As another Tamilian, thank you for making this! I'm fluent in spoken Tamil from my parents and I've learned to read and write at a basic level, but I'd never formally learned the language.
It's a translation map of Indian languages - type in a word, see the translations across 22 languages.
I was inspired by this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152587), and wanted to make something similar for India (which has similar linguistic diversity). Translations are fetched with Google Translate, but I also display 'romanizations' (transliterated into Latin script), which are generated with a local ML model.
Now that it's done, I've mostly been working on a little Markdown-to-HTML parser in Haskell.
A very well-written piece. The section on funding open source is as relevant as it's ever been, and I don't think we've learnt much since last year.
As the proportion of younger engineers contributing to open-source decreases (a reasonable choice, given the state of the economy), I see only two future possibilities:
1. Big corporations take ownership of key open-source libraries in an effort to continue their development.
2. Said key open-source libraries die, and corporations develop proprietary replacements for their own use. The open source scene remains alive, but with a much smaller influence.
Unfortunately I have no clue how to get a company to put money into the open source we use. Not just my current company, but any company. I've sometimes been able to get permission to contribute something I build on company time, but often what I really want is someone on the project to spend a year or two maintaining it. Do the boring effort of creating a release. Write that complex feature everyone (including me) wants.
In decades past companies you to pay for my license for Visual Studio (I think of a MSDN subscription), clear case, a dozen different issue/work trackers. However as soon as an open source alternative is used I don't know how to get the money that would have been spent to them.
Come to think of it I'm maintainer of a couple open source projects that I don't use anymore and I don't normally bother even looking at the project either. Either someone needs to pay me to continue maintaining it (remember I don't find them useful myself so I'm not doing it to scratch an itch), or someone needs to take them over from me - but given xz attacks I'm no longer sure how to hand maintenance over.
In my prior career I talked to many companies about open source usage. If you tell them they are running an unsupported database or operating system in production, they will often see the value of buying support. But it is much harder to get them to pay for non-production stuff, especially development tools. And even if you find an enlightened manager, getting budget to pay a maintainer for a project is very difficult to even explain.
“We’re paying for contract development? But it’s not one of our products and we’ll have no rights to the software? They’ll fix all the bugs we find, right? Right?” This a hard conversation at most companies, even tech companies.
"They’ll fix all the bugs we find, right?" -- that sounds to me like a reasonable requirement on the maintainer, if they are going to be paid a non negligible amount.
At companies where I've worked, all of the money we've put into open source has been in contracting the developer(s) to add a feature we needed to the upstream version. Of course, this means that we didn't really fund ongoing maintenance on anything we used that had all the features we needed.
Most open source projects don't really need an income stream. It only becomes an issue when the project is large enough that there is desire for someone to work on it half time or more. Smaller projects can still be done as a hobbyist thing. (the project I "maintain" only needs a few hours of my time per year, but since I no longer use it I can't be bothered - there is a problem for those who still use it). Of course it is hard to say - curl seems like it should be a small project but in fact it is large enough to support someone full time.
Sadly, as OS dev, I see third way: development behind closed doors.
With AI and CV reference hunting, number of contributions is higher than ever. Open-source projects are basically spammed, with low quality contributions.
Public page is just a liability. I am considering to close public bugzilla, git repo and discussions. I would just take bug reports and patches from very small circle of customers and power users. Everything except release source tarball, and short changelog would be private!
Open-source means you get a source code, not free customer and dev support!
My company, Distrust, exists to produce, support, and fund our open source security tools.
So far our core full time team of 3 gets to spend about half our time consulting/auditing and half our time contributing to our open projects that most of our clients use and depend on.
The key is for companies to have visibility into the current funding status of the software they depend on, and relationships with maintainers, so they can offer to fund features or fixes they need instead of being blocked.
I think big corporations will take ownership - well not directly but via paying to foundations and it already is the case.
Second thing is there are bunch of things corporations need to use but don't want to develop on their own like SSH.
