cjmoran

I have an even more radical solution. The real root of the problem is that we use this "money" concept to represent value. If money didn't exist there wouldn't be any reason to steal, hack, or scam.

What do we replace it with? Haha, idk man. How about water? More difficult to hoard in ridiculous quantities, better spend it before it evaporates, and it occasionally falls from the sky (UBI). That's what I call a liquid asset!

Spectacle pops up as the first result in KDE's app launcher when I start typing "snipping tool." Props to whomever decided to add that alias.

Zero props to whomever decided that punctuation from the outer sentence should be injected inside quotation marks.

There's a very simple solution to keeping podcasts free and open: don't buy paywalled content, and don't listen to shows that are "only available on [proprietary app x]!"

I'm going to continue supporting independent, freely-available RSS podcasts through Patreon/direct donation, and you should too. Nothing (short of ISP-level censorship) can make those hundreds of thousands of hours of decentralized, self-hosted content go away.

I'm not convinced that tightening up web development practices is what's going to solve climate change, but:

When you push the CPU processing of the UX from the mobile device back down to the server, the energy consumption certainly moves. Does it decrease, though?

One could argue that developers/website owners might be more motivated to optimize their server code for performance, thereby decreasing their hosting bills, vs optimizing front-end code which they don't pay to run.

On all the pumps near me, the second from the top on the right side mutes the video. Some gas station attendants or kind customers thought to write "Mute" on the button in sharpie, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

Some podcasts I've listened to recently have had local ads injected into them at the start/end. I can tell it's happening because it takes a few seconds for a download to progress after I start it.

Ah, I probably should've mentioned that the DigitalOcean article I linked shows how to install/configure a synapse binary with apt-get.

The other comments already gave you some great info, but I'll just link some good documentation for anyone looking to get started. I discovered Matrix the other day and decided to set up a toy matrix-synapse server, which took less than two days' worth of free time for someone with a programming background and no serious IT expertise.

Build matrix-synapse server from source: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse

Install matrix-synapse server on a DO droplet (the smallest/cheapest droplet or excess resources on an existing one should be plenty): https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...

I hope this project gets more traction because it's a fantastic, secure, self-hosted, full-featured, (inhales), open-source version of slack/telegram/kind of discord. Not perfect yet, but really great so far. Even pretty easy to set up e2e-encrypted voice and video calling through your server.

I don't think you're wrong, but I'd just add that social media platforms like Facebook are doing everything they can to keep a user's attention at the cost of closer IRL relationships or anything else in their lives. To them, the more time you spend on their platform, the more money they make.

So increased social media use is definitely a symptom of broader disconnection in our societies, but it's also helping that disconnection along quite happily.

I get notifications with the Riot iOS app. I did take a little extra time to set up my toy matrix server with LetsEncrypt certificates, not sure if that makes a difference.

I've been looking into telegram alternatives for a while. The best one I've found is the Matrix protocol (https://matrix.org), which is sort of like a cross between telegram and slack but it's open-source and you can self-host it. There are several app/webapp clients that you can use with your server, like https://riot.im.

It's got end-to-end encryption by default (although you need to manually enable it in some clients like Riot), Riot's mobile app works well, and supports audio and video calling through your server.

They'd just start tracking that info on the server side (while still requiring opt-out per-device), and then we'd have to make the extension copy your session cookie between opted-out devices, and then they'd come up with a way to counter that...

The links I've tried have required I perform additional actions. LinkedIn was particularly bad, requiring dozens of clicks to turn off all tracking.

I don't disagree that it's moving fast, but my experience is that the thriving ecosystem makes JS apps nice to work on.

Every project has its own little tech stack, each part being filled a-la-carte by some JS framework/library/preprocessor. The server might use express or raw node or Koa, the web client might use React or Angular, styles might be done with SCSS or styled-components, etc. JavaScript might have a different syntax between projects if they're using typescript/babel. There are lots of choices to fit many needs and preferences, and that's a good thing™.

All of these technologies are built around the same language and syntax, which at its core is relatively simple to learn (aside from the occasional type coercion/prototypal inheritance weirdness). This makes learning new frameworks and tooling easy: does it need a config file? Chances are it's a raw .js or .json file with a similar format to webpack.config.js or package.json or .eslintrc.

It's not a huge ask, nor would it be terribly difficult, for one developer to become competent with both Angular and React, for example. And once you've made your choices for your project and installed all the npm packages you need, there's no need to keep all of them updated to the very latest, bleeding-edge releases at all times. Just install patch (0.0.x) updates and wait for npm to warn you about any security issues in your existing packages.

That's why I'm kind of surprised to see so many companies advertising JS jobs with requirements like "Must have 3 years experience with React." Any competent Angular developer should be able to pick up React and start being useful in a matter of weeks, not months or years. Just hire JavaScript Developers, IMO.

