Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

476 pointsorbOfOrthanc1,239 comments

I love asking new colleagues this question, figured I would open it here as well.

What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

In-person social organizations.

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.

Basically a social network app, with calendar events, and without the ability to post (because interaction has to be done IRL)?

This is essentially what the book Bowling Alone is about. It's worth reading, along with the writer's other research.

I can also suggest Lost Connections.

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 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 though and all of these cases I was a complete stranger I was never insulted or made to feel unwelcomed.

My feeling is that once people no longer have a keyboard and monitor with which to "hide", they no longer have the ability to hurl insults at other people spontaneously and without being reprimanded for it (if anything they might get juicy upvotes).

The reason I put "hide" in quotes is because people don't act this way consciously. No one wants to throw personal attacks at other people for simply expressing a different opinion. In fact, I regularly read stories of politicians who were arch rivals politically but would still foster good friendships with one another. Another good example is the relationships the judges have in the US Supreme court. I have trouble believing that the judges would be able to form similar friendships with one another if they did that online through soulless text boxes, rather than face-to-face contact.

The anonymity provided online enables this subconscious switch in people's minds that allows them to do things they would never do face-to-face. And I want to add that it's not really the anonymity (though that does amplify this effect), it's the lack of seeing the other people. Posting online with your full name (e.g. Twitter) can still enable these subconscious switches simply by virtue of giving you the illusion of not talking to people because you can't see them. In the end, all the people responding to you are text boxes, not humans with feelings and emotions.

Seeing somebody face-to-face just cannot compete with online connections. The way you see what you say form an expression on somebody else's faces, or the way that looking into somebody's eyes somehow forms this inexplicable connection (I remember reading about how studies were done on the brain that noticed hormones being released when people looked into each other's eyes... not sure where to look for that now), or how you can listen to their voice tones change as they talk allowing you to subconsciously gain more understanding of what they feel as they express something. It's... just not the same.

---

There was this article I remember reading a couple of years ago an article that delved into what guaranteed anonymity does to people. It was very interesting, I highly recommend it: https://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-th...

> The reason I put "hide" in quotes is because people don't act this way consciously. No one wants to throw personal attacks at other people for simply expressing a different opinion.

I think such people are called "bullies" in real life.

The better ones tend to be able to disguise their actions and gaslight people [1], and therefore get away with it.

[1] https://kickbully.com/hidden.html

Love the finding high income partners part. Wow, the hustle.

True story, one of my partners was making 200k, and within a year of meeting her I also reached 200k. She gave me that high income earner energy

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!

If I see one more app to cure loneliness... It seems techy people have difficulty accepting non-techy solutions

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.

This sounds a bit like a hackerspace. The bar and gambling would depend on local laws.

Does this sound like something for you? https://doubleunion.org/

For sure, though San Francisco is a bit far from me! :)

Try one of these, maybe: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/British_Columbia

It's a bit unfortunate that most of them might have shut down (either temporarily or permanently) due to COVID-19, but I hope you'll find what you're looking for!

I think being explicitly a male club is extremely important for something like this to be appealing. Otherwise it’s just a meetup or bar visit. I don’t ever think it should be race specific/racist but I do support “elitist” requirements to get in.

Especially when the non-techy solution is the really fucking hard work of putting yourself out there and developing true and meaningful relationships.

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 expanded on this in an article I wrote, https://invisibleup.com/articles/31/, if you want to check that out.)

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.

Yea so great, until you are struck by a pandemic and your minimalist home is basically now a prison cell where you can't do much because everything there is to do was outside your tiny home.

Now I know people shitting on suburbs is the fashion, but the fact is if you are the kind of person who has hobbies that don't involve going out and socializing a bedroom community is perfect. You get your own land and a detached home with plenty of space to do mostly whatever you want. Woodwork, swimming in a pool, running around with your dog, playing loud music and movies, hosting dinner parties, whatever. It's so much more comfortable for people who don't have urges to just "hang out".

Why not both? Seriously though, suburbs would be a lot nicer if they were built on a human scale with amenities within walking distance rather than a sea of house bounded by freeways. You just need mixed zoning really, model it after a small town with fully detached housing surrounding a small core of low density apartments and shops. Rinse and repeat, call it a decentralized city or some such, maybe it'll catch on and get some planner's attention.

This.

I love in a sea of houses. Bu where I live I can take 30 minute walk to the doctor, or ironically, the gas station.

I think for that to work you need a strong public transport system (regular daily, frequent enough and comprehensive) as well as having multi-purpose buildings so that companies are mixed in housing, as well as green places and areas for people to meet, sit chat and go shopping.

Doctors, dentists, hairdressers, cafes, bakeries and flower shops all fit nicely with housing.

Two of the central themes drawing people to suburbs are space and privacy. I agree that more mixed use spaces in suburbs would be nice, but fundamentally I don't think you are going to do away with cars in most suburban environments because I don't you can achieve the business density necessary to do so without sacrificing lot size and privacy.

I don't think you should do away with cars, we need them for efficient transport and whenever we need to travel longer distances. I just think we should build with both cars and people in mind. Most North American suburbs are focused solely on cars and houses with no provision for mixed use. I think the zoning is more to blame than cars for the current dire conditions.

The Netherlands does this really well.

This sounds like how many places in the Netherlands are. A small town (1000-75000) often with an ancient core (ours dates back to 1300) with the church repurposed as a microbrewery, shops and apartments. Then around that core, ever more recently built houses with yards and a more affordable €/m2 price the further you move out. It puts bars, sports, parks, restaurants, groceries in walking and biking distance, often with bigger cities nearby for theatres, university, or more niche shopping, accessible via public transportation or cars in ~30min.

I live in the burbs with some amenities being walking distance. People are still very isolated and segregated. I'm not sure it can be fixed except to allow easy access through public transportation to more dense, walkable areas. Strong driving culture as well. Save for a few strip malls on main drags, suburbia is a big box dystopia. Anyway yes zoning is probably the most important thing, though people are out here for the (comparatively) larger lots and houses.

> your minimalist home is basically now a prison cell

Went home for Christmas and as part of it swung by the nursing home where my Grandma lives.

She is basically in actual prison for the past nine months. For a good part of it she was confined to her room. It appears that they've relaxed the restrictions after Coronavirus ripped through the place and everyone that didn't die is now immune. She is at least allowed to go sit in the lobby area now and talk with the other residents.

Nothing quite like watching a 98 year old woman break down in tears every time someone reminds her that she can't actually come outside and give us a hug or talk to us in person.

> everyone that didn't die is now immune

How do they know?

If they've recovered, they're immune. If you weren't immune, you couldn't recover - it's the same system.

The only question is how long-lasting it is, and so far the answer is "indefinite / a long time".

But if they suddenly start dying

“Huh well that was interesting”

so honestly theyll say whatever is convenient. nobody knows anything, nobody has any plan, we’ll see

Other people have caught it and recovered, but it was not known whether that gave them immunity. What's different here? In fact, some people have caught it twice, so you can obviously recover without gaining immunity.

Why not break her out I have an 85 year old grandma living with me an its fine...

She has moderate dementia, which means you can't really trust her to do reasonable things if left to her own devices.

Who said anything about minimalist or tiny homes? There's a wide middle ground between a 25 square meter shoebox apartment and a grotesque 230 square meter "family" home.

230 m^2 isn’t uncommon in the US, and there’s plenty that are double. We do have “basements” that sometimes are finished and can be counted against the size, but are generally used to much larger homes than elsewhere.

Specifically in 2019 the average single family home was 2611 sq ft, apartments 1156 sq ft, acc’d to

https://themreport.com/daily-dose/09-02-2020/as-more-stay-ho...

weeps in dense high cost of living area

I respectfully request to cease comments of the type of "weeps in x". You don't have to honor this request, but I would feel better without reading these.

The brevity is pretty unique but lets see what would be conveyed by honoring that wish

Translation: "As someone that lives in desirable parts of high cost of living areas, even the largest premium units are below the average square footage mentioned in that article, I generally try not to think about it but it is fascinating to see, I think I can relate to other people that earn enough to comfortably live in these areas, but it is not common to ever talk about being financially stable in an expensive area, lets go back to pretending that we are all struggling and 'got a good deal' on our 900 sq ft penthouse."

I question their numbers. How many bedrooms are in that 1156-square-foot apartment? At least three? I've lived in several two-bedroom apartments throughout my life in areas with a relatively low cost of living, and they ranged from about 650 to about 900 square feet in area. The latter felt unnecessarily spacious.

So either the source claims that the average apartment has three or more bedrooms (and this is false, very few 3BR+ apartments are built in most buildings), or that the average apartment offers palatial luxury. Maybe they miscalculated?

This is why nothing is walking distance

That's an absurd size for a home.

Thank you for speaking up. You're responding to a comment that angrily assumes some unspoken characteristics about "cities built for humans, and not for cars."

I am a reluctant, but accomplished touring cyclist, and I've ridden hundreds of miles through American landscape that is positively hostile to pedestrians and vehicles operating at less-than-car scales. The assumption of cars has led urban designers to implement travel distances that are only grueling to traverse, and the interstitial spaces are inhospitable, bedecked with exhaust ports, bad lighting, narrow spaces or vast, entirely unfurnished without shade, let alone water or public facilities for miles, even, in larger towns. Sometimes, just crossing the street to go a kilometer I've found the American cityscape impassable without hopping in the car, and popping over a minimum of one (1) freeway exit.

That's just one aspect of the alien dimensions to which our environment's built.

I visited a University in America having lived outside America for 5 years. I walked from the University to the theater 2km away to see a movie. It felt like I was going to die even with a sidewalk next to the high way.

Similar story. The old Apple Maps icon was where the N De Anza Boulevard crossed over the Junipero Serra Freeway. Center of the old icon [0] was One Infinite Loop, top left of the icon was the Cupertino Hotel.

Going from the Cupertino Hotel to One Infinite Loop on foot felt like I was risking life and limb, despite it having pedestrian lights [1].

[0] http://thetrendler.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Maps-Icons...

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/ZMBq8RzpZLc6xwM97

Visiting Plano, Texas (which I really enjoyed) - our hotel was just over the road from the business we were visiting.

That road was a 3-lanes-each-way road with no pedestrian crossing points. We just had to run across when there was a gap. It wasn't a fast road - there were plenty of traffic lights for traffic purposes - but still, nothing for pedestrians.

"230 square meters" is about the size of the average new home being built in the US.

Yes.

How many pandemics have we had in our lifetime ?

This is like saying buy a Hummer for that one off road drive you take in a decade and suffer its drawbacks for 99% of your use case.

Have vast sprawling houses protected US from COVID-19 ?

Let's make data driven decisions please.

Someone needs to read The Black Swan, quick.

The problem of relying too much on "data-driven decisions" is that it leads to absurd optimizations that make the overall system more fragile.

We had only one pandemic in our lifetime, yet. But don't forget about Avian Flu and Swine Flu also happened and caused concern less than 10 years ago. The world is way more connected and we never had so many people being able to go across the world spreading a virus in less than 24h. The likelihood of another pandemic threat is increasing with time, not decreasing.

If anything, one of the lessons that I hope we take from this year is that we need to think our environments (on all scales, from the bedrooms in our homes to our cities and schools for our kids and the city altogether) for robustness and longevity, not for cost, practicality or marketability.

From europe, this rings very true.

I wanted to get a larger house with a garden before the pandemic (which is ridiculously expensive given the rent / value ratio in Europe is a joke) and the pandemics reinforced that tenfolds.

How long before the government lock us in our tiny homes again?

Who said anything about a minimalist home? While a little smaller, our place has a much better build quality than our "stick built" suburban US home (that we still own and rent out - and it requires wayyyy more maintenance). It overlooks a large park (that contains walking paths, statues, water features, skateboard park, various sports courts, outdoor exercise park and even a climbing wall. Additionally, we have a view of the bay and mountains.

Within 5-10 min walking distance we have all daily activity requirements like grocery stores, gyms, pharmacies, restaurants, bars, schools, large year-round indoor swimming pool that blows away any private pool that I've seen, etc. If I did want a car we have underground parking or I could buy a private garage in a self-storage warehouse type area nearby for parking it or using as a hobby workshop. The one thing I do miss is being able to crank up my electric guitar, still looking for a solution to that one. Maybe a music space that rents by the hour or something.

I don't miss the car centric lifestyle for a second, and I'm saying this as an amateur race car driver. With all the time I used to spend driving around for the most basic of activities, I now have much more time available for my family, hobbies, side projects or even the occasional nap. You can't buy this quality of life anywhere in the US at any price or income level.

It looks like other people have got the message.

https://eurocities.eu/stories/reclaiming-the-streets/

and an article in the Guardian about Barcelona https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-r...

I'm personally heartened by people's moves to de-focus the car in urban places.

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.

Depends. Inner city may offer quicker/easier access to favored activities. When I had a car, I found that a ten-mile drive in from the burbs (and back) can become a barrier. Mass transit, much moreso.

Socializing, there can be a substantial difference between interaction and meaningful interaction. Both can require time away from favored/necessary activities; both can have multiple consequences (desirable or not). A perceived need for constant contact may be unhealthy.

Tech is a crappy substitute for the real thing (as E. M. Forster famously noted), so has some destructive potential.

I don't know about that. I've observed that co-workers who live in the exurbs are virtually never seen at social functions.

There are many reasons for that:

- They miss their kids

- They prefer friends and activities much closer to where they live

- Transit home gets far more complicated the later it gets, particularly when alcohol is involved

I think the complications getting transit home is a major cause of point two there. Co-workers that have to catch trains out to commuter towns always needed to be mindful of the time, and may have needed to drive the final part of their journey.

Big contrast to being able to catch an underground/subway within a few minutes with no planning, and fall back to a relatively affordable Uber if you get carried away and miss the last one

People often live in the suburbs because: - They have kids and need a bigger house - They got tired of all the crappy city social life

Plus, most work related social functions are quite cringey.

Just give me my pay-check. I'll skip the booze and small talk with coworkers I should be friend with so I have less excuses to quit.

In short: "Yeah, I'm isolated, but I chose to be"?

The higher barrier will isolate a person more. Whatever initiative a person has encounters higher barriers, with the net effect more isolation in aggregate.

Advertising basically works this way. Nudges demonstrably work at a population level without anyone feeling coerced. In aggregate, for the population as a whole, it likely makes a statistical difference, even though no one in particular feels like it makes a deciding factor. Like, say, with organ donation. Make opt in default, an enrollment goes up.

Unless some other factor associated with suburban living cancels the effect, it seems extremely unlikely that it does not make a difference, even if every individual feels like "the only thing that dictates it is my desire/initiative/ability".

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.

I think they exist, but they don't appeal to younger people. All of the groups you mention that I'm familiar with I associate with people's grandfathers, or at youngest their slightly odd uncles. Also only with men, although maybe that's a bit of selection bias on the ones I know.

If something exists but people aren't using it, it isn't the right solution. It might be hard to say why it isn't, it could even just be a marketing problem, but nevertheless the problem isn't solved by its existence.

They seem to appeal just fine in the Bay Area. In fact, I'd say that the main sources of social hookups and favor-trading around here are (a) churches and (b) fraternal orgs... possibly distantly followed by college alumni groups and actual college fraternities.

I think just talking to an Apple dad about his life and priorities would be extremely eye-opening for a lot of people on HN.

What is an Apple dad?

A male human who works at Apple and has reproduced at least once.

I... have never been aware of anyone in the Bay Area going to either a church or a fraternal org. But I guess it depends on what circles you run in.

I would say that about 40% of my engineer peers belong to a church, but my circle tends to be pretty Korean/Asian. Church attendance is pretty ubiquitous around here. Larry Wall goes to a local church.

Weird that our experiences are so different. Do you mean Korean/Asian immigrants, or Asian-American?

> I think they exist, but they don't appeal to younger people.

I live in the mid-west, where these organizations were very common. I'm ~50 years old, and I don't know ANYONE who's in one of them, and every one of them around the area that I drive by is in disrepair. I expect them to disappear with the boomer generation.

Another feature of my location are all the small "mainline" churches (Presbyterian, Methodist, et. al.), who hover around 30-50 people, and have no members younger than 60. There's a business opportunity coming to buy up a lot of prime real estate when these churches fold in another 10 years.

I think a huge problem with finding "community" now is the utter isolation caused by social media and access to the thinnest slice of the news you want to tolerate. It has created a culture where people are only tolerant to their SPECIFIC view of the world, and it's just really hard to find people who think EXACTLY like you.

For those that live around Tampa, they can always join a Pirate Krewe https://interkrewe.com/ They started out of the Gasparilla Festival http://gasparillapiratefest.com/ but have become more like the Rotary club or the JC's. They tend to attract members from mid 20's on up.

I think they exist, but they don't appeal to younger people.

I actually tried to join a couple of those sorts of organizations, and I found them all very off-putting. Between the weird elitism, the arbitrary and time consuming hurdles for membership and the feeling that everybody there felt 20+ years older than me (even when they probably weren't) didn't make it seem like a good time.

I like the concept though, I just wish there was one that felt more up to date and actually felt like a sort of thing I'd want to join.

> I think they exist, but they don't appeal to younger people.

For the tech and maker types, a hackerspace/makerspace might be more appropriate.

The underground pool at the SF Elks is lovely.

Interesting, are you a member of either. I moved to the Bay Area a couple years back. Would love to join one of these organizations.

I was an active Rotarian for a while, but have scaled back my commitments this year.

Can you please tell me about your experience?

>Freemasons

So, basically people just wanted to hang out but now everyone thinks they want to take over the world.

While here in the Midwest, their golf clubs, parks and buildings are being sold off to the public for lack of membership.

Part of the problem is many are invitation-only clubs. That kept them mono-culture and full of the 'right people'. And the current members have at some time quit inviting? Don't know why.

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.

WeWork tried that. It was called WeLive. It flopped.[1]

[1] https://therealdeal.com/2020/06/08/wework-may-abandon-welive...

To be fair, it flopped during a pandemic that ate both WeWork's and WeLive's business models.

To be fair, WeWork was pretty much a pyramid scene, so maybe not the best comparison.

How was WeWork a pyramid scheme for its visitors? I'm not seeing it.

Seattle briefly allowed microapartments, before single-family home owners fought back and got them killed again. You can see one here: https://seattle.craigslist.org/see/apa/d/seattle-apodment-su... $900/mo for 198 square feet. Kitchen sink, but no stove/oven. You do get your own bathroom, at least.

Feeling a little agoraphobic with the above floor plan? Don't like those vast sweeps of empty space? No problem, try $875/mo for 147 square feet: https://seattle.craigslist.org/see/apa/d/seattle-apodment-su...

Carefully examine the bathroom photos. No sink! You wash your hands in the kitchenette. Easy enough, when it's three steps away. (After all, where would you put a bathroom sink? The entire apartment is the size of an RV.)

One upside: if the landlord gets on your nerves, it would be real, real easy to move out. A one-backpack apartment.

Oh, that looks like the average apartment used by a couple/single people here in Europe. Same price too.

Wut? I always wonder what people mean when they say 'in Europe', as if there weren't vast cultural and economic differences. Remember e.g. Switzerland and Albania are both in (continental) Europe.

A couple of years ago I inquired about the prize in a room in a hotel in San Francisco I happened to walk up to -- the front desk person cautioned that it offered 'european style' shared bathrooms. plonk -- I never encountered a hotel in Europe with shared bathrooms, but I've never been to Albania either.

I remember the geography of my home continent very well, I travel around here a lot.

The hotels with shared bathrooms are very common even in Switzerland, and everywhere else in Europe.

The small apartments are more common the richer the country. Larger apartments are more common in the poorer countries. You can find the small ones in every capital city though.

> The hotels with shared bathrooms are very common even in Switzerland, and everywhere else in Europe.

Truly curious. Could you provide a link to one?

https://www.hostelswiss.ch/

Note that those are called hostels. I don't remember seeing shared bathrooms in hotels.

This change of naming happened during the past two decades. You're technically correct, though. Note that you can get a private room in the hostel I linked, that's not universal - and I feel that moves it towards hotel.

I sense a confusion of the terms hotel and hostel. That 's' separates worlds.

As a young lad (on a tight budget) I stayed in youth hostels in Europe and USA as well. Those (at that time) not only were equipped with shared bathrooms, but also commonly with bunk beds in dormitories (separated by gender -- yeah, such were the times) and usually expected you to take on chores. I enjoyed my stay as it allowed me to go to places I couldn't otherwise afford and meet like-minded young travelers, but it would be impossible to mistake those places for hotels.

Well the line is pretty blurred. But you're right that what used to be called three-star hotels is now primarily a thing of the east, while the west calls them hostels.

https://starcity.com/

Seems to be trying it, rebranded as 'co-living' as I imagine dormitories holds a bit of a stigma.

College dorms house a set of people that have been carefully vetted by an admissions committee. I'm not sure if it's possible to recreate such a community and foster trust among a group of adults without some form of prior vetting or selection.

That's a good observation. It suggests that the adult dorm could work if they all, say, worked at the same company.

If only you'd suggested that :)

You're right, vetting would be necessary. Dorms work because the population is (generally speaking) in the same age cohort and stage of their lives, there for a common purpose, and they have skin in the game i.e. they risk their tuition and completion of their degree if they don't abide by the rules. That's the other thing, students sign on to a code of conduct and are held to account by staff and volunteers. An adult dorm would work but it would need to follow a similar setup.

Perhaps cohousing, or coliving?

You're stepping closer to the concept of a company town. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Not if it's organized as a corporation where all of the residents are voting shareholders. That's generally the model that most cohousing and intentional communities tend towards.

> A company town is a place where practically all stores and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer.

I'm not familiar with varying types, but AFAIU (or hope), the organizer / owner is not usually the main employer. It's foremost a community where people live. Some people work there or self-employ, but it's not usually a corporate-dictated, top-down governed establishment, which would be something quite different. At least in the examples I know of.

And most importantly, people move out of dorms eventually.

Even if there is a troublemaker people can't get rid of, they'll graduate sooner or later and will be forced to move out.

A friend of mine actually lived in a place like this in Japan for a while - shoebox room, and then generous communal areas for cooking / living. It sounded like a great idea to me, and when I moved to London I tried to find somewhere similar.

There were a couple of places in this space when I was looking but I didn't go with them for a few reasons: - cost was high - contractual terms were long (6-12mo minimum) - reviews were mixed, but the general vibe was a "tragedy of the commons" type situation - location / transit links didn't appear great

I ended up boarding with an older couple for a while before finding a more traditional share house with other young professionals.

If I'd been able to try it out with a 1/2 month minimum I would've looked past the other issues to give it a chance, it seemed like it could've a great way to accelerate finding your feet in a new country/city

The "dorm for adults" concept has been tried like 100 times by different startups and companies, always flops.

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.

Plenty of people are isolated here in Tokyo, where the city is easily walkable, and you naturally bump into countless numbers of people everyday.

I agree though that it's annoying that going out = spending a lot of money.

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.)

Meetup.com doesn’t solve this? I ask cause I work remote and meetups are basically what I used pre-pandemic.

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 think one key to a better Meetup would be to solve the no-show problem. From what I understand this is the greatest issue that large-group organizing has on the platform, to the point that I've seen people regularly write sassy rants on event posts to guilt people into accurately updating whether they're showing up or not.

I think part of fixing the problem of no-shows would be to not let members see who/how many people have said that they're going. If 25 people say they're going to show up, then it's not a big deal if I don't, right? Until half the people have the same idea. There will be more perceived social pressure to keep that commitment if people don't think they're just going to get lost in a crowd.

Oh jeez my worst nightmare might just be going to a Meetup without knowing how many people I should expect and ending up being the only one who showed up. If Meetup didn’t tell me how many people RSVP’d I’d never go to any of them.

Having managed large groups, the no-show rate was large but extremely consistent (always within the range of 74-82%, pre-covid that is). Because it was so consistent, we could reliably plan both the space and refreshments.

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.

(This is my experience, YMMV)

That has exactly been my experience too.

I’ve been wondering how much this is true versus it’s just how it has been getting older for most people for a longtime.

I once heard that Meetup is "one night stand for friends"

You're on the money. As I've elucidated elsewhere I think people are going about this backwards, because it's all we know: 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. There are collaborative workspaces, makerspaces, University grounds.. the issue is it can cost a pretty penny to rent, or attend, those spaces.

I've made friends with people at Meetup but I also agree with the above. My guess is that there are people that are looking to make friends, but whether they succeed or fail, they're going to stop going to the Meetup. What this means is that you're more likely to meet the regulars that really aren't that interested in making general friends.

The closest we have come to this type of experience in the online space was IRC.

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.

Care to share more details? I'm very curious what this looks like in practice.

+1 to @jamestimmins' comment

I'l piggyback on @jamestimmins' comment.

Let us know more, I have similar issues and intentions to try to improve up the social fabric around my neighborhood.

> Church goers regularly give up 10% of their (gross) income to be part of that

Having seen the finances for several churches, I can say pretty confidently that most church-goers do not tithe 10%.

True,

http://gruberpeplab.com/teaching/psych131_fall2013/documents...

There are fascinating implications for those that are closer to 10% than the average tithe.

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.

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’ve been thinking for a while that this is needed too. This is a big role that priests play in communities.

If I were to start something up, it would start with a clubhouse and probably two employees—one is an event organizer who plans parties and other special gatherings, and the second would be a host/hostess that is responsible for welcoming new members and ensuring they’re comfortable as they try to fit in. Maybe something like an “onboarding partner” would work too when you’re trying to scale.

The problem with any idea in this direction is that someone ends up having to deal with all of the toxic people, and in this market, there are a lot of them.

In my experience the toxicity you're talking about doesn't usually carry through to in person gatherings. Most people have at least some manners even if they are awkward and being in a group face to face adds social pressure to mind them. It's fairly rare that you see someone who is a complete boor since they are usually excluded from gatherings due to their behaviour. To make something like this work you'd need to leverage all of that cultural machinery that's already in place, networks of trust and reputation, consensus, expectations of politeness, etc. We still have all that social technology that's been built up over millennia, I think we're mostly just lacking the hubs around which we used to organize. Build the hub and people will provide the etiquette.

> In my experience the toxicity you're talking about doesn't usually carry through to in person gatherings. Most people have at least some manners even if they are awkward and being in a group face to face adds social pressure to mind them. It's fairly rare that you see someone who is a complete boor since they are usually excluded from gatherings due to their behaviour.

I think in-person power dynamics are often not immediately obvious, and "inclusive" groups sometimes make it worse.

For example, cases where the inclusion of someone who's socially awkward lead to the self-exclusion of some other people.

Someone's social awkwardness could lead them to constantly stare at people they find attractive; the leaders or organisers of the group might be too nice to exclude said person, since they didn't do anything criminal like harass people, just awkwardly stare at them; and other people might choose to self-exclude themselves because of this.

If the goal of attending gatherings of new people is to expand your social circle then you'll inevitably run into a lot of people that you don't like. A product that enables people to host and attend these events would have to account for such faux pas and gaucherie, maybe having a way to pass anonymous feedback to others at the event (moderated by the hosts first of course) so you could politely inform people that their staring is making people uncomfortable. My thoughts on the initial concept were along the lines of a way of automating not just introductions but also learning how to interact well with others, providing structure to those interactions that people usually fumble through and hopefully avoiding or lessening situations like the one you mentioned.

It’s a real role that’s hired in the Jewish community. Both to encourage in-faith marriages and to foster a sense of community. Usually one person for teens, another for young adults, and others for men’s club, woman’s club, newly parents, retirees...etc

It’s generally funded by synagogues and charity foundations.

I’d of thought the Christian churches/denominations have similar programs.

It could be unique to Jews due to historical and present anti-Semitism. E.g. Jews were (and still are in a few establishments) barred from many fraternities, country clubs, athletic clubs, summer camps...etc

Making it a paid position is a great idea, it provides incentive for the person to do their job well and adds some status to it. I'd like to see this idea carried over to other groups since it's done so haphazardly everywhere else or added on as a soft skill for people in other roles where they either have it or they don't. Is there a name for this role? I'd be interested in knowing more about it.

> with the rise of remote work, social disconnection is only going to rise

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

Immigrants won't give up their high salary in the developed world.

Employers won't pay a first world salary while living in a low cost country.

> won't pay a first world salary

Do tech companies also charge less for their products in non-rich countries?

> Do tech companies also charge less for their products in non-rich countries?

Yes they do. They heavily adjust for PPP and local currencies

can u give an example? e.g. adwords charges less depending on business location? or AWS ?

Steam has regional pricing.

Here is a price chart for Cyberpunk 2077: https://steamdb.info/app/1091500/

> can u give an example?

Spotify, Netflix, YouTube Premium.

(Pre-covid of course)

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.

Ya my thoughts exactly. People are definitely hanging out. The ones that aren't simply don't want to.

The ones that don't you don't see, that's why.

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.

Going to bars in other countries and/or frequenting bars that attract tourists is the solution to your problem. You'll have less inhibition when traveling, or at least I do. I would never start a conversation with a stranger in the US, but it just feels...easier when abroad?

Yeah, it's pretty tough, especially the older you get. You need to find people that are also looking for friends, it makes it much easier. A good opportunity is to look for language exchange or expats groups, local people are always very welcome in my experience since they are rare.

It depends on the bar. If you already are well-established socially somewhere, you usually tend to self-select into establishments that kind of cater to those established friend groups.

For recent transplants they roam bars until they find one with more singles and folks looking for social interaction. They do exist, but are probably more rare.

My theory of course is that the latter type of bar morphs over time (decade+) into the prior type of bar as "friend groups" get established at the new place. The new place slowly turns into the old hangout spot.

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.

Just like porn is not real sex, VR / AR is a long way from making in person friends and acquaintances.

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).

Bumble has both a friends and business section.

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.

My wife met one of her best friends on Bumble BFF - it's the dating app but for friends.

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.

Now I wonder how many people have hooked up via HN.

