TrevorFSmith
Joined 359 karma
Eternal newbie.
- TrevorFSmith parentThe essence of free software is and always has been charity. Some people attempt to interface with capitalism via "open source" but that game is rigged to make previous winners continue to win so you missed the boat. It's a mistake to link coding to how you get food, shelter, safety, etc. Do it for fun or not at all.
- I 3D print items that aren't mass produced, either because I'm one of few people who wants them so there's no market or I'm the only person who wants them because they're customized for me. Most reasonable 3D printer users don't believe they'll replace mass production. They use them for parts you can't buy.
- I am a subscriber but still would love a tarball of PDFs of each issue.
- If AI feature are on by default then no thanks!
This is how to burn what little trust remains: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off."
It has to be opt-in or you're not worthy of trust.
- It's a shame they didn't ship an EV that fit the uses the F-150 serves. The Lightening is a luxury item. The F-150 is a tool, regardless of whether it's ICE or EV. I hope this puts more people in the market for the Slate truck. It won't serve everyone with an ICE F-150 but I suspect a bunch of farm and ranch vehicles that don't do many highway miles could be Slates.
- I'm a happy Kagi subscriber and look forward to Orion on Linux. Every well supported browser other than Chrome is a win. I'd love Kagi to fund people working full time on web standards in the W3C and WHATNG, too.
- A similar result can be found by reading coverage of events you witnessed or topics you know well.
- That's a sweet idea and I'm glad to see your comment about maintaining it as a patch on top of Firefox sources so you can roll in their security fixes.
- This reminds me of gas station pumps that play ads on sub-par displays and tiny crackly speakers. I'm already paying for gas and now you think you can force crap ads on me? If an ad starts I immediately stop pumping and go to a different gas station. The fridges in people's homes. Expensive fridges! That's a hard pass.
- I would really love for new projects to find their own name instead of calling themselves the next version of something they don't like. "Web3" has never been a new version of the web, just a way to inject undeserved clout into a (IMHO fundamentally flawed) experiment. There are so many great unused names! Please pick one.
- I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.
- I would love for everyone designing a new social app to start by deciding how to handle the issues every social app will have. Abuse, hate speech, brigading, etc. We've known about these for decades. They can't be ignored. I'm not dictating how they should be handled (variety is great!) but decisions should be made and declared up front before the first spec or line of code. Otherwise the app is DOA IMHO.
- A good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co. If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.
- So, we want incredibly profitable companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple to take their software development costs and subtract that from their tax bill? These are the same companies that file patents so nobody else can use the ideas that they developed at the expense of public services. How about making it a tax break only for small and medium sized companies?
- I see folks suggesting emacs and others saying that they must use VSCode (or forks) because of the ecosystem of plugins. Folks, we made this mistake with Eclipse and many other IDEs. The root problem is binding the build and instrumentation tools to the editor. Here's how to solve the problem once and for all: Use a programmer's editor that's great at manipulating text and run all tools on the command line. Never mix them. All else is folly.
- Kagi downranks sites with many ads and also with many tracking scripts. It's not perfect but it is, in my experience, a better search service.
- The term is "build in public" not "talk about money in public". If you enjoy chatting about the esoteric details of building a useful thing then great. If you're mostly trying to attract customers and you don't enjoy it, then don't do it.
- I regret that I was born before jobs (the "work or starve" kind we have now) are made obsolete, so in that way I regret keeping every job for any length of time.
- Fedora has a Sway spin that installs all of the usual applets like volume and network config. Sway can also be installed on any Fedora machine with one dnf command. I just don't have the problems described in the article.
- If you're in the Seattle area then the SDF is a gem not controlled by a billionaire.
- That's a spendy domain for performance art. At least, I hope it's performance art.
- Hey, ex-Mozillian here. For the old alt OS people, also an ex-NetPositive dev.
With that context, I'm on board with not giving money to Mozilla Corp. Late last year I cancelled my subscriptions to Pocket, the VPN, and recurring donations.
That said, I recommend that you support Servo instead of Ladybird.
Reason #1) C++ is just dumb in 2024 and choosing it is a big red blinking sign that the devs make bad decisions. Now they're considering a rewrite in a better language? So, starting again from scratch... No thanks!
Reason #2) Given the track record of the main author of being an ass to people who aren't willing to be marginalized, I don't have high hopes that he can lead anything as complex as a competitive browser. No, Serenity OS is nowhere near the same level of complexity thanks to el GOOGs insistence that the modern web includes every API found in OSes. Serial port access, really?
Anyway, please don't just jump on a hype train. Fund Servo.
- PyGame is also great for scripting quick UIs for the fb. You don't want to write big apps in it but for ease of setup and use it's sweet.
- We no longer have an open web. We have a Google web. No amount of coding will change that. Nothing will change until enough people stop using Chrome that devs can get paid to support other browsers. People won't stop using Chrome as long as they keep up the current pace of glomming on more complex APIs and syntax. No other team can compete. Well, a couple could but they quit for short term cost cuts
- Most gigs are fine as long as you refuse the responsibilities of leadership. The compensation bump rarely compensates for the weight of catching the crap that's falling down the org chart. Don't let your ego drive you up the org chart either, it will never be satisfied.
- We can save literal tons of waste if we stop re-implementing the wheel because the C-suite thinks everything from login pages to monitoring is their special sauce. Entire careers are wasted coding that stuff instead of writing and maintaining it as FOSS. The ecological load of the entire lives of people doing pointless work is truly waste.
- It's interesting to me that this article was written ~seven years ago and already feels thoroughly outdated. The core problem is that its basic premise is that we need to scratch-write an OS that is essentially the Alto WIMP (1972), a few BeOS features (1995), and questionable improvements like forcing apps through a messaging bus a la Smalltalk (1972) or CORBA (1991). It isn't that the individual ideas are bad, per se, but if you're going to suggest write an OS from scratch then it really should be significantly different and inherently impossible to make by tweaking an existing OS, of which there are so, so many. Just an unbelievable number of OS options.
- My free stack, 2024 edition: Fedora Linux Sway spin, Inkscape, GNU Image Manipulation Program, KdenLive, Natron, Blender, FreeCAD, KiCAD, OpenSCAD, Orca slicer, IceCat, Zulip, LibreOffice, and a flock of CLI tools
- Windows, icons, menus, and pointers ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) ) had its origins in the late 60s and was codified at PARC in the early 70s. It's ridiculous that we still use it despite the radical change in hardware capabilities and our understanding of coding. This article really missed an opportunity by complaining about trivia instead of the core problems.
- For someone with zero doubt he made a lot of claims with zero evidence.
We're all carrying high resolution cameras 24/7 but somehow there's nothing but shaky-cam and Vaseline lens blurs. Grain of salt and all that.