It's good for them, but the only person I know who owns a boat is richer than me, and I'm already richer than basically all my friends
Old sailboats can be had for practically (and in many cases actually) nothing. If you’re reasonably handy and willing to learn you can do all the maintenance they require yourself
Boats can be some of the cheapest housing there is, even more so if you want to live somewhere picturesque
(There are, of course, significant downsides)
For example, a through-hull needs replacing. Sure you could find a secondhand one that fits, but you still need to have it hauled out to replace.
(source: I grew up on such a sailboat, and we were broke as shit)
My takeaway:
Modern software stacks are usually cloud-dependent, and much bigger and more complex than they need to be, especially for offline, low-bandwidth, or low computing power use cases.
Small, simple, useful software can be written for these use cases and has ownership and longevity benefits.
Not a groundbreaking message, but a true one. And brought home by their interesting cirumstances.
There's a middle ground between locally installed software that fails as soon as you don't have an internet connection for the phone home, and locally installed software that can be used totally unplugged. You can stick a countdown timer within the software that allows 7, 30, 90 etc days of consecutive offline interactivity before the user needs to phone home again. Heck, if you really wanted to, you could sell copies or subscriptions to that software at varying price points depending on how many days the user expects to need - if it's a feature people want, it's a feature you can price in.
Why isn't this model more common? Mm, plenty of reasons. You need to implement pretty sophisticated techniques under the hood to deter software crackers, for one, which aren't required when you make an API call every sixty seconds to an Azure Function. For two the modal human mind really hates middle grounds of this sort. I actually suspect that some "online-only" local software implements something like this under the hood, and just doesn't advertise it, or perhaps gates it being being an enterprise feature. (I have unfortunately learned firsthand that advertising my software as "works up to 30 days off-grid" gets considerably more ire than "ah, sorry, it does require an internet connection, everything's in the cloud these days, you know how it is".)
But probably the most common reason is simply that most people don't need it! Most regular people aren't using software at all when they go off grid.
Now I'm a lot more diligent about FOSS for anything important.
>Other than as confirmation of payment
This is the wrong way around, imo. Confirmation of payment is like the #1 problem a business has to solve. If the business can't reliably turn a profit by running their software on your machine, then they will run it on their own machines, no matter how much it degrades the user experience. The end result is a hollowed out market for anything local and not offered totally for free, which sadly and ironically excludes a great deal of valuable software.
It's not about the boat or the cloud. Yes, they are self-imposed restrictions, but not the actual point the author is trying to make. The message I got from the text was that all these modern systems we use hurt the preservability of software. The text was about the author's journey in finding a solution for preserving their software for generations to come. A solution that if everything is lost, the runtime can be recreated easily so that the actual software can be run again.
This is something that I have been thinking about myself a lot and it was interesting to see that the thought-process has been similar with LISP, Oberon, Smalltalk, Forth etc.
It's like a carpenter creating his own tools before building a dining room table.
Even the nostalgia factor for choosing a Forth is contrived. There are plenty of portable, modern languages that will likely be runnable for decades. Lua is embeddable and will likely be put into new systems for decades, and can run on low power hardware. But Forth is ancient. Its like learning calligraphy. Either you are in a niche, or you just love doing it. But no one uses it for the daily correspondences, they have messaging apps now.
I do agree that everything being connected to the cloud definitely excludes people and places. And that place may be anytime in the future. But you can combat this with more modern solutions.
I'm actually not sure this is true. There are certainly a few quite venerable languages that will be around unchanged for decades (i.e. Java).
I wouldn't however take the bet, that, say, Go or Rust will be able to compile code written now, on whatever the current compiler version is in 2035. I certainly wouldn't take the bet that you will still be able to download the correct dependency versions from a package manager after 10 years...
But a go-vendored repository is buildable indefinitely, and the compiler itself is easy to bootstrap.
I'm skeptical about some kind of catastrophic disaster that makes popular technologies inaccessible (the pandemic demonstrated our strong impulse towards business-as-usual even when the world is burning) but having ecosystems that aren't as vulnerable to corporate capture and exploitation seems valuable in its own right.
Having toons with chat bubbles somehow made the foaming at the mouth mad ramblings of all those burgeoning future reddit moderators feel a little more benign.
gnabgib•5h ago
Animats•3h ago