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I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
321–330 of 501 posts
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#322The first part of this blog really resonated with me. Stuff is bad, fascism is on the rise, mega corporations control more and more wealth, those two things feed on each other, book banning in the US, war in Ukraine, my country is burning due to global warming, ... and all of this bad news damages the psyche. I've been thinking of how I can help, that I should stop reading so much negative news, for my own mental hea…
> Stuff is bad, fascism is on the rise, mega corporations control more and more wealth, those two things feed on each other, book banning in the US, war in Ukraine, my country is burning due to global warming, ... and all of this bad news damages the psyche. Turn off the news. We are living in unprecedentedly peaceful and prosperous times, and it's only getting better day by day. That is a fact. If you feel otherwise…
What's a fact? It sounds like you're evangelizing willful ignorance and hedonic helplessness, while blindly accepting multinational corporate authoritarianism but shirking any responsibility because closing our eyes makes us feel better.
Peace in Europe is shattered. The former President of the United States has been indicted for attempting to overturn an election. R&D on the killer robots + AI from RoboCop and Terminator is nearing completion, almost ready to go into production. Full 1984-style surveillance totalitarianism has been rolled out in occupied China and is at the pilot stage in most western countries.
According to the SlaveVoyages project, almost 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries:
https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates
Today, 50 million people live in slavery, according to the Walk Free Foundation:
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/globa...
Are those sources "not based in reality"?
Can you find any chocolate bars that aren't made from cocoa beans harvested by child slaves in west Africa? (Only ones I've found: https://manoachocolate.com)
Are you saying U.S. police officers extrajudicially executing more Americans in 2019 than mass shooters murdered is something pushed by the "mainstream news"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...
The Bank of England reporting that real wage growth in the 2010s was back to the slowest since the 19th century, that's "getting better day by day"?
https://web.archive.org/web/20161206225850/http://www.bankof...
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#323[dead]
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
-"I'm building a hot rod!" -"Why wouldn't you just go hang out on the factory line at Ford instead?"
The difference is instead of buying parts to build the hotrod you instead start by making an iron mine. If you want to make something custom you don't need to start from scratch.
I don't think he plans to build his own processors and write it in machine code.
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I get angry about not being able to do anything about anything. And this is my way of trying to do something about it. It's the best I can do. This attitude is gold, and it's what changes the whole world. What you said about the misery of "news" resonates with me. In psyops we call it "sapping". Propaganda designed to demoralise, dispirit and corrode resistance used to come from our enemies . The classic example wa…
>> As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. Do you think this is why people are abandoning the GPL license in favor of MIT/BSD? Something about the fight the GPL aims to win being a hopeless fantasy? In the face of the sentiment you and OP express, I'd think GPL usage would be widespread.
I choose MIT as my default license, because I don't like it when the license is longer and/or harder to understand than the program itself. Simplicity is underrated in software development; there's so much you can do with less.
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#326OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with…
I wish more people gave a shot at browser implementations. You see a lot of comments that this in a herculean task, and maybe it is, but it's not _that_ bad. You don't have to implement all of the functionality of modern web browsers. You don't need battery APIs, game controller APIs, USB, etc. Focus on what is important - HTML, CSS, JS. Worst case scenario - you will learn something new. Best of luck on this project…
I wrote my own engine 15 years ago, when web was much much much simple.
It’s a Herculean task. What’s important - HTML, CSS, JS are highly complicated, even if you exclude other APIs.
It’s really cool pet project. But don’t expect anything usable as a result.
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> As you do, I find the discourse around tech to be a pit of dismissiveness, avoidance, denial, resignation, and learned-helplessness. Do you think this is why people are abandoning the GPL license in favor of MIT/BSD? Something about the fight the GPL aims to win being a hopeless fantasy? In the face of the sentiment you and OP express, I'd think GPL usage would be widespread.
Copyleft was a good idea, but its real world utility is a lot less than anyone would like. I once inherited a GPL project, but I couldn't muster any community interest in working with it. Plugin authors would have been compelled to use GPL and no one seemed interested. We had to burn the project to the ground and start over with a new MIT licensed project. Now there's a flourishing community of plugin authors working…
I don't think that's the fault of the license, its the fault of the world going in a less free direction.
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#328OP, love it. This is the spirit that makes change.
I’m sure it will batter your brain and crush your soul as these large projects tend to do, but declaring war on a problem and then getting featured on HN doing so is old school hacker and you deserve street cred for it.
Congratulations on your new baby. Can’t wait to see what college you choose! ;)
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#329It doesn't matter whether the author's browser succeeds or not.
What matters is that this project gives the author a meaningful sense of agency in the world and we all need that in order to be psychologically healthy.
Humans were not meant to sit passively consuming media that makes us feel bad all day. We're animals and animals live by doing.
Re: I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
#330OP here. Thanks for the pos/neg/neutral comments everybody. Some remarks: Yes, there are a lot of browsers out there where I can contribute to which would be more efficient. But that would result in just a few browsers instead of a lot of browsers. I'm all for the last one, as this would give people options. This IS a pet project. I never told anyone otherwise. I would start writing it even when I wasn't fed up with…
I don't know why Linus is trying to write a new OS, we already have OSes. It's not like this Linux thing is going to go anywhere.
It’s like saying “Zuckerberg and Gates dropped out of school so why shouldn’t I?”.
Chances of replicating Linux success are as big as chances of being next Zuckerberg.
Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but align your expectations.
And most importantly, as OP said - it’s pet project. Success isn’t a goal.