The good things in the current age in tech
blog.kronis.dev
blog.kronis.dev
* SpaceX. I have lots of reservations about the company but the fact that they are consistently doing things previously thought impossible is very important for humanity in general.
* The new Dune movie was downright amazing. The CGI was believable and an important part of the story.
* AI-generated art. Fascinating.
* Wikipedia. Wow.
* I can invest in lots of different assets relatively easily.
* Playwright and Puppeteer. I have automated a lot of workflows thanks to those projects. Pressing a button and watching those workflows run is an empowering experience.
* Raspberry Pi and Arduino. A month back I built little hack projects for the pure joy of exploring. Very rejuvenating experience.
* Electric cars. I'm particularly excited about the F-150 Lightning. They really leaned into the whole electric thing and tried to find some compelling use cases e.g. the generator and the massive front storage (Disclosure: I have some Ford stock, less than 1% of my overall portfolio). The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful.
* Wind + solar + nuclear energy. And a nod to geothermal and hydroelectric. Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.
For cities with a dense urban core (of which mine, Philly, certainly is) I'm really hoping we lean in on bikes (electric or not) moreso than electric cars. Even less carbon-intensive to produce, and in a city with this level of density it's shocking how quickly you can get around by bike. I would go so far as to say it's often faster than driving if you consider the time you spend looking for parking.
It's just that with our current car-centric infrastructure, it's way too dangerous.
Plus with some e-bikes, you can detach the battery and carry it with you indoors to charge it back up. Try that with an electric car!
Bicycle is non existent though, what is really different from my low density european experience is the amount and low cost of traditional taxis (Uber gave up and now is a normal taxi provider here because they cant beat their price - https://www.uber.com/en-HK/blog/introducing-uber-taxi/ ) and the insane quality of the metro and bus networks (we didnt have double deckers every 5 minutes in my city in Normandy, we were lucky if the schedule was remotely accurate)
I ve seen some other places more dense that american cities explode in little motor bikes (Taipei, Kuala Lumpur), but that depends a lot on regulation.
Interestingly quite a few taxi drivers drive a taxi not so much for the money (it always helps) but rather to ward off boredom post-retirement (flipping properties in HK used to be almost as profitable as flipping crypto). This might be "competition" of sorts but not sure. I think drivers generally make slightly higher than median income if they work long hours, but don't know how it compares with other places.
The service level is generally shit though, some drivers literally refuse to make money if they deem your request a bit out of the ordinary (eg. refusing to take you for a short ride even if the fare per distance is higher than that of a long distance ride).
If bike infrastructure is done well, it should be accessible enough that those disabled people who can ride a bike are able to use it: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jan/02/cambridge-dis...
Now, you're right that people with some disabilities will not be able to cycle, or will not require a mobility scooter. (Although if you want one and can't afford it, that's also a problem, and I believe a common one here? Our healthcare system...) It's still important to have various accessible modes of transportation. Trains can be a good option here, though it's important that they have level boarding for wheelchair users and that all stations are likewise accessible. (Philly's unfortunately are not. The City Hall station reconstruction is long overdue.)
And some people may always still need a car due to their disability! In the Netherlands, they have something called the Canta, which is a microcar specifically for people with disabilities that's small enough to operate on bike paths and can be parked on the sidewalk: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle)
And yes, some may need a full-sized vehicle as well; it's worth replacing some parking spaces with disabled parking spaces to accommodate that case.
My point, though, is that our car-centric city designs in the US don't accommodate everyone either! We often consider it to be the default out of inertia, but it's important to remember that not everyone can drive a car, and in a car-dependent area that's a recipe for social isolation. Our cities should be designed such that everyone is able to get around quickly and safely.
However, bicyclists need to get their shit together in terms of pedestrian respect and traffic rules. I can cross a street pretty easily but crossing a busy bike path is a real challenge. I‘m sure we will figure it out in due time.
It also seems that the entire sidewalk is fair game for bicycle parking, which is a disaster for people navigating with a cane, but that can be solved with dedicated bicycle parking.
I would think that at a traffic light, bicycles should act the same as cars, but this just doesn‘t happen at all. I‘m lucky if bicyclists don‘t blast straight through a zebra crossing. It feels especially cruel for traffic lights that are placed between the bike path and street yet require a button press.
