jehb

I mean, sure, there are plenty: regulation, battery life, ruggedness, the creep factor, the fact that this does not provide me with anything similar to the value of a smartphone.

Not all of us spend our days walking down urban streets, having a desire to have the things around us augmented. My smart phone spends 98% of its life in my pocket because I don't want or need any application most of the time. I've tried adopting a smartwatch on multiple occasions and never found it offered me any value. All it did was convince me to turn off a bunch of notifications I didn't need to be getting to begin with.

It's in fact pretty easy to melt an egg. First, raise it above 29 degrees Fahrenheit or so, and this will melt the internal section. Remove this melted internal section and set it aside. Now melt the external section, which is mostly calcium carbonate, by raising it to about 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. There, a melted egg.

I'd love to see the results parsed by reason for skipping breakfast.

I used to intentionally skip breakfast as a part of an intermittent fasting routing. I wasn't particularly strict about it, and I didn't really buy into the ketogenesis arguments. But it was a calorie restriction scheme that worked for my lifestyle.

Fast forward a few years, and while I still miss breakfast a lot, I find now it's because of work stress. It seems like I can't ever get out of bed in the morning without being immediately greeted by some "emergency" that popped up overnight, and jumping into that before I've really had any opportunity to start the day on my own terms.

I can't help but feel like the latter is going to be a lot more correlated with health problems down the road than the former.

Not to take this conversation too far off track, but the reverse argument could just as easily be made. Companies are amoral entities, existing only to deliver whatever value their owners wish to extract. Governments, meanwhile, are just the manifestation of the will of the people who live in a place. Even currency itself is just a creation of the people by way of the government; no business has any particular right to it.

Typically when I attend an outdoor events trying to go green, they'll replace something that's normally single-use with something reusable, like renting metal cutlery instead of using plastic. This feels weird. That said, I can't tell you how many times I've seen that reusable cutlery end up in the garbage because people can't be bothered.

No amount of greenwashing is going to solve the real problem, which is that too many people just don't care. The greenest solution was probably not to attend the festival to begin with; the second greenest solution was to attend but actually give a shit about the impact of your decisions.

Is this really the issue that it used to be, though? I'm curious if I'm the only person who just doesn't send email much anymore in my personal life.

Yes, I get a lot of email. But it's almost all transactional or subscription. The number of emails I send or receive with other humans is pretty dang low. Most institutions these days require using their platform for communications. Most people I care about who I communicate with electronically I do over SMS or Signal or occasionally a Mastodon message.

I still own the domain, so I could easily pick up up and move to a different mail service in probably just several minutes of setting up an account and changing some DNS values. So while not fully independent, the time spent getting outbound email right is going to have less impact than other changes I could make.

And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork the project and development of a free version would continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven project, only for corporate-driven projects where a single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to all of the codebase.

In my experience as a hiring manager, I will do a web search. If the LinkedIn result is what I find first that I'm sure is you, I'll click that, but if you have a personal homepage, I'd actually probably rather see that. YMMV, of course.

They could be, but often they launched something on-platform in AOL's walled garden that could not be accessed by a web browser. Basically, windows inside of the AOL application. Screenshots would explain better than I can but I'm having trouble finding a good one. Maybe: https://i.insider.com/53f27f8069bedd317d1c5fb5?width=1200

I think it's interesting that the time horizon being discussed here is so short.

I don't think I've cared about new technology... ever. I have cared about "new to me" technology at several points in my life.

When I was a teenager, the world was FULL of new (to me) technology, and I ate it all up. Programming in QBasic and Turbo Pascal, using hex editors to figure out file formats in my video games and mod them, building PCs from parts. Along the way to my late 30s, a few more new to me things produced excitement: GIS, Bash, Vim, Raspberry Pis, 3D printing, Linux containers, etc. I was years late to all of those parties, but still happy when I got there.

