From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail-wm1-f43.google.com ([209.85.128.43]) by ewsd; Tue Jul 28 05:48:20 EDT 2020 Received: by mail-wm1-f43.google.com with SMTP id d190so58455wmd.4 for <9front@9front.org>; Tue, 28 Jul 2020 02:48:17 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20161025; h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:from:date:message-id:subject:to; bh=kisYhAbO77RWQN1bZgW2oOfh0ME6hOEO5h2zv1jf3RQ=; b=UKBLkb9yWzwqXfAhA2wQSm3xF58C1i/tPmKBK5dyp0T3eRRyfsQ9qJ3sRt+K/hleyt Efldr5uV5Fsx3uz+krIyjvREsoiEkheKS6cNYT6CcF+Zb0TAf4Laxspe2l+XByTGafPX jJ6gYel36wSYv2BwCzmjlcuC5I82E0UIIdJXNanoUZvOrtTEwOkXlttk9MmQWCZKxB13 bxcQq7UIKoC6c2SfjbFzHD9bX2xb5YBUCE/0u1guNPHEBzM3DQ2dfHZmN4fEPc9eLnRY sFnE5nGUiqErAKYEJDqepC6w8XedwTtATgCiyQTee7uSFR+TOzYMCMbuPKBiNjVZeN1i Yogg== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20161025; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:in-reply-to:references:from:date :message-id:subject:to; bh=kisYhAbO77RWQN1bZgW2oOfh0ME6hOEO5h2zv1jf3RQ=; b=S9/odEw3Y4VM616dn81U+nh+6/deE61w3/Kx8gtgOdAo3bZT3CpZBhH07GSd7jchIy tBVHUUbWnQR0QGwioZ56xC2pM0aHYhsYSRFwLiXT6SaNYfGseE26rBhVAKTKyOfD+RfN IqyRsBTYiNJe7pDjXFx+QpYROSx3vvLL/ctk5SxznhfgYYTf26vxB4fEW50kz8Wz4t7j DWNVCGf9Wl/MIFlVJUg11pzobLORTFfpliTh14GBU0frAfmrxeh7U7B/iP/yMLRS8pNR jLRqbbdfrT3F/nGrApi41Y22QwF5OE6SZMVQr2y4T6gMgWm3/gBK2IRpt3f3vA/zd6Dz Nb/A== X-Gm-Message-State: AOAM531Dkr6EvSZGEiyaqAJ5f5xg0U7QhkZDOjv3awjBXhtvcvQ3d+Fo 9aEwWRqVMd8rX+yimODDQeT+s3DQp6JBgSQ+/EjBX6Jd X-Google-Smtp-Source: ABdhPJwTo3qtGyaSVkApqpVYyUF4HtNjr3Hn7WJIX4O2fMJoSHAGhivJ7XyXPi+m+Vj9ksPnLwPcK8q6tD2tg5XkEnM= X-Received: by 2002:a7b:c845:: with SMTP id c5mr3352761wml.180.1595929696154; Tue, 28 Jul 2020 02:48:16 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 2002:adf:fd51:0:0:0:0:0 with HTTP; Tue, 28 Jul 2020 02:48:14 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <5F940CDA-1E2D-4ACE-B70D-AAAD0638C77A@stanleylieber.com> References: <5F940CDA-1E2D-4ACE-B70D-AAAD0638C77A@stanleylieber.com> From: hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 11:48:14 +0200 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [9front] The 9 Documentation Project To: 9front@9front.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" List-ID: <9front.9front.org> List-Help: X-Glyph: ➈ X-Bullshit: shared asynchronous AJAX shader-oriented core optimizer > my experience with this struggle over the past ten years has been that > nobody ever helps. everyone has good ideas, but nobody ever helps. see also: > bug tracker. some ideas are no help and some help i gave was no good idea. for me it has not been a struggle though. even though our communication is very basic and non-organized, it seems like a very relaxed, pleasantly experimental atmosphere and i feel like i have enough space to envision the future, as opposed to our dayjobs with only shitty uninformed code. but that's just me, what about the 9front community? what do *we* want out of this apart from a nice meditative shrine? what are the most pressing issue? obviously there can only be one valid goal: 9front world domination, file servers for president. there has never been a bigger power vacuum in the US before this clown as a president, and it's time we grab it now. for this we need to channel our strengths, and develop new strengths, working together will benefit everybody. for some it is hard to communicate efficiently, they have to become stronger. some don't want to communicate, they have to become more passionate. and some want to just play with the system and have some fun. they have to carry on what they are doing, otherwise they should just go outside and find something more fun that at least doesn't have anything to do with sitting on a chair all day and waste their health doing boring computershit. but what if you decide to communicate, and collaborate, and want to produce great code and great documentation for all of us? generally people are most productive when writing stuff for themselves. they shouldn't stop doing this. just don't be sad it if isn't imported directly as is into mainline 9front. if their result is great, and if they are responsible and collaborative they will want to either communicate the wisdom achieved or even generalize their code into something that can be imported into 9front. only in the latter case we should need to actually *do* anything (apart from just talk talk). a lot of this is happening on IRC, which I sometimes follow closely. when i think it's working well enough i'm obviously biased, as some people reject IRC. for those what I think of as informal drafts/proposals and ideas on irc is not visible in any other form or document. there's often no mail, no