The Unsolvable Mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsolvable-mysteries-of-the-voynich-manuscript? <comment><USER3> Skimmed the article to see if it had been mentioned but from what I could see it wasn't. Stephen Bax, Professor in Applied Linguistics University of Bedfordshire:

 _Through analysis of a number of illustrations in the manuscript, including one constellation (Taurus) and seven plants, then drawing on European and Middle Eastern mediaeval manuscripts and contemporary nomenclature, the paper proposes the identification of a set of proper names in the Voynich text, giving a total of ten words made up of fourteen of the Voynich symbols and clusters. The resulting scheme is set out in Appendix 1 (page 56) of the paper. The aim of the paper is to attempt to lay the groundwork for an eventual full decoding and complete decipherment of this fascinating document.

The evidence shows that the manuscript is not a hoax, and is probably an explanatory treatise on nature. The script was possibly devised to encode a previously unwritten language or dialect, perhaps by a small community which later died out or disappeared._

The paper (PDF): [http://stephenbax.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Voynich- a-p...](http://stephenbax.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Voynich-a- provisional-partial-decoding-BAX.pdf)

The video, 47m-11s: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpZD_3D8_WQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpZD_3D8_WQ)

<comment><USER4> [http://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/21/stephen-bax-voynich- ma...](http://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/21/stephen-bax-voynich-manuscript) is critical of the approach taken by Stehen Bax.

<comment><USER5> This critique seems harsh, maybe dismissive, but it has some merit (then again I don't know much about the VM)

All the gallows pointing at the same letter is indeed something problematic and that the other video pointed in this thread come to the same conclusion (that is, they mean different things)

His point 6 is addressed by the other video pointed in this page (basically the repeated letters should have an 'r' between them)

Point 1/3 might be fair, 2 is just nitpicking, 7 might be an issue but then this is not looking at a picture of a plant, but rather a bad illustration

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For some recent information (mid/late 2016) on applying linguistic methodology to the Voynich Manuscript, see this two part video.

It's really great to see how much progress the community has made.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ)

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4)

<comment><USER7> Wow, thanks so much! End of part 2 is so amazing :). Looks like I can wait for the translated version before I buy a print :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great example for the RPG Call of Cthulhu.

It is an ancient text, written in an unknown language. It appears to have some relationship with our world, because there are plants from earth, but there are also... different plants. Or are they different? It's hard to tell - <USER2> might be fooled by the style of illustration, but there might be something wrong about some of these plants in a very strange way.

And you can kinda guess the meaning of some of the words based on their relationship with the images, something must be connected to the sunflower, something must be connected to that nightshade. But who knows fully?

And thus, it takes months and months to dig through some of the old text, the texts the cultists read so freely. Months of relating to other, equally or more obscure texts, months of lying in bed without sleep until an idea pops into your head. That's why reading old occult texts is hard.

Yes, I love lovecrafts work and that RPG.

<comment><USER9> >> That's why reading old occult texts is hard.

Hard, and it also costs Sanity, let's not forget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If the language is fake, enough special attention was paid to constructing it to look real _enough_ in the present day to still attract analysis. If it's real, it hasn't ever been turned into anything meaningful. Either outcome is incredible.

It's a fun problem. Any angle you attack it at seems to just lead to more questions and dead ends (with some WTFs thrown in).

<comment><USER6> Well, it seems taking a principled approach helps avoid the WTFs :)

Please see my other comment for informative video links reviewing recent work by community collaborators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recommend having a look though the Codex Seraphinianus which is an artwork inspired by the manuscript. It has an incredibly alien feel.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it is a work of beauty. Find some references here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus)

Luigi Serafini thinks that the Voynich is as "invented" as his own work:

[https://www.wired.com/2013/10/codex-seraphinianus- interview/](https://www.wired.com/2013/10/codex-seraphinianus-interview/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know how much the idea is accepted within the community, but for me the most probable case seems to be some guy writing half truth (real plants, constellations), half fiction (imaginary plants and mechanisms) with either made up or intentionally very unknown, even at the time of writing language, script as a hobby/work. The illustrations, even the strange ones, fit the art style of the time pretty well, and if there were people willing to buy things like that, why not make it?

Seems perfectly reasonable course of action to produce it, only thing that's strange is that there aren't more these kind of scripts. Or there are, we just haven't heard of them because they were either in known languages, or deciphered?

</comment><comment><USER14> Mandatory XKCD: [1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/593/](https://xkcd.com/593/)

<comment><USER15> If a new edition of the Manuscript is ever published, they need to add this XKCD as a forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Related discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084229)

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a reason in an American publication to use metric measurements, especially for a book that is about the standard size of 6x9 inches?

<comment><USER18> Well, perhaps the New Yorker knows it attracts a multinational readership, and perhaps it also is aware that the rest of the world tends to view the US customary system of weights and measures as rather silly.

<comment><USER19> > The manuscript is two hundred and twenty-five millimetres tall, a hundred > and sixty wide, and five centimetres thick.

"met_re_s" in an American publication?

In this case, it's obviously just the New Yorker spelling out words and mixing scales just to increase word count/diversity to give the article a more mysterious pseudo-intellectual feel, as is the style of the magazine. The New Yorker spins articles through a thesaurus before publication.

See also

> ineluctable

Considering that the venerated New Yorker(!) is blogspamming a Reddit(!) thread, they needed to do something to distinguish themselves from BuzzFeed.

<comment><USER18> >The New Yorker spins articles through a thesaurus before publication.

Perhaps, but there's a reason for the French saying " _le mot juste_ ": Synonyms aren't actually words that have the same meaning. They are words that have similar, related meanings but don't actually connote the same thing.

What should they have chosen instead of "ineluctable"? Irresistable? Inevitable? Those words don't really carry the same meaning for me.

Precision in language (spoken, written, programming, or otherwise) is a beautiful thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dissecting the NVIDIA Volta GPU Architecture via Microbenchmarking - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.06826 <comment><USER2> I believe the results were presented at GTC this year, and they said the paper (this) was to follow.

edit: Here is the talk: [http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2018/video/S8122/](http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2018/video/S8122/)

and slides: [http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2018/presentation/s8122...](http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2018/presentation/s8122-dissecting-the-volta-gpu- architecture-through-microbenchmarking.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Instead of NVidia just documenting their uarch, third parties reverse engineer it and present it at... NVidia's conference.

<comment><USER4> Papers like this have been written for older GPU architectures and it is disappointing to even have the need for them. That such a paper was presented at a manufacturer's conference is icing on the irony cake.

My underdeveloped tinfoil hat speaks that they want to acknowledge the reverse engineering methods involved and are secretly hoping that they get applied to the competition, too, so they can extract the competitor's secrets from a public source instead of ending up in a reverse engineering grey area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most interesting is who published this (Citadel, LLC)

<comment><USER6> And who are they?

<comment><USER7> One of the largest US hedge funds.

<comment><USER8> GPGPUs and CUDA have been used for predictive financial analysis for some time now, haven't they?

<comment><USER9> A hedge fund backs research into GPUs because they may deal in finance and GPUs can be used for financial analysis?

Not a chance. This has nothing to do with their IT department or back office requirements.

<comment><USER7> It is 100% from their "IT", Citadel is essentially a "Quant" firm.

[https://www.citadel.com/careers/ultimate- guides/quantitative...](https://www.citadel.com/careers/ultimate- guides/quantitative-researcher/)

[https://wei-tan.github.io/](https://wei-tan.github.io/)

[https://www.citadel.com/careers/the-data- open/](https://www.citadel.com/careers/the-data-open/)

<comment><USER10> Citadel is not a pure play quant fund, they have a ton of PMs doing conventional fundamental equities

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how long it took to compile all of this. Great work!</comment>


Instagram Algorithm Update – Jan 2020: a lot of growth techniques are gonna die - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0gPRW4VGQ <comment><AUTHOR> IGTV is weaker, Stories are more powerful, & older posts can make it to the Explore page.

But most importantly, a lot of Instagram growth techniques are going to die thanks to the new comment/like ratios.</comment>


Lucky eBay Buyer Demos Ice Cream Sandwich On Video - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/28/lucky-ebay-buyer-demos-ice-cream-sandwich-on-video/ <comment><USER2> Hoax? Since when do Android versions show up as codenames in Android phones? ("IceCreamSandwich")</comment>


Why Functional Programming? - <AUTHOR> http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-functional-programming.html

<comment><USER2> I don't grok OCaml at all, since I've never even laid eyes on it, but I identified with his personal story of moving from one mind-warp to the next as he matured as a developer. I've now hit the OMG! Functional Programming! stage myself, which leads to an uncomfortable (some days actually painful) cognitive dissonance while I toil away for 8 hours a day writing VxWorks-based C code for a mega-corporation.

<comment><USER3> I never really went through any stages, i just started using python and suing functions seemed better for some reason than using classes. Now im learning scheme and i am sort of starting to get it.

<comment><USER4> For me it was the same.

Python offers it all, functional, procedural, object-oriented. So you just choose hwta fits the problem best and dont worry about politics.

Personally while learning Python I was also learning functional languages and I started to naturally drift towards a more functional style.

My functional code is just much more modular and natural than my OO-code.

Classes I to represent some data every now and then but it is not central to my designs.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Python offers it all, functional, procedural, object-oriented. So you just choose hwta fits the problem best and dont worry about politics."

I find the idea that Python offers it all surprising, for example my understanding is that anonymous functions can only be one line and you cannot write generic functions a'la CLOS.

