Twitter Archive: 2015
Twitter dot com was a microblogging and social networking service, where users could share short posts (commonly known as “tweets”) with text, images, and video.
This is an archive of all my tweets from 2008–2025 (my username was @dubroy).
These days, you can find me on Bluesky or Mastodon.
By year
- 2025 33 posts
- 2024 203
- 2023 97
- 2022 91
- 2021 89
- 2020 26
- 2019 0
- 2018 6
- 2017 56
- 2016 108
- 2015 71
- 2014 197
- 2013 180
- 2012 160
- 2011 162
- 2010 171
- 2009 238
- 2008 101
…or see popular posts.
2015
When your communication tools are built by people who don't understand communication.
"Digital tech…is not the source of future intelligence but an environment where intelligence manifests differently." edge.org/response-detai…
@jasonbrennan Ran across this paper on programming with comic strips today: citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…. Made me think of you…have you seen it?
That thing called "logical reasoning" is much closer to storytelling than some people would like to believe.
"A → B" is hard to reliably distinguish from "it's nice/comforting/plausible to suppose that B follows from A".
Hmmm: "Self-driving cars are predicted to dramatically reduce traffic accidents…by removing human error." kottke.org/15/12/the-ethi…
I really wish we could stop with this magical thinking that software is free from human errors & biases.
Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of "Spaghetti" Code: safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/…
If Star Trek were written by someone from Silicon Valley, the holodeck would only ever be used to play first person shooters.
It's 2015 and people are still designing UIs with floppy disk icons. 😂
@dubroy Should have made the printer icon in the silhouette of a lithograph machine too.
@mwichary I thought of you when I saw this :-)
"Silicon Valley’s amorality problem arises from the implicit & explicit narrative of progress [used] for marketing" berkeleyjournal.org/2015/01/morali…
"Is this even legal? Is it ethical?…I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through these questions. [It's] an experiment in consumer demand"
Love this list by Dunne & Raby (dunneandraby.co.uk/content/projec…). The tech world could use a lot more from column B.
As a follow-up to @worrydream's latest essay, I recommend reading about "wicked problems": uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel… chrisriedy.me/2013/05/29/cli…
Apparatus is an amazing new tool by @mandy3284. It's like a cross between Keynote and a spreadsheet. aprt.us
"Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower." idlewords.com/talks/web_desi…
Excited to finally unveil something @alexwarth & I have been working on—a new tool for parsing and pattern matching: github.com/cdglabs/ohm
When I hear about the "democratization" of some technology, I'm like, "Oh, so it's increasingly controlled by lobbyists and big business?"
On Q&A: "Most of them seem to genuinely believe that their barely-disguised dominance play…is an actual question" blog.valerieaurora.org/2015/06/23/ban…
"Building an open web with decentralized open code is a labor movement for the digital age." medium.com/@jessevondoom/…
I'm curious, are there any mainstream languages that allow non-ASCII digits for numeric literals? cc @ra
Sudden realization that the wrist pain I've had lately may be caused by using Sublime instead of Emacs…way more whacking of arrow keys.
Uber Drivers Deemed Employees By California Labor Commission: techcrunch.com/2015/06/17/ube…
popcorn.gif
popcorn.gif
@nathansobo OT but are you interested in trying a new PEG library that I'm working on w/ Alex Warth? Would be great to get your feedback.
"Traditional inputs" → game controller
"Communicative gestures" → one finger pointing
Bravo. techcrunch.com/2015/06/11/ocu…
"Communicative gestures" → one finger pointing
Bravo. techcrunch.com/2015/06/11/ocu…
Just benchmarked some code I wrote and was excited that it's "only" about 10x slower than it needs to be.
"Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” nytimes.com/2015/06/09/us/…
"TLS everywhere is great for large companies with a financial stake in Internet centralization." ietf.org/mail-archive/w…
"We can't wait to see what happens when it gets into the hands of developers." gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-…
Bummed that I can't go to Curry On (curry-on.org) -- an absolutely incredible lineup of speakers, and tons of interesting topics.
TIL that the CommonMark spec doesn't even describe what GitHub and StackOverflow actually support. Guess @gruber was right after all.
"A word of caution about Facebook is not a wish to return to some non-existent ideal time." theawl.com/2015/05/what-c…
Submissions are open for the Future Programming Workshop @ Strange Loop & SPLASH. I attended last year, it was great! future-programming.org/call.html
The FPW writers' workshop at SPLASH is a great venue to get feedback on early-stage work that's outside the programming mainstream.
Getting beyond TodoMVC -- "7GUIs: A Notational Usability Benchmark for GUI Programming" github.com/eugenkiss/7gui…
Making a Thing connected to the Internet and you've never heard of Mark Weiser? Stop what you're doing and read this: ubiq.com/hypertext/weis…
Hackin'.
