hootbootscoot

or perhaps indicative of what "economic value" means in the context of a finite planet with finite resources.

I think you DID nail the needed change point right on the head. Our economic system prioritizes "anyone should be able to do anything at any time for a price, but the price externalities and waste are irrelevant."

I'll draw a parallel with PC's "This thing should be able to do anything at anytime and be everything to everyone" vs "this device runs circuitry and control loops that optimally manage a given pre-described domain"

Great manifesto, or at least the beginnings of one.

Favorite Quote: "Instead of planned obsolescence, there should be planned longevity."

Which, of course, is yet another artifact of capitalism.

I'll contend that our global economic "system" (or lack thereof, in terms of intended consequences) is a far larger determinant of our living conditions than any local/national government, intertwined as it is with "the economy" (in thrall to?)

Let's not forget where planned obsolescence came from, nor the stream of constant revenue it generates for it's practioners (if also, perhaps, casting it's proponents as antagonists to human potential's realization)...

... but onto more practical matters: I've often found cool chips in the trash and wished to be able to onboard their unique capabilities without having to circumvent:

1) an informational vacuum (their maker went bankrupt, or their technical data is locked in some cellar.)

2) "protection" mechanisms designed to create opacity, because "capitalism" and competition, etc.

I am imagining some sort of Forth-Borg performing some kind of JTAG perimeter-scan-like activity that basically can "learn" any hardware at the raw gate level and then impose primitive functional blocks on top, regardless of the original intention of such logical structures. Am I crazy? probably...

"you will be assimilated" and it guesses the voltages, the high/lows/pullups, bypass caps, etc. perhaps based around a Field Programmable Analog Array..

ok, i'm seriously digressing.

I agree with the author. Bloat and deliberate obfuscation and wasteful fake-"abstractions" that merely obfuscate, bloat, and treat users to less info etc, this all has reached absurd depths of silliness.

I see this sort of movement as (ironically) inspiring new platforms and devices, while perhaps also enabling us to re-examine existing systems in light of such ideas.

mmmm I'm skeptical of a singular study in which a certain tribe of people are asked to modulate a sound to an octave within their singing range disproving octave equivalence being hardwired.

Wanna know why? Our aural circuits have frequency binning, much like an FFT, and they "ring" at certain frequencies, and an octave is either 1/2 or 2x a given frequency/"note". Closer examination of this system under stimulus is what I would consider a gold standard in this field of research. The form of research undertaken in this study suggests many things, and the researchers have chosen a particular conclusion and it's not necessarily indicated by even their own data.

https://www.britannica.com/science/ear/Analysis-of-sound-by-...

Given the current propensity for thinking that frequency detection is pre-cortex (lower level than speech decoding) and available rather early on in the evolutionary chain, I'm going to be interested in physical studies, not social science.

And if it exposes war crimes? Crimes against humanity?

... more shooting the messenger... villains.

Out of curiousity, what statement did I make to inspire a downvote from someone?

Sorry, I meant "read Euclid in Greek" not Latin. doh.

I thought that this was a great & succinct article.

I wonder if the author would have enjoyed a different school or town/region instead. We might simply be addressing culture shock, jet-lag, and a lame school, lol

I hear you, but I think that there is a significant portion of the "modern" university system (particularly larger schools or systems) that is merely paying lip-service to these values, particularly at the undergrad level.

I had the good fortune of small class sizes and being able to debate professors. (Appeal to authority didn't count lol) I think that some school even prioritize what you mention: St Johns school of the great books (not sure if this is the name) in Santa Fe, for example, makes you learn ancient Greek and Latin. When you learn Geometry, you read Euclid in Latin and argue about his books for weeks on end... It's the opposite of the superficiality the author mentions. There are costs to this, however, and they spend less focal time on the 20th century, when, arguably, many important events and works occurred.

Talk about someone projecting their own experiences as universal truths for everyone, LOL

...and then trying to use Heidegger as an excuse for intellectual laziness is pretty silly too. The more languages you know, the more you really understand the true meaning of words in your "own" language. (Certainly with Latinic languages and English, for example.)

There's also a point to be crossed at which you can dream in another language and there's a bit of a desert to be crossed before that happens.

