davidy123

I hope they soon provides schemas rather than just separate human-only markdown description of fields. Both XML and JSON have methods for this using Linked Data.

For JSON-LD, this would basically look like this (from https://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld/#the-context):

  {
    "@context": {
      "name": "http://schema.org/name",  ← This means that 'name' is shorthand for 'http://schema.org/name' 
      "homepage": {
        "@id": "http://schema.org/url",  ← This means that 'homepage' is shorthand for 'http://schema.org/url' 
      }
      …
    },
    … data part using name, homepage, etc
  }

Once you have stable places for information (identifiers), you can start building a real web as described by the semantic web, by bundling schemas with the data you can freely use information with human and machine understanding, until then you've got a muddle.

OK, I must have misread some comments. Thanks for the update.

Not an Apple guy, but I think an Apple M chip will run at ⅓ the speed of a top end RTX GPU, however it uses system memory, so it can easily be 32GB or 64Gb. That's pretty compelling, and if this is really a new class of application, NVidia is going to have to think about more memory for mainstream-ish products.

They used a very defined set of rules, which automatically includes a review (which is in progress). What the occupiers did was unsafe, harmful to a lot of people,and very strategic because they had a few ex military and police in their ranks. There was no reasonable way to remove them without causing greater disruption. There are a lot of unprecedented moves these days, deaths are not a good benchmark, clearing up disruptive idiots with white gloves is the least of my concerns.

I thought they were referring to the post-ww2 'spoils of war' perspective, rather than 'we were here the longest' (for certain values of 'we' and 'longest'). But so many promises have been broken, so many borders changed, so many people swapped in and out, it's hard to call it sensible.

Why is this Abrahamic religion split accepted in the first place. Or is it racist? Long-running feuds?

It's sad to see so many families harmed in all this, their land taken away.

As a Canadian, who lives near one of the main sites, it was not over the top. The "truckers" (in reality, it was some truckers, and a lot of yahoos looking for a good time or attention) were tolerated for quite a while doing quite a few things that went well beyond any reasonable protest, were in fact blatently illegal, easily amounted to occupying key infrastructure that the vast majority of Canadians did not want them to occupy, creating many hazards with constant intended-only-for-emergency-use air horns, diesel fumes, and intimidation. They substantially shut down commerce and cross-border traffic for days and weeks. They even posted a manifesto demanding the government step down, with no basis in law or popular support.

Ironically, it was the mainstream media, the legends in their own minds streamers, and a few select looking-for-attention US channels that made it seem like they had a lot of popular support (through in-crowd shots, amplifying poorly substantiated claims, etc), where at best they have pockets of support.

Oh, and spend more than 30 seconds talking to them, and you'll see how quickly their ideas go to poorly researched conspiracy theories.

Oh funny, I just, inspired by Stable Diffusion, ordered a 3090 ti at what I thought was a good price. Well, I have 30 days to see what happens… There could be an interesting ripple effect if GPUs become more widely available in general. «Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021.» (from https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...)

I'm glad you got your volume control networked. I kind of gave up on that, since everything kept changing with every release.

"Decentralized" in the developing sense, for distributed consumer, business and individual services, is about identity and trust. In contrast to "federated," the services do not have to have a specific agreements between them, they just have to adhere to standards with identity and privacy baked in. As an example, this was how OpenID Connect was supposed to work, but for simplicity, most logins only permit a few providers. The modern standards around these ideas, if you really want to explore, are Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers, sometimes collectively referred to as "self-sovereign identity."[1] These standards are designed to enable deep exchange of information between any services (with user permission), while preserving privacy. Each participating service just gets a random identifier, with no personal information.

The idea of "files," where all the information required for a "document," is disappearing for many purposes. A document is a moment in time. Instead, information is an aggregate panel from distributed (decentralized) information. This is evident from how federated identity works today, and how specialized services people access from a web site work with increasing ease and utility, though today it's about pushing the envelope with obscurity and plunder.

If you only work in files, and you "even manage" to do complex things with your volume control, and you're content, then you're basically part of the problem. You have a 1990s vision of a desktop, which you expect every other user to climb to identically, even though many of the steps constantly shift for arbitrary reasons. The steps you used to get your volume control to work that way were about a moment in time configuration, built on all kinds of underlying knowledge that is probably deeply entrenched in your life, and it should have been simple. Do you expect every user to go through that, or does it take a special user?