If that is the case, while Python may offer a terrific language for Getting Stuff Done, you may want to consider learning other languages on the off chance that they actually do more in each of their respective areas. Then, when you return to Python you can apply what you've learned.

<comment><USER4> Yes that is true and I know a lot of languages and while Python perhaps doesnt offer as deep possibilities within each paradigm it offers every paradigm.

As you said this makes it very good for writing programs and does so in a lot of different domains but perhaps when digging really deep into one area you can find something better suited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not familiar with OCaml, so maybe I'm missing something.

But why does no one gush over Erlang and Javascript when the FP hat gets passed around? Is OCaml really much better than either of these?

(Javascript, granted, has no shortage of warts. But it's the browser language we have, so it's worth learning to love it.)

<comment><USER6> Without being an expert, I'm pretty sure that OCaml is more strictly functional than Erlang and Javascript, though they all support functional programming to one extent or another. With languages like Javascript and Ruby, you can program for years without really learning functional concepts. I think OCaml is the opposite; the paradigm of least resistance is functional, even though you can program in other styles (OO, imperative).

In terms of functional purity, Haskell > Lisp/Scheme/OCaml/ML > Erlang > Ruby/Javascript > Python > Java > etc.

<comment><USER7> I'd say Erlang enforces functional style more than Lisp does... there's no Erlang object system.

<comment><USER5> True, it is virtually impossible to do much of anything in Erlang without using a bunch of little functions. Immutability is a harsh mistress, but one that I've already fallen in love with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "proclaiming the death of patterns due to closures and dynamic typing."

Can somebody explain that?</comment>


Ask HN: Any chance of email address portability in next decade? - <AUTHOR> I'd argue that email now is one of the central parts of your online identity, and seeing how some providers can terminate your account and everything related to it in a second  is actually scary.
How do you think, what is the chance that there will be legislature etc that will allow you to separate your email address from a provider and own it/be able to port it? Are there any RFCs that explore that idea?
I understand that I can buy my own domain, host my server or connect O365/GSuite to the address on that domain, but it's complicated and doesn't solve the problem of letting everyone know that your email, that you've used for past decade, or more, is now obsolete. <comment><USER2> > How do you think, what is the chance that there will be legislature etc that > will allow you to separate your email address from a provider and own it/be > able to port it? Are there any RFCs that explore that idea?

Zero, I hope. We need domain owners to be in control of their domains.

</comment><comment><USER3> > I understand that I can buy my own domain, host my server or connect > O365/GSuite to the address on that domain, but it's complicated

Not complicated unless you want to do self hosting. But if you want to pay a provider the complication amounts to a sum total of installing an MX record into the DNS data for your self-owned domain.

> and doesn't solve the problem of letting everyone know that your email, that > you've used for past decade, or more, is now obsolete.

It is not emails fault, nor the current providers fault, that you failed to understand you were being locked in and didn't get out sooner. I've had the same email address for about 20 years now, it has been attached to three different ISP's and about five different IP addresses over that time, but never once have I been locked in to any provider. Why? Because I own the domain.

But if you never go through the conversion, you'll never get unlocked, and the longer you delay, the more troublesome it will be to switch.</comment>


Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence - <AUTHOR> https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/ <comment><USER2> I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that convergence is the future.

Love or hate it but Unity was IMO the best shot we had at getting an open source unified phone, tablet and desktop experience...and now this is effectively Canonical not only shutting down Unity, but refocusing efforts away from convergence and towards more traditional market segments. I mourn the death of this innovative path.

That said, hopefully this convergence with GNOME will eventually lead back to convergence...but for now that dream is dead it would seem.

<comment><USER3> _data convergence_ is the future, not _interface convergence_. I think they made a serious mistake conflating the two.

You should be able to shift your view of a document from a desktop to a laptop, but that doesn't mean the fundamental interface from one should be shoe-horned into the other.

That could mean a phone that is docked, but when you have 10x the screen real estate, a keyboard and a mouse the interface should be different when docked vs when not docked.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I used to bevery enthusiastic about continuum in Windows. But now, I've come to realize that the interface better be separate for different usecases - plus, no one want to plugin their phone and use it for work. What I want is seamless takeover from one device to another - something like Apple's continuity but way better. In today world this is all scattered into different components*, the first company that does everything can lock in a huge revenue stream.

a) Files - Dropbox b) Activity - Various browser sync for bookmarks, history (and passwords) c) Handoff - Mac is pretty good here. Windows has no equivalent.

<comment><USER5> > I used to bevery enthusiastic about continuum in Windows. But now, I've come > to realize that the interface better be separate for different usecases - > plus, no one want to plugin their phone and use it for work.

You seem to have a misunderstanding of how continuum works in Windows. The interface _is_ separate when you hook up a phone into a dock (it's a desktop interface) and the newer devices can also do it wirelessly.

Windows went with a "similar UI language" for all platforms but _still_ maintained huge differences between each platform because that made sense. It was never the same UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Legitimately never thought I'd ever see this. Possibly the best thing that could happen for desktop Linux in this age.

Edit: and of course this would mean Ubuntu/Canonical and Fedora/RedHat basing their desktop OS's on the same platform, which can only mean easier development of desktop software and services.

<comment> NM-Super I'm a bit torn. I like the design of Unity more than I do that of Gnome, but I think that less fragmentation is extremely desirable.

Ultimately, I think it's a good, necessary move. Linux on the desktop will only happen when the environment is at least as uniform as that of Windows—from the perspective of application developers, at least.

<comment><USER7> Canonical bending their demonstrated ui talents may just lead to a better Gnome 3 experience.

<comment><USER8> Do I live in an alternate universe? Do people really think this looks good? [http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg](http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg)

<comment><USER9> That's a 6 year old screenshot. They've made incremental improvements since... but yes, I've grown to appreciate it. The most annoying part of unity7's interface is its alt-tab function: It toggles between apps, not windows, and that's annoying.

<comment><USER10> That's the same behaviour as OSX. At first I also hated this behaviour, coming form the Linux/Window environment. But after using it in conjunction with ALT+` (to cycle through app's Windows) I actually find it better than the standard Windows behaviour.

<comment><USER11> My biggest issue with the macOS way is that there are edge causes when using Spaces. The _biggest_ being "stand-alone" Chrome apps like Signal Desktop are still tied to Chrome, even though they get their own icon and a separate place on the Dock. CMD-Tab'ing to Signal Desktop might just send me to a Chrome window. Ugh.

<comment><USER12> That's why Google has been phasing out Chrome apps for a while now.

<comment><USER13> Google has been phasing out chrome apps on all platforms because alt tab is broken in osx?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm one of the people who asked for less NIH in Ubuntu in the recent thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821) but I didn't think they would take it this far. Jokes aside, it's sad that Unity won't be developed further.

I'm one of the ones who loves Unity 7, it's always been faster and less memory hungry than GNOME or KDE for me. I will just have to cling onto the LTS for as long as possible.

In the long-term I think this is good for Ubuntu and Linux users in general, less diversity can sometimes help an ecosystem form. I think many users just want a DE to stay out of the way and make life easier, so I hope some of the Ubuntu ease of use focus and community will get injected back into GNOME. I really hope a huge flood of users coming back forces them to look at their memory usage and get it under control.

<comment><USER15> Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were pretty good. Then both shells lost their way. Why do they try to be a bad clone of macOS rather than keep being a Win98 on steriods (KDE 3) or a more simple shell for normal users (Gnome 2).

<comment><USER16> I dislike that people speak in such absolutes on this. You're expressing a personal opinion.

In my opinion, Gnome 3 is amongst the best desktop shells I've ever used. It's focus on simplicity in the base, while including extensibility using, well, extensions is unparalleled. I like that I can choose my own complexity and features without resorting to editing config files or hacky black magic. It's only marred by a subjective lack of quality, quantity and consistency in applications, as is the entire Linux/Unix desktop.

So to each their own. I also think KDE 4/5 are much nicer than KDE3.

<comment><USER17> For the most part I've become comfortable with the UI in Gnome 3, but I mostly avoid it. They've done a lot to fix the initial problems that the interface had, and I think they've got to a good place for the most part.

Try and switch to Gnome 2 / MATE for a little bit and see the drastic improvements in responsiveness, though. That's what kills gnome 3 for me. Even on a nice high spec machine I still end up conscious of the UI latency, and that's really not a good position to be in. The UI needs to get out of the way, and a key part of that is being fast.

<comment><USER16> I agree, that's why I use the Impatience extension [1]!

I don't use anything GTK2 based any more as the lack of smooth scrolling support is really jarring for me, despite the fact that I still like Gnome2's basic design.

[1]: [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what you were referring to with GTK2, but MATE uses GTK3 and preserves the Gnome 2 look.

<comment><USER16> Didn't know they migrated already, good on them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I get that they're moving away from convergence, but what does this ultimately mean for Ubuntu as a mobile OS? In the grand scheme of things, what does this mean for users who want a completely FOSS stack for their phone (let's ignore the baseband for now)?

As far as I can tell, this just means that your only options are Android or iOS. It's not easy to get a Jolla/SailfishOS phone that will work on most Canadian or USA networks, and with this announcement it seems that Ubuntu phones won't be around for much longer. This coupled with the death of Firefox OS means that there's really not much of a choice. Certainly you can run AOSP with no Google Apps, but not having Google Play Services tends to cause more and more problems, or at the very least means your phone is less and less capable as time goes on.

