talkingtab

This resonates for me.

I do not want my technology tied to some person I consider of despicable character. Would I buy a cell phone, even at a good deal from Putin? No. Corporations have increasingly become political. Thanks, United vs FEC! So we see them taking a knee to gain commercial advantage. And as in this case harm to our democracy.

In my opinion, no discussion about Starlink is complete without considering whether the money you pay will be used to profit people or causes you do not want.

If you need this, then great. But I have other choices, just as I would not touch a tesla even if you gave it to me. I just am not that desperate.

I'm sold. Where can I buy one!

I'm an ant. I want to tell you how the chemical trails work. Here is how the pheromones work....

Except. The main point of chemical trails, money or other implementations of the messaging bus of a complex adaptive system is THE COMMUNITY it creates. Think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but instead of language determines what you think, expand that to "your messaging bus language determines how your community functions". Yeah there is lots of stuff about money, but how it determines the form and function of the community (as in CAS) is the important part.

The other primary thing to think about money - once you get that it is a messaging bus - is the idea of making money from money. When you understand the function of the system you can then understand that making money from money is not a good idea. This is not a new idea. The concept of throwing the money lenders out of the temple has been around for a long time.

If you understand money, then you will be able to answer this question:

why is making money from money a bad (dysfunctional) idea?

Oh look. Something works. Lets not break it? How crazy is that?

I sometimes wonder if what happens is like this:

1. Have problem. Need higher level computer language. 2. Think about problem. 3. Solve problem - 'C' 4. Think about problems with 'C' 5. Attempt to fix problems with 'C' - get C++ 6. Think about problems with C & C++ 7. Get: Go, F#, Rust, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, ...other etc.

I tend to do this. The problem is obvious, that I do not repeat step #2. So then I move to the next step.

8. Thinking about how to fix C, C++, Go, F#, Rust, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, ...other is too hard. 9. Stop thinking.

There is the smoke part - worth seeing, the shader part - well worth exploring (shaders make you see the world in a different way , then there is the learning part. The site is very interactive so it allows you to see one, do one and maybe teach one.

Many people are stuck in html land. I was. Webgl, threejs, @react-three/{fiber/drei} provide another dimension and shaders are the gateway.

Very highly recommended as a skill worth understanding (at least).

This is really cool thinking. The fundamental concept I got out of it, was fracturing something means that it can fit together again, so there is a constraint. Of course, but cool. Thanks!

<Here is a joke for you>

Factory work began when people could use other people as machines. For example, mechanized looms could weave cloth but each cloth weaving machine needed a machine to run it. So use people. Children, real slaves anyone. Slave labor. Thus began the Factory Age.

Now AI can replace people for repetitive labor. AI Can run the machines, it is the new Slave Labor. The problem now is what to do with all the freed slaves? If AI can make us the things that are needed, then how are we needed? We are not. As freed slaves, suddenly we are out of work. We are obsolete.

Unfortunately, for corporations that are now rushing to free themselves from the old, difficult, demanding, contentious slaves, they have missed one gigantic element of the equation. Hmmm. What could it be? Can you guess? What could possibly go wrong here?

Fortunately, for us - the freed slaves and factory workers - it turns out we are not just slaves after all. We were just trained to be slaves. So we have a future. If we can adapt to being free. And that is not a joke.

<End joke. I just made this up, nothing about it is true or even remotely serious. />

The issue is good, the thought is good. But things happen for reasons. Those reasons are often how systems work. Unless we understand how those complex systems work, we cannot change anything. We end up with cargo cult thinking. You need to understand the function that produces the result.

Why does the internet function the way it does? It is really pretty simple. The internet is primarily characterized by very-high-volume-very-low-value transactions.

How much does it cost to send an email? When I send a real letter, I buy a stamp $0.78. So if I can send an email instead, it will save me a lot of money. You can try to calculate how many email transactions you can provide on one VPS costing $5.00 per month.

Here is a great business opportunity! You sell people email stamps at $0.01 per letter for 10k bytes. Cool. And 1,000,000 people each buy 10 stamps. Wow. That is a lot of money for your $5/month VPS, right?

