I don't know that anybody in the Slack (other than Mariano) has actually finished a project and put it out into the world.

Spoken like someone who has released two episodes of a so-called "monthly" podcast in the past six months :)

😁

Well, you have to get the awesome intro music right, and that seems like about a month of work right there.

I hadn't focused on it while listening, but fwiw both my projects kinda feel "finished" to me. And I've tried to work in milestones that are each usable by others. I'll continue to work on them, but that doesn't feel like a contradiction. That they fail to get use (my incompetence) seems out of my control to a large extent.

That's actually cool to hear, Kartik Agaram. While editing things (and wondering whether to cut the remark for fear that it might hurt someone's feelings — I do care, I really do) I wondered about whether you think of Mu as "done" or not. The idea of "milestones that are each usable by others" is eminently sensible.

Also, while I'm inviting people to jump further down my throat, let me add (A) I have a cold, so wear PPE, and (B) I talk about "the transistor era" at one point, and what I meant to say was "microprocessor era", and the fact that Jimmy Miller didn't correct this obvious mistake means he must join me in my cloud of unbearable shame.

These are some of the bilateral tensions of open source:

• Often issues or PRs are unwelcome
• If there's no activity people think issues or PRs are unwelcome

In Mu's case, activity is going to be reduced, but issues and PRs are still extremely appreciated. I want it to be usable in 50 years even if nobody's maintained it. Only way to find out how I'm doing at that goal is by having others try it out.

I was almost offended until I realized that, depending on your prior bias, “finish” could mean 1M MAU, or it could mean having a README on GitHub, or anything in-between. In fact, the only way someone can consider their own project as unfinished is by their own volition, I think. That’s what made it such a provocative statement to me.

Yeah, or like… what does "project" even mean to you? Is this community actually project-focussed, or is that just some language we use because it's an easy catch-all? If I'm looking at my personal day-job work through an FoC-inspired lens, does that mean it's also an FoC-pertinent project?

I think a project is finished anew every time someone posts a 2-minute video about it that I find inspiring. :) haha

I always try to work in public in production exclusively. I don't feel something has really been tested until randoms use it. But technical problems is one thing, but the real test is if people like it, which is 90% of the time is not really. FYI, I have a dashboard of all my metrics on Observable, this is the real thing driving the research. What do people keep coming back to?

I won't be happy till Ivan Reese drops a YouTube video titled Addressing The Controversy

haha! Couldn’t ask for anything more.

He actually uses Android but went and bought an iPhone specially for that Notespology authenticity

I'm so lost with all the Twitter references. At least, I assume it's Twitter.

I think this one is more of an Instagram thing

I thought we were going to double down first. Get called out. Delete our tweets and then make an apology video. Disappointed. This was our chance to go viral! :)

Let's take destroying our careers one episode at a time. No need to hurry.

let's show how wrong Ivan Reese is by filling #share-your-work and #two-minute-week with updates on our clearly finished projects (pick any definition of finished you like 😄)

</motivational-speech>

"what does finished mean?" is an interesting question. I would argue Light Table would qualify - it was used daily by 50k+ people and downloaded 1M+ times. It's ideas found their way into Xcode, Chrome dev tools, VSCode, IntelliJ, etc. So while I imagine it doesn't see much continued use today, it definitely went out into the world and was finished enough to be the daily driver of many folks that weren't us.

Yeah, I've always kind of wanted a #share-your-not-super-future-or-super-good-work. Because while the rest of you finish things I don't 🙂. I have things though that I've worked on that were fun. Like text editor in rust that is a canvas where you draw panes, and can run code that can draw in the editor.

https://github.com/jimmyhmiller/PlayGround/tree/master/rust/editor

A clone of phoenix live view for clojure that can inspect itself live, so you can see all the function calls and arguments https://github.com/jimmyhmiller/PlayGround/tree/master/live-view

Or a redux/elm architecture domain specific editor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlG6L2rdSik

For what its worth, when I say "finished" I just mean usable by someone other than me. So light table most assuredly qualifies. In fact, I think light table is almost certainly in the top 10 (if not #1) of the most successful "future of coding style" projects out there.

Chris Granger: Yeah, the later downward slope of some metric doesn't take away the "finished". If Light Table wasn't finished, nothing is.

In a funny/sad way, LT had much bigger impact on the industry than we expected. Part the of the reason Light Table happened was because I was told "Microsoft would never make a pared down version of VS" after I'd pitched something like it. I thought that was ridiculous and about a year after I left, I got annoyed enough with the state of tools that I just built it. My boss's boss was the one who ultimately went on to push VSCode based on that pitch and LT's success 😛 The "sad" part is that they missed the most important bits.

Influential is a much higher bar than "finished", I think..