I guess in general we can all celebrate that Ubuntu is moving to GNOME / Wayland and is ditching convergence, but I think the fact that there's no healthy alternative to iOS / Android is quite sad. If Canonical is exiting the mobile space to work on other things, what other alternatives do users have?

<comment><USER19> I'd suggest the best remaining option for a FOSS-driven phone (now that Canonical have dropped the ball) is Tizen. It's got the backing of a large phone manufacturer (Samsung) and the Linux Foundation, and seems to be actively developed. It'll probably end up being used on low-end devices at first, but is likely to be more open than the two leading platforms, so hopefully they get some traction amongst tech community.

It's also worth pointing out that Samsung has been investing in Servo, and that Tizen has good support for HTML5 apps, so hopefully we can see mobile web apps increase in popularity to get us away from the walled garden approach.

[https://www.tizen.org/](https://www.tizen.org/)

<comment><USER20> Tizen is a joke, they already rebooted the SDK multiple times.

1 - GTK+ based

2 - Took Bada OS C++ SDK with its Symbian C++ like flavour

3 - Rewrote the C++ API into something more appealing

4 - Thrown everything away and replaced with EFL, plain C API with C++ will come soon

5 - Now they are adopting .NET Core with Xamarin Forms

How can anyone invest time developing for them?

<comment><USER19> >"How can anyone invest time developing for them?"

What alternative do you suggest? I suggested they were the best remaining option for an open-source mobile OS now that Ubuntu were dropping out of the race. What other options are there? Sailfish? Anything else?

<comment><USER20> There are no alternatives.

This ideology of open-source mobile OS goes back to Openmoko.

None of them managed to sell enough devices to keep a profitable business.

<comment><USER19> >"None of them managed to sell enough devices to keep a profitable business."

Nokia managed it with the N900 and the N9, the only reason they didn't continue is they lost their bottle and sold out to Microsoft.

<comment><USER20> If you were fine with "open source" on those Nokia devices, you should be happy with "open source" on Android.

Also as a former employee I can tell they didn't sell that much units, specially when compared with Symbian devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy.

I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros.

If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in the last 7 years, not just from a coding perspective, but from a community and social perspective.

I consider it supremely important that we educate as many computer users as possible about the negative side of proprietary software (lock in subscriptions, proprietary file formats, closed source privacy concerns etc).

What Ubuntu did back in 2010 (I think) did major damage toward that vision.

I applaud Mark Shuttleworth for making the decision, even if he only got there because of commercial reasons. I really hope that Canonical and Red Hat can work together to make Gnome not just a technological success, but a social one too.

<comment><USER22> I'm not entirely convinced this is right. Many people worked on Gnome, I'd bet even more did so than did for Unity and Mir. It's not that having more than one project completely divided the FOSS community's resources up.

<comment><USER21> True, Gnome has had huge development carried out over the last few years. Red Hat / Fedora have been great in terms of contributing to the FOSS community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Damn. From the horses mouth: [https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing- ubuntu-for-cl...](https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for- cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/)

I might be a small minority, but I _like_ Unity 7. I have never used Unity 8, and I thought the Ubuntu phone was misspent effort, but wow. Now I have to figure out if there is a way to style Gnome to look like Unity 7.

I wonder what this means for Mir vs Wayland as well.

<comment><USER24> Same here. I love the keyboard friendliness out of the box, and especially how sparingly it uses vertical space.

I like gnome3 visually, but some design choices by the gnome team I don't understand. While unity uses a global menu, which displays the menu items in several columns, The gnome global menu has 1 column, with for most apps a single entry (quit).

<comment><USER25> A blog post by Allan Day addresses the vertical space issue: [https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design- saving-...](https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-you- space-since-2009-or-so/).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> WD-42 Wow. This is a real shock, it wouldn't be out of place for April 1st.

This is good news for linux on the desktop. Not that diversity isn't good, but Unity has been stale for years while Gnome has been progressing, but suffering from the fragmentation that Canonical caused.

Hopefully this will result in more contributions upstream, which will benefit all linux distributions. This was always the main complaint with Canonical.

</comment><comment><USER26> > We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

This is huge and was my #1 request for the previous post for Ubuntu 17.10. Gnome on Fedora is amazing and I have had people walk up to me and ask me - what OS am I running ?

It is so much better for Ubuntu and Redhat to have joint stewardship of Gnome going forward rather than split energy on wasted competition.

My next biggest request is flatpak vs snappy - I cant believe that the package management wars are beginning all over again in 2017. Just pick one and be done with it. RPM and DEB will never converge, but we have a narrow window of opportunity with flatpak and snappy.

<comment><USER27> Flatpak seems more limited in scope as documents say:

> Can Flatpak be used on servers too? Flatpak is designed to run inside a > desktop session and relies on certain session services, such as a dbus > session bus and a systemd --user instance. This makes Flatpak not a good > match for a server.

Whereas Snap documents say:

Package any app for every Linux desktop, server, cloud or device, and deliver updates directly.

<comment><USER26> I know - however these things are seldom demarcated on merit and more on ideology.

I wish the next generation of linux has a single package manager :(

<comment><USER27> I think in case of Snap, it is part of money making server business. So it is less likely Canonical is going to give up on that.

<comment><USER28> But then you're competing with Docker images. Not that Docker is that amazing, but I just don't see why anyone would want to use Snap instead of Docker?

<comment><USER29> Containers are for a completely different use case than system packages.

<comment><USER30> CoreOS and RancherOS have shown how everything can either be built into the base OS image or running in Docker, with no system packages needed.

<comment><USER31> I think this had been shown somewhat before the time of these whippersnapper distros (Slackware, LFS etc), indeed before the days of RPM, make && make install directly on production servers were how things were done.. and it was not good.

Also; in the case of CoreOS, the base image is still built using a package manager (portage). Not sure about that other guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is awesome. When that "What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?" post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821) was up recently, I wanted to say "Get rid of the abomination that is Unity" but figured it'd just be flamebait. Little did I know how close my dreams were to coming true!

<comment><USER33> Gnome (for major versions > 2) is even worse than Unity though. They should've chosen an actually usable DM like Cinnamon.

<comment> shady-lady 100% disagree. Used Mint(& Cinnamon) for years. Recently switched to Fedora 24/25 (+ Gnome).

I will never go back. Gnome is way more polished and enjoyable to use.

Actually enjoyable.

<comment><USER34> Will give it a try given time but I don't have high hopes for anything that messes with menus (was enthusiastic when I got a Mac at a previous job, positively interested in Ribbon but it turns out that for me traditional menus still wins comfortably.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It takes courage to reflect on previous decisions and re-consider your product strategy. I am quite impressed by Mark Shuttleworth decision to move away from Unity and the desktop/phone convergence that has been slowing down innovation for Ubuntu, and allowed other distributions to catch up.

Every Linux users should benefit from this decision; I am excited to see the improvements they will make to the Gnome environment.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm entirely convinced that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence will happen. It looks like an inevitability, as mobile computing power continues to grow faster than typical consumer workloads (the same forces already made it possible for $400 laptops to be good enough for most mainstream users).

Canonical just didn't have the resources to push a 3rd mobile platform. Hell, even Microsoft gave up (who _did_ have the resources, and IMO made a mistake in giving up).

<comment><USER37> Just my opinion: It will be Chromebook+Android or more the mixture of both. Google is playing well by saying: "The time and technology is not yet ready for this to happen." But I'm also convinced it will happen sooner or later. And I'm sure Apple has some experiments in this direction... iOS and macOS are technically more the same than Android vs. ChromeOS.

I just hope I get a good usable *nix terminal with the laptop mode ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> GNOME has been doing some really cool stuff as of late ([http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in- gnome-3-2...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in-gnome-3-24)). I'm still using Cinnamon, because I still like the look a bit more, but it's getting harder to ignore all of the excellent features GNOME provides, including: \- Drive support for file manager \- Gmail/Outlook support for GNOME accounts and built-in calendars \- Working Wayland implementation

I'm holding out at the moment, as it's missing one feature from Cinnamon that I really like (the ability to launch and control any audio player from the sound icon in the tray), but when Fedora 26 launches I may finally have to switch over.

I hope that Canonical shifting back to GNOME will further its development under Wayland and not spend a crapload of time doing more work for Mir.

<comment><USER39> _GNOME has been doing some really cool stuff as of late ([http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in- gnome-3-2...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/top-features-in- gnome-3-2...))._

Do you really think that? To me, this is just a collection of really old stuff and features that should be a matter of course.

Case in point: " _the_ headline feature" (adjusting the color temperature of your display depending on the time of day) is something that has been around for _years_ one way or the other on all operating systems.

Or take: "Bookmarking webpages in Web now takes a single click." Hasn't that been the case since, like, always? Even if I'm wrong, I would hardly file such a feature under "really cool stuff".

<comment><USER9> Yeah, and redshift has been available on Linux for a long time. Now it's built in the OS.

Windows 10 doesn't have that. What's your point?

<comment><USER40> Win10 doesn't have it out of the box, but third-party software that implements it (like f.lux) has been available for a very long time.

(Also, FWIW, Win10 insider builds do have it out of the box.)

<comment><USER41> Third party software has been available on Linux distributions for a long time all the same.