Light Table comes to mind: http://lighttable.com/

Google can't know in advance what the Chinese authorities are going to consider a "problematic" search.

What are some potential solutions here? Some form of intervention by the US government? I think many of us will agree that the sort of behavior these employees are speaking out against is at least unethical, and it also seems this "profits-over-values" behavior is a common one for large tech companies to gradually start engaging in. To your point, corporations in all sectors always do what makes the most economic sense, even if it means building internet censorship tech, dumping hazardous chemicals into the water supply, etc.

As a society which (hopefully) would like to have some sort of moral compass, how do we prevent large companies from seeking profit even at the expense of our freedoms/health/planet? It seems to me that if the punishment for unethical behavior is economically "less" than the costs or potential losses associated with acting in a good, ethical way, companies will continue to do what we're seeing them do now. My intuition is that capitalism (in its current Western incarnation) can't function without some strict controls to protect what our societies value most.

Or do we simply value profit over everything else? If so, that's kind of depressing, but I get the sense that most people don't think this way.

Dumb little thing I made after work. Thought some of you might appreciate it. I think the checkboxes are broken on iPhones, sorry.

I can also recommend the Sony WH-1000XM line. I have the XM2, though the model 3 is out now. Some of the only headphones out there that beat Bose in active noise-cancelling. The sound quality is top notch; the one complaint people tend to have when I show them off is that the earcups are on the small side and they touch some people's ears. Doesn't really bother me though.

They definitely changed something about how WiFi calling works, because with this update my carrier was finally able to support WiFi calling on iOS for the first time. For some reason, up until iOS 12 they couldn't do that or visual voicemail.

My carrier is a reseller (MVNO) on top of T-Mobile. Curious to know why they couldn't offer these features before.

Do you know whether Google Play Music's upload feature works in the same way?

I wasn't a newcomer to JS when I started working with ES6, but it had been a while so I picked up The Good Parts as a primer. It was still quite useful and I was able to (I think) pick up all the new ES6+ syntax more easily because of it.

It's not steam, it's a vapor composed of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin (plus optional flavorings and nicotine). It's not "water vapor" as many seem to be spouting.

Google is working on making Chromebooks more developer-friendly. Some of them support running full desktop Linux apps now, but it's still in the experimental stages and I wouldn't recommend buying one for that specific feature until it's more mature.

That said, I've been doing light webdev work on a Chromebook using Crouton (to run desktop Linux alongside ChromeOS, with seamless switching) and aside from difficulties with the MicroSD slot and apt-get on Ubuntu it's been quite nice. Getting solid, first-party Linux desktop app support would make Chromebooks a serious contender in the "cheap dev laptop for light work" space, and I think Google is working toward that.

Obviously, the hardware is going to preclude you from doing any serious heavy lifting, but I'm pretty excited to see what they come up with in another year or two. The battery life on these things is fantastic, plus some of them can also run Android apps.

Crouton installation instructions can be found here: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

A tip: while you can find ARM distributions of Linux distros and packages, it'll make your life much easier to get a Chromebook with an x86 processor.

Welcome to choir practice, father.

Hm. Have you taken the time to learn all the new features and develop something with them? Most people who work with JavaScript these days seem to like it quite a lot, myself included. Since ES6 released it's become a solid language with a few strange quirks, whereas it used to be a crappy language with a few useful features.

I agree, I think people are putting too much stock in this idea that "phones and social media are killing real social interaction!"

It's definitely true that some people have issues "unplugging." One fried of mine comes to mind; I'll go get dinner with this guy and he'll stare at his iPhone grinding away at some mobile MMO or messaging other friends the entire time, while I'm left to eat my food in near silence (until he finds some hilarious image or video I absolutely need to see, at which point his phone gets thrust in my face). I can even ask the dude a question or make some remark and watch him miss it completely, only to ask "oh did you say something?" about 2 minutes later.

People like my friend need some kind of intervention for sure, but I'm not convinced that a majority of people behave like this. I'm very social and this is the only friend I can name with this sort of problem.

Meetups are great because usually nobody's counting on you to be there (no pressure for introverts like me), but after you've attended enough there will always be someone there who you already know and can introduce you to others.

I don't go to software meetups, though. I get enough of that stuff from working/side projects/etc. Nothing against them, I just feel that filling my free/social time with more programming content might cause me to burn out even faster than I already am. My suggestion: find a meetup for something completely unrelated to your work, like bicycling, board/video games, camping.

Yup, for some reason you can select individual songs on the desktop client even using a free account. Not the case on mobile.

I'm in Carrboro, down for a beer or three. I bet there are a fair number of HN readers in the triangle area; maybe we could also try to organize some kind of meetup?