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i flipped the switch and made the placemark codebase open source today: https://macwright.com/2024/01/19/placemark-oss it's been cleaned up a bit, and some of the external dependencies are now optional, but it'd benefit massively if folks start improving it and tinkering with the internals. open sourcing big applications like this is a big roll of the dice: i think it's valuable in part because it's a complete, production application, but it is also a lot ot absorb all at once. time will tell! Chrome Devtools protip: Emulate a focused page https://macwright.com/2024/01/10/emulate-a-focused-page.html inside me are two wolves, one of them thinks that the ai hype cycle is a cult of optimism inherited from the crypto hype cycle and all of the productivity gains will go to existing market leaders and we will be no closer to a world in which people have more free time to create or even basic services like healthcare, the other wolf says tom, you're kind of depressed there's a third one that thinks that the wolves construct might be a riff on sincerely held beliefs of native americans, which already feels bad in the chance that it is @tmcw I went to SF last February and then again in July and in that time a few of the billboards switched from crypto to AI @tmcw Listening to a podcast while reading this and at the exact same moment the guest said “inside me there are two wolves” and this is the first time I ever heard this expression 😅 So, news today is that I'm closing down placemark.io https://macwright.com/2023/11/13/placemark It's okay! It was a hard decision but I made it a while ago and have (mostly) processed the feels.
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@tmcw Thank you for creating another fabulous tool, and while I’m sorry your business plan did not work out, thank you for deciding to release the code as open source. @tmcw Oh :( I had high hopes for the project, given it's from you. This shows how low the chance of survival is in the mapping world. i think you can explain some of the "software is getting slower and worse" plotline by saying that most modern startups are speedrunning product development and - correctly - judge that speed & reliability are actually low on their users’s list of priorities but that doesn't really explain why, say, google, can't ship performant web apps or slack doesn't switch to tauri or a native renderer or whatever
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@tmcw Gotta show it will increase revenue and the project is already sufficiently profitable! @tmcw as someone once said, broke gets fixed, but crappy is forever. It’s trite but I think it’s accurate. There is no incentive in most of these huge orgs to do these. Obviously there are a lot of complicated things that I don’t know behind the scenes but I suspect it mostly boils down to this. Nobody is going to get promoted for switching to Tauri but they might get fired if they try and it takes longer than expected or goes badly, since electron is the devil they all know. 🤷 i wish there was a tool like grandperspective, that mac app that shows you where big files are hiding in your system, but for postgres. does this exist?
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@tmcw And they should not be coupled to the door locks -- the whole neighborhood doesn't need to know when you lock the car @tmcw If a car alarm sound spuriously for more than five minutes at night, you should be allowed to steal the car. |
@tmcw well written, thank you for sharing it. I feel it will strike a chord in some people who need to hear it.