Shipping this feature out of the box with an OS install started happening only recently (e.g. Night Shift came to iOS only 1 year ago, Windows 10 is getting it just now, AOSP has a "secret" knob to turn it on and it's enabled in 3rd party ROMs, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Unity has often been criticized because it was a Canonical thing and didn't leverage Wayland, but it's another world compared to Gnome shell. I couldn't like gnome shell no matter what.

I was using Gnome shell on a old eeepc. The interface is dumbed down and you have to install a bunch of extensions to make it as functional as Unity.

What was worse is that the launcher automatically triggered the search function, and that slowed down the pc to a crawl. I'm using KDE on it now and, even though less stable, it has a decent interface and it is surprisingly snappy.

<comment><USER43> Why can't Ubuntu ship some extensions by default? After all, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ships GNOME Classic which is GNOME Shell with some extensions and a tweaked theme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I _just_ got the Ubuntu phone. It's the first smart-phone that I don't hate. I do agree that Ubuntu needs to stop with their NIH syndrome when it comes to desktop, but the phone market is just flat out terrible.

I would be willing to spend a lot of money for a decent FOSS phone, but there just isn't anything out there. Ubuntu was my only hope |:(

<comment><USER45> What about the Fairphone + AOSP + F-Droid?

<comment><USER44> Have you tried using that? Android without Google play is still an exercise in frustration. And Google is purposely designing it that way more and more as time goes on. I don't think the Ubuntu phone is a great phone, but if I have problems, I can usually fix them myself. Good luck doing that with any android that I've tried on.

<comment><USER45> > Have you tried using that?

Yes, works fine and there are a lot of awesome apps, e. g. [https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=osm&fdid=net...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=osm&fdid=net.osmand.plus) or [https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=youtube&fdid...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=youtube&fdid=free.rm.skytube.oss)

> Android without Google play is still an exercise in frustration.

What are your pain points? Because not being able to install most of the apps in the Play Store also applies to Ubuntu Phone.

<comment><USER44> > What are your pain points? Because not being able to install most of the > apps in the Play Store also applies to Ubuntu Phone.

Mostly being able to find OOTB tools that I want. I use f-droid on my android and I usually end up just going back to the play store to find anything worthwhile.

The Ubuntu phone gives me a _real_ OS that I can just "apt-get install" something, then make a shell-script or something similar to fix my problem. Android's shell-system is a joke, which makes sense as they don't really want it to be usable. Ubuntu's shell system is much better, which means I can fix the problems that I come across myself.

EDIT: I can even use my existing scripts and tools that I have for my desktop on my ubuntu phone. It may be more accurate to say that I want a "Linux" phone, than a "FOSS" phone, but, I'd like it to be both.

<comment><USER45> > Mostly being able to find OOTB tools that I want. I use f-droid on my > android and I usually end up just going back to the play store to find > anything worthwhile.

Okay but to be fair: If you had the Play Store on Ubuntu Phone you would probably also go there a lot more often. Especially for OOTB experiences ;)

> The Ubuntu phone gives me a real OS that I can just "apt-get install" > something, then make a shell-script or something similar to fix my problem. > Android's shell-system is a joke, which makes sense as they don't really > want it to be usable. Ubuntu's shell system is much better, which means I > can fix the problems that I come across myself.

That sounds nice indeed!

<comment><USER44> > If you had the Play Store on Ubuntu Phone you would probably also go there a > lot more often.

Actually, I would probably not, though I can't deny I would be intrigued to have it as an option. I am able to set up most of the things that I would want via something like apt, or shell scripts or similar

<comment><USER45> How would you hack a navigation app with shell scripts?

<comment><USER44> I'm not sure that I would. I guess I could set up some kind of "I'm on my pc, send this address to my phone" script, or "tell $contact when I arrive at $location".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Wow this is impressive just after the Ask HN they did few days back. It's been few years users complaining and opposing Mir so it seems it just took that last feedback cry. It's great that they listen to their users and also that there's going some love given back to the desktop+server (+IoT).

Disclaimer: I am really happy using Ubuntu everyday.

<comment><USER47> I really wonder if they events are related though. I can't imagine Shuttlework saying "ok, those guys in HN called it", but on the other hand, the timing given motives match so perfectly.

<comment><USER46> I have no idea but my guess is that it's not _the reason_ , but it's the straw that broke the camel's back (that's the saying, right?)

<comment><USER47> I wouldn't know I'm not a native english speaker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As an end user, I like this news. Unity was never for me (I run Gnome Shell on all my distros, including Ubuntu), I was not particularly enthused by Ubuntu phones, and Canonical getting on track with Gnome and therefore Wayland means we're making amazing progress to a more unified modern Linux desktop ecosystem.

But it's also very sad. Canonical tried to bring the open source technology to consumer devices, failed, and never really looked like succeeding in the first place. Although they made the Linux desktop accessible to new large audiences (including myself), they too cannot make the next step in making the technology a real success on the general consumer market.

Ironically, their desktop popularity gave them large popularity amongst developers and sysadmins, which now allows them to have a great business case to sell to enterprises for cloud and IoT. The same guys that boosted the popularity of Linux with a desktop for everyone are now going to be making almost all their money on enterprise licenses for headless systems. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER48> I can't tell you how happy I am to see convergence dying. My desktop is not just a big phone and people put out some atrocious user interfaces in the name of "convergence".

WRT to unity, at least it's improved. Ubuntu w/ unity currently has the best multi-monitor multi-dpi user experience I've seen on linux. I have a retina laptop with 2 external displays and ubuntu unity is the only thing that just works out of the box.

<comment><USER49> > My desktop is not just a big phone and people put out some atrocious user > interfaces in the name of "convergence".

I agree. Sadly, GNOME's huge controls also seem to be optimised for touch screens. There are several semi-maintained hacks to reduce the padding throughout the DE:

[https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TbVt04mk52I/A...](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TbVt04mk52I/AAAAAAAAEGw/AiOPnwu8KaM/s2000/gnome_3__adwaita_improved_by_half_left-d3eqzhx.png)

It's a mess. I wish GNOME just automatically looked like the bottom screenshot when there's no touch screen connected.

<comment><USER50> That's a realy old screenshot. GNOME 3 doesn't look like that anymore[1].

[1][https://people.gnome.org/~engagement/screenshots/gnome-3-24-...](https://people.gnome.org/~engagement/screenshots/gnome-3-24-screenshots.zip)

<comment><USER48> Random nit: is it just me or is the font rendering pretty terrible in the "web" screenshot?

<comment><USER51> Font rendering is entirely up to how you configure it. Install GNOME Tweak Tool and go to Fonts. Keep in mind that different settings will look better on different monitors. But try setting Hinting to Slight and Antialiasing to RGBA. After a reboot the settings will take effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Let me say that the only thing I am sad about is Unity 8. I genuinely liked Unity and it's easy to use, not-too-resource-hungry interface. I definitely do not like GNOME as much. It lacks the cohesion that Unity has (I understand why, but that doesn't negate the point).

I will be happy to see if the best parts of Unity make it back to GNOME - GNOME just feels clunky right now. But I will continue using Ubuntu regardless.

<comment><USER53> > easy to use, not-too-resource-hungry interface.

what? unity? has it changed so much in the last 2 years that its defining features have changed from being difficult to use, resource-hungry, to the opposite of that?

<comment><USER54> Unity 8 is a complete re-write based on Qt5 and Mir, it dropped dependency on X11/Compiz and the custom Nux toolkit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Hope just that Canonical will apply their custom theme on GNOME. As a Arch Linux user, I think that the default GNOME theme is ugly, Unity by default have a much better look.

<comment><USER56> They should use Cinnamon, or just absorb Mint, that's the most popular distro right now anyway, and it is ubuntu-based.

<comment> WD-42 Is mint really the most popular distro? According to distrowatch, yes. But my suspicion is that mint users just like to tell everyone they are mint users. The majority of Ubuntu users probably just install it and go on with their lives.

<comment><USER57> I think a big factor is that if you google for "Linux Mint" the distrowatch page is one of the top results, while if you google for "Ubuntu Linux" you get other results instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I cannot wait for Unity to die, and now it does.

I was not very happy when they decided to make Unity mac-like by moving the menu to the top bar. It has to be the most idiotic decision around for anyone who has multiple monitors. Even with a single monitor, it is a pain in the ass to move the mouse all the way to the top left corner for the menu to appear, and then orienting myself with the items presented.

<comment><USER52> You could always use keyboard shortcuts to access the menu. Unity also let you search through the menu items with the Alt key - no manual navigation necessary.

I thought that integrated menus are a great idea - even Apple does it. It saves vertical space and looks "at one" with the rest of the system.

<comment><USER59> GNOME has solved in a radical way by simplifying menus, so you need neither search nor frequent mouse/keyboard navigation.

Honestly 'even Apple does it' is a poor argument. If global menu would be a really good and generally accepted idea we'd see it implemented in GNOME and KDE (via extensions at least).

<comment><USER60> [https://vizzzion.org/blog/2016/10/plasmas-road- ahead/](https://vizzzion.org/blog/2016/10/plasmas-road-ahead/) Global Menu being implemented in KDE 5.9.

<comment><USER58> I don't mind the principles of it -- and I don't mind it in macOS. At least the menu is always there, the problem with unity is that it is hidden and will slowly appear when you hover the mouse on top. It's really hard to aim for what I want when I actually have to access a function on the menu.

I am using KDE on anything I can, and I have no problem with them doing things like the global menu. KDE tends to get things right to my taste.

