Isn't this more of a home network rather than home lab ? Lab would be where you can run software and hardware to actually experiment with things. Within a closed setup like Unifi you are hardly experimenting with anything if at all.
Cool setup no doubt because unifi does make some good bang for your buck hardware that is low maintenance if you want to mostly just set it and forget it. And this looks like one of those set it and forget it control from a panel things.
> Lab would be where you can run software and hardware to actually experiment with things.
I used to push back against this, and I ended up getting really frustrated.
But then I realized that nobody else really cares, language changes, and I should just pay attention to other sources if I didn't like it.
At this point, to me, "homelab" means Plex, maybe some good organization of your stuff, and just enjoying setting something up that probably isn't really experimental. AKA production, but for the home.
I might be imagining it, but it seems like most people who are experimenting don't call it a homelab first, if they do at all. It's "the HA cluster I'm playing with" or "my AD setup for pentesting" or whatever.
Very off-topic but I’m glad you shared this. I get fixated a lot on language use and find it hard to accept that it evolves. Your approach to dealing with it sounds mature and it’s inspiring.
OP here: the rack is inside a small attic, where I also have my 3D printers and various other tools: https://imgur.com/a/pxSXvQH I just called it homelab, because the location was there and I've seen people use the names interchangeable.
It could just be the start of a network to play with and build on.
In a home, having this kind of a setup is akin to installing appliances that can be set, forgot, and relied on more and more. Everything can have a fast connection, and if enough people work from home, etc, it can be really useful.
There's always ways to make do, and have failover, or backup internet, but in reality, it can be worth it to look at plug and play for home like this to not rely on anything.
Ubiquiti has taken it's lumps recently, but their stuff is still generally OK for home. Other providers like TP-Link with their OMADA setup are quite decent too, it's always possible to go full pfSense, or better yet, as an appliance, just buy a Netgate switch that can do a lot relatively for great bang for the buck.
I have recently used a Ubiquity Dream Machine Pro SE, and it's super decent for any small office or home setup. It just kind of runs, and you can reasonably run and segment a fair bit. It's too bad the new hardware took a step back in what the software allowed but it looks like they're adding the features each release little by little.
A lot of hardware for homelabs can increasingly get into issues with licensing, updates, etc. Once we are beyond 2.5 Gbit fibre into most homes, the jump to 10 Gig equipment and beyond and how to slice and dice it has fewer options.
I would today, not purchase any 1Gbit or 2.5Gbit fibre network hardware. Speeds are increasing, too fast. My homelab might have an older switch one day that an handle multiple 10gig fibre runs, both inside and maybe coming inside.
Having a part of a homelab that is like an appliance (largely set and forget), it can let you have more time to experiment with the experimental.
Production grade in a homelab can be possible too, where others might rely on it. Don't want that getting in the way of homelabbing.
I don’t think revenue is a good measure of ‘decline’. People have saturated their lives with devices over the last 4-5 years and iPads iPhones and watches and EarPods have reached a saturation point. So the revenues will not grow linearly anymore cause new owners of watches and EarPods are not getting added. There is no new device like the Apple watch to enter the ecosystem so revenues have stayed somewhat flat. This is if you think the cult is relevant to revenue.
From what I know everyone and their dog on social media uses an iPhone Pro. Given the high usage and addiction of social media, the iPhone that shows 3 cameras on the back is still the gold standard of status. People thought (including me) that raising the price of the flagship to 1000$+ might affect sales but it didn’t. As long as Apple maintains its luxury, people will buy it no matter what you say about them. The problem is that unlike LVMH where margins are insane, Apple is still a tech company thriving on innovation. So unlike other luxury brands, Apple stock may not do as well as others.
But if you think the cult is buying something else now, just open Instagram and count how many people have selfies with a pixel and thousands of followers (who are the part of cult). You’ll have a tough time spotting one.
If there's one consumer base where the consumers will mindlessly buy every new product despite the price or the fact that it's the same thing as the previous model, it's Apple. It's a brand for people with money who want to flex on the poor, not a brand for people who put thought into their purchases or who care about tech. You said it already, it's about status.
Thai kind of opinion is pretty common and has been around since before the iPhone, when Apple's computers were considered overpriced luxury items to flex on the poor.
Heck, I had this opinion back in 2008 or so.
The problem is that it's a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned apple customers into the rich/dumb/cultist category you become blind to the actual reasons why Apple is successful.
My own take, after using Apple stuff for 15 years now, is it's the attention to detail. It still shocks me that macOS has better support for using EMacs style text shortcuts (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) in basically any applications text field than Linux does.
Similar to the Emacs bindings, in being something where Apple's products are far ahead in ways that are only leveragable for the upper fraction of a percent of technical users, is AppleScript (and to a lesser extent Shortcuts), where to this day, even with AppleScript on the decline, Apple GUI applications are far more scriptable than applications on other platforms. Note this is not the same as CLI script-ability (which the Apple ecosystem is also excellent at) because AppleScript understands data types, e.g., you can iterate through the todos in a list and act on only the ones from the last week, or save the media assets attached to each todo to a file.
