completely anecdotal, but the reason from my perspective is that the system has been overwhelmingly rigged against being able to take economic risk.
I would have started my own business by now ... heck I'd probably have started and failed several by now if not for one thing. Well three:
1) you cannot afford prescription drugs in America unless you have good health insurance. At least in my state (Alabama), the federal health marketplace offers exactly one option from exactly one provider. It has a ridiculously high deductible and is (no shit) not accepted at nearly all doctor's offices in my town.
2) I cannot afford to lose my access to prescription medication and healthcare, because my wife has diabetes and I survived cancer a few years ago. We're in fine health now, but we DO have medical expenses ... things that should NOT be that expensive (yearly CT scans and insulin are hardly breaking technology), but have been SO inflated in price by a bogus, rigged third-party-payer system that we literally can't afford those things without "insurance".
3) I had kids early in life, and since my adult working career began, it has been an absolute baseline requirement that I be able to get them medical care and otherwise provide for them.
ok ... having kids early was my decision, and I'll accept that this decision limited my universe of personal options. Getting sick. Having a wife who got sick. These were not personal decisions. They are just things that happen to people.
Our system in America is designed to keep me at my desk, working for someone else, doing mostly meaningless work. Why? Because it'd be a complete nightmare for those at the top, if every last one of me out there in the workplace could afford to take a risk that might not work out.
There'd be a helluva lot more competition out there.
America is dying because of this. Not just our economy. But our society. The world would genuinely be a better place with the companies I would have started in it. And that is true for every other stymied inventor/would-be-entrepreneur in america.
There is always a downside to risk, and there is always a risk involved in starting a new Enterprise. But what we have right now is so far out of whack that taking even a minor risk, can straight up kill you or your kids for lack of access to proper medical care.
My wife could afford to start a few small businesses over the years only because I have health insurance from my employment, and can get her, and our kids, to the family plan.
If Obamacare did something good to people not on lowest-paid jobs, it is giving at least some options of health care to entrepreneurs who are not yet raking in millions (that is, most of them).
That explains why you, in particular, can't take a risk at starting a business. It does not explain why healthy/young/single/childless people do not try it.
Since we are talking about anecdotes - whenever I mention some success in my business, most friends get bored. Yet if they get to another create-a-crud-form job - this is being celebrated like some kind of achievement. I still hear talks about how small business is celebrated in the USA (i am immigrant), but I do not experience it in practice.
> That explains why you, in particular, can't take a risk at starting a business. It does not explain why healthy/young/single/childless people do not try it.
Historically, lots of small businesses are started not by healthy, young, single childless people, but by midcareer people that have savings to invest and professional networks and experience-based insights to build a business around.
So, when those type of people lose opportunity to start businesses, then total business starts drop.
Also, young people starting non-VC backed businesses have often relied on older midcareer relatives supplying financing, networks, and supporting experience, so many of the same things that hurt older people starting businesses (including healthcare costs, which—with common insurance schemes—not only tie you to wage labor but also still require you to maintain capital reserves for co-insurance, which reduces the attractiveness of using savings for speculative, long-payoff, high-risk business investment) also have a similar, if somewhat lesser, negative effect on younger people doing so.
Because our social safety nets are garbage. People don't feel comfortable taking the risks. It's why most entrepreneurs come from families with money. It's why countries with strong social safety nets are beating us in entrepreneurship rates. Give people easy access to free education, and universal health care and you'll see a rise in entrepreneurship in this country.
Same situation here in Nebraska really, there's a single healthcare provider that offers exactly 1 plan that would cost me, a young, healthy, 23 y/o hundreds of dollars per month with a ridiculously high deductible. If I were to start on my own I would be bankrupt in months from health insurance alone.
Healthcare seems to be so important to your financial future and yet your state consistently votes for politicians who are opposed to providing better healthcare (although, Doug Jones' win was certainly a bright spot).
> you can't become a doc for love of the profession, because it's a profession you can't test drive
oh, I don't know about that. It's like a 6 week community college course to become an EMT. There's a test drive for you. There are 2 year programs that will get you a nursing license.
