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- Systems that work offline. Partly for practical reasons due to my background working in Agtech companies, as well as logistics in developing countries. But al

- Systems that work offline. Partly for practical reasons due to my background working in Agtech companies, as well as logistics in developing countries. But also it's just technically and socially fascinating. How do you detect conflicts? How do you decide what one is? To what extent - if any - can it be resolved automatically? Revisions, event sourcing, CRDTs... there's no one size fits all industry solution and not enough people to take it seriously. (Friendly request - if it's been a problem for you in your industry, drop me a line. I sometimes think I should niche down in it, but wonder if it's too obscure). - Frontend JS minimalism. Any stories about people ditching transpilers, build tools etc appeals to me immensely. My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it. - Concatenative langauges. Less Forth and more Joy[0]. I just feel like there's something here, and the idea will not die until it catches on. The amount of concatenative language interpreters I've abandoned is a bit embarassing. [0] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html

soulofmischief 4y ago
meadhbh-hamrick 4y ago
I'm a fan of FORTH, but absolutely second your motion that Joy is worth investigating. It has a FORTH "feel" but feels like you can more easily do more advanced things with it.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Joy appears even more “write-only” than Forth. Half the skill in the art of programming is choosing good names, but Joy lacks names for arguments and locals. Otherwise, it looks interesting. But, I think I’ll stick to lisp.
grepLeigh 4y ago
Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts? I've been obsessed with machine learning for embedded systems for years! So many practices around ML assume constant network connection and/or that your service runs in a data-center. I'm an ex-SRE and love building reliable offline computer vision things!
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts? Nowhere. Should we start something? :)
  - grepLeigh 4y ago
    I'm in! I run a small Discord server for 3D printer enthusiasts (I'm building a a closed-loop monitoring system for 3D printers). A section for offline systems in general would be easy for me to add. Invite link: https://discord.gg/sf23bk2hPr https://discord.gg/sf23bk2hPr I'm open to wherever people naturally gather though. IRC, maybe? Another community you might like: https://www.tinyml.org/ https://www.tinyml.org/
  - myself248 4y ago
    I share this interest! I feel like a lot of ham radio networking is still "offline" from an internet perspective; you may have a LAN or even a WAN but no connection to root DNS or certificate servers or whatever. This tickles my fancy: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-repositories.html https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-... I feel like /r/darknetplan is tangentially related, but not quite what I'm looking for. I've been playing with Internet-in-a-box, which is precisely wrong about its name; it's an offline repository of content that was developed on the internet. Someday I'd like to marry that with my Othernet receiver, which is a similar offline-hotspot-of-content but keeps that content updated by receiving a satellite data stream. (One-way only.) Piratebox seems to be a dead project by that name, but I like the idea. A local file repo and possibly bulletin-board for use by folks within range of the box. Yes, yes, yes, where do we go to chat?
  - csben 4y ago
    I've joined the discord server advertised by grepLeigh in another comment.
- wwilim 4y ago
  > Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts? Presumably not online
rengler33 4y ago
I'm interested in these offline systems in the agtech space. What kinds of use cases exist here? I'd love to be involved in agtech if I thought it could have a positive impact on soil health.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Can't speak much to the soil health side of things - though I know there's quite a few companies doing that. I was mainly involved in the logistics side of things - moving & tracing livestock, fruit. Long and the short of it most people, solutions and systems just assume always-on internet, which as you can imagine in remote regions is not a reality (even if it's a reality within range of the farmhouse router with starlink, the front gate could be miles away).
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Interesting. Having some friends who write software/hardware for factories, always-on connectivity is definitely not an assumption. I had assumed it would be the same for AgTech but sounds like I'm wrong. What are some of the biggest pain points you've encountered?
    - tonyarkles 4y ago
      Not the poster you’re replying to but I’m also in AgTech. We were at a demo a couple of years ago at a farm. Not a competitor but sort of was doing a demo half a mile north of us. We’d designed for “no connectivity” from day one, including power. Our control station ran on a generator but also had a backup battery to keep the radios alive if the genny dies. Half way through their demo, there was a power outage at the farm (as happens from time to time). As it turns out, their [insert product] relied on a connection to either AWS or Azure for some key functionality. Power goes out, turns out they had been using the farm internet for that connectivity (LTE service was miserable in the region), so their huge machine just stops and sits there idling in the field. Can’t even command it to return back to the crowd. Meanwhile our drone is still running back and forth on our field area and we didn’t even notice that anything went wrong.
