In case of our strongest desires, it usually is just trying to impress others. We as a society need to come up with ways to cultivate strong desires with a better root.
Hierarchy is a very strong driver for our motivation. But also it’s kind of hard to fight for in real life depending on the societal situations. To the point where some cultures integrate the defeatism into cosmology like the caste system.
I wish there is a systematic way to find “better things to fight for”. But I bet most of them are spiritualistic or religious in nature.
People who are not constrained by their circumstances usually quickly realize that the most difficult question in life really is just "what the hell do I do with it?" Especially those unencumbered by superstition, dogma, or other socially induced goals.
> We as a society need to come up with ways to cultivate strong desires with a better root.
Are you sure? Who causes most of the worlds problems? The guy who craves nothing more than a good meal and a six pack, or the overachieving empty-soul who can never rest satisfied?
Not to get too woo-woo, but attachment and aversion are the root of all evil. I think that maybe instead of replacing peoples strong desires with better ones we'd be better served by showing them how little achieving those desires will really do to change their lives and how empty most of those goals truly are.
Maybe, if we could teach people how to be content sitting alone in Pascal's empty room we could have a proper society where the goals aren't all about selfishness and eternal growth at the expense of human happiness.
But CSS can easily restyle every baseline HTML element. Making the web page look like the product is not only entirely possible without having to layer a framework on top, it's likely often easier and faster to implement than layering a framework on top.
I heard dropdowns and certain some other elements are notoriously difficult to style. People resorting to tricks and js to handle their visuals. And it seems to be enough hassle to deem HTML+CSS a non-solution for some folks.
I'm surprised they included proprietary format that's de facto standard in profession or supported by multiple tools (.xls, .xlsx) in preferred section [1]. I wonder if "well-known enough" is as good as "open" from preservation standpoint.
Especially when Office 365 shows that not even Microsoft is capable of making software which can display Office files anymore... if you have a Word file which was created or has ever been modified by the Word application, working with it through Office 365 in a browser is such a pain. I've literally had images which are impossible to delete or move in the web version, and they will absolutely render in the wrong place.
Archivists and librarians have to think in terms of practicality: if many tools exist to read something and it’s a mainstream software product, the odds are good that they’ll be unable to use those files 50 years from now. Not certain, but good, and that matters with limited budget and ability to tell the rest of the world what format to provide things in.
This can require nuance: for example, PDF has profiles because the core format is widely supported but you could do things like embed plugin content from now-defunct vendors and they would only want the former for long-term preservation.
A binary format that is only readable by some very specific version of the program writing it. The older xls comes to mind, but there must be thousands of examples.
I really love the encouragement. Honestly it resonates a lot with me. It shows that the craft itself is still beautiful, you just need to find the right people to mingle with.
But the real world and money blended in creates a weird corrupt mix, just like everything. Not to mention there is a real risk for people who are already has their feet in the industry but not yet senior enough to survive or to control, for example, the AI replacements. And more than likely, the seniority required is way higher than one would think. In the end, economic drives are the dominant forces.
The fact of the matter is that "the craft" is beautiful when you are free to work on academic projects that are concerned with knowledge. In practice, industrial and commercial code is rarely that beautiful. Look at the offering of dev tools designed to reign in the ugliness and help manage the chaos. I'm sort of old school in this regard, but for some time now, many devs rely on all sorts of tooling to write the code, tooling that removes a layer of contact with manual processes of programming and so forth.
It's important to distinguish between the practical and the theoretical. The flippant answers of "idealists" refuse to engage with the messy domain of facts, because it is aesthetically offensive or challenges their comfort or their nostalgia. The steam engine wasn't inevitable either, but people did choose it. How many today in this forum grumble about the loss of a world when the steam engine replaced old ways of working? The next generation won't have these sorts of hangups, just as we don't have them about steam engines. Or, if you like, how many pine for the days of assembly programming?
When something proves to be too useful industrially to opt out of, then it will be adopted. People will choose it. If you want to be Amish, go for it, but most people don't.
>"Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and Ecommerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list."
>While in high school, he saw output from one of the guess the animal pseudo-artificial intelligence (AI) games then popular. He considered implementing a version of the program in BASIC, but once at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), instead he implemented it in several dialects of Lisp, including Maclisp.
Kent Pitman's Lisp Eliza from MIT-AI's ITS History Project (sites.google.com)
I did something similar to htmx over a decade ago, so I know what it's about. And everything I need to say is already said by others in a more elegant way.
> Don’t you think it’s time to give your story?
I am afraid that's completely irrelevant to my comments here. If you read my posts carefully, you'll notice that I haven't said a single negative thing about htmx itself, because I want to very cautious in giving opinions. Everything I said was specifically about the horrible arguments in this article.
In my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst.
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
I think those very total attention expected during phone calls, and the speed at which it happens, contributes to a higher level of anxiety compared to texting. The younger generation hate these elevated stresses and prefer more async communication
Whether it is possible to find pure-economic or pure-societal art is not relevant. And we can't dismiss the existence of these two dimensions, which you can also call "consumption mode" or "purpose".
In (my) definition, art is everything a human make or do that is capable of evoking emotional reaction from another human. So it follows that IMO, art's value is primarily societal in nature. The economic value comes afterwards.
The economic value of art mainly harnessed by people that want to evoke feelings in other people, those in entertainment industry like movie producers, game directors are an example of this. And this is where the push to make art-making labor cheaper mostly come from.
The societal value mainly comes in two forms.
1) Capturing the world around us for a record, and
2) as a medium for communication in emotional or subconscious level.
This value is seperate from the economical one, and I think is the most important one.
Hierarchy is a very strong driver for our motivation. But also it’s kind of hard to fight for in real life depending on the societal situations. To the point where some cultures integrate the defeatism into cosmology like the caste system.
I wish there is a systematic way to find “better things to fight for”. But I bet most of them are spiritualistic or religious in nature.