You can get a taste of the medical career path without going the full MD route. Maybe not as accessible as coding, but it is accessible.
As my kids are just now graduating HS, this is something I try to drill into them. College can be like an assembly line that spits you out saddled with the equivalent of a 30 year mortgage, trained for a job space that you literally have no idea if you'll even want to do ... or it can be like a Baskin Robins of careers, and you can try every last one of them until you find what you really like.
passion and knowledge of self are everything. the rest is a commodity.
> It's like a 6 week community college course to become an EMT. There's a test drive for you. There are 2 year programs that will get you a nursing license.
EMT and nurse aren’t “mini doctors,” any more than doing video game QA is “mini programming.” It gets you near the profession, it doesn’t put you into the shoes.
I don’t know how to articulate this. The job that requires about eight years of post-grad training, including four of them as heavily supervised on-the-job training with slowly increasing responsibilities for 80-100 hrs/week, is wildly different than the job that you can start doing in six weeks. Working in the same setting as a physician is no more “test driving” what it’s like to be a doc than being a secretary at a hedge fund is test driving what it’s like to be a hedge fund manager.
The thing is, the salient bits of being a doctor have to do with the thought process going on in their head, the stresses of responsibility and decision-making, and all the considerations they weigh with each patient. It's just not an "observable" thing. Docs don't really start sharing their internal processes with you until you're in the second half of med school, and even then not commonly. From the outside, it just looks like... guy in a white coat, often at a computer, making pronouncements. And then doing paperwork, which largely consists of documentation to prove to the government and insurers you did everything they decided should have been done for that patient and if not, why not. The combination of accountability and lack of autonomy is a leading cause of physician burnout and, again, is all internal.
The other part it leaves out is the hours. "What do I do with this patient?" is a very different thought process at hours one, eleven, and eighteen respectively, of what should have been a twelve hour shift. One hospital I know of has its trauma/SICU surgeons do 5 days on and 5 days off where they pull 12 hour shifts daily, and they're on call every night. But trauma/SICU doesn't really sleep, so these folks are making critical care decisions at hour one-hundred-and-twenty, of which maybe eight hours involved sleep.
All of these things occur in the internal landscape. Shadowing is ... not effective.
Most med students have done clinical research, shadowed doctors, volunteered in hospitals, etc. Back in the day, I did hospital volunteerism, clinical research, hospital QI, and I worked in health insurance. I'd seen medicine from pretty much every vantage point before I second-careered into being a physician. And every senior med student and resident and physician will tell you, "holy shit, I had absolutely no idea what it would be like." Even the occasional nurse that decides to go to med school, who most commonly think they're halfway to being docs already, will say "omg, I had no idea how much I didn't know, and how much you guys have to do." We had two in my med school class back in the day. When we were in didactics, they were shocked by how much docs had to know. When we got to clerkships (the second half of med school, where you work in hospitals) they were floored by how much was involved in being a physician that simply wasn't visible to nurses. And that's... you know, nurses. Folks who work in our vicinity on a daily basis.
Thank you for the eye opening insight, my significant other was accepted to med school in the states and she/we are double minded on her pursuing the field of medicine due to the dismal work life balance you mentioned, considering she has a science masters and works a 9-5 in medical research. She didn't have the undergraduate grades and did masters + high MCAT score to finally get in at 30 years old.
Given the current state of medicine in the states, you touched upon the topic of insurance companies. The endless paperwork seems to be a side effect of physicians being beholden to insurance companies to supply a steady stream of patients that afford an income that will offset the
steep debt and decades of opportunity cost spent in school. This seems unique to America from what I can tell and is only getting worse, along with what I'm told regarding physicians (MD/DO) competing with nurse practioners and physician assistant, government oversight, etc over area of practice.
I sincerely hope you and all overworked physicians take care of mental health and avoid burnout. I think private practice and limited hours for certain lower specialties might be the answer for my significant other if we plan on starting a family anytime soon.
> Finally, the topic of burnout and physician abuse (lack of sleep, working overtime and being on call), is truly disgusting.
