* SpaceX. I have lots of reservations about the company but the fact that they are consistently doing things previously thought impossible is very important for humanity in general.
* The new Dune movie was downright amazing. The CGI was believable and an important part of the story.
* AI-generated art. Fascinating.
* Wikipedia. Wow.
* I can invest in lots of different assets relatively easily.
* Playwright and Puppeteer. I have automated a lot of workflows thanks to those projects. Pressing a button and watching those workflows run is an empowering experience.
* Raspberry Pi and Arduino. A month back I built little hack projects for the pure joy of exploring. Very rejuvenating experience.
* Electric cars. I'm particularly excited about the F-150 Lightning. They really leaned into the whole electric thing and tried to find some compelling use cases e.g. the generator and the massive front storage (Disclosure: I have some Ford stock, less than 1% of my overall portfolio). The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful.
* Wind + solar + nuclear energy. And a nod to geothermal and hydroelectric. Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.
> The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful.
For cities with a dense urban core (of which mine, Philly, certainly is) I'm really hoping we lean in on bikes (electric or not) moreso than electric cars. Even less carbon-intensive to produce, and in a city with this level of density it's shocking how quickly you can get around by bike. I would go so far as to say it's often faster than driving if you consider the time you spend looking for parking.
It's just that with our current car-centric infrastructure, it's way too dangerous.
Plus with some e-bikes, you can detach the battery and carry it with you indoors to charge it back up. Try that with an electric car!
In Hong Kong, a bit denser than Philly (I googled for giggles: HK is 6300 p/km2, Philly is 4500 p/km, still surprisingly high), we have, I think, reached your no-car target simply because it's unthinkable people get cars when space is so rare and expensive (people here do mortgages to buy 200k USD parkings as retirement investment when they cant buy a home).
Bicycle is non existent though, what is really different from my low density european experience is the amount and low cost of traditional taxis (Uber gave up and now is a normal taxi provider here because they cant beat their price - https://www.uber.com/en-HK/blog/introducing-uber-taxi/ ) and the insane quality of the metro and bus networks (we didnt have double deckers every 5 minutes in my city in Normandy, we were lucky if the schedule was remotely accurate)
I ve seen some other places more dense that american cities explode in little motor bikes (Taipei, Kuala Lumpur), but that depends a lot on regulation.
On the other hand, a bike-centric city would not be very accessible to people with disabilities. Having something in between, maybe trains or small electric buses, would be ideal IMO.
> Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.
I wish to see this kind of positivity around me more often. I have worked with a colleague or two in the past who viewed problems as something that needed to be solved, and were a step or two ahead of the rest of us in terms of finding solutions. Lately, I see that the default reaction to problems is to complain. Don't get me wrong... complaining is fine if it leads to action, but isn't it rare.
I don't understand how it is possible to still have this view of the problem. All the resources I am aware of that seem backed by facts and science are currently forecasting an utter disaster. I think I'm someone with a rather positive attitude in life and as you said I always try to look at solutions rather than just complain. In fact I'm doing rather well at the personal level. But in the case of the environmental crisis (which isn't limited to a climate crisis), I honestly can't see how it's going to work. In the optimistic camp all I see so far is wishful thinking.
> Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.
It's all about what this mess and pain is going to be about. If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances, that doesn't qualify as a success to me. The fact that a handful of privileged people will manage to get through and still have cars and smartphones isn't really a relief.
SpaceX still pales nothing to what NASA did in the height of the Cold War. Well, it's better than zero space exploration, but it's also pretty disappointing compared to what people have already achieved half a decade ago.
I don't know where are you from, but over here landing an orbital rocket booster on its ass is pretty impressive. Something NASA didn't even bother enough to try to achieve.
I have no reservations about SpaceX. SpaceX is doing what every entrepreneur wished they were doing. I want to buy stock in SpaceX. I don't even care if the stock tanks, I just want a piece of the dream.
As I said many times, space has become a religion for people who identify themselves as atheists. And Musk is the techno-utopian Pope, with stock ownership in one of his scam companies becoming a form of techno-utopian indulgence
Many of you are unfortunately too smart to keep believing in absence of evidence, unlike religious individuals who can hold a belief for their whole life.
When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there, then disillusion and disappointment will be a tough pill to swallow.
Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.
You need a sci-fi type discovery such as the anti-gravity equation that Cooper finds inside the Black hole Gargantua and sends back to Murph.
