This is impressive, but they just sound so _alien_, especially to this non-U.S. English speaker (to the point of being actively irritating to listen to). I guess picking up on social cues communicating this (rather than express instruction or feedback) is still some time away.
It's still astonishing to consider what this demonstrates!
I thought Ardour was a commercial product? If you want to download a binary from their site it's either a demo version with injected silence every 10 minutes, or a paid-for option (either a small monthly sub or a larger one-off payment). You can build it locally yourself for free of course, but I don't know if many non-devs would do that.
It is not really a commercial product, rather it follows an old, but somewhat rare, tradition of making usage slightly more difficult in order to raise funds. OpenBSD used to do the same and not provide pre-built images to raise funds via CD sales from those that could not be bothered to learn how to build images from the source code. You can certainly object to this, but I do find it reasonable as there are few good ways to fund open source software.
As for Ardour itself, it is clearly completely open source [1].
I don't object to it at all, I think it's a great idea. We need more models of supporting open-source, including financial ones. BTW I also don't see commercial and open-source as intrinsically opposed to each other - projects can be both, and I wish more were.
Ardour is free software (and therefore open source). Ardour is not proprietary software.
Ardour is a commercial product. They sell pre-built binaries, updates (perhaps some level of guarantee/support for those binaries?) etc. Ardour is not "freeware", shareware or a hobby project or anything else like that.
I am not sure it is clear cut as you present it. Clearly Ardour the project is not a commercial product and the same should go for the source code. Arguably the pre-compiled binaries are a commercial product as they are presented to a market for a price (although the same of course does not hold for Ardour binaries provided through package managers and elsewhere). To me, the confusion mostly arises from the fact that we use Ardour to refer to all of the above, while clearly they are all different things.
Ardour certainly looks like a commercial project to me. I think this thinking arises from a couple of misapprehensions, namely:
1. Commerce is bad and somehow at odds with free software and the GPL,
2. The only way to do any kind of software trade is proprietary software.
In fact, commerce is beautiful and a cornerstone of economics and our civilisation. Most people in the free software community are not opposed to commerce. What they are opposed to is proprietary software. That is, claiming ownership of software and therefore doing commerce based mostly on rent-seeking and retaining power over said users. Free software and the GPL aims to disable this, but it does not disable, nor does it oppose, commercial software, unless you believe (2), which is evidently false, as you can see with Ardour.
I am not sure how Ardour would feel about being referred to as a commercial project. But I do suspect if you went back in time and sent an e-mail to misc@ ten years ago calling OpenBSD a commercial project because they sold CDs you would be told to take a hike. I will just agree to disagree on this one. You seem to want to make a bigger point about software and commerce and all I see are shades of grey in that commercialisation is not clear cut and neither is what is a project, its outcomes, etc.
I think GP makes a reasonable point about what commercial actually means. If you are selling something, that's commerce. If the Ardour dev or OpenBSD devs don't like it, then they are free to adopt a euphemism that makes them feel better about it, but that appeal to authority doesn't change the meaning of the term. I think that actually further reinforces GP's point about how the term "commercial software" has become a dirty word.
Now that said, I do support avoiding language that is offensive to people even if it doesn't seem to me like it should be (so long as it's still clear what is being communicated. I don't like Orwellian expressions).
"Give your stuff away for free to devs" is a pretty good idea for both free and nonfree software. (And Linux users are, for now, still likely to be developer type people than not).
Ardour is very high quality for FOSS. There are many distros that include a free version of Ardour. Ubuntu Studio[1] for instance, and then there are distributions where installing it is an apt-get[2] or yum[3] or whatever[4] away, and paying for it is optional.
That is unrelated. Things licensed as open source can still be commercial products.
Ardour is open source and can be freely build and distributed, but it's also available as a pre-build product to pay for.
Ah I see, so that's what it looks like when you're not using a linux distro to obtain Ardour. And no, I never pressed the button because I just get it through Ubuntu Studio, and I've been using Ardour for years, for my simple (but frequent, multiple times per day) needs whatever version is in there is plenty.
