oscargrouch

> Great line of thinking. But I think the idea of earning income from a creative work throughout one's life also has value.

I agree with you, at least in parts. I was addressing only the issue of copyright with digital copies, where people watch. play or listen free of charge after a given period.

But still after the artist, crew, studio or company cashed from their success, they could still make copyright grants to people that want to reproduce their content.

For instance, the free extension would only cover private listening, viewing or playing. But if you want to play the movie in your theater and make some bucks out of it, them you would have to pay for the copyright with the 'extended period rule'.

If you are musician and want to sing the song in your show, you would have to pay for copyright.

The logic here goes to anyone that might sell others people labor while getting it for free. This should be protected by the copyright law, more or less the way it is now.

But for private consumption, just giving enough time that would not be reasonable to just "wait for when its free" for people that otherwise would be buying is enough.

If your kids want to watch the new Avengers movies that cost just 10 bucks, who would wait 3 years for such a small value?

The problem is the whole industry is still stuck in the 20th century where products were all physical goods.

The digital realm and copies are here to stay, they are fighting against the tide, and one day they will wake up that its a lost battle.

> A compromise is to retain the existing copyright periods (after which works go to the public domain),but after 5-10 years of creation, works would become free for non commercial distribution. So Netflix would still have to pay for movies in their catalog. But me torrenting it from people freely sharing it and playing it on VLC would be legal.

Yes, that's basically it. But 10 years is too much and unnecessary. Within 3 to 4 years anything stop being fresh. People that buy things when they are fresh are no longer interested, and its enough time to make it if your piece had a bad first launch, but by virtue started to catch-up and make some bucks to the creators.

The key is to define a period of time where the piece might stop trending until very few people pay for them. Analitics might help to get a reasonable period for each media.

I think is valid as long as it protects the right of people creating (now) digital goods, to be payed for if they created that value.

But i think the law is to harsh and actually can even destroy that piece from existing for being too severe over the copies of that work.

For movies or music for instance, something like 3 year period of copyright ownership would be fine.

People would still pay for first access to the piece, while it would be much more likely to find a copy after lets say, 100 years somewhere.

> We can decentralize the internet and serve Gemini over our new, decentralized space. We can work on more than just one of THE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEMS™ at a time, you know.

People are creating "killer apps" because the web evolved to its current state. Theres a lot of bloat of course, preventing new browsers to emerge and this is a real issue.

But the serious effort would be to scrap most of this bloat and create a leaner web standard that would be easier to implement and yet offer advantages for people developing in it. Seriously i dont know WHY Tim Berners Lee think the solution is something like Solid, but not to create a leaner version of his own creation.

Which developer will be ok to trade what he/she have today for http0.9+markdown? None, because is too little. Maybe the Linux manuals will find they are more popular there..

The creators will not want to add the solutions to problems that will appear, but this will just make it a small niche.

Im trying hard to launch a solution to decentralization that at the same time looks good for the developer and the user, and its really hard, because the status quo is very sophisticated. Its David vs. Goliath and there's no way to get there except by facing Goliath.

If the guys behind this at least optimize it to be "a protocol for terminal/console browsers" i'm pretty sure that they would find a niche to live and start, but not as something that when looking over the shoulders of the current web presents no advantages to developers or users.

They say they are not competing with the web, and that's ok, but they should at least do it in a way were the thing they created manage to exist. Otherwise it just looks like noise.

Sorry if i take this too serious, but its because we are all facing real danger now, the world we are heading to doesnt look pretty if we keep in this direction.

And more noise right now, just takes peoples attention from where we are really needing anyone help, and i think its a disservice, at least right now. Because we get more divided, and we are already just David, it will be even harder by being half-of-David.

Its cool if people dont care, or are in another phase in life, but at least how about to play in another playground, why waste peoples time in a arena and a time we need all the effort we can get?

Is there anything on Gemini that prevents centralization?

Because lets suppose this will happen, everyone now goes for the sweet land of Gemini.