Wow, that's a crazy story! I wondered what made them decide on VSCode. Such a good business step. But definitely sad to see the best parts of light table never see reality. This blog post is still one of my favorite visions for an editor. http://lighttable.com/2012/05/21/the-future-is-specific/

It is what I want more than anything. Yeah, it doesn't solve the bigger problems with programming languages. But it would be so amazing for my work workflow.

That was such a cool time for LT

I made a big mistake shortly after that bit - I listened too much to other people shouting that LT needed X

If you listen to the folks steeped in what they know, you're going to start moving towards something more like what exists. I wasn't sure what to do though - we needed to find some way for it to be commercially successful and unless we got people using it for work, that was never going to happen. As such it needed to at least feel somewhat fimiliar.

Jimmy Miller better to over share than to under share, if the problem is the name of the channel we will create it 🙂

Chris Granger I wonder if the landscape today would change the funding aspect. The pitch of warp and fig for example seems to be that you can add "teams" and collaboration features into the app and that is why companies will pay for it.

A light table like editor focused on that seems like it wouldn't be as hard of a pitch as it was when you were trying to pioneer this.

people are also way more willing to pay for dev stuff than back then

you should've seen us trying to pitch dev tools to VCs

but yeah, I'm not sure. The problem is that industry seems to have largely consolidated on VSCode and embraced that size of the ecosystem is the primary driver of tools.

Maybe you could make a paid plugin to VSCode, dunno

the industry around Visual Studio itself was ~1B while I was at MSFT, so there's plenty of precedent for it, but at the same time everything went open source, so....

Some of the Eve experiments (esp the wiki ones) were very similar to this current rush of Roam/Obsidian style knowledge bases. A few years too early again!

Chris Knott I still hope to make a dent there before too long 🙂

Yeah, I know they say too early is just as bad as being wrong. I definitely see that in terms of the market. But the impact LT/eve have had are immense.

There will also never not be a too early for most of this stuff. The value of the things that are "too early" is that they show what's possible. You could argue that all the stuff at PARC was too early.

Clarification: The "too early" is just whoever does it first. Someone has to be first.

Yeah that's something I've struggled with and have yet to come to a good answer. I think the things we did were important and I think they did make a difference, but.. were we successful? Should we have done things differently? Should we have settled and just become a (db, notion, airtable, retool)? I think the guys are all glad we didn't, but boy my career has been a strange one as a result.

Seeing Eve/LT and Jonathan Edwards’s chorus I get the dual feeling that I want the demos to get to production (and you to get the recognition or whatever you need to keep going) but at the same time I want you to keep "being early".

I was thinking that you paired with some Angel Investors/VCs creating a funnel where you "transfer" those prototypes to a team, give them advice as mentors and get a percentage of the venture would be a nice thing to try 😉

That's something I've thought a ton about

and would love to do

I don't actually like programming very much 😛 I only want to do as much of it as is necessary to show someone else how X would be done. lol

Well, definitely sign me up if you do get that partnership going 🙂. I definitely can imagine the strangeness of having influenced so much and not having something concrete to show for it.

It really echos the same problem we have in open source. So few people, such large impact, but so little reward.

yeah, I've given virtually everything I've done away 😕

I did the math on what my living situation would be if I had done something more conventional and it was depressing to say the least, especially if you compare that to what I believe the value we created was. My boss at Microsoft told me something that ended up being true more generally than I would've thought; "You can either keep doing what you're doing - work that I think is vital and important - or you can do the things that will get you promoted."

How true and depressing that is. That is the exact reason I want to be part of something like future of coding. For some reason society, businesses, whatever you want to call it, doesn't reward these things.

Pushing hard, trying to make things better, doing something better for users, but that deviates from the norm are all ways to not get promoted. They are all ways to be seen as on the fringe. It is in complete contrast to the outside perception of how tech works.

While we here can't fix the monetary aspect of any of these. Hopefully we can give some social validation. Hopefully we can continue to explore.

Maybe slowly this will change? No idea, but in the meantime, we can be a place where people can feel at home with doing the things that aren't rewarded.

I still think about something Konrad Hinsen said long ago [1]. To put it in my own words:

• Capitalism basically defines wealth as "demand somebody has that somebody else can fulfill." This is the essence of the definition of GDP, for example.
• It's possible to hack capitalism by just buying a single thing back and forth over and over again between two entities (that have been vetted by regulators, gone through the appropriate licensing procedures, etc.) Iceland did this in their bubble before 2008[2].
• On the other side, capitalism also fails to track the value of open source projects. It's not just that projects give their code away for free, but that we're literally blind to people (as opposed to commercial entities) who use a project.[3][4]

[1] http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/thinking-together/1599588394.135900.html#1599633533.179800

[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/04/iceland200904

[3] http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/thinking-together/1600195910.451200.html#1600281628.470900

[4] http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/thinking-together/1600195910.451200.html#1600281369.470300

The pandemic has shown how dysfunctional many of our institutions are, including science and technology research. Suddenly tech money is getting involved in funding research. A lot of things are possible today that weren’t possible 2 years ago. Smart young ambitious people with moonshot missions can get funded. But it has to be something with a big legible impact. I don’t think we know today how to have a big impact on programming. Worse, we don’t know how to make that impact legible to people who made their fortunes on existing software tech. That may be the real blocker.

