Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health.
Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have high fees. Church goers regularly give up 10% of their (gross) income to be part of that group. Cult members might even hand over ALL of their possessions to join.
The camaraderie and experiences that go along with being part of a strong, long lived community tends to be the thing people value most in life. Yet finding those communities has become increasingly difficult in the modern era. People move away to different cities, or just don't run into the same set of people everyday. With the rise of remote work, social disconnection is only going to rise. I think there's a lot of room to create new social organizations with pretty minimal technology, and make a pretty profit from doing so. Humans are still human--they want those connections--they mostly just need an introduction.
I think a large part of this (in the USA, anyways) is due to how modern cities are structured.
It used to be, 100 or 200 years ago, that your workplace, your home, and your usual hang-out place were all within reasonable walking distance of each other. It wasn't a huge deal to go out and meet new people, as you'd naturally bump into them every day.
Nowadays we have a large portion of people in bedroom communities, isolated in a sea of houses. They drive in isolated cars to their workplaces, swing by to get some Starbucks on the way in, and that's the extent of their social interaction. Apart from libraries and parks, there's not many places that you can regularly go and just "hang out" without spending money just to exist in that space. It's incredibly easy to go for weeks or months without any substantial social contact outside of work or your few neighbors.
I feel like this is a reason why internet organizations and social media have exploded in popularity, for that matter. It's the new "default place" to hang out and get social interaction, for better or for worse.
I miss living in the dormitory in college. Everything I needed was within a 3 minute walk. The dorm was full of my peers. There was always something fun going on.
You had a room just big enough for a bed, a desk, and a sink. Everything else was common.
If I was a developer I'd build a "dorm for adults" right next to places like Amazon, but at least around here zoning won't permit it.
It's great if you're single and don't have many possessions. Inexpensive, too.
This 110%. It's especially obvious after moving out of the US and it's hard to convey how much better cities built for humans are than cities built for cars than by experiencing it for yourself.
I blame ubiquitous access to cars and phones as significant early contributors to this problem, with modern IMs and social media being the final nail in the coffin. Because together, these technologies enable your social network to be mostly independent of location. Nowadays, when you move to a different neighbourhood or a different town, you'll still be in daily contact with your friends and family from the previous location, and (if they're relatively close by car) you'll also hang out with them regularly. So you have no reason to try and meet new people at the place you now live in, because you still have your old social network! Hell, new friends will be competing for attention with your old friends - where just few decades ago, these old friendships would go to "hibernation mode" by virtue of distance.
Internet communication, with its much richer modes of communication, is essentially social junk food. It's not a real substitute for meatspace interactions, but it satiates the hunger for socialization. Thus people feel ever more connected and ever more lonely at the same time - loneliness being social malnourishment.
This... still exists? It's called the Elks, the Kiwanis, the Odd Fellows, the Jaycees, the Rotary Club, the Knights of Pythias, the Freemasons, and some organizations based on blood or military service, like the American Legion or the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Even here in the Bay Area I live just a couple blocks down from a huge and well-appointed Elks lodge, and just a few miles away in downtown Mountain View, there is an Eagles lodge across the street from an Odd Fellows, itself a block away from a Freemason lodge.
You aren't more isolated living in a suburban house than in an inner city apartment. Isolation mostly has to do with your desire/initiative/ability to engage in social activities.
I would argue the issue is there are only so many people talented at this particular skill, "making a meet up that works" and so it doesn't scale.
There are all kinds of issues. Setting an agenda. Getting people to follow the agenda. Fostering conversation. Finding venues. Getting the right mix of people. I've been to so many meetups where these kind of issues were not handled well.
If you just want random people you can go to a bar. If you want "like" people it's much much harder.
Victorian etiquette was on to this. You need social market makers who are skilled at knowing a lot of people, introducing them to each other, starting conversations based on common interests and butting out when no longer needed. Formalizing this process would help to some extent, technology could help with remembering names, interests, and whether people have been introduced. Somebody could build this, gamify it and make money all day long if they did it right.
I think about this often, but then I go for a walk (or in other cities, a drive) and see packed bars and restaurants every night with people from all ages having a good time. Makes me feel like the problem is on me - people are obviously able to make friends and hang out without any special apps beyond what is available now.
Pre-covid I went to bars a lot to hang out. Ranging from suburban “family dining” bars to downtown dive bars to hipster breweries, I’ve been a regular at a lot in the last 10-15 years. Most people at my bars come in with friends and really only talk to existing friends or friends of friends. Maybe/rarely the strangers directly next to them if they’re feeling extra social, but not much more than a bit of small talk. From the outside a bar looks like a great place to meet new people and make new friends but in my experience that’s just what it looks like and not how it is.
The only new people I’ve met at bars are friends of friends, not random strangers. And when people are with their group of friends, it’s hard for a stranger to jump into that dynamic.
I've been living in the USA for a year and I don't think I will ever get over this odd 'spaced out' way of living. I see 3 lane roads that would work so much better as a mixed tram/bicycle lane. Crossing roads is also terrifying.
Nix the thought of walking to do the following activities:
- fetching a missing ingredient from a local shop/store that would take 25min round trip and benefit you with additional exercise.
- spending an evening going between bars being mildly intoxicated but not requiring a taxi.
Depends on where you live. Towns and cities with a vibrant downtown exist, from Carmel, California to New York, NY
Bedroom communities established during the mid century tend not to have those. My experience with those have been Fairfax County, VA; Fayetteville, Arkansas; and the suburbs around Sarasota, Florida. These are places that if you walk or bike around or take a bus, people seem to assume you are poor or a servant
Meetup is kind of this. There were also a handful of these in the early-2010s wacky startup boom - I remember some acquaintances discussing Grouper, a startup that organized 6-person social outings.
I guess one distinction between those and your examples of country clubs, fraternities, and churches is that the latter are long-lasting institutions: you find a group of people, potentially spend an extended period of time interacting with them without commitment, and then you become a "member," which carries informal commitment. (In the case of cults there's formal/irrevocable commitment, but for the rest, you're free to leave, there's just a social norm that you don't do so casually.)
The flip side is that a lot of people have either first-hand bad experiences at such organizations or know people who have, and committing to an organization that turns out to be mentally draining (even if not abusive per se) is a worry. So maybe if you want to add some sort of structure on top, find a way to manage that risk. Certainly one step is to not accept as customers/members people who make your organization less fun to join, and be very up front about that. But beyond that, there might be ways to demonstrate to newcomers that the existing members are good people, or to support the organization in establishing social norms that discourage bad experiences, or possibly even figuring out what sorts of things toxic people tend to latch onto and designing your society in a way that lacks those.
(One other danger here is that the easy way to provide some of these benefits, like better career opportunities, is to be exclusionary and offer your members favorable treatment from each other and unfairly treating those outside the organization in a correspondingly unfavorable way. Country clubs, fraternities, and churches all have a reputation of helping the rich and powerful remain rich and powerful. It's possible to provide the benefits in a non-zero-sum way, by actually using the connections to make your members better people, but it's harder.)
I didn't see anything about an app in the op's comment... I started thinking about how to create a social hub where you can just go and exist. Like men's clubs that used to exist, but without the sexism and classism. A clubhouse where you pay some kind of membership fee and you get unlimited access to books, movies, a lounge, a bar, a few games leagues, some mild gambling, etc. Being a queer woman with a disability, I would start by making such a place explicitly inclusive to people like me.
Agreed. I’ve set up my life to foster and form in person social interactions (and organizations to the extent that they help) in my neighborhood. It’s affected where I live, what kind of house I have, each weeks schedule, my kids education, and what jobs I’ll consider. But it’s totally the main thing that we have to work on as humans.
> Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too
I think this is the reason Crossfit got so popular. People could go every day, see the same people, compete against them, etc. Definitely more expensive than a regular gym but offered more than just renting time on equipment.
In the Netherlands we have something like 'Verenigingsleven', loosely translated to club life.
At the end of 19th century workers got better working hours. In the hours after work they set up clubs for everything you can think of. Sports, rabbit breeding clubs, pigeon clubs, shooting clubs etc.
Tot this day it's still a thing, and it's in the canon of the Netherlands.
Last year I did everything I could, to go to tons of concerts, meet up groups, and alumni events. I had a very successful year in terms of meeting new friends, finding high income partners , and generally loving my life. I've long been disillusioned with social media, and I completely blame it for destroying a generation of mental health.
You need to make friends, and you need to go back to the old fashioned way of having light-hearted discussions. Versus nasty arguments on social media. I had to stop using Reddit for the most part, since no matter what I said people would attack it in some way shape or form. Even something as mundane as I find Java to be difficult, turned into a personal attack on my abilities as a programmer. Tons of people are obviously angry for whatever reason, and you feeding into their anger isn't going to help anyone.
I went to tons of meetups, and even though and all of these cases I was a complete stranger I was never insulted or made to feel unwelcomed. There's community out there you just need to seek it out.
I've had Bowling Alone in my to-read Queue, however I think it might be way too depressing to read it in the middle of quarantine shelter-in-place! Would only emphasize the current dire straights!
I was surprised at how many "dating apps" there are that are simply focused on showing people pictures and expecting that simply seeing a picture of someone is going to be a strong enough signal to filter out who is and isn't a viable candidate for dating. It's a tired argument to say it's superficial and shallow, but there are tons of people still doing dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, etc. If you think about it more, I think this is a statement on just how much demand is out there [to meet new prospects] to put up with such a miserable experience.
When I tried using these apps, I found myself trying to reverse engineer the algorithm to figure out exactly how it was ranking me and how to optimize my match rates. Most of it comes down to picture quality and your looks in those pictures. I learned this by running my own A-B tests using different pictures, but unfortunately the apps don't really give any stats on which pictures on your profile are and are not performing. This gave me an idea to create an app to do just this. I called it Cupid's Critics, and you could upload candidate pictures and get people of a certain demographic to vote on them and collect statistics before pushing them live.
What I realized is that this is a band-aid to a broken system. I think a new system is needed entirely, which is why I am now trying to figure out how to make group dinner party dating scale.
If anybody is interested in building it out with me, please send me a DM. If you're interested in an invite/signing up for a group date, please fill out this survey: https://kadray.typeform.com/to/VmhktNHD
Beyond remote work, this will be an even bigger issue with automation in the future.
I can't see university grads opting for 5 remote work days a week unless they've already got a big bubble. It's the people in their 40s with kids already who love fully remote work the most.
Agreed. Why is there no Tinder/online dating equivalent for making new friends locally?
Instead of dating-specific qualifiers, it'd ask for your interests, hobbies, values, age and other demos, then match you based on overlap.
Not Meetup - it's not quite solving the same problem, and so it solves things differently (focusing on shared interests and on discrete meetup events).
Because every time someone builds this it turns into a dating (charitably) app.
If there is a way to find sexual partners in a medium, people will do so.
I think that people will be surprised in the near future how realistic (and similar to in-person) VR and AR interactions will be. Especially with eye tracking that will enable virtually looking the other people in the eyes.
Think about as optical waveguide technology becomes more affordable enabling very lightweight comfortable headsets that actually are close to normal glasses in comfort. Combined with pose detection from cameras with fast AI.
Things like VR Chat are already pretty good.
And actually I think the potential to create perfectly tailored 3d workspaces in VR could make those spaces preferred in some cases over real ones. To me the biggest issue is the size and comfort of the headsets and new technologies are coming to mass deployment in the next couple of years to address that.
It is possible to build technical solutions that take the work and luck out of social organization by shouldering the heavy lifting, but then get out of the way once people meet IRL.
The best tool for this right now is calendar and email. There's a lot of room for improvement.
Please PM me if you're interested in a deeper discussion. I've thought a bit about what this tool might look like and how to get it off the ground.
I've found Meetup alright for finding things to do with other people, but it doesn't work well (at least for me) to find people to be with. Meetup helped introduce me to a once-a-month board game group which is nice, but the problem is that the people I meet through this are sort of stuck in that "role": they aren't my friends and won't be, they are just people I play board games with. Whereas my true friends are people I've hanged out with, speak with weekly, confided in, etc., you can't expect to have that friendship intimacy from strangers who just want a regular activity.
My feeling is that we're losing the facilities to make general friends, and that void is being filled with the non-optimal but best-you-can-do interest-based groups. This is even more effective on the internet where you can find even the most niche group that may not have been possible when we were limited to our local area.
In short: Meetup is good for activities, but it doesn't fulfill the third space OP mentioned.
I’ve been the lead organizer of a largish group with a couple hundred very active members. But getting to that point was quite a challenge that was made harder by Meetup. The group still ended up falling apart.
The Meetup platform is pretty terrible. It’s designed to get people to join many groups, most of which they never engage with and just get a lot of spam from. I’m sure >99.99% of pre-pandemic “social” Meetup groups were totally inactive. Most of the rest would have semi-regular events that <4 people would sign up for.
That said, I think there’s a lot room to build a better version of Meetup.com. The main problem with it is that the managers just don’t know what they’re doing, or are in too deep with tech debt and legacy code. If someone here actually wants to build a better version of Meetup, let me know.
I believe this will be more important as the nature of work changes. In the short run, owing to more remote work as you say, and in the long-run, owing to jobs themselves being increasingly automated away.
Irl organizations surrounding particular interests do materialize as extensions of online enthusiasm (we see this for meetup groups) but this is still insufficient. What's missing is accessible infrastructure to facilitate new connections. For instance, there are today collaborative workspaces and makerspaces (or even University grounds): these can be a good spatial medium for meeting like-minded people. However, the cost of renting is a deterrent. So, that can be addressed in a myriad of ways. As a remote worker, prior to COVID, I'd periodically hit the coffee shops but this did not appear to be an appropriate medium for engaging others.
We are going about things backwards, because it was all we could do: create organizations surrounding particular subjects, then have people join in. In many cases people are surfing around these groups as a means to an end, they don't care the slightest about the subject but they need it as a medium to connect with others. Not only is this contrived, it can lead to friction between individuals who want to focus on the subject and others who want to go on tangents away from it. This problem disappears if you simply have a space where people can choose to mingle or focus on their projects. Historically, physical spaces like this were always important large communities. Now our socially acceptable avenues for engaging others we don't know include very loud pubs, just barely, sports complexes and the like.
> We are going about things backwards, because it was all we could do: create organizations surrounding particular subjects, then have people join in. In many cases people are surfing around these groups as a means to an end, they don't care the slightest about the subject but they need it as a medium to connect with others.
As a long-time member of a hackerspace, I've always envisioned it as a "church" (of sorts) for tech. I feel like I've learnt quite a bit from just immersing myself in the place, and having conversations with people from various disciplines.
