functional) enough.

HOWEVER!

I think the concept of /antipatterns/ is a lot more useful than the concept of design patterns. Common practices that are almost certainly a bad idea and whose presence indicates you will soon find yoursel fin Technical Debtor's prison.

@deshipu For a while there was some interest among the Lisp People to create a software-as-literature journal called Code Quarterly but it never got off the ground for various reasons.

The real solution to DRM is legislative and simple: any work published with the consent and knowledge of the copyright holder under DRM is no longer under copyright.

You can either participate in copyright including full-on fair use, archival copies, lending, and people actually owning the media they buy
Or you can have wallow in your defective-by-design media distribution channels.

So! The interview at https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now has me thinking.

I got online in the late 90s, when HTML 4 was happening, people were starting to flock to Semantic Markup, declarative syntax, open access to rich sources of online data, and the like.

Then the WHATWG enacted their unspeakable treason against all of humanity (Yes, yes, I know I'm being hyperbolic) and said ‘To heck with open data and graceful degradation! What we /actually/ need is a not very good application delivery platform!'

Applying Chesterton's Fence to software development is well-motivated by the realization that ones fellow programmers are generally competent people.

Often people driven to accumulate technical debt, it's true, but if something seems really weird and pointless it's worth assuming the author had a good reason.