Neo Deco is growing in popularity. There's a few youtube channels dedicated to art deco restoration and influencers showing off art deco motifs in their homes that have spurred the trend.
It's just the slow swing of the pendulum away from the AirSpace aesthetic that was the modern interpretation of mid-century modern that came out of the early 2000s.
It's so weird, Art Deco was in vogue for a while in the early 90s (see Batman '89, The Rocketeer), and the nostalgia cycle is just coming around again. I'll take Victorian or Art Nouveau instead, please.
"I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription."
"I'm tired of distracting notifications so I'm getting Meta Ray-Ban AR glasses."
What I find odd is that much of the rationale for these moves is completely absent from the article.
Why is Linux growing in popularity?
People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.
Why are people attracted to analog?
People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.
Why are people looking at offline or self hosted experiences?
People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.
I don't think the OP wants to acknowledge that fact because it paints him as a technology hipster rather than someone taking back their autonomy from corporations. He's saying "Look at me, I'm an individual because I choose to have a different set of companies spy on me than you do."
The other striking thing to me is that the list is also completely devoid of any sense of morality. He might be using Linux but he's actively spitting in the face of Opensource by choosing a Bambu printer.
> "I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription."
I wouldn't pay a subscription to Oura, especially with them moving towards a more obfuscated view of individual metrics. I'm grandfathered in to a lifetime subscription. And eagerly awaiting something comparable in the market, but reviews of competing products are not yet compelling.
> "I'm tired of distracting notifications so I'm getting Meta Ray-Ban AR glasses."
These are for travel videos (dense markets, or places where I can't logistically use a phone or camera). My family enjoys the videos. If the glasses are capable of notifications, I haven't enabled them. The glasses have utility without notifications, and without a heads up display, they'd be of limited value.
> Why is Linux growing in popularity?
This was my point "Integrated platforms seemingly made the Linux philosophy untenable, and yet it may now be growing as a direct result of this decoupling. This was a feature, not a bug."
Linux is not part of an ecosystem, and people are starting to realize they like that for a variety of reasons. We're making the same point
> People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit. I don't think the OP wants to acknowledge that fact because it paints him as a technology hipster rather than someone taking back their autonomy from corporations. He's saying "Look at me, I'm an individual because I choose to have a different set of companies spy on me than you do."
The point is that there is growing optionality. It's becoming easier to participate across ecosystems. We can treat tech as an a la carte rather than an omakase menu. Your computer can be one thing, your phone another, and your wearables something else. It's hard to escape big tech entirely, but cracks are starting to form in terms of portability, and perhaps increasingly in terms of alternative options.
> The other striking thing to me is that the list is also completely devoid of any sense of morality.
I had assumed I could just buy a printer I like that's relatively affordable, on sale, and highly rated? It allows me to use 3rd party filaments and import my designs from TinkerCAD or Python generated. What should I have bought?
The over arching theme of your article is "tech is fun again because we're escaping the monoculture" but there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am". You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment." You've got this curated counterculture vibe of being off mainstream by being on different mainstream platforms.
The shifts taking place are all reminiscent of the shift from Windows to Apple that started in the late 90s. Back in the early 2000s we had Jony Ive channeling Deiter Rams and telling us how cool Helvetica was. And the "I'm a Mac" commercials beating us over the head with metaphor.
You talk about tech consolidation as something that emerged in the 2000s that killed the fun but consolidation has always been there. Technology is about making your life easier and consolidation is a part of that. When a product can reasonably be consolidated into another product, it often is. Look no further than Swiss Army Knives, the Leatherman, Telephone answering machines, boom boxes, or countless other technology chimera. Even your Meta Ray-Bans are a combination of the Humane AI Pin and sunglasses.
You wax poetically about the need for devices to feel personal, that's always been there. It still is but refinement often is about distilling something down to it's simplest possible form and that's where we're at with Smartphones. So the degree of customization is limited to cases and colors in much the same way as a Swiss Army Knife.
We haven't escaped the monoculture. Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture. Options like Linux have always been there, they just weren't cool. Gog for example is nearly as old as Steam.
What's changed is that we've slowly moved from running code on our devices to running in the cloud, which has made the choice of device or ecosystem less relevant. Linux is emerging as an option because Apple has grown to be more like Microsoft with age and they're both stuffing tracking and ads into every corner of their platform. They're no longer cool.
