There are at least two plausible solutions to the Dice Room, depending on whether you adopt SSA or SIA. I wish I knew something more insightful to say about it than that, but I still don’t know the right way to think about indexical probabilities. Do you?
But that code is just a html page you are annotating. What happens on a new commit. The annotations should persist somehow across code changes. That would require specialised solution for code annotation I suppose.
This annotation will always be on the version of active_model.rb at master, even if it changes.
And we try pretty hard to anchor annotations even when the underlying text changes. Here's a talk I did explaining our approach to "fuzzy annotation anchoring" if you're super interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJyqfRcyYIQ
But it's definitely not perfect! Hit me up with suggestions: tom@genius.com
It would have to be a state-of-the-art code diff tool. I've never used a diff tool that can accurately track a line of code through big refactoring changes. They are really only good for small incremental localized changes.
I think that says more about the weakness of mainstream diff tools than it says about the problem. I don't really know how difficult it is, but I'm guessing just a slight amount of semantic understanding would get you way beyond the quality of current diff tools. Kind of sad that nobody is doing it. I use Perforce every day on a really large, old code base, and it's depressing how awful the differ and "blame" tool are. Especially because those tools's usefulness seems to increase in proportion to the size and age of the code base. I guess programmers are masochists; we really haven't put that much effort into our own tools...
My bit of feedback would be that having the annotation dialog cover any part of the code at all is going to create a lot of frustration. Omniref's side-by-side approach is much easier to read.
Hot damn that's badass. Just signed up for the beta. It's a shame that I work for a big corp with code behind the company firewall so prefixing a code repo link like httpS://github.bigcorp.com/code-repo/funstuff.py with "genius.com/" resolves to a 404.
Regardless, this looks really exciting. I'm going to annotate a bunch of stuff just for funsies.
Also soon we're going to take our annotation technology to OTHER SITES! This will allow anyone to create annotations anywhere (and save us the trouble from copying EVERYTHING to Genius.com)
I feel you on "only A players" being a bromide – but I do think there are some counter-intuitive elements to "why do that" and "how to do that" and "what makes an A player anyway" that I tried to spell out.
Likewise with "It's not not your job"; there's definitely a conflict between "take ownership over the overall success of the business" and "focus instead of trying to do everything all the time", and I tried to nod toward this, but I do think both sides are true! You do want to focus AND you don't want to be saying "Well, the company failed by at least I did my job".
Anyway, these are definitely far from perfect but I'm throwing them out there anyway because I think they're better than nothing.
I'd love to see your criticisms in the form of annotations on the piece itself tho! Everyone should get to read them!
The fact that all our text and song page URLs end in "-lyrics" is a relic of a time when we hosted almost exclusively lyrics.
Making the changes required to host all kinds of annotated texts has been a big project and making the URLs make sense is something we haven't gotten around to.
The reason it's not a totally trivial change is that both users and texts share the same top-level namespaces, and so right now we use the "-lyrics" suffix to differentiate song and text pages from user profile pages.
We want to change the suffix to "-annotated" for non-music pages and will hopefully get around to in the next few weeks. To our knowledge the existing situation doesn't help with SEO (no one is searching "bartleby the scrivener lyrics"), and it's confusing, so we 100% agree that the current situation is bad.
I take it you don't believe in the SIA? Is this paradox irreducible? Is the world going to end soon?