The simple truth is this: pay has been dropping like a rock, every public mention of doctors is about how much we suck, regulators and bureaucrats are telling us how to practice medicine (but we continue to carry the liability), we're given 5 minutes to see patients when we should be given 20 (and when we rush out the door, patients think it's because we don't give a shit), and and and. .
The worst of it is: everyone else has a "career" - they're allowed to worry about work/life balance, about trying to get paid for their time, about trying to build a nest egg. When physicians do that, well, medicine is a /calling/. You're not allowed to worry about paying for your kids' schooling, or paying off your debts, or etc. That stuff is for programmers and accountants; you're just working with "sick people in their worst moments," so you're not allowed to be anything but self-destructively selfless. No one is allowed to discuss physician misery (I hate the word "burnout" - those docs aren't a resource that came to the end of its useful lifespan, they're human beings in desperate misery) except when residents are throwing themselves off the roofs of hospitals. I've lost -two- friends in the last year. TWO in the last YEAR.
And the only people that pay attention to that are the residents who have to carry on and the attendings that go, "well, it was still better in my day, when residents didn't expect to sleep or ever go home. It was better for patient care continuity if their doc never went home."
Private practice is dead or dying for most specialties as well. The healthcare field is heavily concentrating into large regional networks.
I knew this all going in. So I can say to your wife what I said to myself: The only reason to become a doc is if you cannot, for the life of you, force yourself to become anything else. It has to be a fire in your goddamn marrow.
And for all that, I recommend choosing a residency in psych. They work 9-5 even in residency - call tends to be 9a-8p or 9a-11p (rather than 24-hour shifts like the rest of us) and every other weekend they tend to work 9-9 Sat and Sun. It's the lightest residency on the planet, and they still make - per hour - the same money as IM and FM. It's the best thing I've ever heard of for people that want to have work/life balance and a family. Unsurprising, as they're the ones who spend every day seeing stressors break people's minds in half.
It remains that there are young people who understand this and still long to study arduously to be doctors, and then put in the work. It seems there is something appealing about the work that can be done, even if it’s imperfect. Is there any kind of enthusiasm you could accept as beneficial?
I don't think I said that enthusiasm was harmful, or non-beneficial.
So I want to clarify: what I said was that people who aim at medical school because "they're passionate about medicine" are mistaken. They're passionate about a fantasy of what medicine is, because you don't really know what it's like until it's there (and popular depictions of it are as unrelated to actual medicine as 1980s hackers movies are unrelated to actual programming.)
Many people are deeply hurt by the gap between fantasy and reality. They don't complain about it openly, but inside the doctor's lounge... oh yeah.
Some find a new passion, for what medicine actually is. Sometimes this is closely related to their original ideas, more often, it's only tangential. But they're on fire, and that's great.
Most just grow up, and find that they do a difficult but worthwhile job. They don't necessarily have a "passion" for it, but they appreciate the importance of what they do, and concentrate on doing it well. They work to take care of their patients, but also to avoid liability, and to earn their colleague's esteem. They're normal physicians.
I'm discussing the fact that what people think medicine is vs. what medicine is has a huuuuge gap. You can't be passionate for a thing when you've only seen its mirage. That doesn't mean enthusiasm is inherently bad. It's misplaced.
>it remains that there are young people that understand this
No, there pretty much aren't. That's rather the key point. I've never met a student, resident, or practicing doc that said, in retrospect, yeah, they had anything resembling an accurate clue about what medicine would actually be like.
“Many people are deeply hurt by the gap between fantasy and reality.” This is another expression of the harm or non-benefit I was referring to you having said.
I agree public perception of a field lags behind reality, but it’s only a lag. Medicine has been a tough job for awhile. There are students who understand this well enough to handle the adjustment (since they don’t have first-hand experience yet.) It’s not a failure of “passion” if it’s crystalized into tangible goals, and better developed motivations and principles, as the student matures. It’s also not fair to equate surprise at some of the reality of a job with regret.
Finally, I know people who pursued medicine from childhood and are doing well in it. Granted, most of them had doctors for parents, but they were still quite excited.
Right all this talk of "what it takes to be a success in OSS" ... programma please!
