>I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship.
I'm sadly not surprised. While HN does attract hobbyists like me interested in technology and how it affects society, it also attracts a lot of those who dream of building and controlling the next big data silo for personal profit. Permanently liberating an entire mode of communication into an uncensorable distributed system that can't be easily replaced due to the network effect (such as your example of email) precludes that path to profit.
I don't think people are pushing ActivityPub as a silver bullet, so much as they're using it as "the currently-available and less-awful alternative to closed silos". If someone is starving, they're not going to hold out for a gourmet cheesecake that's a year away from being made. They'll happily take an immediately-available baked potato instead.
People are pushing AP as a silver bullet. Look at this thread! Twitter is funding work to be done in more than an year and people are saying that should just use AP.
I disagree. I think most of the people in this thread are promoting Activitypub merely as a starting point. Sure, it could use some tweaks and improvements, but it's a good foundation to build on.
Your previous comment came closer to the truth: ActivityPub may work today _as a workaround_, a half-baked alternative to closed silos; but it doesn't have a solid foundation, its problems can't be solved by tweaks and improvements, and that's what every of its critics say.
I think this is going to be an "agree to disagree" situation. Frankly, I think Activitypub is just fine as the basis for building Twitter alternatives. Most complaints I've read about it are from people who dislike its lack of privacy and of the necessity of trusting servers with regards to private messages. I think those people are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
I'm actually building an Activitypub implementation myself. I quite like the protocol and the philosophy of "twitter without Twitter Inc.", but I'm thoroughly sick and tired of the rube goldberg "framework on top of framework on top of framework on top of obscure language for the backend" insanity that comes with the usual implementations. So I decided to do something about it. I'm working on an Activitypub server in Go, sqlite, and a pure vanilla javascript frontend. My goal is to have this be dead simple to install and maintain on a barebones VPS for anyone with a modicum of Linux commandline experience. One static binary, one small config file, one folder with a handful of javascript/css resources and html templates. And that's it. No bloody vue, react, angular, ember, or rails. And definitely no f---ing node.
This is specifically why SpaceX rarely patents anything. From a 2012 Wired article [0], Musk is on record as saying "We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."
Which is sad in part because trade secrets can hold back healthy competition for generations. At least with reasonably limited patents society as a whole can learn without resorting to spying, leaks, or expensive reverse engineering.
My "favorite" part of The Diamond Age was when he had a whole scene solely so one character could explain to the reader what another's (lame) motivation had been for the last half the book or so, as it had been in no other way established or explained up 'till then and the book was about to wrap up.
Every time I read a Stephenson novel I have to break through that first quarter to a third before I'm fully taken in. It's like a dog or cat finding a comfortable position to sleep in. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, all require me to push through that first part before I can get comfortable.
I had tried (and failed) to read Crypto about 3 times before I finally broke through and realised his plotting wasn't bad, he just couldn't set it up right, or something.
I think it's because he hadn't learned a whole lot of bad pacing habits at that point, but had already developed a strong descriptive style. Snow Crash is an evolution of that. The pacing is a mess, but entertainingly so, and the first-class descriptive writing and dialogue makes up for it.
He desperately needs an iron-fisted editor in his life. It's a tragedy that he doesn't.
>Somewhat related, but I have hard time watching older shows/movies where the plot only works because people do not a have cell phones.
One of the funniest moments in the Buffy spin-off Angel was when the title character was trapped somewhere, and after managing to escape he's asked by his friends why he just didn't use his cellphone to call for help - at which point he's at a genuine loss for words, because he did have one with him at the time.
>In my opinion there’s simply too many dependencies to begin with. Some of the simplest things put into a GitHub repository to be “shared” with the world is great—as a gist file. Software needs to be a little more self-contained. Software reuse these days is honestly taking “not reinventing the wheel” to lazy extremes.
All true. Did we learn nothing from the left-pad incident?
One of the things I'm most excited about related to Starship is its landed mass capability for science purposes. Imagine being able to build radio and optical telescopes in the Daedalus crater on the central lunar far side. They'd be shielded from the optical and radio noise of the sun for 2 weeks out of 4, and permanently shielded from Earth. Or imagine infrared telescopes at the bottom of permanently shadowed polar craters, where ambient temperatures are even colder than in interplanetary space. No need to design and deploy a complex sunshield and worry about maintaining spacecraft orientation. The science potential of reusable heavy-lift rockets can't be understated.
>and I'd be shocked if there's a viable company in either the Boring Company or hyperloop.
One of the things to keep in mind about Musk's various projects is that every single one of them has a practical application for Mars colonization. Reusable rockets to get to Mars relatively cheaply, solar panels/grid-scale batteries to keep the colony powered, and mass quantities of phase-array networked commsats instead of laying thousands of kilometres of fiber are the obvious ones, and discussed at length everywhere. But the others are worth fleshing out.
The trick to colonizing Mars quickly is to deliver the most bang-for-the-kilogram in landed mass. If a single Starship can land enough material to build a few big oxygen and methane tanks, all you have is a few big oxygen and methane tanks. If it lands enough mass for a "The Martian" style Aries-type habitat, all you have is a habitat. But if a Starship lands a few fast, miniaturized, automated, and electric tunnel-boring systems and the spare parts to keep them maintained, you can build as many radiation-proof habitats and oxygen/methane storage tanks as you can - underground. I would bet good money on the very first Mars-landed Starships having at least one full tunnel-boring rig (with spare parts) on board each one - if not for immediate use under time-lagged remote control, then in preparation for direct operation by the first landed humans.
As for hyperloop, it's a heavy-cargo electric train designed to run in atmosphere that's 1% the thickness of Earth's. On Mars you wouldn't even need to enclose the rails. This is what you'd want a decade down the road for transporting mass quantities of ice to methalox production/storage sites. Of course it's far less practical on Earth than current alternatives, which is likely why Musk's total Hyperloop involvement is limited to a SpaceX-sponsored tech demo. And I think they're only doing even that minimal investment because they want to see how electric trains work at Martian atmospheric pressure.
>Yes, I'm not sure what the future holds for HTML but I'm confident the ultimate goal of webassembly is to make the browser a secure place to run full native like apps. That suggests some apps will not use HTML and just render everything themselves
Fortunately advertisers are renowned for their self-restraint, and can be trusted to not abuse this capability to simply shove in as many ads as they possible can, wherever they can, with masses of unblockable trackers underneath it all.
I'm sadly not surprised. While HN does attract hobbyists like me interested in technology and how it affects society, it also attracts a lot of those who dream of building and controlling the next big data silo for personal profit. Permanently liberating an entire mode of communication into an uncensorable distributed system that can't be easily replaced due to the network effect (such as your example of email) precludes that path to profit.