I'm a truck driver. My analogy, zooming out a bit, is that the entire road system, at least the National Network, is a system of interconnecting and overlapping conveyor belts.
True - still a lot better than painstakingly offloading a ship's cargo onto trains and trucks and vice versa, one crate at a time. All of civilization runs a good deal faster and better because of shipping containers
Ah! That's a pretty much orphan subject yet the world is constantly moving pallets.
For pallet stability you would like to have a convex perimeter so the stretch wrapping maintains the boxes effectively. And also criss-crossing boxes for shear resistance.
But you need to align as much boxes corners as possible to get vertical stiffness.
A solver proposing stacking patterns with these constraints would be outstanding.
Yes right, I'm biased toward single product pallet. Then high mass items should be placed on the first lower pallet, low mass on the pallet put on top of the first one in the truck. The solver starts to be complex.
Yes but the Pi is calling home, so isn't that trading privacy for convenience? And I fail to understand how it's more secure than ssh + private key? There is still a connection outside.
My best guess is that its made for the lower end of tech user, who knows they want to ssh but doesn't know enough to be able to do it securely on their own? Otherwise I have no idea what the use-case is
That's exactly the use case—I think after they switched to wayland, and RealVNC didn't work (it was included with the default install on every full version of Pi OS), they wanted to make sure there was an easy to use replacement.
Most of us on HN use our own VPNs, or have a dozen other ways to get at infrastructure from anywhere (and mosh, as others have suggested, is a better alternative for simple shell access over high-latency flaky connections)... but there are a _lot_ of people who don't want to (or couldn't figure out how to) maintain their own VPN. Or they want to deploy Pis at remote sites and each one has a weird and unique networking config, and they don't want to mess with Tailscale or the like.
It's a useful service, but it's not supposed to compete with homelabber setups, or enterprise solutions. At least I don't think so.
EU is 450 millions customers, I don't see them missing out on this market. Add to the fact that they can also grow marketshare in a landscape which is still dominated by Android.
That why I hate the word "farm" and derivatives like "farmer" and "farming".
On one side is see land cultivators and on the other hand i see animal exploiters. The first do -IHMO- a great job akin to school teacher, the latter do a horrible job akin to a concentration camp commander.
Having one word to describe both is beyond me.
That said, I do find it amazing how these two groups stick together and back each other up in politics!
Ranchers and farmers are quite different and I get along much better with the latter. Their politics coincide when it comes to a common cause, like water for hay.
I think the terms "farmer" and "farm" are entirely appropriate, as the farms that traditionally sustained humanity absolutely required animals to provide labor, fertilize the soil, and consume what would otherwise be waste. This all looks like a "concentration camp" to vegans, because vegans enjoy their privileged beliefs. Veganism is a form of masochistic asceticism.
But since I'm talking to a vegan interlocutor, the response will be "murderer, psychopath, exploiter, rapist, torturer", et cetera. The out-group is wrong and evil, by definition.
> I think the terms "farmer" and "farm" are entirely appropriate, as the farms that traditionally sustained humanity absolutely required animals to provide labor, fertilize the soil, and consume what would otherwise be waste.
So there was a past in which the lines were more blurry and animals were not as hardcore exploited as they are today. I agree. And there was a time in which people in many places needed animal husbandry to survive (nomads, cold climates, etc. -- everywhere away from the habitat of the other primates). I agree.
But what I do not agree on is that these two points make the word "farmer" less "cover two topics at once" in this day and age, were:
1) animals are most commonly being exploited at a massive scale when being "farmed", and
2) we can live really well without animal derived foods/clothes/labour
Most vegans are not militant and hateful as you describe, they are just the most visible ones. Most vegans live regular lives and are friendly to omnivores, and you'd only know they were vegan if you spent some time with them and encountered situations where food decisions were being made.
That's dirt cheap for a software you can make a living off. For FEA or CFD one would need to shell off in the order of 50-100k plus 20k per year. 1500? I would.
I'm a programmer. I periodically need to make a tiny tweak in a file that's been created by a real artist, or I want to edit a photo I took, or whatever.
It's insane to spend $1500, or even $500 (the CorelDraw buy-it-outright price) for hobby and occasional-use software like that.
And yeah, I use other things like Affinity Photo, which is Good Enough for many of my purposes, but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists--unless they flatten the image before giving it to me, it's a crap-shoot whether I can import it in anything but the exact version of PhotoShop they were using.
It feels like extortion: I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file, or I have to pay Adobe an outrageous sum to do it myself. Lose-lose.
Fully understood, this carefully engineered vendor lock-in is the cherry on the cake. It's in all CAD software for no reason and forces you to follow the herd. Open standards should be imposed by state actors...
