Even if I conceded every point you made about shortening terms, none of those benefits outweigh the benefits of legalizing noncommercial infringement, which is why I find mainstream copyright reformers so insufferable. The Lessigs of the world get really excited about shortening terms and have nothing to say about the far more important issue of legalizing noncommercial infringement.

That's why we should legalize noncommercial infringement first. We can debate terms afterward.

The way people celebrated public domain day was quite telling. People were like, "Yay now I can consume this content for free," not "Yay now I can create commercial derivatives."

That implies what we need is not shorter copyright terms, but to legalize noncommercial infringement.

People often say "why not both?" I'll tell you: we already have an originality crisis in popular culture. Are you tired of the constant reboot culture in Hollywood? I sure am. It would only get worse if more stuff entered the public domain.

Legalize noncommercial infringement. That's what we should be focused on. Not shorter terms.

This was not only the best book I've read all year, but the best book I've read this decade:

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas.

"An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to 'change the world' preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve."

It's time to abandon proprietary IM services and start using Matrix. The most popular client/server is Riot but you can run your own server and use different clients if you like.

Unlike all the different services competing in this space, Matrix is objectively the best. One of the biggest reasons is that it is federated. Like Google Talk was when it was a proper XMPP server back in the day.

Don't fall for another big on hype low on substance service like Signal, which is just as centralized as Hangouts and could one day be ruined just as Google Talk/Hangouts was.

Use something that is fully open source, fully federated, and built to last. Use Matrix.

Are there any implementations for Linux?

Got you covered!

I'll provide a non-condescending response to counter the AC. We agile critics are not all like him.

Cherrypicking applies in contexts where the momentum is against the data being cited. Nobody can deny the momentum is JS' side being the most popular programming language. Citing data that implies that it is not yet the case is an example of cherrypicking. Citing data that implies that it is, not so much.

Dunno man, this feels kinda like the climate change "debate" to me. Sure you can cherrypick data sets that show JS isn't quite there yet, but there seems to be a growing consensus that JS has already hit that tipping point. And if miraculously everyone is wrong about that, it won't be long before even the most stubborn surveys have to admit JS hit that tipping point. The momentum is rather obvious.

That seems unlikely. I'm not aware of any efforts to get something other than JS writing directly to the DOM via wasm. That would be a loooooot of DOM APIs that would have to be replicated in Java or whatever.

Besides, by the time something other than JS has full DOM access, ES7, ES8, ESwhatever will be out and JS will have slowly evolved into a usable language, eroding the appeal of switching to something less popular because the aesthetic differences won't be so vast anymore.

The official WebAssembly FAQ throws shade at that attitude.

Is WebAssembly trying to replace JavaScript?

No!

It goes on to say that WebAssembly is meant to encourage hybrid stacks.

It's much more likely the end result will be an ecosystem similar to Node.js, where some stuff is in JS, and other stuff is in native node modules.

Me: "Nobody denies JavaScript is aesthetically distasteful. But you don't pick the best tool for the job based on aesthetics."

You: "But JavaScript is aesthetically distasteful!"

k.

Did you miss the numerous articles like this published over the past few years? https://arc.applause.com/2016/...

Seems pretty clear JS hit the popularity tipping point already. It's the world's most popular programming language. (For better or worse.)

It's a lot of unnecessary process and meetings. Daily standups, biweekly planning meetings, retrospectives, endless backlog grooming sessions etc. I've been at companies that burn 10-20% of the team's time each "sprint" in unnecessary meetings to discuss work rather than actually doing work.

The meetings impose heavy burdens on anyone who doesn't want to be interrupted at that time. A typical 10am standup meeting is too early for night owls and too late for parents who drop their kids off to school at 7am, as there's a useless 3 hours between school and standup where you can't get anything done because there's a meeting soon. Scrum amps up context switching which prevents people from getting into the zone. Having lots of meetings and interruptions shreds your day to bits.

Then there are the Scrum-specific tools. Rather than using modern project management tools that get out of your way like GitHub or GitLab, you've got regressive, redundant nonsense like Rally or Pivotal Tracker being thrown around. All so you can play planning poker in the cloud. Shoot me now.

Defenders of Scrum tend to use no true Scotsman arguments. "Oh that wasn't Scrum." Or "that was Scrum being done badly." And so forth. Meanwhile the number of companies and teams doing it "correctly" seems to be few and far between. Perhaps because "correctly" is such a fuzzy thing to define. Means different things to different people. Seems to me where it "works," teams are successful in spite of Scrum, not because of it.

Basically it's popularly understood that Scrum basically exists to micromanage the shit out of dev teams. The managers who like it are the shoulder tap types whose management style is straight out of 1950. Marshall McLuhan is rolling in his grave.

Hardly a lingua franca

It's the world's most popular programming language, so yeah, it's a lingua franca.

If a decent alternative to JS were suddenly to be supported by all the major browsers, the rush to get away from it would be immense.

No doubt. But I'm not gonna wait around for that. Gonna use the lingua franca in the mean time.