"Success" in the OSS world is putting code out that others can use. Either they find it useful, or they don't. If they don't that's not failure. That's ... someone else put out something better, or that your user community is small or just not out there.
OSS is not a business model. It's a SHARING model.
God it's just like the music scene these days. Did you get into it for the Art? Cool you're gonna be ok. Did you get into it wanting to be a rock star? Might as well buy a lottery ticket. Your chances are better.
OSS success is providing something of use to a community that contributes back to it.
Yeah, maybe you can find a way to make a nickel off that, but that's not what it's FOR. It's not a marketplace, it's a public library.
This celebrity/glamor seeking is so apparent on github. Every single project's readme.md reads like marketing copy these days.
Just like the music scene again. Reminds me of the 90's when the record labels still had money and steamrolled the alternative scene looking for a cash grab.
That’s the problem: we all take this particular public library for granted, but there isn’t a sustainable model for paying the librarians. Then a librarian tries a creative way to continue serving us without starving, and we tell them “you’re just doing it for fun, if you wanted to make money you shouldn’t have been a librarian!”. This is an ignorant response, because it places on the librarian’s shoulders the responsibility for solving a problem that concerns all of us - because we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.
> we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.
This way of thinking is, in my opinion, destructively pessimistic. Everything is not always a zero sum gain. We can all benefit more than we contribute and it can still be sustainable. For example, 10 people can spend 10% of their time on a project, and get something out of it that is worth 50% of their time. They took the equivalent of 1 persons work and made it worth 5 people's work. I think most popular OSS projects are orders of magnitude more effective than that at creating benefit. Thousands of people contributing code, a few times a year, makes a project that supports all their careers and provides software that benefits society as a whole.
I get that the problem is the undue burden on the relatively few people who organize this work for really big projects. I've noticed that some of these people are employed by large corporations who encourage their OSS work, because the result, and the thousands of contributions from others they harness are very valuable to these organizations.
I wouldn't be surprised if the large corporations that were listed as the ones using Redis software without paying for it would be willing to sponsor a few employees to represent their interests in the OSS projects. That works for the individual engineers, but that doesn't exactly work for RedisLabs to make $$. So I still don't see RediLabs as a beleaguered crusader trying to save OSS.
> That’s the problem: we all take this particular public library for granted, but there isn’t a sustainable model for paying the librarians.
I don't think the fact that RedisLabs doesn't have a sustainable revenue model indicates that open source infrastructure in general doesn't.
It's true that there are a number of relatively new venture-funded OSS infra firms that were built on a step 1, build software, step 2 ..., step 3 profit model. But I don't think that's an OSS problem so much as a startup culture problem, as the same problem is rampant in startups in other spaces.
> Then a librarian tries a creative way to continue serving us without starving
It's not particularly creative or novel; the basic outline has been tried since the 80s at least.
There’s a sustainable model for librarians who don’t want to be paid.
OSS is diverse and there are many, obviously, who don’t mind not being paid directly.
But what’s confusing is that there are proprietary licenses. Anyone who doesn’t like volunteering time to OSS can write commercial software and charge for it. That’s the model that works for them.
But the talk of a 40 year old model not being sustainable is pretty funny. It’s more sustainable because it takes so much volunteer time.
> But the talk of a 40 year old model not being sustainable is pretty funny.
It’s not the open-source model I called unsustainable, but a particular response to new forms of open-source monetization.
At any rate, the current model - of open-source as a mainstream R&D model, and as the critical infrastructure for the largest businesses in the world, primarily funded by corporate sponsorship and venture capital... that model is definitely not 40 years old.
You could argue that the model originated at the Linux hype of 1999, when Red Hat was the hottest IPO and IBM was spray-painting penguins on the sidewalks of San Francisco... Or you could argue it really started in 2004 when the Google IPO showed how much more scalable and profitable a business can be when you don’t pay software licenses.
In any case, the current model for open-source is really not that old, and it’s too early to tell how sustainable it really is.
Or you could argue that it originated with Unix coming out of Bell Labs and being passed around universities on reels of tape, with new extensions contributed along the way.
