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sierdolij

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It depends.

The odds against an eBook store:

0. Undefensible business model - little/no barrier to entry, few patents, anyone can start such a store

1. Getting advertising and distribution at scale

On the plus side:

2. It might work at a tiny scale for niche categories/communities/local businesses.

Otherwise, I wouldn't waste too much time on it. I would something that's more difficult to copy or emulate.

Anomie and omni/suicidal destruction are only a self-fulfilling prophecy only if you subscribe to, and reinforce, learned helplessness as you appear to with a chicken-little "let's do nothing because it doesn't matter" or "it's someone else's problem" argument.

Folks, regardless of the merits of one particular story or another, you know wag-the-dog FUD propaganda has the net effect of increasing us-vs-them nationalism ("See, this country, and therefore its people, are really horrible" stories) in various countries almost inevitably leads to situations like another World War, right?

This doesn't really need another law. If something can be heard X m/ft away after night-time N (i.e., car stereo bass blasting at 3 am), or louder than Y anytime (i.e., concert without a permit), then it's creating a nuisance under existing legislation. It needs enforcement of what's already on the books if there's a complaint.

And the permit requirement to operate a small R/C toy is ridiculous: this information you don't want the government to have because it will be misused similarly to how social media was abused in the Gatwick Airport (non-)incident. The sensible thing would be classes (Class 1, 2, 3, etc.) of unmanned flying devices, as with model rockets.

https://www.nar.org/find-a-local-club/section-guidebook/laws...

Push it hard on social media for 2-3 years.. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. Lots of useful, practical demos showing solving read-world realistic use-cases. Any time there's a release or press mention, add a hand-crafted Tweet that brings some infotainment value (just like any good public presentation).

If after that time, traction isn't happening: adjust prices or make the offering clearer. If that doesn't work, then pivot/try something else. When/if it gets to $1-2k+/month, then it's probably worth selling to someone for $20-25k and not just apoptosisizing it. It can take as long as 10 years or never for something really good and ahead of its time to catch on with insufficient hustling. HUSTLE! :)

And for heaven's sake, don't throw away a good team if it vibes and flows just because one project doesn't work out immediately.

TBH: Aerion has more money, better tech and better technical, monetary and partner backing. Boom's timeline is extremely unrealistic. Aerion will fly around 2024 (give them an extra year as complex product timelines slip), and they have first-mover advantage. Aerion has flown numerous airfoil cross-sections on the bellies of research jets and is likely working on PoC for tech & subsystems, and design. Boom's website is mostly PR & wire-frames.. ambiguously indistinguishable from a scam without seeing other forms of validation (i.e., results (full-scale jigs in that hanger in Denver), partnerships, hires, orders). If Boom wants to secure more funding and orders, they're going to need publish more info to facilitate due-diligence.

http://www.fortworthbusiness.com/news/bass-backed-aerion-giv...

https://boomsupersonic.com/xb-1 (oh boy, strips of carbon fiber and a 1m x 3m hand-laid cross-section)

Disclaimer: I'm apolitical because right/left is divide-and-conquer, divided-we-fall noise.

Climate change shouldn't be political or some far-off hypothetical.. no propaganda, rationalization or BS can deny the mountain of evidence that it's an immediate, existential threat that demands immediate, decisive action on the decatrillion-dollar moonshot scale (roughly the total, multi-decade cost of Iraq & Afghanistan).

Polyrepos are the way to go:

- Semantic versions.

- Group components into reusable packages.

- Don't use git modules or other source cloning in builds, use native/platform package management.

- Access control is made much easier.

- Sign commits and tags.

- Code review either before- or after-the-fact, just do it(tm).

- Reproducible builds - strip out timestamps/random tokens/unsorted metadata.

- Create CHANGELOGs semi/automatically.

- Eliminate manual steps altogether.

- Distributed builds/build caching (distcc, ccache).

- TDD smoke tests should run automatically in dev on save with 10 seconds. Bonus points for running personal TDD sandbox on faster remote servers via rsync and trigger on file-save.

- Standardize on 1-3 languages.

- Services composed of simpler 12factor microservices, not monorepo megaservices. Deploy fuse switching, proxying, HA/redundancy, rate limiting, monitoring and performance stats collection just like macroservices.

I think there's three components to every employment position:

- sufficient work ability, rarely an issue.

- teamwork - at work interface, negotiating, empathy with others. be relentlessly resourceful and useful, but get yours too.

- off-the-clock skills and interpersonal/appearance likability - a bunch of awkward single dudes can't say "no" to the socially-calibrated dude who goes out and convinces a bunch of attractive-enough females to hang-out with a bunch of random engineer dudes. be that guy, and you'll have friends bugging you all the time... turn your phone off and rock out to Spotify. :D

17, ~25, ~30, ~40, ~45, ~65 and even ~70. I think it depends on the personality property of curiosity to delve into the software-hardware stack turtles of details all the way down and not see anything as a real barrier that can't be overcome with effort.

There's something to be said for lots of experience shipping product under a deadline, politely questioning technically-expensive features that wouldn't be good for the user and managing stakeholders' expectations.

This is the problem of decentralized, too open systems (aka anarchy): it enables terrorism, child porn, violent hate groups, organized crime and other extremists and criminals. There needs to be a reputation system and stronger limits to gradually give a user more access. Also, if they're required to pay for what they use (micropayment) to keep resources on servers, they're less likely to post illegal junk. Otherwise, crazy jerks will turn a free service into a Tragedy of the Commons, and everyone loses. We need more user-supported, non-profit sensible social media, productivity and other web apps to replace the for-profit and the wild-west ones that don't scale so well without major work. That being said, free often becomes junk because there's not the focus and professionalism to make something cool.

TL;DR - free doesn't scale without meaningful accountability

Maybe. It has a lot of practical innovations and constraints but some inconsistencies and rough edges that will likely be addressed. Perhaps programming languages need the freedom to try things, make mistakes and then use feedback with an RFC process, which Rust has, to make improvements. Feel free to submit RFCs if you notice anything specific.

Lifetimes - implicit/explicit semantics for how long a name is considered alive, whereas in C++ there would be a delete or falling out of scope.

Borrowing - I still don't understand how or why a non-reference is implicitly consumed by passing it (read-only intention) by value(?) to another function and then can't be used again. Pony does explicit consumption.

There seems to be a need for training classes in Rust that explain the development philosophy, because it's not readily apparent from the online resources to anecdotal me who's able to code in Haskell, Elxir, Erlang, Clojure, C, C++17, Ruby, Python, Go, assembly and LLVM IR.

SRE: do (almost) everything badass, generalist engineer. ADHD (almost also) required ;)

Disclaimer: freelance SRE lead/SRM/consulting EIR