Unfortunately, we're always struggling to make rent. It's a pity that the concept doesn't seem to work well in high-rent areas — many people view use of such spaces as a transaction, and won't contribute financially if it's just like any other office or co-working space.
Meetup’s been doing a good job at this for some time. I’ve made friends and I’ve known people who have made lifelong friends from it.
I think it’s hard to build a community around people who just want one, and it’s more effective if it’s based around a starting ground of an interest and better yet shared values.
I think a lot of this does exist, it just isn't formalized. In person socialization happens at a public place. If you go to the same public place the same time each week, odds are you'll find yourself as part of a casual community after a few months.
Coffee shops are great for this. Game shops as well
"Working on" in-person social organizations (particularly starting new ones or restoring deteriorated ones) seems to require a good amount of personal charisma, ambition, social skills, organizational ability, and not desiring to simply make as much money as possible, plus a long-term focus on community health and success over your own personal gain. People with the first set of skills can make a lot of money in the marketplace. If you make a social organization instead of a unicorn, your "exit" would be being loved and respected, along with having your own friends and family growing up in a good community that maybe, eventually increases everyone's collective financial value instead of just your own.
The reality is the changing social dynamics of a population spending increasing amount of time on the internet and less inclined to do things in-person, amplified by people choosing to have 'busier' lives, is the direction we are currently heading in.
We need top down (govt) and bottom up (community) efforts to start real change that can gain momentum (network effects for the founder inclined).
Working on experiments to chip away at this from the bottom up .
Whole social clubs may have been on the decline for decades, there’s been a pretty big growth in group fitness. CrossFit has been huge for over a decade and BJJ had really begun to explode, prior to Covid. I hit my two-year mark in jiu jitsu, right before the pandemic. While I still maintain contact with a few members, I really miss the camaraderie. I have no interest in returning to my office for work, but the moment it’s safe for me and my family, I’ll be restarting BJJ. And possibly reforming dormant bands I’ve played in.
Wait, aren't all social media platforms with their rooms and groups not promoting the idea of finding like minded strong communities? Sure its all digital and sometimes it leads to events happening in real. The "moderators" in these groups take their positions a bit too seriously sometimes.
Decline of churches is one aspect. Society is becoming more secular, and there is nothing replacing those weekly religious services. There are no replacement "myths" that groups can cohere around.
I am working on an idea in this space. Anyone interested can ping me (contacts in profile), it's in early stealth mode but it is targeting exactly this problem.
Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines.
Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective).
It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but if some lunatic out there wants to blow the money, build and sell a laptop at whatever price point you want that:
- Supports CoreBoot
- Isn't a rebranded Clevo shell and has close enough fit and finish to a recent MacBook. Read: No. Plastic. Case.
- If there is ever the phrase "panel lottery" uttered about your machine, you've messed up.
- No logos, or throw them on the underside like Purism.
- The screen has to be relatively close to the MacBook in brightness + viewing angles. Give me an option for a glossy screen.
- Trackpad must be glass. You won't get close to the MBP trackpad on the first or second pass, but try.
- Go for some crazier vertical integration ala the M1. I don't care if it blocks upgrading certain parts, since I consider the industry to move fast enough that I won't _want_ the machine anymore in 4-5 years.
- There is no need for touch of any kind, nor the ability to flip the screen or anything. Just make a damn laptop.
- Edit: high quality boutique feeling support. I don't need an Apple Store equivalent, but at least invest in this.
I get why Apple can do all of the above. I would pay literally twice what I pay Apple for a competing product. Currently, every laptop that I try feels like stepping back a few years.
The upcoming Purism Librem 14, in terms of images, feels like it could _feel_ close - but I'm not impressed with their other products so I'll believe it when I see it. I remain shocked that System76 hasn't bothered with this.
I found the Surface Book had a wonderful premium feel; I went into the shop with a list of specs in mind, and Microsoft was the last manufacturer I'd imagine going with, but it's a powerful machine and also just a beautiful object. Metal case, relatively subtle/classy logo, absolutely beautiful screen, nothing else was compromised for the sake of touch, clean baseline first-party OS. If you really want a premium feel from anyone-but-Apple and are willing to pay more-than-Apple prices for it, I'd very much recommend it.
I've bought myself a Surface Laptop 3 (15", i7 version) 11 months ago.
I had been looking for a laptop powerful enough to code on, that would look "premium" for business purposes, lightweight and the charge had to last a full workday(or more).
This laptop checked all the boxes, and performed wonderfully since then. To the extend that now we're considering getting it for our employees.
I wanted to like the surface hardware because it kind of seems to run Linux and it is portable. According to 'the internet' that is. I tried different products, all with Windows only before trying Linux (which never happened) and found them surprisingly bad overall compared to Lenovo or Apple. Either all of them were bad luck factory mistakes or some people here have rosy MS glasses on.
First off, The support was horrible: on my first purchase (with MS directly ever by the way) they blamed me squarely for a 1 day old (!) Factory broken display (it would turn on but when it got a bit warm it would show only stripes; switching off and waiting for cool off would 'fix it': did I say less than 24 hours old!?); I sent it in and they said I broke it and told me I could buy a new one.
Also when I got a new one, the new keyboard was broken and they refused to replace that as well. Again, blaming me from something that came broken from the box.
And the rest of the experiences was not much better but at least they took them back without whining (there i learned my lesson and went to a shop instead of order online). Horrible battery life (far from what is promised on the tin, even with relatively low workload), random freezes and crashes, weird balance feel compared to, say an iPad or mb air and slow compared to old and new apple products (iPad and macbooks).
After all I was most angry about the bad support; I never had that with apple even when it was my own fault (they repaired a water damaged mb air without issues and replaced two iPad pro keyboard which where damaged by dropping for free) which this was not.
I tried to give them a chance and I tried: I got most of my money back luckily as after the first fiasco I prepared for that and returned them to the shop in the box, but definitely will not buy again soon.
I am pretty unhappy with my Surface Book 2. It’s quite slow for its specs and has all kind of problems like “not enough resources for USB”, freezing, the multi display setup gets often messed after undocking and so on. Considering that its in the same price range as a MacBook I am quite disappointed.
My wife has a surface laptop 2, and while it's a polished and beautiful device... It's not serviceable. In the slightest. If you want to fix something you have to cut through upholstery.
Related to this, I'm kind of shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes. We've got Windows and MacOS, sure, but the nix ecosystem is so fragmented and not as well supported as the other two that it's hard to justify switching.
Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it
just works. Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.
I turned an old Macbook into a Linux box, and it's
fine*. It does what I need it to do, but it doesn't feel premium at all. I just wish I had really slick, solid, premium-feeling alternatives.
It seems to me that Microsoft or Facebook or SOMEONE with a bajillion dollars could afford to do this and really make a dent in the space and give us more alternatives. I guess the demand just isn't there. Very sad.
I think the demand is there, just no one has the right combination of financial resources, technical ability to pull it off, the right sense of good design, and a way to make money off of it somehow other than by charging licensing fees (which is probably a non-starter if you want to grow the user base quickly and take advantage of network effects).
The companies I can see who are in the right position to profit from developing and giving away an OS that's at least as user-friendly as MacOS or Windows and as open as Linux are Intel and AMD. But it's hard to imagine either of them making something that's a joy to use.
Something Linux-based could work, but Linux is kind of stuck with a lot of decisions made thirty years ago. The kernel is pretty good, but the basic abstractions of POSIX-like operating systems are perhaps not what you'd design if you were creating them from scratch in 2020.
The very most important thing an OS does is run software on hardware. Therefore any new entrant into the OS market must support as much software and hardware as possible. The former is actually kinda doable with compatibility layers and emulation, the latter is basically impossible to catch up on.
You do have Android which is often overlooked in these discussions. Strong base of Linux in the bottom and a very cohesive app framework and ecosystem on the top. Polished and premium coupling to the HW from vendors (ok not all of them but don't tell me the latest Pixel or Samsung flagship isn't great). Only thing is, in the end it's not really a desktop OS.
Look out for Kylin OS, it's being created by some Chinese company with that same premium feel. Not complete yet, but works out of the box. I'd probably switch to it once it just works.
Most of these points are just a matter of personal preference. I like Apple laptops but they're not great in terms of repairability, extensibility, modularity and openness.
There are some non-Apple laptops with much better displays BTW, even Lenovo ships 500 nit displays and wide-color gamut ones with some their laptops nowadays. Dell and other manufacturers ship OLED display with some of their gaming laptops, which far outperform any Apple laptop display.
Regarding Aluminium vs. hardened plastic / titanium I'd say it's just a style question, I have never had any issues with my Thinkpads and they're way more resistant to scratching than Apple laptops (a poor colleage of mine badly scratched his new Macbook with his steel wrist watch only days after receiving it).
Regarding upgradability I prefer being able to extend RAM and hard disk as well as easily replace the battery, again Apple is a poor choice in regard to that.
Regarding repairability Apple actively keeps me from being able to repair my machine, take e.g. a look at Louis Rossmans' Youtube channel to learn about some of the crazy stuff Apple does to keep independent repair shops out of the game. Again nothing that I want to encourage.
That said the introduction of the M1 chips is pretty great, I plan to buy a Macbook Air as my second laptop for office work, I'll keep developing on a Thinkpad with Linux though.
> I like Apple laptops but they're not great in terms of repairability, extensibility, modularity and openness.
I just don't care about any of those. If I need it repaired, I'll pay the vendor to do it. If I need it extended, I'll pay them to do it - or buy something new. I don't care if it's modular. I only care about openness insofar as I can tell what it's doing. The rest is a waste of my time.
I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way, given the way this thread has gone.
Ironically, I actually think old Apple laptops are better to repair, because of Rossmann.
What other brand has leaked schematics and boardviews? Replacement batteries, iFixit guides, and skilled independent technicians keeping the A1398 and A1466 going as long as possible? I doubt Apple will return to their glory days of making those laptops new, but I feel like the repairability of 2014 Macs is still better than many Dell/Lenovo/HP/Sony alternatives. At the component and logic board level.
I agree with this so much. I used to think Apple's products were the best and were so joyful to use. I still go back to try the newest macs with the old foolish expectations and walk out disappointed every time.
I've tried PCs, they just aren't on the same level as Apple's hardware and I hate Windows.
I've seen some cool customizations of Linux but would really rather not have to spend that time myself to get to a place where I'm productive. I want something that 90% "just works", but that's also pleasing to use.
I really wish there was a solid third option, new tech is so cool yet the options available today seem so boring!
Where on earth did you read that I said Apple was _bad_? My issue is with everyone else in the industry not pulling their weight.
I'm annoyed with having to give my money to one of the richest companies on the planet, solely because nobody else will actually compete. I run Apple hardware daily; it's clear that I'm fine with them as a product, especially if I want it cloned.
Basically: I will pay a premium for an Apple-esque open laptop.
Of the 5 XPS line laptops I've had, 2 had component failures that required replacement under warranty (drives and ports) and one had a hinge that failed just after the warranty ended.
As if that weren't frustrating enough, redeeming the warranty required about five hours total of phone conversation per incident. At every step of the way, they would demand I repeat dozens of irrelevant troubleshooting steps, or they would tell me the problem isn't covered (contradicting the last person I'd been handed off to), or they'd tell me it isn't covered but if I agree to pay to extend the warranty by another year then many he can ask his manager to backdate it and squeeze this in, etc. etc. As you might be able to guess, it's all sales/lies/incompetence and eventually I got through to someone high enough up to initiate the replacements under warranty.
Of the many Macbooks I've had, only one ever had a failure that required service. I just scheduled a time to drop the computer off, then picked it up a week later and it was fixed, didn't have to argue with anyone about my warranty.
Also - in my opinion - the XPS may be the best build quality of non-Apple laptops, but it's not even in the same league as a similarly priced macbook.
Dell made so much noise about their cooling chamber for the new XPS but forgot to actually do QA. They forgot to provide a working power brick. It didn't provide the advertised wattage (100 not 130) and even if it did actual workstations go with 230W. The trackpad was also broken for most people.
I'm sure some people like the XPS 15, but having tried it, I don't believe that it fits here - and honestly, I've not found _any_ Dell hardware to have fit and finish remotely close to a MacBook.
My Zenbook Pro didn't seem all that different to my 16" Macbook Pro which it clones.
The MacBook Pro has cooling issues, an awful keyboard and feels flimsy. The Zenbook had only a pseudo 4k display, a massive charger and a large bezel, although I believe that's gone on newer models.
I wouldn't call one premium and the other not. They were both kind of underwhelming.
The M1 Macs (and the Intel generation before it) no longer use Butterfly keyboards, but instead use the earlier "Magic Keyboard" which was well-loved. And the M1 Macs have, let's just say, better thermal management than most laptops now.
Ehh, not really. I've used both Macs (old 15" rMBP, 12" Macbook, M1 Macbook Air) and Thinkpads (T450s, X1C G7, T14 AMD) and Lenovo just frequently drops the ball on things like display, speakers, touchpad and battery life.
Apple has also made some poor decisions in various areas in the past like poor thermals, power-sucking dGPUs, and of course the butterfly keyboard. The M1 Macbook is very nearly perfect though, and I don't know how any of the PC vendors are going to top it.
I have a MacBook Pro and a Lenovo Yoga and while other PC laptops I've had over 15 years were clearly worse than the Apple, the Yoga feels on par hardware-wise. What could I be missing? My only complaint is that the WiFi driver for it was bad (with lots of reports).
The closest thing I've found to what you're asking for is the Huawei Matebook Pro that I rock. Everything I like about Macbooks, plus USB-A, plus 3000x2000 screen.
My Pixelbook seems to hit most of those points (though unfortunately not quite all):
- Ships with CoreBoot
- Much nicer fit/finish than the average non-Apple laptop (all metal, aside from the rubber palm rest)
- Display wasn't defective :)
- There's a logo, alas
- Comparing to my work Macbook Pro, I'd say viewing angle and brightness are both on par, and the screen is indeed glossy
- I don't know if the trackpad is actually glass, but it does feel nicer nicer than pretty much any other trackpad I've used (to the point where I don't miss having a nub like on my usual Latitudes/Precisions and ThinkPads)
- No crazy vertical integration hardware-wise, but it being one of the main targets for Fuchsia is kinda cool, I guess
- It has both touch and screen-flipping, but it's easy enough to just... not use them (and indeed, most of the time I don't)
- I can't speak to the support aspect (since I've never had to put in a support request, and typically prefer fixing things myself anyway), but Google unfortunately has a, um, reputation...
I've been pretty happy with it; it's a nice solid machine, and while I ain't a fan of Chrome OS at all, the Crostini support makes it at least usable for my purposes (and the first-class Android app support is a nice bonus).