So it‘s two things: inconsiderate cyclists and and no common pedestrian crossing system on bike paths (or clarity on rules at existing street crossings).
Not just electric cars but electric vehicles! Cities could be designed around electric bikes and scooters!
As I said many times, space has become a religion for people who identify themselves as atheists. And Musk is the techno-utopian Pope, with stock ownership in one of his scam companies becoming a form of techno-utopian indulgence
Many of you are unfortunately too smart to keep believing in absence of evidence, unlike religious individuals who can hold a belief for their whole life.
When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there, then disillusion and disappointment will be a tough pill to swallow.
Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.
You need a sci-fi type discovery such as the anti-gravity equation that Cooper finds inside the Black hole Gargantua and sends back to Murph.
As an aside, yes, Interstellar is my favorite movie, but I am a practical person and also capable of separating science from sci-fi.
Almost 10% of the global population still goes hungry, even though more than enough food is produced to feed the global population. That's 811 million people that starve while Bezos facilitates ego trips to space.
Nothing but resources, science, space to expand, copious energy and the chance to make humanity some what immune to the next asteroid.
200K years ago there was a guy sat in a cave saying "I don't know why you need to go over that horizon, we have everything we need here".
I am an atheist, I'm not dogmatic about it.
I just think that a species can have more than one goal at a time and that some goals transcend petty day to day things.
The ancillary benefits are nice as well, research and development often pays off in completely unexpected directions.
It's about what I hope the future will be and that's a humanity as partially a spaceborne civilisation.
I was born too late for Apollo (1980) and too early for whatever we are hopefully about to do but I hope to live long enough to see it the first parts.
> Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.
You have to boost enough into space for things out of the gravity well to become mostly self-sustaining outside of the gravity well.
To do that you have to get launch costs down by orders of magnitude on what they have historically been.
We don't want to be putting 10 or 20 tonnes in space, we want to be putting 100 up on every launch with multiple launches a day, the solar system is full of raw materials and energy but to make it viable the processing has to be done without sending it down and up the well every time.
The US didn't become the economic powerhouse that is because the UK shipped everything over to the colonies, that wouldn't have worked instead we (and the other countries colonising North America/Canada) shipped over enough resources to bootstrap an economy by supplying the tools/equipment to mostly survive on local resources, then initially shipped back raw materials which allowed the colonies to expand and eventually become independent/self sufficient in their own right.
I could see a somewhat analgous thing happening in reality and it's been a trope of science fiction for quite a while (The Expanse series has an interesting take on it, the UN/Earth, Mars and the Belters).
It's about time to be very clear about this. This sentiment based on hope for the future and the entertainment of seeing the rocket land on its butt is not unlike the one experienced by the fan of every crappy sport franchise putting too much hopes on their chances to win the Championship .
Said hope is based on nothing factual , but it's all based on the entertainment they feel when a player full of swagger but no technical abilities comes in to energize the team.
There is nothing noble or superior in putting up hope in stuff which has low odds of succeeding , there might be if you do so at the individual level or betting on yourself.
The moment you start evengelizing or trying to convince others to blindly believe in something impossible then it's not noble anymore. It's kinda sad actually. Profiting off it? That's pure grift.
This is true for everything, space exploration doesn't get a free pass because "it has the potential to revolutionize our specie".
Well so has mRNA and brain research and defeating cancer and winning the war against alzheimer and parkinsons. Same goes for cardiovascular diseases.
The actual killers of humans, you know? The things that will get you and me, not the abstract pipedream stuff which the used car salesmen is trying to perpetuate.
> we want to be putting 100 up on every launch
OMG 100 tons!! The human specie relies on 350mi of atmosphere above us to protect us and at least 10 miles of Earth crust below us to sustain us, that's on top of all the mass that's on the surface. We need all of that to thrive.
What's that figure divided by 100 ? How many launches you need?
Discounting the fact that you can't exactly bottle the atmosphere and pack up the crust...and on top of that you need to simulate gravity.
Again watch Interstellar. In order to provide the happy ending Chris Nolan and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne had to cheat their way by having the hero find the anti-gravity formula inside the black hole.
Because lifting 10 billion people plus the crust and the atmosphere was never gonna be possible with present day or even future rockets.
In fact the real plan behind all the window dressing was to simply abandon everybody and send a bunch of sperm and eggs up there in some sort of hail mary attempt.