At the beginning it will be just like the web in the nineties, full of indies web sites, a dozen open source clients, that implements the protocol, yay!

Profit right? Here now enter the 2000's of Gemini.. startups begin to grow stronger most of them mediating and selling the content of others that they get for free.

The individual gemini sites begin to fade, the startups create Gemini clients with a lot of new features starting to turn impossible for new implementations.

(Now its the time we start to ask ourselves, where did we see that movie?)

So whats the point of a new protocol or standard, if it doesnt solve the real issues we are facing nowadays, and the only solution it provides its to manipulate people emotions that we should get back to that romantic era of the internet, the 'belle epoque'.

"Its hard to solve the modern issues? get your time machine pal, lets get to the nineties and start everything again without solving the core issues, and if by chance we happen to thrive, just let those big problems to be solved by your grandson"

There is only one thing we should be doing right now: Decentralize the internet, making "blue seas" for new things to thrive making the moves of FAANGS to centralize and control data, information and computation futile by getting people out of a game they control.

A solution like Gemini would reset the game, yes, but only to have the same problems later, giving the creators were not trying to solve them in the first place.

Gemini is trying to solve a problem by using denial, and as we know, it doesnt actually solve the problems. It just make them disappear temporarily to hit us again in a near future.

You can make a Gemini client in two weeks? thats great, this is probably what you would take to make browsers in the nineties..

Sometimes the solution to a problem that you should not have only gets in the middle of solving the root issue, giving some people fall for the motto "problem solved, look the other way" where the initial problem gets completely forgotten.

This is the reason why i fear that if we dont act fast for some things, younger generations without the proper historical context, will only follow through a path that treat them like human cattle, only to serve the feudal FAANG rulers.

The cloud + dumb web/app clients duo is really dangerous to us all, and unfortunately this is the path we are heading to.

No control, no freedom, no power, no voice, working as a dumb colony of mere tech consumers.

Centralization should be the enemy of anyone who fight for those values.

Yes, Rust is one of those languages now. (C, C++ and the newcomers Rust and Zig)

> This misses the point. I don't care how the language implements the functionality if it meets my performance requirements and it is convenient to use.

I dont think it does, because it meant you are working on a simple language that can only afford to be simple delegating the harder parts to other languages that took the effort to be designed to deal with everything.

The convenience is payed by someone else, and the language that pay for the hard stuff are the ones that are complex, because they need to work well with any sort of algorithms.

This is only being talked about now, because ABI compability is already working.

The Swift compiler is in C++ targeting the LLVM and therefore with great interoperability with C and C++ through Clang.

The Swift compiler also ships with Clang, and you can link C and C++ projects that are dependencies of Swift packages using the Swift package manager with little effort.

> I’ve got a feeling that swift is becoming a very polluted mashup of features that come from parties with conflicting interests. AFAIK, internally at Apple, teams pull in different directions (e.g. to get SwiftUI), at the same time there’s this half-baked differentiable programming / swift4tf manifesto, then there’s the backend swift initiative with vapour.

Cathedral and the Bazar..

You are basically complaining about how messy the bazar model is, and yet the bazar gave us Linux and in the end it won the race against all the others working over the Cathedral model and with millions of dollars invested in them.

Its fine to work at the bazar model, and it seems messy at first, but as long theres a 'cathedralization' phase from time to time it will work as a living entity, with constant organic evolution.

Any software where you will need to develop serious things for will suck.

Almost nobody feels miserable in languages like python because they rarely have to deal with the ugly stuff or having people depending their lives on it. Thats the 50% of the fun writing in it, because you will deal mostly with the cool things, and who would not like the language that gives you that kind of pleasure?

And the languages that are used for this kind of stuff will suck somehow, because its hard to make things right on them, it requires a lot of discipline and you will have to deal with big codebases, in big teams.. so the things gets much harder to do right.

The guy that is chearing Rust today, is the guy that will complain 10 years from now, how Rust sucks, because he have to deal with it everyday in its big avionics codebase and any mistake can cost million of dollars or peoples lives.