<comment><USER61> There is a setting for menu being always on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Super excited for this. I hate Unity's interface and was instead using Fedora solely for that reason. About 5 months ago I switched to Ubuntu GNOME and have been loving the stability of Ubuntu with the advanced interface of GNOME.

</comment><comment><USER63> Dropping Unity means dropping Mir, which is a good thing. Now developers can avoid redundant efforts, and can focus on Wayland. And it's still a huge pile of work for many complex applications like Firefox, Wine and many others, including graphics drivers, GUI toolkits, libraries like SDL and etc.

</comment><comment><USER64> Wow.. I see where Mr. Shuttleworth is coming from.

I'd like to state that I'm a happy Ubuntu user, and have been using Unity for the past few years and have generally found it to be a good ui for the desktop. I know many many others fall in the same bucket.

</comment><comment><USER65> Page isn't loading, but that's a pity if true :(

I ended up dropping desktop Linux entirely last year, but Unity was the only thing that I thought wasn't matched by any other desktop operating system.

</comment><comment><USER66> Not really a Unity fan or a 'Convergence' fan, but just saddened by the fact so many developers and community enthusiasts get to know that their efforts were in vain.

</comment><comment><USER67> Honest question: how is Canonical making money in the cloud with ubuntu?

Everytime someone installs an image with 'Ubuntu' in the name the cloud provider has to pay Canonical? Or what else could be the main revenue stream 'in the cloud'?

<comment><USER68> Short answer: Enterprise bosses like support contracts, because it covers their asses. You can basically ask the same question about redhat.

<comment><USER67> I can imagine this now, but how did they get to this point? I mean RedHat was a small unknown company then probably no one would have bought a support contract from them or at least the prices of these contracts were tiny.

<comment><USER69> I pay for a RH support contract... and it's a ripoff, if you ask me. Unless you're a MASSIVE company spending MASSIVE dollars... response time is slow. The turnaround time for a simple issue was like one question and one answer every 24 hours. It took me almost a week to get a simple registration issue worked out.

The #rhel channel on FreeNode was _WAY_ more helpful in terms of skill and response time, and that was free. :/

I _want_ to pay, to support them, but I'd like it to be worth it. Currently, it's hard to see where it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Does this mean that Ubuntu is moving away from Mir, to Wayland?

<comment><USER54> Ubuntu will use what upstream GNOME uses, which means Wayland for the compositor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Hopefully now we can all agree on Wayland and start moving a little faster towards {application,driver,etc} support and capabilities.

I feel like Ubuntu's Mir pushing was one of the big things holding back Wayland from widespread support and adoption.

I'd love to dump X without feeling like I'm shooting myself in the foot sometime in the next few years.

</comment><comment><USER72> Excellent news! I personally think unity is terrible - and it's objectively lacking in several areas, multi-monitor support particularly.

The Ubuntu phone thing was a nice idea, but obviously never going to fly, so it's nice to see canonical putting their efforts where their actual users are.

<comment><USER19> >" it's objectively lacking in several areas, multi-monitor support particularly."

Interesting, considering...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043855)

Are you basing your views of Unity on recent experience?

<comment><USER72> Wan't thinking about multi-resolution or HiDPI - or other technical 'support' \- but actual ergonomic use of multiple-monitors. It's lack of customisability in the placement of things, as well as the anachronistic global menu bar, mean that using it with, say, 3 large monitors of pretty sub-par.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Unity has grown on me over the years but I guess I will adapt. I'm not interested in having strong opinions about my OS's UI anymore so I just hope they'll stick with whatever they switch to.

</comment><comment><USER74> I knew this was happening. They invested on Unity8 in quite reverse way. They had opportunity to make unity8 excellent desktop environment (they had money and workforce) and after becoming most popular de in linux environment they could continue that to mobile space(they are most popular linux distro already). Putting money on phone portion instead of desktop portion of the unity8 was biggest mistake i cna imagine. I can't understand rational behind it. Just look at what Microsoft does, they prioritize desktop win10 over mobile win10.

<comment><USER60> The only thing I can guess is they thought that to succeed in convergence, they would have to win the phone market, and that was the harder market to design for and react to. So, they built for that and tried to win the hardware developers/companies.

I suspect they thought if they got that, they could converge things back on the desktop

<comment><USER75> That's exactly what Unity 8 in Ubuntu release N.NN was going to do. The converged apps, the latest version of Unity, the new Mir display server, all running on the desktop as well as the Ubuntu Phone builds. The problem was, N.NN kept shifting from 14.04 to 16.04 to 17.04, and now never.00

With each Ubuntu release Canonical made fewer changes to Unity 7 on the desktop (the one I remember is moving from a global menu to a menu in a program's title bar), because the new awesome was around the corner...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I am quite happy to see this. Although I am saddened by the death of the Ubuntu phone, this means that GNOME will get a lot more development and will receive the love and care of Canonical's excellent design teams. Gnome 3 is already shaping up to be quite a marvel, I am very excited about what will come next.

Furthermore, even if the dream of a free as in freedom Linux phone is pushed down a bit down the future, I think that a joint community/Canonical/Red Hat effort will eventually materialize.

P.S. I hope for a return to the brown and orange theme too!

</comment><comment><USER20> I like GNOME, but actually was quite comfortable with Unity.

While I do understand their change of focus, after all someone needs to pay those developers somehow, and resources are limited, it kind of reminds me about Red-Hat's decision that enterprise was where money is, as they switched their focus away from desktop.

Cloud and IoT are basically where enterprise is going and where GNU/Linux is just part of the underlying services, but not the main product being sold.

</comment><comment><USER77> "Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence"

Translation: "We don't really care that much about Linux on the desktop because it's not making us much $$$."

Dear Canonical,

Your actions are a huge let down to the community. You caused a lot of strife with the move away from Gnome to Unity in 2010, and now you're ripping the rug out from under even more users after feeding us crap about convergence, etc. for the past 4-5 years (?). Nobody _asked_ you to do any of that phone or convergence stuff, but peddling it like it's the next big thing and then pulling it without ever even really shipping a working product is just amateurish and make the whole FOSS community look bad.

You and FOSS companies like you - please stop. Next time you have an idea that's going to be the next "big thing" or a "world-changing paradigm shift", ship something _before_ you start hyping it to the tech press. Ubuntu Touch/Unity 8 is just the latest in a long line of embarrassing open-source let downs that took enormous amounts of time and energy away from the community with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Signed,

 _A disappointed ex-Ubuntu user_

<comment><USER39> 1\. You say that Canonical's move from Gnome to Unity in 2010 caused a lot of strife. 2\. Now they're undoing that step.

Shouldn't you be happy rather than disappointed?

<comment><USER77> Yeah, I can understand how that's confusing. I meant to convey two things:

1\. I mean to imply that it was a waste - they created a bunch of controversy, and for what? If they were not committed to Unity for the long-haul, they should never had made the switch away from Gnome in the first place.

2\. In the intervening years since 2010, a ton of people have come to use Unity and gotten used to it instead of Gnome, and now Canonical is pulling the rug out from under those people. This whiplash, knee-jerk approach is just a horrible way to treat your users and is very disappointing.

This behavior reminds me of MS forcing Metro UI on people in Windows 8 for years and then (mostly) abandoning it without ceremony in Win 10. I don't expect MS to care about anything other than the bottom line, but I had hoped for more from Canonical.

<comment><USER19> >"I mean to imply that it was a waste - they created a bunch of controversy, and for what? If they were not committed to Unity for the long-haul, they should never had made the switch away from Gnome in the first place."

So in general if someone recognises they've made a mistake, they should continue on making that same mistake regardless?

>"In the intervening years since 2010, a ton of people have come to use Unity and gotten used to it instead of Gnome, and now Canonical is pulling the rug out from under those people. This whiplash, knee-jerk approach is just a horrible way to treat your users and is very disappointing."

If enough people want it, Unity can continue to exist as a community-led project, just like how GNOME 2 got saved by MATE.

<comment><USER77> > So in general if someone recognises they've made a mistake, they should > continue on making that same mistake regardless?

Doesn't sound to me like Canonical is admitting a mistake. Quote from OP:

"This has been, personally, a very difficult decision, because of the force of my conviction in the convergence future, and my personal engagement with the people and _the product, both of which are amazing_." (emphasis added)

My point is that Canonical's behavior, both in 2010 and now, is bad corporate citizenship. They're showing very little regard for their users and their community.

> If enough people want it, Unity can continue to exist as a community-led > project, just like how GNOME 2 got saved by MATE.

Honestly, I hope that doesn't happen. If convergence and Ubuntu Phone aren't happening, I'd rather see the resources go into other DEs that already have a strong community like KDE, GNOME, or MATE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> For their embedded device support I'd like to see them go even smaller than what they list on their Core (IoT) devices page. Sure, Raspberry Pi is nice and all, but I wouldn't build an embedded system around it.

Lately I've been hacking some projects on the Arduino Industrial 101, which has a small Atheros AR9331 MIPS based SoC, but it ships with a very old OpenWRT that doesn't seem to get much in terms of updates. I spent time building a new image for it based off of the LEDE fork that is being brought back into OpenWRT, then wrestled with various parts of the Linux side of the board, but ultimately I really don't want to be managing build pipelines for Linux system updates. At this point I may just wait for AVR changes to Rust to land and ditch the Linux side all together.

