As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.
Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.
They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
"Millions of people" should either be putting their money (and their objections) where their mouth is or stop relying on someone else's resource. The reality is, that like Wikipedia, few people have donated to IA as a proportion of all its users.
The "good" that they've done is the "good" as the creator's see it, not the "good" as the freeloaders see it. All of which is to simply say that almost all users of IA are relying on the goodwill of the creators.
I wonder if there would be appetite for a sister organization—one with a more conservative, risk-averse, long-horizon attitude—to emerge to mirror IA’s core archives. Let IA keep doing what it’s doing, crazy risk and all; duplicate the conservative functions in a conservative organizational structure.
I think the idea is that the kind of organization that would create the wayback machine in a world prior to the wayback machine is one which will also continue to push boundaries beyond that
I think that argument has a certain stasis to it, and kind of assumes that organisations maintain their energy and people (and those people are not changing!)… but there are realities where the initial push is by some people and then future maintenance is by others.
But I think the IA is a uniquely tough project because of how much the ground is shifting around them constantly. It’s not Wikipedia
And Brewster Kahle's notions about culture and information sharing start well before the Internet Archive. In theory one could pick and choose, but this is Brewster's life-long passion project. The man even outfitted a van with a printer and a binder to distribute physical books for free.
It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good. without that you wouldn't have had the Wayback machine in the first place.
Most of the IA’s ebook collection still supports controlled digital lending, just like every other library that operates an ebook lending system with CDL.
It seems like the strategy is to control state legislatures through extensive gerrymandering, then use state sovereignty to control the cities from without. Blue cities in otherwise red states are not able to experiment with local policies anymore, much to everyone’s detriment.
That’s not even the point though. You can always do these things but you still have no cultural power and you’ve yielded the important structures and financial capitals. That’s not a long term strategy.
And it’s not that difficult to win these things, especially when you look at how objectively poor the oppositions performance has been in them. Historically they’ve been contested.
They don't behave like a political party any more. It's not just the business of politics as usual and a generational shift, it's something different. I've been trying to coin a term for this internal takeover - I think nihilocracy, or nihilocratic populism, is the best I've come up with.
The party as a whole is uninterested in governing beyond seeking revenge and satisfying the charismatic eschatological movement that drives them. The leaders don't believe what they preach, they don't have policy goals besides "destroy what we hate", they don't have any conventional engagement with government beyond using it towards their own ends.
"Long term strategy" is a joke in this context. They're angry, they mobilize their supporters by promising revenge on a world that seems to be defying traditional structures and changing too fast. As with many reactionary movements aligned more by being "against" than "for", there's been little thought for what happens after the enemy has been defeated, and it's likely they'll continue seeking out new enemies until the movement dies from infighting or is ousted from power.
I see the supporter being nihilistic and purely out for revenge. I don’t see that with people in positions of power. They’re looking to line their pockets and they’ll take advantage of a vengeful constituency. True of both major parties. That’s why they focus on social issues and then pass legislation (or lack thereof) that allows them to all get rich.
Yep, I agree. I see the rank and file as being largely nihilistic but the leadership as being either pure ideologues or completely cynical. Either way, the stated values aren't the real ones, but they differ in whether they're working towards other goals or pure self-aggrandizement.
> You can always do these things but you still have no cultural power
That's when you use the power of the purse to contractually bind private businesses, non-profits, universities, etc, to your preferred values. Capital beats cultural power (or so goes the current gamble)
Edit: do I need to insert hyperlinks for the strong-arm tactics this administration has tried to force contractual counter-parties to adopts it's anti-DEI culture-war posture via a clause?
Those are just tactics though. So long as the cities are uncontested there’s no real long term plan. Just being somewhat competitive in them or having a presence.
I note there is no conflict of interest acknowledgment that The New Yorker and its parent company, Condé Nast, own significant real estate in New York City.
Additional context: Condé Nast recently had multiple journalists at Teen Vogue fired, apparently for covering Mamdani positively.
Computer comes from French, so they could just have settled on pronouncing it properly and gotten on with their day, but nooo, gotta invent a new word for this very old french word.
I actually think Typst should ignore the design of TeX and LaTeX more—and especially the well-meaning advice of LaTeX veterans who have only ever known one way of typesetting.
The situation reminds me of how Julia’s evolution was guided in some aspects by some opinionated and vocal {Python, R, MATLAB} developers who never had any intention of transitioning to Julia, whether or not their advice was implemented.
I was not implying they should make the same design choices, but there should be a deeper understanding of the underlying problems.
Case in point: backslashes and braces in TeX were there for a reason. You can say they make TeX code look ugly, and you would not be wrong. But when you throw them away without addressing the reason they were introduced, well, you end up with blog posts like this one.
The backslashes are not really relevant to the problem discussed in the post. The ambiguity between symbols and argument-taking macros exists just the same in LaTeX. Consider:
$ f_\abs{x} $
$ f_\pi{x} $
LaTeX just happens to do what the post calls "runtime parsing" because LaTeX doesn't really distinguish between different compiler stages at all. If you look at a macro, you can't know whether it will eat up the following braced argument.
In fact, not using backslashes for symbols can actually give an _edge_ with this problem because it would allow distinguishing `pi` and `#abs` (option E in the post).
This seems like a counter-example. The `=` was for time the only syntax (presumably taken by MATLAB--which in turn adapted it from IDL/Fortran--that initially Julia was heavily influenced from) with `in` (and `∈`) added afterwards (`in` being the only syntax used by the much more popular {Python, R}). Imo `=` alone was fine since as you say `=` means assignment, just within `for` it's an assignment applied iteratively. Opposite to that, `in` is also used as membership operator (`1 in [1, 2, 3]`) that is entirely different from its `for` role.
> What I want from my typesetting language is "typsetting completeness". While there might be sane defaults, I want to be able to control every decision made by the typesetter by escaping and grouping things as needed. If the language doesn't have these features, by definition, it is not complete.
Then LaTeX is not complete. Macros don’t have to respect the grouping provided by curly braces in math mode, therefore you only have the illusion of control. Nobody in practice actually inspects the full package dependency chain needed to typeset a nontrivial document.
IA is the eccentric, untamed idealism. You can’t have the Wayback Machine without the National Emergency Library and the Great 78 Project.
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