robolange's comments

How do they even think they can enforce the firmware provision? Erect a great firewall? Fine me, the American user, for downloading a firmware update?

> engineers may have to log into a jump box via a VDI to then use Jenkins to run a Groovy script to use Terraform to deploy containers to a highly customized version of AWS.

This hits too close to home. I'm sending you my therapist's bill for this month.

My main desire in trying NextCloud was syncing files with a handful of people, as a free software replacement for Dropbox. All of the other features were nice to haves.

I've tried several of the "budget" NextCloud hosts. I'm not going to name names, but all of them were very disappointing. File syncing frequently broke in hard to diagnose ways. And from a perspective of overall service, I would get 502s, 503s, or 504s far more often that I should have. This was with multiple budget providers. I didn't try any of the more expensive providers, because I couldn't afford it, so maybe this is a "get what you pay for" situation... But in theory, the size servers I was paying for should have been able to handle our traffic volume.

Anyway, after a couple of years of trying to make hosted NextCloud work for us, I gave up and bought Dropbox's paid service and haven't had any issues with it.

We use Cryptomator on top of Dropbox to ensure data privacy, by the way. Back when we were using NextCloud, we had been using their end to end encryption plugin until we discovered a silent failure mode in which it was uploading documents in plaintext to the "encrypted" folder. I believe nowadays the recommendation even for NextCloud is to use Cryptomator on top, rather than their built-in encryption.

I wonder which came first? This site or https://www.b5tech.org/ ? Both sites clearly use the same templates.

I feel this. I recently ran into a problem with a kernel update breaking Bluetooth on resume from suspend. My Logitech keyboard and mouse that I use at my desk stopped working after each resume, and I had to go to the laptop keyboard and manually stop and start Bluetooth. On each resume.

Look, I'd love to contribute to the kernel, but the amount of time I have to play around with these things is now measured in minutes per day. So no, sorry, I don't have time to rebuild my kernel from mainline, and then bisect, and then cherry pick patches, and then test out proposed updates, and then help shepherd it through my distribution's patching mechanism.

So I just gave up on Bluetooth on Linux and plugged in Logitech's proprietary Bolt dongle, and re-paired my devices with it, and haven't had trouble since. I'd prefer to use standard protocols, but this isn't the first time a kernel update broke my Bluetooth setup, so I think I'll stick with what just works.

Naturally on the Internet there is an infinite variety. But using that Whole Foods site to filter the list to what's physically available at stores in my area, it reduces down to a list that's more or less Heinz and Heinz-like.

Yes, and the alternatives are more or less identical to Heinz. The diversity of flavors and textures that this article talks about no longer exists.

Great list. A few more:

- Your ISP is [ISPs are, to your 2nd point] actively hostile to running "servers" from your connection, so you must either pay a ridiculous premium for that privilege, or jump through hoops to evade their intentional breakage.

- Your other cousin does something illegal (sells drugs, posts revenge porn, threatens a public official) using your host and now the police are knocking down your door in the middle of the night and dragging you in for questioning. Even if you avoid charges, your neighbors eye you suspiciously from then on.

I can't count how many hacker conventions over the past 15-20 years I've been to where someone was evangelizing a product that claims to do what you're talking about. So many of these "dead simple" "plug and play" devices. Rarely do they survive more than a year or two before those involved lose interest or give up. They have a very hard time finding a product-market fit in a market of technophiles. They never even come close to a market of normies.

- The raw idea seems easy.

- The initial implementation seems like it should be of moderate difficulty, but is actually very challenging to get even close to right.

- The long term maintenance is a nightmare, but don't worry, you won't survive long enough to worry about that.

- The infrastructure and policy implications of getting and keeping it connected to everyone else are intractable. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531969 for some tip-of-the-iceberg examples.)

And yeah, none of that even touches on marketing.

Makes me wonder how many weapons the other nuclear-armed nations have lost and not recovered. Like the US, Russia has thousands of them, and had tens of thousands more during the cold war. How many of them went missing?

> Now you swoop in and say "Facebook is evil, and if you don't get off of it, I'll cut you out of my life!"

I said no such thing, and I'd thank you not to put words in my mouth. As I explained in a different subthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32131334

I feel like various people are misunderstanding what I've written, so I'll try to clarify here.

> before you declare war on the ones that don't wanna change

I never "declared war" on anyone. I guess it's a lot easier having never used Facebook or Facebook products. I had a bad feeling about them from the very beginning and I've only ever felt more right in that feeling.

What would usually happen was, I'd meet someone new at some event, or maybe I'd be talking to a relative at a family gathering, and they'd say something like, "What's your Facebook? I'd like to add you to GroupX," and I'd reply that I didn't use Facebook. Then they'd follow up with, "You should join, it's <blah blah blah>," to which I'd politely explain why I won't ever join Facebook. And then one of two things would happen. Either they'd understand, and we'd exchange phone numbers or email addresses, or their eyes would glaze over and they'd find some excuse to walk away.

For the latter group, obviously we didn't interact online. For the former group, I'd text or email, and maybe they'd respond, and we'd have what I consider to be a normal relationship, or maybe they'd rarely or never respond, and we'd have no relationship. But in either case, I wasn't haranguing people not to use Facebook; I just wasn't using it. If not using Facebook meant I didn't have a relationship with someone, I was okay with that.

