I built a lot of Ikea last month. And I was just marveling how cleverly designed everything was so that it was quite difficult to put two wrong pieces together. Mostly, the only warnings in the manuals were to rotate a piece correctly.
Before computers and internet, a manager might have been allowed to take work files home to work on them. Or workers on the road, might have stacks of company files with them in their car.
How did companies enforce the worker not taking the files with them on their international trip? Just by punishment when it was discovered after the fact. Things worked fine. It was good enough.
There is no need for additional surveillance, just because computers and internet can be used to do it.
OT: Why is that Alphabet, Mozilla, Apple, etc can get together to create web standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform - only a browser is needed, but Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Canonical, etc can't get together to create standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform?
The browser is an extremely poor medium to deliver applications. It works, but barely, is a huge resource hog, fragile and it breaks way too often due to a lack of backwards compatibility between browser versions of the same manufacturer. I have a small app that I support and it's been fun to get it to work in the browser (instant cross platform support was indeed the driver) but the experience is still sub-par compared to what I could do on a local application.
Unfortunately, I think all these things are externalities - or at least, areas that don't impact revenue enough to get companies to change.
I too wish that software would be efficient, robust and long-lasting. But it seems that most people don't care about this enough (compared to other factors) to force change. (Alternatively, they are locked in to platforms they don't like to use.)
this does not track with my experience, so possibly it's the nature of your app or the way it's coded. frameworks like react are notoriously crap. stick to pure html5/css/js and it can be extremely fast and light.
You could have clicked on my profile to find the app that you're criticizing unfairly. It does not use react, but it uses pure html5,css,js, it is extremely fast and light. And yet, there are things that it can not do simply because it runs in the browser, which is a poor operating system for a hard real time program to run under.
I did not criticize your app. I offered that your blanket statement that "The browser is an extremely poor medium to deliver applications" does not comport with my experience. And it looks like I nailed it, too. It is the nature of your application. Had you said "the browser does not offer a real time API which I need for my application", there would have been nothing to say. This is obviously true. Even native desktop apps provide an inadequate environment for "hard RT". So I suspect that is also not a true requirement, either.
Well, there are apps that you can only do native, not in a browser, we agree on that. But I also think that the browser is actually providing a very compelling standard OS with batteries included for many kinds of applications, and now there is even webGPU. I am currently building a local-first interactive theorem prover with built-in IDE as a PWA, in TypeScript, and you have really cool tools you can use as a foundation for something like this, such as ProseMirror and IndexedDB. Of course the raw prover can also be run from the command line via node. Claude Code is also very useful in this environment. Yes, different browsers are an issue, but so much works on all modern ones.
Apple make money from the App Store and from selling their hardware, so why should they want to invest on something that let people install software bypassing the App Store or that works on other platforms?
Alphabet make money from ads, so they want web pages, apps on Android and Chrome everywhere.
Mozilla make money from Google.
Microsoft make money from software licenses and subscriptions and from cloud services. They might be interested in cross platform installation.
At the moment what we have is PWA and WASM and icons on the desktop.
There are many projects that try to make cross-platform mobile apps easier, including Google's own Flutter. I haven't heard of them getting much cooperation from the teams working on Android or iOS, though.
At least for stuff that doesn't use device API's much, it seems like websites are the way to go. They're a whole lot easier to build than mobile apps.
The API surface becomes the lowest common denominator of all the platforms it supports, possibly with a path to support platform-native features, but probably in a way that’s necessarily not as good as native.
I think we already have plenty of avenue in ‘solutions’ like Electron to let people build bad apps.
The boring answer from Capt. Obvious. Incentive alignment.
That said, WebAssembly might be the trojan horse. While it started as a browser compile target, WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is extending it beyond browsers into filesystem, networking, etc. etc. etc.
Fingers crossed, we may get cross-platform standards by accident.
this. webkit is intentionally hobbled and years behind the standards. browsers on iOS are forced to use webkit for ginned up security excuses/reasons so that no real browsers that implement full standards can complete with heavily taxed app store spyware.
Thanks for your comment. I have in my mind to start a hardware focused business in Ontario. I am a little afraid now, but hopefully, I have better luck than you.
Can you expand a bit more on how difficult it is to deliver hardware product orders to other countries? Whichever countries you have experience in.
In my case I need phytosanitary certificates, with the complexity and overhead varying by destination. It isn't hardware like electronics or manufactured goods, but sterile plant cultures in jars. The main requirement is having the products and pipeline inspected by the CFIA.
The primary tension and strain comes from deciding where your market is, I think. You can simplify your overhead in obtaining certificates and building your workflows by choosing to sell to a market where these factors are minimally taxing (like just selling in Ontario or across Canada), but in my case this limits my market too much. Not that many people in Canada are buying what I sell, but there are large markets in other countries that are underserved.
I have a feeling hardware is much easier. What you're developing is probably not illegal or considered high risk where you want to sell it. In my case, some of the products I sell are banned outright because the province or state it's going to considers it invasive. Even with the certificates, I can't sell some species in some locations. Figuring out all of these requirements and rules in advance is essential so your shipments don't end up rejected and destroyed at the border.
Nice, that sounds fun! Some day I'd love to explore that kind of product development and manufacturing. I think there's certification involved there too, though I'm not sure if there is if it's not a home appliance. I hope it's smooth sailing!
Hardware should be much easier, especially if you get your boards fabbed and assembled at a CM (which you probably should, very few companies have a good reason to move assembly in-house).
