I'm sure a lot of countries in EU did this. First hand I know, they did this in Croatia as I was one of the developer who had to use it to deploy on it.
The worst thing I have ever seen in my life. And I worked on a lot legacy apps written in VB.NET, Web forms, old Sharepoint, Basic and even when the whole app was one big mess of store procedures.
AWS, Azure, GC are at least written with thought about end users (us, developers) while government cloud was architectured, designed and built by the lowest bidder whose first goal was to cut and cut and cut his costs whenever possible.
In my country (Croatia), post WW2 schools in rural areas were one man band. You had professor / teacher and he was in charge about anything and everything in the school.
Also, note that some (if not majority) of kids were malnourished, so an older child could look like "properly developed" much younger kid.
Those schools existed for two reasons:
a) to teach kids how to read and write and some very basic math
b) find ones with potential and connect them with benefactor to sponsor theirs more advanced education
As a former OneNote user who moved to Obsidian, I would say it's like comparing a go kart and luxury sedan. They both technically get you where you're going if you try hard enough. And if you're not going very far maybe all you need is a go kart.
My obsidian has turned into a personal Wikipedia and it's crazy how much it's improved my efficiency.
Never used Notion. I only toyed around with Evernote years ago and remember it being a cluttered mess. One Note worked alright for basic notes but I noticed I rarely referred back to them. With Obsidian, maybe it's because I put the time into my configuration but I have templates for different types of notes, a tagging system that works great for grouping and reference, and the internal linking really ties everything together.
I feel Dendron is practically the more equivalent open source tool, logseq is a more opinionated tool, being focused on the bulleted sequential use case that it actually feels relatively different to use
Just to add to this - I'm from Zagreb (Capital of Croatia, former Yugoslavia republic) - we literally have nudist beach a mile or two from strict center of the city (https://tourist.hr/place/nudist-beach-jarun).
When you are working as backend developer and your clients are mobile devices, is your message 8 times smaller or bigger is difference between up-and-running and outage.
Definitely a blacksmith in almost every city, but probably fewer blacksmiths per city than the other jobs. Metal tools are built to last, and are expensive, so it was probably often a low volume high cost kind of business where production could be covered by a minimal number of smiths.
My Dad was born before WW2 in a village in Eastern Europe, which was probably closer to a medieval village than to a 21st century one. He told me that a blacksmith would ask for 3 plum trees to do a certain job, presumably in order to make charcoal. I don't think there was anything special about plum trees, other than the local availability: people were (and still are) growing plum trees in order to make spirits. Giving up 3 plum trees meant giving up the spirits you could get from them for six years until the new trees would grow to maturity. So, yes, you wouldn't go to the blacksmith very often, if you could help it.
"During the Middle Ages, charcoal burners were ostracised. Their profession was considered dishonourable and they were frequently accused of evil practices. Even today there is a certain denigration of this former occupation."
> True. In medieval Europe charcoal burner was typically a very specialized profession.
This thread reminds me of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a computer RPG which has done in incredible job recreating aspects of life in medieval Bohemia. It has a fantastic level of historical accuracy and things like charcoal trading as a dependency to a forge are integral to one of the DLCs of the game.
While barbecuing last summer one afternoon I fell down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole and for a few days afterwards I was an expert on the chemistry, physics, history and economics of charcoal.
Sadly now all I've retained are a few dirty smudges.
I'm not sure if the blacksmith was making his own charcoal, or exchanging the wood for charcoal from someone who specialized in that. My Dad's village was about 250 km from this village [1] where people make charcoal even these days (one of the last remaining charcoal burning sites in the world). It's possible back in the day there were much more numerous such sites, so one would not have to travel far.
But even if they had, trade over large distances was surprisingly common. When I was a kid and spending summer vacations on the countryside, my grandparents were involved in a business of selling timber that was felled in some forests about 500 km away. The lumberjacks would bring the logs during the summer months, lots of it (maybe hundreds of cubic meters), and my grandparents would sell it to whoever needed it throughout the year. This was happening during Communism, so I guess it was some form of under-the-tables Capitalism at work. I imagine similar arrangements existed throughout the Middle Ages.
> or exchanging the wood for charcoal from someone who specialized in that
This is actually an interesting example of a market state that's sort of intermediate between barter and full monetization. Not everyone is going to want wood, making it a bad currency. Except that The Charcoal Guy always does want wood, so transactions that somehow involve him suddenly can use wood as currency.
Last I heard, fully half the air pollution in the Los Angeles basin was blamed on barbeque restaurants. It may be a higher proportion, now, as the cars have got cleaner, but the leaf blowers may have taken up the difference.