That's all to say, it really would be nice to have a small footprint embedded Linux distribution that wasn't mainly focused on routers like OpenWRT (not a knock on OpenWRT). Raspberry Pi and Samsung Artik 10 aren't really something I'd completely consider as embedded systems (also not a knock on either of those boards).

<comment><USER79> The problem is that all these routers and a lot of the embedded stuff don't get updates due to shitty vendor drivers for a lot of components. Most of the work on LEDE/OpenWRT is from volunteers that just want to make it work. Usally these devices/boards ship with an SDK from the manufacturer that is often based on OpenWRT but has some hard dependency on an ancient kernel, non-GPL sources or messy GPL drivers that need a lot of work until they can be upstreamed to the kernel.

That beeing said, LEDE is not only for routers - I think the ubus/procd/netifd system is pretty great - there is uhttpd-mod-ubus that allows you to configure everything via json-rpc (also websocket support is coming)

Maybe the tradeoffs from LEDE to run with fine with a current kernel/userland on 32mb (or even 16mb ram) / 4mb flash devices might make it more complicated to use it as general purpose system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Ditching Unity for Gnome - good news. Dropping Ubuntu Phone - not. First Firefox OS, now Ubuntu Phone. I suppose it shouldn't be that hard to create a fully open source mobile OS, with possible "convergence" functionality (running desktop apps when device is connected to big screen)? Especially now, when all apps are going to web a. k. a. Progressive Web Apps.

<comment><USER40> It might not be that hard to create the OS. But it is pretty hard to find operators willing to preinstall it on phones, which is what you need to have any sort of marketshare for it.

<comment><USER81> Monetization was Canonical and Mozilla's first mistake. A grass-roots movement would stand a better chance through embracing the custom ROM community.

The way forward would be to fork lineage os as a base, make it dead trivial to port any device that has a pre-existing 14.1 nightly build, then set up build slaves for the community to test with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> This looks like the same shift that has been happening in Microsoft for the past few years. They tried phone convergence (continuum, the one core across devices), but the real focus is now cloud and services. Also, the fact that Microsoft ships Ubuntu as the Linux on Windows subsystem definitely shows an alignment on the companies' plans.

</comment><comment><USER83> Funny that it came after 24 hours of my article about those stuff in Ubuntu: [https://fosspost.org/2017/04/03/ubuntu-needs-consider- remain...](https://fosspost.org/2017/04/03/ubuntu-needs-consider-remain- remarkable/)

3 of them are now true. Karma.

</comment><comment><USER84> I like the pragmatism in this letter: "What the Unity8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear."

Ubuntu has done well in growing the Linux community. I hope they continue interesting work in the future.

</comment><comment><USER85> Does that mean existing resources that Canonical is putting in Unity will be diverted to GNOME?

<comment> WD-42 Hopefully. The folks on irc.gnome.org seem pretty excited by the news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I've mostly been using the excellent Ubuntu MATE lately, but of the "modern" desktops I've always preferred GNOME to Unity, despite the latter having some good ideas. Ubuntu GNOME exists, but it'll be better with official support.

</comment><comment><USER87> Hooray, Unity and Mir are dead!

Now the next step is to give people a good migration path to Fedora or Debian.

</comment><comment><USER88> I think this is the right decision for Ubuntu.

I _also_ think that convergence is the future, but I don't think the market is ready for it. Phones run on ARM, desktops run on x86. The non-Pro Microsoft Surface is good, but many people still have a few x86-only legacy applications or devices that need a "real computer". USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 adoption is just barely in its infancy, and it'll be a couple of years before we start seeing it on affordable mass-market phones, laptops, printers, monitors, and so forth.

I think we've got another decade or so to go, but the pieces are slowly moving into place. Unity was a bit too far ahead of its time.

</comment><comment><USER89> But atleast they made one product from ubuntu mobile: snap (ubunto core)

</comment><comment><USER90> Damn. Just been forced to switch to Mate at work and find it like living in the past. Lots of defaults seem ugly or unusable (hunting through menus for programs etc.).

<comment><USER45> GNOME 3 and MATE don't have much in common though.

<comment><USER19> Apart from GTK3.

<comment><USER45> Only until recently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I am simply hoping Apple is working on parts of Shuttleworths' vision where your iPhone becomes your daily driver. Just plug it in to your Display and have a fully fledged iOS/macOS hybrid version to work with.

Xiaomi is releasing the Mi6 in some weeks with 8 GB of RAM, so it's only a matter of time until we get comparable specs like we have in MacBooks or even Desktops in the smartphone form factor (which will be incredible in itself).

</comment><comment><USER92> I actually knew Unity/mir was doomed over 2 years ago. I can also say aptitude is doomed. Nix or a derivative renders imperative system management obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER93> As someone who bought an Ubuntu Tablet in good faith, and received OK hardware but an OS that was profoundly un-production-ready, I wonder where this leaves me. There's no explicit mention of what's going to happen to people running Ubuntu Tablet who paid for a device.

Maybe I'll get what I always wanted, which is a traditional desktop OS tweaked for tablet usability. Maybe I'll just get nothing.

</comment><comment><USER94> Last Ubuntu I enjoyed was 10.04. They switched to Unity and I didn't use Ubuntu since, I liked old Gnome and switched mostly to CentOS. For me it was like Windows 8 — may be it's good, but it looks completely different so I don't want to deal with it. Now Microsoft returned good old windows with Windows 10, Ubuntu returning to Gnome and Apple's not abandoning macOS. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER95> I wanted an Ubuntu phone but was waiting for some kind of official store to buy them from, and not flash a phone myself or buy a developer device.

</comment><comment><USER96> I'm not a fan of Unity as a desktop environment, but it's sad to hear about phone - I hoped to have a phone with normal, familiar OS.

</comment><comment><USER97> My translation: Ubuntu is running out of money, maybe already feeling the heat from the decision to provide Linux subsystem in W10, disincentivizing developers from switching to stand-alone Ubuntu, therefore they need to cut things not projecting bringing profit soon.

</comment><comment><USER98> The problem was not the vision or community rejection as Mark suggests. It was a failure of mindshare with unpalatable Canonical licensing and suboptimal engagement. These issues are surmountable, but only if Mark / Canonical look within first.

</comment><comment><USER99> The one thing I'd miss from unity is HUD. Too bad canonical didn't focus on it.

</comment><comment><USER100> Gnome was getting better without Canonical exactly because nobody was trying to "converge" it - linux ecosystem gains from randomness and branching. Now new centralized efforts to "canonicalize" will dumb it down again.

</comment><comment> awinter-py All I need graphics for is the web.

Build a terminal-only window manager with firefox built in.

<comment><USER101> Does a tiling window manager like i3 not fit that use case?

<comment><USER102> i LOVE i3. Just gotta say best thing ever for my workflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> Going all in on their strengths and moving away from fluff like 'convergence' is the right thing to do for any company. Happy that Canonical's focus is back on the server.

</comment><comment><USER15> Let's keep Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) an individual company. One of the worst case scenarios is that a big company buys Canonical and f*cks with Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER98> The problem was not the vision or community rejection as Mark suggests. It was a failure of mindshare with unpalatable Canonical licensing and suboptimal engagement.

</comment><comment><USER34> Yes! Yes yes yes!

IMO possibly what I think of as the lost years of Ubuntu are over.

I tried a few times but concluded that they had decided to go in a direction where I didn't want to go.

</comment><comment><USER104> Canonical "raised" like 20 million USD to create a converged phone but the "community/market didn't want it"?

<comment><USER105> That was $12 million, and that was in 2013, and if I understand correctly how indiegogo works, they didn't get to claim any of that money because they didn't reach their goal of $30 million

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> this was expected. Unity 8 has been getting pushed farther and farther and it seemed very unfinished in previews.

</comment><comment><USER107> Firefox OS also (briefly) pivoted to IoT after their mobile efforts failed. Is this a natural pattern?

</comment><comment><USER108> I am happy about this. I hated Unity

</comment><comment><USER109> Looks like they saw that RH recently hit $2bn in subscription revenue and went...damn son :-)

</comment><comment><USER110> Unfortunately, I guess Ubuntu Desktop won't last much, too. Can Canonical make money from that? Nope. They even made their product less appealing when they helped Microsoft run it inside their OS.

I always thought Canonical wouldn't be around much longer, and these news seems to confirm that. I'd, as a long time Ubuntu user, miss them.

<comment><USER55> The great advantage that Ubuntu have by being the most popular Desktop distro is not making money from desktop users. The advantage is that some of those desktop users are also developers, so when they need to deploy their system in Server/Cloud/IoT/whatever, they choose Ubuntu because this is the distro that they developed their application to begin with.

So yeah, desktop is a afterthought for Canonical, however it is still important.

<comment><USER110> Yes but, can Canonical make a business out of that? They get no (significant) money either from people using their system in embedded platforms or cloud servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> Am I the only one who doesn't like this news?

I shared the Shuttleworth's view on convergence.

</comment><comment><USER112> Sorry for being Unity h8ter :/

I mean I appreciate what you all were doing, but ya, I like MATE.

</comment><comment><USER113> This could mean a significant jump in the adoption of Debian, from Ubuntu users!

</comment><comment><USER114> Could it be forked? Is there a community that would continue to develop Unity?

<comment><USER115> _This is a fork of canonical 's unity 8 repository as of April 5, 2017. Following Mark Shuttleworth's announcement to abandon unity 8 development, we are planning to continue working with the project._

[https://github.com/unity8org/unity8org](https://github.com/unity8org/unity8org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> What about snap? Are they going to switch to flatpak as well?