Its psychology. We need the shiny new thing to give more meaning to our lives. It will never stop, but with time you learn to navigate over it a little better.

There is very little change in languages now, and once someone does a real paradigm shift, it will be impossible to ignore.

From memory, a thing i've implemented in C++ that its basically impossible in almost any other languages (with few exceptions).

Represent a data table in memory where the columns are from different types, where the data is backed by a arena allocator and represented contiguously in memory.

Of course you can do a data table representation in almost any language, but once you benchmark the implementations, the languages that gives you full control of memory and are good at moving bytes are the ones that lead in performance.

Lars Bak once said that C++ is a great "byte chunker" (if i recall the term correctly), explaining why its a good language to create a compiler or a VM in it.

No, its ok and not part of that category.

I meant for languages where the hard parts are delegated to another like Python and Javascript (C and C++ respectively).

Is there any language where string handling doesn't suck? (No script languages please, because they cheat by implementing the hard things on C or C++)

From memory the less horrible experience i had was with Go, but there's help for the slices on the runtime which let the difficult parts hidden and also the batteries-included std library, which is one of the most well designed standard libraries out there.

Buffer management is one of the things that sucks the most in any language, and the ones that dont its because the complexity is hidden in another fundamental layer.

> think landing a mature cross-platform desktop app framework which is not beholden to any browser vendors is a huge goal.

So this adapts to different browser engines?

I think this will play in favor of Electron. Because its important to have more control, where you can customize and adapt the customize background engine.

The other thing to take into account is that Chrome itself will want to compete in this vertical, with little modifications a Javascript "application" that reuses the same browser engine you already have in your machine (BTW, I think there is something called 'Carlo' that basically achieve that).

This is a really brutal market to compete, so i'm inclined to think the opposite. Its hard to propose real value here , and if you don't do it, its hard to beat more well established propositions.

I think one big problem with this approach is that if the people behind this find a niche good enough its very easy for browsers to just implement the new ideas and completely kill the competition giving everyone has a deployed browser already.

Im doing something that is based on browsers for instance, but the end product diverge quite a bit from traditional browsers and if they try to play the catchup game, i have at least a 2-year window of opportunity.

Remember PhantomJS? And Phantom was actually providing something browsers were not doing at the time.

It has no real distinct features from what browsers already do right now, and whatever way they make it easy to use, if the product by some change get traction, it will be easy for them to just ship with that feature built it.

It may provide some value on convenience, but its easily copiable by a competitor that is deployed everywhere, which is a big threat to their bussiness model.

That was what i've always think as well. If theres a problem with our culture, that we keep passing through generations, we could even buy more time if we escape, but the problem might go with us.

If we dont fix the problem in the core before we colonize other planets, we will become a interplanetary virus working as a parasyte and killing our host with time.

The middle-man in this case is a trusted one, the owner of the centralized infrastructure, not like in MITM.

Isnt possible that one peer encrypt, pass it to the central server who have the other key, the central server than encrypts again and share it with the real end making it believe the key he is using actually is the same one generated in the first part of the process?

Its like the OR from tor but with 3 parties instead.

How the receiving party can be sure the key was not switched by the all-mighty middle man who can control everything?

It was Opera perhaps?

In the nineties i was in the bussiness of dial-up internet providers here in Brazil and remember how handy was Opera back then.

For instance, it was a great dial up manager back then, and it made the effort of installing dial up clients on Windows machines very easy.

IDK, we should think if we would think its reasonable to add SMTP or IMAP protocol support in browsers, or if this move would be perceived as misguided, by bloating even more with things that should otherwise be optionally implemented in other layers.

For me it just look like the right thing to do. I think we should be more suspicious when the parent company have some interest in deprecate some technology giving they interests clash with the technology being available or promoted.

FTP is becoming obsolete? yes

Google might have a clash of interest with some product over FTP? no

Anything from Zal Batmanglij is out of this world. You should check his early films. I've watched "Another Earth" back in the day for instance and while maybe right now, there is more popular stuff that followed, it was very different back when it appeared.