Sample size would pretty much guarantee more than 0

There is. Try bumble BFF. https://bumble.com/bff

I think there are enough ways to make friends and meet people that a general friend-making app just isn't a big enough need on its own.

I believe lunchclub.ai is solving for it (raised from a16z) - very tech focused though.

I wonder if Antifa is one such organization, just a dystopian one, a confederacy of angst.

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.

How can we PM you?

Also, PM me if you're working on this problem (to anyone reading this :)).

You can both send me an email (see profile), this is something that gets me very excited as well!

Absolutely agree. I've been reading a lot about this recently, recommend:

Lost Connections by Johann Hari The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg Better Together by Robert Putnam

Yeah I think we’re slowly coming around to it again. It’s time we bought back the men’s clubs and women’s clubs. Fantastic places to find mentors.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...

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 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.

One thing I've realized is that if you actually do succeed in creating a strong community, there's a good chance it will raise the property values and appeal of your surrounding area and therefore the property taxes and rent for those in the community living nearby and possibly the community space itself, if the space isn't owned outright by a non-profit organization. Then you risk getting bought / pushed out by outsiders that just want a "safe neighborhood" or an "artsy area" and not really a community.

It seems like these social groups -- besides needing a non-financial mission, shared rituals and beliefs, and some kind of exclusivity -- need a strategy for dealing with the social connection-dissolving "market" that exists around it.

"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 UK appointed a Minister of Loneliness in 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/minister-lonelines...

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.

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

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.

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.

If you don't mind the virtualized social organizations, MMORPG or VRChat or Streaming are good places to get connection.

Look up fraternal orders like Kiwanis , Rotary Club, Elks Lodge , Free Masons etc

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.

End my rant about this industry, I guess.

If Lenovo would ship Coreboot Linux laptops that would fit the bill as premium and good laptop with open boot loader.

This comes close, but I don't find the build to be as nice as a MacBook, and trackpad is the same issue.

I do often look at a ThinkPad and wonder, though.

I looked through ThinkPads in order to find standard recommended laptop selections for a previous job, and it was really striking (a) how many slightly different fiddly model selections there were with tiny differences that should have been an options picker rather than different product entries, and (b) how many of them still had 1080p-only screens in the year 2020. Like, come on, seriously?

This is part of what I take issue with, yeah.

I'm just past the point in my life where I want to itemize this stuff. Take my money and give me the best package possible. I've got better things to do with my time.

The entire buying experience also feels very sales-like - which, yes, it's absolutely a sales process - but the buying experience with Apple is leagues better and feels more human. This isn't even hardware, but website UI/UX... why on earth is it like this in 2020? This is much easier to solve than hardware chain issues.

I just bought a T495s with Ryzen. It's a 14" 1080p. For my desktop PC, I use a 27" 4K monitor. I can tell you I love the 4K and would never go back. For the laptop though, the 1080p resolution is perfectly fine, plus it saves a lot of battery life compared to 4K.

Microsoft and Lenovo both offer full-metal laptops with good rigidity and build quality. The Surface Book is weird but feels great in-hand. Trackpad is quite good, but, the whole thing is a giant gimmick. Lenovo X1 line has an all-metal option. I haven’t handled the 2019 version but previous iterations were quite nice - in a totally un-Apple-like way.

Unfortunately, there’s no retailer out there that I trust to actually display these high-end laptops so you can go actually get a feel for them. The Microsoft Stores was the best bet, but those are all closing. I shopped for an all-metal laptop 2 years ago after leaving Airbnb and was wholly disappointed with this $600-$1400 lineup at BestBuy. I ended up getting a Huawei Matebook Pro X (sic) from the Microsoft Store in San Francisco. I put Linux on it, but were I to do it again I’d just spend 2x more on an actual MacBook.

I also looked at the Matebook... and came to the same conclusion, and just bought an M1. The Matebook felt like it was trying to be a MacBook without being a MacBook (down to the marketing page for it).

That said, to me the existence of the Matebook _proves_ that what I'm after should be possible, and it just comes down to nobody actually doing it.

I don't want to say that if you are wondering about the trackpad on a Thinkpad you are doing it wrong, but the big benefit of a thinkpad is the knob. I would prefer buying a thinkpad that didn't have a trackpad at all, at least on an ultra book - my first one back in 03 didn't have a Trackpad but I found that I rarely used the external mouse I had attached to it.

I've tried the ThinkPad knob and don't care for it - though, yes, I get why some people love it and wouldn't care about the TrackPad issue as much.

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.

The XPS 15 is basically that laptop and is only hamstrung by dell being slow to move to Ryzen 4000 mobile chips. Mobile intel runs hot and slow.

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.

Then you have very strange standards, the XPS 13 I have at home can easily compete with 13" MBP and outshines it in several areas. Especially having a sturdy build quality and a good keyboard.

The latest MBPs have the same, and outperform it. This isn't really debatable at the moment.

Huh, it's not? Why exactly?

After Apple's ongoing keyboard debacle and that stupid strip, I don't see how you have much credibility.

What?

It's no longer "ongoing", as it was fixed and has been for some time. This is noted elsewhere in this thread, too. You can't try to claim someone has no credibility then wade in with incorrect facts.

The TouchBar is bad and I wish they'd remove it, yeah.

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.

How is the buikd quality not in the same league?

I agree, (GP) how is the dell XPS and similarly precision m5xxx not in the same league as the Mac?

Haven't had more than one Mac, but I've had a couple of XPS machines and there were always something odd.

Just another anecdote but they kind of add up, just like the stories about the butterfly keybord on Mac.

That said, personally I don't use Macs as I've given up adapting to the CMD-tab behavior (and misplaced fn/ctrl etc) after trying hard for about three years.

Golly. What a horrid story. In my country I think the commerce commission would have their guts for garters if they tried that sort of malarkey.

What jurisdiction is this, that they can get away with not properly honouring warrantees?

Had the exaaaact same experience

Horrible horrible support. Incredibly frustrating doing all of the steps on phone support to even get someone to come out. They advertise it as better than an Apple store, but after the first year you have to mail it in with a two week repair delay

I now use a MacBook with zero issues, while the XPS never worked properly (they forgot thermal paste after the first repair) and it died entirely after barely 2 years. Huge waste of money

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 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.

> 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.

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.

I share this surprise.

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.

If I could kill the Apple logo, I would. :)

Yes, I think people would agree, but suggesting companies shouldn't market their products is silly.

It's like adding 'I want a million dollars' to your list.

A version of your comment included the line "it's an unrealistic demand".

Not sure if it's caching on HN or whatever, but to that point: so is, clearly, my entire list. If I'm saying I'll pay whatever price, though, you bet I'm putting that on there. ;P

Edit: and to be fair, I'd take a logo that isn't an eyesore - the other commenter on this thread used some odd language for it, but I consider the Razer logo to be an eyesore. Bright green is not something I want on my laptop.

The Apple logo, as annoying as it might be, at least doesn't look like someone took a crayon and scribbled on the back of the machine.

I'm not so sure that's true though. Me, I don't buy any clothing that has a visible logo on it. I won't pay to advertise for someone. I know others show off brand logos for various reasons.

For laptops I don't have much choice except to put a sticker over the logo.

The razer logo looks like a trampstamp

Razer has serious quality/longevity issues. Would not trust one of their machines to last more than 1 year.

Even Linus of Linus Tech Tips fame loved his Razer and recommended it, but had to make a somewhat awkward video when it completely died after barely a year on him.

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.

> shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes

Why when there is no third OS that has even 1% share and all Linux combined is about 3%. And desktop Linux is bad.

Why is desktop Linux bad?

I use MacOS (whatever it is called this week) Mint and LXDE

Love Mint (typing on it) The Apple OS has a lot of rough corners (e.g. (max/min)imising windows is a world of pain) LXDE is acceptable because it is on my PI and I do not use the desktop much

I have not used Windows desktop for about a decade, has it really gotten that much better?

I am really happy with desktop Linux

> Why is desktop Linux bad?

There are a huge range of reasons. There's no consistency, everything changes every 2 years, the documentation is awful when it exists at all, if software is outside your distro's package repo it's a bitch to install, there are too many different distros, the community is full of pricks, fragmentation is a time-honored pastime, complexity is fetishized... fuck sound still didn't work consistently on the last Linux based media center I built. A cursory search of the internet will turn up innumerable reasons Linux Desktop is bad.

Which isn't to say that MacOS and Windows aren't bad (and getting worse), but they're still a damned sight better.

> There's no consistency

Just a reminder there's like 7 different context menu styles in Windows 10, not to mention two control panels.

This only emphasizes how bad the Linux desktop experience can be. The devs of the Linux DE community could do better but chose to do gang turf wars.

And as you say, Windows 10 still sits there having confusing and mediocre system UIs.

> There's no consistency, everything changes every 2 years, the documentation is awful when it exists at all

In the days of electron and web apps, it's clear that the users either don't care or developers are shooting themselves in the foot.

In either case, consistency died a while ago.

Mmmm, I don't think this is fair when discussing Linux. If Electron didn't exist, there's a good chunk of apps that just wouldn't exist on Linux at all.

Doesn't change the fact that if people valued consistency, those apps would be flops on all supported platforms.

People value tools that do what they need to do over consistency, but that does not mean that they do not value consistency.

Not enough for them to win in the market, apparently.

> There's no consistency, everything changes every 2 years

It all depends on the distribution (hence "too many different distros" is good). Choose Debian XFCE and you will never see any change, everything is rock-solid. Tested with my relatives.

It's a matter of perception and need in the end, I think. I am happy with XFCE, but then I don't do much with the desktop environment itself other than manipulating windows, having a nice panel on top and some key bindings. Occasionally, I use a file manager, but most of the time I am just in applications, so they are maximized.

With my really simple needs, macOS and Windows is just mostly memory-wasting fluff to me. I switched away from Macs when I realized that what I need and what I can get is cheaper than getting a Mac. ("Cheaper" because I am very sensitive to cost vs. utility. I am typing on thinkpad t430s I found in the trash which I spent just a little to get a better screen, having everything else already that was missing.)

That said, sometimes get frustrating, but they don't happen frequently for me.

It's not bad, people get used to windows/macos and think that "everything needs to look the same". I've been perfectly content with Ubuntu and KDE for years now. I also use a windows and macos laptop for work and they're fine too. I just think people have built up these psychological blocks to anything outside their comfort zone and poo poo anything that isn't a clone of their favorite system.

While I loved using Ubuntu, I found it pretty darn frustrating that driver support could be wonky. I had to dig deep into the weeds to fix issues with my Wifi driver, and had it not been for amazing Linux users with similar computers that posted their remedies online, I would've been SOL.

In contrast, in all my years of using Apple computers, I've rarely if ever had a driver related issues that wasn't easily solvable by updating my OS.

I had a MacBook 2014 at work and grew pretty quickly to love it after only ever using Windows. However, the updates turned a perfectly reasonable machine into a much slower one.

I switched to Linux when I left the company and while I ran into issues installing it on both my PC and laptop (not Mac), the end result works perfectly. I think all the digging around has made me better understand computers. A lot of the Linux command line skills are transferable to Mac.

I have a 2013 MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM that I bought with Mavericks and updated it all the way up to Catalina. My GF is using it pretty happily now and it feels reasonably snappy, certainly not "much slower" than I remember it.

(just my data point)

We have that one too, the keyboard is amazing. I saw the future and paid for 16gb though. Held off on big sur however.

Linux desktop lacks UI and UX consistency. A GTK and a Qt application look and operate completely differently, and even within those there is no consistency. Windows certainly isn't perfect in this regard either, but it is much rarer that I download a new Windows program and immediately notice how ugly and poorly laid out it is.

I'm not the person you responded to, but here are my thoughts...

Keep in mind that the context of my original comment was with respect to having "premium" devices. People pay thousands of dollars for a Macbook because the hardware and the software feel very high-end. The UI/UX is generally seamless. Stuff "just works". There are regular updates. Any software written for MacOS will work on any other Mac, because the hardware/software integration is so tightly controlled. Is it perfect? No. Are there things Linux does better? Sure. But taking the entire Apple ecosystem into account, it feels cohesive and thoughtful, and it feels like it's worth the money.

Contrast that with Linux. With many Linux distros, it doesn't "just work." The OS itself can change very often. The software ecosystem is fragmented. You have to use apt or yum or some other package manager. Sometimes you need five different package managers to install the software you want! On top of that, you can't necessarily run all Linux software on every distro or any hardware. There's little to no UX/UI consistency. As someone else pointed out, Qt vs GTK apps can and do look totally different and there are no style guides or any enforcement mechanisms to make sure that users enjoy the experience. It's the wild west, which is good in many ways, but in the context of making a device feel like a premium device, a wild west methodology fails that criteria pretty hard.

In other words, Linux is fantastic for computer nerds like us who like tinkering with things and don't mind rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. But it is no way, shape, or form a "premium" experience.

I've been wanting to like Linux for a while. So much, I've spent a reasonable attempt at one distro or another every year. It's always had a range of hardware/software compatibility, or UI issues.

Error messages, crashes, graphical anomalies, hardware kind-of working. There are often fixes, but how much time are you willing to spend trouble-shooting? When you get a new computer or reformat, will you remember what you had to do?

I've experienced this class of issues on a range of hardware and software over 2 decades.

My best guess: Too much design-by-committee, and losing track of emergent concepts - like responsiveness, how the overall ecosystem affects performance, and how the various parts (designed by different people and teams) work together.

Another potential root cause: The way software dependencies and linking works, and the expectation to compile software on your machine.

I may not understand what you meant, but I think that was my question?

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.

So what you're saying is that we're stuck with Microsoft for eternity.

Fascinating.

Microsoft is probably the most strategically important company on the planet. Literally too big to fail.

Yeah, I understand that. But the upside to succeeding is basically a license to print money, ie., so large that it would be worth it for someone to do it... Microsoft focuses on making software that supports as many hardware configs as possible and Google does the same with Android/ChromeOS, but Apple focuses on making the hardware-software integration seamless. They each succeed in different ways, but Apple devices feel like premium, high-quality things where other software-hardware integrations (Windows, Android, etc) feel less polished and less seamless.

It seems like Microsoft or Google could double-down on the software-hardware integration and build a seamless, premium product that really, truly competes with Apple. It seems like it would be beneficial for MS or Google to identify and partner with (or acquire?) a hardware partner and develop their systems hard against that, creating a seamless hardware-software interface like Apple does with its devices.

And I guess I'm just baffled that nobody else is doing that. On the contrary, everyone seems to be going the Microsoft route of developing for as many hardware configs as possible.

If the OS can run in a virtualized environment, you can kind of cheat by letting some other OS like Linux handle the hardware compatibility. It's not as aesthetically satisfying as running on bare metal, but it can work.

If some company wanted to create an Apple-like desktop experience with purpose-built hardware but with an open OS, this could be a good route: implement all the drivers needed to run well on bare metal on the company's own hardware products, but anyone can run it in a hypervisor on any computer.

That seems kind of a circular argument: we need another OS but which emulates existing OS's for compatibility. I agree that compatibility probably overrides other concerns. A 3rd OS would need some revolutionary feature(s) to overcome its compatibility limits. And that revolutionary feature would be something that can't be added to Windows or (x)nix. Anyone want to suggest game-changing OS features?

A better goal would be to isolate OS features to give us more choice. The file system would be independent of the GUI engine, which would be independent of the executable manager, etc. It would give one mix-and-match ability. Possible partitioning:

    - Execution/task manager
    - GUI
    - File system
    - Security system
    - App and upgrade manager
    - Integrator

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.

Yeah right, never going to use an OS developed by the Chinese government.

Google ChromeOS

> 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...

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.

Yeah, that's true, but remember the context of this discussion is how Apple products feel "premium", and there aren't very many (if any) Android products that feel like solid, premium products. Like, we're talking about the difference between a solid, dependable, easily maintainable Honda Civic versus a luxury, polished Tesla.

Did you just call Tesla a "luxury, polished" car? It may be luxurious because of the price tag and lack of polish for the money (i.e. you could easily get a more polished product for the same money). I.e. a Mercedes will get you more luxury and polish for the same dollar.

Tesla is, if anything, similar to Apple in how closed-off they are. Teslas are attractive because of their design and powerful electric powertrain, but polished they are not.

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.

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head here. It's kind of sad... but surely someone will come along in the next decade...

Dell XPS or Precision with Ubuntu Mate, am very happy with it.

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 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.

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.

Does it run Linux properly?

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.

I have a Surface Pro 2 running with the linux-surface kernel [0]. It feels like it has some rough edges - you have to decide between having pen support or having touch screen support, and suspend can be unreliable. These issues may be fixed now. Also, I encrypted my Windows partition, and now it requires the key each time to boot up, so I recommend against doing that.

Overall, I do agree that the hardware feels quite nice, and besides those issues I listed, the Linux experience is quite good. I was very happy to not be forced to use Windows.

[0] https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

You probably need a special Kernal. I got it running with Manjaro. I ditched that, and went back to Windows due to it not having a suitable writing app like OneNote. I found a few apps, but they weren't very good, and the pen had input lag. Also ran into issues with the OSK not showing at the right times.

These limitations seem small, but are enough to degrade the experience.

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.

> It’s quite slow for its specs

Didn't feel like it to me, for development and fairly casual gaming.

> “not enough resources for USB”, freezing, the multi display setup gets often messed after undocking and so on.

Not my experience at all; in fact I was impressed at how well it remembered all my different multi display arrangements.

Yeah, I've seen some similar problems with my Surface Book 2.

I didn't see this initially, but I now see frequent, .5-to-3 second lagging response to the touchpad, seemingly fixable only by reboot. Googling suggests a lot of other folks have seen a similar problem. For my machine, there's no lag from the touchscreen or from an external mouse...only the touchpad.

Re your USB problems...I'm not sure if I've seen that specific error, but I have noticed that I simply cannot plug in two external USB cameras and expect them both to work. The first one plugged in always works, the second appears as a device, but no software I own can get an image off of it (where the same two cameras can easily be used by other Windows boxes).

And, yes, I've also seen multi-screen problems when I put it to sleep with no external monitor and try to wake it up after it's plugged into the external monitor (plugged in through a USB-C hub). Basically, I had to plug in the monitor after it woke to avoid this.

Also...the detachable screen is a cool concept, but given that the seemingly larger portion of the battery life is in the keyboard half, and that the screen half has no power or USB ports, it really blunts the applications I might have put the detachable screen to.

Yes, definite problems here. I've wondered if I would've been happier with the Surface Laptop rather than the Surface Book.

> I'd very much recommend it Same here!

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.

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.

So with regards to getting as close to Apple as possible they've succeeded?

MS' support at their physical stores was fantastic. It's a shame they gave up on that. The phone support sucks if you have a hardware problem.

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 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).

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.

Yeah, it's a 2020. It's pretty good considering the key travel limitations, but absolutely awful compared to other laptops I've used that just have more space. Plus the arrow keys...

M1 does shake things up somewhat, and will make an even larger difference at the high end.

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 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!

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 would pay literally twice what I pay Apple for a competing product.

In what way is Apple so bad that you would pay twice as much (thousands of dollars more) for a competing product?

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.

Razer Blade Stealth 13 & Razer Book 13 fill this gap

I use Stealth 13 and impressed with its metal body and touchpad, also no shiny RGB logo

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 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.

Razer still has hilariously bad product management.

One of their newest (non-hardware) launches is Razer Pay, a QR payment and Visa prepaid solution for Southeast Asia. It's been around since mid-2018, but they've just launched their prepaid card in Singapore.

The app and backend quality is below average for a large company like Razer (think: multiple incidents of double charging, and authorisation charges not being refunded), and has the app's UI is ugly.

When I was looking around a few months ago, the revitalized VAIO looked like it might be the ticket

https://us.vaio.com/

Made in Japan and oodles of legacy ports...

please add: HDMI 2.0+

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.

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.

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 :)

Audio shouldn't be difficult though. There were even a few laptops in the past that did it sort-of-okay.

The trick is to have a bunch of microphones along the edge of the display, all the way around. This then enables beam-steering and noise filtering by keeping only the signal common to all microphones.

Mobile phones often do this kind of thing, but PC developers are stuck in this local minimum that they seem completely unable to escape.

Speaking of which, the iPhone 12 Pro has a HDR OLED display that goes toe-to-toe with a USD $35K Sony BVM-X300 Master Monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_czpXW3yKE

Meanwhile... good luck finding a decent 17" laptop with an OLED screen!

As far as I can tell, all OLED laptops made in 2020 used the exact same Samsung 15.6" panels, and then all other OLED manufacturers also simultaneously agreed that no sizes above that need exist:

https://www.oled-info.com/here-come-oled-laptops-sdc-start-p...

https://www.oled-info.com/boe-demonstrates-new-oleds-monitor...

Keep in mind that Samsung makes an OLED panel for Apple that is capable of 1,200 nits peak HDR brightness, but is incapable of making a laptop screen that exceeds 400 nits for some mysterious reason. I can't prove, but strongly suspect that all PC parts are now being made in the supplier's legacy plants, and the top-tier stuff is exclusively reserved for mobile device manufacturers...

Afaik Apple doesn't use Gallium Nitrate for their chargers and a recent report by Mac Rumors confirms my assumption, but at least they're planning to release such a product in the future: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/02/20/apple-could-launch-gan-...

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.

> - 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!

The Razer Blade 15?

Razer quality control is a joke and I would not consider them a good manufacturer of anything.

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.

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.

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.

Most PC brands don't use custom chips and motherboards and etc. The build might be custom, but most parts are off the shelf. So each separate part is more likely to have some schematic out there of to follow similar design standards to other models.

I think you're missing a critical point here.

> 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.

Yes, hence it's a matter of personal preference.

I have been using a Thinkpad T480s for a while, and I think it's a really great laptop, and have no complaints whatsoever about its quality.

Similarly, GNU/Linux phones, like Purism Librem 5. I expected that by 2020 we would have a huge ecosystem of smartphones like this.

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.

Except: give me touch and a convertible laptop with a good quality pencil. And insane battery life.

We have different needs. Your needs are not mine.

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.

To each their own, of course.

Not really, battery life for non-Apple laptops is terrible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So I did the search and it's totally random whether they're as you describe or as GP describes. My favorite, differing sizes on the left and uniform sizes on the right: https://img.theculturetrip.com/1440x807/smart/wp-content/upl...

I believe those are magazines on the left. (This photo appears to be Book Off, a popular second-hand bookstore chain).

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.

Western bookstores sell manga too, these days! However publishers change the format size for western audiences. Here's what it looks like when stocked here:

https://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/W4Jp1QrsdmGXmogVT8q4...

Each series is a uniform size but that's as much commonality as there is. The height and also depth of each is different. And that's starting from uniformly sized source material; Western graphic novels are even more extremely sized.

(The neat shelves in the sibling comment are mostly not manga, by the way).

Spot on. Why don't we have milk crates for Amazon deliveries?

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.

Even if it's still cardboard, just some carefully thought-out size standards that take into account packing small boxes to fit perfectly into large boxes, and large boxes to stack perfectly onto trucks/forklifts/shipping containers, would have major effects because of the scale at which it would act.

It would also have knock-on effects -- by creating Schelling points for what are generally free variables, your water bottles would be more likely to fit in your car's cupholder, your tupperware would fit in the fridge, and so on.

Oh yeah, and you'd be able to ship your cousin's wineglasses using the boxes that your order of hand soap arrived in, and it would pretty much just fit perfectly.

There’s probably something to be learned from how Mexico processes & reuses glass soda bottles (assuming they still do).

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.

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.

The dairy industry is desperately trying to break away from everybody having identical containers and competing on price.[1] Milk in sippable pouches may become a thing. With bigger markups!

[1] https://www.dairyreporter.com/Article/2017/06/09/Four-trends...

I'm afraid of all these "innovations" they described there. Nice ways to decommoditify and justify price increases, in direct opposition of my goals as a consumer: to reduce food and packaging waste.

I'll grant them that kids do love things they can squeeze. My 18mo loves the baby food pouches. When we're in the store, she'll spot them and grab them off the shelves as we're wheeling by them. We ended up buying resealable pouches that we stuff with home-made food, to cut down on plastic waste.

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.

Apple News is trying. Also better for magazines than current events.

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 dislike Apple News because there is no way to follow the article to the publisher site.

Somewhat of a pain, but you can use the share button to open it in a web browser. Then when it forwards you to apple news use the back to old app in the top left corner. Then hit tap here and it takes you to the website.

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.

I didn't think the goal was "truth and relevancy" but... just to apportion payment for the services used (reading articles).

I think the point is while you start with a platform for "news", if you apportion payment for services used, you get clickbait, i.e. something fundamentally different than "news".

People act differently when they pay for a service rather than get it for free.

Agreed. This will only make clickbait and sensationalism worse, and starve boring but vital reporting on local government.

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/

how do you compare with substack?

Substack can work for reporters who already have a following -- but we are trying to help those in local markets and earlier in their careers.

From a user perspective, we're looking to give a holistic view of what's happening around you, regardless of which trusted journalist is posting.

Tried to join the waiting list but it requires a zip code (and no country) so I guess it is US specific?

Apologies -- For now, yes, we are US specific. This requires a lot of individual connections and deals with newsrooms and reporters, so we had to start somewhere.

Hopefully we can expand in the near future

Can you explain your business model more clearly? Including how you intend to compete with current news outlets, and with the human tendency to not really care about things that should be important to them? The web site was not clear.

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.

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.

What about Brave Rewards? https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

You can set a budget to spend among the websites you visit, if they have "signed up" to the service.

This is indeed the solution, and I don't get the HN reaction when it's mentioned.

How close does Paypal come to this? What is it lacking in your eyes (other than the "open standard" aspect)?

non-anonymous: PayPal always sees who pays whom what amount, maybe even for what content. Reliance on a single vendor: If PayPal is down, or doesn't like some publication ("violates our standards/US laws/etc."), you're out of luck.

That's exactly what https://taler.net is aiming for.

Isn’t this what Privacy does?

https://privacy.com/

+1, I would highly recommend people check out Privacy.com. I have been using it for years.

Create virtual card numbers, set spending limits, frequency, and burn or pause a "card" at any time.

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?

I am not an advertising expert, nor do I know much about monetizing static media (in this case I mean newspapers). But regarding Spotify, the business model roughly breaks down to the top 2% of artists get 98% of the profits. So...it's basically impossible for anyone smaller than NYT or WaPo to ever make money from this model.

Likewise, most artists don't make any meaningful money from Spotify.

https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...

> So...it's basically impossible for anyone smaller than NYT or WaPo to ever make money from this model.

That doesn't necessarily follow though. It just means that organizations smaller than NYT or WaPo will make proportionally less money, which would be true of any monetization method. The question is whether you can bring in as many total dollars with such a shared subscription scheme as you could with advertising or some other similar venue.

> Likewise, most artists don't make any meaningful money from Spotify.

And if they would have made meaningful money with CDs, merch, and whatnot then the cause is that people are paying less in aggregate for music via Spotify than they used to from other channels (Spotify's cut might also play a role if the difference is only 2x or something). It's not that Spotify is paying out in proportion to listens, because that was already happening.

> It just means that organizations smaller than NYT or WaPo will make proportionally less money, which would be true of any monetization method.

You should look at the math in the article I linked. It's proportional to the aggregate of everybody - which basically completely disconnects it from what individual users listen to.

For example: Spotify only has 2 users. User A listens to 10 hours of Drake. User B listens to 90 hours of Kid Cudi. Even though User A and User B both pay $10 and have very exclusively chosen their musical preferences, Kid Cudi gets 90% of the total pool of money.

To put this in another perspective - imagine if someone on Netflix just looped Shit Show A 24/7 and there were 24 other users who watched Good Shit X,Y,Z... for exactly 1 hour every day. Netflix would allocate funding equally between the 1 Shit Show A that the 1 user watched and everything else that the 24 other users watched, even though that 1 show only actually generated 4% of their revenue. It doesn't make sense from a user perspective.

As the numbers increase to the ~100MM paid users of Spotify or Netflix, disparity increases between casual users and power users, it all sort of explodes to amplify all of the earnings to a select few.

What this means is the big guys dominate everything. I realize the music industry has shifted from touring to sell records, to streaming to sell concert tickets - but how do you do that for newspapers? Newspapers can't do anything equivalent to concerts. At that point they're just news stations, which really aren't the same as concerts from a business perspective.

> You should look at the math in the article I linked. It's proportional to the aggregate of everybody - which basically completely disconnects it from what individual users listen to.

I have actually read the article, and that's wholly compatible with my take on things (that before and after Spotify artists are paid roughly proportionally to how much their music is "used"). There are two interesting points that can create the apparent problem/paradox you're seeing:

(1) It's interesting that a typical power user before Spotify would pay more money for more music, and now there's a flat rate (or counting ads, two flat rates).

(2) The definition of "usage" has shifted a bit. Skipping a lot of details, before recordings people paid per performance, with the introduction of CDs and whatnot people are able to pay per unique song listened to (with power users typically though not necessarily buying more CDs), and Spotify shifts things back so that artists are compensated in terms of total listen time.

It's probably true that power users should pay more (if not, and if artists are appropriately compensated, then everyone else is subsidizing their use), and there can be an interesting discussion around how listeners actually derive value from music and if unique songs matter more than total minutes (or if a more complicated but less explainable metric ought to be used), but the big guys dominating everything is not a new phenomenon.

As an aside, the advertising, distribution channels, and network effects enabling the big guys to dominate everything to the extent they do _is_ moderately new on a human timescale, but that would be true independent of the payment scheme and doesn't seem super relevant to the discussion.

Fair enough. You make good points. I mostly see it as making the music industry worse for the sake of convenience, as musicians tend not to be fond of this new payment system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify

I can't really disagree with anything you said. I just view it from a different perspective.

