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I miss flash too. No other development environment was/is as easy to use.

I learning to program with as2 and as3.


If you weren't aware previously, you'll be pleased to learn that you can still program in Flash if you really want to, and distribute your programs on the web. https://ruffle.rs

We need an open source equivalent to the Flash editor (AKA Adobe animate) that uses Ruffle and can output to it.

We have the web, we don't need ruffle, what we need is indeed a open source flash editor. Wick editor was quite close, by outputting standalone html files

https://www.wickeditor.com/

Of course, not at all on the same level like flash was, but some parts worked really nice.

Unfortunately it is abandoned. (I thought about taking it up, but would require lots of effort, basically rewriting core parts)


The web is awful as a programming environment. It's popular because it's everywhere, not because it's good.

Rather a warts-and-all open web than a pay-to-play walled garden where you have to pay the feudal lord a tax for sharecropping on their land.

there are alternatives both in the past (perpetual software) and hopefully in the future

I think they mean you don't need ruffle if you can just export to web. The programming environment can be anything, but adding ruffle in the middle when it really doesn't need to be there, does indeed feel a bit tacky. Flash used to be necessary to add functions to browsers that were otherwise impossible, but these days you can do anything in a browser.

How is renewable in any way independent if we don’t mine the necessary things nor manufacture the things.

My understanding is that wind turbine + PV + battery storage has a cycle where you buy once every twenty years, or more. So you buy once, and have twenty years to figure out the next buy cycle, geopolitical cycles and all.

On the fossil fuel side, you need to buy many times per year, every year. Each one of those buy events is an opportunity for an external party for stop your economy.

The renewable buy cycle is harder for an external party to interrupt.

edit: This is vastly over-simplified, but I hope my understanding reflects reality at least somewhat.


I also worry about the "stop the economy" problem. To me, it's analogous to the AI employment problem. If you cannibalize how a country makes money and generates tax revenue, what do you do instead? For example, Nigeria makes a lot of money from oil sales. Take away the oil industry and how do they make money? Nobody can pretend to be a Nigerian prince or a businessman trying to reclaim millions of dollars.

Now that I think of it, maybe the economic fallout from AI and the oil economic devastation will be widespread fraud, just so people can survive.


Yeah. I've been wondering to what extent this is keeping the global geopolitics stable. Rich countries are keeping many other countries stable-ish that would otherwise rapidly devolve into disaster (obviously the middle east being the huge example). Even going so far as keeping countries stable-ish at the request of those countries (Egypt and Jordan being examples) despite those countries not really being oil countries.

When that incentive disappears, as it will, what then? There is no way in hell the middle east can defend against Iranian aggression without other people doing it for them. And it's not just the middle east. The consequences of isolationism will lower enormously. Why won't rich countries just lock the border and dig in?

We're not even that far removed from finding out what will happen, it's only about 7 years away. I'd love some early warning though.


I think you have it a bit backwards.

The reason we have Iran with an insane government and all the princes and total lack of democracy is BECAUSE of all the interference due to oil.

America and before it Britain and the colonial powers just walked in there and stole everything and so now the region is divided into countries that were soccuessfully captured (Qatar etc) and countries that threw us out (Iran).

If oil wasn’t as important it might be chaos for a while though because this dictatorships are propped up expressly so they can sell us cheap oil.


No. Iraq did not attack Iran due to oil. Iran did not counterattack Iraq because of oil. It was merely dictatorships wanting to conquer and seeing a chance to do so. Sorry.

Ideally one also manufactures them. But when you buy solar panels, one get's 30+ years of lifetime out of it. So once installed. It's tricky for China (or whoever makes time) to use them as leverage. If you cut off oil or gas there is only a few months of reserves.

You can't install them at once, as result at any point in time you'll still need to buy to cover increased demand or replace old units

Any real system will also have backups and emergency reserves.

Lean more on them as you solve the supply chain issue.

No need to make a mountain out of a molehill.


Huh? What prevents you from installing them "all at once"? The downside is obviously a long stretch of no sun, and for Europe winter being both low solar production and high energy demand due to heating which the soon-to-be-cheap grid scale batteries don’t really fix. The logistics of PV don’t seem difficult though - it seems by far the easiest of the power generation methods, even if the synchronization can get a bit tricky in a large grid.

Because manufacturing isn't there to do everything at once. You install say 50gw per year, each year. In 30y you need to replace first 50gw batch and so on

Solar panel materials are extremely toxic (current tech), or are toxic unless properly processed (hopefully, but likely, future tech).