As an aside, yes, Interstellar is my favorite movie, but I am a practical person and also capable of separating science from sci-fi.
Putting Jitsi aside for the moment, Zoom and other video call systems saved lives during the pandemic. It enabled fewer in person gatherings, staved off depression/suicide by maintaining social connections, and enabled remote work.
Less momentously but significant to me, my kids have learned an insane breadth of technologies by watching science and maker Youtube channels, presented in a very accessible way to kids. At 7yo, I didn't know what a lathe or welder was, let alone excitedly insist that my parents get one.
3D printing wasn't mentioned but hot damn, it's satisfying to fix the unfixable by printing a new part. It wasn't too long ago that "broken plastic doohickey" meant throwing the whole thing in the trash.
And another one for kids: cheap and individual computing devices. No more time sharing of a modem on the single computer in the house! In fact, touch interfaces and responsive graphics has kids learning skills before they can even read. Watching elementary kids work on and submit homework on a Chromebook is kind of interesting, compared to my education.
(admittedly, the level of detail and quality of it could be higher, still working on that)
Either way, if nothing else, i wanted to drop by and express my agreement with your point about technologies to chat with others, both in video form and otherwise. Personally, i think that both the self-hosted options and the ones available in the cloud (such as Discord) can have a large positive impact on us, especially during the current times.
For example, they allow me to embrace a more asynchronous way of work - at my current company, we've essentially replaced the daily stand ups with the Standup & Prosper app (https://standup.teaminator.io/) and have discussions more freely in the chat channels otherwise, while still having weekly video meetings, which works for us.
At the same time, everything from Discord to even WhatsApp lets me keep in touch with my friends and acquaintances, even though we live pretty far away - actually, i've moved to the countryside almost a year ago and somehow it still hasn't felt lonely to me thanks to these technologies (while also having lots of other things to do).
I'm not sure precisely why that is, but those platforms somehow feel more enjoyable to me than something like Facebook or Instagram, they allow for a bit smaller and more personal/private conversations, that leave me feeling more socially satisfied than just "shouting into the void".
I don’t want to dox myself but I’m currently solo developing an application that would’ve took a company of minimum 100 to build just 15 years ago.
People are amazed when they see the stuff I solo built and imagine there is a huge company behind it.
It is all because of advances in DevOps, cheap server infrastructure, and good quality open source libraries.
It is actually scary to see this first hand because human productivity is increasing at a such a rapid speed, it will result in extreme levels of excess productivity in future.
So an economy without scarcity is getting closer to our reach but political landscape, general populace, and influential people try their hardest to prevent this from happening.
People bemoan the quality of software (and certainly all the complaints are true, we have a long way to go as an industry quality wise), but 10-15 years ago I remember it wasn't uncommon to buy a piece of shrink wrapped software that should be compatible with your machine and it would just not work.
Failure to install, or crashing on startup, sometimes even requiring a reinstall of the entire OS.
This would happen in the open source community too, but that was to be expected.
I haven't experienced this in many years though, so I suspect we are doing something better.
Also package management has come a long, long way. Everything has a package manager now, that creates a new kind of problem but it's better than before.
That's because the distribution is being controlled by central entities, e.g. distros, app stores, etc. People mostly gave up trying to distribute release binaries on their own. Independent distribution now happens primarily by sharing the source. So the whole not working aspect is still very much alive for source builds, which rarely work; at least, not unless you run them inside a Docker container that's exactly the same as whatever the developer uses. Particularly if the software was written recently, and isn't a decades old C program or simple Python script without dependencies.
That's very true, and those central distribution channels are a mixed blessing.
The Docker containers are beneficial though! At least now I have an example of a system where the software works to dissect and if my use case is a one-off I can run it in the Docker container then move on with my life.
My 8 year old son has a Nintendo switch. I recently showed him a video of the 80' "Mattel Electronic Football Handheld Game" which is essentially just a handful of dim LED's and some control buttons. I used to fight my brother to get time playing on that old thing. My son may never truly appreciate how far we've come with respect to technology.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that you either could afford some encyclopedias or went to the library. The fact that you can learn just about anything today is truly amazing. Folks like Ben Krasnow share amazing DIY things regularly that it would be hard to imagine in the 80's or 90's.
On the other hand, 99% of my looking stuff up online is very low-value, and the trade off for that ease is that any time some question of trivia comes to mind I sort of itch until I find it out, even if it doesn't matter, whereas before most such questions would hardly have entered my conscious mind to begin with.