You are definitely onto something though. No matter how many points I make, musicians do like Spotify less than prior solutions, and musicians have a really hard time turning Spotify into a living. I was really only arguing against some causes for that observation (specifically, allocating a pool of funds based on some "usage" metric seems reasonable), but they're not necessarily off the hook. Here are a couple thoughts more in line with what I think your position is:

(1) Inflation adjusted, per capita we spend 5x less for music now than we did 20 years ago. Is that because Spotify doesn't charge power users more? Is it because users won't accept higher rates for song rentals? Regardless of the cause, there's less money to distribute.

(2) Popular music is more popular than ever. For a variety of reasons (some potentially Spotify-induced -- e.g., it's pretty hard for me to get it to recommend somebody who isn't soundly leading a genre it thinks I might be interested in), the top X% of artists are more listened to than ever, and that's going to exacerbate any other problems for the long tail of artists.

(2a) That idea is affecting a lot of industries right now. At some point in recent decades it was easy to be the best <thing> in your local small town or group of peers and get all the business. Plenty of formerly in-person industries are now competing globally though. E.g., I would have a hard time recommending the best ML practitioner in my hometown as a teacher rather than just taking Andrew Ng's courses. I'm not sure how that's going to play out in general, but if the top 1% of the population in any field can make everything we want/need then the idea of having to work for a living might need to be revisited? Maybe we'll eventually all transition to biomedical research when nothing else is scarce? In any event, in the short term a lot of professions are being disrupted.

Well, advertising is usually billed to advertisers as a cost-per-thousand (really, cost-per-mil, or CPM) for impressions. For a small local news site, they'd be super happy to get a $10 CPM on a local online ad. So let's just say for fun that we'd get the same rate for the hypothetical 'Spotify for news' service. Say a locally focused article about the latest city council meeting gets 20,000 views. At a $10 CPM that only generates $200 (or $0.01 per person). Does that seem like enough revenue to cover the time it took the reporter to attend the meeting, write up the story, have it proofread/edited, and then posted online and printed and still make a profit? Probably not!

The sad part is that the $.01 per person rate is way, way higher than what Spotify apparently pays out (around $0.006 to $0.0084 from some Googling).

This starts to look better if you just go to something like $0.25 per read, but at that rate you're likely charging much more than it would cost to buy a print copy, or a per-day subscription rate, so i'm not sure the economics would work out there either.

When the full paper costs .50-2.00, .25 is too much per article unless you get the entire paper.

Yeah, definitely! I think it'd be a tricky thing to balance an appropriate rate for most publishers. I suppose you'd start by figuring out how many articles per-day the average reader lays eyes on. You'd also start to have to forecast revenue that's correlated directly to readership, which would probably lead to fewer articles about city council, and more listicles or salacious coverage.

If I own a plumbing business I don't want to advertise to everybody. I want to advertise to people 20 miles from my shop, who are likely to hire me.

You're right with Tinypass - it didn't work out. Piano's model is a bit more financially viable for the type of customers it is targeting.

Blendle.com is a notable competitor here. Initially started out with a pay-per-article model, but now moved to a Spotify model as you mention.

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

Mozilla Scroll [0] kind of does this. Not on a large scale, though.

[0] https://scroll.com

sounds like apple news+

Won't that increase the scope of censorship, something that should be avoided at all costs when it comes to news?

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.

Texture was like this, but was acquired by Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(app)

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.

What precisely are you proposing? A gui for creating latex documents?

There already is one. Lyx (at https://www.lyx.org/) is a very nice bit of cross-platform software.

Wow, this is some really high quality piece of software that I did not knew it existed until now. Thank you for sharing it!

I don't really have a good, productive, use case for it right now but I really can't wait to try it out. It looks really user friendly, fast, responsive, has a CLI, and it produces some easy to version in git latex files.

A while ago I wanted to create my CV in latex from scratch and gave up after days of trying to get FontAwesome to work (I wanted brand icons and other nice things), so I switched to a setup where I have a HTML webpage that looks like a paper page, and using chromium headless to "print" it to PDF (only works properly with chrome as other browsers have CSS incompatibilities on PDF generation, never mind the bit fart Firefox is doing on android lol). I guess I could try to replace that setup with this tool, it seems to have a export to PDF/HTML and a CLI interface for exports. Fingers crossed all goes well and hopefully it's customizable enough for the job. This will keep me busy/entertained for a while :).

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.

It would be glorious.

I'm actually working on this + pull requests

There are many many companies in this space. All of them offer paid software.

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

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.

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:

https://www.overleaf.com/

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 an online LaTeX editor that supports multiple collaborators and comments.

Overleaf's commenting feature is decades behind Microsoft's. In online Word you can attach comments to anything, you can have comment threads, you can version comments, you can accept or reject edits and comments, etc.

I can recommend Overleaf. I used it for my PhD thesis and multiple collaborative scientific papers.

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.

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.

> You cannot even interchange documents between Word and LaTeX in an easy automated round trip way AFAIK.

Word is a horrible format too, which explains why conversion is problematic in both directions.

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.

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.

Plan 9 troff might work! It works with utf8 out of the box[0], and while I haven't used it for complex math typesetting, there is a command (eqn [1]) that was developed for it. I'd recommend Ali Rudi's port (neatroff [2][3]) for a minimalist implementation. There's also Heirloom Documentation Tools [4] which is an implementation of *roff-and-friends that uses Knuth's paragraph-at-once algorithm (instead of the original line-wise one) for typesetting, plus some other interesting features.

The authors of eqn wrote a paper about it: "Typesetting Mathematics" by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry. Kernighan also wrote two manuals (one in 1976 with a revision in 1992, and one in 2007 with updates for the Plan 9 version). [5].

[0] utf8 was developed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike during the creation of Plan9. The entire OS is compatible. Story here: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history

[1] http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/eqn

[2] https://github.com/aligrudi/neatroff

[3] PDF manual for neatroff: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf

[4] https://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html

[5] These (and more) can be found here: http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/troff.html

thanks. i do appreciate the effort, but i feel like this just underscores my point how *roff isn't a viable ecosystem like TeX is.

this is maybe slightly unfair, since i don't use TeX or even LaTeX, but XeTeX/XeLaTeX. however, those work out of the box with MacTeX/MiKTeX. i just want pretty PDFs.

My apologies. I think I misunderstand what you mean by "ecosystem". All of your requirements are fulfilled by the tools I suggested. The guides I provided show complex typesetting (mathematics and otherwise), eqn does complex math expressions (more powerful than TeX according to Lorinda Cherry, the neateqn implementation by Ali Rudi allows for using TeX bracket syntax as well), pic and grap provide complex (2D) graphics, refer and bib2ref/ref2bib provide bibliography management, and all of it installed from a single repository and makefile (maybe this is different than an installer framework?) to under 43MB (including demos and acm fonts). XeTeX/XeLaTeX seem to only add support for utf8 (as I mentioned, natively supported by the plan9 *roffs) and various font formats (at least supported by neatroff, I haven't checked the others). Of course, pretty PDFs was the original point you quoted in the parent.

You should at least check out the neateqn guide for examples of math typesetting (even output in Computer Modern). But the original guide, as well as the others will show many more and different examples. These aren't groff guides. You might be surprised.

It's funny, I looked at the "Typesetting Mathematics -- User's Guide (Second Edition)" postscript document, and - at least with macOS' Preview - some big brackets are segmented (Neatroff brackets don't seem to do this, although I've seen it in other troff generated documents), and they even say this:

> Warning — square roots of tall quantities look lousy, because a root-sign big enough to cover the quantity is too dark and heavy

The solution is naturally to rewrite big roots as powers.

pic does seem close to Tikz, although I had to look in the GNU pic doco to figure out how to do colors. Even then, transparency didn't seem to be supported?

Heirloom actually looks the most useful/mature. At least the output looks pretty/someone cared enough to make the example files pretty, there's actual documentation. Limitations are still there (having to convert bitmaps to EPS?). I will say I'm at least slightly impressed by `gpresent`, which is like beamer (so for making presentations), and built-in hyphenation support.

I still don't get Neatroff. It's compatible with/implements a lot that Heirloom does, but then the font support is worse again? It's an impressive project though, the source is very readable, and RTL/LTR support. Less impressive is the lack of a license - I think it's ISC, based on a single comment, but who knows?

---

A repository and a makefile are distinctly different than an installer. Random macro packages that may or may not be on GitHub are different than `tlmgr`. Piping stuff around and having to convert images is different than just one command. GUI editors. Example documents (like https://texample.net/). That is what I mean by ecosystem.

XeTeX outputs PDFs by default (granted, via xdvipdfmx), and can also include bitmaps directly (again, granted it needs graphicx or something). All TeX stuff isn't without it's warts, and seems overly complex (pdfTeX/XeTeX/XeLaTex/LuaTeX/ConTeXt, etc). But in practice, it kinda somehow just works (until it doesn't).

[0] https://github.com/rhaberkorn/gpresent

I appreciate you having a look! I totally understand if it's not enough to make a switch, but I'm glad you were able to see that it's not so bad on this side of things. There's definitely not enough niceties for the average computer user (GUI editing and installing) and some missing for any user (package manager). I will stand by piping as a matter of taste (the biggest benefit for me is it allows for using the tools I'm already familiar with, awk and grep or plain c/zig).

---

My interest in neatroff is mostly the code itself. A tiny and opinionated project with readable source that still achieves quite a lot (all that I need anyways). But it's definitely not for everyone! The author doesn't use a windowing system, for example, and instead uses the framebuffer for pdf viewing and editing (both custom implementations). It is ISC, by the way. It's included in the bottom of the readme.

Give LyX a try.

A hybridization of Overleaf and LyX could be pretty incredible.

I don't want more Word. I want a version of WordPerfect 5.1 that uses LaTeX underneath.

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.

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.

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.

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 agree, the effort is just not there.

What constitutes inappropriate use?

You search for an animated gif using a particular word and the result is a NSFW image, yet you post it anyway.

Postings, intentionally, NSFW images isn’t limited to gifs, or even images – one could make an ascii art image that is NSFW. I must still be missing something as I would assume that it should be super easy to have a talk with any employee who is doing anything NSFW at work/on work equipment and institute strict penalties if it is an ongoing issue. Removing everyone’s ability to leverage a (increasingly) common way to express intent/emotion/levity feels like the incorrect solution.

I agree, but it was one of the cofounders.

Should they have known better? 100%

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'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.

Doesn't seem that bad to me :)

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.

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.

> 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

https://www.boardgamearena.com/ is also good

> 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.

I feel that, especially with video calls, it’s good to have some sort of moderator. If someone is talking too much, they can jump in and just say “xxx, what do you think?”, quite often that’s really all you need.

In video calls it’s much harder to pick up signs that someone wants to say something.

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.

I used this for someone’s birthday drinks yesterday: https://getmibo.com/

It’s a space were you can walk around freely, have proximity-based audio volume, and your head is your webcam.

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.

Human Longevity.

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.

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.

Yes but aging and death are inevitable regardless. Delaying them on an individual basis does nothing to solve that problem.

Sure, death is. But biological aging is something we probably can solve so if that gives us 30 more healthy years that's great!

We might not end up as immortals but doesn't mean it's pointless to try to live a longer and healthier life.

I think it's a fair assumption to make that we cannot increase healthspan significantly more than we can increase lifespan. The increases to each would be similar; after all, a healthy body won't just keel over and die. The post you were responding to specifically mentioned the costs of end of life care. If we can't reduce the amount of time between when a body begins to fail and when a person dies, then we've done nothing to address that issue.

Extending life usually means extending the period of healthy independent function - not extending the life of someone in their incapacitated state.

> As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life.

So, not longevity, then, but extension of the span of healthy life?

Don't they go hand in hand?

Not necessarily. There are science fiction stories about extension of youth without extension of lifespan, and ancient myths about people cursed to live a long time without youth.

It's possible to imagine health-extending treaments (artificial joints and organs (heart), lung flushes) that don't extend lifespan). We already have treatments that can extend people's lives without health. (Unsuccessful chemotherapy, for one; insulin for type 2 diabetes mellitus, for another.)

Correct!

Usually people imply extending both healthspan and lifespan when they talk about longevity.

Yes, you're correct. Many researchers in the field prefer the phrasing 'human health', the consequence of which is human longevity.

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.

> ...help people maintain healthy bodies...

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.

If anything the obesity epidemic shows that a huge percentage of people really arnt that concerned about living longer to begin with

Some of us are though. Maybe we shouldn't set our policy based upon what the bottom x% of the population consider important?

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.

Because aging isn't "one thing" that breaks. There are a multitude of things that break down, and when you fix one, another one seems to pop up.

It's like growing a factory. expanding the bandwidth on one component, just pushes the bottleneck elsewhere.

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.

I really agree with you.

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 extending life to infinity is a good idea. Why would anyone want to live forever? What’s the point?

Not dying from aging in not the same as being immortal though. You could still die from a car accident for example, and there is of course the option to kill oneself (even if I'd consider that a tragedy.)

This is if biological aging could be _fully_ fixed, the first steps are rather to live a healthier life a bit longer.

Even if we cure all illnesses and find a way to halt ageing at 25, and we got rid of car accidents (the biggest accidental killer) and suicide (the biggest deliberate killer), the remaining types of accident and homicide would probably still give humans a mean lifespan in the order of a few thousand years — I doubt I’d be bored of life after a mere few thousand years.

Hundreds of thousands of years would be utterly unpredictable given how big the scale change is (fun though the idea of star-lifting is), but a few thousand years is definitely still in the range of learning to master skills that I admire others demonstrating.

I would expect people to live until they got bored.

I don't have the exact number, but without aging, we'd statistically only live until ~1000 on average before getting hit by a bus or choking on a bite of steak.

The reason people disagree with you is because they're imagining it as the only change with everything else remaining stagnant.

Seems like many people are new to this concept and feel skeptical so here are some useful resources:

* 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/

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.

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?

No, what I mean is looking at the world from your standard, you won't have patience for things to play out. We definitely should improve things, but also we need to have patience for people to catch up. You can definitely help, but help also needs understanding. For example, the problem you are looking at may not be something of high priority to people need help. To understand what people really need will require more than compassion.

Okay thanks, I think I understand you better now!

Helping people in developing countries and curing aging in not mutually exclusive the way I see it, they can be done in parallel. They also usually require very different skills and usually have different budgets for example.

I don't want to take resources away from helping the poor but rather see more focus in the medical world towards aging/longevity. Rather than spending a lot of money on trying to cure (for example) Alzheimer's decease I'd like to see more of those resources spent on trying to solve aging, which seems to be the root cause of Alzheimer's (and many other deceases.)

Does that make sense? Or maybe I misunderstood you again.

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.

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.

The very nature of this (preventing death from aging) means that if everything else stays constant, populations will grow since fewer people dies.

I can think of ways around this, but none that I want to recommend, and I never hear proponents of longevity research mention it.

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.

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.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/pandemic-...

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.

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.

It's an age old issue. Christianity, before it became the religion that it currently is, was known as the religion of widows and orphans when founded. It was meant as an insult as it wasn't prestigious at the time, but clearly there was a fundamental lack of care for those groups that caused them to cling to a new religion.

There are 80,000 post Luther Christianities, so it’s not as monolithic as implied.

The earliest Christians followed principles described in this first century document here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didache

The most famous at the time was loving neighbor as self. Pagans at the time left the sick to die in the streets. This is one reason Christianity had such a positive feedback loop for community life that it became generally the world’s largest belief system.

I mean the religion christianity is today is even more caring of the widow and orphan. The catholic church alone operates a shocking 26 percent of the entire worlds medical facilities. That doesn't count protestanrts or the orthodox.

The difference of course is that the cultural hegemony of christianity has made charity expected

> 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.

Sorry, I guess I had some implicit bias. I grew up in Appalachia which is a bit more clanish. It's not strange to have 3-5 close families living on the same plot of land in trailers.

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.

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.

> long term care insurance

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 don't doubt it. Have any anecdotal evidence to share?

ltc in Japan is closer to medicare in the us. Its run by the city and is need based and they can deliver services to the home. You get a case manager who contracts the services and then you might have a copay or deductible.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

That's why they'll install the technology approximating whatever was around when you were 48, not whatever is "in" when you're 70 :)

Except most technology made today is not designed for longevity. Tech that requires an internet connection to a working server to function even though that has nothing to do with it's core purpose (see https://mobile.twitter.com/internetofshit)

Yeah, good luck running modern games in 50 years. They certainly won't be running any guilds together in any of them.

He probably means it would make sense a few decades down the line, when our generations age.

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.

(do an image search for "hil rom p1900")

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.”

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.

This is a project my uncle designed where 4 houses in a block share a common care facility, allowing the people requiring care to live in a regular house without costing a fortune. https://darrenchester.com.au/freedom-housing-project-officia...

It is definitely a step up from a nursing home, especially for people who would like to live with their family or chosen roommates.

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.

> our elders ... dies more then young people

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.

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.

Young people get neglected too, they are just much less likely to die (immediately) from it.

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.

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.

The nuclear family is the reference implementation for this.

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.

Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone).

It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on, which is why I'm surprised it isn't being worked on by Amazon or similar. The only company I know of working on this is Urbit, which seems at this point unlikely to take off for a variety of reasons.

There is the Freedombox project.

And sandstorm.io ... sort of. A similar problem space.

There is unraid (which I haven't tried)

I'm pretty happy with proxmox - apparently lots of people use the LXC appliances.

I’m honestly amazed at how bad the ux of unraid is. It does a ton of things I’ll give them that. But coming from synology’s dsm (xpenology) the experience has not been good. The lack of a web file manager is mind boggling.

I wondered if this would move along more quickly if hosting from home were easier. Give everyone their own IP addresses and people tinkering their way to personal servers becomes more likely.

With things like Hyperswarm [0], building things like that is easier than it used to be

[0]: https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm

Many of the nas's get pretty close too this... but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. "Whats a domain? Can just put whatever like?" Etc etc.. even if you baby people through all of that, you still end up with a device that needs to be backed up, isn't available when the powers out at home etc..

Not knocking the nas's btw, I really like them because they do make it relatively simple to do a whole swathe of the common services, but it's only simple to me because I know how to do it by hand. A non technical person won't even understand the terminology.

That said.. I did wonder whether the deployment of solar and batteries to many homes might eventually also enable the deployment of edge services to per home servers. Right now the power draw prob makes in unworkable, as do maintenance costs.. but won't someone think of the reduced latency?

> but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people.

Sure, and digital cameras used to be challenging for non-techies to use, and you used to need to understand port forwarding to use ICQ. There's no law that it needs to stay that way. It would take a lot of work, but the benefits would be enormous.

I guess to put it another way, what I'm saying is, when I take a cute picture of my kids and want to send it to Grandma, what I want to do is put it on a $5/mo VPS instead of putting it on Facebook for free (or "free"). But I also don't want to be a part-time sysadmin or set up a private blog and configure it and walk Grandma through authenticating to it - I want it to just work. Which raises the obvious question, "Well who will pay to make this amazing software?" which has an equally obvious answer: whoever sells $5/mo VPSes.

edit to add: I personally would run such a thing on the server in my basement, but the realistic way for such a thing to exist (both in the sense of someone paying to develop it, and in the sense of millions of people to use it) is for it to be mainly run on cheapo cloud instances. It is the answer to the question "What use would a non-technical person have for their own cloud server?" which is a question I would think that Bezos et al would very much like to answer.

I have a Synology NAS at home and it has apps that let you do exactly what you said: it has apps to automatically backup photos from phones and then you can easily share them in a pretty nice interface. And one of their photo organization apps, Moments, also automatically clusters all faces and runs object detection on your pictures, locally, on the NAS. And it just works.

Maybe not for non-technical people but what I'd like to have is something like Docker Compose for virtual machines. I.e. just give it a description of what you'd like and the hypervisor takes care of building immutable machine images and setting them up including networking and potentially also backups of data volumes.

There are a lot of tools that do parts of this but connecting it all is a lot of work and in the end you probably end up with something hacky.

https://sandstorm.io/

This is the closest project I can think of.

Yes, sort of, as is Freedombox and Urbit and probably a few others. So another way of phrasing my post is that I'm surprised Jeff Bezos (or one of his ilk) hasn't gotten tired of waiting for Sandstorm/Urbit/etc to get good enough for my grandma to use, and just assigned 5k dev-years to the project.

I want Mozilla to build this.

Why would a non-technical person choose this over SAAS that already provides the same service?

Not just non-technical people. As a programmer, I don't want to send a significant chunk of my free time figuring out, configuring and then maintaining something.

Many cloud/VM providers like Digital Ocean offer one-click deployments of popular applications now.

There is Yunohost https://yunohost.org/#/ which is a open source project, whose goal is exactly that, personal server for everyone, with popular services that you can install from a web interface and that you can run on a dedicated server or a Raspberry pi like computer.

There is also nextcloud which is more a all in one product.

Geothermal Energy.

Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference. Then stick in two pipes, on for sending water down, one for steam to come up. Run a turbine, add a valve to regulate how much water you want to converted into steam to be able to regulate output, enjoy your first mover advantage and price the competition out of the market.

... It's not that I do not understand that it's a lot more complicated than that - but I'm puzzled that noone is doing it on a much bigger scale.

Oil companies are the ones at the forefront of deep drilling technology,

They know that "Oil is bad" and that oil is going to run out. I'd like them to stop drilling for oil completely - but even if they keep pumping oil, why do they not cash in on this additional front and enjoy money and good PR.

You’re underestimating the cost and difficulty of scaling that to any meaningful energy output.

On bigger scale, it seems this can sometimes cause earthquakes... One geothermal power plant is going to close in France https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Geothermal-power...

That is correct, but not for the "two pipe approach" I outlined in my post.

There is a form of geothermal energy generation that is being used here, that injects water into the ground and taps into the heated water. This is somewhat similar to the way fracking is performed to extract oil and gas from the ground, but it's not the only method.

But to your point - to me it is surprising that these issues aren't being "worked on more".

Where's here?

The Navy had to close one too after the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Weapons_Station_Chin...

Sidenote: how steampunk is it that "causes earthquakes" is just like a common externality of new industrial technology?

Could you imagine if "causes F-4 tornadoes" or "causes "golf-ball-sized hail" were just normal things that new tech might cause?

Yup. The earth's crust is less than 1% of the earths radius. Just below the crust is all the energy we would ever need for a long long time.

It's just not competitive with alternatives in most cases.

I agree with GP, this shouldn't be a discussion of, "we don't need geo-thermal because solar/wind is cheaper".

The issue is we are still heavily dependent on non-intermitent energy generation. Which for now is mostly Coal and Gas Power Plants. Coal is extremely poluting and Natural Gas is both polluting and has a geo-political mess of supliers.

Fusion is still years in the future and if even if there was a political will for nuclear it cannot be realistically rolled out quickly enough to decomission coal in terms of climate damage.

Without knowing all the details it seems like a much easier problem to solve:

- Get 24/7 heat out of deeper earth's crust without 'fracking' earthquake's

- Energy efficient time sustained nuclear fusion

As a bonus, if I'm allowed to be completely cynical, geo-thermal could enable much of the Oil and Gas drilling technology and know-how to transition to a new industry, giving them an exit strategy rather than continue this tactic of agressive lobbying and squeezing the final dollars out of the Petro-Chemical industry at the cost of Human Future.

Geothermal is a lot like nuclear: it's a capital intensive baseload source. As such, it suffers like nuclear in an environment with increasing intermittent penetration.

One might have imagined an environment in which geothermal replaced (say) diesel at remote locations, because diesel fuel is expensive. But add some wind/solar/batteries to that diesel and you save most of the fuel. The benefit of replacing it with geothermal is reduced.

It’s been turning up lately in the energy subreddit, with articles like: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/12/geothermal-energy-ren...

My understanding is that it’s geographically limited due to depth issues.

I don't know if it's just depth issues, I think I saw a story about some sample projects in Alberta where they were looking for the right types of rock for the heat exchange to occur. It definitely sounded significantly more complex than just drilling holes, but finding areas with the correct properties to get worthwhile ROI.

One nice advantage is it draws on skills common to the oil and gas industries.

AGS systems (e.g. Eavor[1]) don't need "hot rock" to be cost effective and can supposedly be operated in just about any area.

[1] https://eavor.com/

You are correct, and this is exactly what’s happening in Alberta, eg https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/eavor-loop-geothermal...

It's really good for heating/cooling buildings. Outside of that it's less clear. It's still extremely underused for heating/cooling. I think there isn't much incentive for people to incorporate it at the moment because it mostly saves on long-term costs, but let's face it most of our new buildings are made in the pursuit of short-term profit. The technology is also underdeveloped therefore expensive in most cases.

There's a very useful and up-to-date writeup of the four main types of geothermal projects, and the latest (AGS) that features 1) no injection wells or other fluid contact down-hole, 2) re-using existing oilfield wells when possible, 3) no need for "hot rock" steam flashing, and 4) no parasitic energy use for pumping (thermosiphon). Well worth the read.

The author, Dave Roberts, is a reliable read in the energy world and has recently launched a Substack dedicated to energy.

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/215154...

Using Graphene to radiate heat from deep holes to the surface is also one other area being worked on.

Graphene has exceptionally high thermal conductivity, 12000x of copper:

https://futurism.com/thanks-to-graphene-we-may-harness-the-l...

>Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference.

>There's plenty of asteroids rich in gold/titanium just floating around. All you have to do is bring them here.

I don't think this snarky comment is justified. Geothermal energy plants as I describe them already exist - I'm just surprised that this source of energy is not exploited more.

Solar / Wind is dropping 5-10% per year and that probably will continue for another 10 years.

No way geothermal will be cost competitive. Even if it has promise in today's marketplace, by the time you get the project completed solar/wind will have dropped in price 50% or more.

It's the same reason that nuclear projects should only be in research for another 10 years. Once the solar/wind hockey stick plateaus, then you have a rational target for these other alternative energy projects to pursue.

You need a deep hole.[1] Kilometers deep for most of the earth.

A hole in the ground is more useful for cooling in hot climates. You can use a well as a heat sink for air conditioning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient

Drilling many kilometres deep inland is not proven technology, despite the fact we can do it at sea for oil.

To everyone saying this is impossible. This is proven tech and it's actually not uncommon to heat your house like this already today. Depth of a hole in your backyard is around 100-200m and one such hole provides more than enough for one big house.

Payoff for such investment to break even with more basic forms of heating is around 5-10 years in cold northern europe climates. Sadly most people have shorter foresight than that when it comes to economic planning.

I think you are confusing geothermal energy with ground source heat pumps. That said, both are being done where it makes economic sense to do so.

Isn’t that similar to what dandelion is doing? https://dandelionenergy.com/

Here in Reno, NV we've got the Peppermill, which is notable for being the only resort in the US (last I checked) that gets all its heating (both HVAC and water) from an on-site geothermal well.

Nevada in general is basically a giant blob of hot springs when looking at a hot spring map, which makes me strongly suspect that it could be a major geothermal energy hub for the Western US. Plus, pretty much all of it's desert, which is perfect for solar, too.

Rock isn't very thermally conductive. Geothermal plants work great where the crust is thin, but for the rest of the planet you have to do a lot of drilling to get not much heat. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geother...

The phone system. It seems like it's an unholy mess. I moved from the US to Hong Kong this year. I have a US number that I want to keep, and of course I need a local Hong Kong number.

So, the US number is on my Google Fi account that I pay to keep active and I get a prepaid SIM card for Hong Kong. I can switch the SIM cards if I travel back.

But why? We have two semi-independent networks, one for voice and one for data. The voice one is arcane, region-locked (local numbers cannot easily or cheaply make international calls), and subject to all sorts of restrictions and regulations.

The data network can send and receive data to anyone, anywhere in the the world, for practically free. Why are we even bothering with the legacy voice network at this point? Why can't I get one number that works anywhere in the world? Google Fi kind of does. It's great if you live in the US and travel a lot, but I've heard that if you're living outside the US and use it outside the US too much, they'll shut down your account.

Even porting the number to Google Voice isn't a solution. It only works in a few select countries and of course Google might decide to just shut it down at any time, so who knows.

Internet speeds are more than fast enough now even on mobile in most of the world that you should be able to handle voice calls with a data-only plan. If someone figured out the backend to connect it to the legacy telephone system, to just have one phone number that is independent of a carrier that you can access from anywhere with an Internet connection, they'd make a killing.

Not to mention, data-only calls are often much higher quality in my experience. Whenever I go from FaceTime audio to regular calls, I can’t believe I used to use them all the time

This is not my experience at all. I've not used FaceTime, but messenger calls are terrible.

In a lot of places, the old PTSN is the only connection. I've been in places where the number of phones in one space made data use impossible, but I could still place a call just fine. In some phones, you can even force data to 1G to use the voice frequencies and avoid using the LTE frequencies.

Perhaps have the option of charging say 2 cents if somebody calls you. An exception list would allow friends and family for free. Phone spam is a growing problem because it's too cheap to robo-call millions of people. If spammers have to pay more, they'll cut down. Plus, money is easier to track. Same for email: we need e-stamps.

Voice over IP and it's connection to the old system is basically a solved problem. VoIP is very widespread, e.g. in Germany basically all new landline contracts are VoIP.

Also the backhaul of mobile networks is usually VoIP (references to this on Wikipedia date back to 2011 [1]), i.e. even calls starting and ending over the old analog network are converted to VoIP in between.

So what's stopping us is not technology, but exactly these local carriers with their national phone numbers and often also national law around selling these services (e.g. in Japan you need to identify yourself as a resident to buy a phone number). Why do we still need carriers? Because they are operating the local physical infrastructure necessary to connect your phone to the network.

So the problem to solve is to cooperate on an international level to use the physical infrastructure of a country/carrier free of charge while you are paying a different carrier in another country. We just recently (~2 years back?) "solved" this in Europe ("solved" because it only works within time limits generous enough for long term travel but not for permanent relocation). It will eventually happen on a global scale.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110809025050/http://www.eetime...

Thanks for elaborating. I know there are a ton of details I don't know about for why the phone system is the way it is. It's over 100 years old and I'm sure there's a lot of cruft.

