It would have been so much better if we had simply decided back in the ’90s that executable programs and HTML don’t belong together. The world would be so much better today.

We should decouple the publishing of papers from academic careers completely. Papers can't generate any reputation or money for the authors anymore. To achieve that, we must anonymize the authors.

All scientists get some (paid) time to write papers — if they want. What they write and if they publish it is not known to anybody. They are trusted to write something of value in that time.

Universities can come up with other ways of judging which professors they hire. Interviews. Test teachings. Or the writing of an non-public application essay, which describes their past research and discoveries.

That is the normal situation, which is the foundation of the progression of civilisation. But some people install incentive systems to sabotage this. They are sabotaging civilisation itself.

The effect after taking the Vitamin longer than 24 weeks is not significant anymore.

The effect after taking the Vitamin longer than 24 is not significant anymore.

The production of renewable electricity is skyrocketing everywhere, far better than predicted. And that's not because of clever politics, but because the technology is good and cheap.

This has only advantages for everyone. Except for a few fossil fuel investors whose profits are marginally reduced. We may even be able to limit global warming to three degrees, giving us a better window of opportunity to come up with solutions for large-scale carbon capture in the 22nd century.

What's more, photovoltaics is super interesting and great to tinker with—it's huge nerd fun.

Can't we all just be happy when we see headlines like this?

It quite smells like the hacker spirit of the 80s, mixed with a little spiritualism and anarchism. Very refreshing after so many other people are just disillusioned, worn out, angry, or frightened.

It looks like a quick vibe coded hack to implement a subset, tailored only for Beechat's own devices.

If someone would want to implement a full no_std Reticulum lib, they would need to start from scratch.

1. The library is written in Python. If you want to design phone apps, Linux server daemons in C, or embedded software (for example for the Lilygo T-Deck) this is a bad choice. Somehow doable (execpt for embedded), but no fun. A small lib with C API and C ABI would be better.

2. Most of the end user software has a horrible UI. But it gets better with software like the Android messenger Columba (https://github.com/torlando-tech/columba).

If we would solve 1., we would have more end user software.

Currently, there are 4 project who try to solve 1. by writing a Reticulum lib with a low-level language, everybody does it in their favorite language and on their own, of course: C++, Zig, Rust, Go

The Rust implementation from Beechat seems the most mature. But I did not see it used in the wild, outside of Beechat's own devices.

Meshtastic and Meshcore are mesh messengers, focusing on mesh text messages.

But it was a long death struggle, bleeding out drop by drop. Who remembers that people had to learn netiquette before getting into conversations? That is called civilisation.

The author of this post experienced the last remains oft that culture in the 00s.

I don't blame the horde of uneducated home users who came after the Eternal September. They were not stupid. We could have built a new culture together with them.

I blame the power of the profit. Big companies rolled in like bulldozers. Mindless machines, fueled by billions of dollars, rolling in the direction of the next ad revenue.

Relationships, civilization and culture are fragile. We must take good take of them. We should. but the bulldozers destroyed every structure they lived in in the Internet.

I don't want to whine. There is a learning: money and especially advertising is poison for social and cultural spaces. When we build the next space where culture can grow, let's make sure to keep the poison out by design.

We should make information about infrastructure public. There was a power outtage in Berlin, due to to an attack aginst a 'secret' cable bridge. If the map of cables would have been public, then the public may have had a chance to realize that having no backup cable is a bad idea for critical infrastructure.

When I become king of the United Continents, I will make a new rule: If you don't publish high-quality updates for your software for one year, it will become open source automatically.