Another note about the Emacs bindings, it's always applications that are highly regarded by the technical community where these stop working, like Blender. It always makes me wonder if on Linux and Windows do folks just live without movement by word, and delete backwards word in file dialogs? Or are there just other bindings for those that work across the OS on Linux and Windows?
FYI, the reason they don't work on Blender is because Blender, presumably for cross-platform consistency, manually draws its entire UI as well as handles its own events. The OS has no involvement in the UI, except to provide system resources. Most applications use standard dialogs for things like opening files, that are implemented in a central system DLL, so the behavior is consistent system-wide, and any improvement MS makes to those dialogs is automatically applied to all applications that use them.
Thanks for the reply! I'll have to try this in Blender, I'd love it if someone could chime in similarly for Linux, I'm super curious about the bindings support on other platforms.
I've got a 12 year old Mac book air that just refuses to die or grow obsolete. I've never been rich or wanted to flex - it was the only thing with the weight, size, and specs from the time and it remains my favourite laptop ever. I hate to think of what I'll have to get next time.
unfortunately I'll want to wait until asahi is sufficiently supported before considering it. I gave up on os x when they made me reboot to disable nanny mode.
"Gravity is caused by the bending of space-time" is a thought-terminating cliché. Once you've assigned gravity to the space-time-bend category you become blind to the actual reasons why things fall down.
There is such a thing as a satisfying explanation. Personally, I like Apple's hardware in general. The 2005 Mac Pros in particular are beautiful machines, possibly the nicest-looking desktop computers I've seen, inside and outside. I would still not pay what Apple asks for, when for the same money I could buy a more powerful non-Apple computer. That leads me to conclude that the people who buy Apple products have more money than me and care more about aesthetics and less about performance than me.
Apple M3 silicon has about 3-4x the perf/w in light workloads as the leading AMD chips on 5nm, despite a slight node disadvantage, let alone the comparisons against generic android phone SOCs.
This is a huge part of what gives them their battery life - it’s not the OS, it’s not the node, it’s not the accelerators, it’s that they pull 1/3 the power running a browser/electron app or a word processor as x86 does.
Again, you’ve volunteered to self-identify as someone who is doing precisely what GP said: you’ve made your little box and you’ve put people into it and you’ve closed your mind to any alternative possibilities.
Yes, x86 does ok in bulk vector computations, but performance really falls off in 1T or light-load scenarios. So they have to boost super high to keep up, which tanks performance. That’s the major difference right now.
Presumably this is because decoding x86 is quite difficult and x86 chips lean really heavily on SMT to keep the cores filled as a result. I’m excited to see how Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake end up working out and if efficiency is improved, but right now it’s not good, some would say objectively bad (60w peak for a literal single thread on AMD, 50w+ on intel, for scores that are +/- 5% from apple and Qualcomm).
If you feel like this is brought up a lot: consider that efficiency under light mixed workloads is pretty much the primary consideration for a large number of laptop buyers. I have a 9900k and epyc systems if I want something beyond what a laptop will deliver (and M1 Max isn’t exactly a lightweight to begin with) so this complements each other quite well.
It's also very helpful to have proper first-party driver support. Linux is a mess and not getting better. HDMI 2.1 still isn't upstreamed even 4 years after AMD started trying, for example. Windows is (ineptly) doing an ARM-to-Windows switchover and (ineptly) doing a big "AI PC" push too, in ways that are much more adversarial than apple. Hard to enunciate the difference, but it's really the same classic "you're the product, not the customer" whereas with apple that's never really in question. I do really enjoy never having to fight bluetooth drivers and whatnot. Linux is great for server PCs etc, but "year of linux on the desktop" is a meme for a reason... and "year of linux on the laptop" is even farther away.
And before you say framework... framework laptops actually do not have very good battery life at all, even among x86 laptops. That's sort of the problem in general: there isn't a turnkey "just buy this and linux works and it's just as good as a macbook" option for x86, at any price, even ignoring the 1T efficiency problems. For example even the latest AMD laptops still have broken HDMI support under linux. That's unacceptable on a big-ticket purchase.
Make a decent x86 laptop and I'll consider it, but right now the AMD and Intel offerings just aren't there. Far from your original claim, to me it's the exact opposite and people are constantly pushing you to buy x86 and overlook all the problems and defects and shortcomings. Offer me something comparable and I'll consider it, but for now I am not going back at least on my laptop.
> Make a decent x86 laptop and I'll consider it, but right now the AMD and Intel offerings just aren't there.
Sounds to me like you haven't even tried using the recent laptops. My 5800u Lenovo Thinkbook is one of the best laptops I've ever owned (better than my 2018 Macbook Pro) and I've yet to be in a situation where HDMI 2.0 needs an upgrade to HDMI 2.1. I'll let you know if anyone at the office brings it up.
It's fine if you want to settle on a more expensive solution, but I concur with the parent. You are overpaying for performance with every single product in Apple's lineup, laptop or desktop. The majority of users will get equivalent or better performance on a cheaper Windows machine. This was even true back at the M1's launch, when Ryzen 7 4800us could be had at half the price of a base-model M1 Air.
