That's the conclusion the article came to, though without the potentially derogatory "hipster" label.
I buy cassettes and vinyl because it's a more complete sensory experience than just Spotify or MP3s. Listening to music then involves tactile feeling, not just audio. And the ritual of setting up to play a song adds something to the experience, too, even if it's more work than just hitting "shuffle" on your streaming service.
My ideal writing experience is one where there is nothing in the way of writing.
For me, that means as close to hand-writing a manuscript as possible, without the pain of extended hours of pressing hard with a pen or pencil.
From there, I may want to share my writing, or not. If so, then I want the process of moving what I've written from the initial medium to online and publicly accessible to be as quick and painless as possible.
If not, then... I just want it to be a file. Something I can save, archive, move, or whatever, like any other file.
It sounds like, given my context, Kraa is not designed for me.
I am interested in hearing from people who feel like Kraa solves a problem for them. I'd like to understand the difference in creative environment!
From what you have written, it actually sounds like Kraa 'might' be for you.
> I want the process of moving what I've written from the initial medium to online and publicly accessible to be as quick and painless as possible.
With Kraa this is a matter of one click.
> If not, then... I just want it to be a file. Something I can save, archive, move, or whatever, like any other file.
And this is more nuanced, but Kraa isn't using any proprietary file system. You can export your leaves to .md any time. Though it's not the same as e.g. Obsidian where it is literally a local file.
> without the pain of extended hours of pressing hard with a pen or pencil.
Excuse me, do you have a minute to talk about fountain pens?
I recommend a Lamy Safari or Pilot Kakuno to start. If the nib is good, no pressure at all is required to write. You have to retrain to relax your hand and arm if you're used to ballpoints and graphite. High quality paper is not required but it can make a big difference too.
As far as digital, .txt will always have a special place in my hard drive. As long as a tool has a way to export into plaintext, I am not opposed to using it.
I was just giving my history :) but yes I am sure this could actually get us out of the COBOL lock-in which requires 70 years old programmers to continue working.
You can actually use Claude Code (and presumably the other tools) on non-code projects, too. If you launch claude code in a directory of files you want to work on, like CSVs or other data, you can ask it to do planning and analysis tasks, editing, and other things. It's fun to experiment with, though for obvious reasons I prefer to operate on a copy of the data I'm using rather than let Claude Code go wild.
I use Claude Code for "everything", and have just committing most things into git as a fallback.
It's great to then just have it write scripts, and then write skills to use those scripts.
A lot of my report writing etc. now involve setting up a git repo, and use Claude to do things like process the call transcripts from discovery calls and turn them into initial outlines and questions that needs followup, and tasks lists, and write scripts to do necessary analysis etc., so I can focus on the higher level stuff.
Side note from someone who just used Claude Code today for the first time: Claude Code is a TUI, so you can run it in any folder/with any IDE and it plays along nicely. I thought it was just another vscode clone, so I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't try to take over my entire workflow.
It's even better: It's a TUI if you launch it without options, but you can embed it in scripts too - the "-p" option takes a prompt, in which case it will return the answer, and you can also provide a conversation ID to continue a conversation, and give it options to return the response as JSON, or stream it.
Many of the command line agent tools support similar options.
However, this is an unexpected bell curve. I wonder if GitHub is seeing more frequent adversarial action lately. Alternatively, perhaps there is a premature reliance on new technology at play.
I pulled my project off github and onto codeberg a couple months ago but this outage still screws me over because I have a Cargo.toml w/ git dependency into github.
I was trying to do a 1.0 release today. Codeberg went down for "10 minutes maintenance" multiple times while I was running my CI actions.
I think it would be pretty hard to argue against that point of view, at least thus far. If DOS/Windows hadn't become the dominant OS someone would have, and a whole generation of engineers cut their teeth on their parents' windows PCs.
There are some pretty zany alternative realities in the Multiverses I’ve visited. Xerox Parc never went under and developed computing as a much more accessible commodity. Another, Bell labs invented a whole category of analog computers that’s supplanted our universe’s digital computing era. There’s one where IBM goes directly to super computers in the 80s. While undoubtedly Microsoft did deliver for many of us, I am a hesitant to say that that was the only path. Hell, Steve Jobs existed in the background for a long while there!