But how do you get the money? You need to find a way for the one million people to each send you a dime. You cannot do it. If they put a dime in envelope and mail it to you, it will cost them $0.78. Etc.

So you have another idea. Why not let scammers include details of their scam in all emails send and they pay for the email. Oops, I should have used the term "advertisers". Now the people who email pay nothing and the scamm.... oops advertisers pay for the cost.

And you surprisingly find many, many people and corporations from all over the world are eager to exploit, oops target with advertising users. Especially if you can identify what kind of target they are.

There is no context here for most obvious and important differences between Windows and Linux. Nor does this article note the furor over the forced obsolesce of millions of PC's because of (drum roll) Windows 11.

Responsible articles and journals note these things.

The real practical and immediate help would be ground water contamination. How many bad chemicals now permeate the water supplies around farming communities. Can this be used to treat the drinking water supply?

I think it is time that open source => community source. Where community is NOT corporations making tons of money without royalties. And where community is NOT AI.

As someone said these are fair uses of Open source. But it would not be fair use of Community Open Source.

Many people will reject such an effort for good reason. Open Source is something of great value. But should only Corporations profit from it. Why not the developers, maintainers, etc?

So the question is whether there is some way to retain the benefits and goodness of Open Source while expelling the "Embrace, extend, extinguish" corporations?

This is not a conspiracy. This is just corporations acting in their best interest. Exactly the same as MicroSoft acted in their best interest as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

If that is confusing here is link to the Friedman Doctrine that explains it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

When we see a technology that appears beneficial and is not adopted, I think it is fair to wonder why that is.

For me the key points I ponder are:

- over several years I saw articles on HN that supposedly promoted Fido, but almost always they talked about Yubikeys. This continues.

- Solokeys built an open source Fido key. They were priced very low compared to Yubikeys, but functioned just as well. You could buy them on Amazon at one point (and I did)

- the Fido Alliance Accreditation fees https://fidoalliance.org/certification/authenticator-certifi...

So no. I do not see a conspiracy, I just see an array of corporations acting according to the Friedman Doctrine.

Perhaps a good question is what benefits might those corporations gain from their actions. Would Google and Apple benefit from broad adoption of Fido keys or would it somehow lessen their profits? I don't know the answer, but I know the question.

In my opinion only, Yubico has done no favors to the Fido by their marketing. A result of trying to make Yubikey synonymous with Fido, it has become unclear what Fido does.

And as a result of how they market their keys, decisions Fido keys are presented with a cost of $20 - $60. Why $60, for a simple Fido key? Because for $60 you get not only Fido, but Flippo, Froggo, x.6s8o and more-o.

The result is that most people know the name Yubikey, but don't really know Fido, or what it is. On Amazon if you search for Fido you get mostly Yubikeys. There were other brands, but Yubico appears to have snuffed them. At one point there was an open source version that worked just as well as a name brand.

As for value? If you are a big corporate type this is the cat's meow. But otherwise? What other hardware is $60? A Raspberry Pi 4? I can get little cheap USB thingies from China at 6 for a dollar.

I am not pointing at Yubico as they have done well making profits from corporations. Rather the Fido Alliance. Looking at the Fido Alliance provides a first pass at answering the question "Who Benefits?"

https://fidoalliance.org/overview/leadership/

Perhaps it is fair to ask "What benefit" as well.

Corpocracy. You gotta love it.

We're microsoft. We don't care. We don't have to care, we're microsoft. Lock in? Embrace, expand, extinguish? Anti-competive? Anti-trust? We don't care. We don't have to care. Pay taxes? We don't have to pay taxes (https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-microsoft-audit-back-...). We're ... etc.

This is not new, not unexpected. This is ongoing. Nothing stops this because who wins elections? How do they pay for all that publicity. Certainly "contributing" to campaigns is much cheaper than paying your taxes.

Supposedly this is a place for hackers. Hackers can build a better alternative.

The course is great. I am a fan. This, not so much.

One of the unsung problems of any technology is understanding what you can do with it that you could not do before. Lets say you are a prehistoric person and somehow you find a modern steel axe. What do you do with it? Ultimately, it is not the axe that is important, it is the metallurgy.