The only element in which reality suprasses fiction is that in the movie that plan is shamed and the person who conceived it is branded as an evil liar, whereas I am sure that if Musk were to propose the same thing many if not all of the space lunatics would stand to their feet and clap, telling him what a brilliant idea he had, all while they are left on Earth to die.
Many already did when he said that the first people on Mars would live a short life and die of a terrible death...again it's religion for the atheists.
Since you're psychologizing the optimists so hard... can you or someone else explain to me the appeal of doom?
Let's go smaller scale then? How many players need CCTV like surveillance down to 50m resolution from above?
How often do the satellites producing such images need to be replaced?
Who's gonna pay for the whole ordeal? It's the government as always.
Even smaller scale: How many people are isolated and need Internet via Satellite? Considering that the world is constantly moving towards urbanization is it really necessary?
Laying fiber cable from A to B will always be cheaper
The private jet crowd and private yacht crowd will maybe be interested in it.
What's the economic breakdown of the ISS? 100B thrown down the sink , just like everything space related which is not military related or weather monitoring.
> Since you're psychologizing the optimists so hard... can you or someone else explain to me the appeal of doom?
We have just witnessed a miracle with the mRNA vaccine, there are so many things to be optimistic about here on Earth. Pragmatic optimism beats pipedream type optimism every day of the week. Also only the latter can be abused for graft purposes, for sure not the former.
Laying fiber cable will not always be cheaper. Satellites can be built and operated by fewer people - and more economically - than the hundreds of thousands of crews you'd need to connect every remote place.
I've often thought that the pragmatic thing to do would be to send people to Mars that already have short life expectancies. Like old people, and people with incurable diseases. They may want to do something great with their remaining time.
> and die of a terrible death
I doubt it would be worse than the terribleness of most ordinary deaths on Earth.
Great Idea! I think Musk himself should go around in hospices and hospitals to find terminally ill people to send to die 35 million miles away.
Seriously, you guys have lost your goddamn mind. And I don't mean it in a fun and exciting way, but in a Jim Jones, L.Ron Hubbard and Hitler sort of fashion.
Pragmatic, right.....
I swear, this place is becoming darker and darker by the day, I was just pissed off because I killed a mouse when with more patience I could have just shooed him away, talking about sending people to die on Mars....fucking incredible mate.
It's about people wanting and choosing to do something great with what's left of their remaining time. It's not about shortening their lives.
I wish to see this kind of positivity around me more often. I have worked with a colleague or two in the past who viewed problems as something that needed to be solved, and were a step or two ahead of the rest of us in terms of finding solutions. Lately, I see that the default reaction to problems is to complain. Don't get me wrong... complaining is fine if it leads to action, but isn't it rare.
> Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.
It's all about what this mess and pain is going to be about. If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances, that doesn't qualify as a success to me. The fact that a handful of privileged people will manage to get through and still have cars and smartphones isn't really a relief.
Right here, here is a sign that you are reading quite extreme literature. More importantly: Unbalanced, uncriticized literature.
Scientific studies don’t only need to seem backed up by facts, they also need to be criticized to ensure the facts were not cherry-picked.
Studying science in the current political climate is like saving paintings during a revolution.
I've read Dire Predictions written by members of the IPCC, the famous Limits to Growth and I follow the works of Jancovici, a French engineer specialized in these issues (here is a talk in English he did for MIT Media Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA ) Do those qualify as biased sources to you?
Potentially yes. Everyone can be biased. Do they share a common interest or trait? They do.
I have been a fan of Jancovici in 2006. I see through his game now. He’s the master of correlations and he’s sorely lacking causations. Because causations at global scale are hard to demonstrate, short of actually doing global-scale experiments, which we can’t do.
Another aspect is that we citizen can’t measure it, so it’s hard to discuss on something that we can’t see (It’s the Covid effect). Another is that we’re planning on literally playing chemists with the Earth’s atmosphere composition, despite just having concluded that large-scale chemical experiments are to be avoided. One last point is Janco divides emissions by the number of people on Earth, which is a heavily-loaded formula with extremely bad side effects (but has been approved by UN), such as giving advantage to countries who overpopulate, which Janco himself demonstrates is bad, but he doesn’t see that because he’s under his own ideology. The EU follows and in June it plans to vote an increase of population of 12% by 2030 (through external growth). It feel like all our efforts will reduce global emissions by 5% or 10% only to be cancelled by a population increase. So it just seems that they want us to consume less.
