The US has never allowed unfettered foreign competition in its domestic market, and neither do most other nations (including, very notably, China).
The US has always done what every other nation seeks to do, which is to try to obtain favorable trade terms for exports while restricting imports that would harm domestic business.
This particular bill is idiotic, likely because it was spawned by an idiot. But the general concept of protecting domestic enterprises from foreign competition who are not subject to the same rules has always been part of trade policy.
This is all true, but just to set expectations: the open source ecosystem seems to be lagging the proprietary world pretty significantly, unless there's some corner where development is really chugging along that's not making it out to the rest of the hobbyist market.
Though there have been incremental improvements in flight control software, and video subsystems have moved (mostly) from analog to 2.4/5.8 GHz and digital, the overall architecture is pretty similar to what it was 5+ years ago. You have a hobby R/C transmitter and receiver driving PWM outputs (through the flight controller, typically an STM32) to hobby-type ESCs which control the motors. The ESCs are microcontroller-driven and can be reflashed, but painstakingly and annoyingly. Telemetry is typically separate from control, which is separate from video. Everything is very short-range and non-IP.
In comparison, a COTS quadcopter from DJI has a single backhaul from the airframe to the controller which does control, video, and and telemetry. And the video is impressively low-latency. (I'm pretty sure they use a WiFi-type chipset and just spew raw vendor frames, and the receiver picks up what it can, best effort. You could do this with an ESP32 in ESP-NOW mode, I suspect?) I've seen some efforts to reverse-engineer the DJI protocol but I'm not aware of a fully compatible implementation or equivalent in the OSS world.
And at the upper end of the commercial/proprietary space you have systems with out-of-the-box autonomy, multiple backhauls over IP -- so they can use LOS/BLOS radio, LTE, SATCOM, whatever you want -- integration with navigation beacon systems to reduce GPS dependence, hybrid motor/generators, redundant power systems, the whole shebang.
There's no real reason aside from developer interest that this situation exists, as far as I can see. The components are mostly all available. A Raspberry Pi running a decent RTOS would have orders of magnitude more processing capacity than an STM32 and could easily do the sort of multi-sensor fusion that the commercial systems do. LTE modems are cheap. A bigger hexacopter or fixed-wing could easily loft one of the small Starlink dishes, if someone wanted to. Stuff like "perching" (landing and recharging from solar panels) is entirely possible.
But from what I can tell, the cutting edge of open source drones is happening behind closed doors in Ukraine and Iran.
Happy to be corrected if there's new stuff that I'm not tracking, but the gap between the "art of the possible" and current practice seems large.
Lots of opportunity though, is the other way to view it.
It doesn't seem that weird precisely because so many people here are in software, rather than hardware. My suspicion is that the median HN reader probably knows a few JS developers, but PCB designers are few and far between in software shops.
Some of the responses surprised me -- I would never have thought about using Fiverr, for instance. I've gone there for graphic design, HTML/CSS/JS, and even some full-stack work, but it never occurred to me to hire a PCB eng there. No reason, just not something I'd looked for before.
In many products, there are different firmware or software loads for the PRC market (specifically PRC -- until recently not the HK versions) and the rest of the world. In some devices it's possible to lock satellite positioning to only Chinese constellation (BeiDou), or introduce error, or just not include positioning by default.
Of course, some of those devices get through, or are carried in by tourists, or are enabled by enthusiasts who load the non-China firmware. This seems to be understood. The Chinese are smart enough, one presumes, to know that actual state-level competitors can get accurate (in the chosen geodetic system) location data without relying on tourists' geotagged Google Photos uploads.
But that does lead to the question, "why, then?" -- if your adversaries know your secret, it's probably not worth the effort of protecting, anymore. (And why, in the US, we know about stuff like VENONA now.) The Chinese seem focused on a different threat: they don't care if a few people have good location data, even if some of them work for the US NGA, they just don't want everyone to have that data.
Which is interesting, because it suggests that that they're less concerned about a foreign government with strategic intelligence, than they are their own domestic population.
This isn't about state secrets vs other states; it's about denying their own population a capability that they find valuable, and thus threatening.
That's only interesting to the extent that an organization has operations in China. Google was mostly ejected from the Chinese market years ago, I thought -- hence Baidu largely taking its place there.
It would be telling if despite that rejection, they were still open to taking direction from Beijing. Google at one point was fairly friendly with US DoD. Clearly the national loyalty of multinationals isn't guaranteed.
Expanding the foreign ownership rule to include social media platform companies (and, frankly, any strategically-important technology company in general) seems like a no-brainer.
Other countries should logically do the same. If Burma/Myanmar doesn't like what Facebook is doing there, they have demonstrated the capability to shut it down on multiple occasions. Setting aside that their government is a basically-illegitimate military junta, if I was them, I sure as fuck wouldn't let a US tech company operate within my country without a significant local presence that I could exert influence on.
"Dictatorships are bad" is not the game-over argument that it once was, maybe 20 years ago.
