I agree with you, but still would like to point out that the same line of argument (we’ve been fine before) would be as valid if society were to actually collapse. No species has ever gone extinct before... until it does!
20,066 karma · joined October 10, 2011
Similarly you could have some shim code for the online games like the horse race one that talks to some community run server, re-enabling a new kind of net experience.
But then offering a shinier/slightly more bespoke way of doing that becomes a competitive advantage for your product, and now you get why everyone wants to build their own custom UI.
The reason why the aforelinked to Open UI project will never be the One and Only way to build UIs on the web is because there’d too much economic value in being able to do precisely what it can’t do!
I’m not disagreeing with wealth concentration being problematic, to be clear.
dea939...82f A scan of Newton’s personal notebook, page 13 (image from London Museum of History, 2013, 8000x6000 pixels)
That way people who like to build such collections would have ways to share and compare theirs, and see if they have anything missing from bigger datasets, etc. You could even imagine a wikimedia style commons to manage a repository of these hashes and associated metadata.
Having a user display and draw on top of an image is trivial, and something our systems have been able to do for decades.
Streaming video bidirectionally is also trivial and well supported by our primitives at this point, even though it's merely a decade or two old rather than almost half a century.
And yet, if you want to combine these two very primitive operations, you need to find the app that supports exactly the use case you want (not guaranteed), or to be a developer yourself.
We're still catching up to Engelbart's demos, and it's disheartening.
Hephaestus was the god of the forge, smithing, and techne - yet he used magic to make many of his elaborate contraptions. Steampunk is a popular subgenre of sci-fi that blends the relationship between technology and magic. Tolkien opposes the technology of Isengard to the inherent magic of nature, but so does Miyazaki.
As they should! These sort of things are properties of the knowledge building processes themselves, and that is precisely one of the goals of research work - to uncover insights in places where people before you thought there were none.
If you’re thinking about sustainability policy, one idea might be to require warranties like this one for all material objects. This would force companies to internalize the cost of goods that wear out quickly and incentivize them to create more durable products.
It may sound radical, but I’m convinced that’s the general direction we need. If you sell a non consumable/perishable object, you should be required at the very least to accept the good back from the customer at no cost to them, and recycle/reuse/dispose of it properly. Requiring 5-10 year warranties or more is also something we should consider. I’m not sure what the exact answer would look like, but those directions seem like the right way to get ourselves out of the huge landfill/electronic waste hills we’ve buried ourselves under.
This is likely just force of habit. Force yourself to eat something light - just a yoghurt or a piece of fruit - in the morning for a few days, and the nausea will likely go away.
However, maintaining such a fork is not the only prerequisite for it “taking off”. It may well be that my great uncle would love that feature - but how are you going to get his attention when several vendors are already spending millions of dollars in marketing/design/etc to influence which browser he uses?
"Then you don't know what other people want" doesn't seem like a reasonable response.
People want a lot of things - but only use what they can access. Additionally, people will deliberately choose to use broken/painful systems if they have to, in order to accomplish a broader goal. Finally, the vast majority of systems used by users are built because they are profitable to build/operate. In many (most?) cases, they are not profitable to the user in the same way that they are to their builder/operator.
From those simple observations, it seems like quite stretch to claim that anything that has many users is something that people want, and that they enjoy using.
In my current Bay Area employment, if I am sick I stay home. If I feel well enough to work I do, otherwise I don't. No questions/justifications asked besides giving my teammates a heads up over text.
When I worked for a French company, being sick meant having to go to the doctor (writing a 23 euro check out of pocket that was reimbursed a month or two later) to get an official sick note to justify my absence from work, otherwise I would get penalized.
I don't disagree with your hypothesis, but also European paternalism is real.
The best you can do is apply statistical approaches to arbitrary abstractions, and the main thing we learn when we do that is that return to the mean is the only thing we can really be sure of?
There are some jobs that are like this, but they are very few and far between. There are far more companies that claim to be like this when really it’s just a convenient excuse for treating their employees poorly.
The reality is that if you care about your craft a tiny bit more than average, you will most likely end up feeling that you are overpaid for trivial work, that you could do so much more for the company, that your coworkers and hierarchy are apathetic to things that do not directly affect them (and will seek to avoid any change as much as possible). The more you stay in this situation, the likelier you are to burn out.
If you are that kind of person, then you need to GTFO and start your own thing - have your own skin in the game - or accept that that’s the reality of being a mere employee. That doesn’t mean that you can’t do good work, btw - just that you’ll have to find your sources of life fulfillment elsewhere.
The number of bakers in France has steadily gone down over the past half century or so. It's been going up a bit recently due to the new phenomenon of upper class white collar workers who quit their job in their 30s to find meaning in their life to do something more "noble" like baking, but it remains to be seen what the long term impact of this will be.
You can manufacture Twix and Cheetos at scale, but not baguettes.
For the past year or so, my electricity goes out at least half a day every 2-3 weeks. Once, it was out from the moment I woke on a Saturday at 7am until 3-4pm or so. I live in the Mission, San Francisco. Sometimes I get a heads up by text from PG&E a few hours before, sometimes not.
My gut wants to agree with what you wrote, but I feel like re-evaluating my priors is appropriate here.
I wouldn't be surprised that, if humanity is still around and computing a few hundred years from now, people will still be playing SNES ROMs. PS5 games though might be entirely forgotten (especially given online components, endless patches, etc.).
The corollary of that is that if you want your software to be preserved by history, your best bet is probably to package it as a NES/SNES/GBA ROM or something like that.