It’s a minefield that would be easily influenced by many parties for political gain. I’m not saying global warming doesn’t exist.
That was true 20 years ago but not anymore. Glaciers, ice melting on the poles, extreme weather events, air and land pollution, biodiversity collapse, primary commodity shortages... some of which we can observe ourselves and some of which is measured by scientists. And again, it's not only about climate.
> Another is that we’re planning on literally playing chemists with the Earth’s atmosphere composition, despite just having concluded that large-scale chemical experiments are to be avoided.
If you're referring to geoengineering, it sounds like a very bad idea to me as well.
> The EU follows and in June it plans to vote an increase of population of 12% by 2030 (through external growth).
I didn't really get this point about population but I'll do my research. I just hope it's not related to the "Great Replacement" theory. I find it interesting that you didn't mention nuclear power as it's one of the most frequent criticism against him (which seems like a straw man to me).
> I’m not saying global warming doesn’t exist.
OK so if I understand correctly your doubts are more about to what extent global warming is caused by human activities? Or do you agree that it's caused by human activities but you think isn't not going to be as bad as some people say?
Would you not envision a hypothesis because you’re afraid of reaching the same conclusion? It’s pretty clear given the quantity of muggings/harassment in my neighborhood (formerly posh CBD) that it’s here, and 67% of French people in average think it’s happening (IPSOS 2021). The only question that raises people’s doubt is, was it intentional.
> Or do you agree it’s caused by human activities but you think it’s not going to be as bad as some people say?
I just despair that the people pushing it are constantly pushing other goals for society, goals that we didn’t approve, that have been kicked out by the main door and coming back through the window.
- Either it exists, and the complementary solution is to depopulate. Clearly the land cannot withstand so many people, and if you also have a humanist goal to offer each person a decent living, then each of them will need to emit for travels, consumption, heating. But that would be incompatible with their other goal which they also want to implement. To see whether people are ideologues using Global Climate Change (GCC) for political gains or whether they are genuinely solely fighting GCC, ask them whether they would be ok to make a concession on their ideology if it meant better fighting GCC. They don’t. They really want to overpopulate the land with people who vote for them, while asking others to do the efforts for climate. Again the only way to durably not weigh too much on this land in EU is to profit from the natural decline of population to lessen the burden on Earth.
- Either those global changes are stronger than us and independent of our atmospheric CO2, after all everything fluctuates naturally, and in 30 years, after limiting the development of the Western countries, they will tell us “We’ve solved it.” Or “You didn’t do enough”, it doesn’t matter since they won’t be here.
I have studied the science side of other similar topics and I can confirm it is possible to reach wrong scientific solutions for political gain, at a massive university/researchers scale, convincing everyone from the lowerclass to the world leaders. It wouldn’t be the first time.
So, if someone uses fear and the sense of urgency to trigger an action from you that severely hampers your life, it’s important to find its opposite and study it too.
One thing which is clear, the people currently pushing are not going to solve it.
In 1970, scientists predicted that we would be in a new ice age by the 21st century. In 1988, scientists predicted that rising sea levels would cover every island in the Indian ocean by 2018. In 2004, they predicted that Britain would be "plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020".
By all means, we should take meaningful steps towards cleaner energy, because it's better overall. But the idea that we're on the verge of an apocalyptic disaster...no, I just can't get behind that.
It's still imperative that changes be made, but soothsaying is irrational and therefore unhelpful because it can easily be identified and disregarded by deniers, but also because it's more demotivating than it is motivating. If you're convinced the world is going to end, you'll just withdraw.
Solved! ^^ Somehow it may be related (but OT) Comic: > //ibb.co/hXjtxLr [sings:] 'freedom!...freeedom!...' (-;
regards,
US GDP in 1965 was $743.7 billion[0].
NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending. The agency was building up to the first Moon landing and the Apollo program was a top national priority, consuming more than half of NASA's budget and driving NASA's workforce to more than 34,000 employees and 375,000 contractors from industry and academia.
$5 billion is 0.67% of $743.7 billion.
SpaceX is doing things that current nation states can't/won't do and do it on a comparative shoestring.
Yes NASA did amazing things (as did Roscosmos) with the technology they had but they had much more resources as well.
If SpaceX continues on it's current trajectory I wouldn't bet on a return to the moon and back inside a decade or so.
