While southern Florida is hardly at the equator, living here has really highlighted how northern-hemisphere and temperate-centric the online sphere - tech in particular - tends to be.
We don't get spring/summer/autumn/winter so much as rainy and dry season; heat pumps are irrelevant; natural disasters come in the form of hurricanes, and weather is either sunny or stormy; the days don't change in length much; and so on and so on.
It's a bunch of little things, but it's been surprising to me how often they come up in discussions, and just how rare (sub)tropical-specific problems and topics are in comparison. It makes me wonder what it's like to live somewhere even further removed from the natural world of the north.
AI actually provides a pretty clean solution to the drawn/generated "CSAM" problem: decriminalize possession, criminalize distribution. Crack down hard on anyone selling/sharing it but let people draw or generate it for themself.
If anyone with a GPU has access then the cat is out of the bag on the creation side of things. But on the other hand, it means there is little incentive to share / distribute it - unless it's not drawn or generated. Resources can be fully put towards preventing harm to children without getting lost in the weeds of questionably effective, 'slippery slope'-based enforcement which will only become less feasible with AI.
Of course, no politician is going to touch CSAM laws with a ten-foot pole. So things remain in limbo to the benefit of no one.
I've been trying to get a more foundational knowledge in areas that interest me, namely spaceflight and paleontology. For a long time now I've been casually interested in both, keeping an eye on major new developments and watching YouTube videos from time to time, but I never felt like I could really put the things I was learning into context.
It's been a while since school so progress is slow as I'm having to relearn how to actively learn, but it's already been super rewarding. I've been making my way through a couple textbooks and have signed up for a course online. Even just memorizing the geologic time scale has made pop paleontology videos feel less like disconnected factoids, like I'm actually building a knowledge base.
I've also decided to condense various web-related projects into one big full stack project with its own protocol, client, server, dns and so on. Basically my idea of what the world wide web should be. I get easily distracted and have multiple web servers, templating engines and so on littered in my wake from when I run into something I don't like and want to do it better.
I know I'll probably never finish it, and even if I do it probably won't be very good. But it makes it a lot easier to stay focused on other projects when they hit a roadblock, since instead of being tempted to remake whatever is causing the problem from scratch I can just make a note for how I think it should be done in my little stack when I get to it.
Fantastic design. Normally pages with funky scrolling behavior and boxes whizzing all over the place and all that are annoying but it really works here. Not to mention the adorable visuals.
That being said I think it misses what made the old physical interfaces so appealing and useful. It's not that there's something inherently superior about multimodality; it's that physical interfaces are permanent, with defined edges and definite shape. Unlike screens you know exactly what's where, building muscle memory every time you use it. There are no hidden menus or moving parts.
Multimodality - such as being able to see the position of a slider at a glance, or feel its position by touch - is useful because it reinforces the absolute existence of a control and its state across multiple senses. Interfaces using voice and gestures like suggested are the exact opposite of that, because each point of interaction becomes even more disconnected and vague.
>Fantastic design. Normally pages with funky scrolling behavior and boxes whizzing all over the place and all that are annoying but it really works here. Not to mention the adorable visuals.
On my phone, there are several pictures that erratically resize themselves whole scrolling past, and that card stack section completely flips out when scrolling back up. Aside from being very visually noisy, I'd say it just doesn't work.
Is it worth pointing out that GNOME doesn't always use FOSS for creating branding materials? Sure.
Is it a betrayal of the entire FOSS movement? A loss of "all pride and dignity"? No.
Pointing fingers like this is more a betrayal of FOSS principles than what GNOME has done and makes me embarrassed to consider myself a part of the community. If you're working to support FOSS it is your right to use whatever software enables that goal best.
I just want to highlight this link in the article, about a mother who was arrested because her son walked less than a mile into town (population 370) on his own [0]. Arrested. For putting him in danger.
I was watching this documentary Happy People, about people who live in the Siberian Taiga (by Werner Herzog, would highly recommend). A man is talking about making a new set of skis, and it shows the incredibly long and careful process of selecting the perfect trees, chopping them down in the right way, treating the wood and so on. He mentions how mass manufactured skis are light and cheap and will work fine for a while, but when one breaks and you're in the Siberian wilderness you can't just go to the store for a replacement. That really stuck with me.
1960s US is hardly Siberia and I don't think any NASA engineers had their heads on the chopping block if their designs failed. But engineering philosophy was still rooted in survival; the primary goal was to make something that wouldn't kill you because it fails.
You hear stories about artisans in the old days refusing work because they don't believe what they're being asked to make is safe or reliable enough for the person asking for it. Maybe it's romanticized and idealized, maybe it's just them covering their ass so they don't get blamed. But that philosophy of personal responsibility not just for making things according to the constraints, but for the outcome too, is something that served society well for a long time before slowly disappearing over the past century or so.
It hasn't left without reason. As the things being made became less key to survival and more key to thrival, as the world became more interconnected and safe, it didn't make as much sense. Just think of how many crazy, inventive concepts we use every day wouldn't have been made if they could only be made to work reliably! Our entire modern existence is based off things that don't work reliably. It's a blessing and a curse.
But when we're exploring the final frontier we need frontier thinking and frontier technology; things that, from the ground up, are built to work first with all other constraints secondary. Unfortunately spaceflight endeavors today must invariably build off the 'good enough, when it breaks just make a new one' foundation that permeates modern design at every level. Even if you want to make something nowadays with the sole purpose of working, as long as you're using any technological advancements made in the past 50 years chances are you're using something that wasn't made with that goal in mind.
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