The main downside for me is that Chrome OS seems to be the only option for it that doesn't have some major drawbacks like missing audio support or suspend/resume issues.
I've really liked Gigabyte's gaming laptops (aero) for this reason. They've got premium build quality and excellent specs but don't look like a Mardi Gras float. They're also very light and have long battery life for the specs. Only downside is the price and mail-only support really.
The actual aluminum casing, screen, keyboard, trackpad - all possible. But designing the motherboard, lithium batteries, and digital charger is well outside the reach of most creators.
I'm not sure about the CoreBoot requirement but I've been pretty impressed by my wife's Microsoft Surface laptop. It's the closest thing to a MacBook you can get.
I have notes from when I was researching around 2018. I had the Razer Blade Stealth in the running, but I was reading about support and longevity issues with them. Maybe they've been better recently? It's difficult to build a track record of longevity.
I've had stellar longevity out of Apple hardware. I'm usually able to use it for a handful of years and sell it on ebay to put a good chunk towards something new. I have noticed certain models/runs have specific issues, laptop keyboards are probably the most recent and obvious, but for the most part you know what you're getting. Screen lamination problems or pinched monitor cable being a few others.
When looking at alternatives saving only around 20% on the cost made it difficult when not being confident about longevity or resale. Sadly, other aspects weren't appreciably better (soldered on RAM, camera quality, performance, battery).
I've had a very similar rant yearly for over a decade. I used to do it on Slashdot before YC News was a thing. You're not the only one, yet I feel this won't ever change.
Nobody in the entire laptop industry cares or even knows about our complaints. There seems to be practically zero overlap between the professionals that use laptops -- such as software developers -- and the hardware engineers that design the laptops. As you've alluded, it's an insular industry with mostly foreign players such as Clevo in Taiwan.
The market exists though. I suspect it would be profitable too! I regularly buy laptops for about AUD $5,000-$6,000, including the Clevo laptop I'm using now for work.
My requirements are much more mundane than yours, but will similarly never be met:
- Alternative keyboard layouts: Why must a $6K laptop for professionals (or gamers!) do idiotic things such as compress the arrow keys or hide the Ins/Del/PgUp/PgDn keys? Why can't I choose the keyboard layout?
- Wider keyboards: I can't stand "gapless" keyboards that make touch typing the rarely used keys difficult. Most laptops reuse the 13-inch model's keyboard on all larger sizes, which wastes enormous amounts of real estate. (My current laptop is wider than my full-size 101-key keyboard, not including the number pad.)
- Decent webcams and microphones: Is there some law that only mobile phones and tablets can have decent cameras?
- Narrow-bezel screens: This is starting to very very slowly become the norm, but is still hit and miss.
- Lightweight power supplies: Only Apple seems to have heard about Gallium Nitride power electronics, everyone else ships their more powerful laptop models with a power supply that is the size and weight of a brick. (My current laptop's brick is 1.9 kg!!!)
- Integrated 5G: I'd like to have Internet connectivity without tethering, just like an iPad.
They seem to have found the room for full-size up/down keys, a number pad, as well as dedicated keys for ins/del/home. I never have to press the "Fn" key in normal usage!
Every few years I look at Dell's top-of-the-line laptop, but decide against buying one because of at least one glaring flaw.
> - Alternative keyboard layouts: Why must a $6K laptop for professionals (or gamers!) do idiotic things such as compress the arrow keys or hide the Ins/Del/PgUp/PgDn keys? Why can't I choose the keyboard layout?
This is actually a fantastic point! Some models of Dell/HP/Lenovo have easily removed keyboards by design in order to install additional RAM/service parts etc. All they have keeping them connected other than some sliding plastic tabs is the ribbon cable. I can't believe no one has ever made drop in replacements either from the manufacturer or as aftermarket parts. Having Ctrl/Alt/Super/Fn keys in a dozen different configurations due to different vendors makes switching between different devices a huge pain.
Imagine if you could even get customised switches on your laptop!
Considering how small my cheap 65W GaN charger is, I would have been disappointed in Apple engineering if theirs were still as heavy and big as they are.
I read recently that the main reason cameras-on-laptops are stuck in '09, is because there's so little depth to work with in the laptop lid alongside the screen. I'd take that to mean the few additional mm thickness you get in a phone are very precious :)
This goes for many many things. Most products are produced and marketed for the general consumer. It‘s time-consuming and frustrating to sort through all that marketing crap when you‘re looking for a new device/product/part when you know what you want.
I have a corporate issued MacBook Pro and an HP Spectre that I bought for myself. The Spectre is better than the MacBook. Both have aluminum bodies, 4K screens, big touch pads, they are the same size, both have great performance.
The HP has a much better keyboard. So much better. It runs Linux, not quite perfectly but pretty darn well. I actually like that the HP has a touchscreen, it’s often way quicker to reach out and touch a spot on the screen than to maneuver the mouse pointer to that same spot and then click. The HP has a regular USB port so I don’t have to keep a USB-C adapter around. The charger isn’t a giant heavy wall wart that falls out of older outlets. It’s a bunch of little things like that.
Not sure what's up with your tone, but sure, I'd agree with the needs comment.
That said, I would would wager that your needs are moreso met as an existing, direct market though - whereas what I'm after is splintered and left only to Apple.
My guess is that, at this point, Apple has absorbed the vast majority of people who care about these things. And that is causing the other manufacturers not to care, because they have already lost the audience who does...
I wouldn't think so. I reckon they've probably absorbed the vast majority of non-gamers and people who don't need Windows for work, but neither of those two groups is small.
No logo? So the Apple logo is ok? My 2017 14" 1060 Razer seemed exactly like a black Macbook Pro (which I also owned at the same time). Metal case, Razer logo where the Apple logo was. HD-DPI display.
I guess you can't out Apple apple. Apple has the culture and cultural force to sell you a laptop with ports you don't like or a weird keyboard. Part of buying an Apple product is being on a certain cutting design edge and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac.
In the PC world, the consumer space is dominated by anti-design nerdy guys who demand every port imaginable, and for good reason, and the business end is similar with their own legacy demands. Big changes in any way, be it features or lack-of are frowned upon and mocked (no wireless less space than a nomad -lame).
No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different. And even then, you can just bootcamp Windows or Linux and buy the 'real' Apple you want anyway. Honestly, its a small miracle something like Apple even exits in the tech space. Its usually a race to the bottom on half-cooked features, general cheapness, and terrible UIs. Somehow Apple broke free of that and never looked back.
Good take. It's true that Apple's products cater to a fundamentally different market if we observe the nuances; they are more akin to luxury products than normal computers. The PC market demands functional computing devices that are extensible, modifiable and repairable, things Macbooks have virtually no advantage in.
> and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac.
Complaints that you commonly see about Apple products are, I find, similar to reading complaints when you're apartment shopping: those who complain have reason to do so, and those with good experiences don't necessarily feel the need to write about them.
For instance: those who experienced botched Catalina upgrades that caused Mail.app issues? I never experienced that, and I've two significantly sized accounts attached. In fact I upgraded my last machine from High Sierra to Catalina with no issues at all. The "beta" parts of macOS that people call out are just never things I've fought against - and I run a fairly custom-ish setup to boot.
On that same note, I could throw a rock and find a KDE user who complains about KMail having issues... but you won't find many KMail users saying "yeah it just works and life is great".
Software is complex. I wouldn't call macOS "beta" and by the same token I'm not going to label other OS/DE combos that either.
(They also fixed the keyboard, so I'm over that complaint. Would I prefer the ThinkPad keyboard? Absolutely. But the new one works fine and fits the design aesthetic of the device.)
tl;dr: The only "agreement" I find myself signing is that the thing looks and feels, and functions, like a premium product. I find myself endlessly frustrated that if I go car shopping for a premium item, I have different options... yet I just don't feel like I have this with computers.
> No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different.
This is exactly why I'm saying that my ideal product wouldn't compete with the PC market. I fully recognize that's a losing battle.
Standardized interchangeable packaging for consumer goods.
Ever been to a book store in Japan? Practically every book is the same size. As a result, bookshelves also are designed to be the right size to optimally fit books. This allows people to fit more books in small homes. It makes books easier to transport in book-sized boxes and book-sized bags too. You can get perfectly-fitting reusable cloth covers to protect your library books.
American bookstores are a war between publishers to stick out from the shelves as much as possible. There's not much that a bookshelf designer can do except guess and have adjustable, oversized shelving.
That also describes the state of today's packaging. With more shopping happening online, the need for items to stand out on a shelf is lower, and the need for them to fit nicely in boxes is much higher.
Nobody would force you to design your products to fit the closest available standard package size, but companies would tend to do so more often because of the efficiency gains. Logistics companies like Amazon or Fedex could offer incentives.
I don't think Japan is any different than the USA here. If you go look at paperback novels in the USA they are 95% all the same width and height, only the thickness changes.
Conversely there are plenty of randomly sized books at a Japanese bookstore. I can go walk to some today and take pictures if you don't believe me.
It's possible the USA is 50% standard sizes and Japan is 70% but it's definitely not close to all of them. Even in the USA many hardbacks are a standard size. At most they are off by an inch so that you can get by with certain sized shelves and have on extra shelf for really odd sizes.
From my experience they're a world apart, but your mileage may vary. You can also tell just by doing image searches for "Japanese bookstore". Or looking at how often US bookstores shelve their books sideways. But I agree that there are exceptions in Japan (including specific shelves for oversized books, like coffee table photo albums), and in the US there are some sizes that books sometimes converge to.
I think Japanese bookstores look very organised partly because they stock manga - where you will routinely get ten-volume series of books (with far fewer words per page than a novel would have, of course)
So while every western bookshop has that shelf full of Lonely Planet travel guides that looks really organised, in Japan you can photograph an entire aisle of books that looks just as regimented.
Standardized interchangeable packaging for consumer goods.
Marketing people don't like that. They want a unique look. Many US state laws requiring some standardization of sizes and fill have been repealed over the last two decades.
Hence my regular ranting about the outsized negative effects marketing has on society. We really should stop accepting "but think of marketing!" as a valid reason to eschew interoperability and standardization. Marketing is ultimately zero-sum, it'll flourish in a constrained playground just as much as it does in an unconstrained one.
Right now, no one wants to pick up things from potential COVID plague bearers. Previously, probably how many wouldn't get reused and just get thrown away. Paper getting thrown away is eco friendly (renewable source, biodegradable, etc.), plastic is not.
Mexico isn't the only one.
I've visited many countries in Europe and Asia that actually recycle their glass bottles without crushing them/melting them down.
Single subscription payment for news along the lines of the Spotify model. I'd happily pay a single subscription which gave me access to ALL the news websites, and divided payment up based on which articles people click on. Do that without tracking me between the different sites and I'm sold.
Pressreader gets close but it only gives you yesterday's print versions (not current online content), it has a few notable gaps which matter to me (the FT, The Times (of London), Bloomberg news among others) and it doesn't really collate different sources for the same story very well. Though I have to say it's great for magazines.
Paying according to which articles people click on has already failed as a model for determining truth and relevancy. We need to think of “one weird trick” that will have the same “stunning” effect but without the incentive to appeal to humanity’s baser instincts.
FWIW, we are working on this. Almost all of the issues listed in this thread can be traced back to the way aggregators and social networks end up monetizing (or not monetizing) news. We're trying something a little different:
https://blog.nillium.com/were-not-an-aggregator/
One alternative is pay directly for total access according to the quality of news source. NYTimes, Washington Post etc just automatically get a lot and go downward.
The aggregator is 100% the judge of quality but start with access to the highest quality sources and go downward. So everything is editorially decided except how many actually subscribe but since it's access to the best quality, it would be a desirable thing to subscribe to.
Apple News is trying this and it doesn’t seem to work too well. The trouble is the best publications can run their own offers and charge much more. FT and Bloomberg in particular tend to be corporate expenses.
Apple news costs $120 a year. Basic digital FT is over $350. Premium digital even more.
It seems like news organizations dislike Apple News for the same reason I like it - they don't get access to their reader. I'm sympathetic to the idea that it would help them make their service better for me, but I also know they would abuse that relationship. I'm happy having Apple in the middle.
Sorry, I should have said “the trouble with OP’s idea”. You wouldn’t get a full business subscription to news orgs for less than $500-$1000 a year, which consumers won’t pay.
A bundle of consumer news might work, but you still get the adverse selection problem that the clients most interested also tend to be the clients interested in standalone, expensive subs. So it’s hard to get NYT, WaPo, times of london, etc
For news? I want an OS and browser integrate single payment system. I don't want to have to give my credit card details to everyone. I want a digital wallet that's an open standard and that's integrated with every form of online payment.
Where I can cut off subscriptions easily and with no hassle, maybe one time payments, etc.
For news, shopping, any kind of subscription (Netflix, AWS, etc.).
I want banking-as-a-service. I already trust my bank with my money, I want them to be the middle man between me and the online payment jungle.
A few different outlets have tried this over the years, and it's never gone that well, as far as I know. I think that was originally the model for Tinypass, which merged with Piano Media. Not sure if they still offer that model or not, but it's the most recent I can think of.
The reality is that for all but the largest news sites, this model won't really work. Say you're in a medium-small city. Even in your best case scenario of like 50% of the population reading your site, you'd still only likely get such a small sum per-article (10-20k pageviews, maybe?) that you'd still have to supplement revenue with advertising and other revenue streams. And now you're back where you started!
I love the idea, but I just struggle to see it happen at scale.
> you'd still only likely get such a small sum per-article (10-20k pageviews, maybe?) that you'd still have to supplement revenue with advertising and other revenue streams
Advertising and other revenue streams also only pay out per view on a fairly small number of views though, right? Is the problem not that advertising pays more per view than people are willing to in the first place of their own volition?
It's too bad that number of sources they actually support is not very good. I got a free trial with my new phone and have no intent on renewing when it's up because it's borderline useless.
I'll check it out. Personally I'm in for "slow news": a weekly/monthly reader like the Economist, CSMonitor, New Yorker etc. I don't actually want to read news every day and I think that would be maddening. I catch a glimpse of headlines from aggregators at most.
LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives.
There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth.
Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people across various different organizations. Everything in MS Word. I don't even hate MS Word, it's useful and its dominant position isn't entirely undeserved. But holy cow was working together a gigantic pain in the behind. I really started to loathe it (Excel is far worse and did its part too).
This was all with technical people. They could potentially grasp WYSIWYM approaches like LaTeX. Slap git and CI/CD on top and you're where software developers have been 10 years ago. But my industry is still light years away.
Part of it is how Word "just works". But it takes 5 seconds of using it until it doesn't. If LaTeX was more modern and also approachable (very ugly syntax/language. Could learn from Markdown here), technical folk could ditch Word and really upgrade their workflows. I'm sick of Word templates from 2004.
