LtU is migrating from Drupal

As many of you know we have been suffering for a long time from the deficiencies of Drupal. We have not updated our infrastructure for a long time. Among the features members have been asking for are better integration with other sites and more social features. In particular, many said they want to be able to mark the posts that they find particularly helpful. I am happy to announce that we have big news!

In the coming days we will be migrating LtU from Drupal to Facebook. All the awesome features of Facebook will be automatically available; in particular the "Like" mechanism. You will also be able to share photos with other PLT enthusiasts, re-share their shares etc. Best of all, you will be guaranteed the privacy standards of Facebook.

Rest assured, we have not made this decision without considering the alternatives. We studied Google+ but given Google's unprovoked assault on RSS with the decision to discontinue Google Reader we found it unconscionable to go with Google.

LtU's twitter feed will have to go, I am afraid, given the relationship between our new home and twitter. Hopefully this issue will be resolved once twitter gives up and is acquired by FB.

The LtU feed will have ads, per usual on FB. I know this is somewhat of an inconvenience, but at least the ads you will be served will be personalized[1].

Ehud and the LtU Team.

[1] I am assured that ads for dynamically typed and scripting languages will never be served to you again after you mark them as "offensive" once.


Update: No, we are not migrating to Facebook. This was an April Fools joke.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Haha!

Good one!

thanks for all the fish

[Original version restored, until Tuesday.] I appreciate efforts you and others put into LtU over the years. Thank you for the nice environment, as well as the hard work of administration. I hope things go well in a new incarnation after migration. This is goodbye, unless I decide one day to get a Facebook account, which seems unlikely as of now. Good luck to you and the team. I'm rysmcc at gmail if you want to keep in touch.

You should have left it. It

You should have left it. It was great. I actually shed a tear.

the importance of being earnest

A caricature of George Bernard Shaw appeared to me in a dream. The caption read, "Write more dialogs." I can write more tomorrow.

To those who are confused

What date is it today (or, in some time zones, tomorrow)? What holiday falls on that day?

Seriously though (since it's

Seriously though (since it's still 31st around here), how come PLT enthusiasts weblog runs on PHP? Shouldn't it be something at least as exotic as HApps or arc? :)

No!!!!! Facebook is blocked

No!!!!!

Facebook is blocked in China. I would only be able to browse LtU at work or with a flaky VPN.

Well, it's been clear that

Well, it's been clear that this was the direction the site was heading.

Fool in April

Fooled for April first is better than being a fool on Facebook.

LoL

So in the future LtU will take fool advantage of FB.

Finally

I'm so relieved!

LLOL. Thank you!

LLOL. Thank you!

Quite good.

Got me.

foq yes

Congrats for continuing to be on the vanguard of PLT field (Programming Languages, The field).

Perhaps you can integrate the new site with my new lazy strongly-typed programming language, Foq; it doesn't bother running code until it has enough "likes". Social proof, you see. It is an offshoot of Fada, which provides security properties by only running (socially) approved code.

As you can see this is a growing field. Research into "contracts" and other partnership arrangements will be needed when integrating with legacy content. I am thinking this goes beyond LtU categories and will need a new developer program, for a nominal fee of course. Let me know if you are interested and I will have my lawyers draw up some papers.

Are terms of service already

Our terms of service already permit us to sell your data. You agreed to them by clicking on the url.

A capabilities-based system,

A capabilities-based system, I see.

It tells you something about

It tells you something about the state of the world that people could read the following line with a straight face: "All the awesome features of Facebook will be automatically available; in particular the "Like" mechanism. You will also be able to share photos with other PLT enthusiasts, re-share their shares etc. Best of all, you will be guaranteed the privacy standards of Facebook."

*I* chuckle when I read it. Awesome features; re-sharing; privacy standards?!

state of the union

And yet I believed you until I saw Simoni's reply, making me slap my forehead. Of course you were kidding, because it would have been a big mistake, right? But that only requires someone you respect talk you into it, and for you to hold an optimistic view in advance of real world evidence about consequences (which can take so long to arrive that aborting a choice is difficult).

People make mistakes all the time. It's an almost continuous process of error and recovery. A lot of my humor leans heavily toward absurdism, cataloging errors presented as if reasonable — the more outlandish the better. The perseverance some folks bring to defense of absurd premises can be pretty funny. That's why it's so much fun to say something silly, then defend it seriously for a while, when it simulates a common grim position: "Wait, I can still make this work!"

To make absolutely sure folks know you're joking, it helps to finally include something so impossible for you to believe that others see you mean none of earlier parts. (Otherwise they may try to make it work.) Tipping off an April fools joke spoils a bit of the punch, so it's tricky to embed subtle clues.

I was going to write a longish dialog for laughs, but I see no one else has jokes, so that would make me stick out. Here's a very short one instead, about a related concept:

     Crash ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Wil quietly admired his new arrow-through-the-head gag, which Crash had carefully aligned with centers of the round test-dummy tattoos on both sides of his skull.
     "Do you ever construe your role as making other folks look normal?" Wil mused.
     "No," Crash looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

Nice. As for the April

Nice. As for the April Fools: I thought that the mention of FB privacy standards was a dead giveaway...

PL memes! The one feature

PL memes! The one feature missing from LtU is the ability to post a picture with some sort of crazy PL-oriented caption on it.