What was the purpose in making the customers give up the opportunity to make spirits, if the charcoal wasn't any more special? Was demand high and the blacksmiths wanted to reduce the volume of low-priority requests?
I think the blacksmith simply needed that charcoal in order to do the job. Since people didn't have charcoal themselves, the blacksmith would take wood instead. "Three plum trees" was probably one option, the most relevant for the local population. I guess the blacksmith would have been happy with "one large oak tree", but that could be used for timber, while plum trees not so much.
Note that when surnames came into existence, they were intended to distinguish their bearers from other people in the local area with the same first name. There's no point being called John English if you live in England and everyone else in your village whose name is John is also English, which is why the surnames English and England (and variants like Inglis) are more common in Scotland than in England.
Similarly, Smith is a common surname because smiths, while relatively common, were rare enough that a given community was unlikely to have two with the same first name. There were almost certainly more shepherds than smiths in England when surnames started becoming heritable, but the surname Shepherd is less common.
Ive heard the possibly apocryphal reason for this is that invading armies would kill or appropriate workers in other professions but keep around the trained blacksmiths working the forge and producing weapons and tools for war. Smiths survived the waves of conquerors.
There were technically invasion attempts up until the 18th century, but even discarding most of those as insignificant, we can hardly neglect the War of the Roses and Henry Tudor's (successful) invasion in 1485...
I have that surname but not for the reason that a blacksmith was in my family. My great grandparents took the name Smith at Ellis Island to Americanize themselves. I suspect this backstory is probably quite common in the US, especially amongst Irish and Italian immigrants in the late 18 to early 1900's.
Probably not; the odds are very high that the name "Smith" (or any analogue like "Kuznets") originally refers to a blacksmith. Most metalwork is ironwork.
My grandfather was a doctor in WWII and at one point traveled up through China and other places that had been heavily decimated / damaged / looted.
I remember him talking about how access to a ship (even if over long distance) with a good machine shop was critical to just get locals up and running with basic metal tools for everyday use and medical uses.
It reminded me of the importance of a local blacksmith and such.
I learned a lot about the production and manufacturing of metal (iron) items. If I recall correctly, for iron production, a lot of people are involved in obtaining the fuel (wood, ash, charcoal) and not so many blacksmiths are necessary
Maybe paying someone else to make your bread is even more luxurious. I wonder if people who ran communal ovens, where you bring your own dough ready-to-bake and then take it out after it cooks, were counted as "bakers".
Blacksmith wasn't a major job until the 1800s when industrial revolution made the job possible. In the 1800s a blacksmith should made nothing: everything was made in a factory and the blacksmith just did the final fitting or repair work. Sure they could and did do some custom decorative stuff, but only the rich could afford that.
Before then a city might have a couple in employee of the noble to make armor or swords, but the common person did without, or handed down tools until they couldn't be used at all. In a village a blacksmith was a side job of a talented farmer, but it couldn't pay the bills as nobody could afford to buy much custom made metal.
In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales there is a smith in the Miller's Tale, who worked on farming equipment: plow harness, shares, and coulters. (Unless my Middle English is more forgotten than I thought.)
Sure there were self-learners that expanded their trade to supply others for coin. However blacksmithing was certainly a skilled artisan / tradesperson role from antiquity to medieval times that operated on an apprenticeship scheme. One often had to dedicate themselves to it exclusively.
Farming tools? Wood working rools? Tools for builders? All made a blacksmith of sorts. Those making arms and armor where a highly specialized bunch.
That being said, arms manufacturing was a very well developed industry during tue middle ages. Including general contractors, cuttlers, in case of weapons that coordinated the work of the people making the blades, the handles, the scarbords and dis the heat treatment.
If anything, the classic blacksmith went into decline during yhe industrial revolution. With tools, weapons and everyday stuff being mass produced in a factory somewhere.
Weren't bladesmiths a separate profession? I was under the impression that blacksmiths were your run of the mill iron workers, especially considering that a good blade could take far longer to produce than a blacksmith might be able to devote time to.
Slapping a wedge of metal on a pole and calling it a pike could be done by anyone though, I suppose.
I think we should separate telemetry from spyware. It is not close the same. We all have telemetry is our cars, yet nobody is making any fuss about it. Even in software engineering profiling database queries or active memory is not something anew and I don't recall we had any problems with that.
I'd argue that if the telemetry is opt-out rather than opt-in it has (just _barely_) crossed the border into spyware. Sure it may not be tracking anything more than usage data, but I'd rather see a pop-up/dialog saying, "we'd like to track X, Y, and Z - we'll be using Q to identify your data. Is that okay?" And make a choice than to have that choice made for me.
