technobabbler

Glad you're interested! That genre (narrative nonfiction with a focus on natural science) is an exploding genre, and there are a ton more books that recently came out on everything from otters to octopuses. Those are just the most famous ones and/or ones I've personally read. But it's a really great time to be a nonfiction reader if you enjoy learning about the natural world.

Yeah, it does take some getting used to. It's nice having a real shell though, and not have to worry about Windows Subsystem for Linux to get work done.

As someone who grew up with MS-DOS, Windows used to be really good until Microsoft started getting desperate and started shoving crapware down your throat... ads for Office, preinstalled Teams that starts up by itself, Skype, stupid Defender scans, nonstop UAC warnings, won't let you use a password instead of a PIN... all these dumb, user-hostile decisions. Zero respect for their users.

Apple has a bit of that now (iCloud logins, OS level notifications, bundled apps) but not quite as bad.

If Linux had Adobe Suite and MS Office I'd probably switch in a heartbeat. Need those to collaborate with other non-devs in the office.

Cool, thanks for the tip! I've been having nonstop issues with my Google Router and ISP modem, will have to try that instead.

Roger that, will have to check it out!

Great point. Meanwhile Steam and the other platforms spent years and years making great tooling and ecosystems to court developers. Stadia just feels like an executive's half assed demo...

Not Stadia maybe but GeForce Now gets you a 3080 and 120Hz (not necessarily fps) at 4k.

But sorry, it's apparently $200 a year now, not $100. My bad.

What is a UDM?

And I believe you. I wish I knew what the variables were. I really wanted to like Remote Play and even got special hardware for it (Steam Link, Shield TV, etc.) and still couldn't get it to be reliable.

An observation: Given the choice between two leaders, one who calls people evil and selfish, and another who (however cynically) defends their behavior and shares in their denialism, the latter is going to have way more followers. It's an unfortunate aspect of our primate psychology and individualistic culture.

Yes, it's true that many of the flames of our culture wars are fanned by the elites on purpose. Divide and conquer. But every accusation has some seed of truth in it, and the recent environmental movement was all too good at providing easy fodder for criticism.

I think the moral purity route is a failure of both strategy and empathy. Demonizing your opponents doesn't get them to listen to you at all, it just puts them on the defensive and they'll look for any excuse to dismiss you. That's exactly how it's played out over the last twenty years, and despite all the yelling, despite Greta. We're no closer to climate solutions, but half the country is a lot less persuadable now and more hardened and inoculated against environmental messaging. They might've listened if we asked gently instead.

If your argument is that all Americans are elites, great, you've convinced the environmentalists and the bleeding heart humanitarians. Everyone else just writes you off and goes on their way. It doesn't change anything, it just satisfied some urge for moral self righteousness, and I bet that doesn't last either.

We're all pretty selfish, especially cultures of the European tradition of conquest, hierarchy, and individual power. The sad truth is that you can't really get people to care about the billions of strangers suffering from their lifestyle choices. We're just not built that way. We got here, living in middle class comfort, through violence and exploitation. It's completely immoral and completely human.

Asking for individual behavior change on that scale is a political dead end that does nothing but create enemies. It's tactically unsound and ultimately counterproductive, even if it gives you an illusory moral high ground.

Greta came and went and the world is no better now, and half the country is dismisses her as an angry young woman and never bothers to listen to her message. Meanwhile solar adoption keeps skyrocketing and cars are getting more miles to the gallon. Sometimes softer broad approaches are more successful than demanding individual behavior change. Most humans just aren't moral creatures. They're not evil, they just don't focus their lives on the pursuit of ethics. It's how we evolved; either we can acknowledge that and work with it to make gradual gains, or keep up a self righteous facade and keep making enemies instead of progress. Shrug.

I don't think Google really has a game plan (no pun intended). They never gave Stadia the dev and marketing resources it needed so it just died on the vine. Their "pivot" is more like a surrender, I think, an act of desperation where they hope other companies will pay them for their tech that never really took off with consumers.

Thing is, porting to Stadia is so much work vs flicking a switch in Steam to publish to GeForce Now. And Stadia can't cross play or cross save with anything else by default, making it a very lonely ecosystem.

Every time I've tried Steam Play, even over hardwired gigabit, it's been laggy, buggy, and crash prone. There was always display switching problems, controllers and keyboards not being detected correctly, graphical issues, etc. Just a PITA.