I'd be happy to pay a local carrier for a data connection using their infrastructure. What I'm imagining is an app that lets me get a local phone number anywhere. Calls and texts to that number ring and show up in the app. If I move to a new place, I just get a new SIM card for data and create a new local phone number in the app.

WhatsApp is almost this, except it doesn't manage any of the phone numbers, and I'd really prefer to use something that I can pay for that isn't owned by Facebook. I've taken to giving people in Hong Kong my US number as well since that's what is tied to my WhatsApp account and there is a 90% chance that if anyone here is going to try to contact you, they'll do it through WhatsApp.

> What I'm imagining is an app that lets me get a local phone number anywhere. Calls and texts to that number ring and show up in the app. If I move to a new place, I just get a new SIM card for data and create a new local phone number in the app.

There are several such apps in the iOS and Android app stores. They work reasonably well.

I would add to this, why even have "phone service" anymore. I call my family via Facebook Messenger or Zoom etc... I'm surprised that more more companies don't let me call them via these services or that some new startup hasn't starting selling the intergration so a customer can click "connect via Whatsapp" to our customer service.

I'm also somewhat surprised there isn't a standard for this (maybe one is being worked on) so that all services and register for the standard to let me connect.

Further, I'm surprised there isn't work to let me register some contact info in a global way. As it is, when I move, I have to contact 15-30 companies and update my address. Why I can't I just do that in one place and the companies can use the info live?

Yes, I get here are all kinds of privacy issues. Still, there must be some solution. For example, id service providers let me login, change my address, and then select which companies that I've registered to that id get my new address, etc.... I'm going to tell them anyway, just make it less tedious to do it.

> I would add to this, why even have "phone service" anymore. I call my family via Facebook Messenger or Zoom etc.

Emergency services. You can't call an ambulance via Zoom. Even if 911 supported Zoom, Zoom probably won't support 911 because they don't want to be held liable if people die because of a Zoom outage.

Is the phone company liable if there's an emergency and the phone system is down?

Yes it is

Earlier this week, the FCC Fined CenturyLink $400,000 and West Safety Communications $175,000 for a multi-state 911 outage that occurred in August 2018. To resolve the dispute, both companies also entered into a Compliance Plan.

https://www.beyondtelecomlawblog.com/fcc-fines-companies-for...

I call my 95 year old grandma every week. She doesn't have a cell phone, only a landline. I would guess many if not most older people are similar. If the replacement service doesn't work with landlines then it's dead in the water as a replacement and will only function as an additional option. Going to stay that way for a while as (my assumption is) the group 70+ likely have a large population without call phones.

Not to mention rural communities without adequate cell service.

I am totally in agreement with you in principle.

But I've lost count at the number of times all these things have failed me at work and in my personal life, where I've had to resort to "telecom" (just making a voice call, although I do know it's still VoIP, but there are different quality of service considerations and carriers always prioritize these)

There is a standard for this which most vendors actually used to support: XMPP federation.

Not surprisingly most vendors also dropped support for this merely in favor of lock-in.

> Why are we even bothering with the legacy voice network at this point?

Because the government helped to create it, so that it was easy to track and intercept, and there's a lot of infrastructure around those purposes, when they want to use them.

It IS being worked on, but things move quite slow - and there doesn't seem to have been much progress for decades, but:

Cure for hair-loss.

Some might say it's just vanity, but if someone could come up with a cure, and sell it affordably, that would be a multi-billion, maybe even trillion dollar industry.

Going from quite balding (NW4-NW7 in balding terminology) to a full head of hair makes most guys look a solid 10-20 years younger.

The hair-loss industry has been in a permanent state of "in 5 years..." for 30 years now.

And yes, I know there are more pressing issues in the world of medicine, but it's a real problem for tens of millions of people.

Out of curiosity, what is wrong with the solutions available today? I see Elon Musk before and after and his procedure appeared to have gone great. Is that just because he could afford a more expensive procedure?

It works for certain hair loss types. It wouldn't work for Jeff Bezos for example.

Musk had a hair transplant, which is quite expensive and a quite involved procedure. The results are also highly dependent on how bald you are, the type of hair you have, and even the doctor who does it. If you accidentally pick a bad doctor your hair transplant can end up looking awful. It also doesn't make your balding stop, so you may continue balding and need another hair transplant in the future. Hair transplants treats the symptom of hair loss but not the problem.

The holy grail would be a pill or lotion you could take and truly stop/reverse hair loss. There are some existing pills (finasteride) and lotions (rogaine) but they don't work for many, and have their own issues as well.

Plus, your head looks like shit for at least a week, maybe much longer, depending on individual. It's a gamble. And it thins out the hair in the back of your head (known as the "donor area"). That's probably why the back of Trump's head looks dodgy in the wind.

Hair loss is important in the IT field because age is frowned upon in our industry. It directly affects our career.

This is surely a sensitive topic and I hope I'm not being too insensitive here, but I've personally never frowned upon someone who has less hair than me. Even if my hair is thicker than that of most people, that only means I have less testosterone in my body that you. It means you are more of a man than I am. Everyone knows that. I say, own it!

I'm not saying people "should be" judged on hair, but in practice they are. If you look old, you score lower in IT interviews. I'm just reporting human nature, not making it. I don't have access to humanity's source code.

Fields like medicine and law value age. I'm jealous of those of fields. In IT you have a grey arrow on your back and have to consciously try to counter it, such as acting enthusiastic about dumb fads that management falls for.

Youngbees don't know better and lick them up with a smile: "Yum yum, block-chain q-bit microservice no-sql serverless node.js++ for our little contract tracking app! Woohoo!" I know better, but STFU to not look like an old-tech-loving geezer.

All of that would change if only you had a full set of hair?

No, it's just one part of a bigger issue. I did drift the topic a bit, I admit. Sign of old age :-)

The relationship between testosterone and hair growth is a bit of a myth.

That explains why I'm bald AND have a small wanker.

The holy grail in hair-loss would be one-time fix, or more optimistically, one pill a day.

Today, just to stall your hair-loss / keep hair, you'll need to be on minoxidil (foam / liquid, twice a day) and finasteride and/or dutasteride (pill). Though many will use more products - and as of lately, microneedling your scalp has gained popularity.

Some of these meds have adverse health effects, but in the end - they can be expensive and time-consuming, and results range from poor/no effect, to good.

A hair-transplant could cost you between $10k-$50k, depending on where you get one. Musk has had a HT, but probably needs to stay on the meds mentioned above, to halt any other loss that's going on.

Long story short: The current solutions are expensive and time consuming. It becomes a lifestyle / daily routine, like with other chronic illnesses. And the effects can disappear if/when you can no longer afford them.

If you want a one-time fix, there's a case of an old guy who fell into coal fire and regrew his hair :)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1351889/

Just shave it off / short. The person it affects most is yourself, and confidence does not come from hair.

This is just plain false. Google attractiveness and bald. Lowering your possible attractiveness by 75% to 50% is not an easy choice. Your confidence has nothing to do with it. Especially in a world where people are chosen via pictures. It works for some men. I might be attracted to DuWayne Johnson but there are plenty of men who look awful bald.

>> there are plenty of men who look awful bald

That's just your opinion though. It's certainly not mine. In fact, I think bald people look cool. I also think a lot of them have much more confidence in themselves than I do and I have a full set of hair.

All people have hills to climb, though. I just wish people who are insecure because of their lack of fur on top wasn't. Only douche-bags will ever hold that against you. Don't try to please those people. They are jerks.

I said 50-75% not 100%. How many other things in life would you lower your chances of success 50-75% if you could easily avoid it? The polls show 75% to 44% of women don't find bald men attractive. I'm going to guess those numbers are worse for bald women. Solving baldness is probably much easier than changing culture.

Everyone can have a six pack.

Not everyone can have hair.

The improvement in atteractiveness from losing weight for the “average” USA person far exceeds hair.

So if you want to look better focus on what you can control and lose body fat.

> Everyone can have a six pack

Not really true. Some people's genetics make it difficult for a 6 pack to show even at a low body fat %.

> Not everyone can have hair

I mean, this is the whole problem that is trying to be solved here.

Imagine if everyone _could_ have hair!

the value of hair would decrease if everyone had it.

Rather than obsess over something you can’t fix (unless and if there is ever a cure), it is better to accept reality and move on. Losing your hair is very low on the list of bad things that can happen to you - I don’t even need to bother listing worse things. If hair loss is your biggest problem, maybe a healthy dose of perspective is the cure!

> Rather than obsess over something you can’t fix (unless and if there is ever a cure), it is better to accept reality and move on

The entire history of human progress is about finding solutions to problems that seemed like they couldn't be solved. Humans will always try to shape reality to their liking.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

Tough question: Isn't baldness a genetic trait just like the pigment of the skin? Are you X% less attractive if you have a certain pigment of the skin?

Person's baldness was given to them at birth. They had no say in it just like the pigmentation color. What's the objective difference?

Yeah, baldness must have a use / evolutionary advantage (cooling, maybe) and isn't an illness. Like having 2 arms and 2 legs, beeing gay or having black skin color.

The confidence I gained from shaving my head far outweighed any real/perceived loss of attractiveness. Walking around trying to hide the fact I was going bald was soul destroying. Shaving it was owning it and it honestly set me free.

This is one of the most copied and pasted pieces of advice on the internet. Just shave it, grow a beard, and become muscular! Not everyone looks good without hair, some people have faces that look young instead of manly, can't grow a full beard, etc. Plenty of reasons men still hate losing hair.

>> Not everyone looks good without hair

Not everyone with hair looks good. The ugliest person ever was probably one with hair on top.

>> some people have faces that look young instead of manly

Some women absolutely love a boyish look. Some men too.

>> Plenty of reasons men still hate losing hair.

Men with hair hate their lives just as much.

It’s because it’s true! You can let going bald ruin your life but there is so much more to life than a full head of hair! You know what I wish would be different? My back which has been totally destroyed since I was 16 with messed up discs. Losing hair would be a lot preferable! But at the same time, I’m very happy I’m not like my cousin with her debilitating disease that will kill her before 30 that has left her family shattered since she was 8 years old!

Perspective, perspective, perspective.

You seem to be forgetting that women suffer from hair loss too and shaving it off is not an option for them.

Like it or not, bald women are a taboo in our society.

Bald guys are hot:

https://extrafabulouscomics.com/comic/180/

And the opposite: permanent hair removal. My partner went through a laser treatment for over an year to get about 60-70% reduction in hair growth. It's immensely painful and time taking process that doesn't work for all akin colors and doesn't guarantee a permanent hair removal. With the current pace of medical research I would have imagined a simple cream that you apply on your skin and whoosh all the hair follicles would be permanently dead. But for some reason, it seems like a distant dream.

I'm actually not surprised it's hard. Bodies are surprisingly resilient, so disabling their functions without secondary consequences is usually hard.

I've considered permanent hair removal for my legs. My legs are naturally hairy and I'm jealous of the guys with smooth legs.

> would have imagined a simple cream that you apply on your skin and whoosh all the hair follicles would be permanently dead.

I'm glad it's not that easy... I can see the "pranks gone wrong", the "ex-boy friend revenge" and the "shave-your-kid facebook 6-month trend" potential of this..

> Cure for hair-loss

Good point. The fact that it would be multi-billion industry means that it's probably super hard. I may be wrong but when people claim we're on the verge of curing ageing, I like to point that we're not even able to cure hair-loss.

Balding is not vanity. It is a marker for serious health problems. Balding men are several times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, for example.

Are you suggesting that a cure for male pattern baldness would address heart disease?

Yes. You can look up scientific papers linking balding with health issues. We know premenopausal women have much lower incidence of heart problems than men. Some ethnicities of men like east asians also have better heart health and incidentally have better hair than caucasian men.

Correlation does not mean causation. I'd actually be very surprised if fixing the hair addressed any correlated heart disease. The hair would be a downstream symptom, almost certainly.

I'm a doctor, if that makes a difference.

It has been shown that finasteride, which is a systemic drug actually helps [1] with heart health.

It's not that fixing hair would improve heart health, but that on a systemic level improving heart health could prevent balding.

  [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25632043/

The experiment you linked was on mice.

Anyway, that's the opposite of what you said before. Treating heart to improve balding is not the same as treating balding to improve heart.

And finasteride is not a cure for balding. At best it slows it, with variable results among different people.

On the flip side: I embraced the fact that I would lose all my hair and just started to shave my head. Now I have so much less to ever worry about: haircuts (diy buzzer in basement), shampooing (there is nothing to shampoo) and styling (there is one default style that is not user configurable)

Male pattern hair loss is a Hard Problem. We understand that it is caused by androgens (maybe DHT?) and affects follicles on certain parts of the head differently.

It's not simple to address something like this. Either you have to replace the follicles (e.g. transplant surgery), or mess around with people's androgens (right now, we can only do that pharmacologically). Drugs that affect people's hormones have a tendency of having longer-lasting effects than those that affect neurotransmitters, which makes treating a cosmetic condition with them somewhat iffy from a "first do no harm" perspective.

Minoxidil (topical) and Finasteride (oral) are the two most reliable pharmaceuticals for pattern hair loss.

- We don't actually understand how minoxidil works, but it probably stimulates blood flow to hair follicles that are going dormant, buying a little more time. It's fairly safe side effects wise, but only addresses some forms of balding (top of head, smaller areas).

- Finasteride affects the production of DHT in men, which can halt or even reverse male pattern hair loss - but a very small subset of patients experience loss of sexual function as a side effect, which can be permanent. This makes it iffy to recommend to everyone without reservation.

The worst thing about both of these medications is that they have to be taken regularly, or else the hair loss will resume.

Until we more fine-tuned ways of tinkering with people's hormones or editing their genes, I don't think that we'll have a truly consequence-free cure for hair loss. Medical technology is just not there yet.

...That said, you're absolutely right that there's a lot of money in selling people cures for hair loss. In fact, if you just take the two drugs I mentioned above, explain them to men on the internet in clear language, and charge a small premium (3x the price of generic) to sell it to them... Boom! You got yerself a startup that just raised a $47M Round B! https://www.keeps.com/

This comment is like poetry

Does anyone know why we can't just implant nylon hair follicles with some biologically compatible glue/plugs?

Edit: Just searched up synthetic hair implants

The FDA banned the synthetic fibers in the US in 1983. The ban resulted because widespread use in the 1970s led to numerous complications including recurrent infections, rejection, contact dermatitis, granulomatous hypersensitivity reactions and cyst formation. Not to mention frequent loss of fibers from breakage.

The synthetic fibers continue to be manufactured in Europe where they are still in use.

Check out this website with an unfortunate name for more info https://www.hairlosscure2020.com/artificial-hair-implants/

That sounds like a wig, only harder to wash, and with added pain if/when it gets stuck in something, and a bigger fire hazard than either a wig or natural hair.

I’m still a bit surprised nobody is trying to tissue-culture skin with follicles that don’t go bald in the same way. Artists have already done the tissue culture part with a different goal in mind, and the tech in this area has been developing rapidly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_Leather

I believe there was a japanese company named 'organ technologies' that was trying that using organ cloning [0] - a brief google of shows sad webpage names like "Director of research Dr. Tsuji resigns from position"

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsob.190010

Human tissue regeneration. Imagine being able to regrow limbs and organs!

For a long time Becker's book was about the only thing out there: "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life" by Robert O. Becker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_(book)

Now there's pretty serious progress being made at Levin's lab: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" talk by Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

I discovered only about 10 million people in the world are amputees, having recently become interested in biomechatronics. Most of them live in developing countries. I suspect this is the reason for the relative lack of research. There isn't big money in solving the problem although its solution would be immeasurably valuable to those it aids.

I'd pay quite a bit for knees that were as good as in my '20s.

Would you amputate your legs for the treatment?

I mean if there was longstanding evidence of the treatment working well enough and with low enough side-effects. I don't think we're anywhere close though. Think of phantom limb pain. That's a brain thing, and it's not clear whether being able to regrow extremities would also entail knowing enough about the brain / nervous system to fully solve phantom limb pain.

Do you have to amputate? My mom has had hip replacement surgery twice.

No, we're speculating about a future with widely available biomechatronic prosthetics that perform at or above the level of "normal" limbs.

If it were a common, reliable procedure - yes. Yes I would.

We get surgery without blinking all the time in this country, and the most common types are incredibly safe. You make leg replacement on the order of knee or hip joint replacement surgery, and you’ll have people beating down your door.

I think the same goes, if not twice over, for spine amd back wear and injuries.

I know there is the whole difficulty with nerves and what not, but I think at least half of my and my wife's families and extended families have back problems.

Sustainable agriculture.

Ag is the material basis of human society. We have to stop destroying soil. We have to stop poisoning ecosystems. We have to minimize artificial fertilizer inputs. We have to stop emitting and start sequestering atmospheric carbon to mitigate climate instability.

If we don't do this we will likely see widespread crop failures and food shortages within 50 years. Land use practices must be reformed to protect soil health. Agriculture must become carbon negative. It may be possible to tweak crops to increase CO2 incorporation rates and store more carbon in soil, for instance.[0]

I want to leave future humans a planet with fertile soils, a stable climate, and vibrant life. I do not want our grandchildren to live in concrete domes and eat out of yeast vats.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17174

Any thoughts on the automated vertical farms that are starting to see good results?

I think they may make sense in some locations. I don't see them scaling to replace traditional ag, barring some unforeseen advance yielding extremely cheap and plentiful clean energy. Besides significant power requirements, large construction projects come with large emissions footprints, as do synthetic fertilizers (it may be possible to repurpose existing buildings, and compost could help provide for some portion of nutrient needs; this would require a sea change in social and lifestyle conventions which is currently happening far too slowly).

There are also real possibilities of supply chain and infrastructure unreliability due to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, geopolitical tensions, etc.

What's most appropriate is likely highly context-dependent. I think a multi-pronged approach is best, and vertical farms could certainly play a role. Personally I see halting deforestation and fossil fuel use/extraction as the most urgent priority. I'm also a bit biased toward crop breeding/engineering for increased carbon uptake and soil sequestration (the lab I work in is pursuing this); it could help restore soil health while improving yield as well as resilience to environmental stressors.

I don't know much about the details of vertical farming, though. If you have anything to share, I'd love to check it out.

> I don't see them scaling to replace traditional ag

That's funny, because I do see vertical farming scaling to replace 100% of two-dimensional (read: "traditional") agriculture, and feeding billions. Every city of over a million should have at least 15 skyscrapers with at least 30 floors each growing staples.

Of course, we also need to switch to meat grown lab for > 75% of our meat demand and mostly stop producing cattle food with agriculture.

It might be a good idea to talk to any agricultural economist in any land grant university in the US before you invest your life savings on that being true in the US in the short/middle term. Or any US dirt farmer. Ag land is cheap in the US, as is water. Electricity and associated infrastructure is not, nor is building high-rise buildings.

I’d guess even reclaiming land from the sea to add conventional farmland would be cheaper, if the numbers were run.

On Mars, maybe another story...

> That's funny, because I do see vertical farming scaling to replace 100% of two-dimensional (read: "traditional") agriculture, and feeding billions.

If you can point me to any resources you've found to support this, I'd be happy to read them and revise my view.

Besides the power/construction overhead, the infrastructure costs, and the lack of political will, many large coastal cities will likely see partial flooding and increasingly frequent weather events this century, while some are at risk of complete loss.

The meat issue is complex. Lab-grown meat is subject to many of the same power and infrastructure constraints as vertical farming; I don't see it scaling to sustainably meet (meat? ;) current demand. We need a massive reduction in meat consumption in the developed world, but we also need to be conscious of the fact that ruminants remain critical to many agricultural ecosystems. We should certainly stop razing the Amazon for cattle pasture, although that will require a dramatic shift in economic incentives.

There was a big thread on this yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25554941

It seems like there do exist more than enough research to perfect agriculture, it's just that it's socioeconomically inviable. Set up optimized, automated farms and you'll be seeing unemployment by the millions as traditional farmers are suddenly deemed obsolete, especially in poor countries that still have majorly agrarian economies.

I'm not convinced agriculture can be "perfected", or that automation is necessarily the way to go. In some situations (e.g., dense urban environments) it seems to make sense, but I think there will remain an important role for smallholders. Huge industrial outfits may make sense under some circumstances, but I think we need a renaissance in small- and medium-sized farms in the developed world, and their protection in the developing world, with farmers incentivized to diversify their output, rejuvenate their land, and produce primarily for their local and regional communities, rather than barely scraping by with destructive practices and federal subsidies as they are often forced to do today. Many farmers in the United States do not even own the land they work, reducing incentives for responsible management.

The fact that our political and economic systems do not prioritize long-term agricultural viability, as you point out, ought to give us pause.

Car-free or significantly car-limited communities. Cars that are safer for pedestrians (not just for occupants in cars). Better traffic safety enforcement.

Automobiles kill ~6k pedestrians and almost 140k are sent to the ER in the US - many of which will have life-altering injuries.

https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...

There is https://culdesac.com/

But I think the market has basically spoken on automobiles, people are more then willing to take the safety risk for convenience and many are willing to live far far outside the city for one extra bedroom.

>But I think the market has basically spoken on automobiles

I don't know about the US but within the UK you have to pay a premium to live somewhere where you aren't car dependent.

Same in the US but only because areas that are like that are so small and are only location based, not intentional.

It does show there is demand though.

So do what smart cities do and make the livable space larger with efficient public transit.

Came to post something like this. The structural dependence of our society on cars has so many and often immense costs. And so much car use could be made unnecessary with some relatively cheap fixes.

I would love to see more companies pursuing this angle. But policy at the state at City level are the limiting factor. Single family zoning effectively bans walkable cities. And the vast majority of America is single family zoned.

this already exists

google: Western Europe.

Some places are better than others within Europe. It isn't one homogeneous region.

I don't understand. Europe has both urban and rural areas, just like any other continent. I believe you can get by without a car in any town that has a school, some shops, a cinema and a pub, anywhere in the world.

So you mean Europe?

Regenerating top soil.

We have degraded 1/3 of the top soil in the last 150 years. At the current rate, we won't be able to grow food in 60 years. This is a significant threat to our food production capabilities as a planet, and has severe 2nd, 3rd degree repercussions as well.

At the moment, agroforestry and syntropic farming are the only large scale solutions, but they need mass adoption.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...

If covid has taught us anything, it's that we should listen to these sorts of warnings.

This is really not an accurate depiction of the problem.

First of all, it may take a 1000 years to naturally create topsoil, but that's not our problem. We have topsoil and can make topsoil much much faster. So how do we preserve, and continue to create topsoil faster than it is depleted.

What is top soil? A collection of macro and micronutrients, microorganisms, and organic matter in the first 5-10 inches of soil. Essentially, its compost.

Traditional farming depletes topsoil because it takes more than it gives. By traditional, I mean subsistence up until early industrial. After we figured out that plants need food, and supplemented it accordingly, the draining of nutritive value of the topsoil largely ended 100 years ago.

However, industry brought about destructive methods such as deforestation and deep tillage which increase erosion. Even if you are adding in enough inputs to balance out what your crops are taking, erosion may simply sweep away your 5-10 inches of good soil. However, in the last 40 years, tiling and no-til methods have vastly improved this. No-til and more efficient combines have also much improved soil organic matter (which take decades to build, but not 1000s of years).

In general. Yes, the erosion of soil is the erosion of civilization, but don't believe the media hype. Farmers aren't dumb, they are incentivized to manage their soil as best they can.

Isn't the real problem these days fertilizer drainage going into rivers and oceans, etc.?

I think the biggest problem is nitrous oxide accumulation in the atmosphere (it comes from denitrifying bacteria acting on nitrogen fertilizers). But there may be ways to address that directly.

Nitrate runoff into rivers is atrocious!

IIRC phosphate is a big problem too.

> Farmers aren't dumb, they are incentivized to manage their soil as best they can.

Farmers aren't dumb but:

  1. they've made serious mistakes like this in the past, across cultures and civilizations

  2. farmers are not necessarily the people making the decisions in the contemporary vertically integrated "food business" economy of US agriculture in 2020

We are blessed with a strong stewardship culture in .US farming, and they are incentivized to manage their soil, but what about the land they rent?

Roughly 1/3 of all US farmland is leased.

https://www.fool.com/millionacres/real-estate-investing/inve...

If it is owned by folks in the community, there is some social incentive. Out-of-state landlords? Profit and loss.

A feedback loop for remote landlords to pay the price for letting their land get overworked might be nice. More than just the crop yield loss, but rebuilding the soil for the next generations.

No-till and cover crops are a great approach, but I’ve been told there’s a steep learning curve. But the results are impressive.

> Farmers aren't dumb, they are incentivized to manage their soil as best they can.

Farmers are definitely not dumb. But many are not currently incentivized to manage soil and (more broadly) agricultural ecosystems with long-term viability in mind.

Despite getting repeated a lot there's no evidence to support this.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24232291-100-the-idea...

The regenerative agriculture movement is gaining significant momentum in Austraila; https://regenfarmers.com.au/

Battery-operated household items. I have a cordless dewalt drill that I can use all day on my jobsite, but every single appliance in my kitchen needs a cord. Hand mixer? Immersion blender? Regular blender? Stand mixer? Everything has a cord. Why isn't there a kitchen battery system yet?

Similarly: I'd love to have a little reading sconce on my wall next to my bed, but running a circuit through the existing walls without tearing them up is impossible. Why isn't there any attractive battery-powered home lighting? Sure, maybe overhead lights for lighting a room need more draw, but there's no reason to plug in a desk lamp, wall sconce, or coffee table light every day. Especially for renters who aren't about to hire an electrician—why no battery-powered lights designed for the home? Periodic recharging is annoying, but it's better than literally not being able to have a light where I want it.

There's a market here and it's not new technology. It's just repackaging existing technology with a splash of industrial design. Hell, the battery requirements for my drill are much greater than the battery requirements for my immersion blender. It shouldn't even be expensive!

Battery powered devices like this do better with brushless motors to save battery. Corded devices which can use a brushed motor since they can sacrifice some electrical efficiency. Good brushless isn't cheap. Fixed appliances this aren't really going to go from kitchen to kitchen like your drill either. Probably pulling it out from the counter and using it and then putting it away. Why deal with batteries?

I'd guess because the market isn't really there when wire is extremely cheap and the building codes require more outlets than most people need. The wire for your sconce has already been run through the wall, it's at an outlet. Managing cables is not that hard.

Power tools are a bit different because they need to fit into any given tight space about once, and can't rely on wall power being nearby. Your sconce and kitchen appliances don't work on the same assumption.

> and the building codes require more outlets than most people need

Does it, though? Never in my life I've seen a house anywhere in the countries I've been to, that would have a sufficient number of outlets. Myself I think corded devices are fine, but houses come with way too few outlets.

What about a mechanical adapter to couple the immersion blender into the deWalt chuck?

I have seen battery powered blenders, though.

On that topic. What happened to standardized batteries, like the good old AA, AAA, etc.

Every appliance i have nowadays have their own built in proprietary lipo and even worse their own proprietary charger which adds yet another mess of cables everywhere. Why can't i take the DeWalt battery and plug into my Bosch screwdriver?

They're still there, but in low-end / low power draw devices. In the past two years, I went from using pretty much no batteries to having ~30 AA batteries spread around various appliances, tools and child toys. Fortunately I recognized the trend early, and bought a charger and a large supply of rechargeable AAs. Now I'm in the process of designing a battery cabinet, because keeping spares and a charger around has become a logistical challenge ;).

It's not exactly like i miss the old days of having AA batteries being spread around and that needs replacement all the time. It's more the lack of something with equivalent modularity, but bigger and with modern higher expectations on energy, power and charging. Like what we are used seeing in laptops, power tools, e-bikes, drones, cameras, torch, appliances, etc.

There's quite a few battery powered LED lights you can stick on the wall. Most of them are meant to go in closets or under cabinets, but there's no reason you couldn't put one next to your bed.

> I have a cordless dewalt drill that I can use all day on my jobsite, but every single appliance in my kitchen needs a cord. Hand mixer? Immersion blender? Regular blender? Stand mixer? Everything has a cord. Why isn't there a kitchen battery system yet?

My cordless dewalt drill cost more than my mixer, immersion blendar, and food processor combined.

I would hate your world of batteries-everywhere. I already loathe the fact that I need to constantly recharge my phone, my watch, my mouse, my kindle, my headphones, my camera, my doorbell, my torchlight, my tire inflator, my tv remote... some of these will be used so sparingly that the batteries might leak in the meantime, or they might just die, so now every time you want to use X you have to wait for the batteries to charge, from a few minutes to a few hours.

Personally, I'm more annoyed by the fact that electrical systems in buildings are still too hard to modify. As you say, you cannot really tweak much once the wall is done. In a day and age where electrical devices continue to multiply, it's sadistic to bang on about extender-cords being "fire hazards" while not providing alternatives. You don't want fire hazards? Give me a way to safely upgrade the energy distribution of my home that is as easy as plugging in an extender cord.

> Personally, I'm more annoyed by the fact that electrical systems in buildings are still too hard to modify. As you say, you cannot really tweak much once the wall is done. In a day and age where electrical devices continue to multiply, it's sadistic to bang on about extender-cords being "fire hazards" while not providing alternatives. You don't want fire hazards? Give me a way to safely upgrade the energy distribution of my home that is as easy as plugging in an extender cord.

Glad someone else is sharing my views. Burying cables into physical fixtures that cannot be accessed any other way than brute force is, I find, completely archaic. The solution is modular home design. Houses should be built more like gaming PCs in a way. Every wall would be 4-5ft thick, be mostly empty on the inside, and have a special door to allow a human to go inside. This "closet inside a wall" would contain standardized plugs/hooks/supports for electrical cables (along with plumbing and gas lines and internet fiber and any kind of wire or pipe that passes through the home). Load bearing would still be assumed by columns and other hard elements, but hidden inside these 5ft thick walls.

I would more picture a system where you install standardized wall panels on the load bearing structure with a DIN rail like system. You buy panels that are some standard width (say 16 inches) and come in standardized heights (e.g. 2ft, 4ft, 8ft) with whatever connections running through them. If you want to re-configure your house, you just buy replacement panels.