The ICCL is the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. They're fully independent of the government and are funded by memberships. If you're an Irish citizen they're well worth supporting (only €40 per annum). I'm a member.
I like the sentiment but this could have been a tweet. If it was it wouldn't be preaching to the choir.
I am being glib above but in the spirit of useful feedback, the article needs editing for length. It's not that it's badly written, I just found that it took too circuitous a route to make its point.
I, for one, learned a new word: Ennui. And I believe I finally understand what people mean when referring to a cargo cult. A tweet most definitely would not have sufficed.
Thanks for the long read, interesting an well written.
(And: true, I'm probably living under a rock for being so ignorant) :-)
Because of the curse of the autodidact, do note that "ennui" is pronounced "on-wee," as it comes from French ("ennui" is "boredom" in French). It is not, as I found out rather embarrassingly, "en-you-eye".
Incidentally, I agree with you. While there could be some editing for length (oh well), the point was well made with a great example to start out with, and a bit of a discussion about some of the effects of being trapped in the Ennui Engine. It definitely hit on something I've noticed about myself.
I have a pile of books I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten to. I have lots of articles that I'd like to read but haven't made time yet. But I'd pull up Reddit and just scroll there. I deleted Twitter when Elon bought it and decided to burn it to the ground, and I'll be deleting Reddit now. Not so much to make a stand, but really just using this opportunity of upheaval as a way for my old head to extricate itself from the Ennui Engine.
'It is not, as I found out rather embarrassingly, "en-you-eye"'
Don't worry, as someone whose vocabulary was extended through voracious reading, I have made several of those "fox passes" over the years... (with that being the most memorable!)
Funny indeed. My wife was just making fun of me the other day becuase of the way I pronounced this. This was the answer to Wordle last week. I new the word by sight, but like a lot of us, had never heard it spoken. I sent her a link to this article just because ennui was embedded in the title :)
Everyone learns these things from different places! I used to get annoyed at content explaining things I already knew well until I realized that I once learned it from somewhere that wasn't the "original place". I forget who said it, but someone said good writing isn't about writing something new, it's about saying existing truths in interesting ways. This piece didn't really land for me, but glad it did for you.
There's a scene in the movie 'Flash of Genius'. The movie tells the story of a guy who invents the mechanism for intermittent windshield wipers and has the design stolen from him by Detroit auto makers.
In a court scene the main character is on the stand, and he reads the first few words from 'A Tale of Two Cities' and asks the lawyer for the other side if Dickens had invented any of those individual words.
That always stuck with me; it's the configuration of over-the-counter parts or ideas that makes something novel. Sometimes articles explain ideas with a twist, a different order or a different interpretation, and furthermore, when you yourself reconfigure a set of ideas under the shower or in a comment section, you should realise that you're doing worthwhile creative work.
I see the two ironies here: I might be explaining things that you already knew, and this comment will probably be skimmed over (as the article puts it) as another pull of the slot machine. :-)
> If it was it wouldn't be preaching to the choir.
I'm not so sure it is. I think the target audience here are people who have already been desiring to break the cycle and might be currently more receptive to long-form content. A lot of people I know have been expressing the feeling this talks about lately, mostly due to the impending downfall of Reddit (how many people have said something along the lines of "i'm glad it's going away, that's one less thing to mindlessly scroll")
Maybe not quite a tweet, but certainly editing it down to 25%-35% of the original length would have resulted in a much higher quality article.
Which gets to the main point that he only grazed but didn't hit, and of which this article is a fine example. There is a resistance to engaging in longer-form works for exactly the same reason he derides the short form (tweets, spouts, TikTok vids, etc.) — there is no guarantee that the quality will be there, and it is a larger investment of time & effort to consume the long-form content, so the potential waste & disappointment will be greater. It's a worse risk/reward ratio than reading a tweet.
Yet, his underlying advice — to be conscious of what you consume and whether it ACTUALLY SATISFIES your needs — is valid, important, and actionable.
I've found that one of the keys is information density. It needs to be at a certain level to be worthwhile (and that level is different for different purposes). For example, I found some 20 years ago that almost all content on cable TV was far too dilute, so I cut the cord. I found that a default Twitter feed has a similarly high trash/value ratio, but this could be fixed by using carefully curated lists of high-value feeds to get high-density info much earlier (this has significantly degraded since Nov-22, I'm finding other better options such as Spoutible).
