Readit NewsThat being said, this article is completely wrong and draws the wrong conclusions. People were anti-car early on because most people didn't have cars. Later, people stopped being anti-car because most people had cars. The article would have you believe that at no point in time did the majority of people want car-centric city streets and that it was forced on them by a small minority of people interested in selling cars. That simply isn't the case. Vocal opposition to cars faded away as more people owned them.
It's important to understand the status quo correctly if we ever want to change things. The sad reality is that most people want cars, even in dense cities. As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle. Hopefully that would change if we made it easier and safer for people to walk, but it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars.
Not that I have any proposals. It's just funny in a dark and morbid way.
The ME ME ME context has more comedy in it. Those roads one looks at as "things for me!" but to a much greater extend they are things for others. Others will come blast their fumes and noise into your neighborhood. Murder your cat, your dog and your kids. But also a parade of suits who got it in their head to serve and enforce a rule set created for you to obey. What is the tax man to do if he cant extremely conveniently get to your house? Is your lawn mowed to spec? That your kids are fine doesn't mean they are yours to keep and neither is your home.
Roads are the great enabler for more and more rules and regulations by designs you only have influence on in theory.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live at the top of some hard to climb mountain surrounded by forest swamps and/or oceans. Surely you could still contribute to society? That your pull requests come in a bit less frequently hardly makes you unproductive.
the MPAA might not care if you are brewing your own liquor and the building inspector might not care you are growing opium, mescaline cacti, shrooms and like licking the psychedelic toads. But all combined they make a formidable army fit to examine every inch of your life. Are those real nikes, is that a stolen rolex? Do you wear a helmet riding that bicycle?
The mailman - the bringer of bad news, over the road.
And in the end your road is perfect for tanks and marching armies coming to murder you.
Maybe I should start participating in Star Trek discussions!
https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/smog-alert-in-force-throughout-n...
I'm not comfortable with the idea the unmatched creative engineering powers of mother nature did not discover something as simple as radio.
We could power down the electrical grid and do the experiment? But I can just call everyone, what use is telepathy?
The cat is in front of the house when someone arrives (which is never at the same time sometimes skipping a day) but the rest of the day he is nowhere near on the camera footage. For him there is a point, it means food!
Sheldrake would love it.
How much of what we do on current-era machines is IO-bound? Not a great deal. And when it is, it's usually a network and not a local hardware limitation.
How much would UX improve? Not a great deal, most usage is CRUD/web/vid.
Would new applications become available? Sure. But what are they?
Is the value proposition vs. total addressable market compelling?
If you can convincingly answer the above you can definitely go get funding and do it.
In the 80ś-90ś I thought of software as prototyping. If we keep a healthy separation of [shall we say] mission critical application and entertainment, today, as far as normal users are concerned, a good 99% is pretty well defined. We are now developing stuff users don't want, rent seeking schemes and prisons therefore.
Not sure if it was my failure to predict or the industries but I thought the most obvious requirements in the obvious applications would find their way into the high level language abstractions (in increasingly large chunks) and gradually migrate to lower language features and so on closer to the metal until the email client is just an array of similar email processors that can be powered on with some basic query. Have a mailto with params, a new mail notification with some custom sounds entirely separate from other audio, some way to export the attachments and the database i/o preferably with a mechanical switch that completely rules out any other process accessing the mailbox unless the user specifically enables it. Yeah, it should probably beep loudly for as long as remote reading or writing is enabled with a red led blinking above the tumbler switch.
That way no one has to ponder how to ruin the protocol, add emoji's, data mine the user, insert ads or otherwise turn email into a first person shooter MMO next level email experience. Regardless what fantastic thing email could grow into it would just not be possible. After all, we've already turned the fantastic document distribution network (www) into a fantastic application platform. Ideally such things should not be possible but it was and we did and the result is ofc wonderful... except that documents are now multi GB advertisement machines that make 500+ requests. (I cant even view the images in this topic because this laptop cant do such websites) Email has the potential to be a superior application platform much superior to the www but I really hope(ed) we could glue its components into place. (toasters that cant run doom)
The next chunk of hardware can do news groups, one for IRC, one for torrents, one for word processing, one for tabular data, one with maps, one with a web browser, a real terminal(!) and eventually we can have a hardware implementation of HN.
Each such application can have its own signal from the keyboard and mouse and its own video output. Some other chip to combine the pictures into windows with some title validation so that one cant mimic hardware implementations without the user knowing it.
I was completely wrong or was I?
That wonderful pdf in the topic makes an analogy replacing a single supper fast bar tender with multiple bar tenders but this seems a poor fit.
The general purpose stuff is like a college degree. It is some college! Its product is state of the art and it is improving all the time.
But if you want to develop, manufacture and finance the development of the next level drink dispenser you cant keep throwing [however excellent] college graduates at it and expect it to scale.
Our college is to produce the finest surgeons who are also the finest pilots, the best mathematicians, greatest artists and stand up comedians.
Good luck with that?