I started listening to the 538 Politics podcast a lifetime ago when they did The Gerrymandering Project. The deep intertwining of history, intentions, and statistics made the narrative compelling. I learned so much about how our democracy worked that I would never have known otherwise.
So, I kept listening and kept learning. It was sometimes difficult, not because of their storytelling skills, but because the news was hard to consume. But the cold numbers helped me manage my emotions with clarity and not disengage.
There's something wonderful about journalism backed by data. The line between news and editorial has long been blurred beyond visibility. 538 was a rare example of a place where smart people could express strong opinions but always had to show the work behind their conclusions.
Yeah, they've been on my podcast subscription list for at least 5 years now, and I'll miss having them around.
I had growing conflicted feelings about the site's overall impact on media, sadly. It felt like, although it was good that they existed as a dedicated organization, they contributed to (or were a symptom of) the overall media landscape's slide into politics coverage as mostly coverage of the horse-race. Sometimes I want to hear what the Scottish teens think a news story means... but more often I want something deeply reported about policy.
I will miss them too. I saw that Galen is already considering starting his own politics pod, but I fear that by immediately jumping into the Substack black hole it will just end up spiraling into the usual engagement-driven slide to the right: https://www.gdpolitics.com/p/my-thoughts-on-the-end-of-fivet...
Imo part of what made 538 work post-blogosphere heyday was exactly that it had backing from legacy media and the funding to continue sharing information with the public without a paywall. As soon as sites go behind a paywall they become a personification of the "media elite" stereotype, where only rich people have the privilege of being informed. But how otherwise to fund not just a cheerful host but a team of data scientists, editors etc in this day and age? Seems like the only interested billionaires do it with strings attached.
You can't expect world percentages to match US percentages. The US is only 5% of the world's population and has a very different relationship to search. Also, only 63% of the world is online, so what does "90% of global" even mean?
Back-of-the-envelope:
- 2tn searches per year.
- US is 20% of all searches.
- Us revenue is 76bn
$76bn / (2tn * 0.2) = $0.19 / search
So, getting 300 searches for less than $0.02 per search sounds like a pretty good deal.
I was rocking my Pebble 2 until the iOS app finally rotted out of the app store a few years ago and switched to Casios.
I agree with the above. The limitations are what made Pebble so special. I recommend everyone take a crack at writing an app for Pebble someday; it's a ton of fun to write with such a limited C API.
I can't wait for the comeback. Now that it's open source, I hope we see open competition on the hardware front as well (the way we have retro handhelds and e-readers).
Time to dust off the code for that Time-Round Pong app I started in 2015...
My old team used Riak in production for time series data in a real-time system.
Our code was in Clojure, and we just wrapped the Java client. The conflict resolution was a steep learning curve, but overall, it was kind of nice (coming from Mongo).
But man, Clojure stack traces wrapping Java stack traces wrapping Erlang stack traces in a Kafka consumer... I wish that hell on no one.
It is a _much_ better logo, which is perhaps surprising given that it's a skunkworks rather than a major social media network. Possibly Musk just fired all Twitter's designers before getting around to the rebrand.
These frameworks are cute, and I understand the desire to avoid the modern SPA JavaScript build systems, but it always seems like so much more work than just writing HTML.
I swear, HTML/CSS + Flask + HTMX gets you so far these days. Then, you can throw in some AlpineJS for any inter-element interaction you need and build a responsive SPA without almost any JavaScript.
Alpine is great for your blog, but it's not even a little bit tempting for real world professional projects. Looking back at every project I've worked on there's no shot I would ever select Alpine for any of them.
These type of condescending comments really scream "I'm not even a web developer but here's my strong opinion as someone who only makes toy front ends to demo my data work"
Back in the day we did plenty of "real world professional projects" with jQuery.
I don't see why you couldn't with Alpine.
Yeah at some point you may need a more sophisticated solution but plenty of projects don't need React. This very forum you're using is just a very simple vanilla js file.
>Back in the day we did plenty of "real world professional projects" with jQuery.
And they were terribly unperformant, bug ridden, messes of spaghetti that I wouldn't wish on anyone in the year 2024. Things evolved past that for a reason.
Also 0 chance. Well maybe under some specific unrealistic constraints.
But I am a fan of alternative approaches to the typical stuff just for the fun and learning aspect of it. I'd never come on here and be like "oh well that's cute, but it's useless, why can't we just x".
For example I think Imba is pretty cool and I've used it for a couple throwaway personal projects just to give a spin, but I'd not use it at work.
And you don't even need build systems for modern SPAs. You can write web components in plain JS, load JS and CSS with standard module imports. Use bare import specifiers with import maps. Things have gotten much simpler.
Rio Dev here. I can see where you're coming from. Seeing an experience web-dev work can be mindblowingly fast. But there's two sides to each story - there's tons of developers that are experts in their own fields but that aren't familiar with web technologies. That's where frameworks like Rio, streamlit, reflex, etc. come in.
We've been getting a lot of reactions from people being surprised how quickly they can create Rio apps after just a few hours, when previously creating UIs was always a major roadblock for them. Seeing these reactions has been extremely rewarding.
I don't think these are the same, but as a non-web-developer who likes building web side-projects, I love pico.css. It's fantastic for forms and the light grid/container stuff.
My stack these days is Flask + HTMX + Alpin.js + Pico.css and I write almost nothing but Python and HTML.
I believe this is an artifact of JIS_X0201, which is, to my knowledge, the first major Japanese 8-bit encoding and mostly 7-bit ASCII + Katakana (that character set you see in old Japanese video games) and some Japan-specific symbols filling the other half of the 8-bit space.
In it, byte 0x23 was changed from "\" to "¥".
The history is fascinating:
> The 1964 ISO draft reserved the positions 0x24 and 0x5c for first and second currency symbols to be assigned by each country, but it was considered too dangerous in international communications to use currency symbols that could be localized. The ISO committee had two options that to use a generic currency symbol (¤) or to give the dollar ($) and pound (£) signs permanent assignments. It was agreed that the dollar sign was assigned to position 0x24 and the pound sign was to position 0x23. The latter was not required in countries that did not need the pound sign. The JIS committee decided to put the yen sign (¥) in 0x5c (one of the national use positions).
It's legacy lived on in Shift JIS which Window's extended and resulted in Japanese Windows computers having file paths like "C:¥Users¥MyName" and escape sequences like "¥n"
All this to say, my respect for Japanese devs who work with encoding is top-tier.
So, I kept listening and kept learning. It was sometimes difficult, not because of their storytelling skills, but because the news was hard to consume. But the cold numbers helped me manage my emotions with clarity and not disengage.
There's something wonderful about journalism backed by data. The line between news and editorial has long been blurred beyond visibility. 538 was a rare example of a place where smart people could express strong opinions but always had to show the work behind their conclusions.
I'll miss 538. They were an amazing team.