Thinking of software, probably early "beta" Gmail. There was so much about the email experience that was improved by a stable web client, with what felt at the time like unlimited storage.
Thinking of hardware, I've never been much for Apple products, but the iPhone (particularly early models) is undoubtedly a design marvel.
The iPad, too. I spend hours with it every day—mostly reading and watching videos—and I rarely have to think about it as a device. It just lets me get absorbed in whatever I’m looking at.
I don’t use it much myself, as I’m not an artist, but the iPad app ProCreate seems to be a masterpiece of good design, too.
LG Tone Flex HBS-XL7. The best earbuds with the worst name. I really like this form factor. I often forget that I'm wearing them and this particular model is the most comfortable of the ones I've used over the years.
Kindle Paperwhite. I have the older model. I've heard the nooks are good too. The simpler the better. Nothing to break or distract. Don't use the backlight and the battery lasts ages. I know a lot of people are partial to physical books but I've read hundreds more books than I might have otherwise read since I started using my kindle. It's probably my favorite thing I own.
+1 on Crock Pot. It's so easy to create something tasty with it.
If I had to reduce my kitchen to as little items as possible, this would be my first pick.
Mine is still going usefully for me, albeit with High Sierra. For most tasks, it's performance is on-par with my 2019 MacBook Pro - which I suspect comes down to thermals more than anything.
A lot of what I use it for is just headlessly running FFmpeg over ssh.
In terms of physical things, my Audio Technica ATH-M50x headphones. I have been quite literally wearing them all day, every day for the past three years and got no complaints.
I got the predecessor of these (ATH-M50) in high school and I still use them 15 years later. Have a bit of peeling where the headband touches my head, but working perfectly otherwise.
I’ve used my m50s so much over the last 10 years that I’ve replaced the cups, and worn out the headband. I fixed the headband with a tennis racquet grip
US Forest Service picnic table. 3 kinds of simple flat cement castings. Held together by their own weight. Easily carried and assembled by two men. Cheap. Almost indestructible.
You said things, so I am excluding software (like the original version of the Square web app)
JVC Flats
GBA SP (the pocket clamshell one)
Retro microwave with the original-ipod style single knob controls
More generically, forks
Grand Prize Winner:
wood Staunton chess set - beautiful, durable, affordable, practical. The piece design is exquisitely balanced between representation and abstraction
HP 8566B spectrum analyzer and 8510C network analyzer. HP RPN calculators. Really any late 80’s and early 90’s HP test equipment. Built like tanks and designed by engineers for engineers.
I’m not really the type to fuss over wine glasses but I was gifted a set of Veuve Cliquot champagne flutes (similar to the glasses that come in this set[1]) and they really are beautiful. The shape of the glass makes the bubbles fizz to the top in this tiny perfect spiral in the center of the glass. You can tell they were designed by someone who cares about champagne and pays attention to its presentation.
- my texas instruments ti-86 (still rocking strong since 1997)
- thinkpads: T42, X220, w530, T440... they're just great.
- my wenger/swissgear carbon backpack
EDIT: actually my regular bialetti moka is replacing an induction moka (still from bialetti) because the induction moka is hard to open (due to the round base).
Have had the exact same Kershaw knife for about the same period of time. It’s my go-to for opening boxes and things around the house. It’s a great product.
Zorijushi rice cooker. It can cook rice perfectly and can hold cooked rice for days.
Facebook portal. Yeah Facebook privacy and all that but that's a good product that allows me to call people without having to mess with the phone. The audio and video is super clear. I use it despite it's from Facebook.
Work sharp knife sharpener. It's superior to sharpening the my knives with the stone.
Apple airtags. I often forget where I put my keychain so this is really well executed. Apple airpods. They just work and they are nice enough.
Hakko soldering station. I don't know if the recent Chinese usbc ones are better but the hakko one I have work well enough for everything I want to do.
I have owned both. AirTags are superior to Tile tags in several major ways: (1) the batteries are replaceable (although I understand newer Tile tags also have them); (2) when you get close enough, the Find My app can give you directions to the tag; and (3) there are far more iPhones/iPads out there than Tile users, so if you leave your tag somewhere, its location is much more likely to be found with pinpoint accuracy.
