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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d add that researchers should eventually try to commercialize their research. I understand that it’s not possible for all the fields, but I think too many life sciences PhD end up in e-commerce and finance.
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.
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!
Interesting. How would that system work for non-trusted people? I see that it would work for family and friends, but how to publish for the general public?
This reminds me that there is/was a company working on blockchain tech for tracking legislation changes.
The point to having the system is that if someone who is a publisher is being censored, they can move their content to another platform and their entire audience knows they moved because their "location" is in the blockchain. That's why being able to store data alongside an identity is important.
Yeah, I got the concept for platform level censorship. If you have adversaries actively trying to shut you down, they can just follow you to the next platform. Government level censorship could still be possible.
Oh, I see. I guess I misinterpreted what kind of censorship you were asking about.
But that also might help combat censorship by governments if you can get your data hosted outside of your country. Not sure how well that would work in practice, though.
We have a bunch of things like this. Torrents and data on the blockchain can't really be removed. The problem with a lot of uncensorable publishing is the average person does not want to be storing and distributing someone elses illegal content.
Blockchain is way too hard to interact with even for moderately technical people. And the minute you create an interface that makes it easy, you become the single point of failure.
I used to think BitTorrent was easy for the average computer user by now, but actually not so. You can't really delete a magnet link, but you can relatively easily take down the websites that host them, so it's not really relevant. It doesn't matter if the file still exists and there's a peer willing to distribute it if I cannot find it. In practice a lot of a popular torrent trackers (or magnet link indexers) manage to stay up for several years, but there's no technological guarantee for this.
Well, people are working actively on Chrome and Firefox, and people are building new browsers on top of webkit often enough.
If you mean an alternative browser not based on the 3 major rendering engines, well that one is not really surprising given that you need a large team to concentrate on it.
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.
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, ...).
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
We build our all-Python full stack dev environment (https://anvil.works) on Skulpt - but there's a lot of room in that solution space! If you haven't checked out Mozilla's Pyodide project, for example, it's truly impressive - they compiled all of CPython and popular data science libraries to wasm for a full notebook experience in your browser:
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?
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.
True, they aren't really in the spot light. I do hear a good bit about them through the stock market news as opposed to mainstream news. Also in science/tech focused publications for the break through news.
We already have the solutions and know they work. Solar and wind are incredibly well developed and successful. We just need to remove the politics and corruption holding them back.
The easiest is to change the content of our plates, without waiting hoping that maybe if we are lucky enough someone will come up with a solution for all the destruction that we cause in the first place when we buy products from the most destructive industry in regards of GHG emmissions, deforestation, fresh water pollution, ocean dead zones and much more : the animal agriculture industry.
Watch "Endgame 2050" on YouTube or "Cowspiracy" on Netflix if you want to learn more
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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)
My grandfather went into a Skilled Nursing Facility briefly last year. They had TERRIBLE wifi and we ended up getting a Verizon Hotspot so he could check his email.
He didn't have any desire to play games.
Of note, the therapy department has a lot of low tech games and might actually have a budget for tech assisted therapy.
I visited a nursing home a few years ago and they had televisions on the wall playing crappy broadcast tv and periodically blaring advertisements at high decibel levels. it was awful.
And some folks just didn't move out of bed much because it was so labor intensive.
We need robots and lots of other tech.
That said, there are some cool hospital beds that are like Transformers. For example, you can get hospital beds that not only tilt and let you sit up in bed - but they can basically turn into a chair or help you get out.
Seniors want simplicity not complexity. Tricked out software and hardware add overwhelming levels of complication so quickly that anyone over 45 will run from it. Among that population, usable apps must be highly visual and the choices apparent (not hidden) and concrete. Their memorization, learning, and logic abilities are often impaired. Never was Steve Krug's UX mantra more relevant than in the aged, “Don't make me think.”
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.
Hold up, I thought we just got done fucking our economy for the sake of the elderly and immunocompromised? How can you shame us for neglecting them after all what has been done and sacrificed? We locked down like people wanted. We threw away the economy and destroyed many small businesses, spit on all the young people who didn't plan on doing their school from home, and made human interaction and socialization a crime. What more do we have to do for the sake of boomers?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What kind of changes do you expect more of? It seems to me like renewable energy is progressing at a very rapid pace so home solar is cheaper and better every year.
Lawmakers and politicians in my country (Spain) have evolved from antagonising renewal energy to having a passive attitude during the last few years. I would like to see a more aggressive approach toward implementing these forms of energy, like in other EU countries.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
>> 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.
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
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadMost 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
I guess I could see it if it was DIY. But then the question would be why it hasn't been done already.
Now scanning on the other hand...
They likely already have enough processing power for that anyway...
The real question is, can it actually be done more cheaply (commercially)?
Someone is likely making good industrial quality ones, now finding those and selling them on that point is something that should be solved...
All that to say - it's not a bug, it's a feature to many Americans.
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.
- 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.
Examples: quantum mechanics, string theory, certain advanced algorithms, AI etc.
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
This reminds me that there is/was a company working on blockchain tech for tracking legislation changes.
But that also might help combat censorship by governments if you can get your data hosted outside of your country. Not sure how well that would work in practice, though.
https://www.lockss.org/
I used to think BitTorrent was easy for the average computer user by now, but actually not so. You can't really delete a magnet link, but you can relatively easily take down the websites that host them, so it's not really relevant. It doesn't matter if the file still exists and there's a peer willing to distribute it if I cannot find it. In practice a lot of a popular torrent trackers (or magnet link indexers) manage to stay up for several years, but there's no technological guarantee for this.
If you mean an alternative browser not based on the 3 major rendering engines, well that one is not really surprising given that you need a large team to concentrate on it.
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/Windows 2000/the first Macintoshes/
ftfy
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-...
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.
Farmers aren't dumb but:
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 are definitely not dumb. But many are not currently incentivized to manage soil and (more broadly) agricultural ecosystems with long-term viability in mind.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24232291-100-the-idea...
https://anvil.works/blog/python-in-the-browser-talk
We build our all-Python full stack dev environment (https://anvil.works) on Skulpt - but there's a lot of room in that solution space! If you haven't checked out Mozilla's Pyodide project, for example, it's truly impressive - they compiled all of CPython and popular data science libraries to wasm for a full notebook experience in your browser:
https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide
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.)
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.
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/pandemic-...
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.
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.
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.
The difference of course is that the cultural hegemony of christianity has made charity expected
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 seems like the system works really need to change to get your dream to a reality
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.
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")
It is definitely a step up from a nursing home, especially for people who would like to live with their family or chosen roommates.
It’s better than most nursing homes. My siblings and I grew up with the residents and were quite attached to them when we were younger. It’s a hard job though and the systems aren’t set up to support you. Full commercial fire systems are required for what is otherwise residential housing. Of course to my mother it’s more of a mission than anything else.
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.
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?
This is my focus next year.
Placing many small bets that niche/vertical search will make this space much more interesting.
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.
Link - https://github.com/webview/webview
[0]https://github.com/webview/webview/issues/76
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.
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.
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.
Idea of runtime mode - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673
I am in general interested in this as well, and have found debugging in most text-based IDEs to be a step backwards.
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.
Just think of all the good it's brought and how underfunded it is
Computational flops are microscopes for a mathematician these days.
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?
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.
What do you envision for an "AppleHelps" program?
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).
#3 sounds good.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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”
https://www.roche.com/sustainability/philanthropy/science_ed...
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.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/can-breathing-pure-o...
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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'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.