Overall, it was a challenging and somewhat thought-provoking read, but I feel that

1) the author approached the subject superficially and in a flippant manner

2) the author is young and has much to learn about LIFE on earth, whether it be China, or any of the other 180 something "countries" we have divided our planets human societies into.

That said: I've noted that large nationalistic nations (China, the USA, Brasil, Russia...) tend to know less about the outside world and navel-gaze more, whereas smaller nations with many different neighbors (most of the world) tend to be aware of the cultural framing on almost any issue, even if they defer to local customs or beliefs. This is obviously a gross generalization, but a flavor one nevertheless is imparted with due to:

1) A tendency towards being linguistically bound in thought. (I will propose that the author here is dead wrong, Martin Heidegger notwithstanding, and that languages bound thought possibilities by their grammars and biases)

2) A tendency to not have experienced any foreign nationals in rural areas, or certainly none that are deemed to be equal human beings by a significant part of the local society.

3) A tendency to believe the local media and governmental narratives at the cost of being completely un-aware of other narratives, regardless of belief or resistance to such narratives.

Ha! That kinda flies in the face of facts. The UK and the US did NOT "over-quarantine" and this is precisely the problem.

Nations, even some bad-old-authoritarian ones, that didn't dilly-dally and turn the question of lockdown into a political issue, but took it as a public health issue, those are the nations that are re-opening now with low enough numbers to claim to be over the first wave.

The Tory's and GOP's treatment of a pandemia as a political football, instead of a public health menace, led to spotty lockdown actualities that precisely resulted in MORE spreading of the virus. I.E. The Wisconsin Supreme Courts decision and the immediate opening of the bars and no masks, no social distancing, etc. These are FAILED policies and the ideology behind them is incorrect.

What you are spouting might have been debatable several months ago, but I'm going to have to rub your nose in the reality that your entire set of talking points are demonstrably rubbish.

gollvm? vs gogcc. that's why i said "an IR interface" when someone asked about transpiling crystal to go and vice-versa.

an IR interface, lol

thanks for the helpful tip! but alas, I'm still on Xorg

Yes, we run several production services on it. Much like Go, it's built for the web, and it's standard library will handle most things (files, http, memory io, ffi to c, compression and image formats, etc... quite extensive.)

There's the likelihood that many future users will encounter it via a "from soup to nuts complete" web application framework like amber or lucky (ROR-like) that include scaffolding for models and migrations and such, or possibly with the sinatra/express'esque kemal framework that mostly concentrates on routing and exposing the request/response cycle, allowing you to inline middleware and pass the request context through your own stuff.

.ecr templating (syntactically similar to .erb templates) is built into the standard library and compiles to actual crystal code.

macros resolve to actual crystal code at compile time, so some of the ruby meta-programming requires a rethink.

While some folks eagerly await true parallelism, which I THINK was here already and then revoked temporarily, but I might be mistaken, I'm quite content to build distributed applications with Crystal communicating over standard protocols or directly via some kind of socket (sockets network and local also being part of standard library)

It's executables are fast, small, and don't use much ram (12megs is one anecdotal totally context-less number I'll throw at you, lol...)

I use crenv for controlling the version churn, as someone else pointed out, they are ramping up to v1.0, and they now claim to have largely finished breaking changes on 0.35.1 and are prepping for 1.0.0 already on the basis of where we are at now. I also tend to use local shards (specific versions) to ensure build reproducability.

Any specific questions?

I'm still stuck on default trackpad Y-scroll direction under Linux. I've done some hacky input stream filter fix, but it's not working in ALL applications. (dunno why...don't really care...)

I STILL feel uncomfortable using my thinkpad scrollpad in geany under linux, as it jumps and the scrolling isn't clearly indicating (through some animations i gather?) scrolling direction when I drag 2 fingers up and down...

Multi-touch, great!

...I just feel like basic behavior still appears to be an anti-intuitive, if admittedly equally logically viable (swiping the paper up or down vs swiping the scrollbar, metaphorically speaking)

It'll be largely underwater. See Hudson Bay? It's going to expand.

NORTHERN Siberia?

I'll grant you that Barnaul certainly knows of 35c+ temps, but arctic circle? Heat records have been broken. Source: broken heat records.

Ummm it's factually correct?