What is with this idea that software has some interactive install process where I would want to be asked questions every time? Blast from the oughts! If you have to ask, the answer is 'no'.
Your software is either trustworthy, part of that being that it doesn't perform surveillance on me, another part being that it installs through well-known automation (apt, nix, etc). Or it will never become part of my trusted computing base (yes, that term is another blast from the past).
If I am forced to use it, it will end up in some isolated VM or throwaway tablet, with the minimum of access required for the functionality I need. I will consider it a second class citizen and generally deprecate it as much as possible (eg for communication apps, work to move the conversation to a different medium).
...do we all have telemetry in our cars, really? I mean, we have data that can be read via ODBII, but it's not exactly connecting via the cell network, it has to be retrieved with a plug.
I can't think of anyone I know who has a car that needs to phone home. But that's a very limited sample size, so you know. Also, I'm most likely in a different market to you, we've never had anything like OnStar make inroads here into domestic vehicles - some commercial operators are using telemetry on their trucks etc.
But rest assured, if all our cars were phoning home, I'd be making a massive fuss.
For example, an insurance company in my country has recently launched an app that will "measure" your driving and offer lower premiums if your driving is "safe" according to their algorithms. It's obviously opt-in, but at some point, the difference between a discount for opting in, and a penalty for opting out, becomes hard to differentiate.
You don't have any rights to review their algorithms if you feel that they got it wrong, it's a combination of Hail Corporate and Hail AI, and context is lost because it's impossible to capture that. E.g., does heavy braking indicate you were driving poorly, or did you encounter a situation where heavy braking was necessary, such as the damn cat down the road that thinks it's invincible deciding to make a sprint for it in front of you? Is acceleration in excess of their defined limit unsafe? Or were you accelerating more than you normally would, because someone gave you space to turn into the road and you didn't want to needlessly hold them up, given their courtesy?
And given what I've seen of the FAANG algorithms, I don't want algorithms from companies nowhere near FAANG level making decisions about me. A personal favourite of mine was FB removing a comment of mine, because my sister said she'd totally marry my wife, on account of how, well, pretty damn awesome my wife is, and I'd replied "Haha, I'll fight you" - and FB had flagged that as "hate speech/incitement to violence".
No, I don't know anyone with a Tesla. I do know people with Hondas, Beamers, Nissan Leafs, and I own two Toyotas and a Mazda.
Definitely no Chryslers, Dodges, Fiats, or Rams. They are very limited in market reach indeed in NZ, unless we're talking vintage cars, then there's a few more.
I also had the, ahem, "privilege" of owning a GM built "Toyota" previously[1]. It was... shall we say, a cacophony of interesting and bemusing engineering choices - the boot/trunk lid was incredibly heavy, yet the latch mechanism was made entirely of plastic, and to turn on the interior lights, you had to turn the dashboard brightness dial all the way up, and then a bit more, and then the interior lights would turn on. Only took me 3 months to figure that out. Admittedly, was handy for turning on the interior lights without looking away while driving, but was not at all intuitive.
Oh, I do know someone with a couple of Jeeps though, the poor bastards.
I guess you could rephrase my statement as "I don't know anyone with a car built after 2016", although as far as I can tell in NZ, Toyotas, at least, ship with telematics as an option for fleet management, rather than a default.
I guess I've lost track of your point. You were trying to suggest cars don't phone home, based on your experience and assumptions, but the fact is that nearly all major manufacturers are selling cars today with systems that phone home for various reasons, whether you're aware of it or not. How does you not knowing anyone with new cars meaningfully inform this thread? The manufacturers are becoming aware of privacy issues, and trying to make some kinds of collection and access opt-in, but basically all of them now offer some services that phone home by default and are opt-out or not optional. Hopefully that data is reasonable and private and protected... hopefully.
A lot of consumers (I would guess most) prefer to have default-on connectivity to provide services like theft protection, automatic emergency support in case of accidents, and up-to-date navigation maps, among many other modern conveniences.
"I can't think of anyone I know who has a car that needs to phone home. "
As others point out, it's almost impossible to get a new car these days that isn't connected. Anything in the last five years in particular. It's pretty disgusting and one of the reasons I'm in no hurry to own anything new. I have a '97, '02 and '10 and they all work quite well for me and I intend to run them into the ground. And if I'm diligent they should last me until I am no longer fit to drive.
Yeah, I think that's more likely the case - I don't know anyone with a car younger than 2016. My three vehicles are 2005, 2006 and 2008, and they're all sauntering along with nearly 300,000 km on them each. God bless Japanese engineering.
