Back in 2012, I was the first developer to join Dominic Tarr on Secure Scuttlebutt. I built Patchwork, the first client. If you’re not familiar with SSB, give it a look! It’s an aggressively anarchist technical model. After a year and a half, I had serious concerns about our ability to attract users. I realized that any activist effort needs a theory of change. For a software technology, that’s the market. We need to make better products if we want our technological goal to succeed.
The model we follow is more federal more than confederal. We use strong leadership that can be replaced. We use that in the governance, the technical design, and the execution. We also follow a kind of separation of powers through modularity, and an aggressive focus on the right to exit. SSB was “no authority ever” and it failed to scale. ATProto is “no permanent authority.”
Give the essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness a read sometime. I’ve worked in open source for my entire adult life and I’m now 38. There’s always somebody in charge. It’s not better when you don’t know who.
We're back to keiretsu. They're called Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix. Each has its own closed world, moat, and small vendors subservient to it.
The irony of you posting this from X, that has been transformed in the last few months on a Right Wing platform, where Trump opposing views, have been shadow banned is funny. Shadow banned by the new Russian style Oligarch of the US.
It's not about free speech, that is safe and sound in the EU.
It's about avoid that the US monopolies on Social Media don't decide what messages get propagated, while others get shadow banned at the whim of their CEO/Co-President of the USA....
Well some of the more discerning people have been waiting for the shoe to drop in sheltered asset classes since the major red flags during the pandemic started occurring.
A large number of structural changes were made that fundamentally make the entire monetary system unsound, and these were largely silent changes (Basel III modified, no longer fractional banking reserve/overunity).
I've still got my copies of Benjamin Graham's Intelligent Investor, and Security Analysis by Graham Dodd sitting on my shelf, but nearly everything in those two books is no longer relevant with these changes, I'll still keep them as historical reference though their utility is now gone.
Other changes include preferential treatment of assets/synthetic shares/contracts during clearing for certain parties in the market (paper printing via commodities contracts/options).
Banking in general is in a deflationary concentration super-cycle. New banks can't enter the market, and the liabilities exceed assets for GSIBs/SIFIs. As time progresses, each will collapse chaotically, and when that bubble bursts it takes the markets with it into full deflation.
The petrodollar agreement being abandoned by the Saudi's is what is driving this to occur more rapidly. All the money printed and held by countries abroad is now returning to compete for the same goods. The demand for that pool of currency is much lower now.
The dynamics/indicators are flip-flopping between hyper-inflation Weimar, and great depression (for a couple months now).
This potentially might be a new big debt crises archetype. It appears that inflationary and deflationary pressures are spiking chaotically, labor statistics are being constantly revised (horribly inaccurate), and since action is based on lagging indicators eventually hysteresis results in a misstep hard landing.
You have a chaotic and narrowing safe path that eventually ends, which some argue describes the economic calculation problem.
Ponzi's always exact an unreasonable price. If you are interested in these archetypes, Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Report on Big Debt Crises is useful, though in my opinion he neglects a basic fact that reserve currencies can collapse without a replacement being on-hand and so a beautiful deleveraging is a matter of chance.
The collapse can be slow though, and evidenced by the shrinking number of producers in the market (those not backed by preferential loans/printing press).
Adam Smith's requirement; producers must make a profit in purchasing power or they leave the market. No real market can exist when entities cooperate, and are sustained by a printing press.
You can't bring Nietzsche's view of ambition and consider it as truth without even bringing more contemporary criticisms of it, even if you'd like to see it through Virtue Ethics it should be considered as a virtue in a diverse set of virtues, ambition shouldn't trump other moral values.
As entertaining as it was to read "On The Genealogy of Morality" when I was 20 years old I'd say it's rather... Reductionist, at least.
Sloterdijk updates on it even bring up how to consider "will to power" not as an individual ambition but as a holistic way to actualise oneself to give something back to the world, not as a power over others which is the main way corporations are run.
Pursuing your ambitions at the expense of the rest of the globe is not moral.
Please update your philosophical repertoire, you're stuck in the 1800s.