Yeah, it's great in terms of ops/J. It absolutely is, and if I was in the market for a laptop, I could see myself seriously considering a modern Apple laptop. But, I only use desktops, so I don't care about ops/J, I just care about ops/s. Apple desktop computers are and have always been atrocious in terms of ops/s/$.
So tell me, exactly what alternative possibility am I missing? I'm not even saying it's wrong to care about things that I don't care about, I'm just saying that the people who care about those things... care about those things? Honestly, I don't know what you're complaining about.
Nope, there's nothing wrong with that. IMO the mac stack really kinda ends at the macbook... or maybe the mac mini (which does make a compelling "NUC" for lightweight niches like HTPC etc). There isn't really anything compelling about the studio or the mac pro... unless you are willing to splash out for 128GB or 192GB of memory for LLMs or something. And you can get 128GB in a macbook if you want, which is by far the more popular option anyway. AMD still has a hard 32gb cap on how much memory can be allocated to the iGPU
(Apple TV is another one... the apple tv is an A15 and is probably unironically the fastest single-thread performance I own right now. For $129 for the ethernet model. Remember, the A15 (the little brother to M2) has been in the iphone SE 3rd gen for several years now too, and Android is basically just catching up to that.)
I have a 9900K+3090 system for gaming, I have epyc and supermicro 2011-3 systems and tinyminimicro pcs for homelab. Apple doesn't add value in that area. Horses for courses. And actually that stuff complements the laptop really well for self-hosting!
But phones and laptops? Yeah, Apple hardware is literally objectively better than the competition. Strix Halo is going to be the first real challenger to a loaded-out macbook and it literally won't even launch until next year. I'm definitely keeping an eye on it etc, I'd love a little mini-PC with a strix halo, but right now apple is running at least 3 years ahead of the x86 laptop/Android phone market.
And honestly the problem even as I'm writing this - is x86 is "fine, except for laptops where you care about battery life... unless you want to do LLMs in which case Apple is still the only game in town... and if you buy AMD the HDMI 2.1 also won't work, and the real Mx-Max performance competitor on x86 should be launching next year, 4 full years after the M-family hit macbooks... and the driver situation is shit on Linux, except for Framework, which has terrible battery life instead". Not exactly great, is it?
Make an x86 laptop that isn't a pile of compromises and defects and I'll consider it. But right now it feels much more like the x86 people are the ones blindly pushing for consideration of their sacred cow far above the actual merits of the product. I'm not going to give x86 a handicap as a product on something that I'm going to use every day for the next 5 years. I want a nice laptop.
>But phones and laptops? Yeah, Apple hardware is literally objectively better than the competition.
Objectively? I don't know about that. I think phone hardware is all basically the same. I'm sure there are minute differences that one of us cares about and the other doesn't, but I'd say it averages out to it all being "fine".
In terms of software... Doesn't iOS still not let you install apps except through the app store, and doesn't let apps do JIT? And don't I need OSX if I want to develop for iOS? I don't know, that seems to me like an objective disadvantage of the platform, as a user. It means I can't use my hardware however I please, at least not without some major inconvenience.
>unless you want to do LLMs in which case Apple is still the only game in town
Nah, it depends. 3090s are going for cheap nowadays, and 24 GB is enough to run some hefty models at acceptable performance, and you get a nice gaming card on top. It's not UMA, but hey, it also costs eight times less than a decked out Mac Pro. It's a shame Nvidia doesn't seem interested in bringing large VRAM sizes to the consumer or at least prosumer segment.
> It's a brand for people with money who want to flex on the poor.
As a user of Apple devices I agree with the first part (unfortunately - their RAM and NVMes are much more expensive than anybody elses) but not with the second. I live in Europe where every second person I meet has an Apple device, so it's hard to perceive it as a status symbol.
Yeah, flexing on the poor is definitely why I buy their products, it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality and productivity gains I get from their product ecosystem.
> the quality and productivity gains I get from their product ecosystem
These gains are also available elsewhere. You are not superior, nor do you have access to superior things or ways of working, just because you buy Apple.
That is the success of the Apple marketing team making you think that way.
Excel, Adobe suite, Cinema 4D, and Ableton Live/Max don't run on Linux, just for the short list of applications I wouldn't want to give up. So presumably you mean Windows? But then you lose AppleScript, Unix-by-default, and global Emacs bindings. Doesn't seem like a great trade off to me, so I'm curious what exactly you'd suggest here?
It's amazing breadth to make a fantastic product for both the most and least technically minded. If you wanted to to summarize the reason for their ferocious brand loyalty I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a better summary then that.
Curious if you'd elaborate this statement, e.g., WSL is definitely a potential solution to one of the items I brought up, but given what I've stated about the advantages of macOS, would you actually go as far as to say it's a better or comparable experience on Windows? I'd love to hear your argument if so.
> would you actually go as far as to say it's a better or comparable experience on Windows?
