This post triggered a wave of bittersweet remembrance: when Watsi was announced I signed up and was genuinely excited for what I thought a well-positioned incubator like YC could accomplish in general redistribution. I was very wrong! But to see this not being a shutdown or acquisition announcement is heartwarming. Keep linearly existing!
This post finally got me to dig back up the ultimate word trivia website, valiantly hosted on Tripod and still maintained: https://jeff560.tripod.com/words1.html
I remember doing this as a CSS copy-protection joke back in 2013. [1] Seems like a similarly petty thing for a company like FB to try and like many have said an extremely low-level arms race.
Reading your parent comment and the replies has me kind of dumbfounded at the wasted potential. Did they ever address these ideas directly? Would opening up the format in even the most limited ways (like focus) have exposed the IP?
Anyone remotely interested in this idea should check out Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice [1], which is an entire (short) novel about how and why an extraterrestrial message would be encrypted. It's worth mentioning how why turns out to be the most compelling question.
A brilliant book which made me think that this is how science is really done. One of the questions is whether there is a message at all. How this message is first suspected (due to non-pseudorandom behaviour of a fraudulent table of random numbers) itself is a fresh idea. I found the various hypotheses in this book itself to be a very nice. IIRC, there is also an "opera singer" hypothesis that it is not the content of the message which matters, but its frequency.
I think this might be something that Netflix is overlooking. The community-like aspect of watching something simultaneously with the rest of the word is extremely powerful. The Twitch generation could prove that live broadcasts or some kind of time-locked release schedule is much more likely to build momentum.
Granted, Netflix's data is probably much more convincing than any vague feeling of community, but I wonder if the "indulgent viewing" they mention is the side-effect of our brains failing to cope with sudden overflow of stuff to consume.
Not really versioning, but Ormr [1] is built around completely non-destructive editing with history baked into each project. Still in beta but worth a look.
I'm sorry, but I have to challenge such a broad statement. The classification of literature is an awful game but Dune is hardly a default candidate for serious study, and I feel a view of literature with it near the top is unfortunately stunted. Just speaking as someone who has taken many of the courses you mention, although not an expert.
