"right to Repair is incredibly popular because it’s common sense—at least to those who aren’t manufacturers. Society works best when we are empowered to fix our stuff"
here is the next win for common sense: a repairability index. invented in france where they know a thing or two about revolutions
A repairability index is about as objective as can get: a list a components and their modes of failure along with a checklist of:
* what can be repaired by the owner using spare parts, instructions and common tools
* what can be repaired by an independend third party
* what must be repaired by the manufacturer
* when must something be junked and how much of it can be recycled
These are not "opinions". At some point we need to start calling out the criminal indifference of vested interests (and their shills) to the sustainability question
A freedom index is about as objective as it can get: a list of categories and their rights along with a checklist of:
* what kinds of guns can be owned
* what kinds of cars can be owned
* what kinds of speech is allowed
* what proportion of income one can keep
These are not "opinons". At some point we need to start calling out the criminal indifference of vested interests (and their shills) to the freedom question
I feel you are trying to make some kind of point but I am not getting it.
Sure, start a democracy index by the methods you stated and compile a list and put it somewhere online and I'm sure people would find it useful. Those facts are useful for people looking into the freedoms of different places.
We are talking about repairability here though.
What is the complaint?
I think some confusion here is about "a number" people keep mentioning. Is it a single number that has to be objectively weighted by the facts? Or are we talking "a list of..." or data points which _are_ just facts can people can make their own opinion of?
The irony is that they are defending the right of a manufacturing cartel to limit the options of what these valiant freedom fighters can do with stuff they own (with the "hard-won" money they managed to rescue from the evil "taxman" :-).
But assuming they indeed want the "freedom" to have unrepairable cars, what about my freedom to want a market that offers them. Same with a market for cars that are not surveillance devices etc. Are their needs more important than mine?
Political extremism turns people into ugly entitled morons. Alas its not a sad circus to watch from afar. They are taking society down to their sociopathic dark world.
Is it a fact that the United States is the most free country? Your index isn’t called “index of phones by number of parts replaceable”, just like mine isn’t called “index of countries by gun ownership”. Like I said, you attached a number to your opinion and want to present it as a fact.
> Is it a fact that the United States is the most free country?
Probably not? Who said it was or wasnt? Maybe if we had a list of facts about each country we could determine for ourselves, no?
This was my above comment.
I don't think anyone wants a single number "index".
Just give the facts.
Its not called "index of phones by number of parts repalceable" its "here are the facts on these 5 axis about the repairability of various phones" go make your own choice. Its not called "index of countries by gun ownership" its "a list of freedom facts about the country, one of which is gun ownership"
I actually don't think that's why they're getting downvoted, nobody is arguing that freedom isn't subjective, it's not a very insightful point.
I think they're getting downvoted (note: not by me, I downvote very little) because they've introduced a controversial strawman around a much more ambiguous topic than one about the repairability of mechanical and electrical consumer goods. It is not some sort of flight of fancy to think we could define what is important about repairability for consumer goods and have at least some objective criteria that is communicated to the consumer.
Python is now bigger than what even its most keen friends ever imagined might happen. This is not automatically solving the issues, nor make it more likeable to those who dislike it, but it does incentivise serious plumbing work.
Something I noticed about all these projects (and they are quite a few) is that they are quite old (some going back ~2 decades or so).
I wonder what is the dynamic behind that longevity. Music hasn't changed ofcourse but on tech side I would think there are significant new possibilities.
Is it something related to the difficulty of implementing low level algorithms (famously a lot of linear algebra stuff goes back decades and rests on C / Fortran libraries). Is it that there isn't enough interest to justify new efforts or are those systems already near "perfection"?
Some indeed started long ago; e.g. Common Music had its roots in the eighties and became a pretty popular composition environment during the nineties; in 2008 there was even a fundamental redesign and it's still developed. But there was also a certain abundance of new tools; many were released that essentially had the same goal and offered the same features, just implemented a little differently.
> Music hasn't changed ofcourse
Music and the way music is composed, produced and consumed has changed tremendously over the years, and so have the tools. In the past the focus was on algorithmic composition, and tools allowed to extend the possibilities of a composer also to sound design, but it took years until computers were fast enough to render a composition in real-time. Then came the time of the DAW's when eventually everyone could produce music with little investments. In the last ten years live coding became popular which is yet another way of composing and producing music, with new requirements for interactivity and ergonomic efficiency of the tools, and yet a different view of the composer and the composition process.
However, and this is something I wrote about recently in my thesis, we are now experiencing somewhat of a renaissance of older approaches as it is only fairly recently that it has become practical to run the older (lisp-based) algorithmic tools in real-time. I can run Scheme during live playback and have the GC finish it's business fast enough to use it with very acceptable audio latencies within Ableton Live for example. I'm just now embarking on a PhD in this area actually, and its pretty exciting how many previously dusty things can be used in exciting new ways.
Thanks for the thesis; looks interesting, will have a close look at it. Actually, I'm not really sure whether "Lisp has always been an elegant and productive way to represent and build music"; from my point of view the optimal way to represent music incorporating all relevant dimensions and relations has yet to be found; actually Dannenberg himself switched to SAL, away from Lisp (see his algorithmic composition book).