munificent 4y ago
> The amount of concatenative language interpreters I've abandoned is a bit embarassing. Earlier this week, I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. He spent a lot of time looking into Forth and other concatenative languages and he said he found a lot of implementations of the languages, but very little code written in them. It was as if soon as the implementers actually tried to use the thing they created, they gave up. So your experience isn't unique. I've also written a couple of concatenative languages and quickly abandoned them after trying to write more than toy programs and realizing I wasn't smart enough to reason about the stack in my head.
- harryvederci 4y ago
  > I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. Do you have a source of this video?
  - Balooga 4y ago
    https://vimeo.com/771406693#t=85m30s https://vimeo.com/771406693#t=85m30s Handmade Seattle 2022, Day One. Around ~1h25min in. I assume this is the video.
    - munificent 4y ago
      That's the one!
  - whtrbt 4y ago
    https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1654475429 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1654475429 just over 36 mins in.
  - abnercoimbre 4y ago
    Organizer here! This talk will be published in a few days, fully-annotated at the Conference Guide [0] where you can download presentations for free. Sign up for the newsletter [1] to stay up-to-date (we're indie and the extra eyeballs help.) Anyhow, the other comments linked the raw streams already :) [0] https://guide.handmade-seattle.com https://guide.handmade-seattle.com [1] https://handmade-seattle.com/newsletter https://handmade-seattle.com/newsletter
btheshoe 4y ago
> My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it. Why do you think this? Would be interested to hear the reasoning behind the take.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Well, as reactionaries love to tell us, it's a library and not a framework. Great, we already have a library for that - it's called the DOM. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for reactive programming, and even templated views. But reacts approach of hiding everything under the rug rather than having a clear "here's where the state changes" and "Here's we we render" divide always struck me as the worst of both worlds.
mind-blight 4y ago
I both love React and love frontend minimalism. I'm curious what you mean by "React is parallel to the DOM"
d-us-vb 4y ago
Mentioning concatenative programming gets an instant like from me.
x-complexity 4y ago
> - Frontend JS minimalism. Any stories about people ditching transpilers, build tools etc appeals to me immensely. My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it. Been going down this path recently via Svelte & SvelteKit: It's been really fun seeing the network responses of the first load being full HTML for any page (SSR), with JS responses handling transitions in between pages (CSR). I've even managed to get my SVG image generator to run server-side first before passing over, with any changes handled client-side & with URL changes. Refreshing with the changed parameters renders the newer SVG. :)
eternityforest 4y ago
I love offline systems. IoT is everywhere, garage doors should not need the internet. SyncThing is one of my biggest inspirations in software. They are one of the only projects I consider truly getting P2P right, ever, and there's a nice ecosystem of stuff people have been doing with just that one primitive of a folder that syncs. A lot of the time it seems like you really don't need advanced conflict resolution, if you change your actual UI model to be inherently parallel, which you often can. A collaborative document editor is hard. A forum that lets you post offline is easy. At worst a conflict will get a few out of order posts, which is not an issue if people use @references, reddit style trees of comments, or there's low enough volume that it's unlikely to be confusing. Post race conditions already exist in forums anyway. There's a lot of low hanging fruit in P2P and offline first, and everyone seems to be mostly doing the hard stuff like cryptocurrency instead.
- myself248 4y ago
  > there's a nice ecosystem of stuff people have been doing with just that one primitive of a folder that syncs. Ooooo, got links? Out of curiosity, how heavyweight is Syncthing, computationally? Could it run in an ESP32? I've used that same "folder that syncs" concept in some of my own designs which I would love to push down to smaller hardware...
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    Most of the stuff is notetaking, people will use markdown based tools and sync them. That's what I do with Obsidian, but it seems like pretty much every flat file app on Android has a lot of SyncThing users. I haven't looked into the internals of ST all that deeply, partly because IIRC it's written in Go(Like so many P2P apps) and I'm not familiar with it. From what I know of it, you could probably port it, just because the ESP32 is really powerful, but it would be a big rewrite. IIRC ST uses some kind of embedded database, not SQLite but similar-ish, I think it might be NoSQL. I looked into it at one point because I wanted to add some features, but abandoned that when I found out how committed the devs are to sticking to the core functionality only. I think if I were going to push it to ESP32(Which seems like an amazing idea) I might look into a custom embedded-first protocol. It would be amazing if SyncThing could add support for a lite version of the protocol, but I doubt they would. The community seems to not mind forks though, maybe someone can make a "SyncThing for IoT" fork?