It does take conscious effort to maintain our entertainment and information feeds to be sure they actually meet OUR needs, but it is worth it.
I, on the other hand, enjoyed a well written piece. It's both and argument and a narration, which sets about the right mood for a critique of narratives. (Also, there seems to be a tactical side to this: as we enjoy the story, spend time over and with this, as we invest energy, we also align with the piece… much like we identify with a protagonist, by the perspective of whom we reconstruct the diegetic world of a novel or a movie.)
I disagree, while liking the tone of the piece and the style of the writer.
However, the appropriate length that the original commenter refers to is, in fact, a tweet.
The reason is simple: the SOTA in internet criticism is quite old whether you read Neil Postman, Mitch Kapor, Sherry Turkle, or David Courtwright. The Turkle and Courtwright quotes are easy to find being more recent. The Kapor quote from the EFF dates to 1993 and so Google et al have found a way to lose it, and if you can find it, you may not be able to read it.
This is genuinely thrilling. I know it’s likely to be a C++ codebase, which I don’t have a huge amount of experience in (yet). But having open source access to a music machine of the Deluge’s calibre is phenomenal.
I've not used Htmx, but a cursory browse of their docs gives https://htmx.org/extensions/multi-swap/ which seems to solve exactly this problem. And thinking about it, what makes it as difficult as you say? If you've a js-library on the client you control you can definitely send payloads that library could interpret to replace multiple locations as needed. And if the client doesn't have js turned on the fallback to full-page responses solves the problem by default.
Of course, I've not used Turbolinks, so I don't know what issues applied there.
Edit: I'm not saying htmx is the future either. I'd love to see how they handle offline-first (if at all) or intermittent network connectivity. Currently most SPAs are bad at that too...
Multi-swap is possible, but it's not good, because the onus is on the developer to compute which components to swap, on the server side, but the state you need is usually on the client.
If you need multi-swap, you'll find it orders of magnitude easier to switch to a framework where the UI is a pure function of client-side state, like React or Svelte.
You should be able to do this with events in HTMX also. So, you could do an update or create something and then in HTMX capture the event and reload the component when that happens.
What are you hoping to gain from learning Clojure?
Have you seen how it’s management of state is different to Python’s in how it allows much closer control of data sharing? That opens up really nice concurrency models, and makes thinking about how data changes over time much more predictable (and powerful).
Does your editor let you manipulate the code as a lisp? The tree-based nature of the code allows for incredible automatic re-organisation of it, on the fly as you need to reshape it.
Have you used transducers yet? They let you specify the essence of a computation and apply it in different contexts - to a series of in-memory values, or values arriving over a network pipe, or any other source, without having to know in advance what that source is
But if these don’t appeal to you or you don’t see the benefits of them then maybe it isn’t for you - which is totally fine. Python can let you express this stuff too, albeit in clunkier ways at times and with a less pleasant refactoring experience. The python repl is also less powerful and not advocated for as a development tool in the same way Clojure’s is.
It really depends on your end-goal. If you’ve not been frustrated by the idioms Python gives you changing languages might feel a little pointless. I’ve used both and I’m far more productive in Clojure. It really rewards study and practice, and grows with you. Python is fine, but it’s a means to an end for me - get in, just get it done, try to remember the irregular syntax, weird build specification, get over white-space layout, use print debugging to get over the repl… it’s not my favourite but it’s perfectly usable.
The quick run speed is great for shortening the feedback loop. I've had great experiences with Lisp-style environments for that reason, and the language is much higher level than Rust while still offering good performance. I've mainly used Quil, the Clojure wrapper around processing: https://github.com/quil/quil
I hope you get an opportunity to explore it (FP, whether Clojure or otherwise) in a more conducive environment. It sounds like this wasn’t the best learning environment for you, and that’s totally valid, but there’s a lot of good stuff to learn if you’re in an environment that suits you.
It's still astonishing to consider what this demonstrates!