As somebody who deals with converting documents a lot on a professional level I say: LaTeX is a dead end. It's a horrible format to convert LaTeX to something else except PDF/Print/Images (where it is near perfect of course). You cannot even interchange documents between Word and LaTeX in an easy automated round trip way AFAIK.
Btw. I linked before a link to usable Markdown variations for academic papers which use LaTeX as a mix in only when necessary.
LaTeX should indeed get a little more authoritative IMO. A good start (that comes to mind) would be a convention for "body text" allowing a parser to convert a document between formats, or building a good 'standard library' of common plugins. Its heavy use of macros and non-standard plugins definitely seems like a big problem for conversion, comprehension and even conserving documents. I do find it wonderful for what it is.
I wish there was a way to maintain git version control while still being able to send and receive files from attachments from people who struggle with the idea of reading or reviewing something in any way other than by getting an email attachment.
I used to work at a bank where we had to collaborate on Word documents stored in SharePoint. It was a nightmare. In SharePoint you are supposed to "check out" documents, edit them, and "check in" the document afterward. The problem was that SharePoint was slow, so it was more convenient to work from local copies. And many people couldn't resist the urge to send documents as attachments when requesting feedback from someone else, thus breaking the version control system. And if someone already had "checked out" the document, there was nothing stopping someone from just working from a local copy, making changes, emailing it to me, and saying "Incorporate these changes into the final version."
It was common for someone to work from an outdated version and accidentally overwrite someone else's changes. Even though SharePoint stored every version, it was still a lot of manual work on my part to be a human git, manually combine edits from multiple reviewers, and update revision history tables on the first few pages of every document because nobody else had the time to do that. There were a lot of manual, human errors introduced by me and others. Partly because sometimes people would make minor changes without updating the version of the document, and then you'd have no idea that you were looking at an older version.
I use git for docs version control now, and sometimes I think of ways to make documentation controlled by git while still making it user friendly for non-technical people to contribute to it. What if you could send someone a file as an attachment, they could edit it locally (perhaps in Markdown or similar, with a text editor that has a Markdown preview), then open it in a special text editor let them click a button that would make a pull request for them without them having to understand anything about git? Maybe the special text editor would also notify them as soon as the doc became outdated.
And if even that was too hard, maybe they could save changes, return it to the sender as an email attachment, then the recipient could quicky make a pull request.
I feel this so much. When my team started up we used latex/mercurial for all documents. It worked great for a year except for one person that used dropbox instead of mercurial. Eventually we reached a critical mass where convincing the whole team to not use word was impossible.
Google docs works pretty well, but I wish it had more friction to download documents in office formats. People are quick to start working on local copies as soon as they miss some minor feature in word and you end up with the same problem you described. I think my perfect tool would not even export to word.
I agree sharepoint is awful and it's even worse now that it's baked into teams and people are using it without even realizing it.
You can set up a GitHub repo and let people edit files there through the web interface. It doesn't show a preview unfortunately, but it does have syntax highlighting and makes it easy for a user to make a PR
The company I work for recently settled on Office for document management and I agree with you, the collaboration part of Office seems to be in it's infancy.
I was thinking about LaTeX and if it could solve a problem for us in in my search I came across this:
Word Online with online commenting and discussion features is a pretty slick workflow for virtual, document-based meetings though.
I considered trying to get us to standardize on LaTeX and git for document management, but delayed that decision in favor of "get started with Word first and get people used to writing at all". Once we went forced-remote and started using the online comment features, I don't see an equivalently accessible means to do that in tex.
Overleaf is very unlikely to be a good drop-in replacement for MS Office for your company because Word and LaTeX are very different tools (with different goals and different audiences in mind). The former is a user-friendly word processor and the latter is a fairly complex plaintext-based document preparation/typesetting tool.
I doubt that most offices would benefit from teaching their employees that instead of just hitting control-B to bold some text, they should now do \textbf{foo}, or that quotes should now be types ``like this''. If you need the huge array of features (which is typically only the case in the context of academic publishing), then it's worth making the investment to learn. But for 99% of corporate documents, Word likely can do what you need with much less pain.
Not just LaTeX, groff gets no love even though it can deliver nice output. The syntax is even more arcane, but on the other hand it doesn’t need GBs to install.
Asciidoctor is a good modern proposition that can handle more than markdown can, but it’s not without shortcomings. Unfortunately markdown, asciidoc, rst and friends have been focusing too much on publishing to the web. Conversion to PDF is mostly over html (in some cases by firing chromium in the background) and the results are not as great.
It is difficult to compete with Word for non-technical people, if the alternative is to install and learn multiple tools, configure a dev environment and setup build toolchains.
> groff gets no love even though it can deliver nice output. The syntax is even more arcane
I think you've answered it yourself. Also damning is that groff doesn't support UTF-8 directly.
Most groff guides only do very basic formatting. Complex math/equation layout can be awful. Image files apparently need to be ps/eps. I just keep running into issues.
There's also no accessible ecosystem for groff. CTAN. Code highlighting (ideally, I want to use pygments - i guess i could write a backend if i was really invested). TikZ is great and something I've invested in a lot. Bibliography management. Also, not an issue for me, but an issue for adoption is Windows support.
As for competing with Word's workflow, at least with some TeX variant I have a chance. Installer frameworks. Editors with previews. So a few GiB to not run into these limitations sounds worth it to me to be productive.
I'm not saying groff couldn't be used for complex stuff, but I wouldn't know where to begin, or want to work around all those limitations.
Social etiquette for online spaces. Especially during a pandemic year, I'm surprised that this hasn't been more of a topic of discussion.
Mostly, if people do talk about social etiquette, it's within the context of not explicitly pissing people off, or looking good to your boss. I've never seen anyone talk about actually having good social interactions online.
I've had a few friends change jobs during the pandemic, and the thing they immediately tell me is that none of them have made any friends at work since starting virtually. They all just work on their own tickets, and whatever collaboration there is, is pretty transactional.
Zoom "happy hours" pretty much get dominated by two or three voices (usually of the most senior people) and everyone else just listens, because you can't have 2 conversations at a time. I've heard a bunch of the most cringeworthy techniques that managements have tried, to enhance socialization among employees.
In person, some things are pretty obvious. If someone is new, usually a good team will invite you into the conversation somehow. It would be weird if you got to your office and sat down and for days no one asked you anything about yourself. But it's perfectly fine to log into slack and have no DMs for weeks or even months.
> Zoom "happy hours" pretty much get dominated by two or three voices (usually of the most senior people) and everyone else just listens, because you can't have 2 conversations at a time.
They tried to do “zoom happy hours” where I work, and this was exactly what happened. The two people who were usually the loudest in the office, just ended up talking to each other.
They would quite often stop and say “it feels like we’re the only one talking here”, and then go on talking.
Of course you’re the only one talking, you never stop talking. It’s impossible to get a word in. If you want others to participate, give them a chance, there’s often a small delay, so giving them 2 or 3 seconds to respond would help.
If I catch myself talking too much I sometimes make a joke or something and make a point out of muting myself until someone asks me something directly.
Still I think there's room for more: I'm not that interesting, it just seems that many people want someone to say something.
> Zoom "happy hours" pretty much get dominated by two or three voices (usually of the most senior people) and everyone else just listens, because you can't have 2 conversations at a time.
This is definitely a problem and my co founder and I wanted to solve it. We tried a bunch of stuff, but one thing that we noticed was that we were playing a lot more casual games with our friends and family since the pandemic. It was pretty enjoyable. We tried the same with our colleagues and it was definitely much better than a Zoom happy hour. The game provides some structure which removes the awkwardness and there is some amount of participation from everyone on the call. We are now working on a product (https://getlounge.app/) that helps teams organize these game happy hours.
Jackbox series of games could be really good for this, only one person needs to own the game everyone else logs in on a phone or browser to play. Mixture of trivia/adlibs/assorted minigames
Our work did breakout rooms, so we had a “virtual happy hour” with 70+ people, then 10 other rooms with silly names like some animal and the name of some popular song, and you were encouraged to pick whichever you wanted. Resulted in a pretty even spread of maybe 7 people per room.
It was pretty cool because after we broke into groups I got to have some lighthearted small talk with the company CEO (I work at a 10000+ people company), which felt really neat to me as just a SWE a few management detached from execs, and I don’t think it would have happened pre-pandemic.
Alternatively, we had another “happy hour” organized by a different team that was like you said, 100+ folks with just a few of the most popular (or maybe just gregarious?) people cracking jokes and taking center stage, like a high school dance where a few people are dancing and everyone else awkwardly stands on the sidelines.
I think alot of this are symptoms of bad management or inexperienced management dealing with remote work.
I have had to rise to the occasion, and facilitate icebreakers with new hires of other teams (that work with my team).
Their managers thought nothing of directing the new hires to slack and email a handful of strangers.
The companies or individuals that had successfully implemented remote work prior to the pandemic, I think are dealing with it better.
The best tip I read was from the Zapier remote work ‘guide’, to use the Slack giphy add-on, because it is easier to convey emotions via an animated gif versus text.
Of course, it was a major setback when we had to ban it for inappropriate use.
> I think alot of this are symptoms of bad management or inexperienced management dealing with remote work
I agree, but I’d say >95% of management is completely unprepared to deal with remote work right now, and it doesn’t seem like they’re getting much better.
I'm sure this is worse because of WFH but I experienced this at FAANG before WFH. The teams are giant, there's a huge list of things to work on, pick one, do it mostly on your own. Loneliest job I ever had. Yea there were co-workers and we'd get lunch and talk but we weren't collaborating, only co-existing.
Do you mind saying which FAANG you found that environment in?
I can understand why some people wouldn't enjoy that environment but a focused workday then a chatty short lunchtime walk sounds like an enjoyable work environment for people like myself.
https://spatial.chat/ is similar but two dimensional. It was used for the social component of the Haskell Love conference this year and I really enjoyed the way that it promoted social engagement.
I started a new job since March, this is similar to what I’ve experienced. Fortunately my team has some ways to work around the limitations (team lunch and what not) so it’s definitely not terrible, but I’m missing the spontaneous smoke/coffee breaks from in-office type of work.
Zoom has breakout rooms that you can assign people to randomly. Take the number of participants, divide that by 3 or 4 and that is the number of breakout rooms you need.
150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. People are forced to save for a future where they have enough to survive for a few years and then pay to have someone take care of them, instead of doing what they actually want to do.
Why are we not all collectively trying to solve this problem? Dying of age related diseases is as natural as dying from malaria or childbirth, yet we try to solve those issues and pretend age related diseases are inevitable. COVID largely shut the world down because the largest risk factor for complications is how old someone is. The gains in productivity alone should make human longevity the number one priority for every government.
I also think it would solve climate change because if you expected to live much longer, the obvious problems are no longer just future generations problems.
That's always being worked on - modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous.
People are trying. We want to cure cancer, and find effective general-purpose antivirals, and help people maintain healthy bodies, and figure out how to repair hearts, and cure diabetes, and fix autoimmune disorders, and figure out general-purpose gene therapies, and work out what exactly is up with the gut microbiome, and make prosthetic ears/eyes/etc, and then there's the brain...
There's only so much that you can do with the technology we have right now. Advances in other fields will eventually help, but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.
Anyways, wouldn't significantly longer-lived people exacerbate climate change? You'd have many more people on the planet, and individuals would accumulate much more total wealth to spend on wasteful consumer goods thanks to the power of compound interest.
I think what OP means is rather than trying to fix deceases one by one, why aren't we focusing more on the root cause (aging)? This seems like a much more efficient way of solving many of these things. There are a bunch of initiatives in this area already, but not nearly enough to be proportional to the potential.
> but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.
This I don't get though. Why not? We already do that. Making people healthier for longer is a massive win.
You're right that it's being worked on - organizations like the SENS Research Foundation have been advocating it for years and pushing the field. From what I see though, far more resources are spent attempting to fix symptoms of aging (cancer, heart disease, frailty), than on preventing those conditions from occurring in the first place.
If we cure cancer, at best we're adding a few years to the average lifespan before something else kills you off. If we rejuvenate the immune system to that of a 20 year old, not only are those cancerous cells far more likely to be killed off at an earlier stage, but also prevent a ton of other age related diseases.
I don't think it's something that should just have a blank cheque written for it, but I think that governments should encourage young people to become researchers in the field and should spend far more resources on basic science. We can change the incentives for insurance companies to pay for preventing diabetes instead of treating it.
Climate change is solvable - it requires both research and effort to get us there. Many people are simply not willing to sacrifice to solve it since it won't affect them. We also have tons of older people who go from producers to consumers, and are not contributing to fixing climate change. A 75 year old can be building windmills instead of hanging out on a golf cart in florida. A research scientist can continue their work instead of experiencing cognitive decline. We'd probably experience a short term increase in carbon emissions but I think the long term trend would be much lower since we'll get past the technological hurtles quicker with more people working on the problem.
As a collective, we try. But are we really trying as hard as we should be? Companies have influenced the public and even health research to be in favor of sugar. I'm pretty sure the rate of diabetes is going up and that doesn't help. Companies contributing to global warming have influenced policies and discredited science they knew would harm their businesses.
There are plenty of smart people doing what they think is best for us, but then there is also greed that hinders us. Sure some of us are trying, but not even close to as much as we should be. The money just isn't there.
End of life care is an incredibly expensive endeavor; why are we so adamant about extending the inevitable?
IMO it's a subconscious projection of the fact that we do _not_ live meaningful lives in our day to day, and so we fixate on a fantastical (yet inspiring, universal) compensation of extending it forever.
"Left to take care of the elderly" suggests we don't value life in the first place. Why extend it further?
The idea isn't that people will live in that fragile and unhealthy state even longer, the idea is to also extend how long we're healthy. Imagine being as healthy as a 30 year old when you're 70 for example. This is often also called healthspan and we probably don't want to extend lifespan too much without also extending the healthspan.
Probably controversial here but as far as I can see correct:
This seems like a shortcut to hell on earth.
Who do you think will have the means to pay for this first?
It won't be the saints, it will be the greediest ones.
So we (or rather out descendants) would probably be stuck with a ruling class of demigods.
Why?
1. They were already pretty well off (since they are the ones who can pay for this treatment in the first place.
2. Now they suddenly also have all the time they want and need.
3. They will now have generations to build alliances etc.
Within three generations no normal person has a chance anymore.
Also for many of those persons I guess it will become nightmarish after a while: the though of dying from a car crash at age 100 probably feels much worse if you are planning to live forever than if you know your lifespan is lifespan.