I'm surprised to see the Portal listed. We have one for letting the grandparents talk to the kids, and it is the most unreliable piece of technology I've owned. Constant connection issues and laggy UI.
A Huskee Cup. Low maintenance, made from coffee husk, great seal with the lid, and I love that it can hold hot coffee but not burn your hands due to the fins running along the body. Many local coffee shops also give me a discount on takeaway coffee if I bring my own takeaway cup, and some offer a Huskee Cup swap program where you can leave your dirty cup with them if you've been carrying it around after drinking your last coffee and get a clean one for your next order (personally I prefer to just keep my own though).
They were making something that would be recognizable as a book (or booklet) at least as early as late republic, which ties in to my point that the format has been refined a long time.
I think you mean the codex? It was like a book, except the pages were bound on alernating sides. Not the best design, they improved on it in the middle ages. The codex achieved parity with the scroll in 300 AD, so that the modern book format coming just 200 years later means it wasn't around for that long.
I liked to read while lying down and e-readers are an objectively better experience. I can never hold a book in a comfortable way - and ereaders are backlit.
BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively easy to implement, it has a diversity of lightweight clients for all OSes and is fairly resistant to censorship. To me it's pretty much perfect tech that solves a real problem. I hope Bram Cohen got rich off of it somehow.
Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.
The Opera browser did for a short while. If I recall correctly, it was taken out since sysadmins at schools, workplaces, etc would ban the browser. Of course that behavior unfortunately ensured that bittorrent would remain a protocol mostly for piracy.
Support in the browser would require the browser to stay on the whole time, along with the computer. Bittorrent clients are better run on small less power hungry boards (RPi, etc.) or on hardware that is meant to be running 24/7 anyway. For example, I run the Transmission daemon on my XigmaNAS home file server. The NAS is headless, but I can control the daemon through its remote GUI, so as soon as I click on a torrent or magnet link on the browser, it calls the local Transmission GUI which sends the info to the client on the NAS which starts the download freeing the browser and the PC of any further work.
It doesn't require the browser to be always on, unless you want to download something (which is the same as a normal download). Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file? Otherwise I'm not sure I get your point.
> Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file?
That is one of the main points. Some files are shared by thousands users and can be downloaded in seconds, but others are much harder to find, so that I like to keep the client on to help other people getting it quickly. I usually am annoyed when a file with a single seed reaches like 97% then it dies until the following day because the seeder had to turn off the PC, so I try to avoid this, especially since it costs me nothing as broadband is flat and the client runs on a machine that is always on.
It would absolutely not require that, it only requires that someone's browser is open when you're trying to download, which is likely since most people have their browsers open a lot.
A major browser supporting torrents would be a disaster for public torrent culture. Since everyone closes their browsers, people would seed substantially less. I have a theory that a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally.
EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover.
I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.
BitTorrent itself doesn't provide any privacy, which is critical for something like a web browser. If anyone in the world can query what you've downloaded, it can escalate into real issues.
This would cripple home internet connections, where the upstream is usually a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth. Most of the stuff people download is created/hosted by big companies. Let them pay for bandwidth instead of individual home users (looking at you, Blizzard and other game companies who like to use torrents to distribute patches).
I'll give you some technobabble: traffic shaping, ack-priorization, quality of service, traffic class.
All things which your home gateway should have in one form, or another, where you designate torrenting a priority which doesn't interfere with the rest of your activities. And adapting dynamically. No need to think about how to slice available bandwith into pieces beforehand.
Nice in theory, but as far as I've seen, most home routers and devices don't utilize those, and most users don't know how to configure them, and the up/down ratio is so vast (like mine is 1000/20, a 50x difference) that it's hard to saturate the down without first maxing the up in a torrent. The exception to that is it you happen to get some phat-piped seeds who are willing to send to you super fast even if you're uploading at a trickle. But in that case, plain old HTTP would've worked better anyway.
At the end of the day the bottleneck isn't at the protocol level, but the asymmetry of home cable connections. Torrents are great when you have symmetric fiber, but very few homes do right now.
