In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most “alternative browsers” do - tweaking or repackaging.

These days, a browser is like it’s own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.

I’d say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.

So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop “apps”.

I did that for 3 years. Funny how it seems to be a universal experience. Confirms to me how it’s pretty much the same, regardless of project, funding or scientific area.

For me it was a bit heartbreaking to see, because I loved the idea of writing software for research. But the reality was that academia simply does not have the right structures to support serious and sustainable software development and until that changes, it feels more like a thankless “bullshit job”.

You simply can’t run software development in such a opportunistic and chaotic way like scientists do their research and write papers.

Nice! That also needs some reasonably good management to see your skills and talents.

Can totally see why you might not like roles “above”. There’s always some point where you stop solving the kind of problems you find interesting and have more bullshit to fight than it would be worth.

Like my team lead wisely said, “never become a team lead”, and I’m absolutely not interested, seeing all the crap he has to out up with, manage and firefight (I’m happy he does it while I can stay pretty relaxed and keep doing all the fun stuff).

That sounds pretty cool, I could imagine myself doing that.

How did you get into such a role? Is it some kind of consultancy?

My last job was: PowerPoint presentation and poster designer, educator, communicator and mind reader.

Tried to be software developer in science, turns out that I had to spend much more time promoting whatever little coding I do to interested parties, and creating software based on guesses what they could need and what the right thing probably should be.

It was a mess, for many reasons.

Now I’m an actual software architect and engineer.

As a metaphor, somewhere between apprentice dark magician (when sprinkling in some fancy things not many others would be able to do), gardener (need to clean up a lot of weeds, tidy up and revitalize the decomposing codebase, trim some rotten code branches) and strategist (when conceptually working on the mid and long-term planning and high level goals).

For me it was more like:

Ages 11-16: unaware sad cringe

Ages 17-24: learning to hide it

Ages 25-27: reaching achievement mountain, followed by

Age 28: quarter life crisis valley and the realization

Ages 29-now: unlearning to hide it and actually feeling good

Life is a beautiful journey. Just need to look with the right eyes.

Sounds like the teaser for “CommieNet: The Nerds Strike Back”, but on a serious note, I think you are right.

In some sense, digital resources are non-scarce resources, they can be copied and multiplied. There is no capitalistic pressure innate to information, not in the way we consider other resources to be scarce.

But such a digital utopia still would have costs for hosting the content and it would need to stay afloat in the profit-oriented world with finite resources and hard costs for running servers. So it would have to be donation based, or subscription based. Ironically, inside it would have to be strict about prohibiting anything that is effectively monetizing anything that happens inside.

And someone would get the money earned from these subscriptions or fees and this would necessarily end up being some non-profit organization which would have to be somehow community driven, and would decide what is accepted in the space it has to take care of.

But this sounds like a kind of internal governance, like a whole state, a body of rules, that exists within the community of everyone participating in that special network. This council would have responsibility to prevent corruption on the network and at the same time prevent it’s own corruption.

I could go on, but I guess it’s pretty clear that creating a uncorruptible social space is exactly the same problem as creating an uncorruptible truly democratic society. If you figure this out for an internet platform, you have figured it out for the real world.

So I guess it’s not gonna happen ever. It goes always like this - something nice grows, at some point it starts to rot, implodes, from the ashes something new can emerge, rinse and repeat. Just humans being humans.

Great, thanks a lot! Before possibly wasting time trying something unrealistic, I just wanted some affirmation by someone with experience that this is in fact feasible with a bit more research!

Also good to know that compost acts as a pH buffer, I’ve read that there are special buffering solutions to apply to coco coir, but if I go the compost-enriched route it’s one less variable to control and manage.

Maybe you have an answer to what non-professionals can’t really help with, I tried to ask it here in the thread and got no satisfactory reply so far.

Let’s say I have some substrate, let’s assume I got drainage, oxygen etc. all dialed in a good range. And let’s assume that I would like to work more with “conventional” mineral fertilizers mostly.

Is there reliable information about how much and when and how often to fertilize some plant and with which nutrients? Because that seems to be the most difficult thing to get right and learn.

Is it really that vendor-dependent? I would guess the fertilizer “formulas” are another marketing scam to convince people to stay with a brand they are used to, and if you know what you are doing you could combine mineral fertilizers of arbitrary brands and figure out the right dosage for some specific plant at a specific point of its life.

If this is really not as simple (because there’s more to fertilization than NPK and pH, I get it), then fertilizer bottles are ultimately as much of a black box as the diverse microbes in working in the soil.

But I was hoping with mineral fertilizers you can really know what is going on and why, and that this must be something learnable without getting a degree in biochemistry and without just paint-by-numbers vendor specific instructions.

Like, I know there are the tables of ranges of nutrient uptake dependent on pH, which gives rise to the “slightly acidic substrate with pH 5-6” guideline.

Now I wish there was like a table showing for different plant per development stage how much of what it needs and maybe some info on how to calculate fertilization based on a random bottle I have, maybe mixing it with some other stuff, if the balance is too far off either by calculation or I see that the plant is missing something.

Or like, I know light green leaves in new growth are likely a nitrogen deficit. Are there some universal cues you can use to diagnose a plant? I guess this is where deeper plant physiology and pathology knowledge is probably needed…

Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.

There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.

I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.

Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of “engagement” into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.

Remember when “Homepage” was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it’s their Instagram profile, or something like that.

