I think it stunted out. Outside of only the densest areas, maker spaces never really formed. The stuff remains accessible as a hobby only to the wealthy who can afford all these tools and machines in the majority of the country. I'm a nearly 40 minute drive to the closest maker space and I'm in one of the 10 densest populated cities in the country. The last city I lived in, the maker space was too popular and raised their fees so high that it is also impossibly inaccessible to most people.
I saw that happen in a decent sized college town near where I live. They had a maker space spring up when 3D printing was the hottest thing. It didn't last very long though. I'm a bit surprised that 3D printer machines haven't become cheaper. Like solid machines sub-$100. 3D printer pens are the only thing that came close to doing that.
They're already very cheap, almost free when you buy used. I got one for $50 that makes pretty good prints. For $300 you can buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon that is a really high end consumer printer. Don't forget that we're talking about CNC machine tools with precision movements here. An entry level manual milling machine from Precision Matthews in Taiwan will cost you $250 shipping alone. Even good linear rails by themselves are more than $300 on ebay. A lot of innovation has been happening in the 3D printer space to make all these machine components cheaper which has also benefited other applications like hobbyist milling.
Nowadays, we are so used to all the injection molded plastic crap, and also so much poorer, that we can't understand why precisely manufactured products made from solid metal or wood are so expensive.
You can get 3D printers from BestBuy(!) for $200 retail. At that point, the cost of the filament is going to quickly exceed the cost of the machine.
At the $200 price point, your Bill of Materials is roughly $65 (about 1/3 of the retail cost). I challenge you to buy the raw materials of a 3D printer for under $100 let alone $65.
I'm not trying to defend maker spaces, though they make more sense to me in a college setting. My college had (has?) one and one of our professors really made sure to always use it, and have students use it and learn. Immense value there, even if only a dozen or less use it every year, its still an avenue for inspiration.
I'm a member of a local maker space that has been around a while and it has changed so much over the years in response to what people are asking for and what gets used.
I don't know if it's a local trend or what but the last 5-7 years the most in demand thing by far are sewing machines, knitting machines, and sergers. They ended up completely scrapping the woodworking area to fit a digital jacquard loom and that thing is booked around the clock, you have to plan 4-5 weeks in advance to get a session. Jeweler's bench is similarly busy.
In contrast the soldering and electronics workstations get regular use but I can usually just walk in and get a spot without scheduling or waiting much, which is almost never the case with the fabric stuff.
This pricing model will continue to incentivize them internally to not fix the hundreds of clearly documented issues that causes CI to be incredibly slow. Everything from their self-inflicted bottlenecking of file transfers to the safe_sleep bug that randomly makes a runner run forever until it times out. All of it now makes them more money
This pricing model continues to incentivize them not fixing the hundreds of clearly documented issues that causes CI to be incredibly slow. Everything from their self-inflicted bottlenecking of file transfers to the safe_sleep bug that randomly makes a runner run forever until it times out.
We are a ~20 person team who use private runners and this will increase our annual costs by ~12k/yr. This is a huge relative cost increase for us. If anything this hurts small teams that focused on expansive automated testing more than giant orgs.
Not really comparable at any compliance or security oriented business. You can't just zip the thing up and sftp it over to the server. All the zany supply chain security stuff needs to happen in CI and not be done by a human or we fail our dozens of audits
While true, the mistake we made was to centralize them. Just imagine the case if git was a centralized software with millions of users connecting over a single domain? I don't care how much easier it would be, or how flashy it would be, I prefer much to struggle with the current incarnation rather than deal with headaches like these. Sadly, the progress towards decentralized alternatives for discussions, issue tracking, patch sharing and CI is rather slow (though they all do exist) due to the fact that the no big investor invests in them.
This isn't really a trust issue. People tend to take shortcuts and commit serious mistakes in the process. Humans are incredibly creative (no, LLMs are nowhere close). But for that, we need the freedom to make mistakes without serious consequences. Automation exists to take away the fatigue of trying to not commit mistakes.
I'm not against automation at all. But if all of the devs build it and get one hash and CI runs it through some gauntlet involving a bunch of third party software that I don't have any reason to trust and out pops an artifact with a different hash, then the CI has interfered with the chain of trust between myself and my user.
Maybe I've just been unlucky, but so far my experience with CI pipelines that have extra steps in them for compliance reasons is that they are full of actual security problems (like curl | bash, or like how you can poison a CircleCI cache using a branch nobody reviewed and pick up the poisoned dependency on a branch which was reviewed but didn't contain the poison).
Plus, it's a high value target with an elevated threat model. Far more likely to be attacked than each separate dev machine. Plus, a motivated user might build the software themselves out of paranoia, but they're unlikely to securely self host all the infra necessary to also run it through CI.
If we want it to be secure, the automation you're talking about needs to runnable as part of a local build with tightly controlled inputs and deterministic output, otherwise it breaks the chain of trust between user and developer by being a hop in the middle which is more about a pinky promise and less about something you can verify.
Yeah this is mostly the "build twitter in a day" projects that conveniently ignore the reason these companies have 10,000+ developers is the 99.9% of the software that is not the frontend that actually makes the company things happen at the company. The much bigger customers of many of these companies being the advertisers and the artists/creators who have their own interfaces and analytics and billing and payment tooling. The business rules engines and feature flags with tens of thousands of rules that allow any of these companies to operate in subtly different ways for customers in different states, countries, and regions with different laws for accessibility, fair use, and using and storing data. The auth and security layers that often have multiple interfaces for employees, customer classes, partners supporting native-auth, oidc, totp, developer tokens, etc... Apps for a dozen or more different app ecosystems on hundreds of device types from the obvious web and phone-based ios/android to the less obvious carplay, watch, roku, firestick, etc...
Right, but if you just search for "house listings" you find zillow and redfin and other stuff. Becoming the new word for "listings" will tie specific brands to our use of language in very interesting ways. What happens if I register my app to a common word. In this example, can I take "listings" and astroturf my app to the top? Is this a new DNS "buying all the domains" race?
Sam specifically mentioned apps would go through a vetting process before they were auto-suggested by the chat. So, at least in the early days, I would imagine some of the basic shenanigans will be prevented.
It's actually hilarious to think of a scene where all the people on the bridge are shouting over each other trying to get the ship to do anything at all.
Maybe this is how we all get our own offices again and the open floor plan dies.
They’d just have an array of microphones everywhere and isolate each voice - rooms only need n+1 microphones where n is the maximum number of people. That’s already simple to do today, and it’s not even that expensive.
But not in paragraphs. Their written language in those forums is short form sentences that are a mix of emojis and almost randomly inserted words that are more akin to honorifics sprinkled in to convey tone "no cap" "frfr"
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