> I believe thinking too much about kids is a trap. Basically you should have them if you can.
I cannot think of worse advice.
Congratulations to you that you found a life that works for you.
But the idea that people should just stop thinking and start procreating is absurd. Kids are a gigantic decision, the biggest one a person will ever make in their life. To not carefully consider that decision is utterly irresponsible, and to tell people to thoughtlessly have children without considering those consequences is equally so.
I don't think people really know what "the consequences" are. There's a lot of flak in the zeitgeist about how awful, expensive, and horrific kids are - but precious little about how wonderful it is. It's false advertising! There is nothing you do with your evening that is better than mine reading bedtime stories to my kids. And your morning cannot be better than mine waking up to the smiles and laughter of my kids, ready to play.
Bluntly, whether you meant to or not, this comment is full of coded bigotry. It invokes images of a foreign hoard, bang at the walls of the west, threatening to dilute or destroy "our" way of life.
1. The comment you're replying to explicitly acknowledges this fact in an aside.
2. It is not full of "coded bigotry." These are simple fact that almost everyone agrees on. India has explicitly made it a goal to reduce their fertility rate over the past few decades because of the problems of overpopulation. China's economy absolutely benefits from a high population. And yet I doubt you would characterize their humans rights record as stellar. It does not mean that Indians or Chinese people are in any way inferior to Westerners. And I highly doubt that the OP would agree with that either.
3. Even if it was, that isn't a critique of the comment's argument. It just means you find it distasteful. So what?
> Even if it was, that isn't a critique of the comment's argument.
Yes, it is.
The core of their comment is "oh noes western values will be lost!" (Or as they put it: "the global West has values worth preserving for the future").
My point is, no, they won't, because fertility is dropping everywhere. We're not that special. And that this purported fear is simply rooted in age-old racist tropes of a loss of cultural identity to scary foreigners, nothing more.
Baloney. The comment might rely on some outdated information, or if you want to be uncharitable, outdated stereotypes, but that isn't bigotry. There's no need to moralize.
Yes, just hacking nights and weekends. I've done my fair share of console reverse engineering, developing software for console devices (mostly GBA and NDS development, but a fair bit of SMS and Genesis reverse engineering), etc, and it's seriously some of the most fun I've had as a developer. But it takes an enormous amount of tenacity to push through the inevitable challenges.
This 1000X ! I'm currently working on emulating the Apple 2+ speaker better. It's been a 2-3 spare time hours a week for about a year now :-)
But the joy of working on a machine that's part of your life, without the need to please end users (which is cool too but sometimes induce pressure), well, that's basically coding like when I was a kid. Except that now I have a TON more knowledge to work with !
And, while working on disk emulation I had the pleasure ot discover those many copy protections that "prevented" me to get many games :-)
And the other thing I love about it is the communities are typically super open and collaborative. I remember back when I first got into GBA development, there was a ton of docs, tools, libraries, and other things that folks had put together and then shared with one another. It's a lot of very passionate people sharing some very niche interests, which can be incredibly fun (of course it can also be a drama filled nightmare but such is life with passionate people).
To this day I consider TONC (https://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/) to be the greatest software project I have ever worked with. It touches everything you need to develop games for the GBA. The documentation is awesome on many levels. The book is great. I am just thankful that I found it when I was younger as that introduced me to a whole lot of critical knowledge.
Agreed 1000%. The issue I have is that its a bit of a shame that we don't have current fun platforms apart maybe from embedded (current gpus are closed, cpu and memory are often not a challenge if you are just a little, unless you use it for huge projects). Or am I mussing something ?
how do you guys find the energy to hack nights and weekends? I do enjoy hobby programming but it takes me at least one week of vacation to detox from the work grind so I end up doing it only when I have extended vacation
> how do you guys find the energy to hack nights and weekends? I do enjoy hobby programming but it takes me at least one week of vacation to detox from the work grind so I end up doing it only when I have extended vacation
Namely passion, curiosity and probably not having much more other hobbies beside programming or hacking stuff around.
I recently went to try to improve a Linux kernel input device driver for a USB headphone: adding unit tests (whose execution is nearly instant). I have learned a ton of things about Linux development, C (I don't know C at all), input devices driver system (hid), the USB protocol and my device specifications.
I have never managed to boot it live to test with my actual device. That is despite spending probably despite spending probably 40 hours including a 10pm - 4am session on a Saturday night. But I had lot of fun doing it and I think that was the point.
Working with code day to day has almost fostered in me a sense of contempt for computers. In high school/college, I spent a lot of free time doing rom hacks, etc. I just can't now. Now my tech hobbies lay more around arcade repair/modding. Knowing what I know now, I wish I could muster up the energy to combine the two and work on projects similar to UMK3+ [0], but I just don't feel like sitting in front of a debugger all evening after coding all day at work :|
I guess in my case, I had to find a hobby that was not exactly like work, even if it was work-adjacent.
When I was more junior, or not doing programming as a full time job, I was more motivated to work on personal projects. Now I am more senior and programming/managing people full time, I can't get motivated to work on code-related projects in my downtime. It sucks :/
Same, I never code personally as much as when I'm in a management position. When coding during the day (which I like very much), I have less side projects or they tend to languish.
