Actually it hasn't proliferated into civilian use because the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy.
I had an old colleague who in a previous life worked on an incredibly accurate positioning system that was effectively a brief case that knew where it was at all times. The story he told was the DoD made them an offer they couldn't refuse, and everything became secret. I'm pretty sure the company in question is still in business.
I'm not trying to say it's not legal but it might not exactly be legal?
> the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy
Real accuracy is a matter of application. For mainstream civilian use the 20-30cm offered by Galileo/GPS is beyond real accuracy. It gets even better for specialized civilian use or with the aid of differential GNSS (low single digit cm). You'd have to think real hard for a reason to need better precision on a global scale especially if that involves any extra cost.
Can't say how much of a priority accurate positioning would be for civilians during an armed conflict.
To be honest, me also. I don't even use Docker either but it helps in conversations to keep it simple.
Since it isn't obvious to your, Docker and friends also have an entire content management system (pulling, pushing, tagging images and layers) as well as a build system.
Seems obvious that it would be incredibly expensive to do for something very few would buy.
Let's say you manage to build a product you could sell as a niche expensive thing and not as a super duper expensive rich-people-only thing; you would still be competing against people buying an old CRT for 20 bucks or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k TV and takes 0% space in your house).
Another advantage of shaders is that you can make them look exactly how you want, down to particular CRT models, screen curvatures, analog signal aberrations, etc. And almost everything you could want comes already included on RetroArch by default, with lots of presents if you don't want to mess with that stuff yourself. Hard to compete with that. A CRT TV comes with only one look. But again, working with the TV you already own instead of occupying a cubic meter of your house is probably the biggest advantage.
I play retro games almost exclusively and I would never get a CRT myself, not even if it was free.
>or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k
It gets you about 90% of the image quality and 0% of the motion quality. Simulating CRT motion quality on a sample-and-hold display requires around 1000Hz refresh rate.
CRTs emit gamma ray at high power(>5kV is usually the quoted figure), and the standard solution was a bandaid fix of attaching leaded gamma ray blocking glass onto the screen. This high lead glass cannot be recycled, and the EU(rightfully) don't like any of that. I don't know if manufacturing of CRTs are banned or legally infeasible, but it's clearly not encouraged.
There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Leaded glass was a cost-cutting measure, used only for the back and sides of CRT. Leaded glass gradually turns brown under X-ray exposure, so the front screen used barium and strontium instead. There's no reason the whole CRT couldn't use this kind of glass. There are probably other heavy elements that would work too.
(Early black-and-white CRTs running at lower voltage did use leaded glass for the front too, but they aren't the CRTs people interested in old games care about.)
> There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.
Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.
Night vision goggles. The photodiode + CsO + lead coated charged glass capillary amp thing is apparently still superior to solid state image sensors with amplifiers in metrics like SNR, minimum luminosity, and longer wave IR response. The performance gap is wide enough that there's a Chinese Norinco subsidiary that entered the market during 2010s by licensing technology from an EU company.
I think plasma displays are a much better option. We really should bring them back. The latest generation of plasma TVs drove their active elements at frequencies in excess of 600hz. You could do a lot of clever things with these panels. They are basically digital CRTs.
A plasma TV in a pitch black room set to its maximum output power is still the most incredible experience I've ever had outside of a commercial venue.
Self emission is the real magic trick. Not the pattern with which we scan.
As far as I know, all plasma screens use pulse width modulation to control the brightness of each subpixel. This produces even worse motion quality than a typical LCD; you get both sample-and-hold blur from the high persistence, and phantom array effect artifacts from the PWM. IMO, plasma displays are only suitable for watching movies, which have terrible motion quality anyway because of the low 24 fps frame rate.
I agree the response time is not fantastic, but if we are going for the effect of CRTs, it's not that far off the mark. Certainly higher latency than CRT and (properly driven) LCD.
Consumers at large don't like them. In the same desk or table you have a crt monitor or tv, you can have a muuuuch bigger flat screen with higher resolution that weighs a tenth as much.
First weight. Then resolution. I think SoTA for CRTs peaked at early HD resolution 720. One might be able to modulate the beam faster now. Size. And safety - anyone starting up production now would have to solve the safety issues from scratch. Nothing like a few cubic feet of vacuum imploding to ruin your day.
Resolutions were very high for the time, I have a 2002 LG f900p (pretty high end, yes but it wasn't super expensive even back in the day) running at 1920*1200@85hz and it's a delight to work and play on it.
IMO, the only factor that kills the crt vs a moderm monitor is the size and weight. I imagine resolution would be limited by how small the dot pitch can actually be made to be with modern processes but with the advances in magnets and power electronics devices I imagine going at MHz horizontal frequency would be not that hard.
I used to have a ViewSonic PC CRT that went up to 2048x1536. Sadly my family didn't realize the worth and tossed it out along with a bunch of other CRTs many years ago. In hindsight we should've tested them all and kept the nicest ones.