Also if you adjust for $/kg to LEO (and eventually Lunar orbit) then SpaceX is crushing NASA.
It's all about what metric you pick (or cherry pick if you are trying to make a point) really.
NASA is amazing, one of my favourite organisations ever back to been a kid in the 80's watching the Shuttle launches and some of the stuff they've done on pure science is amazing.
Let NASA do the pure science (which realistically has to be publicly funded) and SpaceX (and it's private competitors (when they get some..)) focus on that "$/kg to space" - we win both ways.
Also for Clarity, I'm not an Elon Musk fan, I think he's a bit of a prick.
I respect the outcomes/people who work for the companies not the man.
At the peak of the Apollo era NASA was 4.41% of US Gov spending.
For 2020 that would equate to about 264 billion dollars.
SpaceX isn't spending 264 billion dollars a year and look what they are doing!.
Today, that would correspond to more than 100 billion USD a year.
SpaceX has nowhere that kind of money. They are orders of magnitude smaller, and must comply with regulations that Apollo didn't have to.
Of course Usain Bolt will overtake a well trained mouse.
Less momentously but significant to me, my kids have learned an insane breadth of technologies by watching science and maker Youtube channels, presented in a very accessible way to kids. At 7yo, I didn't know what a lathe or welder was, let alone excitedly insist that my parents get one.
3D printing wasn't mentioned but hot damn, it's satisfying to fix the unfixable by printing a new part. It wasn't too long ago that "broken plastic doohickey" meant throwing the whole thing in the trash.
And another one for kids: cheap and individual computing devices. No more time sharing of a modem on the single computer in the house! In fact, touch interfaces and responsive graphics has kids learning skills before they can even read. Watching elementary kids work on and submit homework on a Chromebook is kind of interesting, compared to my education.
I actually did another blog post about self-hosted chat platforms (Rocket.Chat in particular) just yesterday: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat...
(admittedly, the level of detail and quality of it could be higher, still working on that)
Either way, if nothing else, i wanted to drop by and express my agreement with your point about technologies to chat with others, both in video form and otherwise. Personally, i think that both the self-hosted options and the ones available in the cloud (such as Discord) can have a large positive impact on us, especially during the current times.
For example, they allow me to embrace a more asynchronous way of work - at my current company, we've essentially replaced the daily stand ups with the Standup & Prosper app (https://standup.teaminator.io/) and have discussions more freely in the chat channels otherwise, while still having weekly video meetings, which works for us.
At the same time, everything from Discord to even WhatsApp lets me keep in touch with my friends and acquaintances, even though we live pretty far away - actually, i've moved to the countryside almost a year ago and somehow it still hasn't felt lonely to me thanks to these technologies (while also having lots of other things to do).
I'm not sure precisely why that is, but those platforms somehow feel more enjoyable to me than something like Facebook or Instagram, they allow for a bit smaller and more personal/private conversations, that leave me feeling more socially satisfied than just "shouting into the void".
Of course, YouTube is also immensely useful and i can't believe that i forgot to mention 3D printing, even though my printer loves to cause me trouble every now and then: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-make-your-3d-prints...
People are amazed when they see the stuff I solo built and imagine there is a huge company behind it.
It is all because of advances in DevOps, cheap server infrastructure, and good quality open source libraries.
It is actually scary to see this first hand because human productivity is increasing at a such a rapid speed, it will result in extreme levels of excess productivity in future.
So an economy without scarcity is getting closer to our reach but political landscape, general populace, and influential people try their hardest to prevent this from happening.
Sure, I'm a good developer. But as DethNinja points out, the real enabler of this are the advances in cheap server infra + libraries.
It's the tooling as much as the tool-user.
Failure to install, or crashing on startup, sometimes even requiring a reinstall of the entire OS.
This would happen in the open source community too, but that was to be expected.
I haven't experienced this in many years though, so I suspect we are doing something better.
Also package management has come a long, long way. Everything has a package manager now, that creates a new kind of problem but it's better than before.
The Docker containers are beneficial though! At least now I have an example of a system where the software works to dissect and if my use case is a one-off I can run it in the Docker container then move on with my life.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that you either could afford some encyclopedias or went to the library. The fact that you can learn just about anything today is truly amazing. Folks like Ben Krasnow share amazing DIY things regularly that it would be hard to imagine in the 80's or 90's.