"The faster I can get results from my code, the faster I can understand the problem at hand." evanmiller.org/four-days-of-g…
Reminder to Canadian friends living abroad: you can register to vote no matter how long you've been a non-resident. elections.ca/content.aspx?s…
Brilliant piece of writing from Elections Canada: "Your home…is where you intend to return to when you are away from that place."
JSDOM is pretty amazing. All my project's HTML examples are now running unmodified as part of my test suite.
Next step: using Markscript (npmjs.com/package/marksc…) to test all the code that's embedded in my documentation.
Only in Silicon Valley would car services be considered "public transport", and a 5km bike ride "absurd": twitter.com/BenedictEvans/…
Fran Lebowitz: "What's the point of being young if you're not going to make new things, I wonder?" elle.com/fashion/person… /via @kottke
Yup, that pretty much sums it up.
Feeling glee at the amount of style rules I can enforce using @geteslint. There must be a German word for this. Regelgebungsfreude?
"Git is so amazingly simple to use that APress, a single publisher, needs to have 3 different books on how to use it" bitquabit.com/post/unorthodo…
Totally great explorable explanation by @ncasenmare on how to create 2D visibility/shadow effects: ncase.me/sight-and-ligh…
Really impressed with @geteslint right now. Great error formatting, and much more configurable than JSHint.
On my way to NYC for my @hackerschool residency. Should be an interesting week!
Stop for a moment and think about what an amazing piece of writing this was: "Avoid missing ball for high score."
Ted Nelson on PARC: "they gave us the sensual pleasures of fonts in return for giving up any forms of connection" youtube.com/watch?v=c6SUOe…
Finally got around to watching @monteiro's excellent talk "How Designers Destroyed the World": vimeo.com/68470326. You should watch it.
And if you don't get the significance of the background image in the slides: youtube.com/watch?v=XvuM3D…
Smarter Objects: Using AR technology to Program Physical Objects and their Interactions -- fluid.media.mit.edu/sites/default/…
Glad to see that Pebble is resurrecting LifeStreams (cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/…), an idea way ahead of its time: fastcompany.com/3042781/tech-f…
"Capital doesn't need to point a gun at you to remove your democratic rights" antipope.org/charlie/blog-s…
@refreshmunich Can't make it this time, unfortunately.
I want something like @tonyszhou's "Every Frame a Painting" (vimeo.com/118321998) but for UI design. It's so so good.
Cool, archive.org has the complete Smalltalk-72 instruction manual! archive.org/details/bitsav…
@JulianLepinski I'm currently amusing myself by imagining what your reaction to this article will be: medium.com/@sacca/why-i-w…
"As it turns out, organizing the world’s information isn’t always profitable." medium.com/message/never-…
"Simply b/c individual writes are immutable doesn’t mean that program outcomes are somehow 'automatically correct.'" bailis.org/blog/data-inte…
Remember: immutability is not a solution, it's a mitigation strategy.
One thing I really like about Go is that they've basically eliminated this kind of bullshit: blog.izs.me/post/235345869…
"When people say they have no politics, it means that their politics aligns with the status quo." theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
"Doing encapsulation right is a commitment not just to abstraction of state, but to eliminate state oriented metaphors from programming."
That quote is by Alan Kay from the Early History of Smalltalk: worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOf…
Wow. I never realized what a beautiful object Sputnik was:
Very cool project by @i_am_ralpht -- "Towards declarative touch interactions" with constraint-based layout: iamralpht.github.io/constraints/
Apparently Pixar produces ~100,000 storyboards for each film: siliconprairienews.com/2010/10/josh-c…. Imagine if we thought about software that deeply.
"In play…children bring the realities of their world into a fictional context, where it is safe to confront them." kottke.org/15/01/kids-the…
"Scientific revolutions are more often driven by new tools than by new concepts." twitter.com/stevesi/status…
Interesting piece of MVC history -- why Dolphin Smalltalk uses Model-View-Presenter instead of MVC: object-arts.com/downloads/pape…
Help me out: I'm looking for some simple, concrete examples of bugs caused by mutable state.
Why Concatenative Programming Matters: evincarofautumn.blogspot.de/2012/02/why-co…
It's 2015 and all the major operating systems are as buggy as shit: marco.org/2015/01/04/app….
Conal Elliot: "The C language is purely functional" - conal.net/blog/posts/the…
In other words: pure FP doesn't *solve* the problem of ordering, it just moves it to a different meta level.
What products are/were a significant improvement on the classic spreadsheet? I know Numbers took a lot from Lotus Improv. Anything else?
Interesting perspective: "I think the word 'safety' is kind of a PR disaster for PL folks." lambdamaphone.blogspot.de/2015/01/what-s… /via @swannodette
Because computers.