Most things go to the wealthy first, but usually it's worse quality and very rapidly becomes democratized and improved. Consider how great life was 100 years ago for the wealthy compared to the average person today. I would definitely prefer air travel and computers to being wealthy but stuck in the past. Almost every technology has gotten much better when it becomes mainstream.
If treatments become available, the pressure to make it available to everyone will be immense. Consider how much of a government budget goes to health care and how much productivity and resources are wasted on those who have exited the workforce due to age. It will be economic and political suicide not to ensure everyone gets access to anti-aging treatments.
As for a ruling class, the problem exists with or without anti-aging treatments. We're already moving to a world where more wealth is concentrated with fewer people. The solution to this is to demand taxation on wealth and enforce it globally.
I feel the extension of young and healthy life (ideally to infinity) is a number one priority.
Surprisingly, people almost always strongly oppose when I just start expressing my views. I never understood this.
Wouldn't it be nice to see Mars colonized and terraformed? Wouldn't it be great to see the completion of a Dyson swarm and using 100 % of the Sun energy for some ultra-mega-project we can't even fathom yet? Wouldn't it be cool to see the spectacular Betelgeuse star going supernova show in 10 000 years? Wouldn't it be awesome to witness full Milky Way galaxy colonization?
If I would ever become an Earth dictator, I'd use all available resources to fight ageing :).
I don't think it is true for developing world. The cost of taking care of olders are low. Yes, they probably cannot afford the medicine to prolong the cancer patients for 6 months or 1 year, and maybe even other conditions, they are not worse off comparing to their previous generation. If you look from developed world of view, anything below the developed world standard is bad, but comparing to previous generations, they are not.
I might be misunderstanding what you're trying to say, do you mean that because the previous generation had it worse we shouldn't strive to improve things even more?
Taking care of older people is very expensive right now. The majority of health care costs are for end of life care in the developed world. Those costs are going to increase as the largest generation ever (the baby boomers) approaches the point in their lives where they need to access that care.
The birth rate in the developed world is way below replacement, so unless we import workers through immigration, there will be fewer workers to take care of the previous generation.
And then we end up with a Gerontocracy where 100+ year olds are in charge of humanity's future, no thanks. What good is it to live forever if society stagnates intellectually? You may argue this wouldn't happen or that these treatments would also rejuvenate the mind in some fashion, but that seems dubious.
Science advances one funeral at a time and so does perhaps also humanity in general.
(That's not to say that I didn't wish that friends or family lived long lives, but that's not the point here of course.)
> that these treatments would also rejuvenate the mind in some fashion, but that seems dubious.
This is of course included in that and we're already seeing some research into it. To prolong life itself isn't a goal if we can't keep healthy, and the brain is part of that.
If we slow down or reverse aging the brain won't deteriorate either. It's all about solving the root cause of why our bodies and mind fails us over time.
It definitively does. The plasticity of the mind decreases with age, so if we're able to rejuvenate the brain, we would also increase it's plasticity, and we won't stagnate.
If everyone has been rejuvenated, then age would no longer matter. Someone who is 100 can have just as valid opinion as someone who is 25. Better yet, someone who is 100 will still able to contribute intellectually rather than needing to be taken care of by someone younger.
I understand the fear of a geneontocracy, but I think it's unfounded. New people will still be born, older people will get tired of living and opt to end their lives. If age no longer matters, the range of people in ones social group would only expand. The only advantage longer lives people would have is wealth and influence. We can solve the former with taxation and the latter is more dependent on the individual.
Elderly care... in fact this pandemic showed precisely the opposite: our elders were neglected, converted into a statistic that dies more then young people. A complete lack of humanity in a lot of developed countries.
This is the example we gave to the upcoming generations, we're fucked when it's our turn lol.
I've been reflecting a lot on this, and thinking of ways to solve this, but it's not easy - it's bigger than infrastructure or tech... it's a social problem.
My mother in law is 89 and lives alone in Japan. While it's not perfect it's amazing the difference between the system there vs the system in America. I think one of the problems with Elder care in the US is that it's hard to talk about Elder care while we are still arguing about universal health care. It's also hard to talk about how we could create a similar system in the US, because the basis for the system is adult children care for their parents, and mandatory long term care insurance provides coverage where that is not possible.
It's not clear the Japanese system is going to survive the aging of Japan. It's also not clear to me the Japanese system works that well. People point to live expectancy but don't factor for culture, life style, diet, and genes.
There are tons of quack doctors in Japan. Apparently to be a doctor here is much easier than some other places. I love (I think) that it's relatively inexpensive (via price controls) and that their is government medical insurance so it's relatively easy to get covered. I'm not so sure I like that if you want a skilled surgeon you need to bribe them.
LTC insurance is a scam. They will do everything they can to not pay, and most LTC facilities have an organizational structure that makes that possible.
I'd like to see a tech'd out nursing home. Gaming is really a perfect fit for nursing homes, and it will only make more sense as our population ages.
Gigabit internet, house Slack, LAN parties, VR gear, zoom calls with family, rigs for new members... create house guilds. Set the tenants up with streaming setups and let them have fun.
I don't think the gear would be prohibitively expensive given the cost of nursing care.
Nursing homes don't have to feel like you are giving up on life. A tech'd out nursing home could be absolutely kick ass.
Have you ever been in a nursing home? All those systems would go unused. My grandmother struggles like hell to send simple emails with her tablet and she is easily one of the most "all there" residents in her home.
It would probably be more successful in 40-50 years when millennials start checking in to nursing homes, although who's to say we won't be as out of touch as the current generation of residents are.
I was just watching the documentary Alive Inside and one of the doctors talked about how the system allows him to charge $1k/mo. prescriptions almost without a thought but makes it nearly impossible to get a $40 iPod that significantly improved their quality of life.
It seems like the system works really need to change to get your dream to a reality
My grandfather went into a Skilled Nursing Facility briefly last year. They had TERRIBLE wifi and we ended up getting a Verizon Hotspot so he could check his email.
He didn't have any desire to play games.
Of note, the therapy department has a lot of low tech games and might actually have a budget for tech assisted therapy.
I visited a nursing home a few years ago and they had televisions on the wall playing crappy broadcast tv and periodically blaring advertisements at high decibel levels. it was awful.
And some folks just didn't move out of bed much because it was so labor intensive.
We need robots and lots of other tech.
That said, there are some cool hospital beds that are like Transformers. For example, you can get hospital beds that not only tilt and let you sit up in bed - but they can basically turn into a chair or help you get out.
Seniors want simplicity not complexity. Tricked out software and hardware add overwhelming levels of complication so quickly that anyone over 45 will run from it. Among that population, usable apps must be highly visual and the choices apparent (not hidden) and concrete. Their memorization, learning, and logic abilities are often impaired. Never was Steve Krug's UX mantra more relevant than in the aged, “Don't make me think.”
It would, for the younger age group and it will probably move that way. But the current generation often (but not always) have little interest or grasp of technology, especially computers and games. Additionally with dementia and general cognitive decline it makes it hard to learn new systems and games even if there is interest. But for the gaming generation, care homes certainly look brighter. Imagine the levels of VR in 20-50 years time!
Yeah, I've noticed in the US that we've lost sight of the old way of ensuring care for your elders and it makes me sad. I understand that "proper" first world countries should take care of them through social programs, but I'm just surprised it only took us a few generations to completely abandon the obligation to take care of grandma, grandpa, mom, and dad when they get too old to work.
My buddy is a latino and as soon as the elders got too old, they just moved in to the family house and their needs were met.
* I do understand that some level of care is unable to be met by normal families but I'm talking about the situations where its really just room, board, food, and love.
> we've lost sight of the old way of ensuring care for your elders
The "old way" is the current way. It hasn't changed, which is why we needed socialist programs like Social Security. Why? We live in a high trust society that is more individualistic. Families in low trust societies tend to adopt a more "clan" like mentality where you even know your distant cousins pretty well, see your cousins on a regular basis, and it's common for three or more generations to live in the same building. Why? Because in a low trust society, you will lean more on people who are related by blood when it's harder to rely on 3rd parties like the government or anyone not related to you. Conversely, we don't have that issue, so our families tend to be more distant.
I truly believe that one of the ways to measure the evolution of a society is how it takes care of the vulnerable groups: children, elders, and people with disabilities.
Of course there are other social problems, and inequalities, like racism, unemployment, sexism... but the difference is that these groups still have strength and a voice. The vulnerable groups are exposed and left at the waves of the society.
While people were complaining because they had to stay some weeks inside, you have countries where the elder are still in isolation after 9 months, only to finally get the virus to creep in slowly and start to wipe a lot of them. It's borderline criminal.
It's sad, and it makes me worried for when it will be my turn. If we're this detached from the problems of old age, we won't have a good end.
Japan has a culture of obligation to take care of your parents but it has side effects. Dating sites for example you list if you're the oldest because people often don't want to marry the oldest since their obliged to care for the parents. Worse, it's often left to the wife to take care of the husband's parents.
This is interesting. My mother has been doing essentially the same thing for nearly 25 years.
It’s better than most nursing homes. My siblings and I grew up with the residents and were quite attached to them when we were younger. It’s a hard job though and the systems aren’t set up to support you. Full commercial fire systems are required for what is otherwise residential housing. Of course to my mother it’s more of a mission than anything else.
Funny enough, I was looking for references related to this topic this morning.
I would add not just elderly care, but appropriate regulation of facilities that provide elderly care. Evidently, the standard business practice is to not just own the nursing home, but the businesses surrounding it, which are used to siphon money away from the facility. As an example, a separate legal entity owns the building and leases it back at a high rate, or the laundry and over charges, or the medical equipment and over charges, etc. It makes the facility look like they're losing money, but in fact the owning conglomerate profits handsomely:
The net affect is that the facilities themselves are incredibly understaffed and that leads to poor care and massive number of medical errors. As someone who's dealt with both assisted living and nursing home with my own family, it's incredibly frustrating.
Strongly agree with this comment. We hide our elderly in sterile, grey corridors and leave them to die alone. We have totally de-socialized growing old and the process of dying, we've totally dissociated ourselves from it - and when it comes for us we will wonder why we said and did nothing about it.
Check out the "eden alternative". It replaces sterile, medical-like settings with settings more akin to a home. With dogs, cats, birds, etc. Also, they try to integrate kindergarten age kids into the home where possible. It looks amazing.
Truth be old, as a rule the marginalized didn't fare well with Covid. Minorities, specifically Afro Americans, continue to remain on the wrong side of the healthcare tracks.
Not sure about India (lots of similarities) but in Pakistan people sending parents / grand parents to old homes is really looked upon. Only a fraction of population does that. There are not too many of them. TV shows people in old homes crying for their children abandoning them. I guess that's how most people end up in old homes here.
On the other hand this culture has problems as well. It's not easy to take care of old. When children move out, often because of their own children, unless at least one kid is very happy to take care of now very old parents, it becomes a great question which kid they can live with.
I never really understood the culture of adult kids and old parents living all separately as a way of life. What's considered wrong with living with your parents or keeping them with you?
What about when you move to a different country and your parents can't come with you like so many Indians, Chinese, etc? Are the parents of those children who found new lives in a different country going to want to give up everything to follow? They don't even know the language.
A lot of elderly care (not all but a lot) is tied to healthcare and access/affordability of healthcare. That combined with the fact America is mostly "individualistic" society, it is not a great country if you are old and not well off. If you have serious medical issues, that makes it a lot harder. So I agree that is not just a tech problem but you have to look at all the reasons of why America is not that great for elderly people as a country.
Yes please, I'd like it very much if elderly care became a solved problem by the time I get to be an elder. I'd love to not be treated as they are today.
You removed the "were neglected" part of the line you quoted as if it isn't important. Old people dying because they're old is sadly inevitable. Old people dying because they're neglected is not, and when it happens it's due to an infrastructure, tech or social failure. That can be addressed.
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Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health.
Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have high fees. Church goers regularly give up 10% of their (gross) income to be part of that group. Cult members might even hand over ALL of their possessions to join.
The camaraderie and experiences that go along with being part of a strong, long lived community tends to be the thing people value most in life. Yet finding those communities has become increasingly difficult in the modern era. People move away to different cities, or just don't run into the same set of people everyday. With the rise of remote work, social disconnection is only going to rise. I think there's a lot of room to create new social organizations with pretty minimal technology, and make a pretty profit from doing so. Humans are still human--they want those connections--they mostly just need an introduction.
It used to be, 100 or 200 years ago, that your workplace, your home, and your usual hang-out place were all within reasonable walking distance of each other. It wasn't a huge deal to go out and meet new people, as you'd naturally bump into them every day.
Nowadays we have a large portion of people in bedroom communities, isolated in a sea of houses. They drive in isolated cars to their workplaces, swing by to get some Starbucks on the way in, and that's the extent of their social interaction. Apart from libraries and parks, there's not many places that you can regularly go and just "hang out" without spending money just to exist in that space. It's incredibly easy to go for weeks or months without any substantial social contact outside of work or your few neighbors.
I feel like this is a reason why internet organizations and social media have exploded in popularity, for that matter. It's the new "default place" to hang out and get social interaction, for better or for worse.
(I expanded on this in an article I wrote, https://invisibleup.com/articles/31/, if you want to check that out.)
You had a room just big enough for a bed, a desk, and a sink. Everything else was common.
If I was a developer I'd build a "dorm for adults" right next to places like Amazon, but at least around here zoning won't permit it.
It's great if you're single and don't have many possessions. Inexpensive, too.
Internet communication, with its much richer modes of communication, is essentially social junk food. It's not a real substitute for meatspace interactions, but it satiates the hunger for socialization. Thus people feel ever more connected and ever more lonely at the same time - loneliness being social malnourishment.
Even here in the Bay Area I live just a couple blocks down from a huge and well-appointed Elks lodge, and just a few miles away in downtown Mountain View, there is an Eagles lodge across the street from an Odd Fellows, itself a block away from a Freemason lodge.
I agree though that it's annoying that going out = spending a lot of money.
Having seen the finances for several churches, I can say pretty confidently that most church-goers do not tithe 10%.
http://gruberpeplab.com/teaching/psych131_fall2013/documents...
There are fascinating implications for those that are closer to 10% than the average tithe.
There are all kinds of issues. Setting an agenda. Getting people to follow the agenda. Fostering conversation. Finding venues. Getting the right mix of people. I've been to so many meetups where these kind of issues were not handled well.
If you just want random people you can go to a bar. If you want "like" people it's much much harder.
I think about this often, but then I go for a walk (or in other cities, a drive) and see packed bars and restaurants every night with people from all ages having a good time. Makes me feel like the problem is on me - people are obviously able to make friends and hang out without any special apps beyond what is available now.
