kkfx

These days, applications (whether they're web, mobile, or desktop) with absurd shortcomings in terms of UI/UX are a daily occurrence, yet most people seem to have become incapable of noticing, or at least of giving sensible feedback on the matter.

Obviously, the bulk of it is noticeable in notoriously crapware software like management systems, but it's increasingly emerging just about everywhere.

I wonder how long it will take to understand even just this small slice of the problem, without even getting into "anything apps" and the need to return to the OS as a single integrated application/framework with end-user programming—a trend of which we're only seeing a few hints.

In the current economic system, I don't see any. By changing this, for example, by eliminating bank intermediation in the creation of money, well, that could change things. Those who tried, like Lincoln with the Continentals, ended up getting killed...

For me, the great idea behind Nostr is that identity is a self-generated key pair, which can then be used wherever you want (and the economic model, with much potentials). In terms of decentralisation, however, I'm not convinced; I find the model of the late ZeroNet, the KAD network and others, essentially DHT, far superior, because it allows content to stay alive as long as there's interest in it, and every member of the network donates a certain amount of storage and bandwidth (adjustable at will) without being able to choose which specific scrap of content to host.

In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.

The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:

- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)

- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)

- short posts like Twitter/X

- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit

- very long, blog-style posts

- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar

We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.

I would suggest weighing up other aspects: reinforced concrete was widely used under the assumption that it was eternal, or simply without considering how it would behave over time, and today a massive amount of infrastructure and buildings has simply reached the end of its lifespan. Whether the dense city appeals to those most terrified of change or to the few who need it to extract wealth from the many, it is incompatible with the New Deal. This is based on small, semi-autonomous buildings, resilient for that very reason, with sufficient local photovoltaics, energy and heat storage, and heat pumps which have the highest COPs over short distances. It involves designs with large south-facing glazed surfaces, featuring overhangs and blinds, so that the low winter sun penetrates effectively to provide free heating, while the high summer sun doesn't even touch the facade, all elements that are impossible to implement at scale in dense cities. Not to mention that we are very good at making simple things replicated in huge quantities, and much less so at large-scale, bespoke projects.

Whether you like it or not, the "ecological" city that is both dense and walkable DOES NOT EXIST, and there is no future in general for the current city, with its vast waterproofed surfaces where the soil has already turned to sand, eroded here and there by groundwater, causing the weight of large buildings to lead to slow and irreversible subsidence. Cities built in places where it made sense to be in the past, but makes no sense today.

Right now most people, even the bright ones, being victims of habit and propaganda, cannot bring themselves to admit it or understand it, but when they do, the collapse of urban real estate will have a far greater impact than the teleworking that is currently being denied at a high cost to everyone.

It's simple: banks don't want the people they've fleeced to realise that they no longer have a role in the present age. If you let legal tender be exchanged directly via a central bank (which is semi-public by nature), banks lose a huge amount of liquidity that fuels fractional-reserve banking through loans made to generate massive amounts of cash, and without these, the banks are bust.

I'm curious why people do not choose Radicle in FLOSS...

it's the best option after IllumOS (OpenSolaris) IPS integrated with ZFS. Far less powerful not imposing zfs (only well supported for root, swap, encryption etc), so not integrated in the package system and bootloader management (BEs, Boot Environments).

It's not reproducible bit by bit, it fetch the current version of anything, but it's still easy to reproduce enough, stable enough and complete enough, while classic distros need a fresh install every major release or facing issues an keeping a system in unknown state for long until it explode.

The nazi drop more and more the mask. Yet most still not wake up...

BTW France already have

- https://gizmodo.com/france-bill-allows-police-access-phones-...

- https://www.medias-presse.info/une-nouvelle-loi-de-programma... can't find one in English

Plus

- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_renfor%C3%A7ant_la_s%C3%A9...

- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet_de_loi_visant_%C3%A0_s%...

- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_tendant_%C3%A0_renforcer_l...

Essentially China is already here.

Debian, like any other legacy distro, mush became declarative, because the '80s model of manual deploy and the absurd pain of D/I and Preseed must end.

The China gap is going to zero, yet slave masses still sleep...

...just as the kleptocrats wanted, to stop the spread of self-hosting and desktop computing now that society is tentatively starting to go digital.

You send emails to @gmail addresses most of the time, so... How you can avoid giving Alphabet (or some other giant) your messages?

