Had to up-vote because this is hilarious, thanks for sharing. As a critique of evidence based medicine they've clearly demonstrated their point, but it's obviously philosophical and the tradeoffs of practical medical interventions are no where near as clear cut as the case of falling from the sky without a parachute.
We have a known-safe vaccine that has been tested on millions of people. We have a known-deadly pandemic that has killed almost 4.5 million people.
While we are not QUITE as clearcut as parachutes, this is still an area where we can reasonably conclude that the vaccine is vastly safer than being unvaccinated.
Hmm, never thought of ∅ as a φ. (According to Wikipedia, the symbol was introduced in the 1930s by Weil, inspired by the letter Ø in the Danish and Norwegian alphabets.)
My daily driver is a thinkpad X200 that I librebooted myself.
I kid you not when I say that I derive immense pleasure from using it. Apart from a few (equally freedom respecting) devices I find, I literally never feel like I'm wanting for anything.
I can't recommend it enough. I don't have the words.
A distant friend in college was completely blind; an exceptional student that you'd catch studying with his screenreader. I asked him about his experience of it; he was using a mac, and they apparently have some pretty good integrated features for that type of use. He was getting some help with having some material transcribed so he could read it. I wanted to try something like it, but proprietary software is was the table.
To that end, I used Emacspeak for a couple of weeks earlier last year, to extend the range of my interface with the computer. It didn't stick, but I'm about to give it another go soon. Audio cues are absolutely superior to visual ones in some contexts, and emacspeak is definitely amazing.
Humans have mastered so many instruments with esoteric interface designs constrained by physics (I'm imagining mostly musical ones, but I'm sure there's others), but HCI innovation since the keyboard and mouse has been basically 0. Visual interfaces (from text) were a gigantic leap forward, but made tasks trivial from the command line hard (can't pipe a visual interface), and tasks impossible from the command line easy (drawing a freehand line on screen). Touchscreens were a great invention, but their real advantage is their versatility. They suck along so many other important measures like accuracy, tactile feedback, speed of inputs, multiple inputs etc (try typing with your eyes closed on your actual keyboard vs cellphone), yet plague all devices no matter their purpose (touchscreens for important hardware inside a vehicle/heavy-machine? Fuck you.)
Interface design (for the masses) is stagnant/worse with every year. "Best to stick to an impotent interface that's understood, easy to control and monetize."
All of these, and the author's original problem with their prosthetic are a symptom of the plague of spectacle over substance.
Cataclysm DDA is probably my favourite, but I don't like playing more than a single character at a time, and when I get too far into the endgame, I get bored with it, I usually just kill my character in some ludicrous/stupid way.
That's usually when I play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. I think the recent versions are all garbage (I guess there's some pitfalls to democratized game-development), I play strictly version 23.0.
Between these two games, all my of roguelike itches are scratched. I'd say CDDA is sort of like single-player only Dwarf Fortress, and DCSS is Rogue/Angband distilled.
FTL is an INCREDIBLE game, but I've given it up cause it's proprietary software.
I also played some Tales of Maj'Eyal, but imo it's too combat focused for what RP elements are in it.
I've beaten all of these games, and DCSS around 20 times.
I recommend them all thoroughly.
Honorable Mentions:
1) Shattered PD for mobile
2) Slay the Spire
The climb to mid game is definitely the part of the game that works the best, I have some plans for a more extensive endgame, but it's going to be a while.
I read this paper in 2017, I thought it might serve as an interesting starting point for discussion.
I'm young, and living in a place where being a software engineer pays only marginally better than other professions. I haven't managed to gather the land/capital that I think I need to cope with the changes I believe are coming.
For the last couple of days, I've been trying to get a static website up using hugo (emacs + ox-hugo), and I've been using tramp to ssh into the machine and do my work.
Tramp is literally magic. It just puts the right text into your buffer, where all the tools you use on your machine are just available by default. Even org exports and the like behave as expected, outputting the resultant file into the correct dir on the remote machine.
I've been using emacs as a <50IQ user for about a year now. I've yet to write a single line of Elisp (apart from use-package declarations). It's awesome!
These computers runs blobs in the firmware and are not fully open source.
I understand that modern users want modern performance, and that there is only a niche market for a librebooted computer (mostly due to performance), and as a company, it's systems76's responsibility to meet the market. But solutions exist, and if you are trying to market an open source computer, then give me an open source computer.