This is obviously a subjective debate now, its all personal opinion. I would love to have that debate calmly and intelligently, but I feel here is not the place. Maybe we will meet in another place and time and be able to figure out what the other likes and prefers in their OS choice :)
Haha, fair enough, although I do think there is still some interesting objective points, e.g., the NVIDIA/CUDA support is a clear advantage for Windows today, and on the flipside macOS is still the place where software happens first (e.g., Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Lightroom all were launched first for Mac).
>on the flipside macOS is still the place where software happens first (e.g., Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Lightroom all were launched first for Mac).
Don't you think you're generalizing from a set of cherry-picked examples? How would you even approach trying to demonstrate this?
They have nothing to suggest because they have no clue how actual users that aren't like themselves use Apple products. You have ably demonstrated this fact.
> You are not superior, nor do you have access to superior things or ways of working, just because you buy Apple.
They didn't say they were or did. They said that they personally get value out of that product ecosystem.
Me choosing a product because I find value in it doesn't mean that I am calling you inferior for not buying that product. It's not a zero-sum game. You're allowed to be happy with the value you find in the products you choose as well!
No…I did not infer anything other than the ecosystem works for me and I find quality in their products. If some other method or product works for you… a salud.
If it bothers you that I (Some random person on the internet) prefers Apple over whatever you prefer or did not illustrate every possible alternative in my comment…well you should probably explore concern that with your therapist of choice at your next appointment.
> No…I did not infer anything other than the ecosystem works for me and I find quality in their products.
Then apologies for misunderstanding your statement.
> If it bothers you that I....blah blah blah
Your preferences dont bother me in the slightest. It only bothers me when people claim that there are certain objective advantages in one platform over another, which you have clarified you did not do.
However you seem very quick to jump to personal statements, and suggesting therapy. Maybe you should stick to the content of the discussion and not insult people in future? You will find you get on much better on the internet that way.
> You don’t need to go to such great lengths to parse out meaning.
I wouldnt need to if people in forums were more willing to just immediately clarify what they mean in a response instead of jumping to attack the people who are questioning them.
Just because someone loves chocolate ice cream and says “I like chocolate ice cream” that doesn’t mean they hate vanilla ice cream and feel superior to the vanilla ice cream eaters. It just means they like chocolate. That is all the information you have been given and the only logical conclusion you can draw.
In normal conversation, it’s generally not necessary to acknowledge all the ice creams you like and don’t like just because you mentioned how much you love chocolate. I think it would probably be a pretty normal response that if someone demanded that you do that, that you would be irritated at the absurdity of the demand and respond accordingly.
But hey, if I misread that you were being intentionally obtuse, I’m sorry.
No…I did not infer anything other than the ecosystem works for me and I find quality in their products. If some other method or product works for you… a salud.
If it bothers you that I (Some random person on the internet) prefers Apple over whatever you prefer or did not illustrate every possible alternative in my comment…well you should probably explore concern that with your therapist of choice at your next appointment.
…and I am sure I can also buy a boneless chicken breast from the other grocery store across the street from my preferred store, but I don’t like their retail layout so i don’t shop there.
Just because that other store exists and sells a similar product doesn’t mean I have to shop there, even if other people prefer that store.
You didnt say you prefered the apple ecosystem, you specifically said you got gains from using it, inferring that other platforms dont give the same advantages.
If you agree that the gains you get are also available elsewhere to people who prefer other platforms, then I objectively apologise and retract my statement.
> What if the gains are not on the other platforms?
All platforms can do everything. They are all just computers, you just have to learn how to do it.
Everything else here is subjective, which I think we agree on.
> but you’re ignoring subjective needs and opinions.
No I'm not quite the opposite. All platforms are equal if you put the time and efffort into finding the ways to do things you want to. After that, the preference on which you would like to use is subjective.
To clarify definition, needs are not subjective but opinions are.
Opinions are subjective by definition. Do not confuse opinions and facts.
And the idea that “all platforms meet your needs if you put in enough effort and time ” is flawed because that time and effort is part of the needs.
Again, to take their grocery store analogy: the layout doesn’t change the capability of the store. But it does provide them with the ability to get things done sooner, faster and with less cognitive load.
User experience matters more than I think you acknowledge.
I see your point, but I have been shown time and time again that User experience is basically just practice.
People can and do change all the time. Humans instinctively stick with what they know, but in reality most people could be more efficient by learning things outside of their comfort zone. The few people that do this are rewrded greatly by having multiple strings to their bow, and being adaptive to many environments.
Those that stick with they know are super efficient in their own environment, but take them out of that and they invariably complain that they could be better if they had the tools they know.
Are their alternatives? Maybe. I have no idea how they measure up because I don’t use them and wouldn’t comment about alternatives because it was not germane to my point.