Lets say you are a modern person and you found bitcoin. What do you do with it? Again, my thought is not the bitcoin, it is the cryptographic technology.

Lets say you are a modern person and you find threejs. What do you do with it? My personal reaction is that there is so much more that can be done with threejs, react-three-fiber, react-three drei, shaders, shadertoys, than this.

For me the definition of "cool" is things that change how you see the world. Where you never look at things the same way. A little example for me was this:

https://codepen.io/prisoner849/full/wBGQYvy

OMG. This is like reading a headline that says "Cigarette Smoking is a source of dissatisfaction"

It is not advertising. It is a targeted attempt by other people to persuade you to do something for their benefit, their good. Without regard to the effects on you.

Do you remember the Marlboro Man persuading people to buy cigarettes? Many people made lots of money from owning that stock. Lots of people died. Lots of people got addicted. Lots of people suffered.

Do you remember Purdue Pharma? They made billions after persuading doctors to prescribe their drugs. They destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Calling that "a source of dissatisfaction" is just wrong.

Targeting makes this persuasion more effective and more abhorrent.

You live your life, but targeted propaganda is designed to ensure that someone else gets the benefits. As though you were some domesticated animal.

Let them eat cake.

The question is what do you mean by proximity? Is this only physical proximity?And does it mean that if you isolate people, but they are within 10 feet of each other they are more productive? And do the results change when there is not physical proximity, but substitutes or alternatives?

Complained about and already modified. However, what is "wrong" is that some "person" invented the internet. We live in a time of "followers" and in that paradigm we need some singular person to follow. But it was actually a bunch of original thinkers of whom TBL was one. But it was not a person. I suspect a closer answer is the IETF, but that is also a leaky abstraction.

The point is that if you want to do something, you are probably more likely to do it well with lots of other doers. Not followers.

When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.

One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.

But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.

This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...

This is unfortunate and ultimately wrong. The ultimate stupidity is exemplified by Musk and Bezos, and others of their ilk. To step away from Mastodon because people compare you to them is an error.

We need not just Mastodon's but to find new ways - non-corporate - ways to come together and collaborate. I am beginning to suspect that Democracy is not a political system but an economic system.

A better way to address your situation is perhaps to work on implementing a distributed democratic system that works. We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?

Just my 2cents

Lets solve the problem. Why should some IP address be on the internet when it is being used for malicious activity. Everyone seems to assume there is no fix for this. Really?

The discussion is here is sort of which way do you want to let DDos sites damage you? By signing up for Cloudflare or not signing up for Cloudflare. In both case normal users suffer harm.

Why? This is a serious question.

Just take apple to small claims court. If everyone who is scammed by Apple takes them to small claims they will have an incentive to change. Without this they have -0.00000000000 incentive to do anything. Even a class action suit won't help. The fundamental question is whether Apple should be able to sell products with lock in. Since there is lockin on all Apple products it is not accidental. In my humble opinion only. You, dear reader, work out your own thoughts.

"Keeping users safe on Android is our top priority." This is propaganda. It is a statement made to dissuade people from the real issue. The top priority is to make money.

It is hard to to trust anyone who starts communication with an obvious falsehood. Users beware.

MSDF is worth looking at:

https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

and

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...

The context is GPU's, things like three.js

But yes, drawing text is hard.

Somehow, reading the comments made something CLICK for me about how passive and reactive we have all become in this culture.

1. The issue is real. Not sure it is articulated but I related to live vs dead internet.

2. The comments (only 10 as of now) are mostly critiques. (no javascript, call to action, style, theory is wrong)

The CLICK: "Critiques kill". You want a live internet? Don't critique. If you want a no javascript version make one. If you have a better solution do it. If you have insight into the problem share it.

The "follower" internet has somehow instilled the notion that making a comment is the same as "doing something". It is not.

Someone has done something here. If you want to comment, try to develop the thought, not critique. Help build something.

I bought an Apple II and then a SoftCard. I was trying to learn 'C' and there was a compiler on CPM (Borland) but not on the Apple II.