Consumer solutions, based on the web and closed operating systems and ecosystems, are providing these features, based on increasingly sophisticated ideas of "what most people want," and based on deep integration with distributed (but not decentralized) web services. These approaches have risks, but also huge advantages, but they truly need more consciousness from end users. If Linux is going to be relevant to more than a small cohort of desktop users, and a Linux desktop is meaningful as a true open, comprehensible platform rather than a way to access a browser which does black magic, it has to highlight these features. These features are available in completely coherent forms (see Matter standards, IoT, Solid, VC, DID, etc) to allow services like getting a drivers license or booking a complex international trip online in minutes without relying on a black box web site, but because so many people can only see a 1990s desktop, efforts behind Linux Desktops are basically a dog chasing after a 1990s car.

KDE was way ahead of the curve with Nepomuk. It provided a local semantic database of fine information, built around standards with networked schemas that support entailment. So rather than typing documents from memory, local and distributed information is integrated. But it was too ambitious, and most technical users got distracted by the money to be made selling pet food online or the challenge of getting their volume control networked. So, today, all the centralized providers, and open projects like Wikidata, are forming around these ideas. But Linux desktops are too busy trying to re-add live backgrounds to pay much attention.

Finally, notice I am only now mentioning "blockchain?" Blockchain can be used in some schemes, for example to host public keys and revocations, but this is not a side effect of blockchain hype, it's about where everything is headed, if computers are more than fancy typewriters.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity

«If you believe that the number of people wanting a file manager and office suite is decreasing, what do you think the desktop environment actually will consist of?»

Look at ChromeOS and tablets. But, if you want to skip to a decentralized, user innovation and privacy-first future, look at KDE Nepomuk (which was an ambitious decentralized semantic desktop that collapsed), MS Graph (which is a centralized semantic system that probably won't), Plan 9, Nix, Qubes.

«Isn't that precisely what the system is??»

It's not really networked, in fact it's going backwards. X lets you run distrbibuted application on a fine level, as do other decentralized ideas like WS and HATEOAS, but we're reverting to a thin client model where the user is dependant on the browser and ???. But getting to the fine level requires more isolation, data & identify consciousness.

«What does this even mean? What is a "web based conversation" in terms of the user interface??»

Think of an inherently local, yet potentially complex control; a volume control. I can simply use it to control volume, but I might also want to mix volume with networked devices, which spirals into complexity, especially as we get into spatial audio. It's all possible on a Linux desktop, but doing it takes you into open ended complexity, compounded by the fact there are so many versions and combinations of software. A post-90s desktop could add a new control to the context menu which opened a live discussion about that version of that control and combination of desktop options.

I like Gnome well enough. I keep trying to switch to KDE for the additional settings, many of which are useful, and what I understand to be more innovative core features, but its lack of consistency just feels janky. Gnome provides the most essential features, including a good amount of customization around focus and window switching, and Gnome apps are consistent in appearance and features, such as being able to select text in the UI.

The 'problem' I have is that all these desktops are trying to recreate a 1990s era desktop. At least the Gnome people are professionals focused on a higher goal than a cool anime background, but I think the contingent of people who want a desktop experience with local media player, file manager, office suite and games is decreasing daily.

If they don't want to be subsumed by tablet and ChromeOS options, focusing on goals like being a secure, networked operating system that an ordinary user would appreciate might be a good way forward. I think embracing rather than hiding the technical nature of the OS would be a good way to do this, but nothing like the disaster of forums today. For example, give every widget an ID and version, and create web based conversations around them that are embedded directly in the UI.

You can do all this with the mostly ignored part of Fielding's REST, HATEOAS.

Xanadu has a lot of interesting ideas and Nelson is a visionary, though the idea to visually link works just doesn't work. However, transclusion is an important idea, that is critical for Wikipedia's style of evolution, and will be important as Wikidata and other linked data (semantic web) applications get off the ground.

However, the vast majority of the web consists of cheap short cut web sites that aren't much different than dial up systems. AKA start up money grabbing culture trying to carve up every little idea into a unicorn. And once they start carving things up, they sure don't want to collapse it and help create the semantic web, except privately behind the scenes, in creepy surveillance capitalist and other centralizing projects.

I don't love mediawiki software, starting with PHP, but it's indisputable that it is one of the most successful software platforms in the world, and it has quite an extensive ecosystem.

But thank you for pointing out that it's docuwiki that is attempting to inappropriately ride the mediawiki coattails and muddling use.