Time. Small things that add up to big savings of time every day. My watch unlocks my MBP when I walk up to it. Maybe I am typing a note with the mbp, drawing a diagram with my iPad, taking a snapshot of a whiteboard with my iPhone, all of that simultaneously into the same note file—zero consolidation needed later on. I have set up productivity shortcuts that work on all my devices doing the same thing but in an appropriate manner/UX for the specific device. I can manage text messages from whichever device is in my hands at any given moment. My AirPods Pro2s magically shift to whichever device has my focus at the moment. My iPad can act as a second monitor to my MBP, or simply share the keyboard/mouse. I connect to a WiFi on one device, all of them know that password and can connect as well with merely a click. I can upgrade a device, login with the same ID, and lay it down and within moments it’s configured with all my preferences and is ready to go. There are probably another half dozen to a dozen things that I do daily that are seamlessly integrated just because of the ecosystem itself. They are basically working together so well that I don’t even notice the integration anymore. I have 5 different devices that feel like one.
Could I do all these things with other manufacturers…probably. However, all these things I can do with Apple by just logging in to my devices with an Apple ID. I don’t know of any other solution or combination of hardware/software that provides that level of out of the box ecosystem just off a single login.
About 9 years ago I traveled to the US from India for education. Smartphones were still not very common in India cause data was not as cheap as it is today. When I was in the bus commuting everyone’s head was buried in their phones. I thought to myself this is such a sad thing. Look outside talk to each other but the every single person had an iPhone and was doing something on the phone.
Fast forward to 2024 and every person home here in India is constantly on their phones. In the gym, in the car, at work, everywhere. Naturally kids are also getting hooked on devices.
How can you talk to someone when they aren’t even looking at you or paying attention ? Communities and real physical social interaction keep people mentally healthy. All these apps and devices are doing is keeping people away from each other instead.
Of course no one wants to admit this but people are addicted to devices and distractions. The sooner they dissociate, the better.
It can't be treated like drug addiction, though. Most people I know have a _relatively_ healthy relationship with alcohol or cannabis. The addicts, especially of hard drugs, are the odd ones out.
With phones, and before that music, and before that newspapers, it's a social norm. If you are trying to talk to people you feel like the weirdo.
And I get it, cause I don't like making myself vulnerable. I wish I talked to strangers but it's hard to undo a whole childhood of "Don't stare, don't bother them, keep to yourself, everyone loves how quiet you are, you're so mature for your age because you never talk, etc."
I would argue it should be handled exactly like drug addiction ought to be. That is, as a widespread medical issue. But it is more complex than drug abuse due to interaction with people expressly being part of the equation. One's phone is ever available and there are very very few places indoors or outdoors that it isn't considered socially acceptable to use their smartphone for social media. The same is not true for alcohol or cannabis. Most people won't simply walk down the street or hang in a park smoking or drinking. Phone addiction is far more visible.
I'm confused, you paint a picture in which the majority drink moderately and then say "likely not healthy" but in your example 90% of the customers, the vast majority, don't have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol.
So if you have a relationship with alcohol it is most likely a healthy one, and it's "addiction all the way down" for... a minority.
Yeah, well, that majority is likely buying alcohol for events, for celebrations. Not so much a 'relationship with alcohol' as a party favor. Don't drink anything at all the rest of the year.
You have a favorite drink, a regular bar, a liquor store that knows you - you are probably one of the ten percent. Believe it or not, most of us don't go to a bar most months of the year.
There the majority (18 and over, and slightly under 50% of 12 and over) report consumption in the last month.
Of those, a bit under 7% report "heavy usage". You can look up the definitions, but doesn't include e.g. "usually has a beer or two with dinner".
The category you describe definitely exists, but I don't think it's anywhere close to a majority, and there are also at least a couple reasonable categories between that problematic or abusive consumption.
When I'm out at a sit-down restaurant, I always make a mental note of everyone who has their phone out on the table. It's usually 50-50. Not necessarily using them, but within view, as if they're waiting for something else instead of prioritizing the people who took the time to be physically around them in the same place and time.
No wonder lots of people feel disconnected. They forgot how to connect in even the most conducive settings for it.
Personally, when I'm in this situation, my phone is out and face down on the table to avoid the discomfort of it digging into me from my pocket. I've also noticed that other people use their phone less when I explicitly take it out and put it to the side. Also, even though I take it out, I never use it unless the conversation has asked for it, like searching an answer for something.
Sometimes I do that because it's just uncomfortable to sit with my phone in my pocket. I agree it's rude to use your phone while you're dining or conversing with a group.
Not only that, but also in people's hands. I've seen on many occasions a couple sitting together at a two-seat table, obviously they're together for dinner, both silently scrolling on their smartphones. Not even saying a word to each other. It's eerie and creepy, like something out of Black Mirror. Last time I pointed this out on HN, most repliers were either defending this behavior or being sarcastic with "Well why don't you walk over and tell them how to live their lives!"
> I've seen on many occasions a couple sitting together at a two-seat table, obviously they're together for dinner, both silently scrolling on their smartphones.
Once upon a time, being together without having to talk was a measure of closeness. Relationships that achieved this were venerated.
That ideal aside: Proximity itself nurtures trust and feelings of safety.
It seems sad that we could miss examples of bonding because they don't fit our relationship model.