I wish things had gone differently too, but a couple of nitpicks:
1.) It's already a miracle Xerox PARC escaped their parent company's management for as long as they did.
3.) IBM was playing catch-up on the supercomputer front since the CDC 6400 in 1964. Arguably, they did finally catch up in the mid-late 80's with the 3090.
Yeah, I'm absolutely not saying it was the only path. It's just the path that happened. If not MS maybe it would have been Unix and something else. Either way most everyone today uses UX based on Xerox Parc's which was generously borrowed by, at this point, pretty much everyone.
If Microsoft hadn't tried to actively kill all its competition then there's a good chance that we'd have a much better internet. Microsoft is bigger than just an operating system, they're a whole corporation.
Instead they actively tried to murder open standards [1] that they viewed as competitive and normalized the antitrust nightmare that we have now.
I think by nearly any measure, Microsoft is not a net good. They didn't invent the operating system, there were lots of operating systems that came out in the 80's and 90's, many of which were better than Windows, that didn't have the horrible anticompetitive baggage attached to them.
Alternatively: had MS Embraced and Extended harder instead of trying to extinguish ASAP we’d have a much better internet owned to a much higher degree by MS.
A few decades back Microsoft were first to the prize with asynchronous JavaScript, Silverlight really was flash done better and still missed, a proper extension of their VB6/MFC client & dev experience out to the web would have gobbled up a generation of SaaS offerings, and they had a first in class data analysis framework with integrated REPL that nailed the central demands of distributed/cloud-first systems and systems configuration (F#). That on top of near perfect control of the document and consumer desktop ecosystems and some nutty visualization & storage capabilities.
Plug a few of their demos from 2002 - 2007 together and you’ve got a stack and customer experience we’re still hurting for.
Silverlight is only “Flash Done Better” if we had the dystopia of Windows being the only desktop operating system. Silverlight never worked on Linux, and IIRC it didn’t work terribly well on macOS (though I could be misremembering).
In fact all of your points are only true if we accept that Windows would be the only operating system.
Microsoft half-asses most things. If they had taken over the internet, we would likely have the entirety of the internet be even more half-asses than it already is.
What’s funny is that we were some bad timing away from IBM giving the DOS money to Gary Kildall and we’d all be working with CP/M derivatives!
Gary was on a flight when IBM called up the Digital Research looking for an OS for the IBM-PC. Gary’s wife, Dorothy, wouldn’t sign an NDA without it going through Gary, and supposedly they never got negotiations back on track.
I'm not sure I understand this logic. You're saying that the gap would have been filled even if their product didn't exist, which means that the net benefit isn't that the product exists. How are you concluding that whatever we might have gotten instead would have been worse?
And how does it follow that microsoft is the good guy in a future where we did it with some other operating system? You could argue that their system was so terrible that its displacement of other options harmed us all with the same level of evidence.
I'm not convinced of your first point. Just because something seems difficult to avoid given the current context does not mean it was the only path available.
Your second point is a little disingenuous. Yes, Microsoft and Windows have been wildly successful from a cultural adoption standpoint. But that's not the point I was trying to argue.
My first comment is simply pointing out that there's always a #1 in anything you can rank. Windows happened to be what won. And I learned how to use a computer on Windows. Do I use it now? No. But I learned on it as did most people whose parents wanted a computer.
The comment you were replying to was about Microsoft.
Even if Windows weren't a dogshit product, which it is, Microsoft is a lot more than just an operating system. In the 90's they actively tried to sabotage any competition in the web space, and held web standards back by refusing to make Internet Explorer actually work.
I buy cassettes and vinyl because it's a more complete sensory experience than just Spotify or MP3s. Listening to music then involves tactile feeling, not just audio. And the ritual of setting up to play a song adds something to the experience, too, even if it's more work than just hitting "shuffle" on your streaming service.
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