I guess, what I’d like to hear from you all is a way to jump back in as quickly as possible in such a way that it may be a career.
You might check job listings in your region/country to figure out what languages and technology stacks are in high demand, as where you are seems to matter a lot.
I use xmpp. It happens to be a great fit for a private family messaging service. Good interoperability between modern clients. I get that “nobody uses it” is hyperbole, but the internet is a big place and there is room for services without mass market appeal to thrive.
I don’t think it was the point of your post necessarily, but I did want to mention a couple of things that might make the Linux switch a little easier - if not for you, anybody else reading and agreeing.
First, distrobox (https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox) is a nifty frontend for podman/docker that I think makes it a little more usable/accessible without having a PhD in devops. Basically helper scripts that create a series of simple CLI commands that let you launch a new environment, enter the new (or old) environment, do stuff in the environment, exit the environment. Keeps your core system’s python separated from your development environment(s). Sacrifices the isolation qualities of containers in favor of usability, so probably ok for dev work on a desktop and not so much for production on a server.
Also, there are GUI applications for point and click management of distrobox - I use BoxBuddy, which is available as a Flatpak on Flathub, so again no interference with the core system provided it can run podman and flatpak.
Second, I know the php dev world figured out ways to abstract some docker complexity away with stuff like ddev (https://github.com/ddev/ddev) and lando (https://github.com/lando/lando). I wonder whether other languages have or will build that dev environment in a box abstraction on Docker/Podman/whatever.
This is not about quality and costs
It is about quality and cost for the majority of purchasers that worry about meeting a budget. Virtually anybody making purchase decisions on some sort of surveillance system will grapple with that issue. My point is that we all tend to want the best performance for the least cost, and breaking that habit for the less tangible purposes of domestic security or human rights somewhere else is why we will continue to see these articles about Hikvision/Dahua cameras getting deployed at times and in places they probably shouldn’t.
Dahua and Hikvision are deployed everywhere because they are high quality and low cost. It poses an interesting dilemma (extending beyond cameras) for the U.S. and allies trying to break dependence on vendors under partial ownership and alleged control of the government in China. Should we subsidize domestic vendors to tilt the scale? Simply banning the high quality low cost option doesn’t seem to accomplish much.
Fair, I presume you are correct in how it will be applied. That said, given that Reddit has only ever burned cash, there has to be some connection to gravity…I think?
Probably a good thing, imo. Better than selling data for AI farming and blitzing the site with ads. Hopefully it isn’t the start of the entirety of Reddit going behind a subscription wall. Curating private digital communities is a good option.
I use Google files in an effort to minimize the amount of 3rd party software on my phone - particularly when it comes to file access.
Sad news. Here is a link to an impact study (PDF), which describes many (all?) of the projects that benefited from funding. But a few you may recognize include Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon:
Great article. One thing that stood out to me was Texas having the highest state limit for noise level at 85 decibels. That seems insane to me.
The average person isn’t going to delve into the nuance of open source project structure. If I wanted to support the jellyfin ecosystem, I would probably expect that donating to the jellyfin project is sufficient.
It is incredible looking back to 2005 and realizing that the world has 1.5 billion MORE people today and the number of internet users grew by ~5.5 billion. Doesn’t really explain Google’s changes - still remarkable how different the internet was that Google built its search platform around.
Discourse is offering an AP plugin - not sure what it does: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-activity-pub
Random thoughts…
Odd to talk about timing without referencing the election year.
Protecting the solar industry with tariffs in 2012 was probably too late. The US and Europe panel industries were decimated and effectively ceded the market to China.
China bankrupted the only US supplier of rare earth metals in the early 2010s (Molycorp).
There is reporting from April that Chinese EV are piling up in European ports and not being moved to dealers.
opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon
I switched. Not happy about it and will continue to consider it a factor in my next, but that will be years from now and I’m sure the list will be even smaller.
I always find responses like this funny. You know how old you are, but (mostly) nobody reading the comment does. You could be anywhere from 11 to 50!
Amazon is moving away from Android. This move isn’t exactly surprising. It is disappointing though, imo. From my limited testing, I was able to side load an xmpp app on Android and message, voice call, video call seamlessly. In theory, the ability for developers of some types of apps to target Android and reach Windows without writing a touch of Windows-specific or accommodating code was a huge opportunity for open source developers to effortlessly reach cross-platform audiences.
There isn’t off the shelf software to run things like Reddit, and the work to make that happen is pretty staggering. That isn’t to say there isn’t frivolous spending there - I have no idea.
Lemmy has been developed since 2019 and the software crumbled when network-wide users spiked into the ~75,000-ish monthly range when some vocal Reddit users sought greener pastures over the app/api issue last year. A lot of talented new developers contributed scalability fixes that were obvious to them (but not obvious to the main devs), and we now have the largest Lemmy server handling ~10,000 monthly users without crashing. The work that has gone into making Lemmy, an open-source Reddit alternative written in Rust (vroom vroom) handle the waning spike of Reddit users fleeing, was substantial. Look through the lemmy github issues discussions page and merged closed contributions/discussions for that journey. Those people were largely contributing time and expertise for nothing in return. Imagine paying a market rate to all of the people who contributed substantial time into the betterment of Lemmy. By the way, Reddit was open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Takeaways so far: this is a hard problem, even today with faster software and hardware - and Lemmy needed a diverse set of contributors to get its largest server stable at 10k monthly and ~50k across the network.
Reddit had 46,000,000 monthly active users in 2012, ~7 years after launch. Reddit has 330,000,000 monthly active users today. My guess is that Reddit employs a lot of smart software engineers that are needed to contribute solutions that allow the site to serve an ever-growing user count without major outages with new features rolled in. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Reddit users will never pay a thing to Reddit and it isn’t a good platform to deliver advertising through.
My point: It is easy to gloss over the staggering amount of work, talent, and skill that goes into supporting a site that operates at this scale. Reddit is around the 10th largest site in the US (8th if you exclude search engines) and 12th globally excluding search engines.
Other couple ideas to consider if job ambitions aren’t a major thought:
Nim-lang / Mummy. Neat in being high level like python but compiled and can do low level stuff. Small ecosystem but good interoperability with c and Python. Can also compile to js. Target embedded to web, very flexible.
Also php. Some people say modern php looks more like java. Either way, lots faster than it used to be. Wildly productive language for web stuff. Laravel or Symfony frameworks.