What's the topic of your PhD? Who is your supervisor?
Well, Dannenberg's SAL is really a sugar layer over XLisp though right? I remember citing his writing somewhere from the book with Simoni on why Lisp is great for music. My impression was that SAL's raison d'etre was to be more accessible to people for whom lisp is too weird than anything else, but perhaps I am not completely correct.
My PhD is an interdisciplinary between music and CS, working with George Tzanetakis and Andy Schloss at University of Victoria in BC Canada, continuing the same work I did for the Masters. So that is Scheme for Max and other Scheme related music work, targeting algorithmic composition, mainstream production, and live coding contexts. Some of the current initiatives include a browser based Scheme algorithmic music system (not yet published, but using a WASM C++ worker for a sample-based scheduler), further work on s4m, s4pd, and Ableton Live tools, integrations with Csound (I wrote the csound6~ port for Max), likely a standalone host (similar to Grace), an object system and score tool, and some actual music!
(EDIT: I was wrong and thinking Nyquist, not SAL!)
> Dannenberg's SAL is really a sugar layer over XLisp though right?
SAL was designed and published in 2008 by Rick Taube; the present implementations are transpilers to Scheme or XLisp, but SAL is quite different from both Scheme and Lisp (in syntax and semantics).
> My PhD is...
Sounds interesting; but what is the actual research focus (besides the programming work and tool implementation)?
Ah right, typed too soon, I was thinking of Nyquist, which is over Xlisp. YMMV, but for me personally I find Lisp much nicer to represent music than SAL.
My PhD is interdisciplinary, so it is not a pure research CS - it's a combination of CS work, project work, and music composition & performance. The research side will be into how Scheme and recent developments in the Scheme side of PLT can be used in modern machines/environments for exploring algorithimic composition and live-coded composition and improvisation.
> I find Lisp much nicer to represent music than SAL
Lisp and Scheme are indeed very flexible to represent about anything, but on a very fundamental and general purpose level; of course you can do some kind of "DSL" with macros, but it's still "Lispy". SAL has less degrees of freedom and helps users not to get lost or bogged down, but it's still a general purpose programming language, not a specification system covering the essence of musical structures and processes.
> My PhD is interdisciplinary, so it is not a pure research CS..
Here in Switzerland "interdisciplinary" means that the research topics concern more than one research area, not that it's not pure research. Usually the PhD students are more challenged than with a "traditional" PhD, because there are more professors involved, each with his own research focus, that is most important to him (so it happens that the student does actually work for more than one PhD).
Concerning Scheme, depending on how big the "composition" is and whether it does sound generation and has to be controlled in real-time, a traditional byte-code interpreter will likely get to its limits, even on present HW.
Well sure, you can bring any real-time sound system to its limits if you want to - some of my additive synthesis experiments do that very quickly even on pure C++.
But as far as practical use goes, I run 16 algorithmic sequencers implemented completely in s7 in real-time, inside Ableton Live, at an output latency of 8ms, and do so for long enough for compositions. This is while Live does a ton of software synthesis and FX dsp too, and all of the sequencers can be altered on the fly without audio dropouts! This is on the cheapest M1 you can get too. So it's absolutely practical for real time work. This is also without even a ton of attention to real-time GC in s7 - I haven't dug into that yet, but Bill has told me that while he did a lot of work to make it fast, it doesn't use an implementation specifically targeted at lowest possible pause times.
Whether the tradeoffs of Scheme vs other options are worth it for a particular composer/producer/performer varies of course, but it really is time to put to rest the notion that we can't run a Scheme interpreter for real-time music generation.
I think what you are asking for is for an abstraction layer that is on top of what the current systems do. LaTeX is a very good analogy, as it is a set of macros that hide away the numericity of the underlying TeX typesetting system. Once upon a time people did use TeX to write papers because LaTeX did not exist yet.
Such a higher level macro system must make tradeoffs between sufficient control and conciseness (though its typically possible to insert low level code in between the macros since before any macro can be executed, rendered etc. it must be converted to the lower level anyway).
Developing such a system is probably a task for tech-savvy musician rather than a music-savvy techie. Its value proposition would be precisely to crystallize composition "invariants" that are expressive and versatile enough to enable people to compose genuinely new things.
But you should keep in mind that all LaTeX papers look a bit alike :-) (though much better than Word papers).
Excellent storytelling, fluidly integrating geospatial data and other visual elements and statistics in a smooth flow.
Who knows, maybe one day such a "visual space" inside a browser would be interactive, a Google Earth type of thing as far as navigation goes, but with data queries that allow on the fly to populate various widgets. An expert could livestream a story or "save" it for later publication.
The New York Times regularly have this flowing style of stories. It is often quite impressive. Once they did a simple flowless scroll type of story called 78 long minutes, about a scared police force during a school shooting. Very impressive, you keep thinking do something! while reading and scrolling.
There should be more of this. Much more. From different angles and view points but with the same clarity and directness.
Banking is in a deep, existential crisis for decades now and the march of digitization only increases the pressure to find a way forward.