Now I see significant technical drawbacks to such a system, but it is an interesting idea to think about and would be way more space efficient than the one you are talking about.

Seconded. I already told my wife that if and when we'll be moving to a country house, I want to have walls made like on starships in Star Trek - with space in the walls through which cabling runs, covered by disguised access panels that can be taken off.

(I'm not sure she fully understands how serious I'm about it, and the extent to which I want to push it. I want them across the whole wall, i.e. so I could, if need be, reroute any cabling throughought the entire floor.)

It seems far more likely that you'd just install conduit correctly, and do cable routing in the attic.

I remember reading about some construction bricks with removable access panels along these same lines, but apparently I was hallucinating because I cannot for the life of me find these regardless of any combination of search terms on both DDG and Google. I also remember them still being in the design/prototype stage, so they're probably vaporware.

My blender has a base which is attached to the wall, and a removable part where the stuff you're blending goes. What advantage would it bring me if I could move the base? It also has a 1200W motor or something similar. The batteries required to power that for any reasonable length of time would be heavy and expensive.

This seems like a solution in search of a problem.

I understand the convenience argument, but with current battery technology this would not be sustainable. All those batteries require rare earth materials and add more waste to our daily lives as they have limited lifespans.

Using batteries like this sounds extremely wasteful. A lot of energy goes into extracting the lithium and it's not like they last forever.

A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows)

I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it.

Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a remote collaboration revolution, with notion, airtable, teams and slack becoming the norm, but this one thing seems to be completely sidelined.

I would have blindly jumped headfirst into making such an app if I did not have serious visa related causes holding me down. I can see it, but it just isn't there yet.

p.s: I have spent days finding a good app. (onenote is my begrudging compromise for now). Send me a good one if you can. There isn't much on apple either, but I care more about the windows ecosystem.

have you tried https://roamresearch.com/

No, but this does sound interesting. The graph overview is lovely.

I am hoping for something that treats pen input/ white boards as first party and have text take a back seat.

While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/

It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too.

Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid.

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

Even just as a desktop markdown editor, Obsidian definitely delivers. You point to a folder with your files and that's it.

I will be following obsidian's development with great interest. It isn't exactly what I am looking for, but with it might just be enough to convince me to move away from onenote.

An alternative to roamresearch: just use `org-roam` with `org` :). Will support zettelkasten style note taking for free.

I use InkDrop exclusively. It's a paid app, but it's a fancy Markdown editor that has plugin support and various organization systems (tags, notebooks, statuses like "in progress," "completed," etc). I use the Mermaid plugin which allows me to write out some fairly complex charts, but there's some other charting ones as well.

Strongly agreed. Ever since I bought a 2-in-1 device with a pen, I lament at the dearth of applications that make good use of pens/styluses. It's a really powerful mode of input, but you can't treat it as just a funny mouse.

Also strongly seconding the graph point. Over the past few years, I've learned to see directed graphs everywhere (particularly in task/project management, something I rant on every now and then). It's a truly powerful mental model, it's a natural model for representing quite a lot of things, and yet it's also terribly underutilized on the UI/UX side.

Currently, I'm thinking about writing my own todo app ( :) ) with a strong graph twist. I've already switched from org-mode and all the Trellos/planners to Microsoft Project, of all things, precisely because it understands that tasks form a graph and not a shallow tree. But MS Project's UX is quite clunky if you want to use it as a day-to-day task management tool. I think there's a lot of space for improvement here.

(A nice side effect for using MS Project to break down my own work is that when my PM asks me about my progress during our 1:1s, I just show her the GANTT chart, which cleanly communicates my plan, the order of things, their interdependencies, and estimated delivery date. I've learned to appreciate GANTT charts myself, too.)

I'm working on something related in VR. I live in Evernote, Anki, and PDFs.

I currently use Notion. It isn’t perfect but it is getting better.

I hope their API opens a lot of possibilities.

Not quite what you're looking for I think, but Milton[0] makes a pretty great whiteboard with its infinite canvas, infinite detail, and infinite undo.

[0] https://milton.handmade.network/

I once prototyped this [1], if my job search fails, I'm going to work on that full-time for at least a month. I've had several moments where I mentioned it on HN but it never caught on.

To what extent is this what you're looking for? I focused on: collaborative, stylus first, multi-device and pressure sensitivity.

If this is what you're looking for, feel free to chat about it! (my email is in my profile description)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhrNl-fRrC8&

Note: doodledocs.com is currently offline, so that's why I'm showing the video. It worked on a Wacom, iPad and MS Surface.

Honestly, because most "mind maps" convey a loosely connected set of ideas that provide information only to the author. This is not a collaborative tool.

Whiteboarding, there's a dozen existing apps, but none are like IPO worthy IMO. If you think there's something missing, I'm not sure you need a visa to pursue it (unless I suppose if you are already living somewhere on a work visa and need to continue that work).

miro.com does a good job at this

Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)

when you think it through, it's simply better to keep heat/electricity usage to a minimum, and just keep stuff better insulated overall. And I would say this area of problems is still being worked on, but you know physics gets in the way, and iterating in housing is a lot slower than software...

Regarding refrigeration appliances, this is a solved problem. Most commercial refrigerators and ACs have a separate condensing unit placed outdoors (which also houses the compressor so its own heat doesn't affect the indoor location which is a problem when cooling).

The problem is that most homes aren't build with this in mind and don't provide a place to run the refrigerant lines (nor comes with the lines built-in) especially for the fridge.

When I build my next house, I am doing this for the refrigerator, not for the heat, but for the noise.

It also adds a lot of complexity if you want to change anything. Want to remodel your kitchen and move the fridge to the other side? Now you have to reroute refrigerant lines. Want to add a second fridge in the garage? Is your outdoor compressor large enough to handle it? You have to run new lines to it, maybe replace the compressor, or add a second one. Way more expensive and complex than just buying a refrigerator at Home Depot and plugging it in.

When you think about how complex it would be, it makes very little sense to bother putting so much work and money in to such a little savings which also means you can no longer move your stuff around or easily replace your fridge with a different model.

Your time and money would be better spent on buying solar panels and batteries. And once you have those it would be better spent on investing in solar farms.

Real estate agent here... so I see a lot of houses and get asked a lot of questions about houses... at the root of your inquiry, I see a couple things going on:

1) Builders at scale aren't willing to make these kinds of investments. They want standard designs that they can throw up as cheaply and quickly as possible. Frankly some of the developments I've seen in my area are just hideous - like if they had just run the streets the other direction people would have had view lots, but they were too effing cheap and lazy to even do that, let alone hire an actual architect.

2) Distribution networks of building supplies are ineffective and feels like a market ripe for disruption. Just because there exists some cool new material or energy-saving option out there in the world doesn't mean that one's local builders have access. So, whatever is available to them is what's going into local houses.

3) Consumer tastes. Human beings have notions about houses. Lots of humans like house designs that are conforming to local norms and traditions. So thermally efficient designs like below-ground homes often end up as outliers that don't sell particularly well to buyers who don't understand the benefits.

I wonder if GP's problem could be approached through standardization of heat exchange piping? While people like to move the furniture and white goods around every now and then, usually the kitchen stays a kitchen and the bathroom stays a bathroom, because that's where the piping goes. And we already put all kinds of pipes and wiring in the walls. I imagine another set of piping could be run, meant specifically for moving the heat in and out, with standardized endpoints for appliances to hook into.

This is kind of the idea of variable refrigerant flow system which can heat, cool, and move heat from one space to another. Seems like an "easy" solution would be to add appliances to the system.

> like if they had just run the streets the other direction people would have had view lots

Wouldn't that have allowed them to make more $$$$$$$ because places with a view sell for more than places without?

Depends. Would the delays (due to the search for proper architects and waiting for them to come up with a good layout) cost less than the extra profit they might generate? What if the delay results in less sales - the right timing is a massive issue in construction projects. As usual, it's "trade-offs, trade-offs everywhere"...

Hot water heaters are doing this. You can buy a hybrid hot water heater for around $1200 from your local hardware store. The crazy upside is it acts as an air-conditioner for your garage, and the heat exhaust is used to keep the tank of water warm. They're loud, but it pays for itself in a few years.

I'm also surprised other homebuilders/designers haven't connected the a/c condenser heat exhaust to a centralized location for hot water tanks. I've seen a few people on YouTube do it however for their heated pools.

My parents have two of these in the attic of their new house. I went up there over the summer and it was noticeably cooler than the garage where the access is. This is in the summer in Texas.

They also put their HVAC into the attic and the entire house is insulated with spray foam, so the attic only a few degrees warmer than the house below it.

I need to ask them what the energy bills were but I imagine they were low enough to prevent complaint.

With the prevalence of "planned unit development" style suburban housing design I've always been a little amazed that no AHJs require district heating/cooling solutions. Here in Texas they already require PUD-based water and wastewater so often the first developments in rural expansion of the cities have their own small water and wastewater treatment systems.

Its a small step to run hot/cold water supply lines when you are using tax-free muni bonds to put in the streets and sewers already, and have to have a maintenance fee structure that operates the plant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation

This already exists and is starting to gain popularity for new builds. It’s also not that expensive to retrofit, but is most effective when a home is sealed well.

I think you are vastly over estimating how much energy appliances need, and how much waste heat that produces. A modern refrigerator for example can consume less than 1kW per day.

The only common appliance that I can think of that produces a lot of unwanted heat would be a dryer. But instead of a gas dryer that sends all the waste heat outside, you could get a condenser dryer with a heat pump which consumes much less energy and hence produces much less heat.

From a residential standpoint it doesn't really make sense.

*kWh

Excellent post.

But you forgot the "oven-in-summer" :)

Most of the people who know that are Architecture and/or Landscape people. Yeah, landscaping. You plant trees which have shade in the summer and lose their leaves in the winter. As such, it cools the house in the summer, and heats up the house in the winter.

Talk to a few architecture / landscaping experts. They got plenty of ideas of how to optimize homes.

EDIT: And then a technologist comes in, wonders who put this big tree in front of their roof. They cut down the tree, install 20% efficient solar panels and overall have to spend more energy cooling down their house in the summer... completely ignoring the thought and effort the architect and landscapers put towards the home.

But I want sunlight in my living room, not shade!

Cold pantries (i.e. pantries with a vent to the outside) certainly exist, my (Swedish) apartment has one. I believe they used to be common, but have fallen out of fashion.

Its thermometer currently reads 6° C, so in winter it can more-or-less be used as a second refrigerator.

In the 1940s, you could buy a refrigerator with a "butter conditioner" to keep butter at a spreadable 65°F. Basically a compartment in the wall with a thermostat and heater, warmer than the main fridge but colder than the room.

Manufacturers killed the feature to reduce energy waste, instead of adding thicker insulation around the compartment.

I think one thing worth mentioning is that any hole to the outside of your home is a huge deal from a maintence perspective. Animals try to get in through the exhaust holes, the 'flashing' around them goes bad and lets in air, they clog up with dust and dirt, the louver spring holding them closed ages out and lets cold air in, animals nest in there if the louver or grill breaks or rusts, etc. Oh and if we consider things like air fryers, toaster overs, etc then you potentially have a fire situation with whatever dust or food crumbs that may get stuck in there, a bit like a dryer fire because of lint.

I think no one wants a new hole in their home unless they can't avoid it. Its a hard sell all around I'm afraid. Not to mention the DIY spirit around electric appliances. They are such wonderful marvels because we can just buy them and plug them in! We don't need a credentialed professional running tubing or cutting through our walls to install them. A competitor asking for an exhaust port will simply get eaten up by the one not asking for it.

Great idea! There was a system in the late 1800, early 1900 in Sweden. There would be a ventilation whole from the outside leading to the cold storage area. But these seems to have been forgotten since the refrigerator was invented.

We would need todo the same thing but more modern take with a heat exchanger/heat pumps. That would save gadzallions amount of energy used for cooling refrigerators. Depending on climate of course.

This is called a heat pump, and you will likely see this replace or augment traditional A/C and water heaters over the next 5-10 years.

Unfortunately winter air is actually _too warm_ for heat pumps to use winter air for cooling! They use outside air for heating, year round.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vU9x3dFMrU

Thorium based nuclear power, instead of trying to minimize consumption of dirty (coal/oil/gas) or expensive-limited-impractical (solar/wind/wave) energy. We should (again) focus more on producing energy that's too cheap to meter. I want my flat-rate power subscription, and I want it yesterday!

We've invented this artificial energy scarcity problem by refusing to use the cleanest and safest solution out there, even traditional 60's era nuclear power kills fewer people per unit of energy produces than any other source of energy.

I put this down to virtue-signalling more than anything else, but even so, nuclear energy is what I'm surprised we're not working on more.

You know "Explorable Explanations" (https://explorabl.es/)? I'm surprised more work isn't going into tools to optimize ease of creation of that kind of thing. Imagine any grade school teacher could create something like this for their kids (or even let kids make them for themselves - something like Scratch). I think that (easy development of interactive explanations) would be an educational revolution.

I'm working on this and I completely agree! I'm a LOOONG way away, my first goal is to create a drawing app similar to http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend.... From there, I want to create a WYSIWYG where you can drag in these drawings and add controls. Controls -> data -> drawings.

Maybe not so much surprised but more disappointed that sustainable public infrastructure isn't more in focus.

Things like road surfaces that don't need to be replaced every couple of years, or better consideration when large infrastructure spending comes around how those bridges, dams, water works, etc, etc will be monitored, maintained and expanded over time.

To extend that point: I wish there was some focus developing low-maintenance technologies - i.e. things that live long and don't require active maintenace or attention, because they passively or actively clean and fix themselves. It would be nice not just for infrastructure, but also for every household. Despite the proliferation of machines that reduce the household workload, we're still wasting large amounts of time keeping our houses clean and in working condition.

This is my cue to mention Solar Roadways, which I’ve been a fan of since 2013-14. They would solve or beautify so many existing problems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4&list=PLPnz7ojKD2...

Thunderf00t has some really entertaining videos about that.

> Things like road surfaces that don't need to be replaced every couple of years,

I remembered this article where they discuss self-healing materials for use in road construction: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/4/15544156/potholes-self-hea...

Or simply a road design that doesn't involve ripping it up every few weeks for another set of cables or pipes. Some sort of conduit that runs parallel or, where appropriate, roads that have a large tunnel underneath for running utilities?

Happening in my city right now... They're installing a light rail up one of the streets, so first year of the project is naturally moving all the telephone and fiber from buried under the middle of the street to buried under the side of the street.

Web Filtering, Web Automation and especially the UX behind it.

I don't understand why the Web Browser ecosystem is stuck with Extensions, and why Web Browsers, the most used programs on the planet, are still unautomated for 99% of humans.

This just doesn't make sense in any economical or rational view.

Web Filtering and Ad Blocking are things that are stuck UX wise, because currently there are basically two different concepts. Either you have some scammy anti-virus firewall premium service that does things you don't understand, or you have an Ungoogled Chromium with uBlock Origin and uMatrix where you can block per domain basis (which most people don't even understand in terms of terminology).

Why is the Web not allowlisted?

Say you browse a website, and you disable everything by default. Then you want to allow a payment provider because you want to buy something, and you click on "Allow PayPal".

Wouldn't a collective list of services and SDKs and their required assets in the form of a named "web service" list make more sense than the adblocking approach?

I think that this can be improved a _lot_ in its UX.

Coming back to Automation of the Semantics of the Web:

I think once a Web Browser gets smart enough to understand the semantics of a website, and the implications of user interactions ( e.g. "make a payment" or "subscribe to channel") - it can be recorded, trained, and automated.

And I think this is the reason why I started to build a Browser from scratch, even when it is an almost impossible task to do. I believe that Web Automation is a necessary step to get to a superintelligence level.

And such a Browser would push our collective efficiency far beyond what we can imagine right now.

> Wouldn't a collective list of services and SDKs and their required assets in the form of a named "web service" list make more sense than the adblocking approach?

Standardizing things at such scale would limit the implementation of new web technologies as sites have to wait for the overloaded browsers to catch up with their new technologies each time they invent something new. All in all, it would overcomplicate things and slow down development.

Plus, web browsers are an intimate part of our online lives and act as the main gateway for almost all our activity on the internet. As such it is better to have barebones web browsers like we are used to having in my opinion and extend them as users see fit (similar to adhering to the Unix philosophy), instead of having rigidly-built software that take away control what technologies to implement from the user.

> Standardizing things at such scale would limit the implementation of new web technologies as sites have to wait for the overloaded browsers to catch up with their new technologies each time they invent something new.

Isn't this the state we're already in, given that most websites still use jquery, and the websites that don't use babelified codes for decade old web browsers?

My argument was meant from the user's perspective of an Adblocker. A user doesn't know what an included script from xyz.paypal.com/what/ever.js does. But a user recognizes PayPal as a service, and knows that they want to pay for something.

> web browsers are an intimate part of our lives (...)

This kind of contradicts your own argument, because Web Browsers as they are built right now don't give a damn about anything and will happily execute any code from any malicious website.

The only project that somewhat pushes this state (or default behaviour) forward is WebKit, and Firefox sometimes keeps up with how third party trackers are handled.

I don't know how you perceive this as taking control away from the user. I wanted to offer a button that says "Enable PayPal" and a concept that disables everything by default.

A user that doesn't understand the concept of uMatrix is a user without control, that will just enable everything anyways once websites stop working due to lack of understanding.

> I don't understand why the Web Browser ecosystem is stuck with Extensions, and why Web Browsers, the most used programs on the planet, are still unautomated for 99% of humans.

It's simple, really: because it's strongly against the interest of people with money. And I don't mean some shady megacorps like Google here. A sane web goes against most of the commerce, big and small alike.

Ad blockers are what they are because there's no money in making them, and a lot of money in making them go away. That's why they're not included in browsers by default (all two relevant browsers being directly or indirectly ad-funded). A good chunk of the Internet - including all the little content creators - makes money from ads, and would like to see the blockers go away.

> once a Web Browser gets smart enough to understand the semantics of a website, and the implications of user interactions ( e.g. "make a payment" or "subscribe to channel") - it can be recorded, trained, and automated

Again, entirely against the interests of everyone with money. Pretty much every business on-line wants to control the interaction between their sites and you, and most of them want to use that control to screw you over. Expose you to extra advertising, upsell you some of their other wares, make sure you choose the option that's profitable for you and not them, etc. Whether you (generic you) realize it or not, the relationship between you and a commercial site is almost always antagonistic. Any automation and browser smarts that makes your experience better is one that cuts into site owners profits.

In short, the problem isn't technology. The problem is business incentives. The web is a wild west, built for people with means to exploit those without.

Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.

Agreed. There are a few full text/archiving solutions out there but they all seem to be very manually driven. Automating that properly seems to be hard to make slick enough.

One very easy win though would be to address the fact that history in browsers only allows you to see and sort by the most recent date you visited a page. So you can't really answer the question "what are the pages I visited in March this year?" (for example) with any confidence and you can't be sure you've got all the pages you visited in a particular cluster if you might have gone back to one of them later.

This is a problem that Google tackled themselves, but it had too many problems[0]. Recent attempts use Chrome Dev Tools[1] to cache the results. So this may alleviate problems Google had. Memex had attempted this, but deprecated it:

> We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users

...

> We spent so much time on building the search and with it also 30-50% more time on every new feature because of interdependencies with the amount of data produced. End2End encrypted sync, backup, search performance, search filters, all were directly or indirectly necessary to work much better than we can afford. We're just 2.5 devs.

Another developer attempted this, too. But didn't have many users:

> I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]

One user does point out the reason why this may not have took off:

> about once every two months, I am looking for something that I swear I came across on the Internet at some point. However, the rest of the time, I'm able to re-find it just by doing another search, whether on search-engine-of-choice, or a search box on particular-website (e.g. socnet, stackoverflow, reddit, github, hacker news...).[3]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745931

[1] https://github.com/c9fe/22120

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13427464

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744785

>> I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]

Here's then a problem I wish people worked more on: structural support for products/features that are used rarely, but when they're needed, they're really needed. Browser history interface falls under this: it's rarely needed, but when you open it, it's usually because you really need to find something again that's not easily found through web search.

> and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content

...and a history feature that's nearly unusable. I don't even trust it anymore - Chrome's history UI feels like it's losing information, and there've been plenty of times I'm 99% I visited a page few days or weeks before, but it's nowhere to be found in history. And honestly, I don't even need full-text search. I need a table with the following columns: page URL, page title, and access time. I need that table to be sortable by these columns, and filterable by their values.

In a way, we've regressed from the days of IE 5, back from the time where browser cache was a folder. Because back then, I could open that folder, sort it by date, and guess the sites I visited from the name of the files - that being a much better UX than what I get in Firefox today.

yeah what's up with that,. why are sites I know I visited not in my history? Why is their omni bar so awful? etc etc

Having digged through my history on Firefox it seems it has gone backwards... Like now it's something popping up from side and horribly slow. Plus I remember being able to remove sites in navbar by delete... But now that is gone...

i'm working on this as a browser extension. to get my feet wet i created Yet Another Speed Dial (https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial) which many people find useful, but the end goal is to apply the same kind of richness to all bookmarks and history

Please take a look at https://histre.com/

I had to go as far as create a chrome extension that helps with managing 10000 bookmarks, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager-p... feel free to try it out, maybe it helps

Pagination is always obviously somewhere at the bottom of a site's priorities but...that's how people engage with more of your site.

Random examples of the state of the art, which is remarkably similar to the state of the art, oh, 15 years ago:

https://freefrontend.com/assets/img/css-pagination/paginatio...

https://uicookies.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Pagination-...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4a/af/58/4aaf58f56e598e6c485e...

yeah why is pagination on HN so bad I've hit more 4 times to see your comment.

Moreso: does ">>" mean "go to the end" or "skip 10 pages ahead?"

Building a shared runtime for Electron so that each Electron app no longer needs to bundle Node.js and Chromium. It would significantly improve the performance of a framework now used by countless apps. So far as I can tell, this has been on the back burner of the Electron team for many years. I'm surprised it's not a higher priority.

The webview project fills some of this need, correct? I didn't start using one yet but there were multiple GUI projects leveraging it to create cross-platform application binaries.

Link - https://github.com/webview/webview

Unless something has changed, using that means no Webassembly support on Windows[0].

[0]https://github.com/webview/webview/issues/76

For now, hopefully: https://github.com/webview/webview/issues/85

Earlier discussion on this Topic : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19083169

Couldn't that just be made with a browser that would allow to be run in a runtime mode with limited features?

This already exists: the browser is the shared runtime. What needs to happen is everyone shipping Electron should instead ship a local HTTP server and open the user's default browser to run the UI. You can hide the browser chrome and make real top level windows by making your app a PWA. Anything else that needs to happen outside of the browser sandbox can be handled by the local server.

The only disadvantage is you lose control over the browser version that's running, but you also lose that with a shared runtime (unless every app pins their own runtime version which defeats the purpose of sharing). Besides, most Electron apps also have a web version that has to support all browsers anyway. The advantage is you seriously reduce the disk and memory footprint of your app and shed the responsibility of shipping prompt patches for Chromium security issues.

> should instead just ship a local HTTP server

and a Node.JS runtime, and native libraries to support menubars, system trays, dialogs that support folder selections, native drag and drop for all file types, ...

I agree, though: if the electron app doesn't need any of these things, it really shouldn't pull in the entire electron runtime.

Node is a lot smaller than Chromium. Even if the app does want some of the other things you list, it's possible to do all of them from the server, and it'll remain a fraction of the size of Electron.

yeah just use Chromium as the GUI interface and do everything else in node. Come on! Someone goto have alredy done this, no?

With a local server, how do you avoid Windows's scary confusing firewall prompts? I'm sure they cost users, and for a local app they don't make sense. Is there a way to make your server local-only that will prevent them?

You can bind to the loopback interface so the server isn't exposed to the network. I am not sure if Windows will choose to show the scary dialog in this case. To be absolutely sure, according to Stack Overflow you can request admin privileges (standard for Windows installers of course) and add a firewall rule yourself allowing any network communication you want.

We are losing Chrome Apps.

And then you need to have everyone install the runtime. And update it.

And we're back in Java-land, but with HTML instead of Swing :-)

It's nice from a developer point of view but I wonder how many application creators/vendors will actually use it. Most want to control as much of the stack as possible.

Here's the 6-year-old issue about a shared runtime for Electron:

Idea of runtime mode - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

What electron apps can’t be done as chrome pages with local file system access?

Markdown for academic papers. We have this https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown (which is the best template I know and on a personal note I've written my thesis with that too) but the whole ecosystem can be still improved.

How close does AsciiDoctor + asciidoctor-latex get to that? https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-latex

I've only been using Asciidoctor for a few weeks but I'm already an MD convert.

Oh that's also nice. I mean I also like AsciiDoctor. I think this can get close to the link I mentioned. The biggest difference is that the link I mentioned has an example of a real thesis with this markdown toolchain.

I wrote my thesis with Markdown, combined with pandoc. Worked out allright. I think Overleaf supports Markdown now as well, which might be a more practical approach for those not familiar with git/make/shell.

Speaking of academic papers, I'd love to see a focus on readability.

So many papers are just too dense for readers outside of the specific field. This can be because of the complexity of the subject matter, but I often notice unnecessary specific vocabulary and over-complicating concepts.

Because of this, it's impractical for the layman to go read academic papers outside of their field. This leads to reading some news article that attempts to summarize it, and we all know that majority of the time it's just the headline that gets read.

I think that's by design. You could argue that it's a barrier to entry, but I think it's more likely just a means of efficient communication among experts, who already complain there are too many papers to read.

Boils down to “who’s the customer for the paper?”

If it is a clique of experts, they can do what they want.

If Society is paying for it, then the customer base is arguably larger. But the current incentive system for academics and the like doesn’t reflect the needs of that (generally educated and interested) larger customer base. It’s a happy accident when those needs are met. No easier time in the history of the planet for them to be met.

In case it's useful, this one seems to have been built specially for that use case: https://www.zettlr.com/

Packaged 'apps' to run in the cloud.

Rather than everyone selling a SaaS which they're just hosting on AWS anyway, they should just have a one-click install of an instance to my personal AWS. There's really no reason it should be any harder than installing an app to my phone or computer.

I've seen one or two "launch on AWS" buttons about, and they have a marketplace, but clearly these aren't widely adopted or useable.

I think this would open up some interesting opportunities for non-technical individuals and small businesses. Plus then you know you own your data.

Digital Ocean Marketplace https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/ is something similar.

When I worked on Microsoft Azure, my team created many Azure Resource Manager templates that we offered on Azure Marketplace. There was no charge for the software, only the underlying resources that you consumed. While privacy and owning your data was a benefit, this had many more downsides and 99% of our customers were asking us to offer those solution as a managed PaaS offering. First, because the app was single tenanted the cost for most users did not justify the benefits that they were getting from it. Maintenance, trouble shooting, scaling, updating, and support are just few areas to call out where our customers had trouble and wanted us to run everything for them and just give them access.

Of course the customer experience lacked mostly due to the lack of a better platform for offering such "one click to deploy" apps. But still the customer needs to manage the uptime of the system and have on-call engineers who not only are intimately familiar with our software but can quickly identify and fix the issue.

Smartphone Keyboard

I cannot type a single sentence without making a typo and I have been using a smartphone for 12 years. I miss Blackberry's keyboard. At the moment I even cannot use my natural keyboard layout with a fast and responsive keyboard. I type 3 times slower on my phone than on a computer keyboard.

Last time I visited Tokyo I bought a sleek little folding Bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket but unfolds to nearly full size and types very comfortably. By just unfolding it, it pairs with my Android phone and the on-screen keyboard disappears. Folding it up triggers the phone keyboard to reappear. I take it with me whenever I expect to write anything about as long as this comment.

Being generally a luddite when it comes to devices, I'm honestly shocked at how seamless the pairing process is.

I don't know why they don't sell these in North America.

Care to compare / contrast your keyboard to the folding keyboards on Amazon?

https://www.amazon.com/Keyboard-Bluetooth-Geyes-Wireless-Sma...

https://www.amazon.com/Geyes-Ultra-thin-Kickstand-Universal-...

Has anyone tried to improve upon the Dasher eye-tracking thing for text composition? Seems like there could be more ideas here that haven't really been explored.

http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html

Would a smarter auto-correct help?

I'm finding the touch keyboard too impractical for my purposes so I'm going back to BB, probably the Key2 LE. There are other keyboard phones on the market now that run Android but they also don't have the productivity toolset that I'm accustomed to and prefer.

With a little tuning SwiftKey is amazing. (For me I mostly just need to turn off the replace-words-automatically-using-insane-replacements option.)

I very much agree. And the annoying thing for me is that I spend much of my (work) life sitting in front of a full-size keyboard, yet when I want to respond to a personal email on my phone it's actually quicker to type it on the PC keyboard, mail it to myself, and then copy-paste it into my personal email on my phone. It's horrific.

What I've longed for is a bluetooth dongle (or something) that I can just plug into the PC or piggyback on the keyboard's USB connector, and which will let me use the keyboard I already have to type on my phone.

Information discovery and what search looks like post Google.

Seems like we got to a search bar that can answer any question we type in but haven't thought beyond it. Like what if we were recommended what questions to ask in the first place?

Thinking out loud here: we generate a ton of data just by browsing and existing on the internet. This data is plugged into recommendation algos to serve ads. What if instead these algorithms were tuned to serve us direct websites or text that could provide our next source for inspiration?

^I'm working on this idea, still pretty early stages but it feels like the time is right to create such technology. Do reach out if you want to collaborate or riff on it.

> Like what if we were recommended what questions to ask in the first place?

That's what Google is doing in the last several years and it's very annoying. They don't try to look for niche sources and articles and just gently correct your query to pertain to something more popular or trendy. We don't need more of that.

> What if instead these algorithms were tuned to serve us direct websites or text that could provide our next source for inspiration?