The point of ownership is having your mails in your hand, on your iron, anything who can talk IMAPs or even POP is ok for that. For voice/chat etc Matrix or XMPP might be yours, so nobody could decide to ban you or shut the service down. You still depend on a ISP ok, but much less dependencies anyway. That's the point IMVHO.

While thinking that company X is better in privacy terms than company Y is honestly meaningless, you can trust them or not, you don't know what happen on their servers or someone else ones where they actually live on (like using Amazon o Microsoft cloud as a backend).

Honestly... No thanks. It's 2026, those who do not own a domain name should buy one an run their own Matrix/XMPP server.

Internet is not the web... And we do need to destroy boundaries to break walled gardens not creating new one for the joy of giants who knows their "oligopoly power"...

Radicle is a good answer, coupled with a reborn Usenet, maybe Nostr. We have like never before the ability to communicate and cooperate yet most fails to understand and implement that.

Nearly any of us could run an XMPP/Matrix server and federate with friends or Nostr/{0xchat,whitenoise}, all with audio, video, text, file exchange etc, yet less than 1% do that.

Simply people, techies as well, have forgot the meaning of personal ownership and therefore are owned by someone else.

While I use it in LaTeX I tend to avoid it in non-LaTeX contexts BUT even though it's much used by LLMs having switched to EurKey layout years ago I can type it on my keyboard as well as × and many others, so it's not such a perfect AI indicator.

I see no shame in that except a thing: devs should own their infra, instead of relaying on third parties. A thing too many still fails to understand.

For several reasons:

- Nostr is generally much lighter; it can even be served behind Tor without having a public IP, there's no need to maintain a web server etc. There are compact, self-contained relays like Haven, for example, which are a single go install-able app that includes everything needed on the server side, with practically zero setup.

- There are various clients, including mobile and web as well as desktop, which is enough to satisfy pretty much everyone's tastes.

- There's also an economic model that could be the future of journalism: everyone publishes what they want, and those who enjoy it can make micro-payments, if they wish, to support the publisher.

For now, it's a toy with many abandoned experiments, while Mastodon is a walking dead, having never really taken off. In other words, as they stand, neither of them is working. But Nostr has the potential to become the communication hub for many; for instance, there's already a Matrix-like service (0xchat and potentially whitenoise) that supports chat, audio, and live video, requiring only Coturn and a Nostr relay. There's also "long form" support, meaning personal blogs all on the same technology.

In other words, in a short space of time, on Nostr you can have:

- A personal blog-style site

- A personal Twitter/X

- Personal chat with audio and video

- Private notes if you need to jot something down on the go

- A search engine and address book that could allows with different access levels, a real address book usage for personal contacts.

Potentially all in a single, complete and lightweight deployment. There isn't the burden of federation, which makes many hesitate to activate it because, depending on who they federate with, they find a massive amount of resources consumed. It's essentially text, binary blobs, and near-real-time communications all in one. Haven is the first piece of the puzzle, MOAR is the successor in the making, but eventually, there will be one that integrates 0xchat and a web client, all-in-one.

The Fediverse hasn't achieved this and doesn't have the characteristics to do so.

Then again, if we're honest, the old Usenet did it better, but it's dead to most people, whereas Nostr is alive. People only dislike it because it comes from a crypto community, and many are biased against anyone from that world regardless.

We simply need open, decentralized or distributed platforms. Nostr is not that excellent, but it works, and have a potential to became "unified personal web platform", take a look at it.

I prefer no filters instead, for one simple reason: who watches the watchmen? If we had a digital identity on a national blockchain run by open-hardware home servers and FLOSS software, where every node exists by virtue of digital identity, meaning there's no risk of a 51% attack and everyone is forced to play with their cards on the table, I might accept a ZK proof. But that's not the case, and the privacy guarantees of private entities and the very subjects pushing for this verification make me say, quite simply, NEVER.

Because we know perfectly well that it's the precursor to mandatory SSO for everything, South Korea style, which is unacceptable and incompatible with Democracy.

On which hw? Because a smart-card (if open hardware and FLOSS) might be safe, certainly not a smartphone.