To me this article reads as soft elitism with a side of mid-life crisis.
> there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am"
I think tech should feel cool to the person using it, but it won't make a person cool either way. And it's an odd thing to fixate on.
> You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment."
I'm saying I have choices (at least, relative to earlier). I can use a Mac (or not) and that can tell you much less about the type of phone I have than a would have a few years ago.
> Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture
Then it's not really monoculture? It's narrow rather than cross-all-domains. I'm fine is there's a "toaster brand" everyone buys, or everyone likes Dyson vacuums, as long as it's not Apple producing it.
From what I see there appear to plenty of alternatives to Bambu. Instead of smugly calling people amoral because they bought a popular 3D printer, why not explain what's wrong with Bambu? I still genuinely don't know the criticism. Is it proprietary formats? Banning IP infringing content on their store? DRM? Industry lobbying for something nefarious? Lawfare? What is it that are they doing...?
> To me this article reads as soft elitism
Wouldn't the Apple bro archetype signal this more strongly? I think you may have seen a Leica in the list and way over-indexed on that, while it's actually at quite old D-LUX Typ-109 (not much newer than the Canon it replaces).
And I think the smug condescension throughout the response is closer to a kind of elitism, no?
> side of mid-life crisis
Hopefully I'm not at mid-life quite yet, and definitely not in crisis. That aside, I’m not sure it's useful to frame a critique of an article that way.
> I think you may have seen a Leica in the list and way over-indexed on that, while it's actually at quite old D-LUX Typ-109 (not much newer than the Canon it replaces).
> And I think the smug condescension throughout the response is closer to a kind of elitism, no?
The irony of these sentences... I'm not sure what "over-indexed" means and I know nothing about Leica cameras beyond knowing the type of people that carry them around.
> Geofence bypass: As far as I understand, there's no easy way to enforce a geofence server-side other than timing, consistency, etc. You sort of just have to trust whatever the phone tells you.
There's no fool proof method but you can make it very hard and impractical.
Both Apple and Google offer attestation mechanisms to confirm the integrity of the App and Device Environment that it's running on. This ensures that the API requests are coming from an attested device.
To mitigate the MITM attack you can use TLS Certificate pinning on sensitive API requests.
You could have the server side API provide a session specific signing token that the App uses to sign payloads attached to API calls.
There are attestation mechanisms, but huge portions of a public user-base (especially android) don't pass that check because their device is too old, or their OEM sucked, or something something mediatek SOC, or <insert esoteric detail within the attested data that fails check in opaque way>
In my experience, all forms of attestation start to become impractical at scale unless you have a fairly homogeneous, well-patched fleet. This is particularly heinous for TPMs, where I've observed TPMs coming off one STM line having invalid EK certs, but other STM TPMs of the same model are fine. Or the platform firmware stamped out onto the motherboard has a bug in how it extends PCR0 and the event log is just borked forever, and so on... Totally unworkable.
1. This was not a mitm attack, it was lawful mitm inspection of a user's own traffic. Mitm attacks are prevented by TLS and the system CA store already.
2. Please don't give people bad ideas. This is how we get bikeshare apps that don't work on rooted/old/GrapheneoOS/... devices and further entrench google's position in the Android ecosystem.
If your security depends on devices faithfully reporting their location, you've already lost. Get a whiteboard, start from scratch.
My intent was not to color or frame the activity but to use shared understood knowledge to convey the concept. It's like the terms blacklist and whitelist. Yes they're rooted in racism, and gosh darn it if everyone doesn't still use them because we know immediately what they are and there no better term. On the flip side we successfully switched from master to main.
If you don't want people saying "mitm attack" you gotta come up with something that rolls off the tongue a little better than "it was lawful mitm inspection of a user's own traffic".
The wording is only secondary to my point, which is that this isn't something to prevent. It's not "a security thing". You said "to mitigate the MiTM attack". It's not an attack and nobody should be trying to "mitigate" it. If an app vendor in trying to evade inspection by the user, they're either being shady or incompetent.
And no, most people at least in the reverse engineering circles I'm in/follow, don't say "MiTM attack" when things are done by the user with consent. I've heard MiTM-ing as a verb, MiTM/SSL/TLS proxying/inspection/interception or even (incorrectly) SSL stripping (and surely some more that I don't remember).