Exactly. At some point I've had a conversation with most of the people who have filtered out of my life over this. I explained the reasons why I feel that Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopathic scumbag and his company is a cancer upon humanity, with the consequence that I won't knowingly use any product made by any company he owns or controls. For those who've filtered out of my life, their response was mostly along the lines of, "You said words, but I wasn't paying attention. I think Facebook is fun."

For most of the non-techie people in my life, I just communicate via common open protocols like SMS and email, things everyone can use easily. I do encourage people to try Matrix or Signal, but I certainly don't require those to communicate with me.

I continued communicating with those I cared about via standardized technologies. Those who communicated back in kind I still keep up with. Those for whom this was a bridge too far, are no longer in my life. Maybe they weren't ever really important to me, which made it easy for me to drop them? Or maybe they were, but I was never important to them? It doesn't really matter; they're not in my life anymore, and I'm okay with that.

I've never worked at a FAANG, but still this resonated with me. I'm 20 years into my software engineering career, and if I'm being honest, I've accomplished nothing. Literally, not one project I've ever worked on has seen any significant deployment or had any notable impact on the world, not even my small part of it. Just project after project that's ultimately abandoned or shuttered. Sometimes the company goes under. Sometimes the lab closes. Sometimes not, but I burn out and leave just as you described. In the end, the result is the same: no impact of my work on the world, but also no impact of the failure on my "career".

I'd love to work at a competant and impactful organization on something meaningful. The problem is, I genuinely believe that the probability of such an organization existing, and of them hiring, and of my having the right skill set, and of my learning about, applying to, and passing the interview, is essentially 0. Now, I struggle daily to avoid the cynicism you described so well.

If we're going for anecdata, I called Comcast Business a couple of months ago and asked about IPv6 support. The sales rep asked, "What is IPv6?"

Whoops, good call, that should have been 5kBps. GPRS had something like 85kbps theoretical maximum transfer speed, but the fastest I ever got anything to transfer over cellular was about 5kBps. Still, even in that era, that was absurdly slow, and unusable for anything web-related.

> SHR was a light OpenEmbedded-based distro

I might have been thinking of a different distribution. There was one that brought in all of the GTK, Qtopia, and Enlightenment libraries, so you could run pretty much anything that could compile on the Freerunner, but it was quite slow and consumed most of my SD card (which at the time was probably only something like 1GB).

I guess if you were a hard-core hardware and systems hacker, the OpenMoko was an acceptable platform. For anyone else, it was a terrible product and the company that made it was obviously doomed to fail.

Maybe if it had come out at least 2 years earlier, it might have had some hope of carving out a sustainable niche, but by the time it did come out, the expectations set by iPhone and Android made it impossible to find a product-market fit, even among open source lovers like me. Maemo, while if memory serves not fully open sourced, was far closer to something sustainable, but then Nokia voluntarily imploded :-(

After getting rid of my Freerunner, I had one of the the first Android phones (HTC?) briefly, then got a Nokia N900. I liked the OS, although it's my memory that it wasn't as fully open sourced as the OpenMoko. I did enjoy it, even though the device always felt too thick to be comfortable in my pocket, and the touchscreen cracked badly after a minor impact. I ended up using a cheap Nokia candybar phone for a year or so, before eventually getting another Android phone.

I wish Nokia had continued developing the Maemo OS.

Most of the hardware I've ever owned I still have, either in working order or as component boards decorating my walls. I recall my emotion when disposing of the Freerunner was that it didn't deserve an epic funeral (the laser) or even the honor of being properly disassembled.

Openmoko failed for so much more than financial reasons. It's been a while since I've thought of that fiasco, but my memories:

* The leadership was terrible. They had no clue what it took to make a mass market product. They just assumed that they would sell hardware and a community would provide a working operating system and apps magically.

* The hardware was buggy. There was one issue that if you let the battery drain fully, you could not get the phone to recharge it and had to use an external charger. Another issue was that the GPS receiver was accidentally surrounded by metal, so barely functioned. There were all kinds of problems with the radios in the early days. Oh, and that touchscreen -- I guess it was typical of pre-capacative touchscreens, but it was hard to use without a stylus and impossible to hit widgets near the edge of the screen.

* The hardware was massively underpowered (compared to competitors) by the time the Freerunner actually shipped. Weak CPU, little RAM, 2G cellular radio in an era when 3G had become standard, so like 5kbps max data transfer.

*Because of the failure of Openmoko leadership, the community fragmented a hundred ways. This meant that there were a dozen or more "distributions" of an OS for the phone, and none could do more than one or two of the things a typical user wanted in a phone at that time. Then there was finally a big bloated distribution (SHR if memory serves) that packed in enough libraries to make a more or less "usable" device, but doing so maxed out the phone's meager storage and RAM, making it nearly impossible to do anything "smart" with it.

* Once again, in absence of strong UX leadership, the community resorted to dumping X11 apps without modification on the tiny screen. Think impossible to read fonts and dialog boxes that ran off the screen with no scroll capability. The vast majority of devs seemed to only use it by hooking it up to a computer via USB networking and SSHing into it.

As a technical user, I could live with this. Kinda. Sorta. Using it was an exercise in masochism. I was embarassed ... no ... humiliated when a nontechnical person compared their iPhone with the OpenMoko that I had talked up so much (before receiving it).

I had planned to destroy the phone in some fantastic fashion (e.g., melting it with a laser) as soon as I got a real phone. But by the time I could afford an Android, I was so done with it that I just dropped it in the trash (after wiping it, of course).