And what exactly would be the purpose of age verification? Because defining someone "mature" based on their age is pretty hit-and-miss: we have plenty of adults, even of a certain age, who it's hard to imagine have ever finished adolescence, for instance. On paper, they are absolutely of age. We also had a certain Alexander the Great, emperor of a large part of the planet at 20. We had 13-year-old Pharaohs active in government.

We also have gazillions of examples of apparently innocent rules being used to boil Chomsky's frog, one small temperature rise at a time. For the first time in a long while, I'm starting to sense a certain fanaticism on this topic here on HN, which sounds very much like the molecular agitation when water starts to boil.

If you like drink interested PRs dreams on sale yes, but reality is quite different.

The OEMs who have lied https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/der2024_en... through their teeth about the lifespan of a well-made desktop to compare it to a smartphone are simply on their last financial legs; their Nazi wet dream doesn't scale. A society like that doesn't work. That's why they'll collapse just like their German-speaking counterparts did a few years back.

The West is collapsing to save four kleptocrats and their model of exploiting us all; nature doesn't give a toss, it carries on her way and so does technology. Dead wood can stay standing for a long time, in some cases it even becomes a fossilised trunk, but it doesn't evolve; it's still a dead branch.

If you think the current Office model will be replaced by some LLM, you're dreaming just like those who hope for it and are working to make it happen. Sure, plenty of jobs are no longer necessary and gradually mankind, if we don't commit suicide first, will end up only creating new knowledge while machines apply it, but this model only works if it's open, distributed, and diverse enough to be resilient and evolve. The current monochrome model can only flare up and die.

I've tested WriteFreely, Mastodon, Nostr, ... but all lack the basic to succeed IMVHO:

- being a single, simple application, without much deps, maybe go-get-able, pip-able, cargo build-able etc, WF actually is one of them

- offer a platform, meaning a blog, comments per posts, distributed identity, optional chat

We have many different projects who do so, but not a single integrated one.

Nostr is good for the infra, have a sufficiently complete relay (Haven) and a future one a bit more complete (MOAR), but lack a built-in client and a decent chat support (0xchat is nice, and very hard to deploy in a sovereign manner).

WF is nice but limited as a blog and have no comments

Matrix is nice for chatting, with a very complex audio/video support, with very little documentation, I manage to get it running, with LiveKit as well, but it's a pain. XMPP is even worse because it lack a complete client for all platforms and it's very touchy on DNS setup.

The defunct ZeroNet was very nice to host personal websites without a domain name and also behind NAT, but offer nothing ready made to use with it.

...

Long story short we have the wrong tech stack underneath. We need to rediscover the old Xerox model of the OS as single integrated app, where anything can be combined at the user will, with ease. Emacs/LispM do better pushing anything in the config instead of relaying on a live image. But that's what we need. We have one mind, we need to combine out digital companion.

It's simply about time to own your digital life instead of being slave of someone else.

It's not impossible; it's their centralised model that is. It's unthinkable to have private platforms on modern mainframes (data centers) instead of distributed, decentralised services where everyone holds a piece (DHT) or whatever they want (e.g. Nostr/Blossom), and is responsible for what they do.

It's impossible to imagine having democratic societies where four fat cats know everything about everyone and most people know almost nothing about them, where information, instead of being scattered everywhere for resilience, is concentrated in just a few hands.

Coming from a company that profiles children with Classroom, sure. Coming from those pushing for age verification, just to shift the Overton window of acceptability towards mandatory logins for everything, the end of the open web and free discussion, all to better feed on slaves.

No thanks, ChatControl is a THREAT to Democracy, and the companies pushing it must be ELIMINATED from the market for reasons of national and human security, along with the politicians lobbying for them.

Considering that office suites are software from a bygone era, born from the idea of letting untrained secretarial staff use a PC as an advanced typewriter and calculator, the business and the squabbles surrounding them, which have absolutely nothing to do with FLOSS, are frankly laughable, if they weren't so pathetic.

LibreOffice (and any office suite) is a piece of software as massive as it is absurd, and those who use it don't even realise it, which is why there's so much business built around it. It's 2026; information shouldn't be managed in scattered files designed for printing and then used on screens anyway. It's high time people were taught how to actually use a computer, rather than playing around with software that hoped to make computers usable for those who don't know how to use them, and has done more harm than good in the process.

Simply eIDAS must works on smart-cards and desktop USB/built-in card reader, not mobile (cr)App.

BUT government do not want sovereignty more than they want snoop on citizens.