This is pretty much it. Most renters are paying for utilities and don't realize why they're so high.
My kid has been renting the same apartment while in school and their fridge failed over the summer. She manages the utilities and mentioned that their power bill halved as a result of the replacement. She said what they were paying before didn't seem outrageous so it came as a surprise to see the newer bills were consistently half of what it had been before.
> Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers.
I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came away with the impression that it's complicated. And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.
It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on to create a wiki without the other?
Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?
At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped participating in the project entirely after a year. He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project that had strong editorial oversight from experts like Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of Wikipedia.
> And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words.
A big piece of this is that “founder” is actually a very unusual title to use here. Normally someone would “create a product” and “found a company”. Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.
It’s kind of like Steve Jobs saying he founded the iPhone.
> He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation.
Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
> Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.
I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert
> Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
The core arguments are "you shouldn't claim to be founder of a product" and "claiming to be founder implies sole founder". This is why I say it breaks down to mincing words.
> I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert
Fair, but I do think the distinction between the company and the product is relevant. Wales’s claim to be the sole founder of Wikipedia relies specifically on muddying these two notions.
My recollection is that Wales has claimed that Sanger doesn’t qualify as a founder because he was an employee. OK, except Wikipedia is not an employer. If Jimmy Wales qualifies as the founder of Wikipedia specifically because of his ownership in the company that initially funded it, then the other founders of Bomis would seem to also be Wikipedia cofounders.
On the other hand, if being a founder of Wikipedia actually means being instrumental in the creation of the product, then Sanger seems clearly a founder.
Mixing and matching across two different definitions to uniquely identify Wales alone seems very self-serving and inconsistent.
To be clear, I’m not really disputing anything you said here. Just kind of griping about Wales’s self serving definition of founder.
> I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.
> I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.
I don't think that he was claiming to be sole-founder and I don't think claiming to be founder implies you're the sole founder. The choice of "the" over "a" though does have some implication, and his intentional choice to use "the" might have been to avoid broaching the subject of Sanger. It's clearly a touchy subject for him.
And at the same time if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were introduced as the founders of their respective companies I personally wouldn't think much of it.
At the end of the day, the Wikipeida pages on Wikipedia and Sanger credit Sanger appropriately so the it's not as if Wales is exerting his will to erase Sanger or his contribution. He just gets pissy when you bring it up.
In the specific case, this is a long running thing. Historically Wales has in fact dismissed Sanger as being a founder and presented himself as the sole founder. That’s why the interviewer poked at this immediately. It’s also why Wales got so annoyed, because he’s had probably this exact same conversation a million times and didn’t want to do it again.
If Bill Gates called himself “the founder” of Microsoft, people would probably dismiss it as a slip of the tongue. For Wales, I don’t think it was a slip of the tongue at all. It’s an intentional choice. I don’t agree with his interpretation, but I also don’t think he’s obligated to rehash the topic in every single interview.
I specifically do remember comics poking fun at diversity initiatives. A quick search of "Dilbert comic about diversity" brings up some examples.
At the time i read those i probably thought they were on point. I've changed my views over the years. You can't keep them or you end up like Adams. That's probably the key to understanding him. He grew up in an era where black students were not allowed to attend white schools. The world changed. He didn't.
Funny enough, to get to actual representative diversity you need to explicitly hire underrepresented candidates and pass up on white dudes. Which Scott famously complained about.
> you need to explicitly hire underrepresented candidates and pass up on white dudes
If the initiatives that promoted diversity explicitly said that, they probably wouldn't have passed. The whole argument was about whether that was true because proponents would never be honest about that part so the public debate never got past that.
Even in early (20 yrs before Trump stuff) interviews, Adams said that one of the reasons he tried various businesses out (like the comic) was that his coprorate manager told him that the manager was being strongly discouraged from promoting white men. That's likely what folks are referencing with regard to his "origin story."
He definitely blamed both the end of his career in banking and at PacBell on alleged discrimination against promoting White men in/into management (and I think he claims responsible people at both told him explicitly that that was the reason he was being passed over).