I guess it was before things like "Melancholia" and "Interstellar".

This guys is a genius.

Not a crypto expert, but isnt possible to remain e2e and yet giving you have a central middle-man, that this middle-man have access to all the unencrypted data?

The middle-man shares a temporary key where his end-point can decrypt the message at any time, generating a new key to deliver the message to its original destiny.

I mean, i've always understood e2e encryption with centralized points of distributions as whatsapp, having the understanding that they, and they only, could still claim e2e while at the same time being able to decrypt the messages themselves.

So i never trust the claim of full secrecy unless i know its e2e over a real p2p channel without a middle-man working as a broker between the parties (where the broken can generate and distribute the keys)

Its looks like snake oil to me. Of course far from the eyes of north korea, who is barely a treat to anyone, but with all we know about things like PRISM, probably being available to all the north-american agencies.

So you know that the tech to get were we are today, despite doing almost the same as a early 2000's tool, had to overcome a lot of obstacles to become available to all platforms in a open way, with a open 3d api, where you dont need to be forced on having Windows and buy a super expensive(as it was back in the day) license a closed source software.

Giving your presented credentials, you should now how and why this is not exactly the same.

Software is constant automation and improvement, and if the things we suffer to do today, that can make someone be considered special and be well payed, will be achieved easily by children in the future, its just because of the hard work of the pioneers that suffered but persisted in the beginning.

The Unix was there in the 70's, and yet we celebrate "the same" old thing today, because its open, its available and even kids can change and compile it in its Linux incarnation.

So while it maybe looks the same under the surface, its definitely not the same, and we should be glad every time technology gets popular and easy, because its not easy to get there.

Edit: Sorry for the way i've started my first commentary, it was rude and unnecessary, rather you knew or not anything about the matter.

You can only say this by having no clue of the machinery involved.

This is all going through IPC in a command buffer like architecture where the display lists are formed in another process. Where you can have several framebuffers that you can render 2d, 3d and intermix them in a beautiful final output thanks to the sophisticated compositor.

The state-of-the-art on desktop was a in-process direct rendering instead.

Modern browser are wonderful machines, we should be glad we are seing this happening.

Also, Google contantly are being bashed on HN, i know, who like the big man right? i think this we should thank them for pushing the envelope on a open platform, that will probably even eat the closed app platform with time.

Just Dorothy-like hackers would'nt be able to fight back the awful world of closed source applications platform if browsers were not what they are today. We are constantly in danger to get back to where we were in the nineties. If this whole "cloud computer" paradigm were not enough of a threat to a world of global scale control of the digital life of billions by only a few.

Its good to be skeptic and bash the big man, its important to fight back, but lets respect and give them props for the things they do right. A piece of software that has value on its own by the way.

"Its for your own safety kiddo. Those stuff are dangerous and will harm your device"

When companies use the same logic of spreading fear to manipulate and ultimately control as the war on terror/war on drugs from Bush/Nixon, you know something is really wrong.

Not an expert, but..

QUIC is basically HTTP2 (bidi frames and keep-alive connections) over (TCP over UDP) with encryption builtin. The cool thing about QUIC also, is the ability to 'lower down' to the UDP layer and skip the control and encryption protocol if you need it. (I just dont know if they will extend this feature to the application level).

WebRTC is SRTP with UDP have hole punching et al. if you want so use UDP but with a whole problems of the UDP approach P2P world already taken care of.

WebSockets works over plain TCP.

QUIC is the more advanced of the protocols and it will probably "take over the world" with time, but it has yet to prove itself.

It probably can be a good fit to the cases where the WebRTC is being used for, but i dont now if Chrome will be ambitious enough to let developers mess with the building blocks of QUIC. If not, it will just become a sink to HTTP3 (a no small feat anyway).

In my opinion OS's should only give you mapped buffers of memory, where it defines the source.. a network driver or a file in the disk, a gpu memory, or simply the heap and the userspace applications would deal with.

OS's are doing too much in my opinion and the problem is that the status-quo of applications expect them to do it, so theres no clear way out of this.

