alexis_read
Re:The electric car as a talisman of false hope
on Friday August 16, 2019 @12:46PM (#20716990)
Not too complex really. The #1 thing is to encourage flexible working so we can work locally more often - shared office spaces (if required) can be a great resource eg. You get to know people who can provide a great painting service etc.
After that, encouraging building energy efficiency so aircon is not needed so often would be beneficial - well designed buildings that promote airflow without heat exchange for instance. Extra insulation and so on.
Promoting more localised towns and cities, with shared waste/water facilities is good - that datacenter heat can drive aircon or hot water for the town.
Lastly, electric cars as you've said, have many problems - care to see how 2 different companies' cars handle parking in a busy car park? ;)
The best transport option might be smartrail (similar to https://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/?m=1 but steel wheel/LIM and faster).
Smartrail and PRT are designed as a point to point separated-grade network carrying on av. 1 person or a pallette of goods. With a hanging rail you don't need heavy batteries, parking for the vehicles, you can run a pod straight into the factory to pickup goods, and large/rich places can pay to have track straight to their door.
You can prefab the rail and as land usage is just poles in the ground it can be rolled out over fields etc quickly. Track is one-way to eliminate junctions. Pods are on-demand ie. No waiting.
Accessibility improves, you can use the top of the rail to generate (solar) power, run highspeed internet cables in the rail to improve comms across a country, and save on distribution center logistics as you're going point to point.
The last mile may possibly be an issue, but forklift drones and bicycles can take most of the load I feel.
Drivers for this are that it would go fast (200mph+ as light pods so little wear), can go overnight (sleeper pods), you could buy track to your door, personal transport (like a cinema room if you want). The main real issue with cars is that there's a large lobby behind what is a legacy transport solution...
By way of example, UltraPRT has been running flawlessly at Heathrow airport for 10 years, was built on time, on budget, and performs exactly as predicted/modelled.
For more info checkout http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/ in particular Swedetrack
The last thing to mention, and the elephant in the room, is overpopulation. Looking at the stats it seems that birthrates for developed countries is in decline, so the obvious solution is to give everyone a good quality of life.
The issue here is actually at the heart of economics - how do we run an economy with an ageing demographic? Japan is the leader here and they are placing a bet on robotics. What happens though when robots consume 80% of jobs? That may be the issue we need to solve, and as you can effectively tie energy to economic prosperity on a macro scale, a solution presents itself - create more (environmentally friendly) energy sources to raise global wealth.
Re:US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its de...
on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:53AM (#20673393)
These are great ideas! Tbh I think that much of the reason that these don't exist is the configurability of software UIs - these controls in Linux/ Windows/ OSX would need to be specifically programmed for by the programmer, rather than say in Squeak by the users. Breaking down that user/ programmer barrier is key I think.
Re:Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)
on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:47AM (#20554525)
You could try nodered-self hosted or cloud options. It has plugins for most stuff including GPIO, MQTT, HTTP, email, twitter.
Re:Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation
on Friday July 26, 2019 @08:17AM (#20534155)
The best way is probably a bootstrap script ie. ps1 or sh which supplies the platform-specific parameters, and can pip install any script dependencies. So, 3-file solution.
Additonally, this can be generalised to a CI platform as python can subprocess-run anything there's not a native lib for.
Lastly, you could do autodoc via the script for a complete solution.
Re:Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues
on Friday May 24, 2019 @03:57AM (#19999413)
Agree :) Sorry I do want nitpick here as it's seen so often - "innocent until proven guilty" might imply that they haven't been found guilty yet (until). "Innocent unless proven guilty" I think is a better phrase :)
Re:Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues
on Friday May 24, 2019 @03:48AM (#19999370)
I believe it's to testify against Assange, which she has decided not to do as Assange's case is a legal grey area to say the least.
I wouldn't say it's Manning's choice so much as a 'testify if you want to get out' Hobson's choice.
Re:Ask HN: Is it just me, or is CSS too damn hard?
on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @04:53AM (#19033856)
IMHO I think that one of the main problems with CSS is that it doesn't have an explicit model of text. If you have that, then a constraint-based designer can take you through wizards to ask to to consider eg. When there's more text than space. Springs, struts etc. Can take care of layout. Controversially I think we should replace/remove div tags as they don't make all their behavior explicit vs flexbox/ cssgrid etc. Every object should have explicit layout behaviors defined. Then you can compose them or create new objects for undefined cases.
Re:Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
on Saturday January 12, 2019 @06:50PM (#18894007)
https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project
This is what hubzilla can do, along with using the Zot protocol for distributed identity.The main issue really is having an easy wizard-based installation/configuration for new users wanting to host.
Re:Node-Red – Flow-Based Programming for the Internet of Things
on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @03:49AM (#18863306)
Just as an FYI for the kids, I've ported node-red to mobile devices:
https://github.com/alexisread/noreml
I need to finish creating a table plugin, but it's now possible to create apps, including UI, for mobile visually in node red, and actually on the device.
The UI part uses node-red-dashboard etc. And being able to do this might be useful for home automation.