The only new people I’ve met at bars are friends of friends, not random strangers. And when people are with their group of friends, it’s hard for a stranger to jump into that dynamic.
Nix the thought of walking to do the following activities: - fetching a missing ingredient from a local shop/store that would take 25min round trip and benefit you with additional exercise. - spending an evening going between bars being mildly intoxicated but not requiring a taxi.
Bedroom communities established during the mid century tend not to have those. My experience with those have been Fairfax County, VA; Fayetteville, Arkansas; and the suburbs around Sarasota, Florida. These are places that if you walk or bike around or take a bus, people seem to assume you are poor or a servant
I guess one distinction between those and your examples of country clubs, fraternities, and churches is that the latter are long-lasting institutions: you find a group of people, potentially spend an extended period of time interacting with them without commitment, and then you become a "member," which carries informal commitment. (In the case of cults there's formal/irrevocable commitment, but for the rest, you're free to leave, there's just a social norm that you don't do so casually.)
The flip side is that a lot of people have either first-hand bad experiences at such organizations or know people who have, and committing to an organization that turns out to be mentally draining (even if not abusive per se) is a worry. So maybe if you want to add some sort of structure on top, find a way to manage that risk. Certainly one step is to not accept as customers/members people who make your organization less fun to join, and be very up front about that. But beyond that, there might be ways to demonstrate to newcomers that the existing members are good people, or to support the organization in establishing social norms that discourage bad experiences, or possibly even figuring out what sorts of things toxic people tend to latch onto and designing your society in a way that lacks those.
(One other danger here is that the easy way to provide some of these benefits, like better career opportunities, is to be exclusionary and offer your members favorable treatment from each other and unfairly treating those outside the organization in a correspondingly unfavorable way. Country clubs, fraternities, and churches all have a reputation of helping the rich and powerful remain rich and powerful. It's possible to provide the benefits in a non-zero-sum way, by actually using the connections to make your members better people, but it's harder.)
Let us know more, I have similar issues and intentions to try to improve up the social fabric around my neighborhood.
I think this is the reason Crossfit got so popular. People could go every day, see the same people, compete against them, etc. Definitely more expensive than a regular gym but offered more than just renting time on equipment.
At the end of 19th century workers got better working hours. In the hours after work they set up clubs for everything you can think of. Sports, rabbit breeding clubs, pigeon clubs, shooting clubs etc.
Tot this day it's still a thing, and it's in the canon of the Netherlands.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...
Last year I did everything I could, to go to tons of concerts, meet up groups, and alumni events. I had a very successful year in terms of meeting new friends, finding high income partners , and generally loving my life. I've long been disillusioned with social media, and I completely blame it for destroying a generation of mental health.
You need to make friends, and you need to go back to the old fashioned way of having light-hearted discussions. Versus nasty arguments on social media. I had to stop using Reddit for the most part, since no matter what I said people would attack it in some way shape or form. Even something as mundane as I find Java to be difficult, turned into a personal attack on my abilities as a programmer. Tons of people are obviously angry for whatever reason, and you feeding into their anger isn't going to help anyone.
I went to tons of meetups, and even though and all of these cases I was a complete stranger I was never insulted or made to feel unwelcomed. There's community out there you just need to seek it out.
When I tried using these apps, I found myself trying to reverse engineer the algorithm to figure out exactly how it was ranking me and how to optimize my match rates. Most of it comes down to picture quality and your looks in those pictures. I learned this by running my own A-B tests using different pictures, but unfortunately the apps don't really give any stats on which pictures on your profile are and are not performing. This gave me an idea to create an app to do just this. I called it Cupid's Critics, and you could upload candidate pictures and get people of a certain demographic to vote on them and collect statistics before pushing them live.
What I realized is that this is a band-aid to a broken system. I think a new system is needed entirely, which is why I am now trying to figure out how to make group dinner party dating scale.
If anybody is interested in building it out with me, please send me a DM. If you're interested in an invite/signing up for a group date, please fill out this survey: https://kadray.typeform.com/to/VmhktNHD
I can't see university grads opting for 5 remote work days a week unless they've already got a big bubble. It's the people in their 40s with kids already who love fully remote work the most.
Instead of dating-specific qualifiers, it'd ask for your interests, hobbies, values, age and other demos, then match you based on overlap.
Not Meetup - it's not quite solving the same problem, and so it solves things differently (focusing on shared interests and on discrete meetup events).
I've never used either, but I feel it likely suffers from "The problem with Tinder is that everyone on it thinks Tinder is a good idea" issue.
Think about as optical waveguide technology becomes more affordable enabling very lightweight comfortable headsets that actually are close to normal glasses in comfort. Combined with pose detection from cameras with fast AI.
Things like VR Chat are already pretty good.
And actually I think the potential to create perfectly tailored 3d workspaces in VR could make those spaces preferred in some cases over real ones. To me the biggest issue is the size and comfort of the headsets and new technologies are coming to mass deployment in the next couple of years to address that.
The best tool for this right now is calendar and email. There's a lot of room for improvement.
Please PM me if you're interested in a deeper discussion. I've thought a bit about what this tool might look like and how to get it off the ground.
Also, PM me if you're working on this problem (to anyone reading this :)).
My feeling is that we're losing the facilities to make general friends, and that void is being filled with the non-optimal but best-you-can-do interest-based groups. This is even more effective on the internet where you can find even the most niche group that may not have been possible when we were limited to our local area.
In short: Meetup is good for activities, but it doesn't fulfill the third space OP mentioned.
(This is my experience, YMMV)
The Meetup platform is pretty terrible. It’s designed to get people to join many groups, most of which they never engage with and just get a lot of spam from. I’m sure >99.99% of pre-pandemic “social” Meetup groups were totally inactive. Most of the rest would have semi-regular events that <4 people would sign up for.
That said, I think there’s a lot room to build a better version of Meetup.com. The main problem with it is that the managers just don’t know what they’re doing, or are in too deep with tech debt and legacy code. If someone here actually wants to build a better version of Meetup, let me know.
Lost Connections by Johann Hari The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg Better Together by Robert Putnam
Irl organizations surrounding particular interests do materialize as extensions of online enthusiasm (we see this for meetup groups) but this is still insufficient. What's missing is accessible infrastructure to facilitate new connections. For instance, there are today collaborative workspaces and makerspaces (or even University grounds): these can be a good spatial medium for meeting like-minded people. However, the cost of renting is a deterrent. So, that can be addressed in a myriad of ways. As a remote worker, prior to COVID, I'd periodically hit the coffee shops but this did not appear to be an appropriate medium for engaging others.
We are going about things backwards, because it was all we could do: create organizations surrounding particular subjects, then have people join in. In many cases people are surfing around these groups as a means to an end, they don't care the slightest about the subject but they need it as a medium to connect with others. Not only is this contrived, it can lead to friction between individuals who want to focus on the subject and others who want to go on tangents away from it. This problem disappears if you simply have a space where people can choose to mingle or focus on their projects. Historically, physical spaces like this were always important large communities. Now our socially acceptable avenues for engaging others we don't know include very loud pubs, just barely, sports complexes and the like.
As a long-time member of a hackerspace, I've always envisioned it as a "church" (of sorts) for tech. I feel like I've learnt quite a bit from just immersing myself in the place, and having conversations with people from various disciplines.
Unfortunately, we're always struggling to make rent. It's a pity that the concept doesn't seem to work well in high-rent areas — many people view use of such spaces as a transaction, and won't contribute financially if it's just like any other office or co-working space.
I think it’s hard to build a community around people who just want one, and it’s more effective if it’s based around a starting ground of an interest and better yet shared values.
Coffee shops are great for this. Game shops as well
The reality is the changing social dynamics of a population spending increasing amount of time on the internet and less inclined to do things in-person, amplified by people choosing to have 'busier' lives, is the direction we are currently heading in.
We need top down (govt) and bottom up (community) efforts to start real change that can gain momentum (network effects for the founder inclined).
Working on experiments to chip away at this from the bottom up .
Dead Comment
No, it's going to drop. Think immigrants who can move from crowded cities back to their country or a place that feels more like home
Employers won't pay a first world salary while living in a low cost country.
Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective).
It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but if some lunatic out there wants to blow the money, build and sell a laptop at whatever price point you want that:
- Supports CoreBoot
- Isn't a rebranded Clevo shell and has close enough fit and finish to a recent MacBook. Read: No. Plastic. Case.
- If there is ever the phrase "panel lottery" uttered about your machine, you've messed up.
- No logos, or throw them on the underside like Purism.
- The screen has to be relatively close to the MacBook in brightness + viewing angles. Give me an option for a glossy screen.
- Trackpad must be glass. You won't get close to the MBP trackpad on the first or second pass, but try.
- Go for some crazier vertical integration ala the M1. I don't care if it blocks upgrading certain parts, since I consider the industry to move fast enough that I won't _want_ the machine anymore in 4-5 years.
- There is no need for touch of any kind, nor the ability to flip the screen or anything. Just make a damn laptop.
- Edit: high quality boutique feeling support. I don't need an Apple Store equivalent, but at least invest in this.
I get why Apple can do all of the above. I would pay literally twice what I pay Apple for a competing product. Currently, every laptop that I try feels like stepping back a few years.
The upcoming Purism Librem 14, in terms of images, feels like it could _feel_ close - but I'm not impressed with their other products so I'll believe it when I see it. I remain shocked that System76 hasn't bothered with this.
End my rant about this industry, I guess.
I've bought myself a Surface Laptop 3 (15", i7 version) 11 months ago. I had been looking for a laptop powerful enough to code on, that would look "premium" for business purposes, lightweight and the charge had to last a full workday(or more). This laptop checked all the boxes, and performed wonderfully since then. To the extend that now we're considering getting it for our employees.
First off, The support was horrible: on my first purchase (with MS directly ever by the way) they blamed me squarely for a 1 day old (!) Factory broken display (it would turn on but when it got a bit warm it would show only stripes; switching off and waiting for cool off would 'fix it': did I say less than 24 hours old!?); I sent it in and they said I broke it and told me I could buy a new one.
Also when I got a new one, the new keyboard was broken and they refused to replace that as well. Again, blaming me from something that came broken from the box.
And the rest of the experiences was not much better but at least they took them back without whining (there i learned my lesson and went to a shop instead of order online). Horrible battery life (far from what is promised on the tin, even with relatively low workload), random freezes and crashes, weird balance feel compared to, say an iPad or mb air and slow compared to old and new apple products (iPad and macbooks).
After all I was most angry about the bad support; I never had that with apple even when it was my own fault (they repaired a water damaged mb air without issues and replaced two iPad pro keyboard which where damaged by dropping for free) which this was not.
I tried to give them a chance and I tried: I got most of my money back luckily as after the first fiasco I prepared for that and returned them to the shop in the box, but definitely will not buy again soon.
googling
Answer seems to be maybe:
https://www.most-useful.com/ubuntu-20-04-linux-on-surface-pr...
https://old.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/top/?sort=top&t=year
TBH I hadn't really considered Surface's before due to them being Microsoft devices.
Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it
just works. Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.I turned an old Macbook into a Linux box, and it's
fine*. It does what I need it to do, but it doesn't feel premium at all. I just wish I had really slick, solid, premium-feeling alternatives.It seems to me that Microsoft or Facebook or SOMEONE with a bajillion dollars could afford to do this and really make a dent in the space and give us more alternatives. I guess the demand just isn't there. Very sad.
> Chromebook shipments have grown 122% year on year to a total of 9.4 million units in Q3 of 2020. [1]
It covers big market, from tablets [2] to enterprise [3]. And they have AArch64 models [4].
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pc-shipments-google-chromebook...
[2] Lenovo Chromebook Duet (10.1") 2 in 1 ($266.79) https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/student-chromebo...
[3] Dell Latitude Chromebook Enterprise https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/chromebookenterprise/
[4] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
The companies I can see who are in the right position to profit from developing and giving away an OS that's at least as user-friendly as MacOS or Windows and as open as Linux are Intel and AMD. But it's hard to imagine either of them making something that's a joy to use.
Something Linux-based could work, but Linux is kind of stuck with a lot of decisions made thirty years ago. The kernel is pretty good, but the basic abstractions of POSIX-like operating systems are perhaps not what you'd design if you were creating them from scratch in 2020.
Why when there is no third OS that has even 1% share and all Linux combined is about 3%. And desktop Linux is bad.
There are some non-Apple laptops with much better displays BTW, even Lenovo ships 500 nit displays and wide-color gamut ones with some their laptops nowadays. Dell and other manufacturers ship OLED display with some of their gaming laptops, which far outperform any Apple laptop display.
Regarding Aluminium vs. hardened plastic / titanium I'd say it's just a style question, I have never had any issues with my Thinkpads and they're way more resistant to scratching than Apple laptops (a poor colleage of mine badly scratched his new Macbook with his steel wrist watch only days after receiving it).
Regarding upgradability I prefer being able to extend RAM and hard disk as well as easily replace the battery, again Apple is a poor choice in regard to that.
Regarding repairability Apple actively keeps me from being able to repair my machine, take e.g. a look at Louis Rossmans' Youtube channel to learn about some of the crazy stuff Apple does to keep independent repair shops out of the game. Again nothing that I want to encourage.
That said the introduction of the M1 chips is pretty great, I plan to buy a Macbook Air as my second laptop for office work, I'll keep developing on a Thinkpad with Linux though.
> I like Apple laptops but they're not great in terms of repairability, extensibility, modularity and openness.
I just don't care about any of those. If I need it repaired, I'll pay the vendor to do it. If I need it extended, I'll pay them to do it - or buy something new. I don't care if it's modular. I only care about openness insofar as I can tell what it's doing. The rest is a waste of my time.
I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way, given the way this thread has gone.
What other brand has leaked schematics and boardviews? Replacement batteries, iFixit guides, and skilled independent technicians keeping the A1398 and A1466 going as long as possible? I doubt Apple will return to their glory days of making those laptops new, but I feel like the repairability of 2014 Macs is still better than many Dell/Lenovo/HP/Sony alternatives. At the component and logic board level.
I've tried PCs, they just aren't on the same level as Apple's hardware and I hate Windows.
I've seen some cool customizations of Linux but would really rather not have to spend that time myself to get to a place where I'm productive. I want something that 90% "just works", but that's also pleasing to use.
I really wish there was a solid third option, new tech is so cool yet the options available today seem so boring!
In what way is Apple so bad that you would pay twice as much (thousands of dollars more) for a competing product?
I'm annoyed with having to give my money to one of the richest companies on the planet, solely because nobody else will actually compete. I run Apple hardware daily; it's clear that I'm fine with them as a product, especially if I want it cloned.
Basically: I will pay a premium for an Apple-esque open laptop.