If im not mistaken, theres a paper with the 'exokernel' design from the late nineties, built from a NetBSD, that describes a little bit about this approach, if you are curious.

Our OS's should be like that, and i bet they would be so much better giving they would be able to concentrate in being good in a much smaller spectrum, while applications would probably negotiate less with the kernel, giving us a better performance and stability overall.

TPC and sockets would be a library, and once we need to prototype new shiny stuff, it would be much better to get the needed adoption by just linking to the appropriate library.

Projects like QUIC and gRPC would be much more viral, and i bet they could even appear earlier if some part of the stack were not frozen right on the kernel.

I guess, this will become more evident with time, as a lot of those technologies on the kernel will become deprecated, while in the heat of modernism it look a great idea to stuck that thing that "everybody uses" on kernel space.

One problem with this approach is that with time people tend to optimize to gaming the game. With enough time you are just hiring people that are good in the game and not the best fit for the position.

Companies also need a lot of people that are creative and "think outside the box". With this you are optimizing for conformists and people that "think inside the box", and that optimize to fit the game.

No wonder the big companies have a hard time to create things..

Western society need badly to know how to deal well with impermanence, and this are such a case were there's not much prediction that can be done.. its just like dancing expecting the rain will come.. sometimes it will, and we will gladly think it was because we danced.

The best tip for hiring is someone that you know that knows a little bit to point a couple of good people for you. Because those things are pretty hard to know, and there are very little we can do, without the experience to show for some specific characteristics we need.

I think that is reasonable that a company do some tests on folks that don't have much baggage to show for, because in this case they are doing a wild guess and must count a little bit on luck.

But the parent was on his 30-something when he did the interview, and i bet he had a lot in his curriculum to show for, so in this case the company dont have to guess anymore.

I think it says a little bit that the HR is failing somehow. Failing to adapt to different kinds of human beings.

By the way, there are a lot of psychology into this. Sometimes the right kind of people to do some sort of task is the one that are avoiding the whiteboard tests.

In the end it will lead to an unbalanced company with people very similar and optimized for a couple of areas, but lacking in others.

Not a compiler expert, but looking at the bytecode it looked fairly limited and minimal number of opcodes.

Giving it has to be universal, i imagine where a LLVM bitcode op might translate to 1, 2 or 3 native opcodes, with WebAssembly you might with much more opcodes in the native output.

I mean, of course they will be able to make it better with time and effort, but i dont think we can spect a much bigger speedup in comparison with the native equivalent.

Note: this is all very speculative, but by looking at it, it looked great as an accelerator, specially for math stuff, but i imagine that it will be hard even to beat the Javascript code for generic stuff giving how much it was already optimized for it.

If any compiler expert here that is familiar with it want to correct in my assumptions, please feel free to do it.

(Not event touching in issues like the ones you mention, like memory copy, where the compiler cannot translate the thing in a more optmized manner giving it cannot speculate about the environment and optimize for it)

"arbitrary software"...

Take the world "arbitrary" and we can see the truth.

Now let me rephrase this in the right way, to avoid the language tricks used on your question.

Should the user have the right to install software on the device they bough and therefore, they own?

Its not "legally mandating" the provider to be "forced" to do anything. Its just a matter of rights of the user who buy stuff from anyone.

Its a pure ethical thing to do, that protects the user freedom, and thats what the law should do, to protect the rights of the party with the least power in a negotiation between two parties. Especially if the concept of property and ownership is involved.

I dont get the half of the comments in this thread. If we depended on your point of views, we would be stuck with the Intels, Microsoft's, Apples and the likes with absolute control into our digital lifes.

Remember Prism and the collusion of goverment spy agencies and tech companies to know everything everyone was doing?

Now imagine how much power this represents? Imagine a modern fascist with that much power on his hands? What would he would be able to do?

You dont even need to get into conspiracy theories, but just think about the rights and freedoms of the users against the effort of tech companies to control them.

But to avoid the centralization of power and control would be a side-effect of people standing for those simple right's.