The fact this site is starting out without the basic feature of categories is a grave mistake. Maybe docuwiki edits them differently, but having clicky forms for every data field is also contrary to how wp became successful.

Because it's not using mediawiki, it will not be any parallel in development to wp, which is also a grave starting mistake.

They really should NOT make this look like wikipedia, even if it's similar in concept. Wikipedia (and its software, mediawiki) are three things: 1. content that is generated, 2. the community and culture and 3. a standard toolset. This site has very little in common with any of these, and especially the third point. The visual cue of the site's appearance indicates at least 3, but they aren't even using Mediawiki software.

Me too. I think there is a lot of deep thought in KDE, but it's too open to customization. I don't mean settings, I mean visual changes, and that leads to it looking like an unpleasant jumbly mess out of the box, and I'm skeptical that further customization will make that better. And they got a lot of important consistency things wrong that Gnome mostly addresses, like selectable text (almost) everywhere.

Linux desktops in general horribly suffer from constantly reproducing desktops from a moment in the 1990s, where you have an anime background and some bright text on a dark background and you post it and everyone goes "ooh" and "ahhh" and "how did you do that." One glaring sign of this is design is called "art" rather than design. And you have a kind of mostly compatible Office suite (like a dog chasing after a car), one month you can do awesome actions in the file manager or have a live background but next month that's broken, and every month a new music player, as if any majority of people use local music and documents anymore. What an embarassing waste of time.

It's sad because great ideas abound, like KDE's semantic desktop (which is basically a decentralized version of what Microsoft is building toward), Unity's 3d desktop (which failed when all that neato stuff meant nothing), scriptable desktops, distributed desktops, all kinds of glorious ideas. However it turns out the infinite monkeys creating desktops get distracted easily.

They should start by deeply adopting ideas like design tokens. Here's another idea: give every widget and pane a unique identifer with version, and link them to the web using Linked Data, so at least the world of confusion support forums could feature some coherence, you could embed support in the widgets themselves. That would be a 2022 desktop.

I've worked in social services, benefit kings/queens are a thing, but they are only a small visible part of the picture. It is incredibly uncharitable to call alcoholics lazy. These are people who very often have very difficult base struggles. It is an extreme luxury to be at a point where you can easily have a well paying stable job, not to mention the freedom and received ability to "create a startup," and to top it off, expect success. To look at all this with a self serving perspective, well that's laziness.

The drug does something. It at least creates a distraction. That distraction can create a helpful feedback loop. After all, depressive/anxious/etc thoughts are generally arbitrary (though relentness), out of the all the thoughts one could have. So a chemical causing an effect, or just the process of trying an intervention can be useful. Distraction is incredibly important in therapy, it is after all ultimately how we all deal with the fact our lives have an end.

There are formal efforts to create 'decentralized identifiers,' including W3C DIDs[1] and KERI[2].

1. https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ 2. https://keri.one/keri-resources/

The former has good traction, why not support that? (they don't require a blockchain btw, though some implementations propose perhaps one of the most appropriate uses of one, simply to store public keys and revocations).

I think (?) the audience for this site is global, so you can't really say "National" weather service. Darksky works around the world (though I presume not truly everywhere). Glad to hear they are extending non proprietary access to their Weather Kit, that's an encouraging move.

Fully agree. A diagram is ok to describe a flow, but for complex code or systems, round tripping is a necessity, otherwise the diagram is or quickly becomes inaccurate and worse than useless. In the 90s I tried software called TogetherJ, it seemed to support round tripping really well, so well maintaining code was the same as maintaining diagrams, and led to better quality in both, along with documentation and other benefits such as relaying higher order concepts. I just did a search for togetherj and the only reference I could find was a 20 year old forum mention. Weird. I suppose there must be high end enterprise CASE software that still supports this approach, though I'm guessing most people abuse it so it's no longer respected. I think these things happen in cycles, as we can 'orchestrate' larger systems with meta descriptions of components, they become more valuable.

You didn't mention your actual life and what makes you happy, aside from mentioning you are lonely and stressed.

If you're happy with the pay/location, work less. Most people really only have a few hours a day of full-on productivity. A large part of many jobs is station.

Maybe teach or do something so working less is less obvious, because that would be noticed. But get a life, something that lets you enjoy moving around and engage with people who aren't part of work. It's very, very unhealthy to just work. And don't forget, the only 'reward' for being a committed worker in this situation is more work. You will be taken for granted.