I'm saying people are building sputterers, waterjets and even fabing transistors and ICs(Sam Zeloof) in their garages. It goes way beyond factoids. You can connect with experts in just about any field.
Oh man that thing is a blast from the past. It's crazy the memories that come flashing back just from seeing that image. It's extraordinary that my brain hasn't ditched the thing as garbage and deleted it. Must be 35+ years ago. Jesus.
Very good perspective. It’s the “epicurean treadmill” of technology. 20 years ago, you would’ve spent days or weeks getting a server and infrastructure set up. The slower pace was due to natural constraints and generally speaking things are simpler within constraints. Now that you can spin up an infinitely scalable, globally available cluster of servers in minutes, the question rather becomes “what now?” It’s absolutely an objective improvement. Things have gotten better. But the human mind is not built to be satisfied. We always reach out for more, to push the boundaries, and now that the boundaries are pushed so much further than before, the questions and demands asked are much greater.
Kinda minor, but nice:
1) SSDs ubiquitous and don’t suck.
2) 3D printers that work well and are cheap, open source ecosystem. Prusa and Ender.
3) VR that is actually good, doesn’t require external sensors and wires, and is pretty cheap. oculus Quest 2.
More major:
1) cheap Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. Good for DIY. Long cycle life, less likely to start on fire, Cobaltfree and dirt cheap. Being used on base Model 3s and Ys. Makes going off grid feasible when combined with solar power which is also crazy cheap.
On the other hand, almost everything comes with hidden costs and risks as well. Pretty much every new technology or cool gadget comes to the public as a double-edged sword especially when it's "free" or inexpensive. In the open source/developer space things are often far better, but the general public is just screwed. Right now our lives are filled with very cool tech, but nearly always at a hidden price no matter what we've paid for it.
Even the hardware is increasingly controlled and inaccessible (thanks to trusted computing and DRM) and most of the software and devices people use today routinely get code pushed to them remotely (often silently) with little if any ability for the supposed "owner" to control or understand what's being done.
Still, in very specific spaces there really is some great hardware and software available and information is accessible to help people willing to put in the work to take advantage of it. It's nice to take some time to appreciate how far tech has come and how much technology is still open, accessible, and working for us without also being used against us.
You bring up a great point: how do we deliver high-quality software to the general public that is stable, easy-to-use, and secure, yet respects user privacy? Ad-tech and other forms of surveillance technologies have become quite prevalent in consumer technology in recent years, such as the proliferation of smart TVs with ads. I find free, open source software to respect my privacy and generally be stable and secure, but I find it harder to use than proprietary alternatives, and I think the reason it's harder to use is because there's no money being poured into making it easier to use. With the exception of Firefox it's hard for me to think of a commercially-backed desktop FOSS project, while when it comes to system software (e.g., operating systems, compilers, databases, Web servers, Web frameworks, etc.), I can list plenty of examples of commercially-backed projects. I don't think it's a coincidence that FOSS has done so well in the server room (where big companies have backed the development of Linux, MySQL, Node.js, LLVM/Clang, and many other projects) and in computer science academia (funded by grants from industry and government, as well as the free time of students and faculty; heck, RMS himself had an office at MIT and won awards with large monetary prizes), yet it has struggled to gain a significant foothold on desktops used by the general public except for LibreOffice and Firefox, the latter of which was quite popular during the interregnum of Internet Explorer 6 and Google Chrome.
There are two possible avenues to improve the situation on the desktop:
1. One challenge is the sheer complexity of modern desktop software. Take a program such as GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox, and consider how many lines of code these programs are written in. Even for a senior-level software engineer it will take some on-boarding time to become familiar with the codebase of one of these projects. Modifying the program could become quite an effort. If even experienced software engineers struggle to find the time to contribute code to FOSS projects, then making such a contribution would be almost impossible for members of the general public, the vast majority of whom have no coding experience.
I'm wondering how much of this complexity could be pared down such that it would lead to a FOSS software ecosystem where it's easier for users, technical and non-technical, to make contributions. The easier it is to make contributions, the greater the likelihood we'll have a thriving ecosystem of FOSS for desktop computing. Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute's STEPS project (http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf) appears to be an interesting starting point.
2. Another challenge is thinking of new funding mechanisms for FOSS that don't rely on unpredictable donations, the backing of large corporations, or licensing changes (such as the moves that MongoDB made a few years ago in an attempt to stop cloud service providers like Amazon). For example, there should be other business models Mozilla could use in case Google shuts off its funding, but the challenge is I'm struggling of thinking of them.