What I hate most is how the top comment is from Jeremy Soller, but they are literally using this forum as a marketing platform, only responding to the queries that potray their initiative as good, and ignoring the literal highest comment directly under their post.
This is so disingenuous, give me true libre laptop. (C-f tpearson-raptor on this post, they even offers a real solution from raptor to try and make this real).
I'm grossed out.
> but they are literally using this forum as a marketing platform
Almost every post on HN is for marketing. The net positive System76 is doing outweighs the negatives we have in today's software world. Be happy it's not BIOS-as-a-service that requires a subscription and is funded by a VC.
> that there is only a niche market for a librebooted computer (mostly due to performance), and as a company, it's systems76's responsibility to meet the market
I'm not able to update my post, so I'll leave my edit here:
EDIT:
If I wanted an ALMOST foss laptop, I would buy a laptop and coreboot it myself. The reason that it's exciting for a company to be doing something like this is because they have leverage in their decisions that I don't as a customer (custom cpu, custom components, choosing components with open firmware that already have good interoperability on the platform etc)
You might be ascribing quite a bit more leverage to System76 than they actually have here. No one is going to get Intel or AMD to allow open PSP/ME firmware -- AIUI even Google, with the truckloads of chips they buy, isn't able to influence that decision at either x86 vendor. Plus, System76 isn't the ODM -- that's Clevo from what I understand, so their influence on the two x86 CPU vendor(s) will be so far removed as to be quite insignificant IME.
Now, offering something else (ARM, RISC-V, POWER, anything but x86) as a truly open source alternative, then seeing if there was any reaction, might start to apply some small degree of leverage. Definitely there would be more potential opportunities to meaningfully discuss design goals with silicon vendors other than Intel and AMD. Who knows, maybe this could still happen...it'd be pretty easy / cheap to get some POWER desktop offerings lined up based on existing mainboards, and Clevo might be persuaded to do an ARM laptop design based on one of the Chromebook SoCs... ;)
With our baseline blob-free systems, we picked parts that were firmware-free, had open firmware, or could have open firmware written in the future. This is why we don't have onboard 100Gbe, Thunderbolt, or other interfaces that would require relinquishing control of the system to an external vendor. However, the resulting products are quite functional as both PCs and servers, with no real complaints or concerns over the I/O given the multiple PCIe Gen 4 slots available. My understanding is that very few ODMs do this, as they don't want to make that tradeoff, but this is how you apply leverage to silicon vendors long term. And you know what? It's working (outside the GPU sphere at least) -- Raptor isn't the only one pushing hard on these topics from the OpenPOWER side, and so far we've been able to get the silicon we need for our current product lines.
> You might be ascribing quite a bit more leverage to System76...
This may be true, but I think that selling corebooted computers is literally just a marketing gimmick. If a computer ('s motherboard) is corebootable, I can coreboot it myself, or lacking the technical skills, ebay have it done for ~$50 (maybe with video proof that the flashed rom is what is expected by showing hashes)
I don't expect ANYONE to be able to make intel or amd do anything about this situation, which is why I acknowledge your point:
> Now, offering something else (ARM, RISC-V, POWER, anything but x86) as a truly open source alternative...
I would love to see a POWER laptop, but I don't have the technical knowledge or money to help make this happen.
What I think is holding this back the most is that there are very few people with an ecosystem where they can compile all their own programs, meaning that 99% of computer users won't be able to make use of the general purpose computer underneath, because the software they NEED for their work absolutely will not run on it.
As a user however I think freedom is paramount, I'm about to finish up my CS undergrad, and about 3 years ago I became aware of the issues surrounding freedom in computing (literally never brought up in any of my classes), and I bought all the components needed and librebooted myself a thinkpad x200, which I've been faithfully using with parabola/debian ever since. Thankfully this as a platform was within my financial reach.
> With our baseline blob-free systems...
I laud the efforts of raptorpcs, but these systems are completely out of my reach. My previous sentence should show that I'm willing to compromise a lot to have freedom (no usb 3.0, I stopped playing games that have proprietary code, rebuilt my ecosystem so as to never have to move away from totally libre software etc)
I recognize how the fact that these machines exist means that a motivated company can choose to have a free system and that's great!
What I'm looking for as a normal user though is a LAPTOP that has these features, and that's why I get hype when someone claims to have one, but it's always a dissapointment, eg. purism.
I feel like I'm ranting, but it's honestly a little unclear what I'm responding to.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
:D