I have been incubating Mech since 2014, and I'll be finally shipping the first public beta version in October. Honestly I was content to work on this on my own forever, but I started teaching my students Mech and I'm always blown away with what their imaginations dream up, so now I think maybe I'll have more fun shipping and seeing what other people write.

Also I have fantasies about making Matlab obsolete, but that's never going to happen if I don't put Mech out there!

Not finishing stuff: Guilty as Charged. I am trying though.

Kartik Agaram https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29502362-the-value-of-everything has a lot of interesting things to say about that. The first half is a history of how economics used to be the field that would debate how to measure value produced, but in the 70s marginal utility theory won that debate so hard that now value and profit are the same word. The second half looks at all the ways that messes up resource allocation. For most things it's hard to capture any of the value created, which means you don't make a profit, which means it must not have been valuable...

I definitely see a negative correlation between how much I get paid to do something and how much I think it was worth doing.

Conflating value and profit leads to a world where education, child rearing, community service, and elder care are not valued.

definitely hard to reconcile a profit-value mindset with the fact that people demand that programming languages be free of charge

we can now conclude that programming languages have no value whatsoever! pack it up everyone!

One thing I'd like to talk about at HYTRADBOI is funding these kinds of endeavors. We tried VC with Eve and Dark so there are some lessons there. I still think incubation in academia is a good idea, and I'm trying a variation of that with a non tenure track position. Others like Zig have gone the crowdfunding route and that's working too but Zig isn't that far out of the mainstream so I'm worried that wouldn't work for a FOC product.

Jamie Brandon I don't think it's a negative correlation exactly. There is often some overlap:

• I tend to think I provide some value for the salary I'm paid at my day job. But it's not necessarily where the performance reviews think it is.
• There's value in assessing students, but it's probably a conflict for teaching and assessing to be carried out by the same people. That creates a temptation to teach for the test, etc.

Lately I tend to think of the tech company notion of "culture" as "things people do without being directly incentivized to do them." I wonder if there's value in chasing profit but not too closely. The problem, of course, is that this is not very actionable. How do you create a metric for "how closely someone tracks a metric"?

I don't think it's a negative correlation exactly. There is often some overlap

Those two statements don't conflict 😛 Negative correlation just means that I get paid more for the things that are less valuable, not that the things I get paid for have zero or negative value.

Often the tradeoff is very explicit eg if I publish in paid newsletter instead of on an open website, fewer people get value from it but I get to capture some of that value. Similarly for proprietary vs open-source code. The system actively encourages me to make things less useful.

An even stronger version of your argument: correlation can be noisy anyway. So the term could well cover everything I said.

Kartik, that’s actually the exact opposite of the definition of culture that I'm used to hearing from my old manager: https://twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1390659108160774147

You can reward and incentivize people for not chasing profit too closely. I think that was the crux of “Should we have settled and just become a (db, notion, airtable, retool)? I think the guys are all glad we didn't, but boy my career has been a strange one as a result.”

Yeah, that's the usual definition of culture. It's not wrong, so I don't think it's diametrically opposed to mine. But I think it's incomplete and not very actionable. The CEO can only say a little, and culture is constantly emerging at all levels. So we don't have the time to appreciate and reward every little thing that helps the company.

Many of the things I think of in the category of "things you do without being incentivized" include not penalizing things that there are no legible incentives for.

You can reward and incentivize people for not chasing profit too closely.

The challenge is that a company has objective functions fractally at all levels. Profit at the company level is influenced by people chasing their own objective functions too tightly.

Tying it back to my original statement about capitalism, the inside of a firm isn't that different from the space between firms in this respect. Long-term value is often generated in the spaces between legible incentives. Chasing Moloch too closely can be self-limiting.

So it's fine for me to attach a meme to enhance a post? Or did I technically break a rule but we're keeping it because it's a centi-thread?

Apologies if it's the latter!

Eh. Not a rule. Just a norm. But it was an on-point reference, and as a community for real human beings that tries to poke and prod at excessively self-serious programming culture (but also the "GIFs are a great way to make up for our social deficiencies" programming culture), I want to encourage folks to have good taste and recognize humour when they see it. So this was a total 👍 in my books.