If anyone's thinking of starting their own Unoffice Hours, someone started a webring with a good domain. It's semi dormant right now, but the site accepts pull requests and it would be a good place to start building community
I have a lot of my dad's old library. His first career was as a philosophy professor, and so it's mostly books too specific for me to sustain an interest in (certainly not that many of them). I have the space, so I've been holding on to them, but I really wish I could ask him (he passed away in 2007) which books were dear to him, and why. As it is, a particular book could have landed on his shelves because he got a good deal on it or something.
> In contrast, Software 2.0 is written in much more abstract, human unfriendly language, such as the weights of a neural network. No human is involved in writing this code because there are a lot of weights (typical networks might have millions), and coding directly in weights is kind of hard (I tried).
I hope software 3.0 is more human, is more intelligible, is more directly shapeable.
I dream of a world where people aren't intimidated to (and can) open the hood on the systems about them, connect the dots to string up new systems and inter-system capabilities.
It's not clear what the market is for convivial computing. It this long era of computing getting ever more esoteric, receding further & further away from humanity into ever higher built fuedal data keeps: it feels like it cannot keep going this way forever. That someday some democracy & liberty that some open sourcerer crafts will spread & reshape the image of software, a 3.0 that a broad we can grasp & tangle with.
Agree. In the US in particular congress is by far the worst of the three federal branches. Most long term, strategic problems are due to their inaction whether taxes, current account deficits, operationally effective border control, gun laws. Even abortion: it was undone in the judicial branch but the same coterire of supporters know bans will never succeed as as an amendment .. so that's left in the air too without even the attempt to count votes publicly ... that's how chicken they are now that they've caught the bus.
Like a floundering company, the US congress spends most of its time in these modalities:
- trying to convince you they're not part of the DC establishment
- Fund raising off cultural divisions, and exasperation of same for the same goal
- blaming the other side
- blaming congress' culture as polarized hence can't get anything done
- US electorate laboring under the delusion that changing the president is a solution -- maybe helpful at the margins -- but fundamentally unable to permanently circumvent law.
- the far left and right are equally culpable in culture fights while the right is more criminally culpable in how it uses its agency.
And that's exactly right: we're sick of it.
In a floundering company with no product, poor quality control, cost overruns, disdain from existing customers, and non existent cross functional coordination
the first thing upper management must do is fire the people unwilling to stop whining, blaming, and take responsibility.
The focus must emphasize customer satisfaction through quality of service/product. In short the BS had to stop. Second focus must emphasize cross functional coordination. In-fighting is a fireable offense. No complicated product is made by one team. It takes coordination.
(I can name any number of examples from books to personal experience where this was done in US corporate history to get people to understand the old way is out).
Right now the US congress far left and right like the BS; it serves their goals. The middle 4 std deviations over the center stand around with their head down, hands in pockets, hoping nobody notices them. It's institutional incompetence.
In the world of belief systems untied to natural law and empiricism, even the Bible reminds: faith (beliefs) without works is nothing but cheap symbolism.
I work in the defense industry as an engineer, for one of the larger defense companies, a few thoughts on this:
- The defense industry is ripe for disruption, defense contractors are very top-heavy, siloed, and bureaucratic, and incredibly inefficient. However, there are structural issues to getting new companies started, and I don’t see anything in Ares that inspires confidence that they will succeed.
- Cash flow is a big problem for small government contractors. Although there are funding initiatives, such as SBIR, to encourage small entrepreneurship in government contracting, it’s generally difficult to transition out of that because the government can take an inordinate amount of time to provide the funds that they promise to a contractor. You can, of-course, get a loan from a third party to fill your funding gap, but that will eat into your profit margin. Size is a form of protection here because other contracts and programs can buffer against cash flow problems in one program.
- funding mechanisms, and laws surrounding them, the FAR in particular, incentivizes against non-traditional corporate organizing and being effective in execution. If you’ve made the transition to being a more established company, you’re getting bigger contracts, you will be following Earned Value (EV). This is required for contracts of a certain, agency defined, size. EV more-or-less requires you to follow waterfall development. It means you effectively cannot do agile development, although you can find examples of contractors using SAFe and other forms of Dark Agile, these are merely waterfall down poorly with extra steps. EV is a large bureaucratic undertaking, requiring certified earned value management systems and dedicated professionals, such as CAMs, planners, quality engineering, and contracts managers. This in service of being accountable, and making sure tax payer dollars are spent wisely, but it takes money to do this. You can’t capitalize on the benefits of being flexible and innovating with government funds because you need to report metrics as if you’ve laid out your entire plan at the start of the project.