As if that weren't frustrating enough, redeeming the warranty required about five hours total of phone conversation per incident. At every step of the way, they would demand I repeat dozens of irrelevant troubleshooting steps, or they would tell me the problem isn't covered (contradicting the last person I'd been handed off to), or they'd tell me it isn't covered but if I agree to pay to extend the warranty by another year then many he can ask his manager to backdate it and squeeze this in, etc. etc. As you might be able to guess, it's all sales/lies/incompetence and eventually I got through to someone high enough up to initiate the replacements under warranty.
Of the many Macbooks I've had, only one ever had a failure that required service. I just scheduled a time to drop the computer off, then picked it up a week later and it was fixed, didn't have to argue with anyone about my warranty.
Also - in my opinion - the XPS may be the best build quality of non-Apple laptops, but it's not even in the same league as a similarly priced macbook.
The MacBook Pro has cooling issues, an awful keyboard and feels flimsy. The Zenbook had only a pseudo 4k display, a massive charger and a large bezel, although I believe that's gone on newer models.
I wouldn't call one premium and the other not. They were both kind of underwhelming.
Apple has also made some poor decisions in various areas in the past like poor thermals, power-sucking dGPUs, and of course the butterfly keyboard. The M1 Macbook is very nearly perfect though, and I don't know how any of the PC vendors are going to top it.
I do often look at a ThinkPad and wonder, though.
- Ships with CoreBoot
- Much nicer fit/finish than the average non-Apple laptop (all metal, aside from the rubber palm rest)
- Display wasn't defective :)
- There's a logo, alas
- Comparing to my work Macbook Pro, I'd say viewing angle and brightness are both on par, and the screen is indeed glossy
- I don't know if the trackpad is actually glass, but it does feel nicer nicer than pretty much any other trackpad I've used (to the point where I don't miss having a nub like on my usual Latitudes/Precisions and ThinkPads)
- No crazy vertical integration hardware-wise, but it being one of the main targets for Fuchsia is kinda cool, I guess
- It has both touch and screen-flipping, but it's easy enough to just... not use them (and indeed, most of the time I don't)
- I can't speak to the support aspect (since I've never had to put in a support request, and typically prefer fixing things myself anyway), but Google unfortunately has a, um, reputation...
I've been pretty happy with it; it's a nice solid machine, and while I ain't a fan of Chrome OS at all, the Crostini support makes it at least usable for my purposes (and the first-class Android app support is a nice bonus).
The main downside for me is that Chrome OS seems to be the only option for it that doesn't have some major drawbacks like missing audio support or suspend/resume issues.
https://us.vaio.com/
Made in Japan and oodles of legacy ports...
I use Stealth 13 and impressed with its metal body and touchpad, also no shiny RGB logo
I've had stellar longevity out of Apple hardware. I'm usually able to use it for a handful of years and sell it on ebay to put a good chunk towards something new. I have noticed certain models/runs have specific issues, laptop keyboards are probably the most recent and obvious, but for the most part you know what you're getting. Screen lamination problems or pinched monitor cable being a few others.
When looking at alternatives saving only around 20% on the cost made it difficult when not being confident about longevity or resale. Sadly, other aspects weren't appreciably better (soldered on RAM, camera quality, performance, battery).
Nobody in the entire laptop industry cares or even knows about our complaints. There seems to be practically zero overlap between the professionals that use laptops -- such as software developers -- and the hardware engineers that design the laptops. As you've alluded, it's an insular industry with mostly foreign players such as Clevo in Taiwan.
The market exists though. I suspect it would be profitable too! I regularly buy laptops for about AUD $5,000-$6,000, including the Clevo laptop I'm using now for work.
My requirements are much more mundane than yours, but will similarly never be met:
- Alternative keyboard layouts: Why must a $6K laptop for professionals (or gamers!) do idiotic things such as compress the arrow keys or hide the Ins/Del/PgUp/PgDn keys? Why can't I choose the keyboard layout?
- Wider keyboards: I can't stand "gapless" keyboards that make touch typing the rarely used keys difficult. Most laptops reuse the 13-inch model's keyboard on all larger sizes, which wastes enormous amounts of real estate. (My current laptop is wider than my full-size 101-key keyboard, not including the number pad.)
- Decent webcams and microphones: Is there some law that only mobile phones and tablets can have decent cameras?
- Narrow-bezel screens: This is starting to very very slowly become the norm, but is still hit and miss.
- Lightweight power supplies: Only Apple seems to have heard about Gallium Nitride power electronics, everyone else ships their more powerful laptop models with a power supply that is the size and weight of a brick. (My current laptop's brick is 1.9 kg!!!)
- Integrated 5G: I'd like to have Internet connectivity without tethering, just like an iPad.
If anyone from Dell ever reads YC News: I very nearly bought the new Dell XPS 17, but then I saw the keyboard and I immediately cancelled the order: https://i.dell.com/is/image/DellContent//content/dam/global-...
Compare with a Clevo 17 inch laptop keyboard: https://accessoriesales.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1165_...
They seem to have found the room for full-size up/down keys, a number pad, as well as dedicated keys for ins/del/home. I never have to press the "Fn" key in normal usage!
Every few years I look at Dell's top-of-the-line laptop, but decide against buying one because of at least one glaring flaw.
This is actually a fantastic point! Some models of Dell/HP/Lenovo have easily removed keyboards by design in order to install additional RAM/service parts etc. All they have keeping them connected other than some sliding plastic tabs is the ribbon cable. I can't believe no one has ever made drop in replacements either from the manufacturer or as aftermarket parts. Having Ctrl/Alt/Super/Fn keys in a dozen different configurations due to different vendors makes switching between different devices a huge pain.
Imagine if you could even get customised switches on your laptop!
Considering how small my cheap 65W GaN charger is, I would have been disappointed in Apple engineering if theirs were still as heavy and big as they are.
The HP has a much better keyboard. So much better. It runs Linux, not quite perfectly but pretty darn well. I actually like that the HP has a touchscreen, it’s often way quicker to reach out and touch a spot on the screen than to maneuver the mouse pointer to that same spot and then click. The HP has a regular USB port so I don’t have to keep a USB-C adapter around. The charger isn’t a giant heavy wall wart that falls out of older outlets. It’s a bunch of little things like that.
We have different needs. Your needs are not mine.
That said, I would would wager that your needs are moreso met as an existing, direct market though - whereas what I'm after is splintered and left only to Apple.
To each their own, of course.
My guess is that, at this point, Apple has absorbed the vast majority of people who care about these things. And that is causing the other manufacturers not to care, because they have already lost the audience who does...
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In the PC world, the consumer space is dominated by anti-design nerdy guys who demand every port imaginable, and for good reason, and the business end is similar with their own legacy demands. Big changes in any way, be it features or lack-of are frowned upon and mocked (no wireless less space than a nomad -lame).
No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different. And even then, you can just bootcamp Windows or Linux and buy the 'real' Apple you want anyway. Honestly, its a small miracle something like Apple even exits in the tech space. Its usually a race to the bottom on half-cooked features, general cheapness, and terrible UIs. Somehow Apple broke free of that and never looked back.
Complaints that you commonly see about Apple products are, I find, similar to reading complaints when you're apartment shopping: those who complain have reason to do so, and those with good experiences don't necessarily feel the need to write about them.
For instance: those who experienced botched Catalina upgrades that caused Mail.app issues? I never experienced that, and I've two significantly sized accounts attached. In fact I upgraded my last machine from High Sierra to Catalina with no issues at all. The "beta" parts of macOS that people call out are just never things I've fought against - and I run a fairly custom-ish setup to boot.
On that same note, I could throw a rock and find a KDE user who complains about KMail having issues... but you won't find many KMail users saying "yeah it just works and life is great".
Software is complex. I wouldn't call macOS "beta" and by the same token I'm not going to label other OS/DE combos that either.
(They also fixed the keyboard, so I'm over that complaint. Would I prefer the ThinkPad keyboard? Absolutely. But the new one works fine and fits the design aesthetic of the device.)
tl;dr: The only "agreement" I find myself signing is that the thing looks and feels, and functions, like a premium product. I find myself endlessly frustrated that if I go car shopping for a premium item, I have different options... yet I just don't feel like I have this with computers.
> No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different.
This is exactly why I'm saying that my ideal product wouldn't compete with the PC market. I fully recognize that's a losing battle.
Ever been to a book store in Japan? Practically every book is the same size. As a result, bookshelves also are designed to be the right size to optimally fit books. This allows people to fit more books in small homes. It makes books easier to transport in book-sized boxes and book-sized bags too. You can get perfectly-fitting reusable cloth covers to protect your library books.
American bookstores are a war between publishers to stick out from the shelves as much as possible. There's not much that a bookshelf designer can do except guess and have adjustable, oversized shelving.
That also describes the state of today's packaging. With more shopping happening online, the need for items to stand out on a shelf is lower, and the need for them to fit nicely in boxes is much higher.
Nobody would force you to design your products to fit the closest available standard package size, but companies would tend to do so more often because of the efficiency gains. Logistics companies like Amazon or Fedex could offer incentives.
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-stack-of-science-fiction-p...
Conversely there are plenty of randomly sized books at a Japanese bookstore. I can go walk to some today and take pictures if you don't believe me.
It's possible the USA is 50% standard sizes and Japan is 70% but it's definitely not close to all of them. Even in the USA many hardbacks are a standard size. At most they are off by an inch so that you can get by with certain sized shelves and have on extra shelf for really odd sizes.
So while every western bookshop has that shelf full of Lonely Planet travel guides that looks really organised, in Japan you can photograph an entire aisle of books that looks just as regimented.
Marketing people don't like that. They want a unique look. Many US state laws requiring some standardization of sizes and fill have been repealed over the last two decades.
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Pressreader gets close but it only gives you yesterday's print versions (not current online content), it has a few notable gaps which matter to me (the FT, The Times (of London), Bloomberg news among others) and it doesn't really collate different sources for the same story very well. Though I have to say it's great for magazines.
The aggregator is 100% the judge of quality but start with access to the highest quality sources and go downward. So everything is editorially decided except how many actually subscribe but since it's access to the best quality, it would be a desirable thing to subscribe to.
Apple news costs $120 a year. Basic digital FT is over $350. Premium digital even more.
A bundle of consumer news might work, but you still get the adverse selection problem that the clients most interested also tend to be the clients interested in standalone, expensive subs. So it’s hard to get NYT, WaPo, times of london, etc
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Where I can cut off subscriptions easily and with no hassle, maybe one time payments, etc.
For news, shopping, any kind of subscription (Netflix, AWS, etc.).
I want banking-as-a-service. I already trust my bank with my money, I want them to be the middle man between me and the online payment jungle.
https://privacy.com/
You can set a budget to spend among the websites you visit, if they have "signed up" to the service.
The reality is that for all but the largest news sites, this model won't really work. Say you're in a medium-small city. Even in your best case scenario of like 50% of the population reading your site, you'd still only likely get such a small sum per-article (10-20k pageviews, maybe?) that you'd still have to supplement revenue with advertising and other revenue streams. And now you're back where you started!
I love the idea, but I just struggle to see it happen at scale.
Advertising and other revenue streams also only pay out per view on a fairly small number of views though, right? Is the problem not that advertising pays more per view than people are willing to in the first place of their own volition?
[0] https://scroll.com
There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth.
Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people across various different organizations. Everything in MS Word. I don't even hate MS Word, it's useful and its dominant position isn't entirely undeserved. But holy cow was working together a gigantic pain in the behind. I really started to loathe it (Excel is far worse and did its part too).
This was all with technical people. They could potentially grasp WYSIWYM approaches like LaTeX. Slap git and CI/CD on top and you're where software developers have been 10 years ago. But my industry is still light years away.
Part of it is how Word "just works". But it takes 5 seconds of using it until it doesn't. If LaTeX was more modern and also approachable (very ugly syntax/language. Could learn from Markdown here), technical folk could ditch Word and really upgrade their workflows. I'm sick of Word templates from 2004.
Btw. I linked before a link to usable Markdown variations for academic papers which use LaTeX as a mix in only when necessary.
Word is a horrible format too, which explains why conversion is problematic in both directions.
I used to work at a bank where we had to collaborate on Word documents stored in SharePoint. It was a nightmare. In SharePoint you are supposed to "check out" documents, edit them, and "check in" the document afterward. The problem was that SharePoint was slow, so it was more convenient to work from local copies. And many people couldn't resist the urge to send documents as attachments when requesting feedback from someone else, thus breaking the version control system. And if someone already had "checked out" the document, there was nothing stopping someone from just working from a local copy, making changes, emailing it to me, and saying "Incorporate these changes into the final version."
It was common for someone to work from an outdated version and accidentally overwrite someone else's changes. Even though SharePoint stored every version, it was still a lot of manual work on my part to be a human git, manually combine edits from multiple reviewers, and update revision history tables on the first few pages of every document because nobody else had the time to do that. There were a lot of manual, human errors introduced by me and others. Partly because sometimes people would make minor changes without updating the version of the document, and then you'd have no idea that you were looking at an older version.
I use git for docs version control now, and sometimes I think of ways to make documentation controlled by git while still making it user friendly for non-technical people to contribute to it. What if you could send someone a file as an attachment, they could edit it locally (perhaps in Markdown or similar, with a text editor that has a Markdown preview), then open it in a special text editor let them click a button that would make a pull request for them without them having to understand anything about git? Maybe the special text editor would also notify them as soon as the doc became outdated.
And if even that was too hard, maybe they could save changes, return it to the sender as an email attachment, then the recipient could quicky make a pull request.
It would be glorious.
Google docs works pretty well, but I wish it had more friction to download documents in office formats. People are quick to start working on local copies as soon as they miss some minor feature in word and you end up with the same problem you described. I think my perfect tool would not even export to word.
I agree sharepoint is awful and it's even worse now that it's baked into teams and people are using it without even realizing it.
I was thinking about LaTeX and if it could solve a problem for us in in my search I came across this:
https://www.overleaf.com/
I considered trying to get us to standardize on LaTeX and git for document management, but delayed that decision in favor of "get started with Word first and get people used to writing at all". Once we went forced-remote and started using the online comment features, I don't see an equivalently accessible means to do that in tex.
I doubt that most offices would benefit from teaching their employees that instead of just hitting control-B to bold some text, they should now do \textbf{foo}, or that quotes should now be types ``like this''. If you need the huge array of features (which is typically only the case in the context of academic publishing), then it's worth making the investment to learn. But for 99% of corporate documents, Word likely can do what you need with much less pain.
