I'm reminded of a talk I enjoyed about "extreme rewriting" [1] — how rewriting the same code many times (in certain contexts) can help uncover powerful underlying abstractions.
It makes intuitive sense to me that this would be true in complex domains (e.g. legacy code) where you really need to find the right solution, even if it takes a bit longer. Our first ideas are rarely our best ideas, and it's easy to get too attached to your first solution and try to tweak it into shape when it would be better just to start fresh.
I've seen footage of the Mother Of All Demos, and plenty of material depicting a real Xerox Alto exists online. It's too bad none of that material made it into the article, but AI-generated facsimiles did.
AI images in general are a red flag in articles, but these ones additionally push me to go elsewhere for information.
It's sucrose to being a good sweet article. Really though it should be used as a draft for something that wasn't just vibed. Eg fix the mice and loose the sparks from cutting wood.
I think the garbled menu accidentally perfectly illustrates what most menus look like within the brain as it tries to sift through poorly organized heaps of obscure words to find the one word that's actually needed in the moment.
You're being downvoted because you misunderstood the post you're replying to. They aren't referring to profit margins, but marginal utility—i.e. incremental improvements to stop spacing (purportedly) would not be enough to fix a fundamentally broken system.
> as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation
One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit.
Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use.
You've got a point, but the article's thesis is still correct.
The article points to case studies where reducing stops increased ridership: clearly this does make a difference
But I agree that truly good bus service requires commitment and budget. A city that only improves its transit in fast, cheap ways is doomed to bad transit.
Capitalism is not the only way of life (and fwiw, I'm not a fan)—but it is the primary way of life for nearly the entire world. Sweden, Norway, Brazil, France, Egypt, Iraq, and India are capitalist. Even China is effectively capitalist, although they like to call themselves "socialist with Chinese characteristics."
No, Google does not have the right. If you're building roads, you don't have a right to build them unsafely. Doesn't matter if they're privatized or not; they're important infrastructure for which we don't have meaningful alternatives.
Yeah they're describing a real problem, but the cause of that problem—a seamless centralized sign-up funded by VC money—is the reason bluesky took off to begin with.
Bsky offers an on-ramp to a more decentralized experience, but most people won't pay the money and experience the friction to move take that ramp. Platforms like Mastodon are entirely decentralized, but that means the friction of decentralizing happens immediately upon sign-up. The people who don't want to self-host PDSes never signed up for Mastodon to begin with.
I try to be skeptical, but I feel like bsky (or something like it) is the best way can do re: bringing decentralization to the masses.
> Platforms like Mastodon are entirely decentralized
They are not, they're federated and that distinction really matters here. A decentralized platform would be designed to make running your own single user or at least small instance the default but neither ActivityPub nor ATproto do that.
It makes intuitive sense to me that this would be true in complex domains (e.g. legacy code) where you really need to find the right solution, even if it takes a bit longer. Our first ideas are rarely our best ideas, and it's easy to get too attached to your first solution and try to tweak it into shape when it would be better just to start fresh.
[1]: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/03580e19-4646-4fba-91c3-17eab...
reply