Well I hope for Mozilla's sake that you two are representative of Mozilla's current and target userbase because their market share indicates otherwise.
They're not representative; I don't think anyone uses Pocket, except (maybe) those two people, even after ten years of aggressive pushing. And they don't ever let up with that pushing. Mozilla evidently doesn't care about Firefox's plumetting user base. I assume they're investing the Google dollars in other companies, unrelated to browsers.
> I don't think anyone uses Pocket, except (maybe) those two people
Sorry, where do you get off being such a douchebag?
You do realize Pocket existed before Mozilla bought it, right? I started using it back when it was still ReadItLater and it's an incredibly useful service. It's a decent way to collect interesting sites for later reading, as if tons of people on HN don't use various methods to do the same damn thing, but somehow it's suddenly bad because Mozilla owns it? Get lost.
At least when Mozilla buys a service, they continue it and improve it over time, instead of what everybody else does like Microsoft, Google, or whoever else, where they sunset whatever service or project it is and move the developers into other teams. Like, jesus fucking christ. Everybody else is doing wildly anti-competitive behavior, but here's Mozilla actually doing something decent, but fuck 'em right? We want tech companies to swallow smaller companies and extinguish them entirely. That's what we're all about in the tech industry.
I'm entitled to express a (hyperbolic) opinion without receiving personal abuse. FWIW, I haven't ever met anyone that uses it. And yet for years, it's been taking up screen real-estate, and nagging me to sign up. If anything's douchie, it's that.
And yes, I've been using Firefox long enough to know that Pocket was an acquisition.
You're right, sorry. That may have been a bit too much.
I don't agree that nobody uses it. A brief google search tells me that millions of people do use it and the surely inaccurate analytics sites I took a look at show millions of views a month. I disagree with a lot of what Mozilla does, but much of that involves the decisions they make directly affecting Firefox or projects like FirefoxOS or other weird stabs into the dark. Expanding available features for users is something I consider a good thing, that includes providing a decent VPN/proxy service and integrating Pocket.
Mozilla does a lot of things wrong, but imo, Pocket isn't one of them. In fact, if it provides a viable alternative to things like Google News, I see that as a net benefit for all of us.
How does one find out more about this scene, and more importantly does it actually provide you with enough income to live on? (Rent is expensive in cities)
There's not exactly a centralized directory of cool tech coops, but there's a few places that list some or where they hang out. [1] There's also a fair bunch of coop orientation in the XMPP/ActivityPub ecosystems.
Some projects are driven by direct donations, some others via grants (all NLNet-supported projects) and business partnerships (Blender foundation), some provide paid services to fund R&D (SourceHut).
Overall, it's technically possible to derive a decent income from such schemes, but that's not exactly widespread. Many dedicated hackers will work for minimum wage or less, but some will arrange either:
- to reduce their expenses, by moving to cheaper places [2] or living in shared flats or communities; if you're organized as a collective even food and furniture can have close-to-zero cost [3]
- or to have a high-wage part-time job on the side, or support contracts to pay the bills; if you get half-time to work on your pet projects, that's already quite an achievement
Overall, building a cooperative economy asks the question of where does the money go? The more autonomy we can achieve, and the more money we can "recycle" into other cooperatives, the less of our resources leak into the pockets of the 1%.
So yes, if you make a really cool project people appreciate and/or can depend on for their business, you can sure make a living out of it: just be sure to use copyleft licenses (eg. aGPLv3) so you're not scammed out of your work by big businesses. But personally, i'm more interested in non-profits driving R&D with a vision (like Framasoft does with the Degooglize Internet campaign and eg. Peertube/Mobilizon project).
[1] for example libreho.st, chatons.org (french-speaking) for hosting coops
[2] for example in France, if you don't insist on living in the big cities, you can find places to rent for close to free once you subtract housing support from the rent ; i guess the same is true in many places
[3] skipping unsold food from (super)markets or growing food in the backyard; we could also mention utility hacking for free electricity/water but i can't say most devs i know do that
I wonder if this is aimed at elderly folk or people with elderly relatives. It looks like a device (with dubious reviews!) that you can give to them, which they just plug in to their laptop. That seems more convenient than setting up some software, especially if they live far away.
I’ve had an X1 Carbon for almost 2 years now as a development machine, and I really like it. My previous laptop was a 13” MBP.
The X1 is light and fast. I run Fedora, and work often in containers. I have the likes of Podman, VS Code, IntelliJ and Atom running and many Firefox tabs open, all without any problems.
Other good points are the 2xUSB ports, HDMI, and good battery life.
The main downside is the 256GB HDD, which fills up far too quickly, so I end up having to do a bit of housekeeping quite often. But as a dev machine, I can recommend it.
If you want to work in a RHEL-like environment (use a similar package manager, configuration, and so on), then you could look at Fedora (Workstation edition), which is in the same branch of the Linux family tree as RHEL.
Fedora/RHEL uses RPMs to install software, so you can check in advance whether your favourite application offers an RPM. Most of the major dev tools do, including VS Code, etc.
But whichever distro you choose for your desktop OS, you can still try out other distros by running them inside a container.
Linus Torwalds says he uses Fedora.
I don't see why you would use Fedora instead of Centos / Oracle Linux / RHEL free dev subscription.
Maybe because Fedora gets the cool things first before other get them. For testing.
It took them a while to wake up, but I think Argos is better now. You can collect from stores, get it delivered, sometimes even same-day delivery. I value having a store nearby. I trust them far more for commodity products (chargers, accessories, etc) than venturing into the Wild West of Amazon sellers and reviews. I also feel I have more recourse if something goes wrong.
A mini-tripod for a camera phone. It is one of the cheapest things I've bought (<£20 I think), but I've got way more value out of it than most purchases. It can hold a phone vertically or horizontally, and the head and feet are very adjustable. Perfect for joining work/social video calls, recording videos, or taking photos, I just love it.
I wrote a book and chose Asciidoctor, because it's got a lot of built-in features for writing technical docs, such as 'admonitions' (the "tip", "warning", "info" blocks, etc.), 'sidebars' (the boxed Q&A/ancillary blocks you often see in technical books) and code syntax highlighting, with per-line 'callouts' (i.e. you can write explanations of what each line in a sample code block is doing). It can also generate images from ASCII diagrams, but I didn't get amazing results, so I created my own diagrams as SVGs in draw.io.
It's easy to render PDF and EPUB, and Asciidoc syntax is not much of a jump from Markdown either. The biggest challenge is learning the correct name of the typesetting feature that you need, so you know what to look for in the Asciidoctor reference. :-)
So my process was as follows:
1. 1 "parent" Asciidoc manuscript, with individual chapters written in separate files and included with "include::"
2. Write sample code, marking each code block with Asciidoctor fencing, and then reference each code block from the manuscript. Asciidoctor will then include the code and add syntax highlighting etc. I also try to write the example code inside unit tests, so it can be tested every time the book is built.
3. Wrap the process in some sort of build tool. I chose Maven (there's an Asciidoctor plugin for Maven). The process builds the book PDF/EPUB, tests the book sample code, and builds any associated artifacts (like an example .zip file).
Now I'm writing a new short book, and this time I'm trying out Pandoc->PDF (via LaTeX). The learning curve is pretty steep, and the LaTeX errors are a bit WTF, but the eisvogel template (as also recommended by asicsp in this thread) is a great way to have something presentable very quickly.
> I'm also confused... who reads blogs but doesn't read the docs?
I’d say lots of people. Most people are searching for a specific solution to a technical problem. If they see a how-to blog that fits their use case in the results, many people will prefer it over the official docs.