Honest question: how much of the torrent content is corrupted in some way? I dabbled with file sharing back when Kazaa was a thing and I infected my computer to the point I had to reinstall the operating system and I "learned my lesson." But maybe I overlearned the lesson, and it can be used reliably?
Kazaaa has nothing to do with torrents, but what do you mean by corrupted?
Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.
I meant “file sharing” more generally not “torrents” specifically (I edited my previous comment). I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware. While not inherent to torrents, it does seem inherent in sharing of random executables. Have the trust issues improved? What are some good use cases of torrents?
So while Kazaa and the like eventually got the ability to actually download from multiple sources, and be able to see that a particular source is popular, as I recall from the early 2000 days, back then it was pure point to point. That is, if you chose to download something, you also were implicitly choosing what source to download it from. So even if five people had the file "Foo", you chose which one to download, and there was no way to know that 4 had the same file "Foo", and 1 person had something else, with no way to know which was what you wanted.
Torrents avoid many of those issues; you can see how many seeds a file has (though Kazaa and the like later added that). And you had to have gotten the magnet link from somewhere, which would have its own evaluatable trust. It's the difference between downloading file called "Foo" from random internet user's computer, and going to a website, that you know, and downloading a file called "Foo" that you also know has been downloaded, and retained, by X number of users.
I don’t think torrents are any different in that aspect from the rest of the web.
Just as you would download and run an executable from a trusted source, you can download a torrent of an executable (from that trusted source) and run it.
E.g. many Linux distributions offer torrent links next to regular downloads; if you trust that website, you can download either file.
It's mostly like the rest of the web, though another commenter is right that seeds demonstrate a small amount of trust. If I'm on some random public warez site, my executable is likely to be malware. If I'm on something like the Internet Archive, Debian's site, or /r/datahoarder, their torrents are likely just a more efficient way to share data.
> . I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware.
Yes, that's very plausible.
> Have the trust issues improved?
If you're retrieving executable code, the source giving you the magnet link is usually given some implicit trust. A good practice is to distribute a hash or better still a signature of the file(s). Though I would expect BitTorrent is designed to protect the shared contents' extents via hashes too.
If the content is some multimedia, then ideally it could be untrusted. Your favorite OS probably has much more robust libraries handling the multimedia content than it did a decade ago. But ultimately if the content distributed is infringing then it probably comes from a less trustworthy source. In which case you should have a different posture when handling these untrusted files than the generally untrusted interwebs content.
Does the BitTorrent protocol have an announcement / stored metadata of "recently highest percentage of file seen"?
This seems like one of the biggest problems with more decentralized torrents (i.e. ones not backed by a community / core seeder), but also most a UX issue and seemingly trivially solvable.
No, but clients do advertise how much of the torrent they have, so you can glance at your peer list and if you have 2 peers stuck at 10%... there's a good chance that you won't get more than 10%.
BitTorrent is 20 years old, IPFS only 6. So, might just come down to familiarity. Definitively many more people, even outside tech crowd, have heard of BitTorrent whereas IPFS is still mostly unknown.
One benefit of ipfs is that you can use cloud flare as a gateway, which is pretty cool. Don't know of anything similar for torrents (from a reputable company).
Speaking from my own experience, I've had a harder time getting data from here to there via ipfs. It's been a year or two since I last tried, but as I recall my troubles were the following:
* Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps.
* Large amounts of data makes client performance worse.
* Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that.
Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes.
I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.
But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.
This is cool, but unfortunately the best content is on private trackers (you also need them to reduce the risk of abuse reports to your provider).
Not sure if the need to use private trackers can be fixed by the protocol, though. But, maybe adding a bit more of anonymity would be enough? i2p torrents provide that, but sacrifice speed. Clearly it's a spectrum and we need more "points" in the middle of it.
I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 17 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.
I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 20 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.
It depends on how niche your tastes are, or how specific you are about quality. Getting Blu-Ray REMUX files for smaller, forgotten movies on public trackers is nigh impossible in my experience. Meanwhile, private trackers gives the community incentive to seed these large torrents with tiny swarms.