Asciidoctor is a good modern proposition that can handle more than markdown can, but it’s not without shortcomings. Unfortunately markdown, asciidoc, rst and friends have been focusing too much on publishing to the web. Conversion to PDF is mostly over html (in some cases by firing chromium in the background) and the results are not as great.
It is difficult to compete with Word for non-technical people, if the alternative is to install and learn multiple tools, configure a dev environment and setup build toolchains.
I think you've answered it yourself. Also damning is that groff doesn't support UTF-8 directly.
Most groff guides only do very basic formatting. Complex math/equation layout can be awful. Image files apparently need to be ps/eps. I just keep running into issues.
There's also no accessible ecosystem for groff. CTAN. Code highlighting (ideally, I want to use pygments - i guess i could write a backend if i was really invested). TikZ is great and something I've invested in a lot. Bibliography management. Also, not an issue for me, but an issue for adoption is Windows support.
As for competing with Word's workflow, at least with some TeX variant I have a chance. Installer frameworks. Editors with previews. So a few GiB to not run into these limitations sounds worth it to me to be productive.
I'm not saying groff couldn't be used for complex stuff, but I wouldn't know where to begin, or want to work around all those limitations.
That's the holy grail of text processors for me.
Unfortunately the TeX rendering engine doesn't cache partial computations and every single keystroke requires calling the full rendering pipeline.
A hybridization of Overleaf and LyX could be pretty incredible.
Mostly, if people do talk about social etiquette, it's within the context of not explicitly pissing people off, or looking good to your boss. I've never seen anyone talk about actually having good social interactions online.
I've had a few friends change jobs during the pandemic, and the thing they immediately tell me is that none of them have made any friends at work since starting virtually. They all just work on their own tickets, and whatever collaboration there is, is pretty transactional.
Zoom "happy hours" pretty much get dominated by two or three voices (usually of the most senior people) and everyone else just listens, because you can't have 2 conversations at a time. I've heard a bunch of the most cringeworthy techniques that managements have tried, to enhance socialization among employees.
In person, some things are pretty obvious. If someone is new, usually a good team will invite you into the conversation somehow. It would be weird if you got to your office and sat down and for days no one asked you anything about yourself. But it's perfectly fine to log into slack and have no DMs for weeks or even months.
They tried to do “zoom happy hours” where I work, and this was exactly what happened. The two people who were usually the loudest in the office, just ended up talking to each other.
They would quite often stop and say “it feels like we’re the only one talking here”, and then go on talking.
Of course you’re the only one talking, you never stop talking. It’s impossible to get a word in. If you want others to participate, give them a chance, there’s often a small delay, so giving them 2 or 3 seconds to respond would help.
Still I think there's room for more: I'm not that interesting, it just seems that many people want someone to say something.
This is definitely a problem and my co founder and I wanted to solve it. We tried a bunch of stuff, but one thing that we noticed was that we were playing a lot more casual games with our friends and family since the pandemic. It was pretty enjoyable. We tried the same with our colleagues and it was definitely much better than a Zoom happy hour. The game provides some structure which removes the awkwardness and there is some amount of participation from everyone on the call. We are now working on a product (https://getlounge.app/) that helps teams organize these game happy hours.
It was pretty cool because after we broke into groups I got to have some lighthearted small talk with the company CEO (I work at a 10000+ people company), which felt really neat to me as just a SWE a few management detached from execs, and I don’t think it would have happened pre-pandemic.
Alternatively, we had another “happy hour” organized by a different team that was like you said, 100+ folks with just a few of the most popular (or maybe just gregarious?) people cracking jokes and taking center stage, like a high school dance where a few people are dancing and everyone else awkwardly stands on the sidelines.
I have had to rise to the occasion, and facilitate icebreakers with new hires of other teams (that work with my team).
Their managers thought nothing of directing the new hires to slack and email a handful of strangers.
The companies or individuals that had successfully implemented remote work prior to the pandemic, I think are dealing with it better.
The best tip I read was from the Zapier remote work ‘guide’, to use the Slack giphy add-on, because it is easier to convey emotions via an animated gif versus text.
Of course, it was a major setback when we had to ban it for inappropriate use.
I agree, but I’d say >95% of management is completely unprepared to deal with remote work right now, and it doesn’t seem like they’re getting much better.
I can understand why some people wouldn't enjoy that environment but a focused workday then a chatty short lunchtime walk sounds like an enjoyable work environment for people like myself.
I noticed some people like to work on their own, while others like to work as small teams, or do peer programming sessions or whatnot.
Maybe you could try to find similarly minded people within your team.
It’s a space were you can walk around freely, have proximity-based audio volume, and your head is your webcam.
150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. People are forced to save for a future where they have enough to survive for a few years and then pay to have someone take care of them, instead of doing what they actually want to do.
Why are we not all collectively trying to solve this problem? Dying of age related diseases is as natural as dying from malaria or childbirth, yet we try to solve those issues and pretend age related diseases are inevitable. COVID largely shut the world down because the largest risk factor for complications is how old someone is. The gains in productivity alone should make human longevity the number one priority for every government.
I also think it would solve climate change because if you expected to live much longer, the obvious problems are no longer just future generations problems.
People are trying. We want to cure cancer, and find effective general-purpose antivirals, and help people maintain healthy bodies, and figure out how to repair hearts, and cure diabetes, and fix autoimmune disorders, and figure out general-purpose gene therapies, and work out what exactly is up with the gut microbiome, and make prosthetic ears/eyes/etc, and then there's the brain...
There's only so much that you can do with the technology we have right now. Advances in other fields will eventually help, but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.
Anyways, wouldn't significantly longer-lived people exacerbate climate change? You'd have many more people on the planet, and individuals would accumulate much more total wealth to spend on wasteful consumer goods thanks to the power of compound interest.
> but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.
This I don't get though. Why not? We already do that. Making people healthier for longer is a massive win.
If we cure cancer, at best we're adding a few years to the average lifespan before something else kills you off. If we rejuvenate the immune system to that of a 20 year old, not only are those cancerous cells far more likely to be killed off at an earlier stage, but also prevent a ton of other age related diseases.
I don't think it's something that should just have a blank cheque written for it, but I think that governments should encourage young people to become researchers in the field and should spend far more resources on basic science. We can change the incentives for insurance companies to pay for preventing diabetes instead of treating it.
Climate change is solvable - it requires both research and effort to get us there. Many people are simply not willing to sacrifice to solve it since it won't affect them. We also have tons of older people who go from producers to consumers, and are not contributing to fixing climate change. A 75 year old can be building windmills instead of hanging out on a golf cart in florida. A research scientist can continue their work instead of experiencing cognitive decline. We'd probably experience a short term increase in carbon emissions but I think the long term trend would be much lower since we'll get past the technological hurtles quicker with more people working on the problem.
As a collective, we try. But are we really trying as hard as we should be? Companies have influenced the public and even health research to be in favor of sugar. I'm pretty sure the rate of diabetes is going up and that doesn't help. Companies contributing to global warming have influenced policies and discredited science they knew would harm their businesses.
There are plenty of smart people doing what they think is best for us, but then there is also greed that hinders us. Sure some of us are trying, but not even close to as much as we should be. The money just isn't there.
* Kurzgesagt: How to Cure Aging – During Your Lifetime? (7:20) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjdpR-TY6QU
* Kurzgesagt: Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? (6:48) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoJsr4IwCm4
* Why we should cure ageing (11:30) - Heads up, it's a book intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNn-2TXzSaA
* Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (Book, not yet released in the US) https://andrewsteele.co.uk/ageless/
* Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to (book) https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/150...
* Google talk: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To (55:13) - By the author of the book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nXop2lLDa4
Edit:
* If you wish to contribute to this kind of research make sure to check out SENS: https://www.sens.org/
IMO it's a subconscious projection of the fact that we do _not_ live meaningful lives in our day to day, and so we fixate on a fantastical (yet inspiring, universal) compensation of extending it forever.
"Left to take care of the elderly" suggests we don't value life in the first place. Why extend it further?
This seems like a shortcut to hell on earth.
Who do you think will have the means to pay for this first?
It won't be the saints, it will be the greediest ones.
So we (or rather out descendants) would probably be stuck with a ruling class of demigods.
Why?
1. They were already pretty well off (since they are the ones who can pay for this treatment in the first place.
2. Now they suddenly also have all the time they want and need.
3. They will now have generations to build alliances etc.
Within three generations no normal person has a chance anymore.
Also for many of those persons I guess it will become nightmarish after a while: the though of dying from a car crash at age 100 probably feels much worse if you are planning to live forever than if you know your lifespan is lifespan.
If treatments become available, the pressure to make it available to everyone will be immense. Consider how much of a government budget goes to health care and how much productivity and resources are wasted on those who have exited the workforce due to age. It will be economic and political suicide not to ensure everyone gets access to anti-aging treatments.
As for a ruling class, the problem exists with or without anti-aging treatments. We're already moving to a world where more wealth is concentrated with fewer people. The solution to this is to demand taxation on wealth and enforce it globally.
I feel the extension of young and healthy life (ideally to infinity) is a number one priority.
Surprisingly, people almost always strongly oppose when I just start expressing my views. I never understood this.
Wouldn't it be nice to see Mars colonized and terraformed? Wouldn't it be great to see the completion of a Dyson swarm and using 100 % of the Sun energy for some ultra-mega-project we can't even fathom yet? Wouldn't it be cool to see the spectacular Betelgeuse star going supernova show in 10 000 years? Wouldn't it be awesome to witness full Milky Way galaxy colonization?
If I would ever become an Earth dictator, I'd use all available resources to fight ageing :).
The birth rate in the developed world is way below replacement, so unless we import workers through immigration, there will be fewer workers to take care of the previous generation.
So, not longevity, then, but extension of the span of healthy life?
Usually people imply extending both healthspan and lifespan when they talk about longevity.
Science advances one funeral at a time and so does perhaps also humanity in general.
(That's not to say that I didn't wish that friends or family lived long lives, but that's not the point here of course.)
This is of course included in that and we're already seeing some research into it. To prolong life itself isn't a goal if we can't keep healthy, and the brain is part of that.
If we slow down or reverse aging the brain won't deteriorate either. It's all about solving the root cause of why our bodies and mind fails us over time.
If everyone has been rejuvenated, then age would no longer matter. Someone who is 100 can have just as valid opinion as someone who is 25. Better yet, someone who is 100 will still able to contribute intellectually rather than needing to be taken care of by someone younger.
I understand the fear of a geneontocracy, but I think it's unfounded. New people will still be born, older people will get tired of living and opt to end their lives. If age no longer matters, the range of people in ones social group would only expand. The only advantage longer lives people would have is wealth and influence. We can solve the former with taxation and the latter is more dependent on the individual.
This is the example we gave to the upcoming generations, we're fucked when it's our turn lol.
I've been reflecting a lot on this, and thinking of ways to solve this, but it's not easy - it's bigger than infrastructure or tech... it's a social problem.
There are tons of quack doctors in Japan. Apparently to be a doctor here is much easier than some other places. I love (I think) that it's relatively inexpensive (via price controls) and that their is government medical insurance so it's relatively easy to get covered. I'm not so sure I like that if you want a skilled surgeon you need to bribe them.
LTC insurance is a scam. They will do everything they can to not pay, and most LTC facilities have an organizational structure that makes that possible.
Gigabit internet, house Slack, LAN parties, VR gear, zoom calls with family, rigs for new members... create house guilds. Set the tenants up with streaming setups and let them have fun.
I don't think the gear would be prohibitively expensive given the cost of nursing care.
Nursing homes don't have to feel like you are giving up on life. A tech'd out nursing home could be absolutely kick ass.
It would probably be more successful in 40-50 years when millennials start checking in to nursing homes, although who's to say we won't be as out of touch as the current generation of residents are.
It seems like the system works really need to change to get your dream to a reality
And some folks just didn't move out of bed much because it was so labor intensive.
We need robots and lots of other tech.
That said, there are some cool hospital beds that are like Transformers. For example, you can get hospital beds that not only tilt and let you sit up in bed - but they can basically turn into a chair or help you get out.
(do an image search for "hil rom p1900")
My buddy is a latino and as soon as the elders got too old, they just moved in to the family house and their needs were met.
* I do understand that some level of care is unable to be met by normal families but I'm talking about the situations where its really just room, board, food, and love.
The "old way" is the current way. It hasn't changed, which is why we needed socialist programs like Social Security. Why? We live in a high trust society that is more individualistic. Families in low trust societies tend to adopt a more "clan" like mentality where you even know your distant cousins pretty well, see your cousins on a regular basis, and it's common for three or more generations to live in the same building. Why? Because in a low trust society, you will lean more on people who are related by blood when it's harder to rely on 3rd parties like the government or anyone not related to you. Conversely, we don't have that issue, so our families tend to be more distant.
Of course there are other social problems, and inequalities, like racism, unemployment, sexism... but the difference is that these groups still have strength and a voice. The vulnerable groups are exposed and left at the waves of the society.
While people were complaining because they had to stay some weeks inside, you have countries where the elder are still in isolation after 9 months, only to finally get the virus to creep in slowly and start to wipe a lot of them. It's borderline criminal.
It's sad, and it makes me worried for when it will be my turn. If we're this detached from the problems of old age, we won't have a good end.
It is definitely a step up from a nursing home, especially for people who would like to live with their family or chosen roommates.
It’s better than most nursing homes. My siblings and I grew up with the residents and were quite attached to them when we were younger. It’s a hard job though and the systems aren’t set up to support you. Full commercial fire systems are required for what is otherwise residential housing. Of course to my mother it’s more of a mission than anything else.
I would add not just elderly care, but appropriate regulation of facilities that provide elderly care. Evidently, the standard business practice is to not just own the nursing home, but the businesses surrounding it, which are used to siphon money away from the facility. As an example, a separate legal entity owns the building and leases it back at a high rate, or the laundry and over charges, or the medical equipment and over charges, etc. It makes the facility look like they're losing money, but in fact the owning conglomerate profits handsomely:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/business/coronavirus-nurs...
https://prospect.org/familycare/the-corporatization-of-nursi...
The net affect is that the facilities themselves are incredibly understaffed and that leads to poor care and massive number of medical errors. As someone who's dealt with both assisted living and nursing home with my own family, it's incredibly frustrating.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/pandemic-...
On the other hand this culture has problems as well. It's not easy to take care of old. When children move out, often because of their own children, unless at least one kid is very happy to take care of now very old parents, it becomes a great question which kid they can live with.
I never really understood the culture of adult kids and old parents living all separately as a way of life. What's considered wrong with living with your parents or keeping them with you?
Dead Comment
Um, yes? That's what happens when you get old. It's not lack of humanity, it's just reality.
I see no infrastructure, or tech, or social changes that will stop people from getting old and dying.