lobste.rs has a pretty decent system with a global invite tree, where users can provide access for other people. it comes with the benefit of creating an association graph of accounts that allows for swift moderation, and lets the userbase grow within a community of people likely to appreciate the culture.
Hypothetically, preemptive market recapture? This could theoretically make foss OSs non-kosher for any suitably large market (websites, games, chat platforms, etc), and serve to force foss OSs into a niche where theyre technically capable of being personal desktop software, but practically unusable because of lockout.
I wanted to hook into the THREE object and explore the scene, but I wasn't able to figure out how to bring it back into scope after it's been optimized out of the js context, so instead I searched through the bundle to find where it unpacks the data and did that manually.
It just boggles the mind how you can simply write a 3D program with a ready-made library today, instantiate tens of thousands of objects in 3D space, and the whole thing will render in real time on a phone without you ever having to worry about how that incredible performance is possible.
The power of computers comes at least partly from the fact that for many practical problems, they let you effectively pretend that resource constraints don’t exist at all.
It does, it helps to stop and smell the roses occasionally and remember how far we’ve come.
My first proper computer (defined by programming on it) was a 3.5MHz single core processor with 48KB of RAM.
My current one is 16C/32T that can boost to 5.7GHz and has 64GB of RAM.
Considerably more than a million times the RAM and about a million times the processing power (if you factor clock speeds, core count, OOE, branch prediction, memory width and depending on workload etc).
I have more RAM in my house than every ZX Spectrum ever sold (about 5 million which comes out to ~240GB).
Adjusted for inflation a million spectrums (175 at 1982 prices) comes out to about 640 million quid.
My PC cost ~4000 in late 2022.
A million times faster for 0.000625% of the price, it’s been a hell of a ride.
My pet realization: most of the power increase has been spent on graphics at an ever growing resolution, including in resolution not only the number of pixels, that's a squared number, but also color depth and FPS.
Dealing with graphics has shadowed how hugely powerful the modern computers are. We're noticing now because of AI.
That said I think programmers do notice the performance outside of AI when they use software that surfaces how fast modern machines are which we do more than most.
I can remember when compiling a Linux kernel was “start it and go watch star gate” now I barely have time to boil the kettle for a cup of tea.
Definitely agree with the sentiment (also a Speccy 48K guy), but at the risk of being pedantic, I think you're double-counting: "million times faster" is for one Spectrum, the "0.000625% price" is for a million...
Whats to stop malicious actors (bad extensions, compromised cdn, etc.) from painting over the qr code or injecting their own? This is so incredibly terrible.
Doesn't have to even be that advanced, people get conditioned to stuff like reCAPTCHA and friends & Cloudflare's interstitial landing page (when "I'm under attack" mode is on) and they won't bat an eye. That's how we get people piping `curl | bash` into their terminal to "solve" fake challenges.
As a side note though, I recently have tried to turn CSP on a website I run and the amount of garbage I see in the reports is astonishing. There's some noise from things like OpenDNS intercepting YouTube or Social embeds for people using the work-friendly or family-friendly options, but the sheer amount of things attempting to phone home to random URLs and random extension scripts injecting ads into the site would astonish you. My mental model of "toolbar hell" from the Windows XP days being gone has completely shattered.
> That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.
I think that two significant social conditions that very strongly affect how people socialize online now are
a) there are multiple parallel well-established, invasive, unstoppable, government-sanctioned economies of theft that seek to profit at everyones expense (advertising, AI, surveilance). Why would anyone want to share anything if it's going to be stolen? Why would anyone want to be online if they're going to be spied on? Why would anyone want to look at anything if it's all advertisements?
b) it's politically en vogue for major online platforms to allow (and even propagate) hateful content because of the current political situation in the west. The companies that have grown to control the online spaces that people use are the same companies operating the economies of theft, and have demonstrated that they will happily bend the knee if it means they are allowed to continue stealing and spying and selling all this data to governments. Why would anyone want to use a platform filled with hate speech and political propaganda?
I would describe this combination of conditions as repulsive. There's no more appeal in the social internet because the bad guys won.
At first I thought the KDE apps all playing on the K was kinda weird and awkward, but as time went on I really appreciated how easy it was to search for them due to this. So I really think it's a benefit to play on traditional words rather than use them as-is.
As much as I and (probably) most other consumers agree with you, I don't think the car insurance industry does. Very similarly to how governments being buyers of data from adtech companies makes it an impossibility for governments to enact good privacy laws, there are massive perverse incentives here that place too much money on the table for good things to ever happen; car manufacturers want to gatekeep the sale of our data to insurance companies and governments, insurance companies want to lobby for laws that mandate data collection so that more claims can be denied and profit can rise, and governments are happy to enforce data collection because it strengthens their surveilance mechanisms.
At this point, I think I would prefer to carry a dumb flip phone for SMS and phone calls, and a smartphone-shaped generic touchscreen linux computer for everything else. It's becoming disturbingly impossible to find the former, and practically impossible (IME) to find the former.
Does anyone here have experience using Ubuntu Touch? That's the closest thing I've seen to "generic touchscreen linux" for mobile phone hardware. I'd love a device that works for multimedia, navigation, web browsing, and a handful of APKs like various chat apps (and really anything can can arbitrarily use the hardware), but it seems like tying a cellular modem to this ends up fucking up the whole dream because of carrier and manufacturer motivations/compensations.
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