There was a very simple phone from Samsung a few years back that had a solar cell on the back.

Since the battery lasted over a week anyway, you could easily double the battery life by just having it in indirect light.

Modern phones are guzzling so much power that it’s hardly useful there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Nope, 65th place, slightly behind the US and the country of old men: Albania.

It’s the same in China.

And who does that?

I think you don’t really get my point. I’m not arguing that there are no ways to archive data. I’m arguing that there are no technologies available for average Joe.

It is hardly a good strategy to basically set up half a datacenter at home.

Thin concrete slabs are extremely brittle.

Is it? It’s rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?

You’d have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That’s not really low complexity.

But what actually is “archival”?

Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?

Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.

It’s usually not a question of legality, but efficiency.

It’s easy and efficient to bust someone for seeding, but busting hundreds for the odd file you can prove they downloaded is expensive and takes forever.

Yeah, I’d argue that being a war criminal is kind of against the spirit of almost every constitution.

Mostly cotton.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

To be fair, a lot of roles simply disappeared over the years.

Developers today are much more productive than 30 years ago, mostly because someone automated the boring parts away.

A modern developer can spin up a simple crud app including infrastructure in a day or so. That’s much much more productive than 1995. We just cram a lot more of the world into software, so we need 20x the amount of developers we needed back then.

It’s really weird, though, that nobody really created a language/tool to bridge these two world. It’s always just generating one representation from the other, mostly in a bad way.

I’d argue, that for many problems, a graphical view of the system can help reasoning. But there simply is nothing in that regard.

and I could make a death ray out of my home wifi box and a wok.

I mean, you could. Do you happen to have a small nuclear reactor and about 400l of liquid helium?

It’s absolutely not inherently wrong or implausible to assume that the constant and rather direct exposure over decades causes cancer.

Old timey radio operators definitely died earlier. They had much higher cancer rates. Granted, completely different levels of radiation, but radiation damage is stochastic. If there is an effect at all, it will cause thousands of new cases even low doses simply because we have like 7 billion phone users.

Doing proper studies on that is hard, but absolutely necessary.

Well, obviously, you just have to put a sticker with a geometric pattern on it to turn the bad radiation into good radiation!

(I wish that was a joke, but you can actually buy those)

One of our customers does that. It happened multiple times already that one dev fixed an issue in production, and the next regular deployment overwrote everything.

But fortunately, it’s just critical infrastructure and nothing important.

What really bothers me is that rpi seems to have “lost its way”.

I’d argue, there are essentially two camps here. The close-to-x86 camp, who want powerful, but efficient small machines, and the tinker-board camp, who want cheap machines with barely any power needs, basically a microcontroller on steroids, that you can buy an entire school class worth of for a few bucks.

Rpis started in the latter camp. 35€ for reasonable performance, great software for kids to tinker with, hardly any requirements, everyone has a usb mouse/keyboard.

But nowadays pis are in the no man’s land between. They’re priced above cheap N100 PCs, but are not as powerful, and simultaneously way too expensive and involved for throwing them at children - like it was initially intended.

I’m not sure, how that’s supposed to be sustainable.