Readit NewsCompanies whose primary business is weather apps are small, and such areas are highly competitive.
As far as I know, AccuWeather is the main beneficiary. You can easily find reliable sources about it.
The cause is that NOAA publishes all weather data, calculated models (global coverage), meteostations data (global coverage), and weather radars to the public for free (US only, maybe also Canada, I don't remember). Therefore, many weather companies use such data to do their business and compete directly with AccuWeather. They don't like this.
On the other hand, state weather agencies that calculate global models in many countries don't provide such data for free. Therefore, startups and small companies who work in weather and climate fields use NOAA data and directly compete with AccuWeather or don't pay them for data access.
Creating efficient payment rails for its own currency is one of the most obvious roles for government imo. If the government provisions the currency, why would they not also provision the infrastructure (like the printing of the paper money).
That said, you’ve not offered a good rebuttal to any of OPs concerns, just repeated how good pix is within Brazil…right now with their current government.
Digital payments does present a uniquely frictionless route for tyrannical governments to assert power should they ever decide to weaponize it…unlike paper money which is harder to control.
Also, international payments is absolutely an issue with these systems. So you hate crypto due to its 2010s association with annoying Twitter bros. I get it.
But what are you offering instead as a solution to global money? Paying Wise stupid currency movement fees and waiting for them to close your account because you tried to buy a house for your family in the country you moved to?
If we want to have global money and a global payment system, they would be controlled by governments, international organizations, God, Devil, Cthulhu, Spaghetti Monster...
There is no magical solution. We, as a society, need to establish competing social institutions, and try to control them, and try to force them to compete. There is no solver bullet.
Don’t lie to yourself, bro.
the conversation is supposed to be about cryptocurrency technology,
but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.
Not just one feature of its existence.
Common conflation.
Nuclear Energy is great, but governments and international organizations want to control it because it is too dangerous. So, if we need to use Nuclear Energy, we must play by such rules.
Money is the same thing. Each government wants to control them, regardless of their form.
If someone wants cryptocurrencies to be widely adopted, there is no option but to give them to businesses and governments.
So, crypto would be regulated like usual money. Major blockchains have records for all transactions, which can be tracked and used by businesses and governments to implement more strict control over the whole world. Therefore, the more people use crypto, the less privacy they have.
The Internet and Web were designed to be anonymous, but cookies, IP addresses, data collection, ML/AI, IMEI, MAC, and the control of registration in ISPs and mobile operators have led us to a situation where the government and companies can easily track people. The same situation would be with crypto, which was designed to be anonymous but used in another way.
Don’t lie to yourself, bro.
Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1.
How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system controlled by just a single entity / country.
What we may however end up with, are dozens of systems like Pix, one for each country, union, etc. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant (see point 1)
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
Do you trust crypto companies? Mt. Gox, FTX, Bybit…
Do you know that crypto companies must follow government rules, regulations, and laws? Russians were banned from using many crypto exchange platforms. China has strict rules for its citizens. You can buy and sell crypto in Brazil, but you must use only Brazilian reals.
Pix isn't global, but no one government person outside of Brazil can block this system.
MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and UnionPay work worldwide, but only a few countries regulate them, can block their usage, and can use data for tracking and statistics.
Pix is free to use, so no one needs to pay an additional "tax" to MasterCard and Visa (it's about 3%).
Google and Apple cannot say that if you want to pay, you must use only our devices.
> Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil
Now, try to buy ice cream from street vendors using any crypto coins.
These web apps show tables with data, images with figures, and some controls to request calculations or data from a server. jQuery is used to update the drop-down list according to previous choices.
I can recommend reading blog posts by Raph Levien [1], who is one of the founders of Linebender [2] and Xilem [3]. Xilem is a Rust cross-platform GUI framework intended to use GPU for rendering in the first place. Earlier, they tried to develop their own GPU meta-API, then they switched to WGPU [4] and developed their own 2D rendering engine instead of using "standard" Skia, like many others.
JetBrains develops Compose Multiplatform [5]: using the same Android API - Jetpack Compose, but for many platforms and in Kotlin. They also use Skia but are considering switching to Impeller (a new 2D rendering engine in Flutter) because of performance issues in Skia with shaders compiling.
Slint [6], was founded by 3 guys who's been working for a long time in Qt Group. It is written in Rust but uses DSL to develop GUI. As I understand, they try to solve the main fundamental issues in Qt.
MAUI, as I understand it, was Xamarin.Forms and now Microsoft tries to develop it.
Another interesting thing. There is a part of each GUI framework, a system to automatically place widgets on the screen - layouting, something like a grid, table, and so on. Several years ago, Apple had a big boom in the implementation and use of the Cassowary algorithm [7] in their GUI frameworks. It was a promising, strong math-based academia-proof algorithm, but in real life, as I understood, it can not work reliably in many edge cases [8], so Apple quietly removed it and implemented Flexbox [9].
More approaches: to use game engines as GUI frameworks: Unity, Unreal, Godot, etc.
Fun fact: Blender has its own GUI library, which is implemented on top of OpenGL.
PS If you find anything interesting, I would appreciate it if you share.
PPS As a way to find more, I can recommend using search in HN, Reddit, and GitHub. Try to find projects that people develop to solve something and look at what ideas they use.
[1] https://raphlinus.github.io/
[3] https://github.com/linebender/xilem
[4] WebGPU implementation in Rust, used in Firefox and many other projects, can be used as a separate library, cross-platform, meta-API over Vulkan, DirectX, Metal etc
[5] https://www.jetbrains.com/compose-multiplatform/
[6] https://github.com/slint-ui/slint
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_(software)
Does anyone know good magazines about tech/programming/engineering?
I found CODE Magazine [*], which looks promising, but it is primarily about C#/.NET.
What hardware do hobby archivists usually work with?