Honestly, it happens when I get some weird idea in my head that I can't stop thinking about, and a sort of mania takes over and gives me the energy and drive to work on it for hours on end.
Ditto, that kind of mania is a force to be reckoned with. On one hand you get insane productivity and momentum from it and on the other hand can cause you to momentarily neglect some responsibilities. I have a love/hate relationship with that side of mine.
That's about the only time I can do honest work programming. It makes me avoid doing programming tasks at work and try to find more writing-related stuff ...
It helps when the end goal is really well defined like a software emulator. Nearly everything that could slow you down is a known quantity. Conversely, the unknowns, like how to implement native hardware API X on non-native non-accelerated platform Y, are naturally where community emulators are weakest.
(not that you should take advice from random strangers on the internet, but) that sounds like classic ADHD hyperfocus to me. Giving a name to it might help in figuring out how to maximize its benefit.
I experience the same hyperfocus, but I don't have ADHD, I'm quite the opposite really.
My background is design and when I was a child I could easily 'get lost' in various forms of art etc for hours. I've met plenty people over the years that are the same, so I'd argue it might be something more aligned with some creative and analytical thought process, and a drive etc to understand/solve the problem at hand.
In terms of where to find the time, there are 24 hours in the day, at least 8 for working the 9-5.
I have spurts of this, occasionally I’ll spend a month of evenings/weekend time doing a project. It’s usually when work isn’t scratching the right sort of itch, so I scratch it elsewhere.
Personal projects are often embedded coding of some sort, though I spent some time poking at the PS3 firmware when that was first cracked too.
Spending months reversing and emulating a console… that takes dedication I don’t have though. I guess these guys are really itchy? Or it’s in a really hard to reach spot?
The key for me is that it has to be 100% fun. As soon as I start thinking about external recognition or trying to make money off of a personal project I lose motivation. Right now despite coding all day at work I still have the energy for coding on my own time on a NES emulator just because it's really fun.
in addition to what the others have said, I go home every day at 5 pm, no crunch or grind, no work calls outside of working hours. (luckily I live somewhere where that is guaranteed by law).
I think keeping a schedule that way has prevented me from every souring on programming in my free time.
This is a good place to start. Named "the ultimate game boy talk" dives into the CPU used, the instruction set(s) used by the CPU, how the video instruction sets work(ed) etc. The game boy from 1989 is a pretty simple device to start learning from. From there you can look at how various people emulated the system.
I second this. I also have a web background, and last year I started with this video, and the Gameboy is a great place to start with this sort of thing.
Start making a game, and you'll soon realise how the CPU works, and making a simple emulator will start to seem very possible.
"Maria Markstedter – a noted author, assembly language expert, and security researcher who's written extensively about Arm at the websites she operates – received a cease-and-desist demand from Arm's lawyers. Her offense? According to the letter she shared on Xitter, using the trademark "Arm" in the ___domain name arm-assembly.com that she used to promote a book she wrote about the ISA."
So, to be clear, I spent my time reverse engineering software rather than the hardware itself. That said, my observation is that a lot of hardware reverse engineering is software reverse engineering since the software helps you understand how the hardware works (the Asahi guys literally built a hypervisor so they could watch macOS interact with hardware).
And software reverse engineering is just grunt work. I'd start with a very well known existing hardware platform with a very simple CPU design--the GBA is actually a really nice platform as the ARM has a very sane ISA and it's all memory mapped I/O--and get a devkit and start experimenting by writing software to run in an emulator so you can get a feel for how the hardware works.
How is this significantly different from n-1 streams coming from a single peer/server connection? Isn't that simply what it takes to have a group video call?
No, this is like a restaurant giving you free food, and then when they change the recipe, you saying "WTF, you changed the food and now it's too salty, I hate it. Yeah, I could cook my own meal, but screw that, I demand you fix it!"
> but we badly need more options just as accessible- what other E2EE anonymous web-browser accessible tool is as available to the masses, that they can be convinced to use?
Just stand up your own instance and make it available to the anonymous public?
Jitsi itself isn't going away, just their anonymously-accessible instance.
By all accounts it's very easy to operate and requires very little in terms of resources. Hell, DO even has a droplet available.
Sure, but if your use case is that critical, you figure it out. That's what people have to do.
Is it inconvenient? Sure. Nobody is claiming it's not. But to say the option doesn't exist because the public instance doesn't allow it is a bit of a stretch.
Don't blame Jitsi. Blame the people abusing their previously wide open service. They're why we can't have nice things.
As for expecting them to run their own auth service instead of relying on a third party, that is a hell of a lot more complex than it looks. I can't blame them for not wanting to take that on.
If you really disagree that much, go ahead and fire up your own Jitsi service and open it up for anonymous use by the public. Let's see how long you can run it before you encounter the exact same problems.
Nobody is complaining about the login requirements per se, we are complaining about the fact that a supposedly "privacy friendly" and FOSS service chose to implement a login system using only Google, Facebook and GitHub accounts and god knows when they'll add better options.
ffs, they're OAuth providers. It's not like they're passing the video streams over to Google and Facebook so they can mine them for PII. All they'll learn is that a user with an identity on their platform is using Jitsi. So what?