GeForce Now works much better and doesn't require you to have your own GPU. Do need fast internet though.

$100 or so a year for a game steaming service is a heck lot cheaper than a gaming PC and a graphics card update every few years. And you can play anywhere, on any device, where you have a fast connection. It was a godsend for me before I could afford a gaming PC (or find one, during the pandemic)

Google never really tried with stadia. It's just another dead Google product, now changing into some sort of B2B thing. Shrug.

Meanwhile Nvidia kept improving geforce now and it's actually really good now, running on everything from operating systems to browsers with no noticeable lag. Cheap too, like $15 a mo or so, and works with most of your Steam library. Where it doesn't, usually means that the publisher wanted to get off for some reason.

Xbox Game Pass is another great steaming option (via xcloud), Netflix like subscription service that lets you stream games.

There's also Shadow and Luna and such. Many companies are doing this well, just not Google.

Yeah, this. Macos is my daily driver and it does a good job of staying out of my way.

I recently got a windows pc just for gaming, and god DAMN it's annoying. Even worse than Vista. Nothing is consistent anymore and everything is always trying to grab my attention for irrelevant shit. What the hell happened :/

FYI there is also an illustrated edition, with cool pictures illustrating cool tree things: https://greystonebooks.com/products/the-hidden-life-of-trees...!

If you like scientific nonfiction in this vein, I'd also recommend:

- The Wild Trees

- Mycelium Running

- Mind of the Raven

- The Klamath Knot

Or if you want tree fiction:

- The Overstory

(edit: dunno how to do bullet lists here)

Thank you for the explanation.

Submissions like this are when I wish HN didn't have the "original title" policy. It doesn't give you any context about a link and why someone should care about it.

Is it really the media's fault when they've reported at length about Snowden and Assange and Manning and in the end... nobody cared? Investigative journalism was THRIVING in the last few years. Trump, Kavanaugh, Epstein... can't even keep track of the scandals anymore. Did anyone care? Half the country kept voting red as before, the other half blue.

Nothing really changed, and nobody was held accountable for anything of note. The media has been reporting a LOT, people are just... outta fucks to give? It's like a mix of compassion fatigue and learned helplessness... not really sure what normal people can do when there's a class of people unaccountable to the law, the media, or anything really. Their cronies are all in business and government together, with no checks and balances. It's not the media's fault we have zero accountability for our elites.

I don't think it's that black and white? Google Docs, for example, lets you individually review and accept/deny/revise each individual suggested change. It's not a 3-way merge like programmers are used to seeing, but it's the same idea... you start with an original, see someone else's changes, and decide which to keep, or you can take their changes and further edit. And comment in-line too.

I've never used a lawyer's diff tool, but my IDE (IntelliJ) ignores whitespace and lines.

Make a web series out of it and livestream it? Have your viewers vote on what kind of donuts to send? Silly, but probably a better choice than becoming the next Ted Kaczynski.

> If the government going to use tax dollars to collect all my data. They might as well turn it into a searchable service: "I know I email bob 20 years ago, I wish I could find that recipe I gave him". Maybe, they could email me with helpful things like "Y% of people in your area who google'd X, Y and Z had prostate cancer. You should talk to your doctor".

Yeah, exactly this!! If you must know all my financial transactions, can't you at least do my taxes for me? If you already know who I am all the time, why do I need like three forms of ID to get a updated driver's license? If you can track all the phones, do you really need to ask for name and phone number when I call 911?

It's just bizarre how much data they collect and then... ignore? It didn't catch terrorists, it didn't stop the capitol storming, it doesn't stop school shootings... what exactly do they do with it all? It's like a pointless subsidy for hard drive manufacturers, where personal information goes to die.

At least Google provides useful services in exchange for all the tracking. Even Facebook has the decency to let you connect with people you might know, and help you remember what you did 10 years ago. If the government just offered useful services in exchange, millions would willingly surrender their privacy. Most of us just aren't very interesting.

Wikipedia, Google Docs, Microsoft Word... they're far simpler systems, but still useful for everyday edits

Cloudflare charges by the minutes delivered though, so if one of your videos unexpectedly gets popular, your monthly bill might spike up. That's a scary level of unpredictability when you're a small team (or lone wolf) that doesn't know ahead of time how viral a video would get.

Graft is just one problem out of many though. Lack of public investment in public institutions, I'd argue, is another, bigger problem.