If you're paying artists to make art in PS, are you not doing it for something you make money off of? Or are you just really deep in the hobby that you're nearing professional level?
Photoshop was never $1500 either. CS6 was $700. The design standard CS6 suite was $1300.
Maybe hunt for artists that use the reasonably priced Clip Studio Paint instead? It's pretty popular among manga and the like artists anyways.
> I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file
Hire the artist and ask them for the files exported into a format you can open. If they refuse, hire somebody else.
I do agree with the sibling that open standards should be set by state actors. But they should only make them available, not mandate them into private actors.
> ask them for the files exported into a format you can open
They already do that. That's not the problem.
If the original Photoshop file has 200 layers, and 60 of those layers have effects that use advanced Photoshop-only features, then no other art program can open the source material. Period.
At best you can get approximations of the original Photoshop render if you open the image in another program. But generally what you get is garbage if it's not a recent version of Photoshop.
The point of getting the Photoshop original with the layers is that I might be able to make a tweak to one of the layers and have it re-render a result that is better for what I need. Something that is difficult or impossible if I just have a JPEG.
And asking the artist to do the work in a program that doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they don't know). Yes, technically anything is possible in any environment, but it might take 10x as long and be 100x as painful--with a result that may not be as good due to the tools not being as good.
Artists are professionals with an acquired skill set. You can't ask them to work using unfamiliar tools and expect them to be happy or productive.
> And asking the artist to do the work in a program that doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they don't know).
You mean the thing that every single company does for their work for hire?
When a developer doesn't know, they go after another developer. (And they should restrict the number of constraints to what is really important, but almost no company does that.)
No company I've worked for in the past decade has told me what kind of computer I should work on. Even the W2 gigs have allowed me my choice of Mac/Linux/Windows. I work for tech-savvy companies, though. I'm sure there are tech-naive companies that force everyone to work on Mac or whatever.
And companies that want programmers who write, say, Delphi or Visual Basic, are going to be getting crap developers, and would be better off porting their software to something more modern. I did some work on a Delphi project to help out a friend, and no, I wouldn't go to work for a company to work on Delphi full-time. They couldn't possibly pay me enough.
But that's my point: Just like they would get crap developers, I would get crap artists. Or extremely expensive artists. Not interested. It would literally be cheaper to pay Adobe the extortion they ask than to try to work with non-Adobe artists.
- Paint.net is free and covers most of what I'd need to do
- GIMP is free. Cumbersome, but if I need to do any batch operations that's when I bring out a full suite.
If I only need to do a quick edit for some hobby thing, I'm not frought for options.
>but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists
So you are a professional? If you have artists at your beck and call and it's not a forboding deadline, I don't know why you wouldn't ask the artist to make the edit.
There's definitely a debate to be had about proprietary file formats (I work in games, so I completely understand that with its 3d equivalent that is the FBX format... thankfully there are very slow moves to cast that away), but I'm not sure I have a good solution. I don't necessarily think a company should be forced to open source/spec its own tooling.
> I don't know why you wouldn't ask the artist to make the edit.
Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce technically precise artwork?
The point would be that sometimes it takes 4-5 turnarounds with an artist to get something exactly right. Something that I, as a non-artist but skilled app user, can do in less time it takes to explain what I need to the artist a single time. So it's about saving my time and not having to pay for hours of artist time for something I can do in 10 minutes.
What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them. That's what it comes down to. I'm not saying they should be forced to do anything. Just that I don't like what they're doing, and therefore end up having to work around their software rather than using it.
I have a license for the last one they offered for a fixed cost; bought it for a steep discount when the new licenses were the Next Big Thing. But they won't get any more of my money until they offer the software at a reasonable price tier.
>Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce technically precise artwork?
Yes. But I work in games, so maybe I was expecting professional artists working on complex assets and not a grab bag from fiverr for some UI art. Anything "simple" probably takes them 2-5 minutes and maybe a few turnarouns while I could maybe take an hour of edits for much worse quality.
>What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them.
I agree completely. But I know there's no such thing as a smooth migration, especially when working as a team.
It's sad, but they have a lock on the market for a reason and that moral stance won't be without some growing pains or compromises. I'm sure we both know trying to get an artist to migrate tools is much harder than a programmer.
Well, I think you could say I've worked in games too. [1]
In fact, it's in games that the artists, especially when working with 3d, had the hardest time getting the precise kinds of changes that I would need.
But even in 2d, if they, say, created a sprite, but then left a few pixels non-100%-transparent in the corners of the image, I could ask them to go find those pixels and erase them...or I could do it myself.
And if they don't get them completely erased, then there will still be artifacts on the screen and the texture atlas packing will be screwed up.
Yeah. I've been doing this for a long time.
And no, I don't have much hope of getting artists to migrate. I'm just tilting at windmills.
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