631–640 of 1001 posts
Car-free or significantly car-limited communities. Cars that are safer for pedestrians (not just for occupants in cars). Better traffic safety enforcement. Automobiles kill ~6k pedestrians and almost 140k are sent to the ER in the US - many of which will have life-altering injuries. https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...
google: Western Europe.
Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone). It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on,…
Many of the nas's get pretty close too this... but there's really no such thing as a mail server for non-technical people. "Whats a domain? Can just put whatever like?" Etc etc.. even if you baby people through all of that, you still end up with a device that needs to be backed up, isn't available when the powers out at home etc.. Not knocking the nas's btw, I really like them because they do make it relatively simpl…
Sure, and digital cameras used to be challenging for non-techies to use, and you used to need to understand port forwarding to use ICQ. There's no law that it needs to stay that way. It would take a lot of work, but the benefits would be enormous.
I guess to put it another way, what I'm saying is, when I take a cute picture of my kids and want to send it to Grandma, what I want to do is put it on a $5/mo VPS instead of putting it on Facebook for free (or "free"). But I also don't want to be a part-time sysadmin or set up a private blog and configure it and walk Grandma through authenticating to it - I want it to just work. Which raises the obvious question, "Well who will pay to make this amazing software?" which has an equally obvious answer: whoever sells $5/mo VPSes.
edit to add: I personally would run such a thing on the server in my basement, but the realistic way for such a thing to exist (both in the sense of someone paying to develop it, and in the sense of millions of people to use it) is for it to be mainly run on cheapo cloud instances. It is the answer to the question "What use would a non-technical person have for their own cloud server?" which is a question I would think that Bezos et al would very much like to answer.
In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…
Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone). It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on,…
https://sandstorm.io/ This is the closest project I can think of.
Maybe sad more than surprised
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found the Surface Book had a wonderful premium feel; I went into the shop with a list of specs in mind, and Microsoft was the last manufacturer I'd imagine going with, but it's a powerful machine and also just a beautiful object. Metal case, relatively subtle/classy logo, absolutely beautiful screen, nothing else was compromised for the sake of touch, clean baseline first-party OS. If you really want a premium feel…
I am pretty unhappy with my Surface Book 2. It’s quite slow for its specs and has all kind of problems like “not enough resources for USB”, freezing, the multi display setup gets often messed after undocking and so on. Considering that its in the same price range as a MacBook I am quite disappointed.
I didn't see this initially, but I now see frequent, .5-to-3 second lagging response to the touchpad, seemingly fixable only by reboot. Googling suggests a lot of other folks have seen a similar problem. For my machine, there's no lag from the touchscreen or from an external mouse...only the touchpad.
Re your USB problems...I'm not sure if I've seen that specific error, but I have noticed that I simply cannot plug in two external USB cameras and expect them both to work. The first one plugged in always works, the second appears as a device, but no software I own can get an image off of it (where the same two cameras can easily be used by other Windows boxes).
And, yes, I've also seen multi-screen problems when I put it to sleep with no external monitor and try to wake it up after it's plugged into the external monitor (plugged in through a USB-C hub). Basically, I had to plug in the monitor after it woke to avoid this.
Also...the detachable screen is a cool concept, but given that the seemingly larger portion of the battery life is in the keyboard half, and that the screen half has no power or USB ports, it really blunts the applications I might have put the detachable screen to.
Yes, definite problems here. I've wondered if I would've been happier with the Surface Laptop rather than the Surface Book.
- Poverty
- Inequality
- Racial Discrimination
- Affordable Health and Education
- Old Age Care
The list goes on. We are 200 years into industrial revolution and have made significant scientific and economic progress. Time we start looking for solutions to the really Hard problems.
The phone system. It seems like it's an unholy mess. I moved from the US to Hong Kong this year. I have a US number that I want to keep, and of course I need a local Hong Kong number. So, the US number is on my Google Fi account that I pay to keep active and I get a prepaid SIM card for Hong Kong. I can switch the SIM cards if I travel back. But why? We have two semi-independent networks, one for voice and one for da…
I would add to this, why even have "phone service" anymore. I call my family via Facebook Messenger or Zoom etc... I'm surprised that more more companies don't let me call them via these services or that some new startup hasn't starting selling the intergration so a customer can click "connect via Whatsapp" to our customer service. I'm also somewhat surprised there isn't a standard for this (maybe one is being worked…
But I've lost count at the number of times all these things have failed me at work and in my personal life, where I've had to resort to "telecom" (just making a voice call, although I do know it's still VoIP, but there are different quality of service considerations and carriers always prioritize these)
It seems like the AI field got stuck optimizing a particular (and very primitive) decades old ANN model, which is a dead end in my view.
2) Alternative nuclear reactors & fuels, it seems like the field is stuck in iterative improvements on decades old LWR/PWR designs.
In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…