(I'm reminded of this every time a client want "WhatsApp support" in their (commercial) app, so they can "communicate with customers".)

But equally every user will have a different subset of apps they want notifications for.

For example shift workers need to know when they've been allocated a shift. Or when a shift has opened up (because someone scheduled failed to arrive etc.) One group of users consider this really important, another group of users treat it as spam.

But, per the rule above, unfortunately "useful notifications" can easily be subverted by marketing notifications. Yes I want to know my delivery driver is outside, no I don't want to know that you're running a special this week.

Unfortunately there's no way to solve this problem technically. Bad actors can (and definitely do) behave badly. But ultimately the system should work for "good citizens". In other words, the user should ultimately determine what they want to see of not. And if an app has "notifications on or off" as the only option then the user should ultimately determine that setting. Not Google. Not Apple.

Building society around the lowest-common-denominator just ends up sucking for everyone. We should actively promote good behavior, while allowing bad behavior to be punished. Not just banning everything "because it might be bad".

Many meetings have 0% content "that applies to you". But that doesn't stop you being "added to meetings".

>> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.

You are thinking of productivity as "code written". And certainly that part of your job will get more productive.

But that is just something you do when you're not in meetings. (or when you're in a meeting, but the camera is off, and you're not really listening). Your real job is to attend meetings. And unfortunately AI can't help with that (yet).

(I'm not even being sarcastic. Most programmers don't realize that they have been hired to have meetings.)

What it can do is free you up from the pesky code-writing part of your job, freeing you up to attend even more meetings. And this does indeed make management happy because (seriously now) their job is having meetings, and you being "unavailable" (because you know, you want to program) was hindering them in the first place.

So no, you can't have Friday off, but now that you mention it, let's set aside that time for "team building" exercises...

Lucky you :). And I hope you stay lucky! Alas your experience is not universal.

Yes, TSA is a big part of the problem. It's less "how long it took" and more "how long can it take". I've personally experienced those days where "TSA decided to go slow" and a couple hours disappears. The 5 minute days just make that worse.

Yes, the airport matters. If you're at some small regional it's no big deal. JFK or Atlanta etc is another thing entirely.

Yes, domestic or international matters. Yes, flying business class makes it faster. Yes signing up for "special status" makes things faster.

But airports are typically some drive away from city center (both ends, in traffic). Security and immigration both take time (often significant time.) Door to door time is easily 6 hours more than flight time.

The vast bulk of the internet is child neutral. For example my church a web site, the bakery down the road has one, the local pro sport team has one. They're not designed "for kids", but kids are welcome.

Does StackOverflow need to register a .kids domain just so children might get answers to programing questions?

If my-bakery.co.uk and my-bakery.co.au both want to be visible to 16yo there needs to be at least kids.uk and kids.au.

Does OpenSSL.org or OpenSSL.com get to be OpenSSL.kids?

Sorry but duplicating the entire neutral internet domain space with yet another tld isn't a helpful approach.

Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor.

Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skills. Most people didn't need their standard of quality (but customers had no choice.)

Their name is well known today because we never stopped replacing people with machines. Every industry as been "optimized" over and over again since the Luddite times.

AI is the first threat to the Artisans of today (ie programmers). We are just the most recent in a long history of Luddites.

In every change of this nature, some move on embracing the change, others do not. Some will find other jobs, possibly new jobs, others won't. Carriage drivers became Chauffeurs, some grooms became mechanics.

So sure, I'm a Luddite - I don't want to see my skills become cheap - but I'm also pragmatic. The change is here. I'd rather adapt than die.

SpaceX is clearly a leader in the field and (including StarLink) has some real profit centers. Mars is a distraction, but perhaps a useful way to build out tech that may have usefulness elsewhere.

It comes bundled with xAI. And that's much more of a gamble. The market can probably bear more than 2 (not Open Source) eventual suppliers, but history suggests 2 winners and a bunch of very small 3rd places.

Is xAI in the top 3? Doesn't feel like it at the moment. But clearly this will suck resources away from SpaceX in the short term.

So this one is riskier, but with potentially more upside.

Sure, you might think of it as "people with citizenship of another nation."

But I suspect it's more along the lines of "people who don't look like me."

White Afrikaaners are welcome (we'll even invent persecution and call them refugees), but folk from elsewhere (ie actual refugees), um, less welcome.

The trope about "culture assimilation" also comes up. It's OK for Irish and Italian immigrants to keep their culture, adding to the melting pot, but Mexicans and Africans less so

And sure, lots of people are friendly to "the immigrant they know" while at the same time being very against "immigration". One need look no further than the last few elections to see this in action.