- Defense startups effectively have one customer, the US Federal Government. Although it is true that foreign military sales (FMS) happen for a variety of defense articles, all of these sales need to be approved by the US State Department, meaning you are entirely dependent on the executive branch to give you business. How many investors would like to invest in a product that is limited by one party in determining how much you will grow?
Well I think it's neat. The bit I find most provoking is the "if you already have Kubernetes..." premise. I find myself having a hard time not wanting to shove everything into the Kubernetes framework simply to avoid having to document what solutions I've chosen. `kubectl get all` gives me an overview of a project in a way that is impossible if every single project uses a different or bespoke management system.
"simple/complex" is not the right paradigm. The real SRE controversy is "unique/standard". Yes, the standard approach is more complex. But it is better _in practice_ to have a single approach, rather than many individually-simpler, but in-aggregate-more-complex approaches.
Kubernetes is never the perfect solution to an engineering problem, but it is almost always the most pragmatic solution to a business problem for a business with many such problems.
I have some fine $300 bookshelf speakers and tpa3255 chipamps setup in the living room and office; it's great yeah. I tend to think most people will end up with sub-par gear if they try to go secondhand, won't fully appreciate what value you can just buy new just looking at online recommendations in your price range, but if you want to be persistent & picky & eventually eventually snap up a steal secondhand does come up with some buried treasure sometimes.
I do have to switch inputs between Chromecast Audio and the computer that's plugged in. That's annoying. And I'd rather have Chromecast alike built into the amp like Nexus Q showed. At the very least these chipamps could offer me a 5v1a for powering my Chromecast. There are a couple fancy semi-expensive amps that do have Google's audio casting, but they're big-ish fuller-sized receivers and honestly expensive.
This setup I have has been kind of portable, but mannnn I don't love it. I literally have a chipamps velcroed to the side of a speaker. There's a 6s lipo for the chipamps and a USB battery bank for the Chromecast, plus cables for both power supplies. Audio cables from Chromecast to chipamps to speakers. I've gone long on making this a portable useful anywhere system and it rocks.
The one simplification is using some powered speakers. Micca PB42 and Neumi BS5p both will self-power off the 6s lipo batteries, are ~$150.
But it's just absurd & wild that speakers with networked audio are so un-mainstream. That I had to velcro this package together myself is absurd. How has the ecosystem only narrowed and narrowed? (Meanwhile Sonos is busy committing deep-cut enshittification/de-networkization).
I had a teacher once, at a training seminar, that kept repeating the phrase "We need to know what 'done' looks like."
"Done" is often a compromise. There's more that can be added, there's still burrs and "rough spots," but we need to declare it ready to go out the door, and be prepared to fully support our release.
I've been shipping software for my entire adult life, and have had to embrace this philosophy.
Just the other day, I stopped working on a "play" project that I was working on, because it was a rabbithole, and not worth the agita of fixing the fundamental design issues that I was encountering (an unfortunate by-product of my "Evolutionary Design" process, is that it's quite easy to fall into Wonderland, and I need to learn to understand that I should just let the rabbit go).
It really is, it’s just that I don’t want to live in the world where his proposal is the main way to discover and deliver information. His solution to semantics going unused is motivated in the last paragraph, and I just can’t bring myself to feel any of the enthusiasm the writing attempts to convey:
> The parts of the web that have actually delivered are the ephemerality and the security model, the indexability (but only for content, not apps), deep linkability, and the platform-independence. We can keep all those, and throw out the decades of legacy that's holding us back, and we will lose nothing, we will only gain as we unleash the kinds of amazing interfaces that developers can build when you give them the raw bedrock APIs that other platforms already give their developers.
I also have to admit I simply don’t—can’t—trust a proposal to make the (path of least resistance of the) Web less inspectable when it comes from the general direction of Google, even when it’s honest-to-goodness Hixie writing one upon evidently deep reflection; the same way I don’t trust a proposal to make a compiler toolchain collect user data by default when it comes from that direction, even when it’s honest-to-goodness Russ Cox writing one upon evidently deep reflection.