When Stallman thought seriously about open source in the 1980s, it wasn't because he was the only one to ever imagine a culture of sharing around software and information. I think he was reacting to a sense that an existing culture was being erased by growing commercial interests.
One could also argue it originated with gentleman-scholars circulating letters about their new physical science discoveries during the renaissance and feeding into the subsequent industrial revolution. But, I expect it is an emergent property of humanity which is probably exhibited throughout history and pre-history.
It's essentially the same idea of commons and culture applied to yet another domain of knowledge and technology. Was it sustainable for the first farmer to teach his techniques to another? For one chef to teach another how to prepare his dishes? Open source software can be sustainable as long as there are needs and resources available to produce and execute software that does something different or better than could be done without the software (or at a lower cost than other available options). The subsequent sale of additional copies need not be a motivating factor at all.
> Or you could argue that it originated with Unix coming out of Bell Labs and being passed around universities on reels of tape, with new extensions contributed along the way.
That was not motivated at all by the open source movement. The only reason AT&T Bell Labs didn't charge a significant amount for UNIX is because they were under a consent decree which precluded them from entering other industries at the time, see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...
It doesn't actually matter why Bell Labs allowed it to happen. The cultural evolution of Unix development involved many other participants who could not have cared less about Bell Labs' interests. The later developments reflected another phase of culture where certain people started to think about the implications and work the system to their own ends.
> This is an ignorant response, because it places on the librarian’s shoulders the responsibility for solving a problem that concerns all of us - because we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.
I don't understand this. It seems the argument is "I can't keep giving away software for free unless you pay for it". Then it isn't free software, right? Nothing wrong with that, most of us write proprietary software and sell it. If it's worth more to the people who buy it than what it cost, everyone still benefits.
We use open source software to do our work more effectively. There are all sorts of OSS projects, many entirely run by unpaid volunteers. Many people, myself included, sometimes contribute code to the OSS projects, to benefit myself and anyone else who happens to use it. I don't expect anything else.
But you can't feel entitled for people to pay you for work that we all agreed was volunteer. It's not worth it to do OSS anymore? It's ok to stop doing it. There are enough of us that are rewarded by just being able to contribute, we'll have our own projects. So, it's ok for Redislabs to make their code proprietary and make money off it, if they can. There's nothing wrong with that. But the rhetoric that boils down to "people have been stealing from us by using our code and not paying for it", "it's not fair that they are using our code and making money and not giving us any" is wrong. You gave the code away for free. That was the understanding before you wrote the code, and after it was written. That was one of the reasons people were even using the code. It's not an injustice.
When someone gives you a nice gift, they deserve your gratitude. But if they turn around and say "you never paid me for that", then it wasn't really a gift was it?
Redis remains open-source. RedisLabs is using a “hybrid” license for its enterprise add-one, with some properties of open-source but not all. So you can use the source, modify it for yourself or for others. But if you want to make money from it, you have to fork.
The goal for RedisLabs is to make more money from the enterprise add-ons they’re developing. A lot of that money (perhaps most of it) goes right back into maintaining Redis, which remains open-source.
So it absolutely is a matter of funding more open-source gifts, and not taking back gifts.
That makes sense, and like I said, I don't have a problem with what they are doing. It's what they said and how it was presented and how it has been defended. Like evil BigCorp has been stealing from them.
Just a "Hey what we are doing now isn't working, for our business model we need to make more money and we need to make some of our code around Redis proprietary so we can sell it. Don't worry, Redis itself will remain open source, free to use for everyone."
Instead it was "today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings". It was open source, they could do that. If you want to make them pay in the future, that's fine. But they aren't the bad guys for using OSS.
Anyway, I hope it works out well for RedisLabs, but I also hope that the licensing of OSS software is simple and open.
Nope. OSS was here long before redhat and everyone else, and it will be here long after.
Because, in your analogy, the librarians are all volunteers. That’s how we got here. If the pain of not having a problem solved is great enough the volunteers will fix it. Or they won’t. If you feel like the pain level is high enough. Hey maybe YOU should try volunteering to solve it.
This is what makes OSS powerful. It is a community service. If you aren’t happy with the service p become a member of the community and contribute.