Spoken like someone who charges by the hour.... you are incentivised to do things the slowest possible way...

Now, of course, slow might be better, or fast might be better, but you frame fast as "cheating" not as "inferior"... which is ... interesting..

If all you want is to offer "here's some code, knock yourself out" then a license like MIT and BSD is generally more useful to more people.

If the code is indeed Open Source, with an OSS license, then you can use it as-is, or just learn from it and write-your-own. You might even fold it as-is into your app. Keep the code, but remove the dependence.

Free Software on the other hand is a different animal. The GPL et al is viral. Doing any of the above with GPL software has consequences. Even learning and rewriting is risky- the rewrite better be more than just variable name changes.

If you're old school, and you want to share on a "do what you like, I'm not turning this into my day job" basis, where you want folk to actually benefit, yhen I recommend an OSS license over a Free license.

On the other hand if your target audience are other Free developers, then a Free license makes complete sense. And if you plan to commercialize your project down the road an aggressive Free license (like say AGPL) is a good choice.

Ultimately your choice of license should match your goals.

Contrast to the moon. The prestige was great, the investment enormous. The return was more-or-less zero. There was a reason Apollo 18 was canceled, and we stopped going.

(Current efforts are in no rush, and are mostly about prestige.)

The value of a colony on Mars is precisely zero. We might visit a couple times. But colonize? Nope.

For starters it's too cold, too dry, atmosphere is too thin, and there's no reasonably sustainable power source.

But all of that is irrelevant because there's no magnetic field. So radiation. So unlivable.

There's also no point in a colony there. If life ends on earth it ends on Mars. There are no materials there we want. It offers exactly nothing we can't do better here, for much less money.

Will we land on Mars? Sure. There's always the goal of being first. But live there? No. Unsupported by earth? Very much no.

Firstly, businesses can do whatever they like. There are no terms to agree to. They simply function in whatever way they "consider to be valid". If a customer disagrees with what is valid or not, hey, that's what courts are for. And given there's no agreement between business and customer, who's to say who is right?

The business can equally terminate you as a customer, with no notice, for no reason, at any time. They can delete all your data. They can spam your contact list. (Ok, they do all that already, but you know what I mean.)

Secondly, customers can do whatever they like. They payed their $9.95. They can do whatever they like. Sure, sharing logins is fine (if they "consider that valid".) They can abuse the system, scrape data out and resell it, anything goes. And of course the only recourse is back to the courts. Which is ultimately no recourse at all.

Even your analogy to parking breaks down. Should you have to prove legal residency to park? Should I be able to park a car on the street (unmoved) for a year? Should I be allowed to park next to a fire-hydrant? Can I park it in the middle of the road? Can my neighbor "reserve" his parking space using an orange cone? Clearly there's a lot more to parking a car than "I should be able to park".

T&C might not be fun, and you may not agree with them (hint: if you don't, then don't use the service) but they at least set out the business behavior that you can expect. Read them, don't read them, that's up to you. But don't complain that the fault is on them when they do something that are in the T&Cs.

And yes, I get they're one sided. customers never bother to submit their own T&C's so they're not fairly represented. Again, that's on you for using that service.

But a small system is still going to bring a return and is cheap to install. And it'll give you a real way to understand the concept and to experiment.

I started with a 660w small system, and it gave me lots of insight for planning my current system.

I put that in a spreadsheet which calculates money saved. (Which is reasonably complex because of pricing tiers although fortunately I don't have to deal with daily pricing changes.)

Then some math returns the return on investment per month and per year.

Its also trivial to turn your crypto into yuan and your yuan into $. So I'm not sure such a ban would be even remotely effective.

Where I stay solar is really common (probably > 1 in 10 has it.) Plus the Financials make it easy (if you have the roof and capital.) And here no-one really cares if you're green or not.

The fact that it is green is a bonus. (Which i think most people don't care about.)

I guess you can read virtue-signalling into anything you like, especially if it matters to you personally. I just don't think it comes into play here.

Honestly, I don't agree with you though. Yes, there are ways for folk to signal virtue, and that happens, but I don't think solar power is one of those. Frankly the utility, and financial, returns are just too high.

Obviously ymmv with regard to returns, but I'm getting 16% on capital invested (a number that keeps climbing as electricity costs rise.) That's decent enough that virtue-signalling becomes a meaningless goal. I guess folk might _like_ that they're not burning fossils to get electricity (I do) but the financials dwarf that.