Most web apps are an accessibility disaster compared to their native counterparts. I guess that is not the main blocking factor, but not being native has subtle disadvantages all over the place. I remember there was actually a time where web apps were a trend, but most vendors stopped doing that since they just couldn't provide a really smooth user experience.
Somewhat related anecdote: Roughly 20 years ago, I took part in a scientific experiment which aimed to confirm a theory that in blind individuals, parts of the formally vision-related parts of the brain are involved in reading tactile braille. The experiment itself was pretty interesting, since it was conducted in an fMRI machine. Back then, the f in fMRI was sort of the new thing. I was used to a yearly MRI checkup, so this is why I volunteered. It wasnt particularily relaxing, as every session took roughly 3 hours. They tailor-made a helmet from gypsum so that my head wouldnt move at all. My compensation for all of this was clearly not the money (which was too little to remember), but the relaxed chat with the lead brain researcher and the MRI technicians during and after the experiment. At the time, the magnetic field strength of the fMRI I was getting was the highest I ever received. I was used to MRI around 0.5 tesla. During the experiment, I was getting 3 tesla. And I was feeling a strange sort of shiver going down and up my spine. They were experimental imaging people, so I took the opportunity to chat about the fonrtier of healthyness. MRI has this air of "you dont feel it and it cant hurt you". I still believe around 3 tesla can be perceived slightly by your body. I have received higher magnetic field strength in normal medical settings since, and sometimes I can feel that shiver. Anyway, as we were chatting about tesla, the scientist dropped quite casually. "At 11 a mouse is cooking." So much about boundaries. I never asked him if they know because they tried :-)
Isn't that a rather arbitrary distinction? Feels you are making it easy for yourself to just dismiss a certain amount of "not-normal" people as not relevant to the discussion? So, what do you define as "bad genetics", then?
This is nothing new, its just being dressed up fresh and pushed by media. Where I live, the hole in the ozone layer and the imminent end of fossile energy sources was taught in school already 30 to 40 years ago. Everyone and their dog knew how bad we were and are treating the environment. Heck, it took two decades to force the leather-maker in our village to stop completely polluting our river. Everyone knew. But the industry was busy making money, and making the common people dependant on the shiny and new offerings of the consumerism culture. People stopped to do small-scale farming because it was much cheaper to go to the grocery-store and buy stuff.
And now that the industry, mostly managers, have made a shitload of money, the common man is supposed to fix it all up.
Sorry. I know why you think it is important. However, I am too old to believe this system can be fixed. We are doomed, and its about time we start to accept that. We've trained people to consume and be dependant on supply chains. We are not going to unlearn this as a society. A few will deprive themselves of things they could consume. But these people are not going to be significant. The rest is going to go on like they learnt in childhood.
I was thinking about writing a reverse move generator for chessIO just recently. Shouldn't be too hard. The question is how large the tree will grow. Its a fascinating idea looking for useful applications :-)
What a stupid headline. Talk about comparing apples and oranges... But this is normal now. Since the Google car, the media is forcing the self-driving car narrative down its readers throats.
There is another similar topic which is dear to my heart. Implants that make the blind see again. I feel article about these, and self-driving car, read similarily stupid.
Since I am still mostly on a plain terminal, I used to have a time when I used a rpi0w as a laptop, since I really dont need much more then an instance of Emacs and a few ssh sessions in a tmux. I switched to a real laptop by now, and its nice to have a bit of local power. But I could actually do all my dayjob on a rpi0w.
People are not robots. Horrible mishabs happen. But 50 years ago, nobody was doing a global list of these. They ended up being a village story.
We need to educate the young to make sensible decisions. It doesnt really matter if TikTok, FB, the foobar challenge, or something else is the current culprit. The world is full of crazy things. People need to navigate that anyway.
Well, I get your somewhat nostalgic attitude. But back then, computing equipment was also way large, louder, and energy consuming. Heck, one of the "museum" disk drives we have at work used to make the light flicker in the lower floor if you powered it on. So yeah, we're past a certain point of repairability. Thats sad, but more a function of progress, not really something we can do about.
But that doesnt mean all our existing tech will emit the magic smoke in the next few months. The endless need for more computing power is mostly driven by software bloat. We could extend the current smartphone and gadget usefulness by a significant amount of time if we stopped to fall for constant featurism and did lets say, a year or two of cleanup. Sure, "the future" like AR and such will have to wait, but heck, this "we will sell you 3d" thing is around since the 80s and didnt take of in the mainstream yet, so what?
Do people still know about upx these days? However, I think executable compression is besides the point of OP. Around 18 years ago, I was going through the codebase of a program I maintained as a Debian package, and as a udeb for the installer. Back then, I was trying to make it small enough to fit on the first floppy. I learnt about unnecessarily large datatypes in structs, packing, padding and alignment, and that adding "static" to module-local functions and data can really do things to the binary size. These times are over. Nobody cares about binary sizes anymore, the main argument against doing so is "we cant be bothered, we need to innovate."
I also got downvoted for stating that I feel I have enough HW and can live a few years off what is there. I guess people have been trained to get the newest thing every year, that it now hurts them bad to not be able to do so for a few months. And yes, I agree, this could be a wonderful time to actually strengthen our knowhow regarding keeping things alive, instead of just throwing them away. Sounds like a great chance for the climate change people. How is the market for used equipment doing btw?