A lot of comments are about becoming an "actual" 10x developer. But that's contextual. If you're solving problems for a company or people you care about, great. Otherwise, tech comes and goes, keep the focus on quality but otherwise it's unlikely there's much meaning to "better" work unless you're creating something deeply reusable or are in research.

I was also reminded of "Neko" so I installed it on my Ubuntu system. To be honest I kind of feel sorry for Neko on large, high resolution displays, it's a lot more work than it used to be on a 14" XGA screen.

Not if the preserved part was severely restricted in what it was.

I think Framework is great, I'll consider one when they offer a good trackpoint, but Doctorow's description of Thinkpads is…. weird. Like, a heavy X1 Carbon? Replaceable drives that don't go to 2TB? Other generalizations that just don't make sense.

I've been using Thinkpads for a couple decades now, in some ways the quality has wavered (partially due to contemporary concessions like compromises to be thinner) but they are still in general the best mainstream systems to run Linux with end user and field support. I've installed Ubuntu on every system, especially in the last years it has "just worked," and Lenovo even increasing offers Ubuntu pre-installed on some models.

It is 8 years old. Agree about XML.

Yes, but how much does it cost Apple to put a larger volume in, compared to what they charge the consumer for that one feature? I have very often seen Apple users hampered by this, including losing data due to having to juggle external storage. Upsell.

I don't see why that's the case for Lenovo though (which I'm most familiar with - Thinkpads), since you have to order online. They could do batches of different configurations, it might add a small delay for particular configurations, but that would be ok. What they do now, mostly limiting larger RAM/storage configs to top end CPUs, seems like an upsell (though at least their storage is usually replaceable, and aftermarket offers better price/choice, though the spare small capacity device is a waste).

In Apple's case, it simply seems like an upsell. They must have enough volume to sell lower spec, large storage capacity Macbook Airs at stores, or online.

No way I am going to trust today's guessificial algorithm. The capacity/cost does scale as the file size increases, and the algorithms get smarter. Photos can increasingly be analyzed for useful correlation. Today we can find by time, place, people, object, eventually scenes will be reconstructed, lifestyle patterns contributing to long term health outcomes, leading to real diagnosis, memory augmentation and simulation (much of it requiring better privacy). In the meantime, I enjoy being able to time travel to amazing or obscure moments (even if it's just that amazing abricotine in 2016).

See my [comment below](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761413)

You're right about km vs mile, but it's consistently km in the comparisons so the same proportional result. The telcos don't need to provide coverage to every square meter, but they do have to reach many sparsely populated areas. The large carriers have it as a goal to cover areas like Northern Ontario better. I don't know what Australia's policies are, but they would have to be part of the comparison.

The cost difference between Telstra and Telus/Bell/Rogers is double, but over a month tens of dollars is not a significant part of a budget, and when consuming video &c there's really not that much different between 30 - 40 GB (unlimited is another story). For people on a very limited budget, there are lower cost plans, but even with the Telstra plan it's not comparable to wired.

Don't get me wrong, I think Canada, right or wrong, coddles these big carriers as a defence against international players, which creates an uneven playing field here (sharing infrastructure at competitive rates seemed like a fair recourse). I am just trying to bring more perspective to the table than "Ontario has a high density so should be cheap," besides the obvious "we are not just talking about Ontario or Toronto here."

Wired is the real thing to discuss here, and what may get lost in the shuffle.

Ontario has 14 persons per square mile. The population density of ALL of Western Europe is 181, ten times greater, Netherlands is 521. Ontario is quite a bit closer to other "less dense" provinces than most countries used for comparison.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t... https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...

I'm not posting enough references here, but this whole conversation has been so limited in facts and proportion.

The point is the government wants carriers to provide service everywhere, which includes places like Nunavut, 0.019 persons per square mile.

There are local initiatives, and some are really fantastic, but it's difficult to bootstrap those everywhere.

Go to https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm and search for Nunavut and see who comes up.

These prices need to come down, more competition and local initiatives need to happen, and more innovation for systems like mesh networks. It is particularly upsetting when ways can't be found to share infrastructure. But if providing access to every Canadian is the goal (rather than for every person in a city at a cost less than a bag of groceries) there is probably some logic to the existing system.

Some people will say "just pay for Starlink everywhere," but it's really not ok for a country's access to be owned by another country (as long as Musk is still on earth), wired ultimately has advantages, and there are probably benefits to supporting wired infrastructure, and competition and choice are important.