kevinflo

You can easily do this today, just start a mastodon instance and restrict the signups. I run a > 100 user instance on just a $10 digital ocean VPS. I'm seeing small tight-knit community instances popping up all over the place. You can tweak the settings or or even add customizations from forks that cater more to a siloed instance.

I'm shocked by the comments of those here that don't see why something like this must exist and don't see that there is tremendous financial upside for whoever cracks this. Employee equity can generate unbelievable amounts of wealth as well as unbelievable tax consequences/missed opportunities. The deck is mostly stacked against employees, and you're on your own navigating treacherous waters with little information. A strong company in this space can protect employees and ultimately advocate for them and improve the landscape. Or it can augment the deck being stacked in favor of the investors etc. depending on how things shake out for the winners in this space.

The hon is pretty good, but the way the back tilts isn't super comfortable to me, and also the arm rests are a very hard plastic. I put padding on the top of the arms, but then the height of the padding combined with the fact that you can't lower the arm rests quite enough means that they sit a bit too high for me.

Nitpicking, and for the price it's not bad

I 100% agree with the author on this. VR in its current iteration is clearly not suitable for this in any way, but down the line the fundamentals of VR align perfectly with some of the pain points of remote collaboration. With all current collaboration tools the parties are still bridging the gap of working in different places. In VR, everyone is inhabiting the same virtual space. It's just completely different. Practically, all things switch from n representations to 1 representation. Psychologically we register the interactions completely differently because the parties are saying things not in their room with a video displaying them in your room. They're saying things next to you, to the person sitting across from you, while turning and walking away. The fidelity of interactions (and in turn the interpersonal bonds and memories you form) is just an order of magnitude higher.

If hardware is good enough for this to be a practicality, we may be working in AR 100% of the time anyways, and depending on if you want to be remotely present with others, you just swap out your real environment for a shared virtual one. In that dream scenario, the glasses or whatever are high enough res anyways you'd rather use them to make virtual dynamic user interfaces than stare at a static 2d monitor.

It's going to be a long, long, long time before any of this happens but I'm guessing these are the kind of far-off things the author was implying.

Facebook deemphasizing clickbait content reliably hurts their metrics. YouTube deemphasizing extremist videos reliably hurts their metrics. This metrics-driven product development was totally understandable (and I even tried to do it) up until a few years ago when we simply got too good at it and it ripped the world apart precisely along the seams where the human brain has bugs that cause these things to increase metrics.

Email prefill replies are a silly and relatively harmless example to make this case, but the point is every last button on every product we use is caked in this and we're realizing too late that metrics identifying what humans want often does not coincide with what humans want being good.

People may not say no as often, but one no can be very powerful. It's harder to say no. Billions of people nudged towards saying yes is not nothing.

I was just as entrenched but am about a year into a gradual transition. Signed up with another email provider with an address @ a domain I own, transferred my entire mail history, forwarded all incoming gmail emails to new provider, updated all public facing contact @s to new address, switched mostly to open source email clients, all new accounts are made @ the new address, old ones stay @ the old one. It's not perfect and it's not trivial but it's 100% worth it.

I'm a layman, but to my knowledge navigating a digital environment and a real one are the same minus some steps of the process. A self-driving car recreates a digital reality via sensors with as little delay and fidelity loss as possible, then navigates a digital car within that rapidly constructed virtual reality. It then signals back to the real car to navigate the real car exactly how it would navigate the digital one given its immediate digital environment. Since many of the hard problems lie with the navigation in the digital space, removing the sensors-to-digital part of it by training with video games still nets a lot of valuable learnings that can be brought right back into real-world applications. Also, learning in a fully digital environment allows this part of the learning to be done without the spatial/time constraints of reality.

This (or something like it) is always the top thread. I wish this was something the frontend community cheered about, not lamented. Those 200MB of node modules are developers ad-hoc cobbling together an alternative to xcode and android studio, except entirely modular and where we have complete control. Serious application development for the open web is hamstrung by limitations and definitely in an awkward growth phase, but it's marching towards a possible future of competing with native mobile apps and the two companies to which they're entirely beholden. To me, 200MB of tooling is not a sign of cruft, but of steady and imperfect progress.

Edit: and for the record, xcode is a 13.8GB install

I tried to do the same during a bout of extended international travel. I popped out the fi sim once to try a super cheap local unlimited data sim (some countries are great for this), only to find out afterwards that it killed the fi pairing, and that re-pairing is not possible while abroad (tried VPNs etc., no dice). Your only method to get paired again is to either fly to the states (Hawaii), or to ship the phone to someone in the states and have them ship it back. Ended up having to go months without my main cell service, although months later it did somehow pair again while I was in Japan.

Keep in mind that you'd be just as out of luck if you wanted to switch phones while traveling, like if your primary was lost or stolen. For that reason, I canceled fi immediately upon returning to the states and strongly caution anyone I know against fi for extended travel.