It is probably a matter of what kind of content you're after. I do retro game preservation and private trackers are often the only option for certain sets and certainly the most up to date ones.
No. He's describing a distributor's options. You are describing a consumer's problem. Specifically pirate comsumers.
He doesn't need to find his own file; he needs to distribute it. Publishing is a separate issue. With napster, you only had one publishing option: napster.com. With torrents, you have many. As he said, "just dump the magnet link somewhere".
> Unfortunately, bad design won.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Napster and bittorent are different tools that solve different problems.
He's describing general issues involved in distributing something.
You're describing specific issues involved in stealing.
Saying "bad design won" is like saying hammers are a bad design compaired to hypodermic needles because you can't use a hammer to inject yourself with heroin.
I don't know if it started the no-bloatware awareness, that was a remnant of the 90s, where programs were non-bloated by default (with Winamp being the most non-bloated program to ever have been created).
I just got the new Thermapen One and used it yesterday for Thanksgiving dinner. Although it is a relatively small evolutionary step from the ThermoWorks Classic, it is still a great design.
Everything from Valco Instruments, where the founder and CEO (Stan Stearns [0]) launched using his own engineering designs and continued to maintain a prototyping bench indefinitely, long after he had numerous gifted engineers employed.
Not familiar with the hardware that Vici sells, but it sounds like you'd be describing HP test equipment if you were describing tools used by EEs and techs.
994 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 578 ms ] threadThe shape makes it really easy to hold compared to other soda bottles.
Thinking of software, probably early "beta" Gmail. There was so much about the email experience that was improved by a stable web client, with what felt at the time like unlimited storage.
Thinking of hardware, I've never been much for Apple products, but the iPhone (particularly early models) is undoubtedly a design marvel.
[0] https://github.com/alainm23/planner
modern gmail is trash.
i switched my personal gmail account to html-only mode (no javascript) and it's definitely better.
I am surprised that no one else has mentioned the iPhone. It seems to me like an obvious choice.
I'm speaking of the hardware, not of iOS. There's a lot to admire about iOS, but it also has its share of design flaws.
I don’t use it much myself, as I’m not an artist, but the iPad app ProCreate seems to be a masterpiece of good design, too.
https://www.amazon.com/Crock-Pot-SCV700SS-Stainless-7-Quart-...
OP-1. Expensive and makes music feel easy.
https://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Engineering-002-AS-001-OP-1-S...
LG Tone Flex HBS-XL7. The best earbuds with the worst name. I really like this form factor. I often forget that I'm wearing them and this particular model is the most comfortable of the ones I've used over the years.
https://www.amazon.com/LG-HBS-XL7-Bluetooth-Wireless-Neckban...
Kindle Paperwhite. I have the older model. I've heard the nooks are good too. The simpler the better. Nothing to break or distract. Don't use the backlight and the battery lasts ages. I know a lot of people are partial to physical books but I've read hundreds more books than I might have otherwise read since I started using my kindle. It's probably my favorite thing I own.
https://www.amazon.com/All-new-kindle-paperwhite/dp/B08N38WQ...
A lot of what I use it for is just headlessly running FFmpeg over ssh.
A 4 inch pole from a home center through the holes is used to between the two end pieces while the benches and top and dropped on.
A few more men would make it easier.
JVC Flats
GBA SP (the pocket clamshell one)
Retro microwave with the original-ipod style single knob controls
More generically, forks
Grand Prize Winner: wood Staunton chess set - beautiful, durable, affordable, practical. The piece design is exquisitely balanced between representation and abstraction
I know a couple of the guys who worked on that. The in-house code name was "Doomsday." It pretty much was, for the competition.
I have one at home and I’ll likely get the LCD retrofit kit.
[1]https://www.champagneking.co.uk/product/3904/veuve-clicquot-...
- my regular Bialetti moka
- my texas instruments ti-86 (still rocking strong since 1997)
- thinkpads: T42, X220, w530, T440... they're just great.
- my wenger/swissgear carbon backpack
EDIT: actually my regular bialetti moka is replacing an induction moka (still from bialetti) because the induction moka is hard to open (due to the round base).
