Twenty years ago today, Linus Torvalds made the very first commit to Git, the information manager from hell.
Over these last 20 years, Git went from a small, simple, personal project to the most massively dominant version control system ever built.
Scott Chacon
20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful. (GitButler Blog)
Views are the most visible metric on the internet. You can see, in more or less real time, how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. X tracks views for every single thing you post, as does Threads. A view is the universal currency of success — more views, more fun.
But it’s all nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies.
David Pierce
‘Views’ are lies (The Verge)
This first article is from just shy of a decade ago in 2016:
In perhaps the most eagerly anticipated aerospace announcement of the year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed his grand plan for establishing a human settlement on Mars.
In short, Musk thinks it’s possible to begin shuttling thousands of people between Earth and our smaller, redder neighbor sometime within the next decade or so. And not too long after that—perhaps 40 or a hundred years later, Mars could be home to a self-sustaining colony of a million people.
…
Though he admitted his exact timeline is fuzzy, Musk thinks it’s possible humans could begin flying to Mars by the mid-2020s.
Nadia Drake
Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s (National Geographic)
Was there ever any chance for Elon Musk to achieve that goal? Here are two more recent articles that claim he never had a chance. The first addresses engineering problems with SpaceX’s Starship. The second looks at the feasibility of anyone actually living on Mars.
This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.
That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.
Will Lockett
Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning (Planet Earth & Beyond)
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
Albert Burneko
Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars (Defector)
Microsoft got into the mobile market early with Pocket PC devices. Launched in 2000, these were devices aimed at professionals who wanted mobile access to their work-related calendars and email. With dominance in enterprise software, Microsoft was well positioned to sell . Apple’s release of the iPhone in 2007 completely changed that market though.
In order to compete with the iPhone, Microsoft decided to entirely rework Windows Mobile into Windows Phone. It would have a new touch-focused interface and an application model much closer to that offered by the iPhone.
The Silverlight code base ended up being chosen as the basis for applications on Windows Phone. Some of the Silverlight team supported that effort for the Windows Phone 7 release. Then with Silverlight’s wind down as browser plugins became obsolete, I moved over to working on the Windows Phone development platform for Windows Phone 8 in late 2011.
For Windows Phone 8, the big challenge was a move from being based on Windows CE to Windows NT. This brought in a lot of OS capabilities, but it also had the potential to break a lot of things. My work for the release ended up being documenting the places where app developers had taken dependencies on the ordering of events on Windows Phone 7 and then adding code to the platform so that those events would be guaranteed to have the same ordering when the apps ran on Windows Phone 8. It wasn’t particularly exciting work, but it was critical to maintaining compatibility with the existing Windows Phone app catalog.
After Windows Phone 8 shipped, I changed roles for the Windows Phone 8.1 release. I moved from being a individual contributor to being a team lead, and I left the app platform team for the team responsible for the phone browser’s user interface. My team’s goal was to make Internet Explorer on Windows Phone feel modern. We implemented support for having more than 6 open tabs, for gesture navigation, roaming favorites and history across Windows devices, and autocomplete for the address bar. I had been an acting lead for a while during Windows Phone 8, but this was my first time officially being a manager. I thought my team was great, and we accomplished a lot for the release.
Across this time, Windows Phone was a fun project to work on and a product that I was proud of. It had a lot of innovative features like live tiles, jump lists, kids corner, and more. Unfortunately, it was also struggling in the market. By the time Microsoft shifted from an enterprise focus to a consumer focus for smartphones, iPhone and Android were both already in the market. This meant that for app developers, it would be a third mobile OS to support. Then missteps in the move from earlier phone projects, Windows Mobile and Kin, as well as not allowing devices to update from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8 caused frustrations amongst mobile operators, fans, app developers, and device manufacturers.
There had also been a problem with the organization of Microsoft’s operating system teams. When the Windows 8 project started, one of its goals was to support tablets and compete with the iPad. Unfortunately, upper management on the Windows side decided that aligning with the Windows Phone application model would only hold Windows back, so they built an entirely different application model than what the Windows Phone team had been using since the release of Windows Phone 7. This meant that applications written for Windows Phone wouldn’t run on Windows tablets and vice-versa. This set the company on a path where the development platforms and app stores for both Windows and Windows Phone were weaker offerings than they otherwise could have been.