(In the case of Go telemetry, I still remember how Cox responded to a privacy-related question I raised on HN—but don’t even remember now—by proposing the organization maintain an anonymizing proxy for its many employees. Which was a fairly satisfactory solution, if you’re an organization and have many employees. And it seemed clear his mind had no other cases in its working set. Maybe it’s just something in the air there.)
I don’t mean to pass judgment here, to be clear. Hixie in particular has done more to improve the open Web than most people whose explicit job it was to improve the open Web, let alone web programmers, let alone programmers in general (the only cohort of those to which I can lay even a vague claim of membership). I don’t even mean that my upfront bias here is correct or should be emulated by anybody.
I only mean to warn you that I’m just unable to engage with the proposal without considering its source, most of all emotionally, so you should keep that in mind when I say it and its apparent excitement feel bleak, like a coat of bright paint on a rusty playground slide in the midst of a concrete Constructivist slum.
I agree with Moxie. But I’d go even further: I think the real problem stems from the modern corporate structure.
We have this idea in modern management theory that responsibility and decision making must travel up the corporate hierarchy. That execs are best positioned to make product level decisions. Or decisions of any kind. And peons at the bottom - the “individual contributors” who do all the programming must know the least about the product.
But that’s completely backwards. The people on the ground in any organisation know the most about what’s really going on. If we disempower them, and try to turn software engineering into an assembly line process (jira tickets go in, code comes out) then of course programmers stop innovating. They’re explicitly, and intentionally distanced from their capacity to improve the product in creative ways.
To be clear, I also don’t think the answer is to pretend we’re all equal and have an entirely flat management hierarchy. Different people have different skills, and a healthy organisation needs lots of talents to thrive. But there’s lots of ways to do that which don’t disempower the people on the ground.
The book Reinventing Organisations is a gem of a book. It totally blew my mind on this stuff. It talks about all sorts of different ways that innovative companies have upended their corporate structures, and along the way have been able to get the best from their people. If / when I start a company, I’m tempted to make it required reading.
Can anyone explain what Tauri or webviews offer that makes them a good choice over a local-http-server webapps? Imo, as a user, Webview, no thanks. Local webapps, yes please.
There really isn't a good reason for webviews or electron/tauri that I can tell? Why some people love love love native apps, to the extent they'd rather a dressed up webapps is confusing to me. If it's already a webapps, hell yeah give me the user-agency of extensions, browser history, tabs, back buttons, and hyperlinks or give me death! Anything but the power-stripping captive-audience of native apps!
It would be much better to package your app as a small daemon that hosts a localhost webserver. The daemon can talk to all the system APIs it needs to. Add a desktop icon or shortcut that opens the localhost webpage. The daemon can present just a regular HTML hypertext webapps as usual, so all the usual bits of user-agency can slot into the overall experience.
Theres a lot of usenet-related apps that work like this, that run as daemons, and have web interfaces. Sunshine game streaming too.
It's be great to have some massively multi-platform http-headed app frameworks! That does seem semi missing, especially wrt mobile integration.
All: HN is for curious conversation. When you're not feeling curious, please don't post. Instead, find something story that you do feel curious about.
Comments that boil down to "boo cars" or "yay cars" aren't interesting, and set us up for flamewars that are the opposite of curious conversation, so please don't post like that.
I've never done much with Bluetooth under desktop Linux, but that sounds like a woeful pain in the ass compared to the usual steps for Android or Windows:
1. Pair headphones in a couple of clicks/taps; sound comes out.
Since there's a lot of discussion of it feeling expensive for "just push notifications", I think it's probably worth my addressing that directly as a top-level comment.
Zulip Business costs $6.67/user/month. While the only Zulip feature that can't work without purchasing a plan (or doing a huge amount of work to publish your own mobile apps) is mobile push notifications for businesses with 10+ users, https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted details dozens of features for which Zulip Business includes expert support.
Zulip is 100% open source. In open core products, those specific features just don't exist at all in the open source version. For example, Mattermost requires the proprietary Mattermost Professional [1] at $10/user/month if you want to use SSO, LDAP sync, user groups, read receipts, etc.