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0009VC9YK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_...
Even lost it for a couple of years in the yard until the chickens dug it up one day and I just cleaned it up and it was as good as new.
Facebook portal. Yeah Facebook privacy and all that but that's a good product that allows me to call people without having to mess with the phone. The audio and video is super clear. I use it despite it's from Facebook.
Work sharp knife sharpener. It's superior to sharpening the my knives with the stone.
Apple airtags. I often forget where I put my keychain so this is really well executed. Apple airpods. They just work and they are nice enough.
Hakko soldering station. I don't know if the recent Chinese usbc ones are better but the hakko one I have work well enough for everything I want to do.
https://huskee.co/huskeecup/
https://webtorrent.io/
https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/
https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui
That is one of the main points. Some files are shared by thousands users and can be downloaded in seconds, but others are much harder to find, so that I like to keep the client on to help other people getting it quickly. I usually am annoyed when a file with a single seed reaches like 97% then it dies until the following day because the seeder had to turn off the PC, so I try to avoid this, especially since it costs me nothing as broadband is flat and the client runs on a machine that is always on.
EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover.
I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.
a person i know (totally not me) only seeds the rarer things. for more popular stuff they only seed for a couple of days.
All things which your home gateway should have in one form, or another, where you designate torrenting a priority which doesn't interfere with the rest of your activities. And adapting dynamically. No need to think about how to slice available bandwith into pieces beforehand.
At the end of the day the bottleneck isn't at the protocol level, but the asymmetry of home cable connections. Torrents are great when you have symmetric fiber, but very few homes do right now.
Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.
Torrents avoid many of those issues; you can see how many seeds a file has (though Kazaa and the like later added that). And you had to have gotten the magnet link from somewhere, which would have its own evaluatable trust. It's the difference between downloading file called "Foo" from random internet user's computer, and going to a website, that you know, and downloading a file called "Foo" that you also know has been downloaded, and retained, by X number of users.
Just as you would download and run an executable from a trusted source, you can download a torrent of an executable (from that trusted source) and run it.
E.g. many Linux distributions offer torrent links next to regular downloads; if you trust that website, you can download either file.
Yes, that's very plausible.
> Have the trust issues improved?
If you're retrieving executable code, the source giving you the magnet link is usually given some implicit trust. A good practice is to distribute a hash or better still a signature of the file(s). Though I would expect BitTorrent is designed to protect the shared contents' extents via hashes too.
If the content is some multimedia, then ideally it could be untrusted. Your favorite OS probably has much more robust libraries handling the multimedia content than it did a decade ago. But ultimately if the content distributed is infringing then it probably comes from a less trustworthy source. In which case you should have a different posture when handling these untrusted files than the generally untrusted interwebs content.
It can, but the clients I use(d) had an option like 'preallocate space', or similar. Then it doesn't, at least not as much.
This seems like one of the biggest problems with more decentralized torrents (i.e. ones not backed by a community / core seeder), but also most a UX issue and seemingly trivially solvable.
Which seems a pretty reasonable question for a user to have, if we're talking about fully decentralized torrents without a tracker.
He's currently creating a cryptocurrency.
* Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps. * Large amounts of data makes client performance worse. * Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that.
Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes.
I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.
I haven't visited a torrent site in years.
Not sure if the need to use private trackers can be fixed by the protocol, though. But, maybe adding a bit more of anonymity would be enough? i2p torrents provide that, but sacrifice speed. Clearly it's a spectrum and we need more "points" in the middle of it.
No. He's describing a distributor's options. You are describing a consumer's problem. Specifically pirate comsumers.
He doesn't need to find his own file; he needs to distribute it. Publishing is a separate issue. With napster, you only had one publishing option: napster.com. With torrents, you have many. As he said, "just dump the magnet link somewhere".
> Unfortunately, bad design won.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Napster and bittorent are different tools that solve different problems.
He's describing general issues involved in distributing something.
You're describing specific issues involved in stealing.
Saying "bad design won" is like saying hammers are a bad design compaired to hypodermic needles because you can't use a hammer to inject yourself with heroin.
[0] https://www.vici.com/heritageaward2020/