After the relative failure of Windows 8 and 8.1 to draw fans or app developers and the continuing struggles of Windows Phone to build market share, Microsoft decided to merge the Windows and Windows Phone projects into a single team for Windows 10. The idea was that a unified platform would improve the odds of success for both, but a lot of ground had already been lost over the years of them pursuing their own directions. The idea of a unified Windows platform offered some hope internally, and at the time, I was happy to see the teams merging together.
When the reorganization happened in 2014, I, along with most of my reports from the phone browser team, moved to a new team that was tasked with building a browser app for Windows and Windows Phone. My next career post will cover my time on that team.
When even folks who are well-educated and held to high standards are falling for the lies of generative AI, the tech companies creating these products are clearly failing their customers. It needs to be absolutely clear to anyone using a generative AI product that none of the output from it can be trusted no matter how plausible it sounds.
Much like a chain saw or other useful by potentially dangerous tools, one must understand the tools they are using and use those tools with caution. It should go without saying that any use of artificial intelligence must be consistent with counsel’s ethical and professional obligations. In other words, the use of artificial intelligence must be accompanied by the application of actual intelligence in its execution.
Judge Mark J. Dinsmore
Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases (404 Media)
When I graduated from the University of Michigan, I decided to start my software engineering career at Microsoft. I accepted a position on a new small team working on what was at the time referred to as either Jolt or WPF/E (Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere). The product was a cross-platform browser plug-in to support rich applications and media streaming. Upon release, it would be called Silverlight.
The first version of Silverlight was very bare bones. It supported embedding a user interface defined in XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) into a webpage and interacting with those UI elements through the page’s JavaScript. The main goal of that v1 release was media players. At the time, Flash was the dominant way to embed media on a webpage because without plug-ins, browsers did not have a way to support video playback.
From Microsoft’s point-of-view, the point of Silverlight was that competition with Flash. Microsoft wanted to sell their servers for media delivery, but the dominance of Flash for media playback was allowing for Flash Media Server to be the go-to server option for media. In order to support Windows Server sales, Microsoft needed an alternative to Flash so that companies could deliver rich media experiences without establishing a relationship with another server company.
As a side note, when you’re working at a big company, it’s always worthwhile to know why the company is investing in what you’re working on. It won’t always be talked about openly, but figuring it out will help you to understand what outcomes will actually be valued by upper management.
My main contribution to the initial version of Silverlight was its support for Firefox and Safari. I worked on pieces of both the browser interaction through the NPAPI (Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface) and our internal platform abstraction layer for system calls on Mac OS. I hadn’t programmed either browser plug-ins or anything for Mac before this point, so my time involved a lot of learning new things as we pushed towards our first release.
The second version of Silverlight, released about a year later, made things much more interesting. The plug-in now included a version of the .NET Framework allowing for programming of Silverlight-powered interfaces with C# rather than JavaScript, and it supported more media features – adaptive streaming and, unfortunately, DRM (Digital Rights Management). That second release is where Silverlight started to pick up bigger customers including NBC and Netflix.
As Silverlight grew, I worked on other pieces of it and picked up more responsibilities. I implemented its networking APIs to give application developers the ability to make HTTP requests using either the browser networking stack, which allowed for cookies and auth to be used from the browser session, or directly through the operating system, which allowed more control but was independent of the browser’s state. I also worked on its support of out-of-browser applications, including support for multiple window Silverlight apps.
It was a lot of fun to get in on a project from nearly its start and see it grow over the years as we shipped 5 major versions. The team working on Silverlight was also great. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last. While Silverlight was successful in enabling customers to deliver great media experiences using only Microsoft products, shifts in the way people use the internet over those years meant that it had no future.
Two big changes were happening. First, Google launched their Chrome browser and began to push for HTML5. Their search engine business meant that they wanted to both push application development to focus on websites and for those applications to use standard HTML and JavaScript that their search engine could understand. The other big shift was the iPhone. Suddenly people had a capable browser in their pocket that they were using for more and more of their web browsing. Supporting Windows and Mac was no longer a compelling cross-platform story, and Apple had no interest in supporting Silverlight in their phone browser.
Between HTML5 allowing for rich media without any plug-ins and more browsing happening on devices without plug-in support, there was no longer a market for Silverlight. As work on Silverlight 5 wrapped up, Microsoft split the team. A small team would continue to service Silverlight until its inevitable end-of-life, and then the vast majority of the team was moved to either Windows Phone or Windows 8 to work on the application platforms for those two products.