All open-source contributors are certainly not volunteers! Open-source contributors come in all shapes and sizes, and how much they get paid for it has no incidence on the quality or authenticity of their work. It does, however, have a huge impact on who can contribute, and how much.
Since we as a society rely on open-source enormously, it seems to make sense to try and allow as many people as possible to contribute as much as possible. And that requires giving up on antiquated notions that “only unpaid open-source is real open-source!”. Wouldn’t you agree?
> Since we as a society rely on open-source enormously, it seems to make sense to try and allow as many people as possible to contribute as much as possible.
We already do, anyone can do it and we shouldn't restrict that; that's the point.
> And that requires giving up on antiquated notions that “only unpaid open-source is real open-source!”. Wouldn’t you agree?
Not GP, but I most certainly don't, nor is it antiquated. For that matter, calling volunteer work "antiquated" is... A bit cynical, to say the least.
I also don't see how this follows from what you said before, could you walk me through your reasoning?
> For that matter, calling volunteer work "antiquated" is... A bit cynical, to say the least.
I emphatically did not say that volunteer work is antiquated! I myself do plenty of it - but I also acknowledge that I’m privileged to be able to afford it. What is antiquated is the notion that only unpaid work is authentic open-source work. It’s important to realize that providing unpaid labor is a luxury. If you exclude or devalue paid work, you exclude and devalue the people who cannot afford to do open-source work for free. As it turnd out, that’s the majority of people.
"The top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report are Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD, Renesas, and Mellanox."
Hmm that report is confusing. I thought the fact it said sponsoring meant money donated to the linux foundation. But page 14 of that report seems to imply it’s changes contributed to the kernel. Not money.
Making software open source doesn't mean you can't make money from it. Depending on the details of what you build, who uses it, how you license it, etc., it may be harder to make money from it than if you made it proprietary. But that certainly isn't something you can just take as a given. You also can't take it as a given that the project would make money if it was closed source either. Maybe you made something nobody needs. Or they need it, but there are better alternatives out there (possibly some that are Open Source). Who's to say?
Somebody yesterday (maybe DannyBee, not sure) made a very insightful comment in saying that sometimes the value created by Open Source software is created exactly because it's Open Source.
Anyway, you can always charge for software even if the code is Open Source. You can stick it on the web and make it a SaaS app, or you can make the source available but charge to download binaries (ala JBoss back in the day), or you can make source and binaries freely available and sell subscriptions, etc. Aaah, wait, I know, you're asking "who would buy a subscription for something that's free to download?" Companies. Companies will, for things that are mission critical, because they typically need for their to be a contractual relationship (eg, somebody to sue) in place. Or you have a manager who needs to spend her budget or lose it, and she understands that you need to make a profit in order to stay alive and keep enhancing the software. Etc., etc, yadda, yadda, ad infinitum. My point is, it's not as simple as "Oh, I made this Open Source, so there's no way to profit from it".
The underlying issue they are trying to solve is that developers believe they should be able to extract some of the wealth they feel they created. In open source, that wealth is often only created because the software was free. Otherwise, people would have used something else that was free but worked well enough. Developers like to often argue this isn't true, but history shows it to be true basically always :) So saying you should be able to extract this wealth is probably wrong. Saying you should be able to get paid a reasonable amount of money is not.
> But my personal history? My photos? Words I've written? Oh well. If someone wants that stuff, they can probably get it. And the gaping maw of robotic commerce doesn't actually care about me personally, it only cares what it can sell me.
>
> I'm not worried about the police or some authoritarian tyranny on a personal level, on the level where what I say on the internet matters.
Yeah, but then 2016 happened.
This sort of "tactical positioning" on internet privacy is where I was prior to that year. The fact of the mater is that "personal threat exposure", while not completely irrelevant, misses the forest for the trees.
It's not YOU they're trying to manipulate, it's the herd. And it works. And that eventually comes around to impacting you just as personally as if you'd posted your bank account number and ssn on facebook.
I say I'm a musician on the side, but truthfully I've been messing with sound instinctively since I came out of the womb, and I only picked up programming and design and stuff later on. As such, I gravitated toward electronic music doodads almost immediately.