There is already too much internal tooling inside of big corporations that is rotting there and a lot of times it would be much better if they give it out to a foundation - like Apache foundation where projects go to die or limp through.
Seems like the author kind of missed (or buried) the point when summarising the "global fibre-based broadband network" prediction as simply "(the internet)"..
I was using the internet in 1995 - and pretty sure at least part of that connection use was over fibre, so I don't imagine someone trying to get away with predicting that.
But the path to my house was still a phone line - so I assume the original prediction was more about that fibre eventually running to our houses - certainly something many of us were looking forward to back then particularly any time someone in the house picked up a phone and killed our connection :)
(EDIT: have added an amendment in reply to this comment after reading some of the original PDF)
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As for high contrast digital paper, that was also already part of the collective wishlist
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age [1] came out in 1995 and featured an e-book with an embedded AI and nanotech based display surface
BUT e-ink was first investigated at Xerox PARC in the 70's and was already under development by 1995 at MIT's media lab (commercialised in 1997 but hardly as bug a leap as it sounds) [^2]
Ah, just saw that the author has included the original text as PDF so don't have to speculate about original intent after all
Does seem to mostly be "here are some people in touch with current developments happening in the world thinking about their next phase" more than full-blown futurism - but still super interesting to read (if only to see the vestiges of tech optimism pre-dotcom-enshittification)
A few things which leap out that weren't included in the original post:
- "everything will be smart - that is, responsive to its external or internal environment"
Predicted the glassy eyed dream at the time, but not the more cynical reality we got where that smartness more often benefits the seller than the consumer
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- "in-depth personal medical histories will be on record and in full control of the individual in some form of medical smart card or disk"
Another fun combo of rarely safe prediction based on developments of the time mixed with (in hindsight) overly optimistic assumptions about commercialism
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And the bit summarised as purportedly predicting "(the internet)" actually has a pretty neat bit which was missed
"face-to-face, voice-to-voice, person-to-data, and data-to-data communication will be available to any place at any time from anywhere."
Predicting Skype/zoom seems a tad more interesting (even though things like Dick Tracy or 2001: A space odyssey had long had us wishing for it before 1995)
The preceding bit aged less well
"...broadband network of networks based on fiber optics; other techniques, such as communications satellites, cellular, and microwave will be ancillary."
Interesting that they appeared to be emphasising an _increase_ in wired data transit
But not surprising, as back then any cellular comms were far from impressive in comparison to the big-ass wired links you could use from universities
(That said, even back then we had microwave links acting as secondary high speed links for campuses which didn't yet have fibre or coax installed)
>Predicting Skype/zoom seems a tad more interesting
The Mother of All Demos was in '68, though. Some of the past (now legendary stuff) like this or the Lisp workstations (Interlisp-D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKjFJDZmWNM) still looks futuristic today.
Agreed, one of my favorite pieces of literature. It's what got me into American historical fiction - I later ventured into Steinbeck and Mark Twain, both of whom are masters of the genre.
Love Twain and Steinbeck (most especially other works than Grapes of Wrath). Great Gatsby didn't work for me when I read it recently - just not my thing. I loved Catch 22 because I hadn't realized it was a comedy before I read it. It's tough because too often the best known past authors are unenjoyable to read.
For those who like C because of the simplicity, I can wholeheartedly recommend Go. It's replaced C as my go-to for personal CLI projects - while it is more complex than C, the core language features fit in my head pretty well. Add to that the excellent tooling, primitive OOP and clean syntax, and it's a damn good replacement.
Neither. While colonialism didn't _create_ generational poverty, the systemic genocides of the British were new. Colonial policy of prioritizing exports directly led to the deaths of millions. That's a fact.
A similar comparison would be between Roman slavery and the chattel slavery of the Americas. They are both abhorrent practices (just like the genocides caused by Indian rulers in the pre-British period), but it pales in comparison to the scale and horror of antebellum slavery.