More major: 1) cheap Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. Good for DIY. Long cycle life, less likely to start on fire, Cobaltfree and dirt cheap. Being used on base Model 3s and Ys. Makes going off grid feasible when combined with solar power which is also crazy cheap.
Pity we haven't solved that for normal printers yet...
Even the hardware is increasingly controlled and inaccessible (thanks to trusted computing and DRM) and most of the software and devices people use today routinely get code pushed to them remotely (often silently) with little if any ability for the supposed "owner" to control or understand what's being done.
Still, in very specific spaces there really is some great hardware and software available and information is accessible to help people willing to put in the work to take advantage of it. It's nice to take some time to appreciate how far tech has come and how much technology is still open, accessible, and working for us without also being used against us.
There are two possible avenues to improve the situation on the desktop:
1. One challenge is the sheer complexity of modern desktop software. Take a program such as GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox, and consider how many lines of code these programs are written in. Even for a senior-level software engineer it will take some on-boarding time to become familiar with the codebase of one of these projects. Modifying the program could become quite an effort. If even experienced software engineers struggle to find the time to contribute code to FOSS projects, then making such a contribution would be almost impossible for members of the general public, the vast majority of whom have no coding experience.
I'm wondering how much of this complexity could be pared down such that it would lead to a FOSS software ecosystem where it's easier for users, technical and non-technical, to make contributions. The easier it is to make contributions, the greater the likelihood we'll have a thriving ecosystem of FOSS for desktop computing. Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute's STEPS project (http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf) appears to be an interesting starting point.
2. Another challenge is thinking of new funding mechanisms for FOSS that don't rely on unpredictable donations, the backing of large corporations, or licensing changes (such as the moves that MongoDB made a few years ago in an attempt to stop cloud service providers like Amazon). For example, there should be other business models Mozilla could use in case Google shuts off its funding, but the challenge is I'm struggling of thinking of them.
You have an honest business model where people pay for things.
"Free" is the cornerstone of surveillance capitalism.
“Free” makes honest software impossible because software is labor intensive.
I wouldn't say "impossible", because lots of really great and privacy respecting software exists even while being well maintained. VLC is my go to example: Free, popular, as good if not better than commercial alternatives (given all it's capable of), and still extremely privacy friendly after all these years.
I don't think volatilizing users' privacy for money helps to make a product more stable, secure, or easy to use. It's just something companies do because they are allowed to and it makes them more money.
> I find free, open source software to respect my privacy and generally be stable and secure, but I find it harder to use than proprietary alternatives
It's a problem certainly. It's not universal (VLC comes to mind), but the trend is real. Open source software does tend to lack the polish but the authors often lack the resources of commercial software.
> If even experienced software engineers struggle to find the time to contribute code to FOSS projects, then making such a contribution would be almost impossible for members of the general public, the vast majority of whom have no coding experience.
I'm not sure the goal should be for non-coders to contribute to code. I think projects could try to make the process of submitting code less intimidating, maintain standards that are clearly defined, and try to avoid cliques that might make it hard for newcomers.
The best thing non-coders can do is what they love doing already: complain and offer suggestions. If something in a program like libre office is counter-intuitive let them know. If the UI in firefox is terrible let them know. It does mean that the people working on those projects have to be willing to accept criticism and respond to their users concerns though.
> Another challenge is thinking of new funding mechanisms for FOSS
I agree that this is an issue. The fundamental problem with software written by single dev hobbyists or many volunteers in their spare time is that is that the result is about what you'd expect. The more money there is behind a project the more likely it'll be polished and professional looking, but there's only so much you can if you want to keep the F in FOSS
Those cheap(ish) reteo hand held and the community of moders are my vote for good things.
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
Open source desktop operating systems have surpassed windows and Mac in terms of quality. It's true.
AMD is stronger than ever.
Mice and keyboards have improved massively. TVs finally allow higher than 60 Hz input. Took them 20 years.
Electric vehicles are about to become the norm. Not just cars.
I could go on for a while but frankly I am way more excited about biology. Feels like we're just a couple of major breakthroughs away from making huge leaps that could shake things quite a bit
Features such as RGB lighting/doubleshot keycaps, Bluetooth, and USB are nice, but for me the massive improvements have been retro features from the 1980s (or earlier), such as electromechanical switches, tactile feedback, keybed curve/sculpting, and well-made, swappable keycaps (including ones made from PBT as well as ABS plastic.)
