In The Aleph, Borges predicts the internet : "... Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it
“interesting,” and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern
man.
“I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner
sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs,
phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries,
timetables, handbooks, bulletins...”
He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our
twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain;
nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed."
South American countries are not doing well. The region is one of the places with more inequality "Of the 20 most economically unequal countries in the world, eight are in Latin America"[1]. So maybe the rich in latinamerica are doing well. Also is a political polarization scenario
between left and right extremism some countries close to a conflict or war.
[1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/inequality-and-s...
Also had a Kindle some years ago and walked the Calibre road : Problems wity text flow, TOC, that are not Calibre problems but poorly formated books even from high end publishing houses.
I vow for open standards and used to upload epub files to Google Play Books and read in my devices (Kindle Fire 8 - with Google Play sideloaded, iPhone, iPad) with decent Sync. In december I got a Kobo Aura 2, my eyes are more comfortable have less distractions but I lost ubiquity and sync, also E-reader feels slugish and dictionary font is very small even with glasses. It's a take the blue/red pill situation.
I live in a 3rd world country, worked the last 20 years as systems administrator. Recently lost my job and while looking for a new remote job I have been touched by the hard reality: The world changed and I was full of self leniency, years using the same bash scripts, the same tricks day to day. Did lot of things maintenance, networking, security,databases, mail servers, anti spam. I consider myself capable of put a SMB connected and working. My job didn’t demanded me new skills an I was self indulgent, happy to have enough money for the day.
Some recent job interviews showed me a depressing reality : I did the least, I know the minimum, never upgrade my knowledge, just relied on Google search. I didn’t know about CI, CD, containerization, DevOps in general. I have a B.S in Systems Engineering (Some sort of CS , without the ‘science’ part) enjoyed math and code in college, done tens of websites in WordPress, Joomla and some Drupal, I’m capable of code in Php, some bash, some ruby, some python.
I’m in my mid forties a kid 4 years old and cannot afford to stay worried, I have to do something to land a remote job, I want to thrive and motivated enough to learn, but time is ticking would like to hear some advice.
Jet Brains is another example that OpenSource doesn’t kill industries or companies. JB won over Eclipse and Netbeans with great products, great customer service and fair licensing options and prices.
I feel Ionic is more engaged into open web than big companies trying to enforce their own standards. The question is when Appple and Google will start blocking (outside of walled garden app stores) hybrid apps?
I have my important VPSs on Linode since 2008, good experience, almost zero downtime in 10+ years, very reliable, great customer support. They have a $5/mo Nanode 1CPU, 1 GB Ram.