So they won't be made in the EU, since nobody wants to make concessions here. Solar panels have the same problem as oil and mining: they will destroy nature somewhere, otherwise it doesn't work.


Which materials do you mean?

https://blog.ucs.org/charlie-hoffs/how-are-solar-panels-made...

Crystalline silicon solar panels have about 95% market share, and "By weight, the typical crystalline silicon solar panel is made of about 76% glass, 10% plastic polymer, 8% aluminum, 5% silicon, 1% copper, and less than 0.1% silver and other metals."

Everything that is manufactured is made out of atoms, and you can say that any manufacturing requires some nature destruction in the aggregate. But solar electricity requires far less mining and natural despoilation than fossil-fueled electricity.


Solar panels contain quite a bit of lead, and small amounts of cadmium. Lead can be taken out if you're willing to pay a bit more, in other words it never is. Cadmium is required. Other metals are sometimes present.

So solar panels are classified as hazardous waste.


Cadmium is only required in cadmium telluride solar panels, which have less than 5% global market share. Lead solder is still common in crystalline silicon panels, though not universal; modules built with heterojunction cells typically avoid solder because the cells can't tolerate temperatures that high:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pip.3688


They don't have the same problem. They have approximately one tenth of the problem until reprocessing reduces that even further.

There is only degrees of independence in the global economy. No country can be completely self sufficient. Having an energy infrastructure that runs for a decade or two before it starts crumpling without trade is a lot better than having an energy infrastructure that is in dire straits after a few weeks or months of embargo.

Even if we get the data and an EU cloud we still need chips, operating system, devices.

Unless we’re all going to use. Raspberry Pi I’m not sure how this works.


So quiet…

Why is this on the front page?

Must be a quiet night - 9 points to get on the front page is pretty unusual.

Why not? Interesting technology and people upvote it

What's interesting about it? Wifi Mesh networks have been around for ... more than a decade?

It’s just a mesh router, they’ve been around for years. I don’t get it.

I thought it was going to be something about Starlink making mesh networks so they could still be used in an internet shutdown… but no. It’s just a WiFi router.


He headline misleading - they will give it if there’s a court order, not just if asked.

Still crap but the headline is intentionally inaccurate for clickbaiting


Microsoft confirms it will obey the law.

All true apart you can only lead it to water - it drinks ALL the water regardless of anything else.

Except when you want it to improve something in a particular way you already know about. Then god forbid it understands what you have asked and makes only that change :/

Some times I end up giving up trying to get the AI to build something following a particular architecture or fixing a particular problem in it's provious implementations.


Totally. I just meant literally, AI servers need a lot of water to work.

  I did not catch that. Nice.

Jokes aren’t as funny when you have to explain them…

Are search engines like Kagi completely screwed by this or is there a way for them to keep operating?

Kagi doesn't have a partnership with Google - they work under adversarial interoperability, stealing results from Google against their will, and paying some third-party to enable this. They'd like to simply pay Google, but Google doesn't want their money.

Kagi is backed by russia so they will be fine.

You’re probably referring to the fact that their search results include entries from Yandex. That’s something entirely different from being “backed by Russia.” If anything, they pay Russia, not the other way around.

And Yandex has better results than Google, so I support this move. The USA does more wars than Russia does anyway.

What do you mean "backed by"

Out of these the text selection and the Apple Pay card button bring me the most daily pain.

Even writing this short sentence I’ve accidentally deleted words when I just wanted to move the cursor and it decides, no, you must want to select that whole word


> it decides, no, you must want to select that whole word

Yeah this arrogance where my tool decides what I want to do, and even if I put the cursor to where it will want, Apple will (un)helpfully move it. Because Apple thinks its users are retards and need help


Yeah what’s with the cursor moving thing? I put the damn thing where I wanted. Why move it? It’s so interrupting to general mental flow having to constantly check and double check every action.

This is a great idea. I’ve been thinking about making something like this for a while due to all the problems you describe.

I was planning to make something that used rfid cards to play specific songs / albums so it worked more like yoto. But that would just make it even more niche!

Good luck you you!


Thanks! The RFID approach is cool – I actually built a box with real buttons and RFID connected to our Sonos system at some point. Was fun, but in the end I prefer the digital approach. Less hardware to maintain.

And niche isn't bad – sometimes that's exactly where the best apps live.


Yeah the little hardware I had actually tried to make was so painful compared to software dev. Interested to read the part about asking users to make their own spotify dev account. How’s that going so far? Seems like it could be a big roadblock for non techy users?


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