In response techno-solutionists imagine all sorts of replacements, whether it is "fintech", or "banking-as-a-service" or "crypto" but all are hopelessly shallow and incomplete, almost insultingly crude.
What is entirely missing from these neobanking movements is any straight definition of what is the purpose of banking and bankers. What is their irreducible value proposition that cannot be delegated to machines and algorithms. What is their role in society. Are they allies or enemies of surveillance capitalism? Are their users clients or products? Can there be an honest relation with the sovereign monetary system and the lender of last resort or is private banking a scheme to privatize profits and socialize losses? Last but not least, what role, if any, should they play towards environmental sustainability.
The questions and challenges are pilling up and there are no breakthroughs worth mentioning. In a parallel universe we might have something like BN (banking news), where all sorts of individuals, teams small or large, would pimp their blogs, radical ideas, open source solutions or fancy software products, but above all a positive, forward looking vision for a crucial sector.
To borrow money from you, paying you a low interest rate, but allowing you to withdraw it at a drop of the hat, while lending money to someone else, at high interest rates, but on a fixed, multi-year repayment schedule.
Borrow short, lend long. It's socially useful, and if the bank does it well, it stands to make a lot of money.
And the purpose of this is to increase money velocity by providing loans. "Narrow banking" (having the government provide bank accounts) wouldn't work unless the government also provided business loans, which doesn't really make sense.
You'd be fine with a regular law. But like I said, it would affect money supply greatly (ceteris paribus) so there's a lot of consequences to work out.
Free countries start from the presumption that everything not forbidden is allowed. It would affect the money supply greatly, but there was a time when every bank was a narrow bank, so isn't it really the fractional reserve banks who came along and affected the money supply greatly?
I'm not saying narrow banks are worthwhile, but it's utterly insane that it's illegal for a bank to simply hold $100 bills in a bank vault on your behalf. It's utterly insane that banks are not just permitted, but legally required to lend out your money. And there's a minimum amount, too, because a bank that lends out $1 of each customer's money won't get a license.
Thats a rather incomplete business model description of banking.
There are at least three distinct elements and largely unrelated to core banking: payments infrastructure / gatekeeping the private/public monetary system, managing interest rate risk (which is what you describe) and managing credit risk.
Add to that countless "non-core" intermediation activities which nevertheless, depending on the type of bank can be major revenue sources.
Maximazing social utility is indeed the key question but how to do it in a sustainable and future proof way is hardly ever seriously asked.
The purpose of banking is to allow people to store their money safely. It is not to allow finance bros to gamble with customer deposits without consent.
The purpose of banking for most people is to put their money in so they don't need to carry cash around, but the purpose of banking for banks has been to make profit by gambling the money people are giving you for safekeeping.
A bit like the relationship between Gmail and personal data, really.
Is there some sort of citizen science we could engage-in with these datasets? When zooming in on Euclid’s view of the Perseus cluster of galaxies I see some very strange stuff :-)
A popular citizen science is writing a classic hacker script with wget/curl to download all of the images and then stack them together. Numerous comets have been found this way as the comet will be the only thing moving once all of the images are aligned. I guess it doesn't have to be a comet, as asteroids and Planet X could be found this way as well. If the dot changes course/speed in your research, it could be Aliens!!!!
The fun thing is that when a group gets scope time, it's typically for a specific purpose so the images are initially studied specifically for that purpose. It's possible there's more treasure in those images beyond the original intent that just needs more time being studied or added to other imagery/collections that come together to reveal something.
So depending on what you might be interested in, you can find all of the images from every scope imaginable of the same object to do some fun stuff, or you could find a time series from one scope that might reveal something.
The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc).
Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.
> The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state
So does this nation-state have democratically-adopted rules directing the city to act differently on housing? If not, how is this claim relevant to the comment about how democracy is supposed to work?
No, that's exactly how democracy worked in e.g. Athens. Or how republic worked in e.g. Rome. But then again, wealthy people pretty much always owned the political process.
Plus, of course, there is a bunch of people who understand "democracy" to be simply "the rule of the democrats" :)
And the converse - if you own the political process then why aren't you wealthy? In an ideal system the answer would be "because 1/Nth of the power isn't worth much", but there in practice are always power bottlenecks that give disproportionate sway.
Even assuming a given ruling actor is principled and incorruptible, an archetypal "good king", there would be many other aspirants who want to replace them by means fair or foul. Large piles of money just lying around have always been an attractive nuisance for thieves.
Because the nation-state is constantly using the democratic process to decide which powers should be delegated to which part of the hierarchy.
This thread is about that abstract process, and indeed whether "housing crisis" is enough justification to start overriding local autonomy.
For example, in California the state government recently restricted the power of local governments to regulate ADU construction. This was a case of state democracy overriding local decisions because of their negative externalities when taken in aggregate.
Basically the whole point of a government hierarchy is to resolve the multi-agent coordination problems that routinely occur. The government is the equivalent of the mob boss in the prisoner's dilemma, and without it we will devolve into a tragedy of the commons.
"Interestingly, there is in fact a noticeable downward slope in average sentiment over time for those topics as well"
I would speculate total sentiment on HN is trending down. Its the disillusionment with tech.