Sure, I like that. But how do we ensure it would also not be used for ads and tracking again? I feel companies are just too easily tempted and can't be trusted.

> Seems like we got to a search bar that can answer any question we type in but haven't thought beyond it.

IMO a lot of us here thought about it but (a) it's not easy, it's likely a rather gigantic undertaking and (b) nobody funds such research and (c) we can't do it as a hobby while maintaining a $dayjob so in the end we are the mercy of the corps.

Innovation in the mental health care space. Right now most of the top funded startups are working on either 1) Simplifying access for wealth people to the already available supply of therapists; or 2) Removing the human component entirely by creating with apps which have very little evidence to back them up.

I see mental health care as one of the most important problems of out time, at the root of so many of the issues we see in society today. Yet government has been very slow to act, which in turn means insurance companies don't modernize their reimbursement policies, which then stifles innovation.

I agree. How can mental health issues like depression be affecting so many people, yet all we are settling for as a solution are pills that don't even work that well, haven't been studied in the long-term, create a long-term dependency, and have unholy side effects??

I was shocked when I found out that the current most effective therapy modality, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, is only successful in 50% of patients.

I'm very hopeful for the future of psychedelic therapy, as it seems to be very effective after just a single dose and non-toxic.

One frequent complaint I see is the difficulty accessing therapists either owing to cost or availability. Also just feeling lost as to how to attack the problem.

I see it as an information issue. According to research, online-administered CBT can be effective, and so are workbooks. Since CBT is so simple in principle, no reason this information shouldn't be easily accessible. I've even found free CBT workbooks online: https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/therapists_guide_to_brie....

This doesn't have to "replace" therapy, but it can be the first line of defense, along with what we know helps a great deal: regular exercise (boosts serotonin and reduces stress), adequate vitamin D3 intake (mood enhancer and helps anchor circadian rhythm), proper whole foods diet, enough socializing, etc.

I think the (possible) epidemic of mental health issues is exacerbated by a combination of isolation, stress (and negative newscycle bombardment), sedentary lifestyle.

Subvocal recognition (wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition) - it seems like it's a mostly solved problem in labs, but hasn't been commercialized. I feel like being able to do voice control silently would be a major paradigm shift in how we interact with computers.

My VR headset has voice recognition. The problem? I talk to myself when gaming and trying to figure something out. So I end up "opening" random programs when I say, "huh, I guess I need to open that next." Detecting that I want something with this technology is the "easy part," detecting that I actually want something right this second and I want actually desire for the device to commit, is the hard part.

Consumer throat mics in the field get generally negative reviews. In particular if the transducers shift position even a little, the speaker become unintelligible. That ergonomics problem needs to be solved first.

I think the military throat mics are usually built into flight suits, so they may be less prone to shifting? I know in the lab, they are usually taped into place, which isn't really practical for the real-world.

Yes, this a step towards technological telepathy.

Something that hasn't been tried as far as I know is to design a new human language from the ground up with only phonemes that are easily distinguishable when spoken silently.

That is, first we figure the kind of signals that are well separated by ML interpreting EMG output on the throat when subvocalizing a range of sounds, and then we build a conlang using only the precursors to these signals.

Possibly this conlang could then be parsed and translated and the recipient of the message could hear their native tongue instead.

It could start as a computational language at first, only used to send commands and control to software, but then it could be expanded with more nuances and human-centered constructs.

I work on voice control with a custom speech engine and models (Talon). I know nothing about subvocal mic hardware or even how the audio sounds, but if anyone has a viable answer to this, especially with a good hardware option, please reach out to me.

Basically, if someone can point me to a solid subvocal speech recognition tech demo and a reliable subvocal mic (note the sibling comment that indicates generic subvocal mics are frustrating and fall out of alignment easily): I think I could train production subvocal speech models, tune support for the audio style in my app, and ship to the public in a matter of weeks.

Structured interviews. There's a massive literature supporting the idea that structured interviews outperform any other kind in predicting outcomes, and instead we get ten remote whiteboard screening apps, and adhoc interview panels of people with, frankly, conflicting values and evaluation criteria.

I’m interestsd.

Can you link any of the literature you have in mind?

Well, the lit survey people tend to cite on interviewing is Schmidt and Hunter 98: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Schmidt-and-H...

GUI's, such as a GUI Markup Standard. Mobile UI conventions stole the show, but IN PRACTICE gui's still rule the office and productivity world.

Yet, our current web standards are GUI and CRUD un-friendly. To be desktop-like in a browser requires giant JavaScript libraries which are clunky and buggy.

GUI's may no longer be sexy, but they still run the backlots of the world and that's not likely to change within the next decade or more. Mobile UI's are a sub-set of rich GUI's, which logically means they don't have the same full ability. I could list several UI patterns GUI's do with fewer human eye and finger movements.

So, let's create a state-friendly GUI markup standard so we can have rich GUI's in browsers without requiring bloated buggy JS/CSS libraries.

And somewhat related, our current web standards have too many "positioning problems" such that they can't replace PDF's. PDF's are needed because end users (non-IT office workers) want WYSIWYG documents; they can't afford to go to CSS school.

What makes you certain any theoretical GUI markup standard would improve on the industry standard of Electron and Chromium wrapped web components? Just need to look at the utility and performance of vscode to see what is currently possible.

People who set out to invent "better GUI tools" always eventually realize it's no the specifics of the programming language used to build them that's hard. It's high level things like state management.

iOS doesn't even have a stable answer to React, yet. The problem isn't JS/CSS.

Why is state management a problem? Could you give a sample scenario? Have all screens be tied to an application session instead of managing page per page. A given screen stays put the entire session (although may be hidden or removed as needed). Its state would be hierarchically addressable & examinable, such as requesting "scopeA:screenB.panelC.widgetD.value". (Scoping clause optional.) I have some further suggestions for state and scope management that would take up too much space here.

The Oracle Forms client seemed to somehow pull it off. (It used a proprietary markup, not XML.) There are deficiencies with the Oracle Forms model, but it proved a browser-like GUI client approach can work. Companies loved Oracle Forms before Java ruined it. They weren't pretty, but cheap and practical to create and maintain. The Oracle Forms devs were 3x more productive than our MVC team and it took about 1/5 the code to do the same thing. Productivity died in CRUDville; we de-evolved. (Same for desktop VB & Delphi like tools, although they required per-PC reinstalls for app upgrades, unlike Oracle Forms.)

A way for a company I interact with infrequently to identify me over the phone. Pin codes and secret questions are easy to forget when they can literally go years without being used. What was my favorite movie when I setup my ISP account in 2016? This leads to customer service reps that are too forgiving and are easily susceptible to social engineering.

Randomize the answers to those things, and stick them in your password manager alongside (or separate from) the log-in information.

Site asks for my mother maiden's name? Let me check "pwgen 18 1"... That'll be "Viquo4cai2gienoo2p".

That may be vulnerable to social engineering if the person on the other side accepts "I'm using a randomly generated string of letters" as an answer :). So if your password manager accepts user-provided passwords, I'd just string two or three random words together and use that as the maiden name.

Never understood those kind of "security" questions. Is the site really going to hand out access to my account if that question gets answered correctly?

Also, some sites don't allow you to not set up one, so it's like forcing users to open up a new vector to be hacked.

Charles Schwab does this with voice recognition. It certainly works, but I'm guessing its cheaper to use these legacy systems.

You'd think they would just use the same 2FA methods that are popular for logging in. 'We sent a notification, click accept on it to continue' or 'read the 6 digit authenticator code' would be re-useable for their web login and there are a ton of libraries and info that make it easy to implement.

Alternative ways than tracking, ads and information gathering/selling as a revenue source for companies handling users data.

I agree with this completely. I probably think though that the industry needs to be disrupted, ie. prove that you can monetize at scale without relying on user data. I think this is something very hard to change because the industry and its large customers are actually quite conservative. It is understandable because newspapers are not exactly a fast growing sector.

I wish that newspapers at least, etc. would instead consider working out their subscription models a bit more. I like to read stuff from multiple papers but can't justify multiple subscriptions for the occasional thing I want to read from them. The Internet opened new ways for people to access news and information but it just feels like the business model of newspapers hearkens back to pre-Internet times where you would buy the paper either at a newsstand or through home delivery.

Self driving on highways. I know many companies are focusing on tier V, everywhere. but it's starting to look like an AI-hard problem to me, and might not yield a usable solution for a while.

Meanwhile, I believe cars could do motorway driving from entry to exit today, if we focused on that. With LiDAR, some extra safety hardware on roads, coordination with local highway services, a company could make a car that is fully self driving on specific highway stretches.

Lots of people are working on this (see all the companies working on autonomous trucking), but it's less visible because public testing of this is more dangerous than non-highway driving. We won't see the progress without a much higher level of confidence.

I think the key to fully autonomous vehicles is a three part solution: Smart cars, smart roads, and car to car communication. The current view is to build all the intelligence into the cars, but as we've seen from Tesla, this effort is hard and there are an unlimited number of variables the vehicle needs to adapt to.

However, if the cars were able to communicate and get information from the road itself (speed limit, turns, traffic control etc) then the car doesn't need to be able to figure this out. Yes, it'd take awhile to retrofit roads.

Car to Car communication could be used to let vehicles know how the traffic is flowing without needing to use radar/lidar to determine when traffic is slowing ahead.

These are very basic thoughts on the subjects.

Or build something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHyxakXed34

Effectiveness and chemical makeup of home remedies/ancient medicine. I know there is no money in researching non patentable chemicals, but I'm surprised that governments are not sponsoring the research

Collection of environmental/lifestyle information of cancer patients. I know it would lead to a ton of stupid headlines, and correlation does not equal causation, but I think if you have cancer they should ask where you live what you eat what products you use and whatnot. Atleast for the cancers that do not have well known causes.

Superficially, why is there no standard video streaming api. Do content/platform owners really want to be in the app business? They are all bad it.

In rightsholderworld, the application is a mere irritation that must be paid for in order to retain absolute control over distribution for as long as possible. They probably don't want to pay for it -- why can't the customer just be happy with whatever we were already giving them! -- but they want to cede control to a third party platform even less.

Researchers and pharma companies do mine traditional medicine for potential meds. See e.g. phytoalexins. Maybe it could be more widespread, but a lot of traditional remedies just don't hold up to rigorous controls/testing.

Sex toys that are more than just a piece of latex with a vibrator.

There are tiny vibration units like the one in your phone, why aren't there sex toys with 200 of them and various patterns going through them?

Why are there no sex toys that use expanding or contracting materials like electroactive polymers.

The sex toy market is apparently 26 billion and growing.

Why don't cars (or even pickup trucks) have modular storage?

Why isn't there a way to load up your groceries in the store, put them in your car in a modular way, and help you unload them into your house somehow?

It could go even further to mini palettes that can be loaded and unloaded automatically. And even electrical cool or cold boxes to keep stuff at the right temperature as you drive home.

I think storage bins/totes and coolers work fine for most people. Throw a folding dolly in there if you want to move them faster.

Bed organizers are already a popular addon for pickup trucks, including rolling drawers.

I dreamed once if the car that has a little shopping cart that dicks with the back of the car.

Honda experimented with some ideas. The CR-V once came with an integrated folding picnic table and the Honda City had a space for a 50cc Motocompo folding scooter.

Animal Sensation of Earthquakes.

Though a not well studied phenomenon (thankfully), it is well documented and seems to be a reliable, if brief, predictor. Even if it is only a few seconds of warning, that could mean a lot of lives saved by announced warnings or via automatic means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction#Animal_b...

> only a few seconds of warning

the lead time is important for the value. I don't think a 3 second warning is valuable at all, but a 30 second warning might be. so we have stats on this?

> I don't think a 3 second warning is valuable at all

3 seconds is plenty of time for a sensor to trigger an actuator to close valve, say a natural gas valve that could leak and cause fires.

Also enough time to shut down a nuclear reactor! https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-rea...

> A reactor trip causes all the control rods to insert into the reactor core, and shut down the plant in a very short time (about three seconds).

It would be kinda fun to have a camera-ML-algo combo just looking at a bunch of cats in a room, hooked up to a nuclear fail-safe switch, waiting for them all to just freak out abruptly.

Kinda like a reverse Schrodinger's Cat experiment: the cats live if the random event triggers.

TIL. i rescind my assertion.

1. Regeneration of teeth. Maybe with stem cell biotech? I don’t know what is relevant but it’s a damn pity we have to have root canals and screw nuts and bolts for fallen teeth. 2. Nanobots that get into your bloodstream and dissolve plaque and repairs old cells/regenerates tissues.

Electric cars, but without the bullshit: no giant screens, no autopilot, just a reliable, lightweight box on wheels that can do 500km on a charge.

Or: really efficient petrol/diesel cars that weigh 600kg and consume 2l/100km (that's about 120MPG).

VW Up (Electric or petrol) or ID3 is kind of you are looking for or moving towards that. I own up petrol version - 6l/100km, but I believe petrol engines hit their limits. I remember vw built super efficient petrol car but I doubt that it will be ever in production.

Giant screens aren't expensive compared to the cost of those batteries for 500km range. Look at the new Korean EVs. They are basic but they still cost a lot.

KIA Niro EV is close. Very conservative, physical buttons for pretty much everything (thank god), modest screen, seems very reliable. Not lightweight though.

Debuggers which can visualise known types of data (e.g. vectors, matrices, bitmaps etc) and display changes made to them over time.

There you go https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hediet.d...

The programmer version of "there's an app for that" has become "there's a VSCode plugin for that".

LabVIEW has this, so you might check it out in LabVIEW Community if you're interested in this. Data flows across wires, and so you can probe the data in a running program to inspect it, which uses default displays for the probes. You can create custom probes for the data, which allows custom user interface interactions that takes in data from the probes (custom displays, additional calculations, etc.).

I am in general interested in this as well, and have found debugging in most text-based IDEs to be a step backwards.

I worked on this for quite a while: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd

Check out the glamorous toolkit https://gtoolkit.com/

Actual, practical human longevity improvement. It seems ridiculous how small of a healthcare tech niche this is given the potential impact.

I searched the internet for “telomere therapy” earlier today. I was curious if there had been any interesting advancements in the past year. Almost all hits were holistic healing sites.

There was a study in the last month showing telomere lengthening in humans via hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Still waiting for more reproductions of the study but quite promising.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/can-breathing-pure-o...

There was a big splash about this just a couple of weeks ago: hyperbaric oxygen treatment triggering telomere restoration.

Don't know if anybody has shown any actual benefit from having the telomeres boosted. Some of what had seemed like a good idea (antioxidants!) have turned out to interfere in essential signaling pathways, and be therefore harmful in excess.

Why? Human longevity is a source of problems, and I personally wish we'd work harder at making the quality of our lives better instead of extending our time here.

Human longevity goes hand in hand with making our lives better. You don't make people live longer without drastically reducing diseases and healthcare costs whilst also greatly increasing the lifetime earning potential. Human longevity is one of the most important things we can be focusing on.

I disagree with that assessment, and it isn’t what I was referring to. Of course advances in healthcare are good for people, especially for things that address disorders that strongly affect someone’s health and quality of life and also those that prematurely end life. But these things are already under heavy research and development. So it calls into question what the original commenter and I suppose you are searching for. Why do we have a need for additional work on explicitly increasing human longevity whenever such a thing is already a secondary or tertiary effect of what we’re already doing?

But a cure for cancer, for example and if it ever happens, will have no effect on poverty, lack of education, inequalities of all kinds, mental disorders, and the multitude of other societal and environmental problems.

There are tons of things we can be doing that can improve people’s quality of life, standard of living, enjoyment of life, reducing stress, and more that have little if nothing to do with healthcare advances.

Even advances in the fields of psychology and psychiatry are a bit like trying to plug a leak with bubble gum. Certainly helping people to recover from and live with mental disorders is a good thing, although seemingly underfunded in current times, but one must understand that humans are not emotionally built for the societies we’ve created. I just don’t see how longevity should be an explicit goal when the lives for so many people are a complete struggle.

Because longevity is barely studied. It receives near no funding. It has barely any attention and yet it kills more people than any other disease.

The quest for longevity explicitly helps many things. Fixing cancer is reactionary, preventing cancer from starting is longevity.

You’re confusing existing medical research with longevity research. They are very different. Almost all medical research is for fixing things that have gone wrong, longevity is trying to prevent them going wrong in the first place.

There’s always the idea that we could be doing something else, something that helps more. No one said you need to stop all other research and funding, but if we are able to prolong aging diseases you’ll help near everyone on the planet.

Give Lifespan by David Sinclair a read

I have never seen that characterization of longevity before, so I am generally confused by what you’re discussing. It is my understanding that prevention is heavily researched. I equate longevity with duration, not with preventing illnesses and diseases. Even Science Direct defines it as:

> Longevity is one of the commonly used terms in aging research that may be defined as an individual’s ability to reach longer life span under ideal conditions.

That is the definition I was asking why against. My genuine question was and is: if life is such a struggle and tough for such a huge portion of the population, why is increasing the duration of life an interesting goal?

It's usually implied that it would also increase the healthspan, rather than prolonging suffering.

Aging itself isn't something you die from, you die from age related deceases. By living longer (eg. slowing down aging) it usually means we somehow avoid and/slow down the occurrence of these deceases. On a high level this isn't something new (eg. working out, not smoking etc), but on a medicine level slowing/stopping/reversing aging isn't something that's very researched and have just recently started to get some kind of traction.

So you're correct in your thinking, we don't want to increase the duration of life without also increasing the duration of healthy life.

Edit: see my other comment with some resources you might find useful/informative.

> It's usually implied that it would also increase the healthspan, rather than prolonging suffering.

As I've stated multiple times now, this is only true if you consider suffering related to health, and I am not considering just health-related suffering. Please read my other comments before replying. I keep getting replies only talking about health in the very physical and medical sense. When I say "quality of life", I mean it in the holistic sense. For example, if someone who is poor, disenfranchised, has no retirement, lives paycheck to paycheck, lives in heavy pollution both of air and water, etc., is living longer really on top of their list?

And of course, no one has addressed the societal issues that longevity creates.

> Aging itself isn't something you die from, you die from age related deceases.

That's kind of pointless semantics, but anyway, it doesn't address anything I've said.

If we go back to the original query: "what are you surprised isn't being work on?", then is it really surprising longevity is a niche thing when there's so much else to work on (i.e., so much going wrong)? If someone really thinks longevity is interesting enough, then I'd like to see the political, societal, and environmental, not just the medical, arguments and solutions that would need to come along with it to make it a net positive.

Wanting longevity seems to be a rather privileged position.

The surprise comes from all the resources we put on solving deceases that are caused by aging. Why not solve the root cause? That's where I and many others are surprised.

> For example, if someone who is poor, disenfranchised, has no retirement, lives paycheck to paycheck, lives in heavy pollution both of air and water, etc., is living longer really on top of their list?

Maybe, maybe not. Most people don't want to die even if they don't live in the western world. Some of the things mentioned here (eg. no retirement, polluted air) wouldn't be as big of a problem if aging was solved since they would be healthier.

I would agree most people in developing countries wouldn't put longevity on top of their list (seems like people in the richer countries doesn't do that either) but the thing is we can work on multiple problems at the same time. People generally aren't suggesting we take money from aiding the poor to instead focus more on solving biological aging. It's rather using resources allocated to fighting age related deceases one by one, to instead fight aging (which seem to be the root cause) and/or adding _more_ resources to the pool of doing good in the world.

Innovations in publishing. Books are still being written, customers are still making purchases, there's clearly an appetite for longform writing, and yet everyone seems to have given up after Amazon "conquered" the industry with the Kindle.

Perhaps the innovation here will be regulatory

Do you have any concrete thoughts that you would want implemented in this domain ?

Amazon/Kindle self publishing is actually a less known but pretty clever innovation they did, especially for printed physical books. The books are printed on-demand after a customer places order on Amazon, instead of advanced publishing. This cuts down a lot on costs and resources for each book, cuts out lot of middlemen for a writer and also provides avenue for writers to go direct to market without giving up huge profits to publishing houses.

Print On Demand has been around for decades. Before Amazon, it was companies like Lulu. I haven’t used Amazon’s POD, but I’m pretty sure the concept itself isn’t their innovation.

Better cycling infrastructures, and some ways to prevent bicycle theft and vandalism.

Cycling is a great mean of transportation, it's ecological, healthy, quiet, convenient. Lack of safety and theft are hindrance to more adoption.

Would like to see an innovation to improve this in the winter. It's too dangerous in snowy/icy conditions.

An sustainable economic system that promotes sustainable consumption and recycling.

That products are design for repairability and sustainability in such a system.

Third an economic system that is not built upon debt slavery but promotes individual freedom in the age of robotics.

That would be the three main things that needs fixing. Plus most countries needs four-seven weeks of vacation per year. This would promote healthier work life balance. Four day work week another one for work life balance.

Ok I'm guessing this is super naive, but holy cow someone sell me a home robot. Ideally something with a good enough arm to load small things into the dishwasher, or at least unload onto a surface, open the front door, get the mail, put shoes where they need to be, pick up socks, dust/mop/broom, mow the lawn, fold towels, fold clean clothes from a basket, replace toilet paper, clean toilets, scoop out kitty poops, and maybe make the bed. God what a timesaver that would be. I'd pay small car prices for something like that.

I have a robot under way that can pass the butter, sadly.

But jokes aside, what a terrible life for an AI to live.

This thinking makes me think of buttons to push buttons. Gotta go up a level and imagine toilets that don't need to be cleaned.

That or become this automaton yourself. Making my bed each morning happens almost automatically before my brain is fully booted, after a while of forcing myself to make it.

You should watch the movie Robot & Frank: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1990314/

Load small things into the dishwasher: Do you want an internet-connected device that can pick up a butcher knife and move it at waist level, that has a human watching its camera to back it up when it fails? This objection applies to a bunch of your feature requests, since knives don't weigh that much :/

Open the front door: You can do this with a $5k investment in some IoT + automated door opener

Get the mail: Curious what subtasks you imagine here (e.g. outdoor vs indoor, pick up packages, climb stairs, etc)

Put shoes where they need to be, pick up socks: This could totally work today if you don't need to open doors and you don't mind organization on piles in the floor, but I think the use case isn't compelling enough on it's own to create sufficient demand.

Dust/mop/broom: lots of people have robots for floors, but higher surfaces are hard to make work. Despite this, some teams have worked on bathroom-cleaning robots with this capability.

Mow the lawn: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-robot-lawn-mowers

Fold towels: Not that hard, but small market

Fold clean clothes from a basket: Super hard if you never want to destroy the clothes, and hard even if you can destroy some clothes.

Clean toilets, replace toilet paper: People are trying! Not going to be in homes for 5+ years though.

Scoop out kitty poops: products like this exist, but you still have to manually unload them to a trash can.

Make the bed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzNZrFhBeoY haha

Computing tools for non—programmers.

In the early days of computing, we quickly came up with the spreadsheet and the user-friendly relational database (Access, FileMaker).

Then we just sort of stopped. The no-code thing today is a step in that direction, but we could do so much better.

I’m actually ashamed of the software industry that we have done so poorly at this.

I recently thought about this, too. Is there any cloud-based, simple relational database, aimed at non-programmers?

Microsoft Access is a database aimed at non-programmers. I'm not really sure why you would care if it's cloud-based or not if you aren't a programmer though. You could have Access save your database file to One Drive or something. Access also integrates with SQL Server and you can probably get a free tier one on Azure.

Microsoft is aiming to replace it with their easy to use Power App platform. Plenty of people and companies are working on this problem

QuickBase and Knack are along those lines.

A long time ago I used QuickBase. It was like a Google sheets before google sheets and you could couple multiple sheets together, relating them.

It has probably come a long way since then, but ironically, I can't get past the marketing ui of the website to see how it really works.

Fucking marketing people love to hide the product behind bullshit.

Interesting. What do you envision non-programmers would do with it?

Airbase.

Airtable

Excel, web version.

( https://www.google.com/search?q=%22excel+database%22 )

One answer is that people stopped valuing software and thus paying for software. Furthermore, every service out there now attempts to monopolize their market and intentionally degrades interoperability, further lowering the potential value these tools would provide.

Let's say there's such a tool out there and you want to buy it to roll your own mailing list and want to message your customers on Facebook Messenger. Well, you can't, and any attempt at circumventing the restriction such as screen-scraping will be met with account closures citing ToS or legal threats abusing the CFAA or even the DMCA.

It sounds like you have a specific case of this which caused some problems, what was it?

We have not done poorly. Atall. "no-code" is a whole movement now - it's the modern day COBOL. See: * Airbase (imagine circa 1998 Microsoft Access but on the web and with integrations) * Infinityapp.com * Monday.com (easily recreate your business processes and types of data, and integrate with other systems) * Asana * ....dozens more.

Then add the universal integration tools: * IFTTT * Zapier * Tray * ...and many more

Basically we're now "post-app"... a non-technical user can go to a SaaS product, follow a tutorial, create something representing their business, and link it to other best-in-class products for accounting, warehousing, shipping, e-commerce, etc.

Don't be ashamed. We've a long way to go for sure, but we've come a long way, baby.

The real problem is maintenance. Maintenance of software is about 2/3 of programming costs. It's counter-intuitive, but has proven true over time. Tools that make it easy to create the original application often make maintenance worse. They only help 1/3 of the total cost pie, pumping up the other 2/3.

Learning how to write maintainable code is actually harder than learning to code. You pretty much have to be burned by maintenance trial and error on your code AND others' code to learn this skill. There are plenty of books that teach "principles" of maintainable designs, but the principles often conflict with each other such that it's a balancing act between competing factors such that a simple list of rules fails.

I can give lots of anecdotes of people getting carried away with specific "principles". The necessary principles are a piano keyboard, but they play only a few favorite notes, making even cats cry. Knowing when and how to use which note is still an art.

Healthy and delicious mass market food. At least in the US currently it's either healthy or delicious, while in Asia and Europe it can be both.

We do, but the problem is cost. It’s one of those “of these three attributes, pick two” between healthy, delicious, and cheap.

Add a 4th item: long shelf life

Healthy, delicious and cheap exists (at home at least). But it is very labour intensive and it will go bad in a couple of days.

I think that's the difference between EU and US. After living in both, in the EU, we shop nearly every day, while in the US it's ~ every weekish or longer.

We’ve got a very limited understanding of biology. Ask any kind of researcher and they’ll tell you we need more data, i.e. more experiments. Also, there’s Illumina monopoly in sequencing market, we desperately need competition for genetics to become accessible to general population.

You can buy a nanopore, no need to go with an Illumina. You can clearly do genomics at home with this.

Nanopore is a different kind of instrument and absolute majority of cutting-edge protocols rely on Illumina chemistry. Just no way of escaping it if you're doing science.

I briefly looked at a couple of dirt cheap biology programs near me because I used to love biology and it was something different. Then I looked at the salaries working in the field and kinda just stopped.

It's a supply and demand issue, just like in nursing. There are a lot of bio undergrads out there in the US, and as such the wages are depressed.

That said, with higher degrees comes higher wages. And with 'outsider' skill sets comes higher wages. Things like programming, EE, and management-skills will get you a better job in bio. Honestly, most bio people don't have anything past Calculus 1, so if you even have Linear Algebra, you're much ahead of the group, let alone Diff. Eqs. or some real Stats classes.

Granted, these salaries not near SWE jobs, but you're not working on dog-walking-apps, you're working on heart conditions and health issues. The effort, inherently, is compensation to those doing it.

There's a poster out there of all the relevant chemistry of human mitochondria. It's a pretty big poster, about a square meter of paper. Every pore and protein's function is represented. The Kreb's Cycle is in a corner of this thing. All the chain reactions are there, with lines trying to vainly connect it all together. The font on it is ~9 pt., I think. And it's double sided. I can't find a good link on Google, but other biologists will know what I'm talking about.

That poster is the result of ~70 years of hardcore work and blood and sweat of ~10k+ people on the human mitochondria. That poster alone is worth billions of dollar of research and will likely save billions of lives. And it's just the normal functions of the human mitochondria. One of many organelles in a 'typical' human cell. I'm not aware of any attempts to produce such a thing for something as complicated as the ER or the nucleus.

Our understanding of bio is very much limited. But I want to stress that Bio is complicated much more beyond what anyone thinks it is. There is a good quote to help grok the ocean we are looking into:

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. This is biology.

–Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”

Can someone find this poster? I would utterly love to buy it and hang it somewhere, but I can't find it when googling.

The two posters on this website look similar to the provided description: http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1

This is exactly it! Thank you for the find!

Roche will send you a free copy!

https://www.roche.com/sustainability/philanthropy/science_ed...

Holy Cow! I didn't know they were free. Thank you so much for the link!

I'm guessing you're talking about the Roche poster. IIRC, it's only useful as art - it's too detailed for a high-level overview, and way underdetailed if you want to work with any of the pathways displayed on it. This only highlights your point: bio is much more complicated than people think it is.

There is Illumina competition now with BGI Nanoball sequencing...

Business automation.

There seems to be so much that can be easily automated by simple scripts. We just need a better UI and a better way to teach people how to use it.

Isn’t that Microsoft’s entire “hey use active directory, and write this no code flow app” premise?

Interesting idea. I thought that everything in business is automated already. Can you give some examples?

TBH that can already work quite well with Zapier and the like (in cloud-based businesses). I know businesses where almost every department from operations to HR has one or two Zapier accounts and connecting their dots, no IT or Software Engineering involved. It just needs a bit of oversight from compliance and security.

This so much.

Also I'm a big fan of chat-bots. How about a chat-bot that answers typical HR questions for an organisation?

"How much leave do I have remaining this year?" -> 16 days.

"Book the dates 10/5/2021 to 11/5/2021 as leave" -> Confirmed. Request sent to your line-manager.

etc...

I've seen so many bespoke web pages for these sorts of tasks. Including emailing someone in HR to do it for you.

I'm sure a system exists, but too lazy to google for it :)

I feel the opposite about chat-bots. It just adds to the clutter of the website (along with cookie notification, asking for email signup, etc).