Somewhat later (but still quite a while before what people describe as him “turning”), he would also claim his Dilbert show on UPN was cancelled because he was White, making it the third job he lost for that reason. (More likely, it was cancelled because its audience was both small and White and UPN was, looking at where it had successes and wanting a coherent demographic story to sell to advertisers and in an era where synergies between the appeals of shows on the same network was important to driving ratings, working to rearrange its offerings to focus on targeting Black audiences.)
If a show that mostly featured black people was cancelled due to "looking at where it had successes and wanting a coherent demographic story to sell to advertisers and in an era where synergies between the appeals of shows on the same network was important to driving ratings, working to rearrange its offerings to focus on targeting White audiences," would you so readily dismiss the creator at being miffed at that?
Later on there was a ton of weird anti-feminist content in the comics.. he also had his blog where he wrote way too much so ended up in holocaust-denial and “evolution is fake” territory. Another person talented in one field and pretty unremarkable otherwise who needed to air his terrible opinions about everything else.
>Later on there was a ton of weird anti-feminist content in the comics
Others provide convincing demonstrations of what Adams himself said about women so this is more of a tangent....
But good god that was well within the era of "I hate my wife" comedy being rampant. I will never understand fellow men who seem to think "Women suck" or "The person I married is garbage" as the pinnacle of humor.
Yeah every once in awhile I’ll catch an old comedy special and it’s almost jarring how much of the content from some comics was “my wife is awful and she’s really dumb for expecting things from me”.
Neighbors of a certain age have that same mindset.. “Want to come over for a drink and get away from the ball and chain?” Or “After your done with the lawn, would your wife let you come over for a drink?”
I mean I wouldn’t mind grabbing a beer but your view of relationships is exceptionally weird.
What a weirdly worded post. You could have said something like:
"Dell has priced it's Pro line of laptops in-line with Apple's Air equivalents, however Window 11's high resource utilization means we have to pay for higher spec machines while still ending up with reduced battery performance, and inferior screens, webcams and audio."
But instead you make weird misleading statements like "and 8 more gb of RAM" and "it's over $1100 a laptop" that need to be decoded but are easily misunderstood if the reader lacks certain domain knowledge.
Then you have these unqualified statements like "they also recently swapped to soldered RAM for both Intel and AMD" which implies that it's a bad move but don't articulate why or acknowledge that Apple has been doing this since 2008.
Ask people to express coherent thoughts without a jargon barrier or epistemic exclusion as a form of gatekeeping your circle jerk is now considered "ChatGPT generated legalese"?
Bro, this is HN where the are so many obscure acronyms, frameworks, random Saas providers assumed everyone knows. This isn't a site where discussion can break down to the level of detail you seem to want. It just needs to be on the level anyone who knows what an XPS even is can follow.
I think the current NOVA Classification for Ultra Processed Foods is flawed and often drops food containing preservatives and stabilizers into the same bucket as nutritionally poor items.
It also doesn't do a good job distinguishing value or health outcomes from consumption and simply lumps all UPFs into the same bucket. In otherwords fortified whole-grain breads and sodas are both UPFs but objectively they are not the same in terms of nutritional value or health outcomes.
The NOVA Classification's intent is to flag products where processing replaces whole foods, or adds cosmetic or functional additives to engineer taste/texture. It doesn't really factor in actual nutritional value or health outcomes from consumption.
We need to come up with a better system to identify to denote healthy or unhealthy foods, and also to identify foods that contain ingredients that have unknown impacts on our health outcome. Our current regulatory environment is to permit until proven harmful, so having something to flag x-factor ingredients would be beneficial.
The Venn Diagram of people who ride motorcycles purely for entertainment, and people who like to annoy others by being loud and obnoxious is just a circle.
First, that is wrong because Venn diagrams don't work the way you think they do.
Second, even if they did work they way they think they do it would still be wrong. :-)
Venn diagrams show all possible inclusion/exclusion relations between the sets they are showing. A Venn diagram of two sets is always two circles that partly overlap.
Even if the way they worked is that you could omit regions that are empty and redraw the remaining regions to be circular, it doesn't help because ending up with a single circle with both sets in it would mean you are asserting the the two sets are equal.
That is clearly false because pretty much everyone can name someone who likes to annoy people by being loud and obnoxious but does not ride a motorcycle.
It's just the slow swing of the pendulum away from the AirSpace aesthetic that was the modern interpretation of mid-century modern that came out of the early 2000s.
Author is a hipster.
reply