Another lesson from Silverlight is that sometimes even if your product is successful, the market can shift and change its fate. Silverlight didn’t end because we failed to deliver a good product or because we were out-competed by another plug-in. Instead, changes in the broader market brought about the rapid disappearance of browser plug-ins as a whole.
I was on the portion of the team that moved over to Windows Phone, but that is a story for another post.
Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It requires intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices—and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful. It reminds me of when I was in college and everyone in my dorm was sharing their iTunes music libraries on the local network. I discovered so many new artists by opening up that ugly app and simply browsing through my neighbors’ collections. I even made some new friends. Mix CDs were exchanged, and browsing through unfamiliar microgenres felt like falling down a rabbit hole into a new world.
While streaming platforms flatten music-listening into a homogenous assortment of vibes, listening to an album you’ve downloaded on Bandcamp or receiving a mix from a friend feels more like forging a connection with artists and people. As a musician, I’d much rather have people listen to my music this way. Having people download your music for free on Soulseek is still considered a badge of honor in my producer/dj circles.
Janus Rose
The Digital Packrat Manifesto (404 Media)
Where possible I try to make sure I get DRM-free files that I can keep. For music, I buy mp3s, usually as albums. For movies and shows, I do mostly stream. For any movie or show that I want to actually keep, I buy discs rather than digital copies. On the rare occasions that I buy a digital copy of a movie, I make sure it is on Movies Anywhere so that there is less chance I lose access due to one tech company deciding to abandon their service. For books, I only ever buy ebooks from stores that sell without DRM, like DriveThruFiction. For other books I want to read, I’ll either buy a physical copy or borrow a copy from the library.
As a result of having worked on it at Microsoft, I’ve been using Microsoft Edge as my browser for years. Recently though, I’ve been looking for alternatives due to the amount that Microsoft has been adding bloated features that I don’t want to the browser so that each overview of new features after an update was a list of things I wanted to turn off rather than anything that excited me. More broadly, the company’s shoving of generative AI into every nook and cranny has pushed me to look for alternatives to pretty much every Microsoft product that I use.
On the browser front, I’ve switched to Firefox with DuckDuckGo as my search engine. Both of those still seem to be investing in AI, but it was easy to opt out.
On my phone, I installed both the standard Firefox browser and Firefox Focus. Since doing that, I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying Firefox Focus.
It is a simple, privacy-focused browser. It is essentially always in private mode and deletes your cookies and history each time you close it or at the convenient press of a button in its toolbar, and then it also has built-in ad and tracking blockers. On the other hand, it intentionally lacks a bunch of features that I’d normally like in a browser: roaming favorites, password management, tabs, cross-device history, etc.
Despite that lack of features though, it turns out it feels pretty perfect for navigating a web that is hostile to users. Obnoxious ads are a problem all over the internet, so I recommend everyone use an ad-blocker no matter what browser you’re running. Then a lot of sites use cookies to track activity and interfere with users. For example, news sites often record the number of articles you view and then at some point stop letting you read without a subscription. It turns out defaulting to private mode where cookies are regularly deleted makes those sites feel a lot more user friendly.
On the rare sites where I actually want to sign-in, I’m easily able to switch over to the full Firefox on my phone with a menu option in Firefox Focus. Then I can benefit from all the roamed information from my desktop browser.
If you’re not happy with your mobile browsing experience, then I recommend giving Firefox Focus a try. Oh, and also change the settings in every single app that tries to open links in anything other than your default browser to stop doing that.
Firefox Focus (Mozilla)
We do absolutely know what we need to to to fight the climate crisis: Reduce carbon emissions radically. Which we have known for decades (I was taught about the “greenhouse effect” in motherfucking school 30 years ago and my schools never have been especially avant-garde). We know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, stop eating as much meat, invest in cleaner energy sources and insulate houses, etc. We know.
But it’s inconvenient. The solutions we know, we have researched, we have tested, are annoying. They force us to change our lives, force us to rethink our social and economic structures (Oh who would have thought: An economic system based on limitless growth and consumption would lead to bad outcomes. Let’s start a research project!). And who wants to do all that?
Jürgen Geuter / tante
Innovation is a distraction (Smashing Frames)
Scott Boehmer 