No demand. There is some imaginary demand but I doubt it will realise. And on other side LCD screens are very cheap. 74,25€ for 24" IPS. With 25,5% of that being tax... There is no way CRTs with current volumes would be anywhere close.
> Those that develop on top of open-source have no obligation to give you their work for free.
This is a pretty narrow view of open source.
Just as a simple example, GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are both considered Open Source and, depending on how you hold them, may obligate releasing work to customers essentially for free.
"...are both considered Open Source" << Free Software (GPL) is the O.G. - it's like saying "George Washington is considered to be an American President" or "The Beatles are considered to be a pop/rock band" or "water is considered to be..."
I remember so well when "Open Source" branding started with Bruce Perens - all the business arguments. When you need a database, someone ELSE'S business decisions (how THEY are going to make money) never end up helping YOU. If you use proprietary extensions and become dependent on them, you inevitably will get BURNED when their business needs diverge from your needs.
- They close shop
- They refuse to interop with something you need
- They demand that you obey their arcane rules
- They rug-pull
- They get hacked as only they can
- They lie to you
- They stab you in the back
Do passkeys improve security posture for the average person, reducing the likelihood of them losing their accounts to fraudulent actors? Absolutely.
But they also introduce single points of failure, as the article points out. I can't even remember how many times I've had to help a family member recover their account or get confused when they can't sign in on a new device. It's incredibly frustrating that this flow is promoted as the default for so many services.
1password is the best solution I've found for the average person. It's not perfect (it's definitely more complex than writing down your passwords on a piece of paper or using the same password everywhere) but it's much easier than juggling yubikeys. I know so many non-technical staff members who prefer the OS or browser keys even if it means another account recovery is lurking around the corner.
I get what you're saying but you're also being incredibly dismissive to the common understanding which is still correct, otherwise most astrophysics wouldn't work, because it wouldn't be possible to predict where another planet will be at a later time. It's possible to have two alarm clocks go off at the same instant on two planets, though obviously each will observe the other going off later, after a delay.
It's obviously fair to say they happened at the same time in this scenario.
I love how the Planetscale CEO has been shitting on multigres[0], Supabase's equivalent to Neki, and gloating about how superior Neki is, and yet Neki is not even open source!
Sam, it feels like you're just playing games. It's hard to take anything you say or do seriously. Are you going to OSS this thing? Or have you decided to backpedal?
Congrats on the checks notes closed launch, I guess?
Sam is always shitting on others. For years he has been screaming how bad PostgreSQL is compared to MySQL. Until getting silent about this topic for a few months and then launching PostgreSQL support. Seems he had to realize than the market for PostgreSQL is too big to ignore.
No it isn’t normal, its just this one person. I don’t personally find this language particularly appealing, especially for a serious discussion on technology. But hey, its a free country, they’re a startup and its one way of grabbing the scarcest of resources: attention.
They both are characteristics of software that people consider when deciding whether to use it.
Open source being by far the more important of the two, since it means the user is more insulated by terrible corporate decisions thus making it more suitable for long term planning.
who said open source has no value? I worked at GitHub for 6 years i clearly love open source.
We maintain Vitess using our company funds. Why are you going after a small company for defending itself against companies like Amazon but not criticizing the reason we have to do this.
I would love to open source Neki and I have not said we won't.
People think comments like this really bother me as if I believe that I've missed out on any dollars at all from you, as if you have the buying power or ability to drive any workloads that would in any way move the needle on my revenue.
I want to let you know that I have customers that pay PlanetScale millions of dollars and have told me they came to the product because of my Twitter account. So you will never make me feel bad about this.
This line in the closing epilogue really resonates with me:
> It’s one thing to revisit those old machines just to relive your own years of (likely imagined) glory, but yet another to see people see them as inspiration: to encounter computers that were simpler, unencumbered, unenshittified, and with software you could understand, remix, and own.
I feel as though we have strayed so far from this in modern times and yet it seems to be beyond nostalgia, but firming up to actually be ideal. The idea that your personal computing experience is truly malleable.
We're at a crossroads and where we end up a few years from now, either a personal computing dystopia or utopia, is really up in the air.
We're long overdue for an explosion of new forms of truly liberated personal computing.
"I feel as though we have strayed so far from this in modern times"
I don't know, some years ago I just accepted the system level UI problem's as they are and at most made a suggestion somewhere - and now I can just point claude towards it and achieve more or less exactly what I want that same day. So I am closer to a system that is personalised to my needs.
Recently I showed my 7-yr-old son and a friend of his how they could build their own little video games with the Claude app. Simple stuff, make me a maze game, make the walls move sometimes, make it bigger, make there be a score.
The delight they have at, video games aren't just a thing to play, it's a thing they can design and change, share with each other... I think that dream of a truly malleable experience is still there, I think this "explosion of new forms" you talk about is happening right now with AI, and I think this time it is going to be bigger than ever.
Games that allow custom map is not that new. Minecraft also allows you some basic boolean mechanism that you can build surprisingly complex stuff. I don't know why do you need AI for this
Actual real content negotiation in 2026. Never thought I'd live to see the day.
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