I've had relationships where I just liked spending time with the person, even when just sitting and not talking, but I've also sat around on my phone not talking to people, and it's not at all the same. When you're on your phone, you're in your own little world trying to ignore everyone. When you're such close friends with someone that you even like sitting around and not talking, it's because you want to spend time with them so much that you want to just be around them even if there's no real "excuse" to hang out.
I’m old enough to remember a time where you would see couples on the table next to you that wouldn’t talk the entire night but listen in to other table’s conversations.
Smartphones make not working social relationships more visible, but I doubt they’re the root cause.
I will forget my phone if I’m having an excellent live experience, eg a great conversation.
I'm not saying smartphones are never a problem. However, look at old photos of the bus or subway in the USA or UK from decades ago. Passengers were not having social hour - they were minding their own business, reading a newspaper, listening to music, staring out the window...
I'm more interested in the question of whether technology tethers us home more strongly, instead of venturing outside of our homes.
>they were minding their own business, reading a newspaper, listening to music, staring out the window
Much better cognitively than endlessly scrolling Instagram reels YouTube shorts that are algorithms trying to keep you hooked. Sometimes I’ve seen people just open random apps and close and do nothing. It’s like a habit they are unable to let go.
Phones must be orders if magnitudes more common than newspapers. It seems that no matter where you are in the world, everyone from age 12 and up has one on them 24/7 and uses it as soon as they have 20 seconds to spare. Newspapers were something only a few adults would use, and you usually have read all the interesting parts by the time you get your second coffee.
I agree that the tendency for wanting distractions has always been present in humans, but the hyper connectivity of today's world really taps into it unlike anything else we had before. It's a different quality.
I've noticed the same thing even on airplanes, where everyone is offline. Unfortunately in that case almost everything is either sleeping, consuming corporate entertainment, or reading books.
BUT there are always a few people who are open to talking. I prefer talking to being on the phone when I'm in flight. I get to have a long conversation about 1/4 of flights.
If you read old books like Pilgrim's Progress you see people walking towards the same town together, and they always struck up a conversation. Look at the Canterbury Tales: some really great literature that consists just of fellow travelers having a storytelling contest! We are missing so much humanity in our kosher lives.
At least in the US, most aircraft have internet now - many people are not offline. And even if they're not paying for the internet service, a number of airlines deliver their free entertainment services through personal devices - so they may be watching the same sort of content that would be in a seatback TV on other airlines.
Speaking personally:
I also tend to just load entire books onto my phone for flights. Reading on a small screen doesn't bother me.
With regards to talking - I like talking to strangers. However, the plane is one of the few places I try to avoid striking up conversations. People around me having loud (and it is loud, because talking quietly on a plane is impossible) conversations for hours about nonsense is something incredibly annoying to be on the receiving end of. While I enjoy actually having a conversation, I also know that by doing it I'll be annoying a half-dozen other people not involved in it but forced to listen to it in an environment where they can't do anything to escape it, and it feels rude to do that - especially since I don't enjoy when I'm in their position.
Does anyone remember when the TVs on airplanes hung down from the ceiling and there was only one or maybe two movies on the flight? There was either nothing on the back of the seat, or there was a very expensive satellite telephone.
I still do what I did then - read. I just read on a Kindle now instead of a stack of paperback books bought at the airport.
A fond memory I have from about 25 years ago when I was still a kid:
I was flying economy on KLM with my mom and dad, family vacation to Europe. About a few hours prior to landing, the crew put on some Mr. Bean movies. Back then at least on that flight as far as I can still remember, there weren't seatback screens; only those dropdown TV screens on the ceiling above the aisles, so everyone had to watch Mr. Bean.
Well tell you what, Mr. Bean is bloody hilarious and I was a kid. I couldn't help but burst out laughing even though I knew it was bad manners, and in short order the entire cabin was laughing with me. That was a fun day.
If you like those kinds of storytelling-on-a-pilgrimage stories, I highly recommend Hyperion by Dan Simmons. A large part of the book consists of a group of pilgrims-of-sorts traveling together and sharing stories, which gradually help you understand what's really going on.
I apologize if this comes across as 'how dare you talk about pancakes when I prefer waffles', but I just want to mention that, like a lot of people, I destroyed my hearing when I was young and now I struggle to hear on busses and planes.
If someone talks to me on a plane I say "Sorry, my hearing is really bad", and its really embarrassing when they respond by speaking so loudly the whole plane can hear for the rest of the flight.
Yes, I've tried two different hearing aids, and they were both worse than useless. They often amplified the wrong voices in the crowd, and not even consistently. It was like listening to the radio and having someone constantly changing stations.
If you've got a recommendation for one that is able to identify which voice in the crowd I want amplified, I'd appreciate it!
I don’t have first hand experience, I just know someone who described a similar problem and then raved to me once they got hearing aids about how life changing they were for that problem.
It sounds like yours were trying to actively amplify certain voices? I wonder if that’s sounds good but doesn’t work sort of feature. Naively it seems like just shifting the volume on everything should work as long as the frequency curve matches the lost frequencies. The brain is what is separating the voices, not the ears.