Shell scripting is a strange beast. The fact how long it took the author to explain the reason for the first parameter expansion pretty much demonstrates that. You can (and I regularily fall for that) loose yourself in scripting. It sort of lures you in. You take some command line invokations, wrap them in a while loop or pipe it to some grep/sed/awk magic, and achieve things. You can even go and learn the idioms. Important things like "set -e" and ${foo}, remember to quote every file and directory name that contains a variable (yes, people use spaces in the project directories they upload) and yadda yadda. Now you are approaching something vaguely safe. But dont rattle it too much, it might break. And it will definitely break in 2 years. But hey, you've written a program... It feels like compiance bias. "I can learn everything necessary to make bash into a programming language", yeah, you can. However, the question is really if you should...
Perfect timing, for once. In 2019, I jumped onto the Sonos train, got rid of a bunch of old hardware, (finally) replaced my desktop with a ThinkPad X1. In early 2020 (before the first lockdown) I completely redid my little "home office", investing in 4 combinable tables, a new 8-channel USB soundcard, a MIDI controller, and some more stuff I should always have had... Two weeks after I managed to clean out the apartment from old tables and stuff, lockdown came. In summer 2020, I finally got the long-overdue replacement for one of our HPC clusters at work. Neitzer at work nor at home do I plan to invest any money into hardware in the next two years. Sure, it might sound easy from where I am to say that, but I find this period of the world a perfect time to do some consume consolidation. Looking back, I surely spent a bit too much on hardware over the last 20 years. Thats fine in the first few years of your career, because after all, those are not just toys, they actually help you acquire knolwedge. However, after a time, it somehow becomes silly. If I am true to myself, there is really nothing I need right now. And I guess that applies to more people then just me.
I also found ringworld pretty unreadable. But I guess thats mostly because I find the world that is being built too hilarious and unbelievable. It lacks a sort of seriousness that cyberpunk usually doesn't.
SInce you mentioned "unique" features, Emacs is the only programmable editor which works mostly the same in terminal and GUI mode. You can write extensions (in elisp) which largely dont know about the UI used by the user. So you actually can write UI-independent programs in elisp. I dont know a single tool that got this right. Sure, you're going to tell me that termianl isn't relevant these days, and everyone has moved onto windowing systems. Yes young padawan, that might feel true to you. You will understand one day.
Emacs is the self-documenting editor for a reason. I always found the documentation very good. I submit that every sufficiently complex system will need some terminology specific to the system the user will have to learn. Not wanting to do so if a form of lazyness that the developers cant really do anything about.
The title is rather strange considering Emacs is Free Software. Forks are fine. So why not UX forks. But demanding changes to the original without going through the dev process as everyone else would need to do is rather weird. "X should do Y" seems to be the new way of treating eachother...
If you ask me, Emacs is fine as it is. In fact, I have been bitten by two changes over the time which come from the "better UI" camp. matching-paren-mode stopped to do the jumping cursor thing, which I totally rely on working with a braille display. I luckily caught this during the dev process and managed to submit a patch which adds a flag to force the "old" behaviour. And frankly, the guy who forced transient-mark mode on the world needs to hugs till he feels the pain. I am always bewildered when something I just marked suddenly vanishes just because I hit del. Move cursor a bit and DEL suddenly does something different again.
IOW, I am a long-time Emacs user, and really, stop breaking the world just because you think something needs to be "modernized". Breaking the user experience of long-term users in order to cater to newbies is rather rude to those who have invested considerable time to learn the system so they can use it as effectively as possible.
As a person with disability, I have a chunk of experience when it comes to being patronised. I can tell you one thing: the giving end usually does not realize they are patronising. Either because they are too conservative to grok the concept at all, or too dumb to realize they have to treat others as equals if they dont want to come across as full of themselves. Usually, if I confront them with their actions, they react like you just did. "Oh no, not me, you are wrong, and you need to change."
I dont feel it is really relevant how many people "can" get the vaccine. First of all, if you can/should get it with your current medical condition is also a fluid thing. One doctor might advice against, another might advice you to get the shot anyway. So this is no clear cut number. There is also the social pressure. So someone might be adviced by their doctor to not get the shot, but they feel so much peer pressure that they decide to take the risk anyway. Ignoring all these issues and claiming their might be a clear cut number just underlines the complete lack of empathy and understanding of how humans work.
The point is that vaccination is still not mandatory, but vaxed people behave towards unvaxed as if it were.
But whats most devastating about all of this is that it made anxious people go fully nuts and break out of their protective shell. I have an axious mother, so I know a bit or two about how anxiety can have bad effects on the people surrounding the anxious. Most of these people were able to "hide" most of their issues and be mostly functioning humans. The pandemic has changed them into little political activists, and has destroyed most of their remaining true social connections. I cant be bothered to spend time if over-anxious people anymore. Life is too short.
Is that true where you live? The latest media story around where I am is that we will not see crowded hospitals since allegedly only unvaxed people will go to hospital. So what? Since the triaging monster is out of the way, what do you now use to make people afraid of daily life?