soulofmischief 4y ago

meadhbh-hamrick 4y ago

I'm a fan of FORTH, but absolutely second your motion that Joy is worth investigating. It has a FORTH "feel" but feels like you can more easily do more advanced things with it.

wrycoder 4y ago
Joy appears even more “write-only” than Forth. Half the skill in the art of programming is choosing good names, but Joy lacks names for arguments and locals. Otherwise, it looks interesting. But, I think I’ll stick to lisp.

grepLeigh 4y ago

Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts? I've been obsessed with machine learning for embedded systems for years! So many practices around ML assume constant network connection and/or that your service runs in a data-center. I'm an ex-SRE and love building reliable offline computer vision things!

LAC-Tech 4y ago
Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts? Nowhere. Should we start something? :)
- grepLeigh 4y ago
  I'm in! I run a small Discord server for 3D printer enthusiasts (I'm building a a closed-loop monitoring system for 3D printers). A section for offline systems in general would be easy for me to add. Invite link: https://discord.gg/sf23bk2hPr https://discord.gg/sf23bk2hPr I'm open to wherever people naturally gather though. IRC, maybe? Another community you might like: https://www.tinyml.org/ https://www.tinyml.org/
- myself248 4y ago
  I share this interest! I feel like a lot of ham radio networking is still "offline" from an internet perspective; you may have a LAN or even a WAN but no connection to root DNS or certificate servers or whatever. This tickles my fancy: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-repositories.html https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-... I feel like /r/darknetplan is tangentially related, but not quite what I'm looking for. I've been playing with Internet-in-a-box, which is precisely wrong about its name; it's an offline repository of content that was developed on the internet. Someday I'd like to marry that with my Othernet receiver, which is a similar offline-hotspot-of-content but keeps that content updated by receiving a satellite data stream. (One-way only.) Piratebox seems to be a dead project by that name, but I like the idea. A local file repo and possibly bulletin-board for use by folks within range of the box. Yes, yes, yes, where do we go to chat?
- csben 4y ago
  I've joined the discord server advertised by grepLeigh in another comment.
wwilim 4y ago
> Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts? Presumably not online

rengler33 4y ago

I'm interested in these offline systems in the agtech space. What kinds of use cases exist here? I'd love to be involved in agtech if I thought it could have a positive impact on soil health.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
Can't speak much to the soil health side of things - though I know there's quite a few companies doing that. I was mainly involved in the logistics side of things - moving & tracing livestock, fruit. Long and the short of it most people, solutions and systems just assume always-on internet, which as you can imagine in remote regions is not a reality (even if it's a reality within range of the farmhouse router with starlink, the front gate could be miles away).
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Interesting. Having some friends who write software/hardware for factories, always-on connectivity is definitely not an assumption. I had assumed it would be the same for AgTech but sounds like I'm wrong. What are some of the biggest pain points you've encountered?
  - tonyarkles 4y ago
    Not the poster you’re replying to but I’m also in AgTech. We were at a demo a couple of years ago at a farm. Not a competitor but sort of was doing a demo half a mile north of us. We’d designed for “no connectivity” from day one, including power. Our control station ran on a generator but also had a backup battery to keep the radios alive if the genny dies. Half way through their demo, there was a power outage at the farm (as happens from time to time). As it turns out, their [insert product] relied on a connection to either AWS or Azure for some key functionality. Power goes out, turns out they had been using the farm internet for that connectivity (LTE service was miserable in the region), so their huge machine just stops and sits there idling in the field. Can’t even command it to return back to the crowd. Meanwhile our drone is still running back and forth on our field area and we didn’t even notice that anything went wrong.