In NZ we tend to buy used Japanese imports because they're so damn cheap (IIRC, Japan has very strict rules about the age of a car for pollution control purposes, so they get shipped off to Australia and us after hitting that age limit, and we don't charge tariffs, unlike the Aussies), most people here would be lucky to buy a new car once or twice in their life.
Unless you go the usual route and start a building company, tick up a new Ford Ranger on the company's credit, transfer ownership to your spouse/partner, and then go into liquidation leaving behind devastated people who were trying to build their first home - and subcontractors who really need the $12k you owe them.
> ...do we all have telemetry in our cars, really? I mean, we have data that can be read via ODBII, but it's not exactly connecting via the cell network, it has to be retrieved with a plug.
Nissans do, my Leaf does. They connect to a mobile network or WiFi and upload data.
Yup. My Nissan gives me a monthly nag screen to accept terms in order to use my navigation map and audio system. The car has its own 4G connection (I don’t pay anything, it’s not usable to me) in order to download traffic data, send telemetry home, and I believe SiriusXM radio.
I've been driving EVs for the past 10 years (LEAF -> Model X -> I-PACE) during which time I haven't used a gas pump. After reading your comment I had to go searching for this thing about ads playing while you're filling up. I found this Reddit post about being forced to watch ads before being allowed to even start the pump!
Yeah, I'm unsurprised a Leaf does. I also remember that Nissan had a security hole back in 2016 that meant that a bad actor could drain your Leaf's battery with only a VIN.
It's definitely the way the industry wants to go - I mean, free data, why not? Bit like the FAANGs, dress up the data collection with some features people want.
Might just be a case that no-one I know owns a late model car :D We're big on older Japanese imports in NZ, god bless our lack of tariffs. Although RIP our local car manufacturing industry, god bless neoliberalism.
We all have telemetry is our cars, yet nobody is making any fuss about it.
That is very much not true, on both counts.
There is a lot of nuance in this area.
Monitoring how well your own systems are working and how they're being used is one thing. It's obviously reasonable and necessary for a variety of practical reasons.
Monitoring how someone else's systems are being used, even if they happen to be running some of your software or incorporate some equipment you made, is something else. If you're no longer responsible for those systems and ownership has been handed over, including remote access or phone-home functionality means crossing some lines that maybe shouldn't be crossed, particularly not without the full knowledge and genuine consent of the person whose system you are communicating with.
> We all have telemetry is our cars, yet nobody is making any fuss about it
This is like saying nobody cared about mass surveillance before Snowden. The problem is apparent, but the realization isn't evenly distributed.
The only difference between this Lua server and other Software Augmented with Additional Surveillance (SaaS) is your trust. You apparently trust them to not sell the data trove to a surveillance company (or to a VC who eventually will), but I see no reason to. Heck, I've been answering no to popcon for over a decade now, even though Debian is outstandingly trustworthy.
Even Backblaze, a company whose core product is securely storing your data, just recently suffered from an in house attack - apparently their security team didn't foresee the need to protect against javascript injection by their own marketing stooges. When data is there for the taking, most people cannot restrain themselves - the problem is endemic. The only solution is to assure the privacy of data, through means such as Free software, E2E encryption, and not collecting it in the first place.
> We all have telemetry is our cars, yet nobody is making any fuss about it.
I sure as hell am making a fuss about it, which is exactly why I drive a car that's old enough to vote (and pretty soon will be old enough to drink, smoke, and/or buy a handgun in California).
Neither is Croatia.
However, it is usually much easier / faster to enter Schengen from Croatia (which is part of European Union) or Ireland or UK then from, e.g., Ukraine.
Also, in airports there is usually "more-relaxed" EEU line to get into any European union country (+ some other like UK and Switzerland), no matter is it in Schengen or not.
Disclaimer: I'm living in Croatia.
I am from the EU too. I was just wondering what the advantages of the UK/Ireland are in getting from a non-Schengen island to the continent as opposed to some other non-Schengen countries with no land connection. There are separate airport gates for Schengen and non-Schengen destinations. Had no such doubts about Croatia but thanks for the comment!
The point is that those countries are not “high-risk”, and also have easy/cheap/fast access to Schengen, so they make a good “entry point”. Fly from your “high-risk” country to Croatia/UK/Ireland, then enter Schengen from there.
You still need time based planning. You can't go to client and say it will take 500 points to finish the project. You also can't bill story points.
Yes, after some time velocity will enable you to easily convert points to time, but in real world when customer is de facto product owner and team size is in constant flux depending on each customer wishes, you need experience engineer to give you ballpark value how long something will take long before the coding even starts.
AWS, Azure, GC are at least written with thought about end users (us, developers) while government cloud was architectured, designed and built by the lowest bidder whose first goal was to cut and cut and cut his costs whenever possible.