And excepting Apple laptops (I still have the "butterfly" keyboard as well as the trackpad with poor palm rejection.)
Remember old mice? Remember having ps/2 being stuck to 85 Hz, or when you had to trick windows into clocking usb to 250hz, even 500hz and that 1khz was outright impossible? This Quake player remembers
But there’s a lot of good too! It’s worth remembering.
Weird, I know. But I would say that a little over a decade ago, it feels like Facebook wasn't even being questioned and that everything new in tech was always awesome. And was always like, we are screwed if people don't begin to see how creepy this stuff is.
Now, I mean, there's work to do, but I don't get seen as the paranoid weirdo when I criticize Facebook anymore. :)
I learned there was a VOR navigation system nearby, and was able to build a flowgraph in GNU Radio that showed the bearing as I moved around the area.
It's amazing how much computing power you can get for about that amount of money as well, with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards.
Or if we’re sticking with tech = computers, I can sculpt for free in blender (the software) and print it with a 3d printer. Or paint in procreate/photoshop on my ipad with this fantastic not-really-a-pencil (and somehow procreate is only $10??). Or learn to draw from the internet.
Or the fact that nothing like D&D Beyond existed for a game I’m playing, so I was able to put up an app based on free software (react + yjs) on cloud servers god knows where for dirt cheap without knowing much of anything about any of those things.
Hobbies and leisure activities seem to be pretty accessible (in price). The downside for me is that all the accessible addictive stuff (like this site) makes it hard to actually dedicate time to the hobbies I want to spend time on.
[0] Unfortunately, I couldn’t find data on prices of various art supplies going very far back.
As much as people complain about the walled gardens of Google and Facebook, overall the barrier of entry to computing as fallen significantly.
It'll teach your kids phonics even if their teachers aren't.
I don't think people understand that controlled fusion is actually on the horizon finally, and it is going to change absolutely everything.
Just to be clear, I don't personally have a position on this; I don't know enough about the field. But I'm very interested in understanding developments in energy production, as at the end of the day, this is humanity's only real source of leverage.
- Yes, but if he invents X, that'll change everything!
- ...
Weren't we supposed to be working 1-2 hours/week by now, thanks to techno-utopia? :)
Technology at this point is like children running around with scissors. What's needed is some adult supervision, not new toys.
And with ESPHome's ability to flash from the browser and OTA it becomes even easier. Still can't believe the browser part actually works lol
What problems are being referred to?
I'm afraid that i don't have an article about those distros in particular, but some of the issues that i've run into over the years:
- Ubuntu introduced snaps as an alternate way of packaging software, however in practice this sometimes means that certain packages migrate over to snaps only
- not only is this challenging from the perspective of wanting to pin specific versions of packages to be used, but also sometimes presents problems in regards to how the software runs and how it uses the file system
- in regards to server software that shouldn't matter too much, but when you're trying to install a browser for something like automation (say, Selenium), i've found that the count of moving parts is directly proportional to the chances of things breaking (e.g. Java --> Selenium library --> Gecko webdriver --> local browser and how it's installed --> the actual site that you want to test)
- Debian is also known for including slightly older (and sometimes better tested) software in its releases, so even though they will usually be behind Ubuntu, they can be good for when you want things to "just work" (e.g. how many pick CentOS over Fedora for particular setups)
- as for CentOS, i rather enjoyed its longer life cycle, however towards the end of its life, i found some packages breaking without clear reasons
- for example, a regular update once ruined my install of xrdp, so i could no longer graphically connect to the server (needed it for a niche use case)
- now, this is perhaps more of a nitpick rather than an outright problem, but there's a divide between DEB and RPM distros and how they do things, for example, how Apache2/httpd has both different names and different configurations on those distros, for seemingly no good reason
- also, depending on what you're doing, SELinux can have missing policies and cause issues with the software you're trying to run (there was this kerfuffle a few years ago about Docker (maybe Swarm) not playing nicely with the firewall on CentOS; i still remember that because someone actually suggested turning it off!)
- the worst problem by far was GRUB breaking and preventing startup after an unattended update: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-and-grub-are-broken
- Debian's older software also meant that for a while Ubuntu was a better choice for using WireGuard: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-your-homelab-behind-nat
space travel is nice, still early
It’s the small things.