Not sure how I should feel about that. It’s highly likely any party engaged in tracking activities will try to grab as much data as they can. So a non-Google device seems like it would be doing twice the amount of data collection.
But considering Google also controls the hardware design of the Pixel, it wouldn’t surprise me if they have some additional tricks up their sleeve.
What we really need is a full open-source phone, including firmware. Maybe we’ll get there one day.
Additionally, if you’re into mapping, give QGIS a try.
It’s an open source geospatial data management application, which is available cross-platform.
It neatly integrates many processing tools into a relatively intuitive GUI, and having even some basic skill can lead to some job opportunities.
You can even import OSM data through plugins or download services, which you can use for all kinds of fancy things.
It’s a simple and elegant way of covering 95% of document structuring needs, while being as close to readable plaintext as possible.
The vast majority of documents currently written in MS-word could just be markdown. The vast majority of web content could just be markdown. This would save the modern world petabytes of XML bloat.
If you need something fancier, either use a vector format or do fancy client-side styling.
No amount of rhetoric will ever convince me that someone who engages in the act of “dunking” is supposed to be taken seriously… The word sounds like a family-friendly replacement for what should be profanity.
Either own it and say that you’re using provocation as a “90s flame war tactic” or get dunked right back into the kiddie pool.
Which would still be accurate as Java is widely used in Geospatial software. That in itself can also be considered “playing with fire”.
Exactly, on the one hand this might pull some users away from Google, which deserves to be knocked on their ass for once. But if this is how it’s going to be done, you might just be trading one abusive partner for the next.
I say we let Microsoft pound on Google for a while and then we regluate the both of them into the ground!
My goal is not really to turn this into a discussion, but I feel like your concerns might be based on common misconceptions about nuclear energy.
Chornobyl (Ukrainian spelling) was such a big disaster because it was the first major nuclear disaster. The reactor was built without hands-on experience with the consequences of a nuclear disaster driving the design of the facility itself. We have since learnt a lot about proper design of nuclear reactors and about how to respond to any incidents.
The Fukushima reactor was designed with that knowledge in mind, but the event was a perfect shitstorm consisting of both an earthquake and a tsunami hitting the facility at the same time. And even though the local population might disagree, the disaster was arguably less serious than Chornobyl was. Due in large part to a better design and proper disaster response.
We’re more capable than ever of modeling and simulating natural disasters, so I’d argue we acutally CAN plan for most of those. Any disaster we can’t plan for nowadays is likely to also fuck up an area even worse than the resulting nuclear disaster would.
But probably the most important thing to mention is that nuclear power is a lot more diverse in the modern world. Gone are the days that uranium fission reactors are the norm. They were only popular because they serve a secondary purpose of creating resources for nuclear weapons, in addition to their power generation. With molten salt reactors, thorium-based reactors and SMR (small modular reactors) there’s really not a good reason to build any more “classic” nuclear reactors other than continuing the production of nuclear weapons, which I hope we can just stop doing.
The best way to prevent large scale incidents is to prevent large scale reactors, which is why there’s so much interest in SMR lately.
All in all, we likely can’t fully transition to renewables fast enough without the use of nuclear power as an intermediary. But the actual dangers with modern designs are far fewer than they used to be and we should take care not to give in to irrational fears too much.
To put things into perspective: We currently have no way of stopping a major solar storm that would thouroughly disrupt all modern life, nor can we stop large asteroids heading our way. Both are potentially planet-ending disasters, but the possibility that they might occur doesn’t stop us from trying to build a better earth for the future, right?
That was awesome, thanks for sharing.
I fully get what you’re saying and I think I know a thing or two about how lifestyle branding consumes people’s lives to the point where they’re fully absorbed.
Social media platforms seem to be by far the worst offenders of stimulating this kind of addiction (let’s just name it for what it is).
Coming from a background of designing products, as opposed to selling them I tend to be focused on product representation, rather than selling an idea. Which is not actually the route to making stupid amounts of money.
You’ve convinced me that marketing is definitely part of the problem. Here in the Netherlands they’ve recently (about two years ago) relaxed some legislation on online gambling (gambling itself is legal, just the ads weren’t) and since we’ve seen a surge of ads on television and social media featuring sports icons and influencers. The result has been a giant increase in profits, which directly corelates to figures of increased debt, prevalent mostly in young adults. I firmly believe this is toxic and needs to be fixed asap.
If you do decide to host a Q&A I’ll be sure to have a look for more cool insights.
Interesting take, mind if I dig a little deeper?
