It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.
> one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows
In the 80s/90s this wasn't feasible due to network latency and bandwidth, but it's pretty common now to do exactly this, with VNC and other remote desktop protocols.
The big obvious one is web-based tooling. Your information & settings are stored on a server and you use a web browser to view it via whatever device you're on. For more locally based workflows, we have networked filesystem protocols, automatic syncing between systems, that kind of thing. It's not a 1-1 equivalent of running a remote program and viewing it locally obviously, but it gets the same job done, in a much more useful & flexible manner than X forwarding did.
For example, the remote mail client usecase I was replying to is simply done with a webmail client today.
I don't really feel like web interfaces or syncing are really a substitute tbh, and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens, and the program itself doesn't need to be designed differently to work
> and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens
But this doesn't work on your phone, or on a Windows or macOS device, right? That's what I meant by flexible, X forwarding fits a pretty narrow set of usecases, while on the other hand keeping programs on the clients and data centrally located on a server allows for a whole lot more options for how to interface with that data.
(To be clear, nothing wrong with X forwarding! It's a cool tech and I'm glad you have a use for it! I'm just arguing that it's fine for Wayland to not try to support that kind of thing, because we've got other ways of working remotely now.)
X servers are available for phones, Windows, and macOS. X interfaces not designed for phones can be difficult to use on phones. But web interfaces not designed for phones can be difficult to use on phones.
There is not a web tool for every use. And web tools are not better for every use.
Phone I didn't know, but the sibling comment interests me. Windows, it works fine on local WSL but for remote yes you do have to have something like mobaxterm running. Not a big deal to me. Mac, I thought it just worked? It used to at least for me, but the last mac I owned was on snow leopard, so I wouldn't be surprised if they decided it wasn't the Mac Way to do things.
Most recently I used X forwarding to manage some LVM disks. I usually like using cli, but for me it's just easier to deal with disks with a GUI. Shy of setting up a full remote desktop, which I've had a lot of trouble with getting to work reliably, what's a better option here for an arbitrary disk program?
I think about how we could've paid for two brand new, gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants for the same amount of money as Elon Musk flushed down the toilet to try to shut down a website he didn't like. Extreme wealth is a mental illness, and wealth caps are healthcare.
He’s not “doing something with his insane wealth”. He’s wealthy because he’s doing something. The moment he announces he’s stepping back and going to be boring he loses half his wealth or more.
God does not come down from the heavens and bestow money that one spends on what one chooses. People value his companies because he’s there. TSLA will instantly collapse in valuation if he exits.
At this point I wish he had shut it down. Instead he turned into a mouthpiece for the right and duped his followers into thinking he’s “liberated” the site and made it into some bastion of free speech.
If you can guarantee two brand new gigawatt scale nuclear power plants for $44b then you can raise that money easily. The problem isn’t the access to money that prevents it. It’s that the the number of NRC approved reactors built since it came into existence is countable on your fingers.
I’m not even kidding. If you can pass the regulation, environmental, land permits, local opposition etc. you will be a hundred millionaire maybe a billionaire.
This is just patently false. There are many companies and workers that have the knowledge required to pass NRC approvals. The NRC are not some NIMBY gatekeepers for the nuclear industry they do care about safety and the have a vested interest in getting reactors approved and under construction
There are just not that many people building nuclear reactors because it's very a expensive process and other investment vehicles are way more ludicrous
Also bonus addendum I just realized, the NRC has a plain writing plan
"We will also use plain writing for all notices that inform you of meetings and significant actions. We will even use plain writing for specialized technical publications, but we will consider the needs and subject matter expertise of our intended audience. In addition, we will use plain writing to develop licenses, license amendments, and guidance documents. Such documents are primarily intended for our licensees, who are technically proficient in nuclear matters. Nonetheless, we believe that these documents must be clear, concise, and well-organized because they explain how to comply with NRC requirements. In cases where these documents must necessarily be written in considerable technical detail, we will develop a brief executive summary to make the content accessible and easy for you to understand."
So, if you can read and understand plain English how about you go make yourself a couple billion dollars.
I fail to see how British sarcasm qualifies as a personal attack. Specifically in reference to plain English that is the specification of the NRC as cited
I'm a fan of British wit, but these things don't necessarily translate across contexts. On a broad and shallow internet forum like HN, a line like "if you can read and understand plain English how about you go make yourself a couple billion dollars" pattern-matches to boxed wine sarcasm, not ripping port sarcasm.
I hate WFH, personally. My company is actually closing the office I work out of due to lack of use, so I'm in the opposite scenario from "forced-RTO", I'm being moved to "forced-WFH." It's the right call objectively, the office is genuinely very empty, but I'm a bit annoyed about it. I'm actually going to be paying to rent a desk out of a coworking facility so I don't have to WFH. If this situation sucks, there's a real chance I'll be changing jobs later this year because of this.
> If you’re running a business that relies on external cash (VCs, loans/bonds, etc) to keep things going things will get very ugly.
Honestly thrilled to hear it. The AI bubble needs to burst so we can find out what's actually useful, start requiring real business models again, and get rid of all the noise and waste.
