onefish · HackerTrans

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

The aerodynamics of flapping aren't actually very well understood, so one of the reasons is just a platform for applied experiments. The reason you would want such a platform is because bird fight is potentially more energy efficient than anything humans have developed (as seems to be the case with so many naturally evolved mechanisms).

onefish

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

I don't know if it's just me, but it seems to only generate luxury homes in a contemporary minimalist / modernist architectural style. Not once did it generate anything resembling a Tudor mansion or Victorian cottage or Midwestern rancher or split level.

Nothing really wrong with that and it's neat anyways, but seem to represent its own sort of strange bias in a sense.

onefish

قبل 8 سنواتdiscuss

I guess I'd be curious about how you deal with e-mail, since that was my negative experience with a cloud provider (Lavabit), and I think in-general e-mail is a much harder (and maybe inadvisable) service to self-host.

I always like to read experiences and opinions of people who lean one way or the other with regard to all this stuff, or are at least cognizant of it at all, since it seems 99% of people just use whatever they happen upon first and solves their problem.

onefish

قبل 8 سنواتdiscuss

Recently I've been playing around with something like this, or really; getting back to something like this. Years ago I was an idealistic graduate student who didn't have any "free" (you-are-the-product) digital service or social media accounts - I used Lavabit (before it got shut down) for email and a couple of cheap VPS providers to run a little blog and IRC bouncer. I had a dumb "burner" phone, a RockBox-based MP3 player, ran Tomato on my router, and ran Debian on most everything else.

I think the main factors that killed it for me, that made me drink the Kool-Aid so to speak, were a combination of getting an Android phone and the shutdown of Lavabit (with all the hassle that incurred - notifying dozens of colleagues, mailing lists, etc of the change). Concurrently with this I had just gotten my first industry gig at a pretty large networking equipment company, on a team with mostly older, mellowed, senior engineers for whom programming was "just a job". I didn't want to seem like a "paranoid weirdo" who had some black-hat alter ego. I sold out.

Since, I've pretty much moved wholesale to Google. I still don't use any other digital services - Google has basically become my one-stop shop, for better or worse. I use Android, Chrome, Gmail, Drive, Music, Books, Search, Maps, Keep, Photos, basically the whole damn suite. It's a beautifully unified and seamless experience. I feel in-general, Google gets just about everything right (I don't use Docs - I still write docs in LaTex, haha). It's quite a 180 from what I had before.

But ultimately, I think this has caused me a lot of cognitive dissonance. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to "get back" lately, but this is tempered by how much control I've already given up and, well, what is frankly a pretty damn high quality and convenient experience and there are some things (like Maps, and Photos) which I really don't want to give up. I also don't hold any delusions that anything I do is going to be "more secure" from any threat model, really. I guess I just miss all the DIY. The creativity and control.

Anyways, recently I've been building an ARM64-based "mini-homelab" around an Archer AC1750 router running OpenWRT, a stack of three Odroid C2 SBCs, and an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (with a 50K LUT FPGA on the m.2 PCIe slot). I also have an ARM64 VM in the cloud. Once that's all set up, I've been considering how much I can "get back" under my control.

onefish

قبل 8 سنواتdiscuss

I'm with you there in not really buying into the whole security, trust, and ethics story line which mostly seems to be appealing to a bandwagon of sentiments around corporate and government spying. Unfortunately, these sentiments are probably the only reason otherwise-average people - the kind of people who don't care about recompiling the kernel for their phone, on their phone, or jiggling GPIOs to remove power from subsystems - would probably buy anything other than an Android or Apple phone. Without this both comparatively large in one respect (with respect to the set of all reasonably tech-savvy people) but comparatively minuscule in another (with respect to the set of all smartphone consumers) set of people, you're going to end up with another OpenMoko Freerunner type situation where the only people using it are the frankly ultra-fringe types like us who care more about having a pocket computer that behaves like, well, an actual computer should and are frustrated with the creative limitations of SDK-based lock-in.

I sometimes wonder how much Purism actually cares about all this security, trust, ethics rhetoric and how much of it is a bunch of geeks who just want to finally have a smartphone which can run an actual Linux distribution and figured "hey, consumers are pretty riled-up about this whole government spying thing - and it's pretty easy to audit open source software for that sort of stuff - maybe we can work an angle..."

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