</comment><comment><USER117> Today was a good day.

</comment><comment><USER106> Do one thing (Desktop) and do it well.

</comment><comment><USER118> any specific reason why desktop linux seems to be converging on gtk instead of qt ?

<comment><USER40> I think it's a combination of largely unrelated historical trends (dating to way back, when Qt was GPL-only, and even before that, when it had its own incompatible license).

That said, it's interesting that most commercial desktop software for Linux these days seems to be written in Qt, not Gtk. Also, while this is anecdotal, most _new_ projects (as in, started recently, as opposed to old software having new releases) seem to be trending Qt in my experience. So there's a weird divergence here between the DE and the apps.

<comment><USER119> > I think it's a combination of largely unrelated historical trends ...

Some of the facts are still true. Say for example, Qt is now licensed under LGPLv3, which several corporate hate. GTK+ is licensed under LGPLv2.1+.

<comment><USER115> How is LGPLv3 different from the usual binary only libraries the corporate buy??

Also, there is a paid Qt license if you don't like *GPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> Time to switch back to Ubuntu

</comment><comment><USER121> I am so happy

</comment><comment><USER122> This is going to be interesting. The whole reason I moved away from Ubuntu, which was my goto linux distribution, around a decade ago was because they moved to Unity. I switched to Linuxmint and have been on it ever since.

Now that Ubuntu is going back to Gnome, although I may not switch back to it immediately, it will at least be in my mind as an option whenever I keep upgrading Linuxmint.

</comment><comment><USER123> Now if they could just abandon systemd.

<comment><USER124> Gnome 3 and systemd are closely intertwined. Running Gnome without it would be a lot of work.

<comment><USER125> The death of unix right there

<comment><USER126> UNIX was never very good, though. Even at its inception it was a stripped down OS for the PDP-11 because they could not run Multics. C was a stripped down version of BCPL that didn't even have floating point numbers. Looking to the "UNIX way" as the gold standard sets the bar very low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How much has another company paid, that Ubuntu dropped it?

</comment><comment><USER33> Growing Ubuntu for [current buzzword] rather than [last year's buzzword].

Why not just build it for server and desktop because that's what Ubuntu is best at, and not chase the latest fads?

<comment><USER127> > Why not just build it for server

What do you think Cloud means?

<comment><USER128> Exactly. In this context, "cloud" is just the buzzword du jour that makes pointy-haired bosses throw money at IT infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> Not really news, saying "linux distro chases ideas to rewrite instead of sticking to one thing and fixing it and that's why linux desktop won't ever happen" is like saying "grass is green".

</comment><comment><USER130> Does that mean they're going to make it easy _not_ to have the taskbar on the side - or god forbid, even put it at the bottom _by default_? I remember that "convergence" with mobile was the primary reason why the Ubuntu UI was designed the way it was and why the taskbar was put on the side.

Yes, I realize a lot of Ubuntu users have already gotten used to it, and some may even prefer it, but I'm sure the majority of new users would feel confused and turned off by it. I would argue Ubuntu has to focus more on gaining Windows users than on keeping the hardcore Linux users.

<comment> WD-42 Have you ever used Gnome? There is no taskbar :)

<comment><USER131> To me as a Firefox-and-terminals user, the main difference between the two is that Unity has a fugly taskbar always on the left of my screen where I don't want it, and windows have their menu somewhere unrelated to the window (at the top of the screen). If Gnome doesn't have either, great!

<comment><USER132> You can auto-hide the taskbar, and switch to "menus in the windows" in the settings (I mean the UI, not some obscure terminal thing).

My mother in law managed to find that option on her own, I'm sure you can as well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER133> Sad to see this. But also glad to see a less fragmented Linux desktop. I've always stuck with Gnome but the video in Mark's announcement looks pretty good. I guess it's true what they say - A system is never a popular as the day it is decommissioned.

I hope they can also align their release schedule with the Gnome team. I want to be on the latest desktop and get access to all the new features as they come out - not six months later.</comment>


Posterous is Down - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/posterous <comment><USER2> And rather than posting any useful details in the twitter feed they simply spam it with @replies saying the same thing. Oh, and post.ly links which are also affected by the apparent DDOS.

It would be vastly more beneficial to post a link to the instructions than simply repeatedly posting:

"if you have a custom domain, pls send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com for instructions; otherwise u should be up in 1 hour"

Can't say I'm impressed with how they are handling the PR aspect of it.

<comment><USER3> So instead of replying to the people who are too lazy to check their Twitter page / follow @posterous they should... not do that? Oh, and if you took two seconds to click the "more" button, you'd see they _have_ posted a link to the instructions. Using post.ly _and_ bit.ly. But by all means, make up more things to complain about.

<comment><USER2> Which link are you referring to? I went down back to where the tweets stopped looking to be referring to the incident. To do so, I took many seconds to click "more" repeatedly. Every link I saw either didn't response to expand (post.ly) or redirected to their blog... on posterous, which didn't respond.

I don't see a single tweet explaining what they changed (they mention IPs, did they change IPs, IPs for all servers, or just bring up additional ones) or why it is that custom domains are affected (I'm assuming it's an IP change, but is this a permanent change, or one I can just ride out).

I also don't see an actual announcement other than the @replies, although it's possible it's buried under those. As I'm not a frequent user of Twitter, I'm not aware if there is a way to filter out the replies and see only the useful content.

*edit - after typing that Posterous "finally" started responding again, so I can see what the blog post said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> CNAME anyone?

<comment><USER5> CNAMEs totally work -- the problem is that they override MX records. Earlier on we used to encourage users to use CNAMEs, but then they would inadvertantly lose ALL their email, even if we tried to explain to them that they shouldn't use CNAME's if you have MX records on there. So we stopped telling people to do that.</comment></comment>


Record Labels Keeping All the Money from Spotify, Rather Than Giving to Artists - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150204/07310329906/yes-major-record-labels-are-keeping-nearly-all-money-they-get-spotify-rather-than-giving-it-to-artists.shtml

<comment><USER2> Typical techdirt bullshit.

 _The report claims that 95% of that money that goes to the labels goes to cover all of the "expenses" those poor poor labels have to endure to record and... um... upload(?) the actual music. Sure, in the past, it may have been reasonable for the labels to take on large fees for distribution -- but that's when it meant manufacturing tons of plastic and vinyl and then shipping it to thousands of record stores around the globe. In this case, there's no manufacturing, and distribution is an "upload" button._

So streaming revenue can only be applied to streaming expenses, and can't be used to offset the costs of physical production, advertising, tour underwriting...? Presumably Mike Masnick also thinks that CD revenues were never used to pay off the expenses of vinyl pressing or promotional swag. He's probably also oblivious to the fact that many musical acts lose money and until they become profitable any incoming revenue will be used to pay off money advanced by the label. And the lowish (IMHO) payouts from services like Spotify don't go as far as some other revenue sources when it comes down to paying off the up-front expenses.

Is Mike Masnick really this stupid, or does he just like pandering to his readers' ignorance? these statistics are _meaningless_ absent any context of profit and loss for the labels. It's not that I love record labels, but typically they are fronting the money for the production, marketing, and sitribution and I don't think it's so weird that they prioritize recovering their investment, like any other capitalist entity does. It's not like pop singers and rock bands are going to have an IPO and sell shares direct to the public.</comment>


Rabbit brain returns successfully from cryopreservation - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/rabbit-brain-first-mammal-brain-return-successfully-cryopreservation-424913?rx=us <comment><USER2> if you look at the comments, it turns out that the brain wasn't "revived", but instead was sliced and the researchers noticed that, upon inspection under an electron microscope, the connections were preserved.

but you know, that makes a terrible headline.</comment>


Windows Virtual PC for testing websites in different Internet Explorer versions - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en

<comment><USER2> That's just awesome. All we need now is some testing environments for Maxthon and we'll have a complete kit to ensure that websites are compatible with the crappiest browsers available. I'm still looking for a way to emulate Windows 3.1 on OS X. That, along with some 1.44 floppies and I'll be in dev hell.</comment>


The Fantasy of Opting Out - <AUTHOR> https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-fantasy-of-opting-out/ <comment><USER2> 'Obfuscation' \- feeding fake data to privacy-violating apps - is a promising solution for everyone who does not want to miss out on apps like whatsapp, or become the digital equivalent of a prepper with only self-compiled OSS or hobbyist software.

On Android, XPrivacy and the newer version XPrivacyLua use this approach, but they require the Xposed framework to run. I wish this approach would be more common: [https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua/blob/master/README.md)

<comment> dawg- The problem is that for lots of these services, some of the coolest features come from them having your real data. I would love to be able to yell across my house and tell google to re-order toilet paper, or check what's on my calendar for lunch tomorrow, or remind me to change the guest bathroom lightbulb when I get home from work today. Seems like overly aggressive obfuscation would take a lot of features off the table.

I wish there was a way to have the techno-optimist frictionless utopia without giving up full control over my own personal data. The right to be forgotten in the EU is a good step towards that, but we need to go a little farther I think. It just seems like nobody is really sure exactly what that will look like yet.

<comment><USER3> A little farther you say? That's not nearly going to cut it. We need radical change. The only way data will be 'safe' is if it lives on your device and verifiably only leaves it when intended. Any untransparent store is per definition prone to abuse.

