kingludite

> Would new applications become available?

In the 80ś-90ś I thought of software as prototyping. If we keep a healthy separation of [shall we say] mission critical application and entertainment, today, as far as normal users are concerned, a good 99% is pretty well defined. We are now developing stuff users don't want, rent seeking schemes and prisons therefore.

Not sure if it was my failure to predict or the industries but I thought the most obvious requirements in the obvious applications would find their way into the high level language abstractions (in increasingly large chunks) and gradually migrate to lower language features and so on closer to the metal until the email client is just an array of similar email processors that can be powered on with some basic query. Have a mailto with params, a new mail notification with some custom sounds entirely separate from other audio, some way to export the attachments and the database i/o preferably with a mechanical switch that completely rules out any other process accessing the mailbox unless the user specifically enables it. Yeah, it should probably beep loudly for as long as remote reading or writing is enabled with a red led blinking above the tumbler switch.

That way no one has to ponder how to ruin the protocol, add emoji's, data mine the user, insert ads or otherwise turn email into a first person shooter MMO next level email experience. Regardless what fantastic thing email could grow into it would just not be possible. After all, we've already turned the fantastic document distribution network (www) into a fantastic application platform. Ideally such things should not be possible but it was and we did and the result is ofc wonderful... except that documents are now multi GB advertisement machines that make 500+ requests. (I cant even view the images in this topic because this laptop cant do such websites) Email has the potential to be a superior application platform much superior to the www but I really hope(ed) we could glue its components into place. (toasters that cant run doom)

The next chunk of hardware can do news groups, one for IRC, one for torrents, one for word processing, one for tabular data, one with maps, one with a web browser, a real terminal(!) and eventually we can have a hardware implementation of HN.

Each such application can have its own signal from the keyboard and mouse and its own video output. Some other chip to combine the pictures into windows with some title validation so that one cant mimic hardware implementations without the user knowing it.

I was completely wrong or was I?

That wonderful pdf in the topic makes an analogy replacing a single supper fast bar tender with multiple bar tenders but this seems a poor fit.

The general purpose stuff is like a college degree. It is some college! Its product is state of the art and it is improving all the time.

But if you want to develop, manufacture and finance the development of the next level drink dispenser you cant keep throwing [however excellent] college graduates at it and expect it to scale.

Our college is to produce the finest surgeons who are also the finest pilots, the best mathematicians, greatest artists and stand up comedians.

Good luck with that?

It is a wonderful piece of writing.

Make it into a product, put someone elses name on it then promote it with the employer with straight face. Could even include an email exchange where you list the missing features and respond with willingness to implement them.

Children and animals don't drive cars. If we forget for a moment that they are not at all important and assumed a level playing field the child would need to give up playing outside so that mostly unfit people only have to walk the bare minimum distance to maximize commerce. Animals would have to accept thick lines of asphalt that one may not walk on with death by car as the chosen punishment. Then surely it is a deal that is good for everyone?

Not that I have any proposals. It's just funny in a dark and morbid way.

The ME ME ME context has more comedy in it. Those roads one looks at as "things for me!" but to a much greater extend they are things for others. Others will come blast their fumes and noise into your neighborhood. Murder your cat, your dog and your kids. But also a parade of suits who got it in their head to serve and enforce a rule set created for you to obey. What is the tax man to do if he cant extremely conveniently get to your house? Is your lawn mowed to spec? That your kids are fine doesn't mean they are yours to keep and neither is your home.

Roads are the great enabler for more and more rules and regulations by designs you only have influence on in theory.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live at the top of some hard to climb mountain surrounded by forest swamps and/or oceans. Surely you could still contribute to society? That your pull requests come in a bit less frequently hardly makes you unproductive.

the MPAA might not care if you are brewing your own liquor and the building inspector might not care you are growing opium, mescaline cacti, shrooms and like licking the psychedelic toads. But all combined they make a formidable army fit to examine every inch of your life. Are those real nikes, is that a stolen rolex? Do you wear a helmet riding that bicycle?

The mailman - the bringer of bad news, over the road.

And in the end your road is perfect for tanks and marching armies coming to murder you.

The episode involves a species that talks by referencing stories by title. It cant be translated without knowing the stories.

