Publius_Enigma

I’ve used both wired and wireless headphones and earbuds for about the past ten years. I really enjoy many aspects of wireless earbuds, one of which principally is that I don’t need to carry a player on my person, and cords can easily get in the way of mundane tasks.

However, I will no longer invest in high-quality (and expensive) wireless headphones and earbuds, and have been investing more heavily in wired sets.

One of the key reasons is they many wireless products do not have easily replaceable batteries, let alone other spares, on what is ostensibly a consumable component. I had a pair of expensive Bowers and Wilkins wireless headphones where the battery had degraded to uselessness after five years, only to be advised they were irreparable. The cost of ownership equated to $200 a year, which is definitely in luxury territory.

Other reasons drive me back to wired headphones too. They are more readily interoperable. I can use them with musical instruments, computers, analogue stereo systems. I am not constrained to using them with the amplifier embedded with them. There is no latency, which is a huge problem with Bluetooth headphones for music. They don’t succumb to wireless interference. And I don’t need to navigate the minefield of codec compatibility (SBC/LC3/AptX/AptX HD/AAC/LDAC). I also don’t need to charge them constantly.

I appreciated the article’s author taking the time to document their observations of how wireless listening, and the convenience it supposedly brings, on changing the way we consume music - and other societal impacts - on top of the technical implications too.

I’ve been using NFS in various environments since my first introduction to it in my university’s Solaris and Linux labs. I’ve run it at home, on and off, since 2005.

I’ve recently started using it again after consistent issues with SMB on Apple devices, and the deprecation of AFP. My FreeBSD server, running on a Raspberry Pi, makes terabytes of content available to the web via an NFS connection to a Synology NAS.

For my use case, with a small number of users, the fact that NFS is host based rather than user based, means I can set it up one on each device, and all users of that host can access the shares. And I’ve generally found it to be more consistently performant on Apple hardware than their in-house SMB implementation.

Still performs better than SMB on macOS for many workloads!

I'm sure the architecture and scale of NetFlix's operations is truly impressive, but stories like this make me further appreciate the elegant simplicity of scalability of analogue terrestrial TV, and to a similar extent, digital terrestrial TV and satellite.

This spoke to me. I see it as putting tools before ideas.

Australian Aboriginal people, have very advanced social and cultural structure. Australia is comprised of several thousand different aboriginal groups and territories. Acceptance into another community relied on endorsement from the elders of the community you were leaving. Family bonds and ties are extremely strong.

Hence, one explanation may be that participation was essentially mandatory to be considered part of the community at all, and to be recognised as an adult.

These are all problems that shouldn’t exist. You have succinctly described the problems with modern IT. Software doesn’t need to have an expiration date. It doesn’t decay or expire. But because of our endless need to change things, rather than just fix bugs, we end up with this precarious tower of cards.

If, as an industry, we focussed on correctness and reliability over features, a lot of these problems would disappear.

This. Furthermore, this posture has percolated down to home computing environments (because it is all Windows or Linux) so even my home computer has to receive constant updates as if it’s controlling a Luna lander.

Latency of text entry, as one example.

In an application like Teams, the delay between striking a key on the keyboard and the corresponding glyph appearing on screen is comically bad - two orders of magnitude higher than performing the equivalent action on a computer from the early 1980s.

I too am nostalgic for a simpler web, and also an increasingly of the view that the modern web was a severe wrong turn for software engineering and computing generally. I also run my own gopherd and httpd servers. Despite the severe shortcomings of Gopher as a protocol in 2023, I simply cannot understand much of the design rationale behind Gemini.

Markdown is not a well-defined standard and is arguably no easier to parse than basic HTML 1.0. HTML can easily be rendered as text in a style not dissimilar to raw markdown if required.

The decision to enforce the use of TLS means that rolling your own client is less trivial than had it been optional. It also cuts out a big chunk of the hobbyist market who are most likely to be interested in a small, lightweight protocol. Support for Gemini will therefore be limited to systems with maintained TLS libraries. At the end of the day, anyone sniffing your Gemini traffic is going to be able to see the host you’re accessing - whilst TLS will preventable them knowing which specific page you’re reading, they will be aware of the set of pages you could be reading.

Instead, I am focussing my attention on building small, light web-pages that have completely optional CSS, are pure HTML without cookies or JavaScript and work in browsers modern or ancient. There’s a plethora of great browsers that can access it, from Lynx and Netscape running on a Solaris 8 machine to Chrome on my work PC. Servers are ample and well-tested.

And a good chunk of my website is text (rendered in Groff) to boot.

It’s 95% of the Gemini experience with 5% of the effort and 1000% more reach.

Yes, but only because of the way Musk went about changing the WFH Policy. Musk is quoted as saying "If you can physically make it to an office and you don't show up, resignation accepted". He was placing the onus onto employees to make it to an office at all costs, else they would be out of a job. To then lock employees out after such histrionic demands seems ironic.

I find it curious that Musk has simultaneously demanded that all employees cease working from home and return to the office whilst also locking them out of the office.