Effectively what this is, is a nodeJs instance running node-red, with a Cordova webview set to point to the node-red dashboard URL. As such, you can do heterogeneous clustered processing across mobile devices using dnr nodes: https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-dnr
You can reach the node-red UI from the usual URL in your browser
Re:Scratch 3.0
on Thursday January 03, 2019 @03:26AM (#18813657)
Quick plug for my node red port to android (and can do ios) https://github.com/alexisread/noreml
It's missing a table component really for UI programming, but can support visually programming apps on mobile devices :)
Re:Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea
on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @03:32AM (#18501074)
EDIT: Ran out of time to finish the comment:
Allowing this to run on mobile means that you can develop/monitor systems on mobile, cluster the systemsphone with other nodered instances, and develop mobile apps (the package is basically nodeJs, nodered and a cordova webview which can be hooked up to display the nodered dashboard).
The important things to note here are that the underlying language to the visual DSL is flexible enough to do everything, and standard ways of building visual extensions (aka nodes) exist.
The main thing missing on the Dashboard is a table node, which would allow a much more flexible layout of data (sorting, trees etc).
Re:Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea
on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @07:36PM (#18499212)
Exactly this. The best example here is NodeRed, Javascript underneath and a dataflow UI on top.
You can get connectors for pretty much anything eg. Raspberry pi robot/ home automation, twitter, http, email, mqtt, SQL, openCV, parallel processing.
The dashboard allows you to create UIs visually, and I've ported it to run on Android + IOS:
Re:All the plastic you can and cannot recycle
on Friday September 21, 2018 @04:18PM (#18042371)
After re-reading this, I realised I wasn't clear on the taxation - this would apply to manufacturers not consumers, thus incentivising them to advertise green credentials as a feature, and to cut down packaging or pass the cost on (at which point most customers would move to the cheaper product).
As far as non-homogeneous packaging goes, if it takes longer than 5sec to separate each bit into homogeneous parts, then I'd class it as non-homogeneous.
Re:All the plastic you can and cannot recycle
on Friday September 21, 2018 @09:49AM (#18039648)
Tbh the main issues in the UK are 2:
Non-homogeneous packaging eg. Cardboard food containers with plastic windows - maybe a tax applied to this package type would help.
Inconsistent disposal/recycling between boroughs/counties - there should be a countrywide mandate for recyclability types for the consumer, regardless of how those types are actually disposed of. Eg. Everyone has a food wastebin even if the council has to throw it with the rest (it doesn't have the facilities).
Educating people to recycle is difficult enough without the inconsistencies.
edit Taxing packaging by weight and type would theoretically work to minimise packaging and encourage eg. Bringing a tupperware container to the shops. You'd also need to (countrywide) standardise container types so then you could eg. Put your standard coffebean container under the supermarket dispenser and do away with packaging.
The above is a thought experiment btw. Usual dicussions about personal freedom vs state apply, but the driving force there is valid :)
Re:Let’s write a Kernel with keyboard and screen support (2014)
on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @12:35PM (#18025455)
I've not watched the series, but the full stack (ie. Cpu and gpu design in verilog, hdmi, bootstrapped mutitasking os dev, not your average FullStack marketing-speak) for a platform is done by bitwise: https://m.youtube.com/#/user/pervognsen
Looks very accessible :)
Re:On the Road to Pure Go X11 GUIs
on Saturday September 08, 2018 @09:15AM (#17940692)
If you're looking to program a GUI, you'd be best taking a look at Go's parent AOS/ Active Oberon, and the accompanying GUI (Bluebottle : A Thread-safe Multimedia and GUI
Framework for Active Oberon):
http://e-collection.ethbib.ethz.ch/ecol-pool/diss/fulltext/e...
Might be best to port this to Go?
Re:The problem with programming and how to fix it
on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @03:33AM (#17651241)
I'd suggest that the perfect tool here is Zeppelin (notebooks), basically a centralised multi-user sandbox with built-in versioning and scheduling. Deployment of a json notebook to different environments can be handled easily while security can be done at the data layer (ie. SFtp, file access, database, API level).
Re:Build Android Apps in PicoLisp Without an Android SDK
on Thursday July 19, 2018 @03:31AM (#17564467)
I have a node-red instance that does a similar thing, to allow drag-n-drop programming (Including UI), and (using dnr) heterogeneous cluster processing on mobiles (ios and android).
It starts a node-red server on the device, and uses cordova to host the webview.
I'm in the process of adding an ag-grid node so you can do complex UIs in the dev environment on the phone/tablet.
Re:Build Android Apps in PicoLisp Without an Android SDK
on Thursday July 19, 2018 @03:29AM (#17564461)
I have a node-red instance that does a similar thing, to allow drag-n-drop programming (Including UI), and (using dnr) heterogeneous cluster processing on mobiles (ios and android).
It starts a node-red server on the device, and uses cordova to host the webview.
I'm in the process of adding an ag-grid node so you can do complex UIs in the dev environment on the phone/tablet.
Re:Apple open-sources FoundationDB
on Friday April 20, 2018 @03:34AM (#16882856)
I think Scuttlebutt might be more suitable for you? Extract the text from a conversation on each robot.
The offline story is easy here.
The other option would be some sort or CRDT-based system - Antidote perhaps?