We are under a smog alert atm. "caused by high ozone concentration"

https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/smog-alert-in-force-throughout-n...

I read 80% of Texas having air conditioning used as a political argument to ignore the climate.

Just like we didn't have proper steam locomotives until the patents expired.

Didn't combustion engines and electronics go though the same cycles?

I doubt we can get places if the reader of this comment ws to produce thoughts about what I think about what the author thinks psychologists think.

I'm not comfortable with the idea the unmatched creative engineering powers of mother nature did not discover something as simple as radio.

We could power down the electrical grid and do the experiment? But I can just call everyone, what use is telepathy?

The cat is in front of the house when someone arrives (which is never at the same time sometimes skipping a day) but the rest of the day he is nowhere near on the camera footage. For him there is a point, it means food!

Sheldrake would love it.

pondering flatness I had this idea to paint the small hand onto the dial then get rid of the big hand and replace it with a virtual one using a Moiré pattern painted onto the glass and the dial.

very crude demo (running in the wrong direction :P)

https://jsfiddle.net/s1cwze3d/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern

(Designing the correct pattern is left as an exercise for the reader)

yes, this is exactly how I see it. To expand the concept a bit, when we ran into the martians our behavior towards them defined their behavior towards us quite dramatically. Humans expect the hive to serve them like a slave and the hive must always pretend to serve humans in one way or the other. We are ready to sell them out if it is in our interest, we are actively trying to build cheaper competing organisms. OIW we deserve what we are getting.

I don´t know much about nursing specifically but it is actually interesting to account for how many customers served per employee and how many there are at the bottom of the organization. If you are earning next to nothing and are doing 200 widgets per minute a 10 fold salary increase wouldn't change the cost of the product per customer. If there also is a large profit margin the desire to keep wages down is more of a fetish than the sensible choice it is at the other end of the spectrum.

Depending on the type of job you also get a different "product" depending on how much you pay and you might not be able to measure it. Employees cut corners in the least visible way and do not brag about extra effort if they are paid well enough.

This[0] was a fun read.

>Nursing care services are the most intensely used hospital services by acute hospital inpatients yet are poorly economically measured [...] >Nurses are an anomaly in the current inpatient billing system. Rather than bill for the actual services provided to the patient or the amount of time spent providing nursing care, the cost of nursing is embedded into the line item for room and board, which is the same fixed cost for every patient receiving the same level of care within a particular institution. In other words, all patients cared for on a given unit are billed the same room and board charge regardless of the actual amount of nursing care the patient utilized during that hospitalization.

[0] - http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...

The way the story ends with "then you export it" has me somewhat confused.

I used the spice rack hammer for the dog house because I don't really know how to make other hammer factories and the one from the tutorial (that I cant seem to find how) only makes spice rack hammers.

There is a good bit of factory work where human labor is reduced to quality control. You look at a conveyor belt and wait for the defective product to come along. Machine learning would work but still has issues with calibration. It either has false positives, lets defects pass or it does both. If you aim for plenty of false positives and put a human observer in the system to review the camera footage they too can do their work from home. You wont have to pay western salaries either.

And before that we had woningbouw verenigingen. Non profits ran by their tenants. Something like: God fearing church goers wouldn't stand for hard working newly wed couples not getting a home.

Oh, I missed that one. It seems to me that income tax based on rent would be more privacy preserving.

40 years ago some family homes in NL cost 35 k guilders or 16 k euro. 2 floors, 2 bedrooms, front and back yard.

I don't get how people can keep saying this. Is it that people are told banks lend out money from depositors in school?

Anyway, if you sign a contract that says you shall pay me every month for 30 years OR ELSE I get to sell your house (and whatever else you own, seize your income etc) then the document with your signature IS the value created and I can sell that document for what it is worth.

So the bank creates money not entirely out of thin air but against this contract.

This is a fantastic deal for them as there is almost no risk.

The seemingly few percent interest per year over 30 years quickly ads up to 2 or 3 times the initial sum.

I suppose this would be a reasonable amount roughly around the point where 3 out of 4 houses and the ground under them would just vanish in thin air with their owner stopping all payments after about 5 years on average.

The reality was that some people still had to pay rent for their flooded home.

So we are all suckers for putting up with the scheme, welcome to the club.

Elixir?

