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Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

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Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#301

I came here for a technical discussion about Fuchsia and it's microkernel approach instead this is mostly fill with complains about Google as a company. Is there a social justice forum I can visit where I may be able to have a technical discussion about Fuchsia?

Hacker News is still the best place for such discussions. There's just a lot of low-effort noise from people who force every topic to conform to their existing knowledge areas.

> Hacker News is still the best place for such discussions

In general it is, but I too have noticed this trend more specifically in Google-related threads. Most other subjects don't suffer from this as much, but almost every Google one devolves into jokes about when X will be canceled.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually had a really positive experience using a smart thermostat. The main benefit is having a temperature schedule, which my previous dumb thermostat didn't have. It's also handy being able to adjust the temperature from my phone whenever I'd like to. I find controlling it by voice kind of pointless. On the phone, you can easily see what it's currently at, then adjust it for the next e.g. hour, after which it…

You don’t really need anything “smart” for this. This is basically simple remote with timer. My $50 thermostat has adjustable schedule with override capability. No machine learning needed. The only thing that’s missing is the phone capability but I think that would be easy to add.

Totally agree. I still don’t get the appeal of “smart” whatevers.

> No machine learning needed

Now this reminded me of the windows 10 update announcement proudly declaring that they were going to start using ‘machine learning’ to figure out if you were using your computer to minimise the disruption from their automatic updating. I’m still baffled by it. Why not solve the actual problem at hand - updates being really slow, risky/buggy, settings altering, and very disruptive even when scheduled, and users not having enough control over updating? I’m pretty sure ‘machine learning’ isn’t needed to determine whether a computer is being used.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#303
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually had a really positive experience using a smart thermostat. The main benefit is having a temperature schedule, which my previous dumb thermostat didn't have. It's also handy being able to adjust the temperature from my phone whenever I'd like to. I find controlling it by voice kind of pointless. On the phone, you can easily see what it's currently at, then adjust it for the next e.g. hour, after which it…

I agree being able to change the temperature settings from a phone would be convenient, but they've had "smartish" thermostats capable of relatively complex temperature schedules for at least 20 years. No need for an internet connection or mega corp data collections.

can smartish ones detect when you leave home and turn down the heat until you get back? My nest can. This is great because my schedule is not the same every day.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm curled up comfortably with my SO, and don't want to take ten minutes of unwinding, doing whatever, then tucking back up together...

It seems like in that case a remote control could be placed nearby -- are you also using voice activated code words to control the television ?

> are you also using voice activated code words to control the television ?

I happen to have backed a Kickstarter that will hopefully enable me to do just that ;)

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rhasspy is an easy to use open source, fully offline, suite for this with wake word detection and integration with home assistant.

I've never understood the desire to control systems by speaking to them in code words. Speaking monopolizes a shared channel, requires diverting your conversation, and is really slow. For practically anything that involves using code words to tell the computer what to do there are better input methods, like physical switches, or purely automated. This is slightly off-topic, but in your opinion what are some of the re…

1. Hands are dirty/unavailable (like other mentioned cooking) 2. The physical controls are physically across the room 3. The physical controls can't be located easily (lost remote, dark room)

Another point, the cognitive load of speaking a command is different than pecking through menus on a phone or finding the right button on the remote/device. It may be easier to just speak out load depending on your state if mind.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#307
The badbadbad part is that this won't be open, and it'll force adoption of restricted hardware that will no longer be usable by the AOSP. Prolly 5 years out, but still; pour one out for unlocked Android-compatible hardware at any price. Gonna hafta go full tinfoil hat and get a PinePhone.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#308
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And get some motion detectors. Your lights should come on when someone enters the room and the light is below a threshold. I usually hit the off switch by the door when I leave, otherwise if no one is present the lack of movement will dim and then turn the lights off. It's 2021 people!

Do you not move when you're asleep?

Don't use the motion detection/automatic in bedrooms.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you say something, how the kernel is different from linux for example? Why would I want to choose Fuchsia for a smartphone, for example. Where is the advantage?

The key concepts are documented here: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts Some things that Fuchsia was able to do thanks to starting from scratch: - The system is based on capabilities, a security model which is based on explicit tracking of permissions. It wouldn't be possible to change Linux to be capability-based because the ambiant-authority model has been used pervasively since it was conceived 30 years ago…

- Fuchsia provides a stable binary interface (like Windows, but unlike Linux).

