I've been a user of the Java/Maven ecosystem for decades. Maven has had local caching of artifacts for as long as I can remember, and there are several ways to set up a private repository mirror for caching and reproducibility.
Self hosted means you host it yourself. I.e. you run the software. Running on your own home machine is definitely self-hosted. Hosting it on a VPS in some datacenter still is. Running it in a cloud platform somewhere is stretching it but I'd say that sill is. SaaS definitely is not self hosting even if the software is open source. The important part is that you're the one in control of the software.
I've learnt that flat out statements aren't always the best way. I suggest curious minds consider the evidence laid out in Palmer's book, which is not only free but also a true pioneering work, to then “come to their own conclusions” (if they're into that kind of thing – not everyone is).
I had never really understood why in the early 90s “nuclear weapons” ceased to be “a problem” (a media talking point) moreless overnight “when the Wall came down”, as the arsenals still existed. A dozen years later I realized the Russians kept talking about them, and I was worried about “stability”.
And there were other things I couldn't make sense of – such as what does it mean for an aircraft to be “nuclear-capable”? I mean – there's a payload, and there's speed and altitude, and there may be safety concerns, but nothing really seems to fit when you look at what's considered “capable” and what's not.
And why did we have barrages to stop tank armies entering “from the East”?
And why spend so much on military in the first place when the bomb dwarfs everything? Why all this insanity?
Another dozen years later I found that same Swedish naval engineer whom Palmer would later also find in the exact same way, and whom he mentions in the preface. It was a bit like “tolle, lege” although of course I don't compare to Augustine.
And then the insanity started making sense again, but in a very different way.
But there's something else that strikes me profoundly when I read discussions such as these. It's not about the topic, it's about the participants. It's the way they talk about it – the way “the Bomb” has become an object of both erudition and veneration. “The Bomb” is studied and idolized, intellectually hugged and worshipped – while the victims are a mere projection screen for the greatness of “the Bomb”.
How can that be?
To me, the psychology of things is often the most interesting aspect. And I think what we have here is a cover story, a self-serving cover story, and that is not an accident.
A cover story for what ? We have eyewitnesses of Hiroshima. We have videos of atomic bomb tests. We have seismic recordings of underground blasts. Multiple countries claim to have independently developed the bomb. A coverup on a global scale, lasting for decades, implicating people from the military, scientists, everyday people from many countries, without a single person breaking secrecy. Why ?
So my sibling comment posted yesterday did not get killed, unlike 49953689, 49954141, as well as 49938615 and 49941900 before.
« A cover story for what ? » — To cover up dozens of heinous mass-murdering crimes with veneration of “the Bomb” ?
« We have eyewitnesses of Hiroshima. » — Yes, we do. You'll find some in the Palmer book (link in the dead comments). You'll also find some in chapter 19 of the Rhodes book (The Making of the Atomic Bomb), where they're more numerous but less interesting, as the book serves a different purpose: it's not an investigation, but a narrative. About 60 % of the eyewitnesses Rhodes quotes were children, and what we have is their recollection decades later. Let me quote this:
A five-year-old girl: The whole city … was
burning. Black smoke was billowing up and we
could hear the sound of big things exploding.
Big things exploding? Sounds like multiple explosions. But the testimony, as quoted in Rhodes, is too brief to make much of it, and, like many others, not exactly precise, and hence not substantial. And also probably a much later recollection. And she was only five years old.
« We have videos of atomic bomb tests. » — Those are separate incidents.
« Multiple countries … Why ? » — You're rushing to ulterior questions, if not to conclusions. Palmer focuses on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki evidence. And there is more than enough in there already that is “puzzling”, to reuse your expression. So I'd prefer to stay focused.
I'd reply but it's pointless, all my comments are now stillborn, dead on arrival. It appears some people on HN, despite all the talk about “curiosity”, don't like seeing their topics of predilection and veneration challenged by views and evidence that could lead people to reconsider whether the establishment view is correct at all.
One of the main problems with UX in my opinion is that someone arrives, sees a problem in their own eyes, and try to make changes and impose their views on everyone. Because a lot of that is personal preference, taste, habits, ability, and so on. You can't have a one size fits all solution. If you try you end up discovering that there are many dimensions and that people are scattered around in the space. And either you try to remove dimensions, and yay suddenly you have a one-size-fits-all solution but only because you removed choice (Google is a big offender in that regard), or you realize that you have no right to impose your views, get more humble, and propose a new solution, expanding the choice of others (but that is rare).