Re: "A small Russian town" lol, Do you propose that temperatures were different 50km away?

There is a massive heat wave rolling through NORTHERN Siberia right now, and it's not been confined to one town nor is this "record" the only broken heat record.

Southern Siberia, like the Altai region, hit's such temperatures regularly, but that's Novosibirsk and south. What we are referring to here is unprecedented, so let's please stop acting as if ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE wasn't a factual reality threatening mammalian life on earth.

What's the upside? Paying 1/4 of your salary for low-grade healthcare with a $10k deductible?

Getting treated like a second class human being by even "liberal minded" folk simply due to an accent and the lack of hip phrasology "like, I KNOW! I CAN'T EVEN, OMG"

Being kept at arms length for decades even after putting enormous amounts of money in escrow and submitting piles of paperwork just to get the slightest hope of a visa appointment at your local US consulate, let alone entering the Green Card Lottery?

It's over-rated, over-ripe, and the "Land of Opportunity" is now the "Go away, we have self-inflicted problems we will likely blame you for" land.

Flag this if you want, but I have direct personal experience in many many countries and I come from the states, so I'm not talking out of my behind. We are the meanest country on earth right now. That's why I left. (well, actually it was the Iraqi invasion, Guantanamo Bay, and the ongoing activities in central Asia coupled with the new-speak that even the Dem-aligned rags were pushing, NYT, WaPo "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and wars on emotions and such... but see, this is related: it's about being mean and making others pay with their lives for ones ideological comfort zone, etc.)

But that's funny, as my mother immigrated from Europe in the 50's and the naturalization process was rather straightforward.

If you are referring to national immigration quotas then I agree that yes, it was quite unfair for awhile now.

It's just a bit odd. There wasn't even a hard physical border with Mexico until the 1920's. There used to be a rather active workable "temporary farm worker visa" program that got sacrificed on the altar of pleasing xenophobic morons somewhere in the 70's or 80's I guess...

Family reunification is generally considered a right, not a privilege, at least in the "civilized world".

The US switched to acting stingy, mean, xenophobic, etc. a few decades ago. I'm not sure why, as it has about 1/9th the population density of an India.

One could wax philosophical about "the end of the west" and how the influx of immigrants was needed to colonize the land up to the Pacific Ocean and feed the factories of our vast manufacturing sector, and clearly those motives both dried up.

I'm not sure where the whole "punish immigrants and treat them like garbage" concept came from.

I may sound extreme to some folks, but having some experience as an immigrant FROM the USA moving TO Europe after significant time lived abroad (50+ countries in a decade) I can honestly say that no country on earth is currently more xenophobic and snobby.

Someone will probably flag me for promulgating such views but it's the inexorable conclusion I've come to given my experiences.

Excellent article.

I'd just skip the "when" and end up with lot's of different folders full of almost-identical ansible scripts lol...I've gone so far as to archive playbooks and banish them from the production folder just to lower the terror factor :D

But YES, ansible is amazing! all the simplicity of ssh and no leftover muppet agents plotting against ya!

I would qualify this: The web is simple when one uses it as intended. (hyperlinked documents that may or may not have interactivity beyond the hyperlinking and embedded media or animations etc.) The web is complex when one attempts to do "GUI by RPC". If one is OK with page reloads, this asynch remote folder browser hypercard thingy is fine. If one seeks to replicate the event-loop desktop "window"-based application one will have the use-case for large frameworks as one will literally be re-inventing all the wheels, which they tend to do, as this is not the default behavior of the application we call a web browser.

...almost... i'll accept "an SPA on one server-side route for that one complicated page that's full of bells and whistles."

and then I'm still going to say "yeah, i'm roughly equally verbose and spaghetti-like in even the best most prescient framework from the gods themselves" and merely wish for the means of modularization: breaking my server- rendered page that my javascript "unfolds from" into further little bits that can each have their own smaller less-spaghetti like world without having to try to dynamically load and include javascript on the client. Break it up. Divide et impera...

meteor

This was a very nice article. It was one of the best web-related articles I've read in a long time. I liked it.

This seems like a good thread to hijack for a second and complain about the default Ubuntu screencapture utility writing "scrot" into every file name, which is embarrassing to send to people and requires manual editing.