Readit News
* SpaceX. I have lots of reservations about the company but the fact that they are consistently doing things previously thought impossible is very important for humanity in general.
* The new Dune movie was downright amazing. The CGI was believable and an important part of the story.
* AI-generated art. Fascinating.
* Wikipedia. Wow.
* I can invest in lots of different assets relatively easily.
* Playwright and Puppeteer. I have automated a lot of workflows thanks to those projects. Pressing a button and watching those workflows run is an empowering experience.
* Raspberry Pi and Arduino. A month back I built little hack projects for the pure joy of exploring. Very rejuvenating experience.
* Electric cars. I'm particularly excited about the F-150 Lightning. They really leaned into the whole electric thing and tried to find some compelling use cases e.g. the generator and the massive front storage (Disclosure: I have some Ford stock, less than 1% of my overall portfolio). The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful.
* Wind + solar + nuclear energy. And a nod to geothermal and hydroelectric. Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.
For cities with a dense urban core (of which mine, Philly, certainly is) I'm really hoping we lean in on bikes (electric or not) moreso than electric cars. Even less carbon-intensive to produce, and in a city with this level of density it's shocking how quickly you can get around by bike. I would go so far as to say it's often faster than driving if you consider the time you spend looking for parking.
It's just that with our current car-centric infrastructure, it's way too dangerous.
Plus with some e-bikes, you can detach the battery and carry it with you indoors to charge it back up. Try that with an electric car!
Bicycle is non existent though, what is really different from my low density european experience is the amount and low cost of traditional taxis (Uber gave up and now is a normal taxi provider here because they cant beat their price - https://www.uber.com/en-HK/blog/introducing-uber-taxi/ ) and the insane quality of the metro and bus networks (we didnt have double deckers every 5 minutes in my city in Normandy, we were lucky if the schedule was remotely accurate)
I ve seen some other places more dense that american cities explode in little motor bikes (Taipei, Kuala Lumpur), but that depends a lot on regulation.
I wish to see this kind of positivity around me more often. I have worked with a colleague or two in the past who viewed problems as something that needed to be solved, and were a step or two ahead of the rest of us in terms of finding solutions. Lately, I see that the default reaction to problems is to complain. Don't get me wrong... complaining is fine if it leads to action, but isn't it rare.
> Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.
It's all about what this mess and pain is going to be about. If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances, that doesn't qualify as a success to me. The fact that a handful of privileged people will manage to get through and still have cars and smartphones isn't really a relief.
Solved! ^^ Somehow it may be related (but OT) Comic: > //ibb.co/hXjtxLr [sings:] 'freedom!...freeedom!...' (-;
regards,
Dead Comment
Today, that would correspond to more than 100 billion USD a year.
SpaceX has nowhere that kind of money. They are orders of magnitude smaller, and must comply with regulations that Apollo didn't have to.
Of course Usain Bolt will overtake a well trained mouse.
Not just electric cars but electric vehicles! Cities could be designed around electric bikes and scooters!
As I said many times, space has become a religion for people who identify themselves as atheists. And Musk is the techno-utopian Pope, with stock ownership in one of his scam companies becoming a form of techno-utopian indulgence
Many of you are unfortunately too smart to keep believing in absence of evidence, unlike religious individuals who can hold a belief for their whole life.
When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there, then disillusion and disappointment will be a tough pill to swallow.
Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.
You need a sci-fi type discovery such as the anti-gravity equation that Cooper finds inside the Black hole Gargantua and sends back to Murph.
As an aside, yes, Interstellar is my favorite movie, but I am a practical person and also capable of separating science from sci-fi.
Dead Comment
Less momentously but significant to me, my kids have learned an insane breadth of technologies by watching science and maker Youtube channels, presented in a very accessible way to kids. At 7yo, I didn't know what a lathe or welder was, let alone excitedly insist that my parents get one.
3D printing wasn't mentioned but hot damn, it's satisfying to fix the unfixable by printing a new part. It wasn't too long ago that "broken plastic doohickey" meant throwing the whole thing in the trash.
And another one for kids: cheap and individual computing devices. No more time sharing of a modem on the single computer in the house! In fact, touch interfaces and responsive graphics has kids learning skills before they can even read. Watching elementary kids work on and submit homework on a Chromebook is kind of interesting, compared to my education.
I actually did another blog post about self-hosted chat platforms (Rocket.Chat in particular) just yesterday: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat...