By now I think it's safe to say the free market has provably failed us. We should require regulatory bodies to enforce an open standard for this if you ask me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see this a political problem rather than a technological one. Obfuscation certainly helps, but it's still death by 1000 cuts. Even if information is sufficiently hidden in 2019, it might be retained for many years and eventually decoded. Modern privacy issues were pretty unforseeable when most democracies were founded, and seems to be the kind of thing that constitutional amendments were intended to address. I dont know why there isnt more political will surrounding this despite the level of discontent. Maybe people assume that problems arising from tech can only be solved with tech.</comment>


The Collapsing Crime Rates of the '90s Might Have Been Driven by Cellphones - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/how-mobile-phones-could-have-changed-the-drug-game/590503/ <comment><USER2> This article barely mentions lead, which seems like a big oversight. See Kevin Drum's "An Updated Lead-Crime Roundup for 2018": [https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated- le...](https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime- roundup-for-2018/).

<comment><USER3> The whole world went from leaded to unleaded fuel around the same time. During that time in Poland, where I live, crime, if anything, went up. Someone should do a study across all countries where the data is obtainable to confirm/refute the lead hypothesis.

<comment><USER4> You absorb the lead when you are a child. It's biggest effect is in young adult years. I'd expect at least a 10 year delay from "reduction of atmospheric lead" to "reduced crime rates".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nope. Video games IMO. Cheap awesome entertainment for basically everyone. Everyone can afford consoles and escape reality. Why act out aggression in real life and risk prison when video games let you do all that and more?

<comment><USER6> Or free and easy access to porn. Really.

<comment><USER7> 90s dialup Internet was not in every house yet. Microsoft succeeded in getting PCs in homes but free was not the name of the game with pay per minute online access. Things didn't really take off until the 00s with broadband access.

<comment><USER6> Not true. Pay per minute Internet access did not last that long, by the mid 90s it wasn't even a thing. Image porn on the Internet was a big deal in the 90s, especially in the second half of the decade. Plenty of people had dial up, hence the massive popularity of ICQ and later AIM. And of course email, online gaming, and the dotcom bubble...

And I never said Internet porn. While not free, porn was still cheap and easy to get on cable or satellite, or at video rental stores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any correlation like this - as implicitly stated in the article - should be taken with a massive pinch of salt. They're only given any credence because they "make sense" \- i.e. fit preconceived notions of how the world works, mixed with a magic PR-friendly sprinkling of supposedly counter-intuition - rather than anything meaningful in the stats.

For more, see [http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious- correlations](http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) where you will find that, for example, the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with the number of films that Nicholas Cage appeared in that year.

<comment><USER9> But the article does enumerate flaws wit the cellphone-violent crime hypothesis:

The University of Leeds criminologist Graham Farrell, who is closely associated with the hypothesis that better security technology is the primary cause of the crime decline, also took issue with some of the paper's data analysis. "At first glance, it seems to be that antenna [density] increased mostly after homicide already declined," he wrote to me in an email.

The data that the economists presented don't match the chronology of the decline of homicides, especially considering that their proxy variable—how many antennas were up—would almost certainly precede cellphone usage by some period of time. The timing, he said, is "not even close."

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but no one said it did.

<comment><USER8> It's the title, combined with the fact that they've even given the idea air time, which made me write that comment. My argument is essentially that this article shouldn't have been written.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope this is correct. If it's correct, then this is something very powerful! It would mean that disintermediation can reduce violence! In retrospect, this seems obvious. There was a recent study of house cats in a southern English town, where the cats were tracked with GPS collars, and some were given camera collars. (There was also a documentary on the study on streaming services.) One thing they saw, was that cats used chemical and auditory signalling, as well as physical encounters, to negotiate schedules that prevented them from encountering each other.

I wonder if it would be possible to create an app where people could (with consent) register people they really don't like. The exact locations and identities wouldn't be displayed, but venues might glow red as if they're radioactive. Couples who have broken up might want to use this, for example. It would be like an anti-Foursquare. (Just spitballing a silly idea.)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have for a long time believe that the entertainment value provided by the internet and connected devices should not be overlooked when considering factors that contributed to this decline in crime during this period. Just having something to entertain people can help keep them out of trouble.

<comment><USER12> The entertainment value is also a cheap distraction. Poverty isn't so miserable when a little entertainment is available.

<comment><USER13> Bread and circus of the modern era. Not that surprising. Most criminality is/was done due to opportunity[0] after all, and when you're busy consuming entertainment...

[0] [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2193-7680-1-3](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2193-7680-1-3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Meanwhile, the economists behind Freakonomics argue that it was caused by the legalization of abortion: [http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and- crime-who-sh...](http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who- should-you-believe/)

I don't have a strong opinion on whether cell phones or abortion or anything else caused the collapse in crime, but do feel like the theories you'll read about the most (assuming you're not an academic in the social sciences) are the ones that make for the most interesting headlines.

<comment><USER15> or the elimination of leaded gasoline.

<comment><USER16> Or too cheap to steal consumer goods.

<comment><USER17> Crime rates fell across the board, not just petty crime. Violent crime rates fell especially hard

<comment><USER18> Rape dropped by 75-80% between 1970 and 2015.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is an interesting freakonomic style perspective.

It makes the 1984 Lifeline (more commonly yet erroneously known as ObamaPhones) project to get phones to impoverished people have larger network effects.

It also points to the faults of the 'War on Drugs', as very little of this territory would be needed without black markets.

<comment><USER20> So much drug and gang related crime can be pinned on the conceptual failure of the "war on drugs". But it succeeded where it was supposed to: incarcerating millions of black and brown people, and maintaining white supremacy.

For a brief history of the racial motives behind the war on drugs, check out this episode of On The Media:

[https://www.wbez.org/shows/on-the-media/this-american-war- on...](https://www.wbez.org/shows/on-the-media/this-american-war-on- drugs/f9053d04-7aa9-4e11-990e-f31bb02a4115)

The bit about Billie Holiday is particularly heartbreaking and infuriating.

<comment><USER21> So weird when people say the war on drugs was about racial superiority. Sure some people promoting it were racists, but a lot of voices in drug ridden communities demanded action against the addicts and criminals. Shockingly enough (to those not paying attention), the communities with the largest drug usage suffered the most from drug related crime.

<comment><USER22> There were multiple potential solutions to drug use/crime. The chosen solution was the one that took away the freedom of millions of POC without actually solving the problem. And when it failed, they just doubled down even harder, because of course it didn't actually fail.

<comment><USER21> I don't believe there are multiple potential solutions that anyone in the 70's believed worked better than throwing criminals in jail. To this day it is a primary possibility for why crime receded so quickly in the 90's.

<comment><USER20> Tell that to the millions of (mostly black and brown) people whose lives were ruined due to possession or sale of small amounts of cannabis. I'm sure as states legalize cannabis we'll see a spike in crime now?

Even if we agree that tough-on-crime works (I do not agree, but say I did), the way the war on drugs applied tough on crime was predominately on people of color. If you were white and sold weed you were MUCH less likely to go to jail than if you were black or latino. We could have locked up all those white weed dealers and driven the crime rate down even lower. So at very very very best the war on drugs was the right policy applied in a racist way. At very best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This might be my perspective from a flyover state, but weren't cellphones rare until the late 90s/early 2000s?

<comment><USER24> Yes, but people who got a lot of value out of them (e.g. drug dealers) were early adopters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >The data that the economists presented don't match the chronology of the decline of homicides, especially considering that their proxy variable—how many antennas were up—would almost certainly precede cellphone usage by some period of time. The timing, he said, is "not even close."

So the response to the post title is "No, not really"?

</comment><comment><USER26> Ok, not the first time I see the land-less business theory. Half surprising, half sad (that people still ~need to make money this way), half happy since it makes most lives better I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER27> Freakonomics speculated that it was because of Roe vs Wade in 1972.

<comment><USER28> Would that imply that unwelcome babies are more likely to become criminals?

<comment><USER29> More about single mothers, lack of oversight/parenting because she's struggling to put food on the table.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A rise in cell phones coupled with a decrease in cash (more and more CC usage) making robbery less profitable while penalties stayed the same makes intuitive sense.

</comment><comment><USER31> Right in the first sentence the article equates cellphones with smartphones. Manipulation.

</comment><comment><USER32> Another mystery is why the police have not used the cellphone data to take out every dealer. They would only have to do so a city at a time to put the fear into everyone nationwide. The text messages are always incriminating only if you pretend to be naive and a stickler for evidence (wanting to see the drugs) can the nature of the messages be denied.

America is different, but in the pre-cellphone UK there were pubs to meet dealers in. After a beer and a walk to the car the transaction could be made. A fully legit landline call could be made to arrange meeting up for a beer, no code words needed. With cell phones and messaging there is invariably some discussion on quantity required, hence evidence one would think would be good for court.

Coupled with this change there has been woeful cutbacks to policing in the UK so there are no resources for clearing drugs out of a community. It sort of suits the government to have people stoned rather than demanding social change, people with drugs or related paraphernalia are not wanting to get in trouble with the authorities.

<comment><USER33> The answer to this "mystery" in the US would be the Fourth Amendment. The UK has similar requirements for warrants.</comment></comment>


Tent.io - <AUTHOR> https://tent.io/ <comment><USER2> Protocols solve problems. Whats the problem being solved?

<comment><USER3> Tent dates back to the days of Diaspora. They've dressed it up a bit, but the original idea was to decentralize social networking.</comment></comment>