I'm not perfect, but I do make a conscious effort to put away my phone when in transit or idling around. Not that it matters much as pretty much everyone else is stuck in their own little world. But I think it's better for my own health.
> How can you talk to someone when they aren’t even looking at you or paying attention ?
I'm talking to people constantly without looking at them. Some are loose ties like this one. But group chats, texts, Discord servers, even Facebook. Tons of 1:1 communication with people I see in person regularly. But also I don't have to see someone in person to have a real conversation. I'm often fully present with real people when on my devices, and I'm perfectly capable of dissociating while politely not touching my phone when I'm in a boring conversation with people standing next to me.
humans will always take the path of least resistance to spike domaine when given the option - that is why we banned drugs and most of these apps with short form info like tiktok, reels, instagram, twitter - these are pretty much like drugs. I wish i can just throw away my phone and live my life but 'being on' is just an expectation in todays world.
> The outage highlighted a different kind of digital divide. On one side, gmail, Facebook, and Twitter kept running, letting us post photos of blue screens located on the other side: the Windows machines responsible for actually doing things in the world like making appointments, opening accounts, and dispatching police.
At this point using windows for these tasks seems like using legacy software because training people to use an iPad or a web browser seems too complicated or because no one wants to move their age old systems to a more modern web based system because of costs. Native apps work great, but I think the world is moving to the cloud and that means web based everything should be the norm. Yes AWS AZURE outages can still happen but those can be fixed by spinning up a VM in different clouds.
This is also why software jobs aren’t going anywhere thanks for a while. Many systems need to be changed to more modern and robust clouds. It might take decades for this transformation across the globe.
Your “modern and robust cloud” is my “why on Earth doesn’t this thing work offline”.
The world is absolutely full of things that have worked for decades to centuries without the Internet, are eventually more or less consistent (remember carbon paper credit card machines?), and did an amazing job of keeping the world running despite, wars, network partitions (the “network” would basically always be partitioned), mistakes, entire branches offline, etc.
Sure, a lot of things are easier when centralized, and “the cloud” is incredibly powerful. But it’s not necessarily more robust. Also, depending on any sort of cloud means you’re also depending on the network, and networks are far from infallable. There’s a reason that a lot of stored-value transit systems still track balances on the card and will let people in even if a fare gate cannot connect to a cloud service.
And CrowdStrike took out plenty of cloud instances, and recovering them can be worse than recovering physical hardware, as the “robust cloud” has an absolutely terrible ability to do anything outside the happy path of booting an instance normally.
Okay this sounds all very reasonable, but how do you know when your washing machine is finished, when it's not connected to the cloud and you won't get notified in your app? It sure is not an easy thing and the cloud helps very much here
Well, for people in an apartment it doesn't matter all that much, but if your laundry washer or dryer is in the basement, you don't necessarily hear it if you're out in the garden.
Sure, it might be a "nice to have" thing. But the machines usually show how long they'll take. And even if it's a newer one with sensors that make the whole process vary in time. I'd still be like "Oh, okay it'll take about 3 hours, so ill be back at 6pm". It doesn't really matter if the clothes chill out for about an hour, especially the newer machines don't stink that fast. And on top of that, I don't think that it has to go over the internet if you needed some sorta notification. Local would be suffiecient.
If I buy something new like this and have a few choices, I intentionally pick the one with as few smart features as possible.
I think you are joking, but I'll reply with a serious answer.
Where I went to college, our dorms had (free) shared washing machines. This was "pre cloud", but wifi was throughout. One student rugged up a hall-effect sensor and attached it to each power cable. It could detect if the washers and driers were on. It sent this info to a specific website that the students could monitor to see if there were any available washers or driers.
I wish washing machines had a fixed cycle duration. When I start the cycle my washing machines tells me the same duration, always, but in actuality it takes different amounts of time every time. Madness. I've been told this is a feature.
It actually is. Fixed length cycles haven't been a thing for many years now - modern washing machines adjust the washing cycle length by the weight of the laundry and its behavior during spin-drying, both its vibration behavior aka weight distribution (that can have multiple adjustment cycles to achieve reasonably even distribution) and how much water it loses - when no more water comes out during spinning, it will cut the cycle short to save energy.
> When I start the cycle my washing machines tells me the same duration, always, but in actuality it takes different amounts of time every time.
If it says (e.g.) 43 minutes, but sometimes it takes 40 and sometimes 49 or 53, set your timer for 60 minutes and get on with life. Your laundry sitting for 17 or 7 minutes isn't the end of the world. If your timer goes off and it's still not done, set it for another 20 and do something else.
Of all the things to fill your head with worry and annoyance with, laundry is near the bottom of the list for me.
Except when you live in a building with communal washing machines and where you need to book time for laundry, as it is common in many European cities.
My washing machine is kind enough to both indicate time to end in minutes, but also allows me to delay start so that the cycle is finished in [x] hours. It's not even that modern.
My modern dishwasher is also very kind, and displays the time to end in minutes throughout the wash. Counting down from an hour. But I don't know what kind of upbringing it had, for some reason, the sneaky bastard always adds another 25 minutes, when there is supposedly only 10 minutes left.