Does it?

Fuchsia is a brand new OS, at least from the perspective of the world. One reason my interest in it died quite early on, despite being an aficionado of new operating system designs my entire life, was finding stuff like this in the docs:

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/components/v2/mi...

It's brand new and there are already migration guides for core parts of the design. Also:

https://fuchsia.dev/s/results?q=deprecated

That's a lot of deprecated stuff for a project that started with a blank slate.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#310

I came here for a technical discussion about Fuchsia and it's microkernel approach instead this is mostly fill with complains about Google as a company. Is there a social justice forum I can visit where I may be able to have a technical discussion about Fuchsia?

I think the cause of this phenomenon is that most HN readers are not qualified to comment on Fuchsia, are ignorant of any and all facts about it, but are also compelled to comment. So you get this thread, and most threads here. Actual technical exchange between people who are both not obviously wrong is rare here.

I disagree, I think the state of this discussion thread is about what should be expected given what Fuchsia is and how the project is run.

Firstly, there is little technical discussion of Fuchsia here because there's actually very little to discuss. Fuchsia is, design wise, a pretty ordinary operating system differentiated from Linux mostly by using a microkernel. If you've ever looked at SEL4 then you've got the gist of what's going on here. I'm not aware of any obvious ways Zircon differs from any other microkernel design. Like all such systems it has an inter-component RPC layer (called FIDL) which if you've ever used the Android Binder will look familiar. And it's got a component system. In some ways these upper layers are reminiscent of COM and the whole OS has a bit of a Windows NT 3.1 architectural vibe. That's about all there is to say on the matter.

Fuschia is an oddly unambitious platform. Here's a representative quote from the docs:

"There is no concept of inter-package dependencies because transitive dependency closures have unbounded resolution time"

This statement is technically correct but practically incorrect: when users complain about dependency resolving package managers, they are complaining about out of date packages, broken dependency graphs, centralized repositories and other things. The fact that dependency resolution can be NP-complete in artificially constructed worst case scenarios never comes up because in the real world, dependency resolution takes a few seconds and the problems surface elsewhere. But they found an excuse to avoid doing anything hard or new in the world of software distribution, so they took it.

Elsewhere people promote its ABI stability compared to Linux. Maybe, but this is Google we're talking about. Constantly obsoleting stuff is literally built into their incentive structures, so we should double check that right?

https://fuchsia.dev/s/results?q=deprecated

120 results for deprecated already! Nobody even uses this OS yet and they already changed their mind about APIs all over the place.

The same lack of ambition is visible if we look at the Architectural Principles section of their site. Their principles are: "Secure, Updatable, Inclusive, Pragmatic". That's it. "Secure because capabilities" is a very old discussion with not much to add, and the rest is vague or just not that interesting.

Those principles brings us to the final reason the HN discussion is so lacking in technical depth.

The OP complains that the discussion here is all about politics and wonders in jest if there's a social justice forum where they might find technical discussion of the project. Amusingly the OP's wish is easily satisfied by the Fuschia website itself. Fuschia is by far and away the most ideologically biased operating system project you will have ever had the misfortune to encounter. It is something the world has never seen before, an entire operating system controlled by the hard left. Every single page in the docs has a giant banner across the top saying "Google is committed to advancing racial equity for Black communities". Note the demand for equity, not equal opportunity. Classical liberalism is dead here, tokenism is in. Of only 4 so-called architectural principles one of them is "Inclusive". They make a brave effort to pretend this is actually about technology by claiming that being just a microkernel+RPC is inclusive because they don't provide any language runtimes for the users (i.e. spinning missing features as a form of moral purity). Then it all falls apart and they go back to talking reducing harm and bias via language control - another tenet of hard left thinking.

So let's imagine we're looking for something better, fresher, bolder than Linux, macOS or Windows. We look at Fuschia. What we see is an extremely conservative OS design in which the most modern ideas in it pre-date Linux itself. We see an overwhelmingly political project, run by a company that has in the last year been systematically erasing from its platform crazy wack-jobs like, er, doctors and professors simply because they disagreed with the WHO. And we see that there's no discussion, anywhere, of any features that end users might actually care about.

That's why there's no discussion of technology in this thread.

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