Mad Lads and Dev Freedom
Some mad lads made bat, a Rust-based rewrite of cat but "with wings".
This has got to be the most bike-sheddy of bike sheds.
Separately, I was shook about a week ago, when I found out some of my friends are into fish shell, a user-friendly rethinking of the command line, modernized "for the 90s". They are unblinkingly willing to give up POSIX compliance, in return for not having to spend two minutes installing oh-my-zsh or starship or powerlevel10k or powerlevel9k like the rest of geekdom.
These friends might also handcraft their .eslintrc configs, gleefully install Nerd Fonts for coding ligatures, and excitedly share the incredible CLAUDE.md setups they come across.
My point is that people get to do what they want.
Sometimes this sucks for me, in less trivial ways than the examples above.
A couple of years ago, I performed a non-AI-assisted survey (it was horrible ! haha) of blog commenting systems, and went with utterances, a lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues.
The comments live in GitHub, which is public, transparent, and arms-length, effectively arbitrating my ownership of my blogspace and the reader's ownership of their contribution. It's free, which means I don't have to make any difficult decisions about the long tail of resource allocation. And it forces commenters to sign in first, reducing 99% of spam as well as 99% of comments lol. But I don't have to do shit to moderate it. I can go offline for years, and the comments will still appear.
That was around the time when the solo dev stopped updating the MIT-licensed open source repo, allowing 145 Issues and 25 open Pull Requests to pile up.
Fine. After working on it for four years, this open source software had naturally achieved perfection, was ready to release the Ātman and achieve moksha. Right? Right?
Actually for context, GitHub had released GitHub Discussions, which allows a commenting system to provide superior threading of replies than what the prior GitHub Issues could easily achieve. And it appears that an open source hero in Jakarta built giscus, heavily inspired by utterances and with proper attribution, before the original developer, apparently employed by Microsoft in the Pacific Northwest, could find motivation to rebuild his entire project. For free.
For various reasons, I have been thinking today about Forever Data and the Tech Lifecycle.
In starting a new Bear Blog, for comments I'm stuck in a tech cul-de-sac, if not a dead end. I can stay here until I feel uncomfortable about: graphic design of comments components; commenting UX; any new whiz-bang features, e.g., earning leader board rewards for engagement. The brain-itch has already started: maybe my brilliant thoughts don't get the lively discussion they deserve, because, well...
