As a programmer it's been really hard to wean myself off of thinking in terms of global solutions. This, in comparison to building local or community technology.
Thinking this way can make things harder (now your tech needs need to scale to the world) and not useful (different people in different places have different needs).
This kind of blew my mind: like, you can just go and build a piece of tech and only give it to your friends & the immediate people it's helpful for. You don't *need* to design for The World. I think this kind of thinking is really important for breaking away from capitalistic modes of thinking.
@pizza_pal Yeah! I wish more people talked about their hacky local solutions to their problems. It's easy to only see corporate stuff & think that that's the Only Way.
@pizza_pal we're so fucking used to corporate enclosure that we reproduce it unconsciously
@tty I'm not really a programmer, I'm a librarian, but at my job I do a lot of python and they have pycharm pro licenses for everyone, so they encouraged me to use pycharm. Prior to this, basically all the programming I have done has been on emacs. It has so pretty nice features, but personally I like emacs better because you can just do all this crazy text editing, like all the elisp, and rectangles, and cursors.
@pizza_pal oh cool! have you ever considered doing something like running emacs classes out of the lib? I'd be so pleased if my local lib had a resource like that.
@tty I don't work at the library anymore, but I think that's a really cool idea.
@tty I was thinking about creating a Lisp club at the library, though. It actually is one of the most accessible languages because, especially with functional programming, you don't have to k now alot about computers to get started.
@pizza_pal @tty You can just create all this absurdly specific shit, which you don't have the freedom to create with a corporate product.
@tty Personally I'm much more motivated by knowing I've served someone(s) well than that I'm serving everyone well.
@tty helping your local community in meaningful ways is very rewarding in ways sweating it for a megacorp can never be.
@tty this is great, thank you!
@cb yer very welcome ^__^
@tty and if it's open source, other communities can adapt it for their communities as well
@tty I read a great thing about this called human scale software. It was enlightening.
@ajroach42 do you have a link?
@tty Probably.
Two good peices on medium, unfortunately.
https://medium.com/@jkriss/human-scale-technology-75da763eb03
https://medium.com/@jkriss/anti-capitalist-human-scale-software-and-why-it-matters-5936a372b9d
@ajroach42 thank you!
@ajroach42 you may also enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful !
At first read I thought this was a pun on scale/enlightening & a “book on anti-gravity/couldn’t put it down” reference, but reading upthread — I’m just happy it caught my eye on TWKN.
@tty The companies that are building global scale stuff are also scaling their software in the least interesting way possible; they're scaling it in terms of QPS and storage, but NOT in terms of usefulness. If anything, it's much LESS useful because it's made for the lowest common denominator, and the company's business model precludes their caring about a problem unless it affects hundreds of thousands of people.
@tty One of my dreams/medium-term plans is setting up a server to host a bunch of simple services for my friends and family.
The kind of thing that they can't/won't do for themselves, and would be just big enough to share but not enough as to be unmanageable.
@tty this makes me want to build a small device that will only group text a set group of like 14 people. You have to have a device to get on the message thread. No alternatives.
@abrahms @tty I think there's a slight mismatch between software and hardware here though, hardware at such a small scale would probably be very expensive in either time or money because you don't have the economy of scale. Software, however, is usually the same amount of code whether 1 or 1000 people use it
@tty i'd say free software breaks those mode of thinking, but I suppose there are large projects with similar problems - being too lare scale in terms of features, and not listening to a community
Small scale free software would probably be the play. Write software that doesn't pander to large audiences, but release the code so that other groups can benefit, and to give individuals autonomy over their software
@tty and I have to extend it to visual arts, like animation. The horror I feel when someone says "it's accessible for everyone, it's universal, this doesn't has dialogue" just tell me more about cultural formation and heritage. It can be accessible, but not for everyone, it's not universal
@tty
Like your thinking here.
Always this "think about all possibilities, get the broad scheme" attitude that everyone in every corp is carrying aorund like it is the holy grail. Sometimes it just leads to outright bad results, not only in the tech world but in other areas too (working in a bank as an accountant).
@tty what I realised is that you should not try to build universal end-user solutions but you should strive to build apps from small, modular parts. Reusability of them is just a nice bonus to the clear, solid architecture this gives.
@charlag yes! classic unix philosophy. ideally the application ends up just being a thin layer of glue and domain logic! (in practice though, it's real easy for apps to get BIG even with the best of modular intentions :x)
@tty Oh yeah big time. I'm so glad to hear people say that. People are always like, why are you making bulletin board for your local area network so you can talk with your neighbors? And using scheme? haha