Johann

It is amazing how sometimes saying no to a feature or a whole set of features can reduce complexity.

My process for getting to my "dream CMS" is like an endless series of stepping stones: with each iteration, I know more about what I ended up using and what I actually could have done without, versus the real costs it incurred on the complexity and structure of the program. And of course, I also learn new things and get new wild ideas, which in turn take a few iterations to get reduced to something more elegant.

I want to have few files, I want the folder structure and file names give me a good idea what to find in them, and the rest should be a breeze to just read between well named functions and variables, plus a few comments where necessary. I want it to be as "self-evident" and brief as possible, and I also want to make something that runs on any web host, i.e. PHP, and JavaScript, Maria DB, that's it. No giant database schema, just the one that allows for the kind of site I want, and no more.

And "the site I want to make" is essentially a slightly glorified file explorer with a lot of ways to display the "files", and where all files are folders at the same time. That's basically it, plus ways for visitors and users to personalize and configure things, and what is needed for easy data import and export, and exporting via RSS feeds and whatever else might be useful. But at the core of it it's just pages, images, links, audio and video. And while ways to "discuss the content" are planned, it will be a completely separate stream, because the main idea is precisely to get away from the purely chronologically sorted feeds and endlessly scrolling pages. It will be easy to see what's new, but that will not determine the structure.

Accessibility and ways to further transform or filter the content to make it useful for other software also very much interest me, because the better it gets, the more all my note-taking will take place in it, and publishing from there to elsewhere, as well as having a canonical source for it all that looks decent, runs fast, and works on all sorts of devices and for all sorts of humans(!), is the end goal course. But then I also want to maintain it, and maybe even to keep making it slicker (and more light-weight!), and the less of it there is, the better. Sometimes 10 lines of code allow a whole new array of features, sometimes they're just a tiny improvement over something that's basically fine, or could be made good enough with 2 more lines.

You could call it a way of trying to be frugal, except with the time I spend obsessing over thousands little details :)

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The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.

Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" (1963...!)

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Stephen Hawking, https://archive.is/A3WOs

Viele IT-ler glauben insgeheim oder sagen offen, es müsse ja "immer" Programmierer geben (und denken, genau sie wären die, die keiner wegautomatisieren wird), haha. Aber die letzte Ausflucht ist immer die Mär, dass die Leute dann "frei" werden für schönere, erfüllendere Arbeit. Genau die Prozesse, die jetzt für eine immer größere Ungleichheit sorgen, hören auf einmal auf! Wenn die Arbeiter, die man vorher ausgebeutet und peu a peu entlassen hat, überhaupt nicht mehr gebraucht werden, sich die Ausbeutung für nix mehr lohnt -- dann heißt es auf einmal "war nur Spaß", und alle teilen?

Natürlich nicht. Und so zu tun, als könnte es so kommen, ist bösartig, feige und dumm zugleich.

Automatisierung könnte so toll sein, könnte uns tatsächlich vor allem dröge, "menschenunwürdige" Arbeit abnehmen, aber sie findet nunmal in der Welt statt, wie sie gerade ist. In der nur noch ein paar Dutzend Leute 50%+ des Reichtums besitzen, Verfolgung von Journalisten, Massenüberwachung, Aussitzen des Klimawandel und zig andere Sachen stattfinden, während wir vermeintlich hilflos zugucken und die Kluft zwischen Arm und Reich immer schneller wächst.

But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.

Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

Today, registry.npmjs.com lets users publish packages via a PUT request to the corresponding package URI (ex. https://registry.npmjs.com/-/). This endpoint accepts a request body which looks something like this (note: after almost a decade & a half, this & all other registry APIs continue to be horribly undocumented)

The massive bug at the heart of the npm ecosystem

(emphasis mine)