The Chinese aren't just competing against the US for control of some islands and sea lanes here and there, they are putting their political system -- which is de facto a dictatorship selected periodically by a small ruling clique -- as an alternative model to democracy. One that can compete with and defeat democracy, in fact.
And to be blunt, it's not clear to me that they are losing. We in the US have put ourselves at a disadvantage w/r/t China over and over again, relying ostensibly on the magical power of democracy to always win the day. As far as I can tell, it's straight-up magical thinking.
If we do not take China seriously as a threat to democracy, not just internally to Asia but as an aspirational model of society and the basis for legitimate government, I think we risk losing.
Why we would allow a propaganda outlet of what is effectively an enemy state to operate in the US, and why we would allow technology transfers and other advantageous trade arrangements, is mind boggling to me. Sure, the 'marketplace of ideas' sounds great on paper, but not when the other people don't believe in the same things. That sort of treatment -- access to the US market, both economically and that of ideas -- should be reserved for polities that at least have signed-on to the basic concepts that the US is built on.
That's only true if only a small percentage of users actually use that particular ad-blocking strategy. If a significant number of users did, then it would be a real concern.
Although I think YouTube et al see an increasing amount of revenue and viewership coming from apps... and if they could, I suspect they would kill their web sites in favor of apps where they have much more control.
I don't mind PiHole, but it doesn't do nearly as good a job of ad blocking as a "real" browser plugin does.
The amount of crap that still comes through when I turn off uBlock -- but am still using PiHole DNS, which is always active on my home network -- is a lot.
Honestly I don't think DNS-based adblocking is really viable, long-term. It's just too easy for advertisers and dirtbag website operators to get around it. There's just no substitute for controlling the retrieval of content elements and their presentation from the application where the user is doing the interaction.
This is why keeping browsers out of the hands of adtech corporations is pretty important; once they control that presentation layer it's largely game over. They can just tunnel all the traffic through a single connection to a relay server, if they want to, and there won't be shit a user can do about it once they've decided that's the only browser they can use.
I get that the WSJ needs to run these sort of pieces every so often to sell papers, but "No One Wants [Whatever]" think-pieces should be treated the same way as the overly-speculative question headlines that led to "Betteridge's Law" in the early 2000s.
Office culture, like the rest of culture, is cyclical. People are reactive, and tend to move in herds. Given an intense external stimulus like the pandemic, we should expect to see waves of behaviors propagating out through time for at least the next few years.
During the pandemic, nobody was in the office, so right after the pandemic, there was a boom in office socialization (in some quarters). Now, apparently according to WSJ, the pendulum is swinging back. This isn't indicative of very much, except that there was a big shock to the office-work social system and it's still not stabilized.
In particular, it's not especially suggestive of what the steady state will be, once these perturbations diminish.
I think we probably have several more back-and-forth cycles around everyone-works-from-home! vs. 40-hours-in-office-or-bust!, before the market works out what the relative value is (to the employer and the employee) of having people in the office and paying for a physical office for them, vs. the flexibility of working from home and of having a potentially international hiring pool. There are benefits and hazards for both parties in either arrangement.
My personal feeling, just based on how the job market has tended to stratify in the past, is that we'll see multiple approaches within each industry/sector, based on how fundamentally creative the work is.
The organizations in a particular sector who are really pushing the boundaries of that industry, who are actually advancing the state of the art, will likely be in-office cultures, because nobody has yet found a substitute for in-person communication particularly as it applies to creative problem solving. But those will represent a small tip of the workplace iceberg, sitting atop (and demanding higher rates than) a larger volume of companies whose work simply isn't that fundamentally creative or challenging, and have to compensate by offering flexible / WFH arrangements, and actively court the employees who are more interested in work-life balance than in working in their industry's version of the Manhattan Project.
That explains why the K8S defaults are bad, but why use K8S at all here?
Personally it seems like a lot of shade-tree server admins are way too eager to bust out much more tooling than is actually necessary for many tasks, just because it's the way that $BIGNAME company does it.
Realistically, most people running a personal or small community's IT system aren't going to need the sort of crazy scalability that container orchestration systems are designed to provide. And if you're not running them at significant scale, the containerization and orchestration-system overhead are often quite significant fractions of the overall resource footprint. Plus there's the unnecessary complexity due to all the levels of abstraction that just don't need to be there.
E.g. for a Mastodon instance, I wouldn't touch Kubernetes or complex orchestration unless I was out of other, more traditional options for scaling. The server side is already broken into a number of components (RoR app, PosgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, node.js) which you can separate out onto their own servers, and from there each component has preferred ways of scaling based on need. And while nothing is safe from failure, backing up a bog-standard PostgreSQL VPS is a lot more straightforward than K8S.
If you're doing deployments dozens of times a day, of course automation is desirable. But if you're doing it once, I suspect most people would be hard-pressed to make back the investment of time and additional testing required (well, should be required) of working through a complex container-management architecture.