This issue of "falling down the LCD well" has been at the forefront of electronic music for a while. Synthesizers were cool in the 70's because they had knobs, and any abstract logic involved was done by you, so you had to be into it.
Then the 80's and 90's came along and we got stuff like the DX7 and innumerable "workstation keyboards" that were little more than a tiny display and two or three buttons. Maybe a jog wheel if you were lucky.
These were unambiguously cleaner from a design perspective, but what people began to realize is that the screen was too much of an abstraction. Then of course DAWs came along and even the synthesizers themselves moved into the computer physically.
Music, like life in general, is visceral, and the screen is not. Musicians became frustrated with the lack of physicality.
The modular synthesizer approach of the 70's has made a HUGE resurgence with the eurorack standard.
Not everyone, but LOTS of people actually PREFER a gigantic mess of tangled wires with physical plugs and knobs to a sterile pure-logic implementation on the computer that can do all the same stuff cheaper and in a more reproducible way.
I suspect we'll see a similar sort of resurgence of physicality across every product that has been absorbed into the computer screen.
As a life-long musician, I found that the tedium and aggravation of fighting the software and associated hardware to get it to do what I wanted - a wholly left-brain activity
- was taking up half my time.
And that was after the learning curve of trying to adapt to the melange of hardware, interface, and software options.
That time and energy was taken away from creativity and experimenting with music to improve its richness,interest, and originality.
Modulars can be more expressive in expert hands (seldom the case). But making good music requires a different kind of expertise. And I hear that difference - and the cost of all the lost creative energy - on the radio every day.
The first time I heard about Eurorack was when the guy behind the Audio Damage plugins remarked on his blog that part of why he he was making the move to Eurorack was that hardware couldn't be pirated.
The Korg MS-20 mini sells for $450, the Moog Mother-32 sells for $600, and the new Behringer Neutron will sell for $300 when it comes out. Semi modular synths are pretty cheap these days even though they aren't quite as cheap or popular as non modular synths like the Arturia Microbrute or the Korg Monologue.
A basic modular system with all the basic oscillators and filters you'd find in a standard VST plugin set will cost roughly 5 thousand if not more. It's a bit expensive really, but I suppose that's the cost of analog in a digital world. It might just be me and my reluctance to spend money but it seems like prices would be dropping for equipment if it was making as big of a comeback as it is, but prices seem to be relatively stable, sometimes more expensive as new small scale manufacturers come out with modules.
Well into the era of digital mixing consoles, the complex tactile control surfaces remain. Faders and knobs are the right abstraction for working with sound. Contrast with lighting, which has become almost entirely keyboard driven; faders are now optional add-one for some of the most popular consoles like the Ion.
> What are the remaining APIs that people need in Electron that are not available in the web browser? And what's the timeline to getting those in the browser to deprecate Electron?
I get what you're saying but to me, even if I could do literally everything that node does inside the browser, that STILL would not deprecate electron for me.
It's not lack of functionality in the browser that's a problem for me. It's mutability of the browser.
With electron, I get to use ONE version of javascript, ONE implementation of the DOM, ONE implementation of CSS. Period.
I do not give a single hoot about that ancient corporate version of IE you have to use at work. About how this looks in safari, versus edge versus, opera, versus whatever.
It simply doesn't matter anymore.
no more shims, and I can dump about half of the frameworks and stuff from my code because of it.
If I get an app going that everyone likes and I actually want it on the web, THEN I can go and add all the cruft I'll need to make it work out there in the wild.
You got a great point. And don't forget that Electron is not a web shell, it can replace native apps. Look at VSCode! It's not just about Electron vs Browser but there are certain cases where you don't want to go into a cloud.
You also get full control over the local file system with electron. There are plenty of system utilities... stuff like etcher.io, disk partitioners, backup software, custom FUSE-based file systems, etc., that you couldn't do purely in a web browser for security reasons, but that can benefit from the portability and sexiness of an electron-based UI (performance concerns aside).