No amount of adopting the new version of an existing thing will ever replicate the joy and wonder of encountering something entirely new to you, and as you stay in the industry longer, there just aren't as many completely-new-to-you things to come across. Now, I have more excitement learning new things that have absolutely no connection to tech, because it's still novel enough to be exciting. Small engine repair, biology, and carpentry have sparked more wonder in my more recent years than anything I did on a computer.

I use it all the time, not because I'm as good as I'd like to be about keeping things out of the cloud that don't need to be there, but because I often have ad hoc spreadsheets that are bigger than Google Sheets can handle.

It's an interesting question, but it's the opposite of the one I usually ask.

Software should be open source. "Why try to monetize?" would be the question I'd ask myself.

I can't answer this question generally, but one example that is very close to home is bamboo. (Actually, it's no longer close to home. We moved, and despite being very close to our old house, have an order of magnitude fewer mosquitos.) Water collects in the broken culms, which can be very deep, and doesn't go away because they remain shaded.

I live on a busy road, not too far from the intersection with another road that has a quarry on it. The worst thing of living here are the dump trucks who come speeding around the corner and then use their unmuffled engine brakes to slow down to zero to make a turn onto the road with the quarry. Sure, we've got the kind of assholes who mod their trucks and motorcycles to be as loud as possible, too, but nothing can compete with the low frequency vibration of those engine brakes. When I'm in my basement, I can barely hear the road noise at all, but I can feel the truck engine brakes.

Fun fact, when I worked at Red Hat for many years on the Opensource.com project, we created a collection of dozens of great articles on the ins and outs of git, written by open source community members. You can still find most of those articles here:

https://opensource.com/tags/git

Unfortunately, the team who ran site got caught up in Red Hat's layoffs earlier this year and the site has been sitting in limbo ever since, so I don't know what will happen to it long term.

Non-exploitative business models.

Yeah, but back then we were all just cramming "Britney Spears" into our Meta Keywords tags; we weren't actually eroding the quality of our entire web properties to court a live-or-die relationship with a single traffic vendor.

As I read the process, at this point they're primarily looking for "conversation starters" (my phrase, not theirs) in the form of presentations, as well as attendees to discuss at a number of in-person events this year (I'll be at the one at All Things Open in Raleigh NC in October). I think once they've got something a little more substantial to review, they'll have a more robust "public comment"-type process.

I'm sure you could also offer a meta-comment on the process itself.

Of note, if you're interested in helping participate in the discussion of what an open source AI would actually look like, the Open Source Initiative is looking for your help:

https://opensource.org/deepdive/

This has not been my experience at all with SaaS.

I find SaaS products, including ones I have paid for, disappear at a much greater rate than the rate at which the desktop tools they replaced stop working.

There's also next to nothing I can do as an end user when they do disappear. If I'm very lucky, I get a limited window to be able to export a portion of my data. But we've eroded data formats to the point where even if I can export my data, there might be nothing to plug it into. What good is a CSV, even, when what I need is a tool that processes the data in the CSV? There's no option for me to keep an old machine or a VM around and self-support on a discontinued piece of SaaS.

That's to say nothing of the price hikes. $10 a month today becomes $14.99 next month, $17.99 in a year, and before you know it the proprietary system you've locked yourself into now costs five times what you originally paid. Sure, they might add some more features, but since it's SaaS, in many cases you have no choice to seek out a different vendor to provide the same feature, as again, your data is locked up in a format you can't easily extract and work with elsewhere.

"We're not firing you for discussing your wages, we're firing you for leaking proprietary individual labor budget information with unauthorized employees."

> No thanks, I don't want a human connection and asking someone for help when looking up information.

Ironically, at the rate the quality of Google results is current diminishing, you may need a human connection in order to have any sense that the information you are getting is accurate in the very near future.

I think it won't be the worst thing if curation is seen as valuable again.

I'll take a swing, but I welcome additions.

> How does an Open source hardware company make profit?