website, no paper, no publication, no pdf, nothing. I didn't feel a need for this to change, but admittedly right now there's more noise, and the outcome is not as easy to re-share with people that aren't already on that IRC channel anyway. an example how it could be done differently is the iwp9 conferences, which always produced very interesting papers that I enjoyed. this is a format i have missed lately, but IRC just makes it so easy... i heard recently a complaint that it's too hard to get patches for 9front approved and commented on. this included a second complaint that cinap has been split into mail and irc, and i identified a belief that cinap will only answer mail fast enough for their taste if nagged on irc enough. of course experience shows that many problems are most easily solved if cinap solves them. but making more infrastructure to make cinap solve more problems might not scale right because there's only one cinap. so instead i demand we find a process that allows people to *learn* most efficiently from each other, perhaps also enabling more people to share cinap's responsibilities. technology and infrastructure can aid in this, but there's clearly a bigger picture and social level that isn't as easily programmable. so here we have to ask ourselves what we demands of others (or ourselves) and what is really about our infrastructure. 9front sometimes moved faster, but IMO we have to allow it to move slowly. we don't all have a well-funded research organization to pay us for working on plan9, remember this is all free-time activity. now, about the platforms that nobody gives any help on: there's now a mail/web bug tracker, but i haven't seen any mails lately. that's ok. i'm patient and still discovering. there's web/hg fqa but it's not mounted by default in my 9front install, so i only was able to check it rarely when i have a browser on linux open, and sent only few patches (again, from linux and via mail), been a while, i don't remember the process. and there's a new 9front wiki (don't even remember where it is and if it was web-only/werc or something else) and that is also not available to me unless i acquire it's url and use my main browser, unless it's already open on the other webbrowser on the other laptop or workstation, but i can't remember. i'm also not gonna start some kind of performance art like using mothra either. to summarize: these web services are plainly not in my namespace right now. i admit it's my limitation, i'm sure i could organize my browser and tab sessions more efficiently. but i have not (and i'm sure i'll regret it forever). for a longer time now, services are put online and taken offline before anybody can get used to the systems and the processes involved in using them (bell-labs servers, wikifs, google code servers, new webshit werc/cat-v.org services, and most recently (for some of our members): irc). at the same time the 9front community is spreading and taking over more social networks like discord, gridchat, github, bitbucket, hackernews, twitter, matrix, mastodon, sr.ht, in turn making it harder to track what is even going on. i try sometimes, but recently i didn't have the time or browser real estate. it got too much. i am experiencing a medium overload. already just mainline 9front hg changes, mail and irc can already waste all my time. i am not able to add even more mediums and still (ever?) engage in any significant way. (in addition to having multiple mediums available, people (yes, me included) demand that during one conversation the other side switches between multiple mediums in real-time in lockstep with them.) i don't think i'm alone, and i don't think the 9front community is the only one suffering from medium overload. if you can't afford all the dependencies all the different mediums come with it creates a media gap. the simplest example is that you might not be able to hg pull right now as your 9front machine is not connected to the internet. you might also not be able to copy&paste some error or make a screenshot and put it online somewhere. you might not be able to access the fqa from 9front installer disc. at best you might have another computer with windows/chrome, but even then you might still not be able to copy&paste the lines you found into your 9front, creating frequent spelling-based mistakes that waste everybody's time on IRC when we try to help debug it... and i think if you indiscriminately add more mediums it only gets worse. let's not only think about what we need to do, or what we don't do, let's also think about what we shouldn't do. perhaps we can do with less for now. perhaps at least until we have some more capacity worth managing with all this technology. hiro