(admittedly, the level of detail and quality of it could be higher, still working on that)
Either way, if nothing else, i wanted to drop by and express my agreement with your point about technologies to chat with others, both in video form and otherwise. Personally, i think that both the self-hosted options and the ones available in the cloud (such as Discord) can have a large positive impact on us, especially during the current times.
For example, they allow me to embrace a more asynchronous way of work - at my current company, we've essentially replaced the daily stand ups with the Standup & Prosper app (https://standup.teaminator.io/) and have discussions more freely in the chat channels otherwise, while still having weekly video meetings, which works for us.
At the same time, everything from Discord to even WhatsApp lets me keep in touch with my friends and acquaintances, even though we live pretty far away - actually, i've moved to the countryside almost a year ago and somehow it still hasn't felt lonely to me thanks to these technologies (while also having lots of other things to do).
I'm not sure precisely why that is, but those platforms somehow feel more enjoyable to me than something like Facebook or Instagram, they allow for a bit smaller and more personal/private conversations, that leave me feeling more socially satisfied than just "shouting into the void".
Of course, YouTube is also immensely useful and i can't believe that i forgot to mention 3D printing, even though my printer loves to cause me trouble every now and then: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-make-your-3d-prints...
People are amazed when they see the stuff I solo built and imagine there is a huge company behind it.
It is all because of advances in DevOps, cheap server infrastructure, and good quality open source libraries.
It is actually scary to see this first hand because human productivity is increasing at a such a rapid speed, it will result in extreme levels of excess productivity in future.
So an economy without scarcity is getting closer to our reach but political landscape, general populace, and influential people try their hardest to prevent this from happening.
Sure, I'm a good developer. But as DethNinja points out, the real enabler of this are the advances in cheap server infra + libraries.
It's the tooling as much as the tool-user.
Failure to install, or crashing on startup, sometimes even requiring a reinstall of the entire OS.
This would happen in the open source community too, but that was to be expected.
I haven't experienced this in many years though, so I suspect we are doing something better.
Also package management has come a long, long way. Everything has a package manager now, that creates a new kind of problem but it's better than before.
The Docker containers are beneficial though! At least now I have an example of a system where the software works to dissect and if my use case is a one-off I can run it in the Docker container then move on with my life.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that you either could afford some encyclopedias or went to the library. The fact that you can learn just about anything today is truly amazing. Folks like Ben Krasnow share amazing DIY things regularly that it would be hard to imagine in the 80's or 90's.
Dead Comment
More major: 1) cheap Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. Good for DIY. Long cycle life, less likely to start on fire, Cobaltfree and dirt cheap. Being used on base Model 3s and Ys. Makes going off grid feasible when combined with solar power which is also crazy cheap.
Pity we haven't solved that for normal printers yet...
Even the hardware is increasingly controlled and inaccessible (thanks to trusted computing and DRM) and most of the software and devices people use today routinely get code pushed to them remotely (often silently) with little if any ability for the supposed "owner" to control or understand what's being done.
Still, in very specific spaces there really is some great hardware and software available and information is accessible to help people willing to put in the work to take advantage of it. It's nice to take some time to appreciate how far tech has come and how much technology is still open, accessible, and working for us without also being used against us.
Those cheap(ish) reteo hand held and the community of moders are my vote for good things.
There are two possible avenues to improve the situation on the desktop:
1. One challenge is the sheer complexity of modern desktop software. Take a program such as GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox, and consider how many lines of code these programs are written in. Even for a senior-level software engineer it will take some on-boarding time to become familiar with the codebase of one of these projects. Modifying the program could become quite an effort. If even experienced software engineers struggle to find the time to contribute code to FOSS projects, then making such a contribution would be almost impossible for members of the general public, the vast majority of whom have no coding experience.
I'm wondering how much of this complexity could be pared down such that it would lead to a FOSS software ecosystem where it's easier for users, technical and non-technical, to make contributions. The easier it is to make contributions, the greater the likelihood we'll have a thriving ecosystem of FOSS for desktop computing. Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute's STEPS project (http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf) appears to be an interesting starting point.
2. Another challenge is thinking of new funding mechanisms for FOSS that don't rely on unpredictable donations, the backing of large corporations, or licensing changes (such as the moves that MongoDB made a few years ago in an attempt to stop cloud service providers like Amazon). For example, there should be other business models Mozilla could use in case Google shuts off its funding, but the challenge is I'm struggling of thinking of them.