I love this genre, and there is such a plethora of interesting reads. I think one of the most interesting, in terms of presenting technology's role in varied societies, is A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Great read if you are bored of the classic space opera.
And the prequel A Deepness in the Sky is even better with very alien aliens (and a neat way of hiding that alien-ness from readers) and some very nasty antagonists with truly terrifying technology in the form of "focus".
Mind you, Vinge's Rainbows End is also really good and set in the near future with what may be an emerging AGI as a key character.
Amazing, history does repeat itself. One of the companies in my batch (S07) was iJigg (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ijigg), which had the 2007's version of this interface: single upvote, player, and all. It did well and then petered out as many hyper-niche apps did at that time.
There is also https://hypem.com/, which focuses on music posted by blogs but is otherwise fairly similar. It helped me discover a lot of cool music back in the day :) Nowadays Spotify's music discovery algorithm is often "good enough", though.
If we think about the technology available around 2007, a crowd-sourced music recommendation system is basically what I would expect. No offense, that’s just what we had at the time. The Netflix prize wouldn’t come out until 2008. Pandora’s Music Genome project was perhaps ahead of its time but mostly manual (20-30 minutes per song!).
Today, we would usually use automatic song similarity technologies to recommend songs. The reason is pretty clear: popularity-based systems don’t know anything about the songs they recommend. They don’t know anything about you. They only know metadata about the song, that a certain number of people liked a song, essentially throwing away half of the information in a user-song tuple.
(It re-opens in April, if anyone happens to be in New York and hasn't visited Storm King, I really cannot recommend it enough, it's a lot of fun, Dia too, Earth Room and Beacon are magic but honestly they're all amazing, so fun! https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites)
I was thinking more towards the strandbeest series (https://www.strandbeest.com/), although those have entirely too many legs to be spiders and are also not made out of aluminium.
You're not unreasonable for expecting something at least vaguely spider-like. This just looks like a big crane for assembling big wind turbines.
Is the "spider" part supposed to be the web-like aluminum frame of the crane? That seems like a stretch, but it's the most charitable interpretation I've got.
Love this article. I wrote basically the exact same technique almost 10 years ago. At the time I called it `lazy-easy` and still use it today. Sometimes you just want some nice smooth animation without all the state management: https://www.hailpixel.com/articles/lazy-animation-with-lazy-...
The main reason you prepare crêpe batter long before you want to use it is two fold:
1. Allows a bit of gluten development (like cold ferment in bread)
2. And (i believe) most importantly: it allows all the air that was incorporated during whisking to escape, resulting in an even batter
Always wondering if you could just stick it in a vacuum pump...
Honestly, whatever suite of tools allows you to organize your research, thoughts, and easily write text. Remove as much friction as possible. When we wrote The Workshop Survival Guide (https://www.workshopsurvival.com/), we used post-it notes on a wall and google docs. It allowed for a fluid collaboration.
On a more meta note, how you approach writing your book is probably more impactful than your toolchain. If you're working on a book that educates (rather than, say, entertains), I'd like to share the writing framework that my longtime collaborator, robfitz, describes in Write Useful Books (https://www.usefulbooks.com/). Basically, treat your book like a product, find your audience, and test your subject matter with them as your craft your prose.
* Disclaimer: Rob and I run Useful Books, a community and toolset for non-fiction authors.
But I agree with you, a great use case for a Next.js-esque static site.