The core of a microscope are the lenses. For this, you are required to buy three different ones [1]. One of these can be acquired from Thorlabs for 65 USD [2].
How difficult would it be to build lenses of this quality "at home"?
It's not super practical to make objectives. While I suppose it's technically possible, what you produce will almost certainly be worse, more expensive, and more time-consuming.
$65 for a good lens is really not a huge amount of money; you can also find slightly cheaper lenses (about $20 on aliexpress).
To make a lens like this, you would have to buy a glass blank of the right type (two, actually- a doublet is made of two different types of glass), grind and polish them (very messy), and then bond them and apply an antireflective coating. Getting the lens geometry just right is very challenging. Or you can just give Thorlabs $65 and focus (ha) on building a microscope around it (I do this as a hobby; I'm sitting next to one of those lenses right now).
However, folks do this, see http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www... but I can tell you from the images that you could get the same results (better really) with a $150 microscope (which also embeds many hundreds of years of practical technology that make your experience significantly better).
Also, if you're really keen on doing it yourself for pedagogical reasons, then have at it, I just don't think it's the best use of time.
Almost all the energy consumed by appliances in your home gets ultimately converted into heat. For example, the picture on your TV is made from emitted light rays that are absorbed by various solid objects in your home and heats them up. Same for the sounds from your speakers. Your washing machine spins water and clothes around, which makes both the water+clothes and the body of the washing machine to heat up due to friction.
A counter example is a water pump, which converts electricity into gravitational potential energy of the water as it flows upwards.
Not sure about the point of your comment. Ok, doing work generates heat. But if the primary goal is to generate light, not heat, then incandescent bulbs are terrible at their job.
What is the latest on metal 3D printing? How long before I can send off models to a shop and they can print it close to the price of the underlying metal?
I imagine metal printing will never be something that happens at home.
Never? Never for plastics either. It seems like there's always going to be a lot of cost in shaping these materials through carefully controlled very high temperature environments. On the plastic side of things just the filament you feed to a printer is a multiple of the cost of the plastic feedstock that goes into making the filament.
You can send off models and get them 3d printed in metal today reasonably affordably today, reasonable as in "considering the time and expertise that go into making the model making a one off part like this isn't breaking the bank" not "competes with mass manufacturing on cost".
It's not writing that destroys memory. It's fast/low-cost lookup of written material that destroys memory. This is why people had strong memory despite hundreds of years of widespread writing, and it suddenly fell through the floor with the introduction of widespread computers, internet, and smartphones.
The normal person has no knowledge of stats. I am a professional physicist, and I struggle with stats. The methods you suggest can convince a stats professional that the tally is correct. It cannot convince a normal person of the same.
Election security should not hinge on a "trust me bro" - especially when people are being convinced the other way by Russian propaganda talking heads on social media.
Manual counting requires zero trust. In my country anyone is welcome to observe the entire process from start to finish, if they wish to do so. A few years back a fringe far-right party tried importing the voting integrity distrust over here, and recruited people to watch their local polling stations to "expose the fraud". Which was totally fine because they were always allowed to do so, and it fizzled out because zero evidence of fraud was found, and that party still didn't get a significant number of votes.
Don't these two situations (watching vote counts; understanding a complicated statistical argument that the vote is tamper-free) require the same kind of trust?
1. In both cases, everyone is theoretically capable of checking it themselves; they're theoretically zero-trust. In the former scenario, I'm theoretically capable of attending the vote count, and in the latter scenario, I'm theoretically capable of learning the statistics needed to verify the argument.
2. In both cases, most people cannot (or will not) practically check it themselves, and is trusting that someone they trust is doing the checking for them.
I'm not saying they're the exact same situation, but they both ask for a large amount of trust from most of the voters.
You are correct on both points, which you elucidated well. Let's me differentiate the two systems based on "who-to-trust".
- The observe-system operates on an adversarial basis. The people observing the voting process are state officer, independent observer, each party's observers. If you vote for party X, then you trust that party and its people to do right by you. This include trust party X's observer, who additionally is often a local well-known person. You can actively distrust all the other observers and officers, and as long as your observer gives the A-Okay, you are happy with the result. This trust in your observer is a very simple human kind of trust. No expertise is needed by your observer. If you trust other observers, your trust in the result goes even higher.
- The stats-system is founding its trust in the trustworthiness of the stats experts. The problem is that (1) you don't know the stats expert personally. In fact, a huge chunk of the population in any country doesn't know anyone who is good enough at maths and stats. If people in your family are not the math type, your friends will also not be the math type. (2) It is incredibly easy to sling mud at the expertise and trustworthiness of an expert. This process is operating at a very high level these days on social media. Anyone remotely connected to politics is continuously character assassinated by others. Adopting a stats-system actually will actually increase this mud slinging to new heights.
The observe-system is better because as someone else has said, all the counters and anti-counters to it have been known for 100s of years. Breaking it requires breking 100s or 1000s of polling stations across the country. The stats-system has more central points of trust which can be broken more easily.
On the first page, I see 9 countries which it claims have a default risk of 50% or higher in the next 5 years. Which means a probability of at least 1-0.5^9=0.998 that at least one of them will default.
That's a crazily high confidence prediction. What is their track record? What did they predict 5 years ago and how did those predictions bear out?
To be clear, those countries are: Argentina, Belarus, Ghana, Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Venezuela. It would not be shocking if any of those countries defaulted. Also: your math assumes events are independent, but at least the Belarus/Russia/Ukraine events are probably not independent.
Edit: whoops, CFR only gives Russia a 9/10 score, not the full 10/10 score of 50% default probability.
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