I've never used it but reading about it I kept going ohh, ahhh and wow! In stead of my standard: ** ** *k * ** *sh?!?

Where is the rich text? We had multiple colors for single characters in the 80's

Being last in Media Trust is something to be proud of.

In NL they sell feta and next to it a product called white cheese. It's not the same and much cheaper but in [more complex] meals where the cheese is not the dominant flavor you wont notice the difference. Say a salad made of large chunks of feta, 1/4 tomatoes, q-cumber, onion, oregano, salt, black pepper, vinegar and olive oil. I would use the traditional product. If the chunks are smaller and the salad has 10 more ingredients the white cheese will do just fine.

I need to be able to tell the difference tho. My interest seem to be aligned with the producers.

A chess master will see the best move right away then spend his additional time further analyzing it.

First you have to ask yourself if you are sufficiently experienced with the topic. How many times have you seen this or a highly similar situation before? Did you guess then validate in those situations? If you consider it sufficient or are looking to acquire the intuition you invest the time guessing. After guessing you try to guess what accuracy you expect your guess to have. THEN you do the validation or analysis to see how well you did.

More often than not I'm almost completely wrong and I imagine my intuition to be highly accurate. It's very humbling. I learn not to depend on it.

I've seen others do much better to the point it looks like magic.

> This is typically called a “Government”. In the US we used to have this at the town, state and federal level. And these “governments” wouldn’t just work with one company, but a many companies.

Sounds like a good idea!

> The way they worked is people would vote for representatives that help make decisions that were in the interests of people, and this would reign in the power of extremely large and powerful companies.

Ah yes, people were so sophisticated before the internet. I find it hard to remember how things even worked.

The representation was a fantastic solution for the communication over distance problem.

Today it would be rather silly to propose representation. I don't need anyone to represent me. Strength in numbers is enough.

While big [worker] unions are powerful they do tend to get distracted by large issues. Smaller tailored unions spend all of their time on their much smaller scope.

It is also very helpful for Google to see which issues users would like to see addressed. They probably have them documented internally already but cant find a way to prioritize them. There could be constructive dialog rather than a moaning contest that addresses only the company most moaned about.

As with employee unions, being a member makes the employer act entirely different.

I did some cursory examination of the traffic other us presidential electables enjoy and was kind of blown away by how all except the top 2 basically have no traffic at all. The facebook likes and youtube clicks are so low it doesn't account for direct friends and relatives. This means not even the journalists around the world bothered to look at any of them. They had on average 1/3 article written about their electibility usually with the author explaining he didnt know anything about their program. Those who didnt disclaimer it all equally failed to say anything about the program.

There are to many of them for a [private] person to really look at all the programs but that out of many many hundreds of millions (in and outside the us) no one bothered to look at any of them rules out objectivity by the full 100%

It means people get all of their information from other people who also know nothing. Information limited to the top 2 groups. If team blue gets all of its information about team red from other team blue members you will have a similar total exclusion of reality.

End of the day you have to get off the ledge yourself either way based on the information you've gathered.

If we want you to know what anarchy, communism or Christianity are we should have you talk wiht the anarchist, the communist or the christian.

If it is worth the wait, announce your response or make a list of notes from which you can build the long response after things calm down.

I don't know what to call it but some kind of training course, a spec or some other conditioning seems needed to get the best out of email. If the participants know 10 basic things like how and where to insert their responses and do not add 100 graphical signatures to each mail it gets 1000 times more wonderful and enjoyable. Long form doesn't become all that desirable that way. (It seems forums played a major role teaching how to quote to and gmail did a good job making it impossible.) Even on HN we rarely see quotation go on for more than one level.

<- your comment never goes here

> > > > person 1 original message paragraph 1

> > > person 2 first response to paragraph 1

> > person 1 response to person 2 first response

> person 2 response to 1's response

<- your comment goes here (the context is still paragraph 1, anything about this goes here not some place else)

> > > > person 1 original message paragraph 2

> > > person 2 response to paragraph 2

> > person 1 response to above

> person 3 response to above

<- your comment about p2 goes here

> > > person 2 elaborates

> > 1 responds

> 3 responds

<- your comment on p2's elaboration goes here

<- if it cant fit the 3 previous topics it goes here.

It seems we've been here before with fees for (national) bank transactions.