Interesting, as I have had the opposite experience. There are lots of documents that I have to work with -- most created originally in Word 2007, I think -- with very intense formatting, forms, embedded charts and other crap, and Google Docs makes a total hash out of them.
LibreOffice, OTOH, pretty much looks just like they did on the original.
The one issue I've run into is font substitution. The fonts that LibreOffice uses by default if the actual Microsoft fonts aren't installed are not, at least IMO, very good substitutes. They don't look great to me, but worse they seem to be very different in terms of character/word width, so everything gets reflowed to hell and back. But assuming you install the actual MS fonts, the results seem quite good.
There's really no technical reason why imagery like that couldn't be contributed, and IIRC Google does use municipally-owned imagery in its products. A single city might not be a big enough source for them to bother, I don't know, but I know particularly in Europe I have seen copyright notices for national and regional governments when looking at imagery.
Though there are a lot of sources for satellite imagery right now; Google may not be that hard-up for new stuff. I suspect the commercial vendors they work with probably image the entire CONUS area every 12 months or so.
The imagery that would seem to be more in-demand would be the aerial photos used at very high zoom levels. I'm not a geospatial expert but I think these images are combined with some sort of LIDAR or multi-spectrum imagery to have height maps in tandem with the visuals. That strikes me as pretty expensive to obtain.
I agree with everything except I don't think I would have called out OrangePi as the worst of the lot -- at least not anymore.
They seem to have basically outsourced their software maintenance to Armbian, and if that relationship holds it's probably a win-win. Armbian's build system is really nice, IMO.
FriendlyElec are borderline; they make nice hardware but definitely seem to take a "here's a kernel we got to boot once, good luck!" attitude towards software support. Some of their boards are supported by Armbian but often without key features due to lack of documentation or binary blobs.
Below that is a vast sea of largely-anonymous Chinese-based hardware companies who drop a design (sometimes really neat) into the world, then disappear without a trace. Mostly I think these are designs whipped up quickly to use up spare parts, or originally designed for embedded use in a particular product and being sold on the side. (I've definitely seen 'development boards' that were clearly designed for security cameras or TV decoder boxes, f.ex.) But you are buying yourself a new hobby if you decide to get one.
> Anybody not a pure hobbyist left the RPi space long ago.
I suspect a lot of hobbyists have left too, and that's why there's so many not-quite-knockoff SBCs on the market (ranging from the respectable OrangePis to weird fly-by-night stuff on AliExpress made by a company that's already out of business before your order arrives).
But I don't know how many people are using alternatives because they want to use alternatives. Raspberry Pis have been like hen's teeth for a couple of years now. If you have a NIB Pi4, until recently you could sell that sucker and probably by 3 OrangePis instead.
But if RPis were the same price? I think they'd sell like hotcakes just like they did a few years ago, and you'd see them in every random project on Youtube. I don't know of any SBC (other than very high-end industrial embedded modules) that are as well-documented as the Pis.
I'm not sure the Pico and Pico W are going to make as much of a splash as the original did (it's harder for people to get started with an overgrown microcontroller than it is a tiny PC), but I expect them to sell very well, too. Maybe they won't show up in every disposable pregnancy test and lightbulb like the ESPs and Nordics, but I suspect we'll see them in some commercial products too.
I guess... but if industrial is really their market, I think they need to up their game in terms of documentation. "Real" industrial embedded modules tend to come with reams of documentation covering almost down to the silicon. You pay for that, of course, because writing documentation costs money, but so is having your engineers spend time twiddling bits and poking at undocumented registers, trying to figure out why your sample code works and theirs doesn't.
That said, I've seen some neat shoestring-budget prototype projects done on BB hardware, so there's some market there. But it seems like their stuff is a bit expensive for low-end learners and hobbyists and missing some of the niceties you get if you convince your boss to buy a ComExpress-based industrial module, or (if you really twist their arm) something like the Arnouse BioDigital SBCs.
Having random people reverse-engineer your hardware in order to document it seems... a lot less ideal than having the people who actually built it in the first place reveal some of the information that they must already know and probably have written about it.
I've been down this road and while it was certainly an interesting learning experience in some of the mechanics of the kernel build process, module dependencies, etc. etc., it was not necessarily productive in moving the projects forward that I wanted to do with the temptingly-cheap Chinese SBCs that I couldn't resist buying.
Having learned that lesson, now I won't order something unless it's formally supported by someone like the Armbian project (or Debian, or OpenWRT, etc.). And as interesting as some of the niche SBCs are, sticking to boards that have a broad userbase saves a lot of time when you run into weird errors.
The US has always done what every other nation seeks to do, which is to try to obtain favorable trade terms for exports while restricting imports that would harm domestic business.
This particular bill is idiotic, likely because it was spawned by an idiot. But the general concept of protecting domestic enterprises from foreign competition who are not subject to the same rules has always been part of trade policy.