Meanwhile, the vast majority of users around here will have a GitHub or Google account, and probably Facebook as well. This is hardly much of an inconvenience.
And if the complaint is that now Jitsi can tie back activity to a durable identity: yeah, that's the entire point. They're fighting abuse. At some level, to prevent that abuse, they need some form of trustworthy authentication. That, by definition, means to some extent piercing the veil of anonymity.
It's also why running their own auth doesn't fundamentally solve the problem, as anonymous users creating their own accounts on their platform is a minor speed bump to folks who would use the service for nefarious activity. For that auth to be worth anything, they'd have to engage in their own forms of user verification, and that'd be no more privacy protective, and frankly probably less so since you'd have to trust their security posture.
The fact is they simply cannot run the service in a way that's both perfectly anonymous to Jitsi themselves and simultaneously resistant to abuse (thereby protecting them from potential liability).
Look, I get it, I'm not a fan of the big tech providers, either. But the claim that this somehow crosses the privacy rubicon is a massive overreaction. And the software itself remains as Free and Open Source as it ever was.
I don't have a Google, Microsoft/Github and Facebook account. Do you know what they require to register one in terms of privacy? Their terms are horrendous. Jit.si must not care about privacy or they'd have other OAuth options from the start.
>Meanwhile, the vast majority of users around here will have a GitHub or Google account, and probably Facebook as well. This is hardly much of an inconvenience.
I don't think you know the typical user profile of Jit.si. If people are happy with Google, Microsoft and Facebook, then why use Jit.si instead of their own video call offering?
> I don't think you know the typical user profile of Jit.si. If people are happy with Google, Microsoft and Facebook, then why use Jit.si instead of their own video call offering?
This hits the nail on the head. It’s not just about having an account with those platforms or being unhappy with their video call services. It’s more about which platforms one chooses and for what reasons. Those who choose jit.si would be the ones who want to avoid these tracking and profiling platforms and/or are completely against those platforms.
I agree that we are not entitled to Jitsi (8x8?) providing us with a free service. But it is not as clear of a cut as saying "Run it yourself then!" to a bunch of spoilt brats.
At the height of the pandemic I started using Jitsi for all my conferencing needs and was very happy to find that 8x8 had a paid-for option so that I could support Jitsi development through a 8x8 Meet Pro subscription. However, in December 2022 8x8 decided to axe the service and replace it with their "X Series plans" that are an order of magnitude more expensive (can not even find quotes easily right now [1]) and clearly geared towards large-scale enterprise. "By moving to 8x8 X Series, you will have access to features
like business SMS/MMS, unlimited calling to select countries, fax, voicemail transcription, integrations with business applications, call queuing, analytics, and more.", sounds great right? But not really to someone wanting to have a fixed URL and make twelve or so video calls per week on a budget.
This effectively forced me to go and "freeload" on Jitsi again, despite being willing to pay. However, I refuse to go crawling to Facebook, Google, or Microsoft for an account as I worked long and hard to divorce them already. It is doubly frustrating when you know that 8x8 has an account infrastructure (I have used it) and they are deciding not to offer it to us.
So, yes, we are not entitled to their free labour. But it is not like their track record is perfect here. This could all have been done much smoother.
To end on a more positive note, I posted this story a few days ago [2] and here are some alternatives that were brought up:
Do seriously consider supporting organisation that provide these services so that we can continue to have nice things. I would also love for there to be a Jitsi alternative out there with a "leaner" technology stack and higher focus on security that (paranoid?) people such as myself would feel more comfortable hosting on our own.
> As for expecting them to run their own auth service instead of relying on a third party, that is a hell of a lot more complex than it looks. I can't blame them for not wanting to take that on.
Pretty much every web site that requires login allows local registration. This is the first web i heard about that requires third-party registration. That seems absurd to me.
>If you really disagree that much, go ahead and fire up your own Jitsi service and open it up for anonymous use by the public. Let's see how long you can run it before you encounter the exact same problems.
Wait. They want me to sign up to Google, Microsoft or Facebook (worst possible choice ever) and I shouldn't complain. Seriously?
> While a traditional social networking site will host all its content on servers owned by the parent company, the decentralized social media sites that make up the fediverse allow any individual or organization to host their own servers (referred to as an "instance").
It goes to show how your upbringing affects these things. Before Ruby I spent a lot of time in Smalltalk which really shaped the way I thought about language and program structure, APIs, etc. I'd also spent a metric ton of time writing Perl. Jumping into Ruby was like putting on a comfortable pair of shoes.
Meanwhile Python always felt like an ill-fitting suit to me. I just personally didn't connect with the language design.
I cannot think of worse advice.
Congratulations to you that you found a life that works for you.
But the idea that people should just stop thinking and start procreating is absurd. Kids are a gigantic decision, the biggest one a person will ever make in their life. To not carefully consider that decision is utterly irresponsible, and to tell people to thoughtlessly have children without considering those consequences is equally so.