I guess dishwasher years are like dog years. At least it definitely behaves like a teenager at 2 years old, finishing when it wants to finish. Estimates be damned.
My home assistant does approximately this without the cloud, but it isn't magic: cloud is just 'someone else's servers' and I just host it on my own raspberry pi.
What does this have to do with “the cloud?” If you want to make a washing machine robustly notify its user that it’s done, surely a message sent over the local network or even Bluetooth is a better start. Anything involving the Internet is only useful when the user is outside the house, and there are more robust solutions to that than a server in us-east-1 that you hope the manufacturer keeps paying for.
In all seriousness, I think never has there been a better time to educate people on the fundamental philosophy of computing freedom, and I usually start with Eben Moglen and RMS's talks with people.
I don't know how much of this is generational, or how much of this is corporate sell out, or maybe even sockpuppetry for consensus cracking and other psyop techniques, but relearning the lessons of early computing (such as being able to do things offline, locally, as a core part of a functioning decentralized system), seems highly in order.
This could have been fixed by having a minimal baseline of machines not running the same software
Resilience comes from diversity, in computing and in biology. Whether that's having critical workloads on multiple cloud providers or having one user interface on windows on network A (Arista) with crowdstrike and one on a mac on network B (cisco) with Sentinal one
Sometimes perhaps you can't eliminate a single point of failure, but you can sure reduce them to a minimum.
Or you can choose to increase next years bottom line and thus your bonus by not having a robust DR plan or system. You can also skip on boring things like raid and backups.
The trick for a CxO is to ensure that when failure happens, it's massive and widespread. Then it's not your fault. The CxOs in a given industry won't be fired because their DR plans didn't work because they believed Gartner and all their CxO chums in competitors did the same thing.
Nobody got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/Cisco/Crowdstrike/Azure, even if it's worse than the alternatives. People do get fired for bucking the trend even when it's measurably more reliable.
The update affected less than 1% of all Windows machines. [1] Although maybe the biggest software failure in history, far from the biggest possible one. The level of cloud connectivity in the world could basically break the world if we didn't have diversity.
Cyber attacks rarely take down stuff directly. Rather attackers will establish a bridge head into your organization first and inspect the network and gather data for further (phishing) attacks.
Diversity only means more opportunities to install bridge heads.
I'm not sure I follow, I doubt the web vs native implementation of an application makes much difference when the terminal used to access it is unavailable. A cloud based web-app is not much help if no one has a working computer and browser.
I'm not sure we're quite at the stage where a check-in agent using their personal un-managed devices to handle passenger data via a web-app is a great idea.
They might not need them, but I'd be surprised if at least some companies don't install security BS on them anyway (just like they do on Linux machines), because of compliance reasons. It can't hurt, can it? (at least that was what most IT departments thought before CrowdStrike)
Hmmm, my experience is vastly different. I wanted to make a graph using 5 cols of data, first col is x labels, then data for 4 lines. The cols are not next to each-other in the sheet. Then add linear fits trough that. Then give specific html colors (woops no impossible) custom colors and line types to the original lines and the fitted lines. It's possible but the ui is terrible. Changing line type is simply bugged half of the time.
> training people to use an iPad or a web browser seems too complicated
iPads aren't designed to be turned into kiosks or airport departure displays and web browsers aren't operating systems (except maybe ChromeOS). So this advice boils down to don't run Windows, but CrowdStrike has caused outages of Linux as well.
AI blockchain 5G IoT ML self driving are a few trends I’ve seen in the last 10-15 years or so. I was too young to witness things like dotcom bubble but the theme remains the same.
Everytime something becomes popular there is always the ‘you got a hammer so now everything is a nail’ problem. Eventually the trend filters out the non sense applications and only the really important and impactful applications stick around.
Humans never change. Neither in stock markets nor otherwise. Everyone falls for the same things again and again.
When you have a great product, you can get away with mediocre or even bad internet presence. Take Starbucks, visa, Mastercard, Walmart etc who have at best average presence on the internet but their physical products are making them a lot of money because they are simply that good. Improvement to their online presence will only improve their product growth and sales.
The fluff you see on the internet is for bad products. The products themselves are generally nothing special and hence the whole marketing, analytics, social media presence is whats required creating this wave of websites and social media presence that is nothing but people trying to sell you stuff you don't need.
Take doctors for example. Good doctors can get a few bad reviews online but people will still go to them because the good reviews generally are a lot more than bad ones. Most great doctors don't even have a good online presence. On the other hand average or bad doctors tend to spend an awful lot of time improving their online presence to get new patients all the time because old ones tend to not stick around thanks to average patient care.
The web is what you make of it just like everything else. People looking for quick cash have existed for decades. With the web, it's become easier for them thats all. You can chose not to fall into this trap.
Cool setup no doubt because unifi does make some good bang for your buck hardware that is low maintenance if you want to mostly just set it and forget it. And this looks like one of those set it and forget it control from a panel things.
But this is less lab and more network imo.