The problem, in my opinion, isn't that they "do", but they "can". Once the windowing system gave up control, it disempowered the user. For example, allowing apps to change the window chrome. For me that was basically the end of usability of WIMP. We no longer have a strong separation of concerns. we need that back, and we need the user to be in charge of the behavior of the windowing system. my strong preference, for example, is that I cannot interact with any window that doesn't have focus until I give it focus. At some point in the last 20 years, that standard was broken, and I have been stuck ever since accidentally doing things to windows that don't have focus.
Some window managers let you configure that. Tiling WMs in particular are better for that kind of thing, IMO.
I don’t think the “desktop metaphor” is particularly important or useful. It seems more like a gimmick to help people who’ve never used a computer before have something concrete to cling to. If you take away the desktop, tiling WMs are a natural place to end up. (Not that you can’t have a desktop with icons etc. in a tiling WM, but it loses a lot of its significance and isn’t really needed.)
You need that to do drag and drop with one mouse-down and one mouse-up.
Given that, the designer can decide if that’s an exception and everything else requires click-to-focus before being interactive, or to use focus-follows-mouse. People really seem to have individual preferences on this, so there’s no one right answer.
I think this is why FVWM is around for so long, OpenBSD even still ships it as the default. The configuration is painful but every tiny thing can be adapted. I stopped using it though because other DEs were more actively maintained and so much quicker to configure.
Considering the base version of fvwm is no longer supported by anyone on planet Earth, it's there because it's deraad's preference, and that's fine.
Newer versions are available in ports.
It's important to remember that fvwm is customisable so it doesn't need to look dated. Given enough time, it's possible to have an environment which suits the individual just fine.
I don't know what the parent was thinking about, but the examples where the USA intervenes militarily in some country under the guise of justice while refusing any accountability for itself are many. The latest example to date is capturing Maduro because he's supposedly the leader of a drug gang to have him tried in a US court. So the concept of supranational justice and "assault on state sovereignty" is fine when it is in the interest of the USA.
Glossing over that too long article, the main proposition seems to be :
> The registries should charge companies, and pay maintainers
They already centralize packages, centralizing money flows is bound to cause more issues. By the way, npm is owned by GitHub, and GitHub is owned by Microsoft. "Your payment for your leftpad package has been transferred to your Microsoft Wallet". No thanks.
I just think there's a fundamental disconnect between the goals here. If I write free software, I don't write it to get paid, I write it to benefit others. If someone takes my work without also contributing back, I will get upset. The solution is not to give me money, that's not the spirit. We should not force people to pay for OSS but we should force them to give back to the community.
That's why copyleft licences like GPL are superior. People licence their work under BSD-style licences that are the equivalent of putting a box of stuff on the side of the road with a "free, help yourself" sign and then get upset when people do. BSD-style licences take away as many rights from users and authors as they can. GPL-style licences give as many rights to the users as they can. That's basically completely opposite philosophies. Use the right licence folks.
Memory factories cost billions to tens of billions, "investors" aren't going to spend that kind of money if they are not reasonably certain that they are going to make a profit, and the market is very uncertain right now with everybody bracing for a bubble burst at any moment. It's not the first time there has been such a shortage in the computer parts market, and the oligopoly, be it RAM or hard drives manufacturers, has always managed to keep prices high and production low enough to avoid a price crash after recovery.
Here's a plan to build a reactor that generates unlimited energy, at the human scale anyway : take a lot of hydrogen. Put it together until there is enough mass to spontaneously start thermonuclear reactions. Then it will start generating lots of energy for a long time. Having a plan does not mean 9 billion people on Earth are going to be able to build the thing. Then it does not mean either that they are going to be able to use that energy to do something. You need also physical things on which that energy can act, and that's not going to appear magically.
> we should not allow everyone access to unlimited intelligence
Who's we ? Who's going to decides who has access to "unlimited intelligence" ? An AI ? Why would the AI be better than a human ?
> One with no off switch.
Whe're not living in the Matrix, such a thing is not possible. If it were it would be a likelier candidate for the Fermi paradox than what you're proposing.
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