What is "the slightly toxic baggage of maker culture"? One of the things about modern life that seems most toxic to me - and I'm guessing you'd agree - is that our interactions with technology are so heavily skewed toward consumption, not creation, and what creation there is is overwhelmingly in the service of a desperate desire for fleeting online attention. If there is a toxic side to "maker culture," how can we ameliorate it and emphasize the fun, learning, and agency?

Mostly that "Makers" would best be described as "Geeks who missed shop class", and that they should understand that there were reasons for pretty much every aspect of traditional work, and that their facility with computers/technology does _not_ make them more knowledgeable possible approaches than folks who did this for a living in the past.

I like the look of them, but have never understood what people actually use them for.

Generally, they don't use them for anything. Kind of cyberpunk LARPing or something.

They actually have a purpose, if you're in a role where you need to interface with a lot electro-mechanical stuff of varying vintage though. Basically ends up being a pelican case with a fat battery, a small network with short patch cables for reconfiguration on the go, two SBCs running windows IOT and linux, a PLC + 2/3 I/O cards, a CAN adapter and some space for 6 inches of terminal block on a DIN rail. Then a keyboard + monitor.

Maybe not as sexy as some people make but it is a cyberdeck/briefcase lab and it will allow you probe most distressed machines without having to waste time running around for supplies or back and forth to offices.

The way many manufacturers are structured however, there is too much red-tape and osha for this to be a reality for a lot of people, at least in the usa. It does exist in some places though.

That’s exactly what they’re supposed to be. The Flipper Zero is also a type of cyberdeck.

the rest of it makes sense but what's the PLC for?

Super Evil Shit™: https://www.controleng.com/throwback-attack-an-insider-relea...

More generally, there's a vast world of civil / industrial infrastructure controlled and monitored by SCADA / PLC networks - boring stuff, city scale water and sewerage, mineral processing plants, refineries, port loading, reserve tanks, pipelines, etc.

Regular technicians carry cyberdecks / portable work units that speak PLC alongside ethernet.

Speaking only for myself, I'd love to have a modern netbook with great battery life and a decent keyboard. I'd carry that around with me all the time to hack on random bits of code or whatever when the mood strikes.

If I weren't completely tired of waiting for iPadOS to grow a Terminal.app, an iPad mini with a keyboard folio case would be nearly my ideal portable computer. For functionality, I'd vastly prefer something in that form factor that only supported text mode of something that had a beautiful GUI but no terminal. At least I could run emacs and fish shell there, and that'd cover 98% of my on-the-go needs.

Super bonus points if you can make the thing look cool at the same time, but that's just icing on the cake.

My impression is, that movement it's more about having a modern accessory. All the videos I've seen so far are about look, not technology, purpose or actual usage; thus I label them fashion-deck. Kinda strange, but maybe something more will grow from this.

Yeah, it's a fun, retro aesthetic; but I also care about having computers on my person that are genuinely useful for things I want to do, just as my smartphone is useful.

Seems like that's just for protesters.

Whew! Glad that's sorted.

Okay well we have those already and it hasn't really changed anything.

> we have those already and it hasn't really changed anything

What’s the term for antibiotics having been so successful that we forget all their benefits?

The Montreal Protocol worked [1]. It probably couldn’t have without our satellite data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

Disagree about the change. Even the fact that you know and care enough to argue this on-line is a change that can be attributed to space missions - and it's even more true about the overall global conversation about climate situation, and all activities taken to help with it.

These things do take time though.

Because it's only an option if you're rich and most of us aren't rich.

Others won’t benefit ?

Here is a meta-analysis that says trans women don't exhibit significant differences in performance: https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/60/3/198

Here's an in-depth critique of the claims made in that paper: https://www.voidifremoved.co.uk/p/beef-trifle

That is a blog.

It is, yes. It is also a substantive critique pointing out methodological issues in that meta-analysis.

Not really!

Does that work?

It works really well. I've been using this prompt to find spelling and grammar errors for about a year now: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

"fix english" is the prompt i wish to turn into a button

> I get the feeling that it's not worth looking at because it was probably made using LLMs

This is the big one for me. Small toy website someone has made as a passion project used to be the big draw of HN for me but now I just a assume it's a vibe-coded mess that'll 404 in 7 months.

> If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product

Really? Because most of the time what you see is huge layoffs and gutting the company's assets.

> Workers ultimately have a job because they are useful to managemen

Workers have a job because their labour produces value

Of the 8.1 billion humans alive, 3 billion of them have jobs (approximately). You are speaking for every single last one of them, that they weren't hired for some office political reason and every single last one of them is useful at their job? I haven't spoken to all of them, but I find that hard to believe.

The fact that you have to invoke "every single last one" of 8 billion people to demonstrate the possibility of this happening is pretty telling.

Oh you know this for an irrefutable fact, now?

Yes. It's the kind of thing stated by people who have never run a business.

You seem less deductive in your reasoning than desired for a good faith discussion, and pathological in your baseless accusations.

For example, I have run my own business before I hired people.

Good faith discussion? Your reply to me was "Oh you know this for an irrefutable fact, now?". What discussion is there to be had from a sarcastic quip that deliberately misses the point?

If you want to good faith discussion, address the substance of my comment.

.....

Are you an llm trained to troll?