So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices?
In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:
* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.
* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)
* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)
* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.
> a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products
This is expected IMHO, given that name brand product do nothing more than raise and raise prices, with varying list of ~excuses~ reasons such as "war here or there", "material/labor costs", "crisis", etc... But consumers' salaries are the same than before price raises of the last 7~10 years, so the new prices are unjustified (no better quality, no better products) and so people will keep expecting that a boot (or anything else) costs today the same as it cost in 2019.
I think it's not as bad of an analogy. Where you dedicated time and perfectionism for each piece of clothing (line of code), now you push a button and get them all done for you.
You mention improvements on how good clothes are washed for you, after decades of technical progress. Oitside of the analogy, we are literally living through that, but in 10x speed on a day to day basis regarding how well AI writes code.
We're just getting used to the invention of the washing machine. All clothes are equally cleansed on average, with good enough results even if afterwards some particular pieces need a bit of extra care, while before we had to clean them all one by one and paying attention to minutia and details on each piece's needs. Nowadays you just control a couple buttons and hope for the best.
Better to find joy in other parts of the process! Hanging clothes out is still a widespread practice in Europe, and some enjoy it. Likewise for software quality controls, testing, and full product lifecycle.
I we are heading towards a digital world, we need to solve the issue of how to ensure by legal means that in 800 years people will still be able to study current day media and arts.
As not a web dev, out of curiosity: What would be the drawback or problem with showing a header or pop-up on mobile browsers, offering to install them as (web)app? Then using the PWA functionality of the browser to do it.
I'm not a heavy user of those but the result of PWAs has always been an icon that's handled by the OS like if it was any other native app, and when opened it just behaves like the web browser in kiosk mode just for that website.
Funny because a couple weeks ago a colleague showed me his Obsidian based note taking for work, and I decided to start trying that and Logseq out, side to side, learning their ins and outs as replacement of Keep for Android note taking.
So far I liked them both, Logseq is quirkier but I can live with quirky in FOSS. Confusingly enough though, now a new rework is announced and switching away from Markdown... One improvement I want from Keep is to have notes synced to my Linux PC and grep over them, so this news make the decision easier I guess.
I'm just in the toying and evaluation phase with Obsidian and so far I like it, but I'd like to understand why an AI is needed or even useful to begin with it? So far I just see a powerful text editor, what did you benefit from with AI use?
So it has the potential to even look and work like an actual NAS! That is so cool. Sad state of affairs that 64GB seem to be around €400 nowadays, that's actually double of what the whole machine cost. I'll wait for the AIpocalypse and come out later to buy some sticks.
The whole point of the discussion is that if we're moving to a digital world, we should not go to a worse state than before. So if we were able to lend a game disc before, we should still be able to lend a digital copy in this great new fully digitalized world. That we're not able to, is precisely what's wrong with the transition. We had physical ownership of a disc, and companies have replaced that with immensely more limited usage licenses, which is bad.
I'd love reading some blogs about what's the best usage for actually minimal computers, any suggestions?
It always gets me how the world of self-hosting is usually introduced from claiming that you can start giving a second life to a Raspberry Pi or a forgotten laptop, and suddenly the next blog you read calls "minimal" a beast machine meant for racks and semi- or professional environments.
Bought a ThinkCentre M910q with an internal SSD and 16 GB of RAM for €200 a couple years ago... Right now I got it chugging along with TrueNAS + 2 USB disks in ZFS Mirror (sitting in a closed cupboard so no chance of cable disconnections).
For me, "minimal home server" means a small computer that fits on a cabinet on the living room, is practically silent, and has a very small power consumption profile (less than a decent Hetzner otherwise the cost wouldn't be worth it). I have a mini-PC in mind, but people think of Dell PowerEdges. Even if given for free, I would never install at my home a PowerEdge for a home server.
I guess it must be the difference between living on a flat vs a 2 story house :-)
Are you saying that we should not be able to buy a book, read it, and then exchange them with each other?
You should not be able to read a book or watch a DVD movie and afterwards give it to a sibling or friend, or leave it on a bench on the street for someone else to pick up?
I don't care if the medium is physical or digital, we should be able to, and OUGHT to do those things.
What is becoming absurd is the inability of so many people to extrapolate the most obvious conclusions instead of reaching the most obtuse and unhelpful ones, which arguably takes more effort to do.
In all your examples you are buying a service, isn't it obvious? the counterpart of "products" in the phrase "products and services". And yes, you are buying the right of being entitled to receive it. Ideally, you should be able to sell and transfer that right, or gift it to someone else. And if the service is eventually cancelled before being delivered, a full refund for the price should be issued.
The film is going to be projected anyways. You are buying the right to be present in the room when that happens. You can transfer that right (give the ticket to someone else), even sell it. Before the projection happens, the company might want to close and cancel that projection, in which case you are left without the chance to attend and exercise your purchased service; in that case, the company would (should) refund your full money.
Now change "attend the cinema" with "play a videogame" in those phrases. We should be able to freely exchange games between us. I should be able to sell them to you. The medium (digital, physical) is irrelevant.
Videogame preservation is on par with other media conservation, like literature; something that's an overall good for humanity as a whole, but not in the mind of the majority of consumers of such media. And that's perfectly OK. Most people just want to consume and forget.
Conservation is a social interest amd must come from organized initiatives, it will never take shape magically from individual judgement.
Comparing side-by-side is always easier. The question is never that (should not be). The question is, would you approach a random coworker's desktop and really, sincerely, notice if they have a 120 vs a 144 Hz (or 240) monitor?
I'd say maybe if you are a professional in the sector of multimedia processing, you would be so accostumed to the smoothness of high FPS that a meager 60 fps monitor would be obviously noticeable. But for the untrained eye, I feel most people wouldn't even notice in a random scenario like that, whether the screen is 60 or 120 (and that's the range with highest ROI on FPS increments!)
Oh but I have seen totally tech uneducated people saying that they are tired of so many apps in their phones that slow things down. People do notice, and as soon as you start asking around groups who use mid- to lower tier level of Android devices, they do develop a diffuse intuition of what is and what isn't a "heavy" app. It is unavoidable, the cruft and bloat can be observed very visually in some apps that don't care about performance.
If the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free...
All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
All-things C/C++, real-time multimedia, embedded AVR, and Oxford commas.
Connect: @j1elo at Twitter & GitHub.