It is always hard to go back and understand what it was like before an event. Like the Velvet Revolution. But at the time I was working on an IBM 360, mostly doing Fortran for scientists running anemometer simulations. The center for this activity was the person in charge of the 360 who could dole out time on the computer.

The power dynamic was something I did not really notice, but in retrospect this was frustrating for the mathematicians/scientist trying to run simulations. They had to queue up and wait.

Then one day a mathematician brought in an Apple II running VisiCalc. His own personal computer. He ran his simulations on that.

It was like our small world trembled as the tectonic plates of technology shifted. The power shifted just in that one instant. It was cool - how we saw the world changed in one instant.

A proprietary project. I was surprised to realize how little interest I have in these things anymore. I mean genuinely surprised. I suppose I have just seen so many large-corporation-does-something in isolation projects that I make two possibly wrong assumptions.

1) It will never work 2) The article is just advertising. Jobs, products whatever.

There is a third conclusion which is worrisome. That the leadership of the organization just doesn't get it.

I'm not advocating these as correct, just wondering if other readers share my instantaneous reaction of been-there, seen-that, know-how-it-ends.

In complex situation you can often deal with parts of a problem to the detriment of the whole. There should be some expression "its the whole, stupid", because we all tend to do this.

Long ago I worked at a significant corporation. We won't name names. They decide to completely rewrite their software because the original architecture was limiting. A good decision. So for one YEAR different groups went off - in silos - and worked on their area of the project. On the day, of the release they put all the pieces together only to find that NONE OF THE PIECES fit. The company was doomed.

We talk about intellectual terms - like Agile, like Silos, like whatever. None of that matters. It is intellectual. Only one thing matters. Functionality. If you get better results from thinking in silos, then that is the best. If you get best results from 'agile' then great.

But to a large extend arguing agile vs silos vs some other thing is just an indication you are not paying attention to the real thing.

One strategy for all of this is just "hello world". Want to build a new, shiny software thingy? On day one, get it to say "hello world". Then every day forever after make sure it can say "hello world" AND can show some new feature. Like every day demo what it can do.

That's it. If you can do that in a silo, great. If you can do that in agile, or waterfall, or whatever that is great. As long as you can *show* that the product can do more today than yesterday.

"Decrease collaboration". Sigh.

The issue of android being open is not a developer issue. I do not mean, it does not affect developers, rather that the wrong that must be righted is to the user.

The F-droid article states: "You, the consumer, purchased your Android device believing in Google’s promise that it was an open computing platform and that you could run whatever software you choose on it. "

This is an actionable issue. I believe this is a legally reasonable issue. If you buy a car and then the car manufacturer changes the car so you can only buy gas from them, or parts, that is an offense.

If you accept that users are wronged by googles action, the problem is what can be done about it?

Wrongs committed by companies like Google, Apple, Amazon are difficult to fix because of failures in our legal system. The typical legal action is a class action suit. These typically result in large "settlements" with little real effect. Users get a notice that they are entitled to $40 but only if they jump through seven hoops. Lawyers on both sides make out like bandits. The offenders have little incentive not to be repeat offenders, just not to get caught again. This is an acceptable risk for corporations and so does not act as a deterrent.

There are states Attorney Generals who can file anti-trust actions. The US government (ha ha) could file an anti-trust action. In my opinion neither of these are likely. And even if it happens, it will take years. And years.

A problem with these two legal solutions is that they rely on someone else. The result is that users are victims. We are all used to that by now.

Since we, as android users, are legally entitled to compensation - is there another way to take a legal action.

In most states the limits on small claims actions is between $3000 and $10,000. Well above the cost of an android phone. If there is one class action legal suit against google they can easily spend the money to defend it. And the time. They have the resources to do this.

However, what would happen if 1000 people filed small claims action, asking for a refund for the cost of their phone? Google is declaring war on users. They have their big legal tanks. Small claims are the equivalent of drones in the legal world.

We have the internet. We have AI. Can we generate reasonable and fair legal small claims court filings for each of the 50 states and put them online to help people.

We, the people, have learned helplessness. We need to learn something else or resign ourselves to simply being fodder for predatory actions by corporations.