The key part of Apple’s success is that they make idiotproof devices for people who want something to “just work” (insert linux desktop memes here). The way I’ve come to understand it in the last couple years (having relatives who’ve drank the cool-aid and are starting to spot the cracks in the facade), is that they have been pulled in by values way up high in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. They are locked into the ecosystem, believing that their current solution is somehow ideal and they seem most of all afraid that anything else will completely turn their world upside down. The weird part is that Apple manages somehow to convince people they are the only ones capable of providing an experience that will cover those needs.
The thing is: Being convinced that there is no greener grass elsewhere puts up a barrier to entry into the unknown. I really do wonder if the solution there is cracking down on marketing, as it would require broad sweeping legislation that would likely defeat the purpose.
Sure, companies will put forth the occasional blatant lie, misrepresenting their product, but oftentimes the heavy lifting is done by the established brand image. I would not know where to begin preventing such an image from forming in the first place without community pushback.
And that is where my original point comes in: If we push back by ridiculing the userbase we’ll have a culture war on our hands. The trick is to be smarter than that and actually show them that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Every time the consumer gets fucked over by corporate greed, it is because we’ve let it happen by accepting the slippery slope brought upon us. (Publicly traded) companies will only listen to financial consequences from their actions, which means we have the power to stop their bullshit by not buying into it. Doing so requires a large enough group of people to start spending money elsewhere.
Problem is: The current market is affected by Apple’s shenanigans (though examples of the same pattern are also found in other industries). Which means other manufacturers are copying all the anti-consumer design decisions and you’re not left with much of a choice.
This is where legislation comes in. By providing basic consumer protections like in the proposed right to repair bills, we can at least be sure to have the option of choosing our own repair provider.
Though I’m curious if there is an additional angle we need to explore as consumers. Having said all the above, would you still disagree that educating our peers in a respectful manner will lead to people changing their behaviour, and if so, why?
Agreed, they’re usually influenced by their emotional attachment to the Apple brand (or [insert fashionable electronics manufacturer here]). And my hunch is they respond to valid criticism with a defense along the lines of “they obviously know what they’re doing” or “tech is hard/dangerous/intellectual property, we can’t have just anybody working on it”.
The reality is, they often fail to see the bigger picture because they’re blinded by what they’ve convinced themselves is the truth. This unfortunately also means that clowning on them is counterproductive, as they won’t see the light without being eased into it.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t judge people for believing soldering an SSD to the motherboard is somehow innovative and progress, but it is hard to accompany our laughter with the patience to actually explain to them in a respectful manner that this is not the way.
It takes a hard reality check in the form of their data being gone when their SSD inevitably dies someday, and recovery not being an option “because you should have paid for an iCloud subscription”. Or it takes a way for “them” not to see “us” as the enemy when we’re advocating for Apple and competitors not to pull us further into a dystopian technological hellscape where devices are single use. Try convincing a cultists that they’re in a cult and they’ll see you as a threat. We have to make sure this doesn’t escalate into polarizing tech culture war any further than it already has.
We need repairability and sustainability to be the basis for consumer electronics going forward. Corporate profits don’t justify wasting resources on single-use electronics.
Seconded, depending on what your goals are with transcoding, you might want to reconsider your strategy.
Hardware encoding (with a GPU) is mostly useful for realtime transcoding applications like streaming video. There are definitely some caviats that come with the realtime performance, and you’ll find that NVENC encoded video is almost always inferior to the slower equivalent software encoded variants.
So let’s talk codecs: While h.265 might seem like the holy grail, it is way more computationally intensive than h.264 is. In some cases the difference in encoding time will even be as high as 3-5x. Not really worth it if all you’re gaining is a slightly lower filesize.
Your results will vary by the media you’re encoding, by your encoder quality settings, tuning and encoding speed. As a rule of thumb: slower encoding speeds equal more efficiently compressed video (a.k.a. relatively higher quality for lower file size).
Handbrake is my choice of software for encoding video. It includes pretty much everything you could ever want if you’re not looking for niche codecs and exotic video formats.
I find myself mostly using x264 because it is relatively fast and still provides awesome results. My encoding speed is always set to “slow” or “superslow” (not much difference for my setup). I usually set the quality by making use of the preview function in handbrake, which transcodes just a short section of the video which I use for pixel peeping and checking for any major artifacts that would ruin the content. The resulting file also provides an estimate for how large the final transcoded file will be. If you’re happy with the quality setting, you can opt to mess with the encoder tuning. There are different presets for film, animated content and such. I usually do use film tuning if transcoding live-action media.