If I need help, I'll go specifically to the "contact us" page.

I think the opposite. Those questions are incredibly easy to answer, why would an HR organization pay for something that's about 2 clicks away on a (yes crappy, but readily available) web portal?

It's the questions that are difficult that you need people to answer and some chat bot cannot figure out. "Chatbot, does my spouse taking a new job trigger health plan reselection allowance for my family?" Go figure out that one and maybe you've got an idea.

That's Workday, except it's a web gui.

We have this at work with a `/afk` command in slack.

There's been a lot of products that try, including MS's current "Power Apps" and "Power Automate" utilities. But the problem is that lots of intricate business rules need to be understood and maintained longer term. RAD has had a problem with long-term maintainability of business rules. Instead, I'd like to see a focus on a stateful GUI markup standard so that it's easier to do regular code-based CRUD apps without dealing with screwy web (un) standards, such as bloated JavaScript libraries and CSS wankiness. The UI is a bottleneck to CRUD dev productivity.

That all parents must attend parenting classes. We have drivings licenses to drive a car. Yet there’s no such skill requirements for parents on how to raise children.

Cost of dealing with miss raised children is very high.

If you start mandatory parenting classes, you have to start mandating the ‘correct’ way to raise children. There are HUGE cultural, religious, financial, and educational barriers to implementing a one-size-fits-all parenting regime.

Good luck with that!

Why not a menu of different approaches to chose from?

I don't get the jump from parenting classes to "the correct approach".

Could be N correct approaches, but I guarantee you that for any set of criteria you devise, some group will come out of the woodwork and shout that it's Wrong. And you need testable criteria set by some central authority to determine whether someone learned the information from training course correctly - otherwise the whole course will turn into one big waste of time as it scales to large amount of training facilities.

Like schooling. And some do homeschool. And some of those shouldn't.

Anyhow schooling is considered a Good Thing (tm) and nobody claims we should give up on it, because some shout that it's _wrong_.

But sometimes "miss raising" a kid is the right thing to do. This is especially true in a society that has gone awry. Shouldn't I as a parent and who knows my kids and their needs better than anyone be free to raise them as I see fit?

It’s a hard question. You know your child better than anyone, but you don’t own your child nor their future.

There are legal expectations for parental behavior at a Societal level, and perhaps informally at a Community level. Is that enough?

Always thought a parental/guardian “report card” for those caring for school age children would be a good idea. We measure students and teachers, why not parents? Teachers rate parents on the educational support they provided their children and their teachers. Red/yellow/green, meaningful in child custody case and the like. Just an idea...

What about single parents? Or parents who work two or three jobs to keep food on the table? My wife is a teacher and regularly deals with parents who are to busy trying to keep food on the table to study with their kids.

It's super easy to judge when you make a 6 figure salary and are highly educated. But most families aren't making that kind of coin.

If you don't have any 'baggage' then yes, you'll most probably raise your kid just fine.

But then: what harm would it do if you'd anyhow participate in a training, that, in said happy case, would just reiterate and reinforce what you'd do anyhow?

And has the society possibly gone awry exactly because some common sense in child bearing has been buried? Dunning Kruger tells us we might just not know what we don't know...

So, if the curriculum can be freely chosen for the "parental drivers license" what is the problem?

There is plenty of research on the outcomes of parental training, btw, one random example of a training that has proven useful:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=bris...

I think we would do better by allowing parents more time with their kids by reducing working hours. By all means, access to better parenting media would be good. Maybe give parents some time to attend those classes or read/watch parenting media rather than insist they work 50+ hours a week or work two jobs.

Sounds like someone is for a communism run state. No thanks. I'll raise my kid the best possible way but the government cannot and will not tell me how.

It's not a problem of ignorance (limited to this particular area.. broader ignorance, yes). Anyone with a good moral compass will do a decent job of raising their kids and seeking out answers when they need to. The kind of person that would most benefit from changing their parenting style is also the kind that would actively reject it.

I think for developers (and users) everything is broken, just check https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

That's programming 1.0, and we're need programming 2.0

What I mean about programming 2.0:

- better security

- less bugs and more stability

- less complex code and API

- less APIs

- no halts, reactive live coding everywhere

- less coding, NoCode variants

PS: Who works on programming 2.0 besides me https://animationcpu.com/ ?

We need higher-level, context dependent programming languages. Homotopy type theory promises to be revolutionary, and Jet Brains is working on integrating the theory with their IDE, so you can write any program with well defined inputs I and outputs O and the computer will find all equivalent programs for you. Programmers would no longer need to get lost in the implementation details.

Thanks Jet Brains for C-Lion !

Why "Less APIs"?

Because https://imgur.com/gallery/cxwSlUX

hmm, I'm still confused. Are you saying there are just too many APIs and my app's little API is insignificant in a world overflowing with APIs? What if several customers want access to my API? Is there an alternative that I should be using (like GraphQL)?

You can use anything and write your own API

I think there is no way to reduce the number of APIs with code. NoCode hides complex APIs from the developer. Use third party services and projects that bundle random APIs like Miro.com or hackhaton-starter bootstrap etc. Higher API level that hides a lower API level that YourApp is not interested in and only focuses on the program algorithm.

But here is situation where we have 14+1 API standard

It's not the job of application programmers to maintain the security of a system, that is the sole purpose of the operating system. There exist systems which can do the job, but most people haven't even heard of multi-level secure systems, and most people also believe it impossible to secure a computer.

The model of trust that everything linux, windows, etc. is based on is faulty. The process is given access to everything it's owner is allowed, by default... which was fine for academic computing in the 1970s, but not in the age of the internet.

There is hope... Capability Based Security is on the way, slowly but surely... and then we can kiss virus scanners and the like goodbye.

Yeah! Human error is a huge black hole.

We can fix the software (Heartbleed), but the main thing is the hardware (Meltdown)

Educating the general population.

I'll agree with this, but want to clarify that the education I would reference isn't necessarily formal higher education, but educational reforms at primary and secondary levels to include more useful life skills like logic, finance, and understanding of civic duties including the legal system.

And yet, the official platform of the Texas GOP used to (and still may for all I know) have a plank opposing any schools teaching "critical thinking skills". Because, that's just liberal indoctrination leading children away from authoritarian structures of "whatever I say is true is true".

All that to say - it's not a bug, it's a feature to many Americans.

Depending on how it's taught, that could be a concern.

I've experienced some bad marks when doing critical thinking exercises in grade school simply because my view didn't match with the teacher. They wouldn't even let me defend my positions, just mark it wrong. This was a common problem for me as I would think out side the box (as told) but they didn't like my answers because it doesn't fit with their view. This still happens at work today.

I had a logic course in college called philosophy of argument. It was graded differently. You were graded on your knowledge of fallacies and structures of arguments. You did have to construct some basic arguments, but you could have people in the same class with opposing positions and both could still recieve full marks if their arguments didn't contain fallacies, factual issues, or structural issues. This way provides the building blocks for arguments and recognizing fallacies without indoctrination.

Agreed and I'm especially concerned with how little people are taught about IT even though it's an important part of our daily lives. Specifically I think everyone should be thought about:

- cryptography basics

- how the web works (cookies, JavaScript etc.)

- how email works (MTA/MDA/MUA responsibilities, OpenPGP, S/MIME, maybe also SPF/DKIM/DMARC)

- TCP/IP basics

- how computers and operating systems generally work and execute programs

Though I'm not suggesting we should replace other subjects with IT.

Fusion energy and regenerative agriculture. Maybe I’m naive, but I see those 2 being unbelievable transformative for the world, significantly improving quality of life and preventing all those really bad climate change scenarios that seem almost inevitable at this point.

ITER has been making some headway in the fusion reactor space. https://www.iter.org/

A 10-year plan was presented at the beginning of the month to the federal Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/us-physicists-rally-...

Tokamak Energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWYnbYsp3i8&t=2s https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk

I’ve heard and read about all these initiatives that you and few others mentioned in your replies. However, (as per original question) I’m surprised we’re not investing much more resources into these. Again, super naive me - we put a lot of money and resources into finding the vaccine for covid and it quickly paid out, I think if we did the same for fusion energy we would also see big leaps in smaller period of time.

Or is fusion energy really not just a matter of how much cash we throw at the problem? I don’t buy that.

Overpopulation.

It's the main source of humanity's current woes and will only get worse with time. We seem to be content with addressing the symptoms rather than the problem. The idea of population control is taboo but will help everyone in the long run.

Surprisingly capitalism seems to be helping here. A lot of people feel they are unable to afford to own a house and have kids at the same time.

Haha, "helping" and "growing wealth inequality to such disturbing extremes that the richest have more than ever before and more than most could conceive whilst the poor are faced with crushing existential dread and complete lack of power" might not be analogous to me, but yes.

I'm not saying its helping the individuals, but if you look purely at the problem of overpopulation, its helping.

Maybe 4°C+ climate change is how we'll maintain humanity under 500-million in perpetual balance with nature? https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/scientist-warm...

> “In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something — namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,” said Dr. Schellnhuber

This is a problem that is solving itself. As countries get richer, their people have less children. And this result holds true in every country for which we have data. The prediction is that the world’s population will peak at ten billion then start to decrease.

Well the population is still growing faster than ever, so everybody must be getting poorer.

It isn’t growing faster than ever. It’s growing, but the rate is declining, and it’s expected to hit net 0 in the next 30-50 years.

If that's true, it can be accelerated by eliminating global poverty and allowing universal access to contraceptives.

Most models have the population capping at ~10B, so people don't tend to worry about it any more? (10B number is recalled from "Factfulness", which I'd recommend)

Seconded on recommending factfulness. It's been very helpful to me in seeing the world more the way it is rather than in the negative light you'd get from watching sensational media only.

I actually made a preview of iirc ~10 pages that I found to be very powerful near the beginning of the book, but I don't just want to post it to avoid copyright issues. Shoot me an email at factfulness202012@lgms.nl (just link this comment in the subject or so, no body needed) if you are interested.

I learnt a lot from Factfulness. Great book!

My concern is mainly an ecological one, which I don't recall Factfulness really addressing. While human welfare continues to improve in most of the world, our sustainable use of natural resources does not, reducing our access to fertile land and fresh water in years to come. I hope technology can get us out of the giant pickle coming our way because I don't put much faith in our long term planning at a national or global level.

Check https://OurWorldInData.org to see that a lot of our woes do not get worse with time. A lot of things are actually getting better quite fast. That does not mean that everything is good yet but at least it is better than it was in the past. The past sucked. A lot.

Also: peak population growth rate was 50 years ago and it has been decreasing since then: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth-past-futu...

Net population growth has not certainly peaked. The earth’s resources are limited in absolute terms, not in terms of exponential growth. A linear increase looks like a declining exponential rate, but still grows unbounded. Any trend of growth exceeding a constant multiple of the inverse total is unbounded.

> Net population growth has not certainly peaked.

Net population growth peaked 30 years ago, see [0].

The rest is "technically true" if you argue solely based on an exponential model. That's not how it works. There is more to modelling population growth (or a pandemic for that matter) than just fitting an exponential.

People had lots of children in the past because almost half of them died young and the parents needed children to care for them when they were old. So they defaulted to "more children". Then child mortality was brought down and people adapted with delay - which lead to more people growing up and increasing the population. Then people adapted and the fertility rate fell a lot and in some cases even very fast. Compare how fast Iran an South Korea transitioned and see how long it took the United Kingdom to do so before [1].

The articles on "Our World in Data" are really interesting and the people behind it make lots of effort to ensure good quality of the data. I can really recommend to checkout the website.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/absolute-increase-global-...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t...

Yeah, OWID is great, as is Hans Rosling's work (mentioned below) concerning human welfare improvement. The past definitely sucked a lot. My main concern with overpopulation is that we may have already exceeded the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet, which can have disastrous consequences for all. Soil and fresh water availability spring to mind as ever pressing issues resulting from unsustainable practices in many parts of the world. Climate change is sure to stress agriculture further. Dietary changes and technology will surely help but judging from how reactive we appear to be as species, I don't have high hopes.

https://worldpopulationhistory.org/carrying-capacity/

I don't know why people still think that overpopulation is a genuine threat. If anything, there's a genuine threat to industrial societies in that their birth rates are almost all sub-replacement. This is true for countries in North America, South America, East Asia, and Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

I don’t know why people continue to believe it is not a threat.

Outside of economy, why is replacement rate needed? If the world reduced to 1 billion humans would the Earth be in a better or worse place?

Seems clear to me that fewer humans = less CO2, less deforestation, etc. You can argue less invention too but that’s not as obvious to me given Multiple Discovery (1).

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Imagine the entire population of the world was a village of 100 houses. There are 100 people.

Imagine the village ages out and you have 90 old people, and 10 middle-aged people. There's not enough people harvesting grain to feed everyone. There's not enough workers to maintain the roads. The life-savings everyone accumulated under the balanced population gets spent squabbling for the limited food at inflated prices. The water and roads fall apart with no one to maintain them. Life gets worse, not better. Unless there is war, famine or pestilence, usually reductions in population will be unbalanced by nature.

Yeah, and that’s why we need universal basic income for all the young people without jobs. That’s why education takes up half of our employable years. That’s why over half of employed people say that their own job could be eliminated without consequence. That’s why unions protest against job cuts. That’s why real wages keep dropping. That’s why the trend toward industrial automation has been dwarfed by the trend toward outsourcing to cheap human labor.

I think you misunderstood me, or had a soapbox you wanted to stand on. My claim was limited--non-gradual population drops are a negative thing.

Basic income is a way of re-allocating the value produced. I'm for it. It won't solve the problems that come from sudden population contraction, which would be a separate additional problem to add to those you list. For example, when you have way more houses than people, what happens to real estate prices and most of your people's net worth? The real estate and construction industry? Rent? Empty restaurants with too few people?

When your tax base is too small and can't easily pay to maintain your infrastructure (Arecibo?) what happens to it?

> Imagine the village ages out and you have 90 old people, and 10 middle-aged people.

Seems a bit extreme. I don't think drastic population decline is on the horizon anytime soon.

The developed world has sub-replacement fertility rates. As other countries develop, their fertility rate drops in the same manner.

Japan has been in a funk for years. China has shifted from a many-child culture to a one-child norm. These problems aren't theoretical.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

https://www.oecd.org/japan/working-better-with-age-japan-978....

Re: "If anything, there's a genuine threat to industrial societies in that their birth rates are almost all sub-replacement."

That's because budgets etc. assume population growth out of institutional habit. If population stops growing, then the usual assumptions and habits of governing shaped by past patterns are suddenly "wrong". Also known as "poor planning".

There's no problem with overpopulation, globally. The population is forecast to max out at around 10B. The problem is that a small section of humanity use a completely disproportionate share of resources. We also have a consumerist culture that keeps upsizing our desires, often in banal and wasteful ways. E.g. SUVs and blow-up lawn ornaments.

EDIT> I would say that advertising is a worse problem than overpopulation.

In less developed countries, kids are free labor, so unsurprisingly countries with high population growth are poor. I'm not sure sure what you expect these countries to do.

I agree. What's astounding to me is that people will in the same instance downplay the impact of population, but soothsay about global warming, land-use, other ecological issues. Most of the issues are moot if the population stagnates. More demand means more ecological destruction, you might increase efficiency but that is still the equation any way you slice it.

There are non-profits out there that might help to this end, but they are numerous. They ought to organize better. We need Universal access to contraceptives, and elimination of global poverty. Some organizations that may be helping: https://pai.org/, https://populationmatters.org/, https://www.ippf.org/, https://www.guttmacher.org/

Building new cities - actual cities, not suburbs - in the western world. This seems especially relevant in the US West Coast, where there’s both tremendous demand for development and population growth and vast amounts of undeveloped land, yet simultaneously, a housing shortage and general affordability crisis.

AI-assisted "queue" management. We all accumulate a multitude of different lists to work on: tasks lists, email inbox, open tabs, bookmarks, saved articles, books to read, movies to watch, games to play. I've never seen anything that attempts to unify these against their common constraint: time.

Sustainable timber. Given it's popularity as a building material (at least in Australia) I'm surprised there isn't more research into genetically modifying trees to grow quickly / have desirable characteristics for construction / need less land and water. I wonder if lab grown timber is a possibility. (I could also imagine a GM'd fast growing tree becoming a ecological disaster though...)

Quick and desirable for construction is a hard one. A slower growth is better as the food is then denser which means it's stronger.

Maybe solution is some type of composite of fast growing fiber material combined with some type of binder...

I guess in many ways we're doing that already with pine board ply and bamboo benchtops.

Flexible regex engines. Pattern matching is a much more general problem than string matching, and you don't necessarily always have the entire input available initially. (In fact, especially for performance reasons, you might the pattern itself to tell you what possibilities to consider for the next portion of your sequence.) I've repeatedly found that a regex engine that can work on more general objects (not necessarily string/numeric inputs) and which can be fed the input at the caller's convenience could be quite handy for some applications.

I just wish there were better UIs for much of this stuff. Most code editors have a regex search and replace figuring out the regex requires too much regex expertise. I can't think of a good example off the top of my head but for example, being able to search for things that match multiple rules. It would be much easier for many users to be able to say "starts with x", "ends with y", "has abc in the middle" as 3 separate statements than to have to derive the regex that does it.

Similarly being able to search easily for balanced parens, brackets, quotes. And being able to search programming language aware as in "only in strings", "only in comments", etc...

All of those seem like they'd be useful features but I know of no editor that do any more than just a single regex with no context

> It would be much easier for many users to be able to say "starts with x", "ends with y", "has abc in the middle" as 3 separate statements than to have to derive the regex that does it.

This seems like a less error-prone and more testable way of writing regular expressions in code too! Writing out the individual portions of a regular expression might be a ton more verbose, but it's because regular expressions hide a ton of complexity with "write-only" shorthand.

Some of the things you say can already be achieved with Prolog DCGs, which are more or less like pattern matching over lists (usually lists of chars, but not needed).

Voice interfaces. We have Siri and Alexa, yes, but they're very limited -- they just have a list of pre-programmed tasks they know how to do.

I realize that a fully-general voice interface is an "AI-hard" problem, but surely we can improve over what's on the market now?

I think you're underestimating what Google and Amazon are doing behind the scenes (there are a lot of people working on this currently).

G&A are going to be so concerned with "loosing out on data" that to their detriment all of their voice-driven interfaces will be cloud dependent. Hopefully, someone with enough wits will dare to lose out on that data and instead create devices with local voice models that can still learn and become more useful as you use them. I want this model to become embedded into my operating system.

I want an OS that gets smarter by the day but without phoning home. I want my OS to become better than yours, simply because I trained it better that you did yours. I want this OS to be _my OS_. Not your's. Not Apple's. Not Microsoft's.

Did you see the movie "AI" (written by Kubric, directed by Spielberg)? In the movie there's an AI driven teddy bear that is awfully close to being an AGI. I want my OS to be like that.

I think ironically your criticism of voice interfaces actually betrays perhaps their biggest weakness over visual interfaces - it's not immediately obvious what their capabilities are, what they will respond to or understand, or what your options in a situation are.

Super users and developers of these systems are likely able to harness them for much more powerful usecases than the average person, but how do you make those options and usecases visible to the end user?

It would seem like the answer is either 1) a robocall / callcenter bot style solution (press 1 to ____, press 2 to ____, press 3 to ____) where you must listen to lists of things but can more expressively verbally respond rather than press 1, or as you said solve the Hard AI problem of the bots contextually understanding your current situation and suggesting options based on it.

One of the challenges with voice assistants is that voice is a very low bandwidth medium for communicating information. If I ask Siri to tell be about Bill Gates, it would take her a minute to read to me what I could skim in seconds from a Google Search result.

There's nothing inherent to voice assistants that requires that they speak back to you. You can ask them using voice, and get the results on a screen.

Same with phone messaging (like whatsapp etc) where it's much faster to receive a text message vs the same message in spoken audio.

Voice recognition general is half baked. Voice recognition has been pushed on consumers for 10 years. Siri barely knows what I am saying. The voice recognition on customer service is always broken.

The technology is in its infancy. Yet, being built into more and more devices and services daily.

Not to mention, I don’t want to talk to my television remote. I want to use muscle memory to press a button.

Voice recognition is a mess.

An immediate push to simplify complex concepts / ideas given that we know from history how much the efforts pay back in terms of broader adaptation / understanding by the masses.

Examples: quantum mechanics, string theory, certain advanced algorithms, AI etc.

Hi! I am Xavier, Mathematical Artist and am leading an initiative to do just that with a form of thinking called “Omnidisciplinary Thinking” or Thinking OMNI. The intent is to encourage people and organizations/groups to identify the root structure of concepts (“Engage with the Root”) and to use any shared structures to help them reason quickly and accurately across, within, and between domains, disciplines, and industries.

The applications of this are intended at the personal, interpersonal, and social levels. At the personal level, the mindset can be used to make sense of complexity and for self-understanding. At the interpersonal level, such a mindset is useful for finding common ground/understanding between philosophies such that we can have difficult conversations with those who seem most different from us. And at the social level, we have many applications such as more efficient and rich education, and for companies and job seekers we get better talent recognition and integration into organizations (e.g. removing the keyword bingo everyone must play on resumes).

Please feel free to check out the site: mathis.art and subscribe to our newsletter. Also feel free to reach out. We have a passionate team working on content to help people understand this way of thinking, its utility, and its ability to help one to express!

Think OMNI

Robotic motor learning.

It's being worked on, but not nearly to the same extent as machine perception. And yet it's probably the biggest technology gap preventing us from deploying human-equivalent robots in unstructured environments.

From seeing the robotics field from a distance - the issue doesn't simply stop at high-level intelligent algorithms; there is also the problem with actual hardware. The human body is an incredibly efficient biomechanical system that can perform a wide array of delicate movements, and current robotic systems are still too far away from reasonably mimicking human muscles, joints, and sensory nervous systems. Robots might still has difficulty in performing everyday tasks done by humans, even if the algorithms are intelligent enough.

Client-side scraping to extract the signal from the noise on commonly used sites.

I've seen older (yet still updated) implementations/portals, but I'm surprised nobody has made federating site scripts easy for client-side use to expose as pseudo localhost site APIs and a portal that resembles Craigslist to bring all of the data together. Again, this has obviously been half done, but it's not packaged for mass appeal ala popcorn time for general web info.

Cloud tools for musicians. It's a pain setting up a new environment. So many plugins and libraries etc. Also, version control and backup. All manual.

Universal Audio at least on the non-VST side and (is it) slater have interesting models.

I started using https://www.bandlab.com/ soon after lockdown started.

It's a collaborative DAW that allows you to record, save, and mix music in the cloud, and even lets you share access and collaborate in real time with others. It was great for sharing ideas with my band when we couldn't really meet up and play in person.

It has a few performance/audio syncing issues being in the browser, but for what we use it for it's an amazing tool.

I once thought about contacting Ableton to offer my assistance in taking their DAW to the cloud so that we can have collaboration, version control and publishing in one place, to sort of marry Ableton Live with Soundcloud. I would love a service like that.

eMagic had a great collaborative DAW plugin in 2001 or so, the year or so before they were bought by Apple. You'd be in a shared chatroom with others, where you'd all see the same DAW view, and could play all the tracks. You'd record a new track locally, and then upload it. It was a cool compromise - in most use cases, you didn't necessarily need to record live, you just wanted to work on the shared project at the same time. I haven't seen that nice of a UX since.

The micropayment problem. Sometimes I click a link and it's to the Cleveland Plain Dealer or something like that, asking me to pay $2.99 a month for access to their 120-year-old archive. I mean seriously guys I just want to pay a buck for this article and never talk to you guys again.

Movies work like this, I can pay $15/month for Netflix OR I can just rent a movie on Amazon for $3.99. Why not for Web content?

Elementary Schooling - At a young age teaching skills such as Critical Thinking, Self awareness, Inculcating curiosity to understand others perspective, understanding logical fallacies, Ethical behavior are not prioritized. In a way these are more important than learning the normal sciences which can be taught at a later age. I find focus on that lacking outside of fleeting local attempts.

Real news and true unbiased, truth seeking, fact checking journalism.

How would we go about proving that a news source claiming to be those things are actually real, truly unbiased, truth seeking, and fact checking?

There are two things that seem to undermine the currect media landscape.

1) Profits are more important that facts and integrity

2) That race to the bottom prevents the media from policing each other. That is, for example, ABC News won't call out CBS News because ABC News fears retaliation (so to speak).

I was thinking a bit on this few weeks. How real news can be gathered up as now internet is everywhere.

A website made up of Google maps, people would post status or their street or place they visited. Status could be picture or message like "Green", "repair" street lamp not working, awareness" too many street dogs.

Messages could be just few sentences not big as a article. Restricted tags to filter news. This is sort public alerting what's happening in their neighbourhood.

Wow!

Let's not get to crazy here... fear and hate drive audiences which drives profits.

Also we we need to start with a critical thinking public.

But I'm with you, I'm going to keep hoping.

Absolutely. The two go hand in hand. And yes, individuals need to be more responsible.

However, that lack of critical thinking doesn't excuse the media from too often selling editorial as journalism. It doesn't excuse them from serving up click friendly fluff while real news gets sidestepped.

I'd argue this is basically impossible. Choosing what to report and how to report it. Which facts, how they are presented, etc. Listening to mostly left leaning shows, even when they think they're just reporting the facts I hear in their voice, their choice of questions, how they ask the questions, how they respond to the answers, which ideas they agree with and which they don't and in essence which ideas they want you to believe and which they don't.

PS: if that wasn't clear I don't listen to many if any right leaning shows. I listen to radiolab, this american life, flash forward, no stupid questions, etc....

Two things I've been thinking in this regards:

1. Social network that people vote on where in the political quadrant something is, at the same time it takes into account their own political leanings/upvotes/etc. So you can say this is lefist, I'm right-leaning, but I still like the article, and think it's newsorthy so I'll upvote it.

Basically adding a lot more granular user sentimentality around articles. Letting users organically fact check, but having it all be transparent, you can see the user, and they're color coded by their political leanings so you can know you're talking w/ someone who supported Biden or Trump.

2. News show like Morning Joe with Krystal Ball, Cenk, Tucker Carlson, Hannity, Joe Scarborough, Cuomo, Anderson. -- Essentially voices from left, right, center-left, center-right, and mid-center. All with equal air-time on the issues.

Format could be something like: Announcer announces topic/news. Each person gets 1 minute to respond, 15 seconds for rebuttals. Then move on to next topic.

At the end of the show, fact checkers will grade each person's performance based on the percentage of factual statements vs lies and post it online with the video segment for transparency.

It's disappointing that so many things listed here either are not real problems (soil degradation) or are already solved (we're spending a tonne of money on fusion, populations are already falling in many places and will fall globally from 2100).

In light of that: I'm surprised we're not better at spreading awareness of, and prioritising, problems.

Programming languages with built-in inversion of control by way of an effects system, like in Elm.

Could you elaborate on that a little?

Elm is a purely functional language, meaning all you write are the insides of functions that take a value and return a value. There's no imperative way to "do anything" like make an HTTP request, all you can do is return a "command" value from a function and the core libraries will do it.

This means that the core libraries define the signatures of the functions that an Elm application must implement. (All Elm apps "work the same way" in that sense.) It also means that you never have to mock or stub anything in a test. There are also great implications for performance and maintainability.

Elm compiles to JavaScript and is specific to browser applications, but there's no theoretical reason the same idea couldn't be applied to mobile apps or CLI applications or webservers or anything else. (It's just a lot of work.)

So it sounds like there's Elm the framework and Elm the language then. The language is the language and the framework gives inversion of control. So this is a bit unique in that usually frameworks are built in a language that has other uses, but how is it qualitatively different from programming in any other framework?

A little bit of both!

Elm the language is different from JavaScript, Java, Ruby, etc because there is no facility for statements or imperative APIs. It’s restricted in that sense. Frameworks in those languages still have some inversion of control, but there’s nothing stopping you from making a network request in your Celsius/Fahrenheit conversion function. (And over enough time that’s usually what happens, and you have fewer constraints with which to reason about what the code does.)

I can’t speak for languages that are similarly restricted, like Haskell, but my impression is that Elm is different because you don’t have to learn extra rule-bending mechanics to do I/O.

The Elm approach is unique, as far as I know. And while it doesn’t make for a truly all-purpose programming language, it’s a great model for developing libraries and applications on the web. I’m just a bit “surprised” there isn’t a similar thing focused on web servers or IOT or whatever else.

Content categorisation service.

For example news. There are thousands of topics. They are hierarchical. Every news article touches some of those topics to various degree. I would love to subscribe to some topics with some kind of tolerance. Like I want to know about most important world political news. I want to know about important IT news and my country political news. I want to know almost everything about Java, cryptography and my city news. I want to get every content from or about my favourite bloggers.

And that should be extended to all kind of new content. News, articles, videos, tweets and so on.

Eliminating "poor" as an adjective for humans.

If we must commercialise it, more people with money = more customers.. Apple, Amazon, etc.. there's billions of potential iPhone and Alexa users out there long term if you set something up to help them now. What, you don't think you'll be around long enough?

This is an extremely complex topic that would likely require political and societal reforms. I'm curious why you are suprised there aren't more more people working on this?

We're on a site for a VC right? Big risks for massive rewards. The biggest risk is compassion. The reward a dedicated however many people you help as customers later. If an AppleHelps scheme set me on a path out of poverty I would never even think the word Android.

Companies are the only entities with the clout and long term justification to get those reforms started on.

e: version 1 of this comment was very snarky, sorry. I took your comment as quite dismissive and responded emotionally.

I see what you are saying. I guess I just don't know what those companies could do to pull those people out of poverty, especially at the macroeconomic level. It would likely be easier for them (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc) to join forces and lobby the government to provide people in poverty with smartphones, or at least provide grants similar to rural internet grants today.

What do you envision for an "AppleHelps" program?