I'd like to see graft tackled by more competitive elections (multi-party, ranked-choice, easier voting processes, etc.) rather than simply gutting the government so it can't do anything at all... I think the conservatives call that starving the beast? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

That just puts government in a death spiral and drags huge swaths of society down with it.

By comparison, a small degree of graft is an inefficiency inherent in any large organization. As a taxpayer or customer, it doesn't necessarily matter to me whether $20 of my $100 goes to a politician's vacation home or the CEO's yacht, as long as the shit gets built effectively. If it gets to $50 or $80 of that $100 though... yeah, shit's broken.

Healthcare? Renewables? Carbon sequestration? Cybersec? Underground power lines? Housing? Repairing existing roads & bridges? Education?

There is so much we could & should build, but we don't...

That's awesome, thank you. I did not realize hosting prices were so cheap now... good to know for the future.

Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere near the limit).

Where can you get a gigabit host that serves many TB a month for $100?

Not being sarcastic, genuinely interested in such a service.

Yeah... back in the day, someone made a virtual file system layer that could span 1 or more Gmail accounts, basically using it as a block storage thing. IIRC (it's been a while) there was also some built-in redundancy, like the same file would be stored redundantly across multiple Gmail accounts in case one got deleted. Kinda like an early cloud RAID.

That was before even CAPTCHAs were common, I think, and so getting new Gmail accounts was very easy.

Eventually Google revised their ToS and clamped down, of course.

I'll see if I can track down some historical links, but it was a long time ago...

Edit: one of them was called GmailFS: https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS

Old slashdot (remember that?) post from 2004: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---...

But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins? Vimeo is one of those who liked to advertise seemingly unmetered bandwidth behind an fine-print fair-use policy, luring people into a cheap pro plan with the hopes that most of them won't take off and become viral. That was their bet, one that they're now regretting. They could've just easily put a bandwidth meter on every account and let people decide what to do if they get close to that limit.

It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated. This person is just using Vimeo as they intended: hosting and serving videos. She wasn't trying to abuse the service, just using it the way they sold it to her, as a place to host videos for $200/year. Whose fault is it that they underpriced their plans as loss leaders on purpose, and the bet didn't quite pay off?

If they want to up their price because they want to change their business model, you know, more power to them... but sheesh, at least give her 60-90 days to figure out next steps. Some home internet connections can't even download all those videos and reupload them within 7 days.

(edit: to be clear, Gmail didn't offer unlimited disk, just a LOT of disk)

Maybe it doesn't have to be as binary as more vs fewer police? I wish the call wasn't "defund the police" but "create institutional alternatives to militarized policing".

That same heavily-armed force you use to fight druglords doesn't have to be the same force used for routine traffic enforcement, and maybe traffic enforcement shouldn't automatically get people scanned for outstanding warrants and such. A broken brakelight need not escalate into an armed car chase. The same way the fire department is separate from police, maybe there needs to be other institutions for tackling different situations, with academies training for different tactics that don't always involved armed conflict.

Our one-size-fits-all policing might seem relatively harmless for middle-upper-class whites and Asians, but they can be outright deadly if you're black or brown. You never really know if you're just going to get a friendly warning or say the wrong thing and be killed. The way we do policing is relatively unusual in the developed world, and very violent, and encourages both arms races and a severe distrust in certain communities. Just reimplementing that sort of system is going to get us back to the same place... armed enforcers that serve one part of the citizenry at the expense of others.

Sorry, but I have to disagree. It IS elitist, the sort of law that a detached lawmaker would make, with no concern about its impacts on regular people. Again, do we outlaw beef consumption, road trips, flying, older cars, leaving the lights on when nobody's home, more than 2 kids...? All these things contribute to air pollution, but we don't want them to be illegal. Yes, even if it means worsening climate change.

If idling is such a big problem, legislating adaptive technology (auto on/off) is a better solution.

If it is really about the billions of underprivileged humans and animals suffering from climate change, we need mass mobilization on the scale of the Manhattan Project or bigger, across multiple coordinated nations... not hunting down people who idle their cars more than 2 minutes. It's just the sort of thing that's neither necessary nor sufficient for addressing climate change, yet with a big social cost (distrust), which makes the working class hate environmentalists even more. It is the exact kind of elitist regulation popular in the 90s and early 2000s that caused a huge cultural backlash and created the climate divide we see now. It's not just regressive but counterproductive.