All this generally leaves me with pretty compact file sizes for 1080p media. And transcoding usually happens at a rate of 60-75 fps depending on the resolution. Going up from “slow” to “medium” improves fps by about 25% and increases file size by about 10%. The ideal balance is up to you.
Advanced tips: try using VMAF (objective video quality analysis algorithm developed by Netflix) to score and compare your different encoding settings. VMAF is neatly integrated into FFMetrics, which is a GUI for FFMpeg and a couple of video analysis algorithms. I also use MPV (open source media player) with FFMpeg command line arguments for playing videos synchronized in a 2x1 or 2x2 matrix. This helps compare the results for quality.
While this is very much welcome news, I am a little skeptical because this might still be a PR stunt.
Apple has shown they have the engineering capacity to design their devices to be virtually unfixable, all while still technically being compliant with this proposed piece of legislation.
Nonetheless, this show of support might finally be a means for us to end the ongoing culture war on repairability. It has been too much of a polarized debate lately, where opponents seem to be under the impression that a lack of repairability is a good thing for everyone, when it is really just having a choice that matters most.
Now that Apple has officially put in writing it’s support for repairability of consumer electronics, we can finally stop debating wether or not repairability is a good thing, and instead how we’re going to ensure the new situation works for everyone involved. Hopefully.
Anything other than whitelist-type parental controls will likely be insufficient to block absolutely everything you don’t want them to have access to (or want to have access to them, for that matter).
Honestly, the best way to do so would be no internet access without supervision, which is usually not really a viable option in any reasonable real-world scenario.
The second best way I can think of, albeit a slightly technical solution, is to setup a VPN server at home using a raspberry pi or a similar hosting solution and have the phone connect through that. That way you can control internet access in any way you’d like and even block nasty tracking attempts from apps if you so wish. Most android phones have the option to prevent internet access entirely if not connected to the VPN (this will prevent internet access from any WiFi and mobile data networks). In which case they can still just call or text in emergency situations. The only thing left to do is locking down the phone’s settings, and the rest can be dynamically managed from your network.
All of this does require some basic networking knowledge, but it’s actually surprisingly easy to setup.
You might want to consider setting up a VPN tunnel to your own network. Main benefit is that you can access your home network as if you were connected to it locally. Which makes switching between mobile data and WiFi a non-issue.
This requires some sort of VPN server and usually a single port-forwarding rule for the protocol which your VPN software of choice uses. For the simplest default configuration of OpenVPN this means setting UDP port 1194 to point to your OpenVPN server.
Generally, keeping things simple, there’s two types of VPN you can set up:
It is a little more complicated than that, and there’s more nuance to it, such as wether to user your own DNS server or not, but all that is best left to some further reading.
I’ve setup an OpenVPN server myself, wich is open source and completely free to mess around with. (Save for maybe some costs for registring your own domain or DDNS serviced. Those are all optional though, and mainly provide convienience and continuity benefits. You can definitely just setup a VPN server and connect with your external IP adress)
You can do both though. Lots of high-profile software is both open source and available as SaaS.
The beauty of that strategy is you can ensure the software will survive your service provider going bankrupt or otherwise suddenly disappearing, leaving you without a solution.
By not being locked into a specific vendor, competition will be centered around providing the best service, which is in my opinion exactly as it should be.
I take issue with some of the statements here. First of all:
I find this whole “right to repair” really pointless endeavour pushed by repair shops wanting to retain their outdated business model.
Right to repair is definitely not just being pushed by repair shops. If you take a good look at the rate Framework is selling devices at (batches instantly sold out until Q1 2024), you’ll see that consumers want this more than any other group. We, as the consumers will ultimately benefit the most from having repair options available. Right to repair is not meant to halt innovation, it is not about forcing manufacturers to design products in ways detrimental to the functioning of said products. It is about making sure they don’t lock third parties out of the supply chain. If you replace a traditional capacitor with a SMD variant, someone is going to learn to micro solder. If you convert a chip from socketed to BGA mount, someone is going to learn how to use a heat plate and hot air gun to solder it back in to place.
The main problem is manufacturers demonstrably going out of their way to prevent the feasable.
The second part I take issue with is this:
It is probably better use of our collective resources to focus on researching technologies that will help us deconstruct these tiny components into their constituent matters
From my 12 years of experience in design of consumer goods and engineering for manufacturing I can tell you this is not happening because no one is going to pay for it. The more tightly you bond these “constituent matters” together, the more time, energy, reasearch and money it will require to convert them back into useful resources.
There is only one proper way to solve this problem and it is to include reclamation of resources into the product lifecycle design. Which is currently not widely done because companies put profits before sustainability. And this model will be upheld until legislation puts a halt to it or until earth’s resources run out.