The problem is all these over-leveraged sectors will drag everybody else. And guess who will be bailed out? Heads they win, tails everybody but them loses.
> The problem is all these over-leveraged sectors will drag everybody else
Well, the good news is that's what good public policy is for, to blunt the impact of the damage with strong anti-trust enforcement and careful cash injections to weak-but-critical areas of the economy to help stabilize in rough times.
Now, hang on for just one moment while I crawl out from under this rock and take a look at who we have entrusted to set our public policy.
The problem is, what assets remain of a company that doesn't own anything material? OpenAI, Anthropic - they don't own datacenters that could be auctioned off. All they own is training data and trained weights, and both are relatively worthless.
The game that all the AI companies are playing is to be the last dog standing at all costs, because that kind of dominance is a money printer.
> but if AI is just as good, doesn't that just mean more good PRs?
If you believe the outputs of LLMs are derivative products of the materials the LLMs were trained on (which is a position I lean towards myself, but I also understand the viewpoint of those who disagree), then no, that's not a good thing, because it would be a license violation to accept those derived products without following the original material's license terms, such as attribution and copyleft terms. You are now party to violating the original materials' copyright by accepting AI generated code. That's ethically dubious, even if those original authors may have a hard time bringing a court case against you.
> In that case a lot of proprietary software is in breach of copyleft licences. Its probably by far the commonest breach.
Sure, but this doesn't really seem relevant to the conversation. Someone else violating software license terms doesn't justify me (or Debian, in the case of TFA) doing so.
> Is it always ethically dubious to breach a law?
I'm not really concerned with the law, here. I think it is ethically dubious to use someone else's work without compensating them in the manner they declared. Copyright law happens to be the method we've used for a couple hundred years to standardize the discussion about that compensation, and sometimes enforce it. Breaching the law doesn't really enter into the conversation, except as a way our society agrees to hold everyone to a minimum ethical standard.
> I'm not really concerned with the law, here. I think it is ethically dubious to use someone else's work without compensating them in the manner they declared.
OK, that is reasonable. I do not think copyright is a good mechanism though, and I think the need to compensate depends on multiple factors depending on what you use a work for and under what circumstances.
Hmm. I understand that perspective, but I'm not sure I agree. It does seem to matter over a relatively short & realistic time scale. According to the Wikipedia page, there have been 27 seconds added since 1972, which is only 44 years ago. At that rate, that's about 1 minute per 100 years. We have many systems that have existed for several centuries and I think it's not unreasonable to start making plans for systems that may exist for millennia, where you're starting to talk about a 10+ minute offset at the current rate.
But I do think there is a valid argument that the infrequency of these events cause more issues than maybe one large adjustment 500 years from now would cause. Not sure where I land on this one.
I ran into this trying to view the meridian line at the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels in Rome.
I was told the sun would show up on the calendar in the floor at noon. As noon approached, I saw nothing. Then I figured it probably needed to be solar noon, so had to look that up and wait around until that time. Today, that will be 12:20pm.
Nothing would have broken had I missed this, and nothing of critical importance is running on a solar clock (I don’t think), but it still led to a discrepancy in what was expected and where I needed to be when, based on drift from solar noon.
The problem is that Earth's rotation isn't consistently faster. Some years leap seconds need to be added, some years they need to be removed. Would be far better to leave them alone, let them average out, and as the GP said let the people who care about this add the offset they need.
> Some years leap seconds need to be added, some years they need to be removed.
Is that true? Per Wikipedia:
> Since [1972], 27 leap seconds have been added to UTC, with the most recent occurring on December 31, 2016. All have so far been positive leap seconds, adding a second to a UTC day; while a negative leap second is theoretically possible, it has not yet occurred.
Either way, it's due in part to Earth's rotation slowing down, so the average drift would still be non-zero.
We've not had to apply negative leap seconds yet since leap seconds were introduced in 1972, but that wasn't the point.
The time period of the Earth fluctuates a lot [0] and actually in 2020 it was less than 24 hours, but not a large enough change to warrant a negative leap second. If you go back to the 1940s, we would had needed negative leap seconds if we had leap seconds at all then, and going back 150 years we would have needed multiple negative leap seconds every year for several consecutive years.
What we can say is that on average, it is close enough to 24 hours and the average over hundreds of years is even closer to 24 hours that it's not worth adding these extra seconds as you'd then need to remove them again later on.
You make a good argument for the opposite of your conclusion. If you’re planning a system that’s supposed to last for millennia, that system shouldn’t depend on the fiat of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.
Let's just do leap minutes. If humanity survives long enough to witness a leap minute without destroying ourselves then that's ample compensation for the minor inconvenience.
I have a direct mailto: link to my email address in the footer of my website. Zero obfuscation. I don't get any unusually large volume of spam. Maybe Fastmail's filters are that good, or maybe scraping emails off the web just isn't worth the spammers' time anymore and they've all moved on to posting thirst traps on Instagram. I dunno. Hasn't been a problem either way.
I've had two or three articles I've written on my blog hit the HN front page, and each time I get one or two emails from some random person about it. It's great. A little connection that some human out there read a thing I wrote and it meant enough to them to write something back to me. I put my email on my stuff because I'm happy for people to use it :)
It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.
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