I actually doubt there is anyone who thinks of electron in this way, in that they only use it because X feature isn't in the browser _yet_. Many electron apps could only be done natively, again for security reasons. Things like the slack desktop app don't meet that criteria, however.
I think you meant to say "This website is optimized for IE 5.0 and 640x480 please upgrade your browser". Chrome still lacks something essential that IE had back in the day: API and bug for bug stability. Moving targets just aren't as atractive.
Hmm, I have never seen a conflict like that with any of the Electron apps I use daily: VSCode, Cypress, Wire, and (blecch) Slack.
What app was that, and what platform did you see it on? (I use the apps mentioned above on macOS, Windows 10, Ubuttnu 18.04, but I guess 80% of the time I'm using macOS so I might not have noticed if its a Linux thing...)
tl;dr (as I understand it) is that a change in FreeType invalidated an assumption that programs were making in how fonts were rendered, making text look garbled. It was fixed pretty quickly in Chromium and Firefox, but it took a few months to trickle through to Electron and finally to the apps based on it. In the meantime, Linux distros had started upgrading to the new "fixed" (seemingly broken) FreeType, so the workaround was to downgrade FreeType until any affected Electron apps were updated.
One of the reasons I love HN is that the commenters here usually have a much deeper understanding of this sort of thing than I do.
Which is why I'm left wondering why nobody has mentioned Firefox Incognito mode (chrome too I think).
At least on firefox, incognito mode does not store cookies on disk. They persist for the duration of the tab/window you logged into.
this would circumvent cookie tracking, I think. I mean I guess not if you opened one icognito window and did all of your browsing inside of it, and never closed it?
Incognito, aka private browsing, aka guest profile, is a great way to avoid permanent cookies (and local storage too!). This feature exists on all major browsers.
This doesn't solve all tracking, but it will stop some cookie abuse. Choosing to use it also comes with the downside that you can't stay logged in to sites, and you may lose context & history you wanted to keep.
Incognito is super useful for web development precisely because you can very quickly get a fresh profile with no cookies in it.
private browsing won't stop browser fingerprinting, which is an increasingly common tactic. Your browser fingerprint then is linked to other attributes (including other devices you may own, where say an IP may be shared) allowing firms to build profiles that are not-linked to cookies, which is harder to block.
Blocking the canvas fingerprint also enables easy identification, so you'll need a free add-on that generates noise.
Yep, all true. Incognito doesn’t protect you from tracking. The sooner cookies become useless to sites & advertisers, the sooner they come up with something else we can’t block. We might be mostly past that point already.
I would have started my own business by now ... heck I'd probably have started and failed several by now if not for one thing. Well three:
1) you cannot afford prescription drugs in America unless you have good health insurance. At least in my state (Alabama), the federal health marketplace offers exactly one option from exactly one provider. It has a ridiculously high deductible and is (no shit) not accepted at nearly all doctor's offices in my town.
2) I cannot afford to lose my access to prescription medication and healthcare, because my wife has diabetes and I survived cancer a few years ago. We're in fine health now, but we DO have medical expenses ... things that should NOT be that expensive (yearly CT scans and insulin are hardly breaking technology), but have been SO inflated in price by a bogus, rigged third-party-payer system that we literally can't afford those things without "insurance".
3) I had kids early in life, and since my adult working career began, it has been an absolute baseline requirement that I be able to get them medical care and otherwise provide for them.
ok ... having kids early was my decision, and I'll accept that this decision limited my universe of personal options. Getting sick. Having a wife who got sick. These were not personal decisions. They are just things that happen to people.
Our system in America is designed to keep me at my desk, working for someone else, doing mostly meaningless work. Why? Because it'd be a complete nightmare for those at the top, if every last one of me out there in the workplace could afford to take a risk that might not work out.
There'd be a helluva lot more competition out there.
America is dying because of this. Not just our economy. But our society. The world would genuinely be a better place with the companies I would have started in it. And that is true for every other stymied inventor/would-be-entrepreneur in america.
There is always a downside to risk, and there is always a risk involved in starting a new Enterprise. But what we have right now is so far out of whack that taking even a minor risk, can straight up kill you or your kids for lack of access to proper medical care.