I hope the Bill of Materials concept spreads to more areas of software development.

A bit different from your example, but a small group of us started a "Bill of Models" project for our department. We spent too much time failing to manage complexity with fancy tools. We ended up writing our own simple tool for reading custom BOMs to create and manage simulations.

Do you have anything publicly available to read about this project? Or any background on what inspired you?

We wanted to do more simulations with Simulink models to help cut back on physical prototypes. We started tracking time spent to get the results of these simulations. Most of our engineers' time was spent finding the right models, setting them up, and configuring these simulations. They didn't have much time left to do modeling and testing work.

At first we just created some "Bill Of Models" to define systems and simulations. Slowly we've expanded the scope. Each BOM contains a system definition, components, subcomponents, interfaces, and some metadata. There's pointers to different repositories, parameter databases, and scripts to configure runtime environments. We have a small tool that reads BOMs and instantiates them as full simulations.

When someone wants to test a new system variant, they can usually just modify an existing BOM. If they have a new feature, BOMs give them an easy way to see and create every variant simulation to work with. We had to do a lot of standardization of our models, but that helped our efforts to move toward fully automated tests and CI/CD. We now have a web-based catalog of models and BOMs that are automatically generated, run, and tested. All of this has also helped get new people to use simulations for their work.

Thanks for the response, it is a very interesting approach, it sounds more practical than the typical MBSE way of building top down SysML diagrams and adding simulation models afterwards. Are your models liked to other product data in a PLM system or similar for traceability? I'm researching adjacent issues around the flexibility of product platforms and the integration of new technologies in later product variants and model-based approaches to decision making in that regard are fascinating.

I don't use any PLM software. Someone in the company might, but I haven't heard of any being used. All of our requirements are maintained in a company-wide tool though. Requirements get decomposed from customer requirements all the way down to subcomponent requirements. Departments/teams get requirements assigned to them. Engineers were spending too much time manually checking and signing off those requirements. Currently the model and BOM metadata includes related requirement IDs. We are working toward having generic tests for requirements. Our goal is to implement tests for a requirement and have an automated signoff of BOMs.

At this point, our group is actively pushing back on SysML, at least for our roles. Each group's system(s) has a well defined interface to the whole, and everything else is decided within the team. We've found SysML mostly just duplicated work for us. Our software is already written in Simulink so we just build models of our system in that, too. We don't get much value from SysML, and whenever someone else tries to use SysML (like an architecture team) they don't know enough of the details our system.

I don't claim to know much about this stuff, but that's been our experience. The speed and flexibility of our engineers has vastly improved. We've started catching integration issues months in advance, when they are still easily fixable.

I got the free zozosuit when it came out a while ago. It sounded really cool but it didn't have the iPhone AR at least that I can remember.

Virtually trying on clothes would be cool but I don't think there's any way you could get actual tailoring, but maybe adding a few intermediate sizes from the standard s m l?

My prediction for fashion change would be more towards ideas like NTWRK. I hate the false scarcity 'drops' trend, but doing a cool digital launch experience is fun and chunking out a season like Jacquemus seems to build anticipation.

https://qz.com/quartzy/1539036/the-zozosuit-has-been-an-expe...

Virtually trying on clothing has significant social hurdles in the fashion industry, primarily due to a complete lack of trust within the industry. Design theft is one of the most major concerns, and any system attempting to enable consumers to virtually try on clothing requires the clothing designs to be released to 3rd parties before the items are in the market - and that early information release is exactly what all social lessons from past interactions in their industry tell them never to allow.

brands can't own their own app (to be fair the gucci on succkks) or LVMH just pools their brands onto a new virtual department store brand?

Personally I don't get the appeal. Seems to me like those who want to actually try on clothes want the tactile feel which you can't get virtually. Versus shoppers like me I just can see from images online what I like and read the fabric, especially a designer I enjoy I already know what the quality is.

... then build a platform that feeds a consumer's measurements to a secure environment controlled by the brand/designer, render the result there, and send the picture back.

Everything can stay under the control of the designer, including 2FA of the end-user, the degree of fidelity of the rendering, rate limits for requests, timed release to selected partners, etc, etc.

Two minutes into that pitch, any and all major fashion corporations will kick you out the door. I spent significant time trying to crack this nut - the fashion industry culture at it's core is luddite, that and any tech that is not 100% transparent ain't gonna fly.

In Megaman Battle Network, the “shadow net” had a name: UnderNet (UraNet, in Japan).

> New law enforcement techniques using DNS and other Intel techniques will be used to track, seize and tax cryptocurrency - which will cause increased popularity of Ethereum.

DNS? Not sure how that's relavent. And furthermore why would a crack down lead to more popularity?

> A qubit will travel around the world without decohering and increase attention on quantum internet investments

Well that would be good for researchers, there are basically 0 applications so i'm not sure why it would generate imvestment excitement (who needs QKD when you have public-key crypto?)

To join many Bitcoin based peernetworks - you first contact one of the DNS seeds. Which is traceable by LEO. Ethereum has their own DNS and other security protocols which bypass this problem - which would be attractive to those who use cryptocurrency to avoid LEO.

Quantum internet is different than QKD. The best analogy I can give is its like the difference between Morse code and the internet. Things like quantum teleportation, superdense coding and distributed quantum computing through a quantum internet will be revolutionary.

Since I had to look it up: LEO = Law Enforcement Officer(s) in this context.

Thanks for that, I initially read it as “Low Earth Orbit” which didn’t make much sense.

> Things like quantum teleportation, superdense coding and distributed quantum computing through a quantum internet will be revolutionary.

Why?

> quantum teleportation

What is the practical near term (next 10 years) applications? I can't think of any.

> superdense coding

Somewhat better compression is hardly a killer app, especially given the costs imvolved.

> distributed quantum computing

Need actual quantum computers before you can have that (definitely more than 10 years away imo). I'm also a bit unclear as to how applicable quantum algorithms are to parallelization in distributed machines.