I'm always baffled when I read news about unethical things that a piece of software does; I can't comprehend how software engineers, people who probably have the ability to do critical and structured thinking, program such software and feel ok with it - they can't just plead ignorance and say they're just doing their assigned tasks or sth, they actively make the decision to participate in this.
The managers, I think it makes more sense: they may be evil about coming up with these decisions, but may not have much exposure to the product to understand the consequences of how it works so they just get money and handle they contracts etc.
But the people who write the logic, they're the ones who are sitting down days at a time focusing on their task to think how to design the algorithms, from killing people, to simply tracking people online and exploit a user's behavior, data about their personal life and relationships etc
"Hmm yes if a user seems to spend much on microtransactions in games, we could maybe lure them to an online casino! Lets now work on the algorithm that recommends betting games based on their online behavior. Oh did they lose their job recently? They now have more free time to sink into our platform! We may be able to lure them with games that have small bets 🤔 I'm so good at my job I might get a raise now!"
And I guess now with vibe coding this can only get worse 😕
With a 5-year lifespan and a conservative estimation of 200.000 folds, I count 110 folds per day, which comes out at around 1 fold every 6 minutes for 16 hours straight every day
That's not what my objection is about 😅 Of course low power consumption is important
My point is about depending an independent peer-to-peer off-grid network on one specific technology
E.g. imagine if TCP/IP, BGP, or HTTP were proprietary (instead of owned by standards organizations), and in order to connect to the Internet you would need to buy a network card that is licensed from the TCP/IP company! But since that's not the case, people can connect to the Internet using any technology they want (Wi-Fi, Ethernet), but as long as their device uses TCP/IP, anyone can connect with anyone
(PS maybe there is a better physical layer or routing example than the above 🤔 But I think the principle still stands)
Again, the fact that it is owned by someone means that the community (probably) does not have control over it, and one day we might need to fork the whole network and migrate every node
there's nothing they can do to stop you using it as you see fit
If a specific radio is illegal, it's easy to just find where it's transmitting from and fine you; they already do this with pirate radio stations
There is no way to be completely free of dependence on others
But why be dependent on 2 companies instead of having the option to buy a radio from any company? Why is competition and diversity bad for an independent and off-grid network that we don't want it to have a single point of failure? 🤔
Why lock every user into a single technology just because some users want to have a long-lasting battery? (Which btw is probably important for very remote nodes and not the home and portable nodes that I think are more common).
you're going to want to buy some LoRa devices anyway
Yes, but you're not forced to; you can have nodes in your city that use any radio they want to communicate to each other, and e.g. your local hackerspace can have a node with multiple radios that bridges them to other nodes on the global network
Reticulum is pretty much developed by a single person.
Hmm that's unfortunate, I didn't know that 😕 But that's a chicken-and-egg and network effect problem; we shouldn't be "forced" (network effect) to use something that is not ideal just because more people use/develop it, otherwise we will never have a better alternative, because no one wants to develop it because no one is using it because no one wants to develop it
(I don't have the experience to say that Reticulum is the best option, but it's the main agnostic network I've seen with the little search I've done; people reading this feel free to make suggestions! 💚)
Meshtastic® is a registered trademark of Meshtastic LLC.
I don't have relevant experience, but I'm looking to maybe join such a network, and being forced to buy specific hardware to join a network that is ran (/developed?) by a single LLC company is not very appealing for a network that is supposed to be resilient, off-grid, peer-to-peer, etc
There was no way to use or even just mount and migrate my existing storage (btrfs+LVM). LVM wasn't even installed, and when I tried to install it, I got an error saying that apt was disabled on the system, which means I was basically locked out of doing anything more than what they allow you to do on your own hardware.
It seems like it's technically open source, but having all the vendor lock-in features and lack of control of a proprietary solution
The only use case seems for it to be used as a black box appliance:
on a new system
with empty hard drives
only with ZFS
without having any control on your own system, except enabling samba etc and maybe installing the predefined Docker containers that they allow you from the web interface
I knew it is supposed to be only an appliance, but with how much people recommended it, I didn't thing it would be this closed of a system; I think I've read about people doing more things with even just their Synology hardware
Unfortunately I don't have a source, but I remember reading that some Debian packagers prefer using Arch, because doing the packaging there was easier for some reason 😅
Videos: I use HTTP Shortcuts to share the links to metube to download them so I can watch them later
Interesting sites, projects, etc: bookmark them using tags so I can easily find them later ("if" I ever need them); use floccus to sync them to linkwarden so they're also archived and searcheable
The rest are more or less leftovers from tasks I've probably stopped working on, so I try to close them (btw tree tabs help detect such groups of tabs)
(I still end up with many tabs, but at least it's not as bad as before I did the above 😅)
https://docs.libre.space/en/stable/operation/it-infrastructure-operations.html (archive)
Most notably:
We use gitlab.com in general, so we also use it for support tickets if that's what you mean 🤔