The same way an open source software company does, which is to say, there's no definitive answer. If you're building an open source platform, you're just as likely to make a profit from something in the ecosystem around the platform as you are the platform itself. Sure, you can sell the hardware, but you're likely to make as much or more selling your expertise around the hardware, whether that's in the form of add-ons (think: open core), books and courses and training, certifications for certain compliance needs, or services customizing the platform to meet a specific need for a specific client or industry.

It's worth noting that pretty much every successful open source software company targets enterprise clients. It's (sadly) very difficult to make money in the long term from consumers and hobbyists, because price is so often the deciding factor in their decision making. If you crack that nugget, you'll be among the few.

> If they do want to make profit by going closed source, what is the issue in that ?

Mostly, it's the backlash of a perceived bait and switch, or "openwashing" something that isn't. It's harder to track contributions for open source hardware like it is software, but it's worth noting that if a copyleft license is used, outside contributors would need to agree to the license change (if there were any outside contributors).

It's also, frankly, a value add that goes away. I bought a Prusa 3D printer because of the openness. If that goes away, so too would go away my willingness to pay a premium for their product.

> Does it matter if they go closed source? People still figure a way out to tinker with most stuff.

It depends? One of the most important parts of open source is the ability to freely redistribute my changes. If I improve an open source product, I have a right to share my version with anyone I want, including by selling it. I may not have that right if it's closed.

It's also a slippery slope. The changes hardware manufacturers make to keep people from copying their products also tend to make them harder to tinker with. Or to be sure I could get parts from a different supplier if the original maker went out of business.

I'm sure others can add much more to my comments.

For anyone else looking for the whole list, here it is:

https://github.com/Lxtharia/minegrub-theme/blob/main/resourc...

Thanks. I should have been clearer, I am okay leaving tech. :)

I came here to make this comment if it hadn't already been made.

Seriously though, this is the one thing that has kept me a ThinkPad user ever since I got my first university-issued laptop 21 years ago. I've had other laptops since then, and I've never liked any of them. Once I've got my hands in a comfortable position for typing on a laptop, I often have to move either my entire arm or my entire laptop in order to use a trackpad. I don't even really want my laptop to have a trackpad, it's just something for my palm to accidentally hit.

No, it's not comfortable for extended gaming or other things like that, but honestly if I'm not using an external mouse for that I'm going to be pretty grumpy anyway.

> I work seasonally and spend the other half of the year trying to disconnect and focus on real-life, outdoor hobbies.

A bit off-topic, but I'm curious if you have any advice for finding seasonal jobs? It feels a bit ironic to be working in tech, making twice what I actually need to live off of, but with no real option to just work half as much.

It's also missing from the marketing side of the house. I've jumped between technical marketing (being an expert on the software we sell) and marketing technology (being an expert in the tools we use to power our marketing stack). In both types of roles, I've found it difficult to find career progression without a move into management. So I guess now I'm in middle management, and struggling with this for helping my own employees along their career paths.

There sadly doesn't seem to be much appetite for finding parity with the product engineering side of the house, even when the work is quite similar. A principal architect is a principal architect, whether the systems they are tying together are Istio and Redis and Kubernetes or Salesforce and Marketo and Tableau. A Senior Developer is a Senior Developer whether the code they're writing is for our product or for the backend of our CMS.

> Privacy is about giving people the freedom to choose how their personal information is distributed.

That's one take, and I won't argue that it's an unreasonable one.

That said, if you asked me to describe the UX patterns I might expect to find on a privacy-respecting website, interrupting me to ask me for personal information probably wouldn't be on that list. I probably also wouldn't have expected to see the third-party tracking pixels from Cloudflare, Datadog, and Google, etc.

That's okay. It's not egregious, it's just a bit odd, like if you were reading Apache documentation on a site served by IIS.

I can't help but notice that I got an interruptive ad asking for my email address on a site that's supposed to be about privacy.

I understand it's a Substack, but something about that just felt jarring given the subject matter.