Congratulations, you made it big on Mastodon! Teach me your ways.

Congratulations!

I also created a little AUR package or two or manually fixed some broken PKGBUILDs sporadically, and yeah it’s something you can figure out in a day when you have a little bit of understanding of the command line overall.

Arch AUR is really a nice sweet spot between power and convenience.

My boss at work is using Gentoo. I guess that’s why he’s my boss. No, but seriously, the Gentoo build system sounds much more complex. Yes, you can control compilation flags and tweak every package up to absurd details, but I’m willing to sacrifice the few percent of performance.

Whereas, AUR is simple enough to be used by ADHD folks like us :D If it’s more work than a weekend project, I don’t care about it. I know I will most likely give up on it if I don’t need it to survive.

This is the way.

“understand all the bits and pieces so I can cut through all the bullshit” -> that’s exactly what I was hoping to do.

Do you have some reading recommendation? You know, like in every area there’s this one book or two you’d give a beginner to learn the most important things right from the start, and the rest is details you can fill in and refine later ? In another comment I got some book recommendations, don’t know what you think about them.

Contrary to a different commenter, who advised not to mix soil and non-soil, you seem not to have any issues with fertilizing with mineral NPK fertilizer on soil?

I also did that before without second thought, but I got warned that it kind of leaves the microbes in the soil/compost starving or something. I guess that would matter only if you try to do “living soil” or something, and otherwise the worst thing that happens is the microbial life in the soil dies off and I just have depleted substrate (with possibly molecules holding NPK in locked form that cannot be released without the microbes) that I can fertilize with mineral fertilizer without any issue, is this correct ?

And thanks for replying :)

Nice, your “ratio” I also figured out as being a good baseline. Mixing down too THC-rich weed with pure CBD buds, and trying to grow hybrid / well balanced strains after I figured out that too much THC is the problem.

Just still looking for nice upper/downer strains, according to common wisdom is seems that different terpene concentrations affect the high. I’m kind of looking for a chill/wind down/muscle relaxation strain and one motivation/productivity strain. But maybe it’s just bro science and it all does not matter to much, except for placebo effect, no idea.

That sucks, but you can put some isolation tape on LEDs.

But I wish something horrible to those who thought it’s a great idea to make every goddamn electronic device make beeping noises.

My water boiler, fan, washing machine. In my childhood I don’t remember everything beeping at every interaction. It makes me furious and you often cannot fully disable it.

Once I tried to solder the beeper out but my soldering iron was probably not suitable so I failed :(

I thought compost is supposed to be microbiologically active and fertilization is produced and released by microbial activity, while mineral fertilizers are more typical for hydroponic setups and do not rely on any biological activity, why not buffer nutes directly in the coco? I thought they built up salts over time? Now I’m confused.

What kind of approach are your recommendations based on? It sounds like neither the typical information for soil growing nor like hydroponics, but you do include some organic material in your mix and still fertilize with mineral fertilizers?

Concerning the additives, I thought the point of vernaculite was that it’s porous and was intended to actually keep the water longer, and for pure drainage you would use something else. I already noticed that coco coir also dries pretty quickly and wondered if with these additions it would behave more like soil in how long and how much water it can hold. You do not seem to be fond of them.

What do you recommend to read that explains your perspective? It seems not to fit in any “growing concept” I can recognize, so I’m curious.

Good to know about reusing soil, I always thought it’s wasteful and inconvenient to throw it away and in an actual garden nobody would do that. So I am also definitely going to try reusing soil I use in the pots, just bought a sieve to simplify the process of removing roots etc. from used soil.

Only 5% compost ? I don’t know how dense compost is, but typical suggested DIY mixes use more like 1/4-1/2 compost, by volume.

I was planning to do 1/3 coir for the loose structure, 1/3 of some perlite or similar, to hold water better, and 1/3 compost for initial nutrients, and then see how it behaves and adjust.

Would you recommend to use other proportions? I was going to experiment with the perlite percentage and see how it behaves with respect to watering etc. But with compost I really don’t know how I would even estimate how much I need to add so that a plant has enough “food” from seedling up to the first weeks of growth.

Would adding more compost to the mix simply extend the “nutrient store” for longer? I’ve read that you cannot so easily over-fertilize with compost / organic fertilizers, so I guess it’s then more about price/availability?

Is it cheaper or simpler to have less compost and more of that (I guess solid) slow release fertilizer, is that why 5% is enough?

That does sound very convenient. If I could mix some soil with slow release fertilizer and it would last the whole season, that sounds pretty awesome. I guess it’s released due to repeated watering? Or is it decomposing and releasing at its own pace? Like, do I have to worry about releasing too much if I water too much?

The most “outdoor” I have is the balcony, so it will be a pot- and box-based little garden (some that will be permanently outside and some more movable).

Thanks for the tips! Good point, I also maybe should not overthink or over-engineer it. I’m a software engineer so maybe I approach this way too analytical :D

I managed to be 10 years on reddit in niche hobby and nerd communities and it feels like I lived in some parallel reddit all the time, reading about how toxic and broken it is supposed to be.

Same with YouTube. There are nice channels with less than 100k Views per Video or even just a fraction of it, producing amazing informative videos.

Gotta find the gems in the dirt.

I have a nagging feeling the platform is not or only a part of the problem, but collective human nature is. When enough people join a platform to be a representative sample, you get the representative shittiness of the literally median person on the internet.