(Note also that $10/user/month is the minimum price at which Mattermost offers push notifications "for use in production environments" [2].)
If you compare Zulip's pricing options to Mattermost's, our offering is substantially more generous.
It would be even if we went open core and moved a few dozen features of Zulip to a proprietary version. But we're not going to do that: we really do care about being an 100% open source project.
If you instead compare Zulip Business to using Zulip for your business's mission-critical communications between paid team members without paying for something, I think that's the wrong question. Skilled humans' time is incredibly valuable, and people spend a LOT of time in team chat tools. It is rational for businesses to pay a tiny fraction of the fully-loaded cost of their employees for the insurance that comes with support and mobile push notifications for their main collaboration tool.
(If you're using Zulip for something other than a server full of paid employees and contractors, see the Community plan and discounts for other use cases).
Finally, on the topic of cost to us: Supporting a business that is self-hosting complex, mission-critical software like Zulip is more expensive for us than having that business using Zulip Cloud. Hosting is cheap compared to humans who can debug anything, and there are big economies of scales in terms of human time for managing a large multi-tenant cloud installation.
Helping thousands of different people with varied skill levels self-hosted your application successfully is not cheap, even for a project like Zulip that is very focused on making self-hosting Just Work.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
> Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.
> By comparing the treatment arm to control 1 arm, we observed that removing third-party cookies while enabling the Privacy Sandbox APIs led to -20% and -18% programmatic revenue for Google Ad Manager and Google AdSense publishers, respectively.
For the mysterious "new experience in Chrome" they mention, I'll be keeping an eye on their public planning repositories, but there's no guarantee that the project they're mentioning is related to any of these:
> OPFS doesn’t come with graceful handling of concurrency out of the box. Developers should be aware of this and design around it.
There's a multiple readers and writers proposal [0]. It's been "position: positive" by Firefox [1], implemented in Chrome [2], and ignored by Webkit [3] (of course).
Love the shoutout to Roy Hashimoto. He's been writing VFSs for SQLite-on-the-browser and perf testing them. He's recently wrote "IDBMirrorVFS", which "is a new example VFS that keeps all SQLite files in memory while persisting to IndexedDB". It has remarkable performance, of course. https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/discussions/189
This is one of the reasons I'm always singing the praises of Kanban over Scrum. Scrum encourages busy work on too many things. Kanban encourages ruthless focus on a few things that need to be done next, and what is blocking it. Scrum encourages "agile cosplay" with folks taking on things they shouldn't be doing now to make the right (imaginary) story point total for the sprint (which of course gets gamed as points get estimated to fit). Kanban encourages teaming up to get the hard stuff out of the way now.
I have led a team in a transition from an over-done scrum to minimal Kanban process and talked to many others who did the same, from small startups to AAA game companies, and they all loved it. I've never heard one dev say they thought it was more productive to have scrum. As far as I can see, Scrum makes middle managers, "scrum masters" and people who don't care how much work actually gets done happy. Kanban actually helps development go faster.
If anyone's interested, Microsoft press has a great light book on. The WIP limits are a key part.
Impressions from last week’s CVPR, a conference with 12k attendees on computer vision - Pretty much everyone is using NVIDIA GPUs, and pretty much everyone isn’t happy with the prices, and would like some competition in the space:
NVIDIA was there with 57 papers, a website dedicated to their research presented at the conference, a full day tutorial on accelerating deep learning, and ever present with shirts and backpacks in the corridors and at poster presentations.
AMD had a booth at the expo part, where they were raffling off some GPUs. I went up to them to ask what framework I should look into, when writing kernels (ideally from Python) for GPGPU. They referred me to the “technical guy”, who it turns out had a demo on inference on an LLM. Which he couldn’t show me, as the laptop with the APU had crashed and wouldn’t reboot. He didn’t know about writing kernels, but told me there was a compiler guy who might be able to help, but he wasn’t to be found at that moment, and I couldn’t find him when returning to the booth later.
I’m not at all happy with this situation. As long as AMDs investment into software and evangelism remains at ~$0, I don’t see how any hardware they put out will make a difference. And you’ll continue to hear people walking away from their booth, saying “oh when I win it I’m going to sell it to buy myself an NVIDIA GPU”.