Specific measurable actionable relevant timely (SMART) steps that Apple/iOS and Google/Android could do to help poorer people:

1. Improve device sharing. One example: a family can have one phone with individual accounts for each member.

2. Permit better repairs. One example: the company can state that it's legal for a user to replace an old phone battery.

3. Accelerate free knowledge. One example: preinstall Wikipedia and similar free libre open source software (FLOSS).

Wouldn't #1 and #2 potentially reduce their profits, especially if there's nothing limiting it to the poor?

#3 sounds good.

I'm wanting to work on this.

Think build multiple companies for services people already use/need competitors to existing products but they're owned by the community. People still pay for the service, but they earn shares for their loyalty to a product and get dividends from those shares.

Marriage of socialism and capitalism essentially. Marketplaces still exist, but union/co-ops thrive and make businesses more about building products/tools people want not for profit motives as much as to make society better / stronger as a whole.

If everyone could afford 4 year colleges and science degrees and didn't grow up in poverty how much faster could we as a society get to the stars? Fix global warming? Instead millions are lying in bed, covers over their head, depressed that next week they will be homeless or worse.

If the didn't have to worry about money, they could do something productive, drop the depression or work on fixing that, and live happier more fulfilling lives.

As a freelancer, I bounce back and forth in this situation. Doing good, to depression/sour grapes when clients are sparce.

So, part of my wanting to do this is self-serving essentially fix this for myself as well as others.

We could buy up hospitals, medical companies, etc... takeover 80% of the medical industry. Start our own medicare 4 all (who are in our union: workers, consumers/loyalists, adopted (need our help, but can't afford to consume)). We could lower costs, offer hospital boards like 300k salaries take it or leave it, and offer doctors/nurses the position instead. We could do single-payer negotiations with drug companies, etc...

If anyone wants to work w/ me on this... email me: patrickwcurl - gmail Trying to put a team together. Co-op style.

Just wanted to say I like this sentiment but find it hard to imagine revolutionizing entire industries without a minimum of billions of dollars of altruistic funding. And billionaires aren't well known for wanting to weaken capitalism

Better software for growth engineering teams (experimentation, analysis, etc). Existing products in this space are limited, expensive, and still pale in comparison to in-house solutions at top tech companies.

I have also observed this. We had a custom thing over Wasabi : https://github.com/intuit/wasabi which was quite difficult to maintain, but compared to the paid solutions out there was still cheaper to do. I wonder why aren’t there more products in this area.

Yup, we just ended up building ours from scratch. Glad we did, in retrospect.

How far did you go ? Something comparable to wasabi ?

It looks pretty comparable to wasabi from what I can tell, yeah. We made some different design decisions than wasabi from what I can tell, but the core of it is similar.

Unbiased, independent, unsponsored "CONS Reports".

Before buying something I want to know all CONS about specific thing, service, product, car, real estate, etc...

Everyone pitching PROS. I want to know CONS BEFORE I commit.

User authentication using client-side (aka mutual) TLS certificates. This was promoted with netscape navigator and then never came to be. Be authenticated everywhere, without ever having to log in.

I did this for a bunch of government sites many years ago. It was amazingly simple and completely transparent to the user. No passwords. No auth cookies. No registration. Developers don’t even have to know about it. My understanding is that it’s still supported by every major browser. I’m not really a web programmer though; just stepped in on a lagging contract and it seems like the best solution.

Most big tech companies use this internally. Google "beyondcorp" works this way.

Perhaps that's a good thing, because I'm almost certain that would be abused as a user fingerprint.

So is your password presently (via auth session cookies). The same whitelisting used for cookies today would work to allow fingerprinting of your personal certificate.

So much this! WebAuthn is sort of doing this, but I think it is way too complicated. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. All we have to do is be better than passwords, and that’s a really low bar.

I teach at the high school level. I fervently believe that the lack of any kind of modernization of assessment tools for k12 educators is a profound impediment to the advancement of education (and instead we flail around with fads and bullshit).

There are millions of assessment items created and administered by instructors everyday in the United States, but the results are unreliable so we spend billions on standardize testing which is “trustworthy” while also (often) having negative externalities. We accept this dual system because the two modes of assessment have different goals, but it is wildly inefficient.

If it were possible to create an assessment platform that supported the rapid generation of unique and trustable assessments[1], we could have 1) more frequent/less costly assessments of student progress, 2) better instructor accountability, and 3) greater opportunities for non-traditional educational pacing.

[1] more ‘contextual autocomplete’ than ‘discrete item creation’ as a primary mechanism for assessment creation. Yes, someone has to create the original bank of assessment materials - but, for the love of god, how many times has an assessment been developed on “To Kill a Mockingbird”, the Pythagorean Theorem, etc? Make the tool slick enough for content creation that it is at least on par with current offerings, do automated assessment analysis a la College Board, et. al. in the background on all submitted content, and then allow the instructor to create an assessment based on the class & lesson context as easily as accepting/rejecting a list of questions as a final “cultural fit” culling. Ideally, this final step would be completed as quickly as the instructor can read and reject assessment items such that they could - conceivably- be able to create and administer an assessment during a lesson in a manner that is reactive to the immediate progress of the students. Reduce the assessment feedback loop time this much and the ground would move under the profession.

Edit: for those asking via email, the core tech here to be developed (at least initially) is automating the assessment analysis: how do you know the assessment items are correctly assessing what you want them to?

Once you have that there would be downstream effects on instructional design, pathways to graduation, talent identification, etc. - but that’s the special sauce.

The labor of assessment analysis is what provides the creators of standardized tests the ability to maintain a monopoly on trustworthy assessments. They will not themselves develop the tech to do this analysis in an automated and distributed fashion as it would undermine their core business. In this way, they seem to be trapped in a classic innovators dilemma.

Baby crib connected to a senior. You have countless of lonly seniors and countless of babies that need constant attention during their sleep. The solution is an automated arm mountable to any crib, two refurbished tablet and a decent software to connect the two. The senior could: watch the baby, check that it breaths, take its temperature, talk/sing to the baby, use the hand to give it a dummy, cover the baby with a blanket, reposition the baby slightly or alert the on place caregiver.

Better authentication practices.

I've been writing auth for the web since 2005 and it hasn't gotten easier or more convenient as a programmer or as an end user. The problem is so bad that email/password combos need to be managed by 3rd party services.

Migrating away from Google Authenticator was a massive pain for me this year and as we continue to use more services, this problem will grow.

Some apps on my phone started using biometrics (face id) for authentication and it's extremely convenient.

2020 introduced a new major challenge with face id, given mask usage

Biometrics are ultimately just a password that you cannot change and share all over the place. They're convenient, sure, but are a step back in security.

Sexbots.

It may sound amusing, but there really are many sexually frustrated individuals who could potentially see massive improvement in their social and physiological life and lead to a net gain for the society. Also it might lead to a reduction in the overvaluation of sex in romantic relationships and thus happier couples. Add this to its potential of sexual education (by having realistic simulation devices) and it might just compensate for the damage pornography has done.

I think VR is heading this way. Ultimately it is probably more efficient, both in cost and experience, to improve VR with supplementary hardware than have sex-dolls that can walk on two legs for no reason.

Sure, yes. That would be more realistic to expect than actual humanoid robots. I meant something similar, probably should have worded it better.

Love is a phenomenon which bears comparison with electricity. E.g. A home cooked meal has more love in each portion than does a restaurant meal, and does more good than a restaurant meal. E.g. A loving act generates Happiness in the actor, which generates Beauty, which generates Love for the actor. I think that there is an identifiable phenomenon involving love, beauty and happiness and that study of this phenomenon can only benefit the student.

An alternative to the web.

Designed for the user, not for developers, or cooperations.

All these initiatives like SOLID, ad blockers, regulation & censorship should not be needed in this new alternative.

Power was given to devs and we ended up with web obesity.

Power was given to cooperations & we ended up with subversion.

Then when people asked regulators to fix it we ended up with popups.

The web is currently rotten beyond repair. We need an alternative

I think that you are correct. There are alternatives though, but they don't like to use it much. Also would be alternative that the web browser could be designed better; interpret them differently and more efficiently for the user to have more control and don't waste too much energy.

For different applications, you can have:

- NNTP

- Gopher

- IRC

- Telnet and SSH

- etc.

(I have a NNTP server set up. If you want to set up discussion forums, this is a good idea, I think. I also have Gopher and QOTD (TCP only, no UDP) services set up too.)

There can also be the better uses of HTTP too (it is capable of some things but that they don't commonly use properly), and the uses of different file formats (you do not have to be limited to only HTML; you can also have plain text format, httpdirlist format, etc).

I already replied to the parent, but Gemini is a modern protocol that significantly improves conceptually upon Gopher. It's lighter than HTTP/HTML and with just enough features to serve the small web and not much more. It's worth checking out if you haven't already.

Yes, I believe you, although my list is not meant to be exhaustive.

Gemini protocol aims to address some of these problems by doing away with the web entirely. It's like a modernised Gopher with improvements that benefit from 21st century hindsight.

Life support. AFAIK we can't keep someone alive in a sealed container for five years, even if we supply as much power as desired.

I’m surprised there’s not more construction tech. I mean housing is multi trillion dollar industry with enormous unlimited demand. I get that it’s hard due To regulation and barriers to entry but still

Transpilation platforms. There's a lot of new programming languages being written, but few people want to use a programming language without many libraries. One solution to this is to host the new language on an existing platform/library ecosystem, e.g. JVM, BEAM, Lua, C, but this requires choosing a platform and tying the language to that platform (and accepting the design choices of that platform's major implementations, e.g. in some cases, the platform implementation may have slow startup time, which makes it hard to use your new language for quick scripting from the commandline).

Instead, one could imagine a programming language platform designed to transpile the new language to multiple underlying platforms. Like LLVM IR, this transpilation platform could be a nexus that supports many different frontends and many different backends. Such a transpilation platform would make it easier for new languages to be useful sooner.

I should be clearer about how a "transpilation platform" would differ from something like LLVM IR. First, a transpilation platform is focused on interoperability between the source high-level language and the target platform, including high-level language constructs like passing hashtables back and forth. Second, where feasible a transpilation platform attempts to output human-readable high-levl code in the high-level target language.

Hearing aid technology. In the last decade, the biggest innovation has been to add Bluetooth to premium hearing aids. It's a total game-changer, but I'm very surprised that there hasn't been more innovation on this front. I'm profoundly deaf, and my hearing aid gives me so many cool features... but I can't help but wonder how much better someone with normal hearing would feel with those features as well. I'm practically a cyborg at the moment, with technology augmenting my crappy hearing. Why wouldn't a normal person want to be a cyborg too, and have tech-augmented super-hearing?!

Like many other things, I guess the demand just isn't there. And even though Bluetooth devices have made having things in your ear all the time way less stigmatized than they were when I was growing up, there's still a bit of embarrassment about having something like a hearing aid in your ear. It's a shame, really.

If Musk’s claims are true, neuralink could make you hear music by bypassing your ears [0]. That could plausibly cure many types of deafness.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

Frameworks and languages to build small to mid-sized web applications that aren't no-code or low-code or tied into an online service. Basically, PHP alternatives.

Here's a "wishlist" of features I'd like in such a framework:

- Absolutely no boilerplate code: It should feel more like a powerful templating language than a general purpose programming language.

- A static type system that's checked before your application can go live

- Vertical integration, especially towards the database: You could go really crazy with this. LINQ-style query-ability is just the beginning. Imagine if you had a typed access control framework that lets you specify which users/roles can access a database column. Or built-in ways to handle migration and automatic schema checks to prevent mismatch issues.

- Useful primitives, especially around authentication and authorization: For something simple I should only have to write my business logic.

- FFI (for example to C or JVM libraries)

- Automatic and safe dependency updates

Hard problems:

- Poverty

- Inequality

- Racial Discrimination

- Affordable Health and Education

- Old Age Care

The list goes on. We are 200 years into industrial revolution and have made significant scientific and economic progress. Time we start looking for solutions to the really Hard problems.

That’s a list of topics, but not problems. Need problem statements and definition of terms before they get to be called “hard problems”.

I agree. The question to ask is "how do you boil those problems down to computational problems?". Those problems you've listed are broad but solutions to subproblems would go a long way. I'm surprised this hasn't been explored deeply yet.

Nanotech and mass adoption of graphene based products. I understand the cost hurdle but so was solar which has been seeing major improvements lately to help reduce cost and improve efficiency. I'm still surprised by how little has been done to make nanotech and/or graphene based products more viable and affordable.

Mathematics

Just think of all the good it's brought and how underfunded it is

Can you elaborate a bit? My son is a mathematician, a post doc right now. While I would not say math is over funded, my understanding is that most of the money they spend (above and beyond salaries) is just travel related so they can talk together. That is they don't have expensive equipment like electron microscopes, server farms, etc. On the other hand I think you can make a strong case that math education outreach to under represented groups in math, like some minorities and women in some countries maybe does not get the attention it deserves.

One thing that does cost a bit is the computers.

Computational flops are microscopes for a mathematician these days.

More funding can mean more people working in the field with the same amount spent on everyone rather than more money spent on the same number of people.

• Speech synthesis for games

• Social connection apps (dating/friends/hangouts) that aren’t optimized for fleecing users

• VR tourism

• Some way to digitally record and recreate smells, scents and odors

• A unified paradigm for controlling machines from fridges to elevators. Like tiny touchscreens with a modern and accessible UI you can hook up to with your phones

Privacy and forgiveness. Cancel culture needs to be cancelled.

Large-scale seawater desalination.

The big problem here is how to make it more energy efficient (let alone more energy efficient than our existing freshwater purification/distribution systems). We know how to build them, they're just very expensive to run.

Tunnels. Even with Boring Company I think they are being underinvested in. Can completely revolutionize cities once the cost drops. More green space. Eliminates air, noise and light pollution. No more unsightly telephone poles and wires. Reclaim prime land for other uses.

New York —https://earthlymission.com/new-york-city-underground-infrast...

London — https://londonist.com/london/transport/london-cutaways

Static code optimization, particularly for the web. There’s a really great thing happening where more and more frontend work is embracing static site generation, while using tools more commonly used for client rendered content (eg react), but the frameworks then ship tons of JS duplicating the mostly static content of these sites, roughly doubling page size and at least doubling render times.

Easy to use, type safe, automatically validated/decoded/encoded/documented interface boundaries. There’s awesome tooling for this and nothing I’m aware of checks all those boxes, at least on platforms I develop on.

I’m considering experimenting with solutions for the former, and actively developing a solution for the latter for TypeScript/Node.

You know how we have an overabundance of ways to design, describe, develop, and document rpc-based distributed systems like REST and microservices? Why isn't there anything like that for event-driven, message-based systems? If there's a message bus in your architecture, it's usually just a pipe-shaped widget on a diagram. There's dozens of tools that can describe and API down to the finest detail, like swagger/openapi, uml, C4. We have infrastructure as code (helm charts, etc).

In all of them the events and message buses are kind of an afterthought. Everything seems geared towards request-response systems, and nothing adequately deals with the range of event systems and message flows.

Hi, you’ll be pleased to learn about the AsyncApi initiative! https://www.asyncapi.com/

Haven’t looked into it too closely but it looks promising

Thank you!

Open source printers

Why do you say that?

Most printer companies make their money off of the ink/toner for consumer products. The printers themselves are usually close to break even prices. That doesn't leave much room for open source competitors.

apparently commercial printers leave microdots on printed pages that can be used as fingerprints. Perhaps an open source one would not. just a guess though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

I think the microdots have become mandatory. Any commerical open source printer would likely be required to do this too. I guess I just don't see that as giving people a compelling reason to produce one (meaning I'm not surprised by a lack of people working on it).

Many of these printers don't work well on Free OSes unfortunately. Or require binary blobs (looking at you Canon) that are barely maintained piece of software cobbled together...

I had an HP and Lexmark working with Ubuntu and didn't have any problems that I can remember. I still imagine the market demand is quite low, especially if there are some existing printers that already work.

I guess I could see it if it was DIY. But then the question would be why it hasn't been done already.

I use Ubuntu and my Brother laser printer is plug-and-play... not with USB but with WiFi!!!

Now scanning on the other hand...

Absolutely, some printers work beautifuly.

Why don't we have a common interface for printers. Something you could just push a simple pre-processed postscript or even bitmap. And then the device would do the stuff it needs to print it. Have basic set of options in there, page size, duplex, etc...

They likely already have enough processing power for that anyway...

Just because of the scam you mention. EVERYONE complains about their bullshit low quality home printer with super expensive ink. Yet nothing is being done about it.

I don't mind my printer. I buy refurbished/off-brand cartridges and they work pretty well.

The real question is, can it actually be done more cheaply (commercially)?

Printers are complex mechanical devices. And people want them cheap as possible. I don't think there is big enough market for open source printer that would cost x-times more.

Someone is likely making good industrial quality ones, now finding those and selling them on that point is something that should be solved...

Tbh I think the age of printers is just about over. I haven't had a printer for years and get by just fine. For the rare occasion I want to print something, I just print it at the library or work or a commercial printing store.

Printing on standard paper is of marginal utility. Being able to adapt open source printer designs to print on various objects would change the game.

It's funny you can get a cheap DIY OSS 3D printer, but not a 2D :)

Placebo effect: how can knowing you’ve taken a treatment improve your condition, without having actually taken the treatment?

There is considerable debate on if the placebo effect is real and for what situations it is. For example apparently it can cure a headache but AFAIK there is no evidence it can cure actual physiological issues (cancer, sickness, ...) It makes some sense it would work on pain since pain at some point is just a signal to your brain and you chose consciously or unconsciously to change your perception of that signal. On the other hand there is nothing placebo will do to stop that cancer from growing or those viruses from multiplying.

Given the various issues with painkillers, a better understood placebo effect would be great even if it is pain only.

With the rise of video based meetings, I'm surprised more products around video first dating haven't appeared.

It seems to solve several issues with apps like Tinder / Bumble etc. I guess a negative is that it's more nerve-wracking to video-date complete strangers, and to ensure it doesn't go the way of chatroulette.

Over quarantine I started something in this space [1], but I thought some of the larger dating companies would have introduced products around this concept too.

[1] https://copperdating.com/en/

Can you make a version for my audience too? https://speedfriending.at/ at each of our events we get 100 people, it's something people care a lot about, we are the 2nd biggest meetup group in vienna https://www.meetup.com/speed-friending-events

1) Full day elementary education.

2) Universal charging adaptors for electronic devices.

3) Charging for disposal of oversize trash like appliances and furniture. Reduce the bad habit of buying cheap junk only to toss them in a couple of years. This is how it works in Tokyo and consumers think full-life cycle cost of a product, not just the upfront cost.

4) Grocery trucks that make their daily rounds in urban neighborhoods so all people need to do is walk up and purchase fresh food. Reduces the need for grocery delivery which requires a lot of packaging. Basically same as food truck idea, but for fresh groceries.

First-class logic/constraint programming like in Flix (https://flix.dev/). This would make complex logic easier and powerful.

The coding part of the software development process. We're still writing code in a text editor like we were 40+ years ago. The editors have become more powerful but writing code is still very similar.

40* years ago I was using an IBM 029 keypunch, and sequencing my cards using an offline sequencer in case I dropped the deck.

Today I use an editor that knows, semantically, the context of everything I type. It suggests nouns, and checks compatibility. It automatically shows me documentation for APIs. It knows several hundred common pitfalls to watch out for and suggests corrections for them. It even auto-formats my code so I don't have to dink around doing that.

We've come a long long way in 40 years.

* Ok, it was actually 1979. We got Vaxes and VT100 terminals with VMS EDIT 4 years later. The state of the art in editing was QED, a souped up version of unix 'ed', and vi hadn't really escaped Berkeley yet. Somewhere in MA and CA, some people were munging TECO to become Emacs.

Besides all other points by jhayward, what kind of changes do you have in mind? From my perspective at first sight it isn't necessarily negative that we are doing the things in a pretty simlar way as to how we were doing them 40 years ago.

A few things I've been considering for the last few years. These are just brainstorming thoughts, so I definitely haven't thought these ideas through. * Why do editors allow us to write invalid code? Most editors know the syntax of the language, many embed (or connect to) the language runtime. If the editor knows a file is going to be invalid, why allow it to be saved (allow the user to force the save, of course). * Why are editors still showing us entire files instead of functions? I usually edit code by looking at functions and how they relate to other functions. Why not show a function at a time and allow you to bring up multiple functions at a time to edit, regardless of which file it's in?

Light Table (http://lighttable.com/) started down the path of what I was thinking, especially with the continual/inline code evaluation.

Once again, these are primarily just thoughts I've been considering. I haven't found a good outlet for discussing my ideas, everyone I discuss them with seems to respond that "that's the way things are" or "that sounds complicated". I've been considering writing a little editor proof of concept to explore some of these thoughts.

Robotics. In my opinion the cyber-physical is clearly the next frontier. I think people stay away from the field since it is quite interdisciplinary and requires a lot of additional knowledge and effort.

Age reversal / life extension. Most people seem contempt with the fact they'll die pretty soon. Otherwise every scientist would be working on curing this inevitable "disease".

Governance systems. A lot of resources are allocated by institutions, and institutions have a lot of power over our lives. There is a decent amount of research comparing and analysing existing governance systems (e.g. comparative constitutional law) however there is surprisingly little effort put into coming up with new ones. In more detail, there is surprisingly little thinking, research, and experimentation on alternatives to the current procedures by which institutions make decisions (things like Robert's Rules of Order; voting systems; procedures for determining what gets on the ballot of e.g. corporate shareholder meetings; procedures for selection of judges, conduct of trials, resolving disputes in the interpretation of rules; etc).

There are many new and small institutions being formed all the time (e.g. HOAs; new companies; local non-profits; technology standards committees; etc) but few of them experiment with new and "experimental" procedures, and few experimental procedures are proposed (which could be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; maybe no one wants to try out a novel procedure unless it has been at least analysed a lot, but maybe no one wants to spend time inventing and analysing novel procedures if there is little chance they will be used).

In addition, there is little work on novel procedures for self-governance of large asynchronous online communities (such as forums).

How will I manage to live when I will grow old? I often feel like society is not made for old people.

Desktop UI beyond wimp.

Maybe it is not for lack of trying but it is surprising to me that the desktop UI of today (say MacOS Big Sur) is the same "windows, icons, menus and a mouse pointer", beyond some improvements in animation and graphics, as it was 20 years ago (say Windows 2000).

I think its more that the core concepts of a desktop UI were correct 20 years ago and other than minor refinements, there is no reason to change it up just for the sake of change. If you look at apples other products (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch) they all have radically different UIs which suit their form factor best.

We see this in basically all established industries. The bicycle of 30 years ago looked pretty similar to one you would buy today. Its just every part has been made slightly stiffer, lighter, more durable, more vibration absorbing, etc but the core shape is still the same because we already came to the correct design.

s/20 years ago/36 years ago/

s/Windows 2000/the first Macintoshes/

ftfy

WIMP is fine. The problem at present is that “modern” UIs don’t adhere to WIMP conventions (tooltips, context menus, regular menus, keyboard accelerators/shortcuts and navigation, using native look & feel and controls including windows chrome, unambiguous visual distinction between actionable controls and mere labels/text/images, power-user features like configurable toolbars that were a common feature 20 years ago, ...).

Beat me to it. This is now an old entrenched industry overripe for a little...disruption (what a nauseating term, I just don't know what else to call it).

This is my focus next year.

Placing many small bets that niche/vertical search will make this space much more interesting.

I just hope one vertical is web forums. AFAICT, most useful knowledge that I search for is in the collective archives of reddit, stack overflow, comments here, and the endless sprawl of vbulletin.

My thought exactly. But Google has built such a big moat that it'd be hard for any new player to take out any considerable market share from them.

The only way to beat Google is to come up with a whole new paradigm for information access. Perhaps something like Wolfram alpha for the web.

Can't we beat Google by being better than them at solving the search problem?

Google launches approximately one new and helpful search feature per year. What if you launched a company or conjured up a community that could give birth to two helpful features per year, wouldn't that company or community catch up and eventually surpass them in functionality?

This company wouldn't have to come up with a new paradigm for information access. Instead, they would have to come up with a way to launch helpful search features that wasn't dependent on PII. To me that doesn't sound as scary as having to come up with a new paradigm for information retrieval. To me it sounds fully doable.

Apple‘s Reminders app. Unfortunately, the app is not mature at all. The text (date) recognition, like "4pm shopping", should in its current state just be removed. I honestly don't know though if it's intentional, to create a place for companies like Todoist in the App Store. If the text recognition and user interface in Apple's Reminder app would be better, I wouldn't use Todoist anymore.

Real estate tools that actually help buyers and sellers! The vast majority of tools in the real estate space are there to help estate agents / realtors.

I wish that would happen, too. Cynical answer for why it doesn't: buyers and sellers are in an antagonistic relationship, so it's not easy to optimize value for both simultaneously. Realtors are the middlemen who derisk both sides of the transaction, raking in money in exchange. They have the money, they have the tools.

Protocells.

Self-replicating cells that can be programmed to perform specific tasks.

The first protocells will be bacteria with heavily modified DNA. Eventually, we’ll be able to build fully-artificial self-replicating protocells (more “artificial cell” than “small robot”). Being fully-artificial will help us integrate new tech that nature hasn’t quite discovered/made-full-use-of yet — like different battery techs, RF communication, transistors, etc.

Here’s a good paper exploring the topic: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/5/2/1019/htm

Imagine a blob that could wash along the floor, clearing 100% of detritus and intelligently depositing it — or perhaps even recycling it.

Imagine being able to repair a worn hip joint by injecting then commanding these protocells — no surgery required.

Imagine them self-assembling into structures to transport, deposit and combine material like an advanced 3D printer, building objects to incredible detail, or massive structures quickly, or both: massive structures with incredible detail.

Imagine programming them to kill all COVID-19 virions!

Imagine programming them to make paperclips :P

The word you are looking for is "minimal artificial life/cell". They are being worked on, a lot. A bigger problem is increasing funding for life sciences and making commercialisation cheaper.

Python for serious game development. Python for browser scripting so we can have true, full-stack web development in Python. More aggressive expansion of Python into the embedded world. More Python for terminal scripting. Widespread teaching of Python to schoolchildren in order to make programming the new literacy. More aggressive attempt to make Python the lingua franca of the programming world.

Did I leave anything out?

Cross platform accessibility APIs for integrating with OS and programs with high level scripting language bindings such as Python.

> Python for serious game development.

While it's not python, Godot's 'native' language is GDScript, which is quite python-like.

I don't really see the point of the rest of your comment though. Python is fine, but other languages have their advantages as well.

UAP. There is clearly a phenomenon occurring that is completely unexplainable and well beyond our current understanding. We have countless credible witnesses and multi-witness events in our armed forces alone. I don’t purport to know what the phenomenon is or why it is happening, but it seems important on a variety of levels. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population doesn’t seem to care.

Replacing JavaScript

God, yes...JavaScript is the great "stick a bandaid on it" story of tech

As someone with many years of JavaScript development experience I approve this message.

The annoying thing is that the community/OSS is so great that nothing that departs too drastically from JavaScript can get traction. Code you're working with is written in JS, docs are written in JS, tutorials written in JS, people you talk to are talking about JS.

TypeScript has really taken off because it's still very similar to JavaScript, something that can't be said of things like Elm or ReScript.

I'd say there's lots of work being done here.

Today's JavaScript is different from JavaScript of 10 years ago. There's also TypeScript and other alternatives that compile to JavaScript.

Are you looking for something different?

What about WASM?

Human genetic engineering. Its like the cure to everything, and everybody is too scared to actually work on it. Especially big grants committees

Education. At best we're playing at the edges by making knowledge more accessible. But to wit, education is mostly trying to teach content that becomes modern, using 19th century methods.

Given how important the knowledge economy is, I would think that significantly more money (worldwide) would be invested in researching promising delivery models. Admittedly, I have no idea what those are either.

Google Wave. Basically integrated information transmitting and collaboration in an easy to digest manner.

Google failed miserable with their invite requirement.

Google's marketing around Wave was extremely disappointing to me. The invitation system was only a small part of their problem.

I know I was incredibly excited about it because I immediately understood it to be a way to kill email and the things that surround it. To think that Microsoft's Bedlam DL3 incident could have been a bitter memory.

Oh well. I guess we're stuck with email as it continues to exist today.

Reply all. "Remove me from this thread please." Send mail.

Adoption of applications that are mostly text-based (e.g. chat) that don't require increasingly more hardware requirements to be usable.

The typical ones - cancer and longevity. Why billionaires aren’t dumping 99% of their net worth into extending their lives is beyond me.

Endometriosis and adenomyosis.

Endometriosis is a condition that affects 10-15% of adult women, that can be extremely painful, that we barely understand, and that we can't effectively treat most of the time. It also confounds a lot of the conventional understanding of the source of pain, which means we might get some interesting insights from studying it further.

There is no easy diagnosis for Endometriosis either. It’s symptom-based “maybe it’s endo but until we open you up and scope you, there’s no way to tell.”

And no idea what causes it, how to treat it, and what all does it affect. Does it cause infertility? Who knows. Maybe. Does it need to be removed? Maybe. Depends. Is there medication? Not exactly. Can you do anything to reduce the effects? Be healthier.

It is one of the most frustrating things to go through and it absolutely messes with the quality of life. It’s basically the “default:” or “Other” for all undiagnosable issues.

Dynamic Relational: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic-database-s...

Unlike the NoSql movement, it embraces SQL and many RDBMS conventions to reduce the learning curve. It only removes or changes RDBMS features that get in the way of dynamism, but keeps the baby in the bathwater. And it allows incremental tightening of constraints/types to go from prototype to production. I'd love such a tool for prototyping.

This "isn't being worked on" topic is large and popular; I suggest follow-up HN entries break suggestions into categories for further discussion. HN is about innovation and the future.

I miss the C2 wiki for documenting opinions on various suggestions, and allow slower pondering. Nothing has replaced it for that function.