In terms of sustainability the desireable order of action is as follows:
I agree, reddit gets most of their traffic from the engagement surrounding the latest shitposts and low-effort memes. (Or just genuine community content if you prefer)
Months old posts are hardly relevant to large scale user engagement and it’s unlikely that the one user trying to solve a problem by visiting a years old thread is going to have much of an impact.
If people are going to move away from the site in a healthy manner, they need to realise for themselves that it’s time to move on. Better to have a bunch of hopeful and curious people looking for new opportunities rather than bitter and resentful users which are going to vent their frustration elsewhere.
Ik ben de hele tijd bang dat mijn reactie overdreven is. Maar het was echt heel eng, vooral dat hij me echt een heel groot stuk gevolgd is. Ik heb ook een verleden waarbij ik meer vervelende ervaringen heb ik dit vlak en dit heeft die herinneringen daaraan flink getriggerd.
Wat anderen ervan denken is niet relevant. “Overdreven” is een subjectief begrip en is volledig afhankelijk van jouw referentiekader. Wat je op dat moment voelt, en hoe je daar later op terugkijkt, en vooral wat het met je doet is hier van belang. Zolang anderen niet in jouw schoenen staan hebben ze ook geen recht op een oordeel of dit een overdreven reactie is of niet (dat neemt helaas niet weg dat ze wel een oordeel zullen hebben).
Je bent slachtoffer in deze context, en jouw reactie komt voort uit het onrecht dat je wordt aangedaan. Volgens mij is dat al erg genoeg om je druk om te maken, wat anderen vinden van hoe je ermee omgaat is extra ballast.
Iedereen heeft het recht om in zijn/haar waarde gelaten te worden op het gebied van angsten. Bij PTSS hebben die angsten helaas een sterkere en invloedrijke aanwezigheid, maar daarvoor heb je dan ook hulp van de psycholoog.
Ik vind het moedig dat je de intentie hebt om terug te gaan, en ik kan het ook zeker aanbevelen om dat gewoon te doen. Iemand meenemen is dan een goede manier om niet bezig te hoeven zijn met het “stel-dat”-scenario, want dat heb je al afgedekt met een bodyguard. Maar bedenk wel dat je op die manier ook niet of minder geconfronteerd wordt met je vervelende ervaring. Jezelf echt goed wapenen tegen dit soort situaties lukt natuurlijk alleen maar als je ook stevig in je schoenen staat. Maak voor jezelf (eventueel samen met de psycholoog) daarom de afweging welke strategie het beste past bij wat jij nodig hebt.
En bekijk het misschien ook eens van deze kant: Het feit dat de dader dit soort acties kennelijk nodig heeft zegt veel over diens mentale toestand. Daarmee gaat het voor de dader misschien niet eens zozeer om jou als persoon, maar om de reactie die het teweeg brengt. Het kan best wel eens zo zijn dat de dader er juist op uit is om je onveilig te laten voelen en dat daar de kick vandaan komt. In dat geval is de lol er natuurlijk direct af als je geheel tegen de verwachtingen in gaat. Maar ook dat is natuurlijk wel afhankelijk van of dat voor jou haalbaar is. Zo niet, dan zit de dader nog altijd fout.
Blender is awesome for modeling, but it does not do parametric modeling, which makes its use limited outside of game art / VFX workflows. It’s more suited as a replacement for Maya/3DS Max than it is for replacing Solidworks.
That said, there is the CAD Sketcher plugin which makes Blender behave slightly more like a parametric modeler.
There is also Plasticity, which behaves like an oddly satisfying mix between Blender and parametric CAD. It’s built on Parasolid, which is the same geometry kernel powering Solidworks and Siemens NX.
Do learn Blender, but use it for further detailing your models and making renders. The best way to export for Blender I’ve found is through Solidworks Visualize, which can export to OBJ and FBX formats. Depending on what you’re rendering, you might have to spend some time UV unwrapping in order to get textures to map properly.
Bonus tip: If you have a VR headset give Gravity Sketch a try, it’s a great way to do conceptual design sketching and NURBS modeling in a really intuitive way. I’m confident VR/AR is the future of 3D modeling if diffusion models don’t fully replace the need for it in the near future.
I’ve identified good progression systems as the main thing I like about games with crafting. You make something which enables you to get the next best thing, repeat.
Notable examples are Terraria, (modded) Minecraft to some degree, Runescape (no bias towards OSRS or RS3), Monster Hunter series, various MMO’s, Subnautica, ARK and Forager.