munificent 4y ago

> The amount of concatenative language interpreters I've abandoned is a bit embarassing. Earlier this week, I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. He spent a lot of time looking into Forth and other concatenative languages and he said he found a lot of implementations of the languages, but very little code written in them. It was as if soon as the implementers actually tried to use the thing they created, they gave up. So your experience isn't unique. I've also written a couple of concatenative languages and quickly abandoned them after trying to write more than toy programs and realizing I wasn't smart enough to reason about the stack in my head.

harryvederci 4y ago
> I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. Do you have a source of this video?
- Balooga 4y ago
  https://vimeo.com/771406693#t=85m30s https://vimeo.com/771406693#t=85m30s Handmade Seattle 2022, Day One. Around ~1h25min in. I assume this is the video.
  - munificent 4y ago
    That's the one!
- whtrbt 4y ago
  https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1654475429 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1654475429 just over 36 mins in.
- abnercoimbre 4y ago
  Organizer here! This talk will be published in a few days, fully-annotated at the Conference Guide [0] where you can download presentations for free. Sign up for the newsletter [1] to stay up-to-date (we're indie and the extra eyeballs help.) Anyhow, the other comments linked the raw streams already :) [0] https://guide.handmade-seattle.com https://guide.handmade-seattle.com [1] https://handmade-seattle.com/newsletter https://handmade-seattle.com/newsletter

btheshoe 4y ago

> My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it. Why do you think this? Would be interested to hear the reasoning behind the take.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
Well, as reactionaries love to tell us, it's a library and not a framework. Great, we already have a library for that - it's called the DOM. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for reactive programming, and even templated views. But reacts approach of hiding everything under the rug rather than having a clear "here's where the state changes" and "Here's we we render" divide always struck me as the worst of both worlds.

mind-blight 4y ago

I both love React and love frontend minimalism. I'm curious what you mean by "React is parallel to the DOM"

d-us-vb 4y ago

Mentioning concatenative programming gets an instant like from me.

x-complexity 4y ago

> - Frontend JS minimalism. Any stories about people ditching transpilers, build tools etc appeals to me immensely. My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it. Been going down this path recently via Svelte & SvelteKit: It's been really fun seeing the network responses of the first load being full HTML for any page (SSR), with JS responses handling transitions in between pages (CSR). I've even managed to get my SVG image generator to run server-side first before passing over, with any changes handled client-side & with URL changes. Refreshing with the changed parameters renders the newer SVG. :)

eternityforest 4y ago

I love offline systems. IoT is everywhere, garage doors should not need the internet. SyncThing is one of my biggest inspirations in software. They are one of the only projects I consider truly getting P2P right, ever, and there's a nice ecosystem of stuff people have been doing with just that one primitive of a folder that syncs. A lot of the time it seems like you really don't need advanced conflict resolution, if you change your actual UI model to be inherently parallel, which you often can. A collaborative document editor is hard. A forum that lets you post offline is easy. At worst a conflict will get a few out of order posts, which is not an issue if people use @references, reddit style trees of comments, or there's low enough volume that it's unlikely to be confusing. Post race conditions already exist in forums anyway. There's a lot of low hanging fruit in P2P and offline first, and everyone seems to be mostly doing the hard stuff like cryptocurrency instead.

myself248 4y ago
> there's a nice ecosystem of stuff people have been doing with just that one primitive of a folder that syncs. Ooooo, got links? Out of curiosity, how heavyweight is Syncthing, computationally? Could it run in an ESP32? I've used that same "folder that syncs" concept in some of my own designs which I would love to push down to smaller hardware...
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Most of the stuff is notetaking, people will use markdown based tools and sync them. That's what I do with Obsidian, but it seems like pretty much every flat file app on Android has a lot of SyncThing users. I haven't looked into the internals of ST all that deeply, partly because IIRC it's written in Go(Like so many P2P apps) and I'm not familiar with it. From what I know of it, you could probably port it, just because the ESP32 is really powerful, but it would be a big rewrite. IIRC ST uses some kind of embedded database, not SQLite but similar-ish, I think it might be NoSQL. I looked into it at one point because I wanted to add some features, but abandoned that when I found out how committed the devs are to sticking to the core functionality only. I think if I were going to push it to ESP32(Which seems like an amazing idea) I might look into a custom embedded-first protocol. It would be amazing if SyncThing could add support for a lite version of the protocol, but I doubt they would. The community seems to not mind forks though, maybe someone can make a "SyncThing for IoT" fork?