What does the author mean when he says 'black sun-like VR network'? Googled and couldn't figure it out. Hoping it's a reference to some good sci-fi I haven't read.
Products I Wish Existed
341–350 of 434 posts
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#342What does the author mean when he says 'black sun-like VR network'? Googled and couldn't figure it out. Hoping it's a reference to some good sci-fi I haven't read.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Nuclear reactors don’t scale down very well. The economics really break down under about 10MW which is ~5,000 times more power than most homes need. This is true and fully agreed. Home reactors are not really feasible or even a good idea. >Even ultra cost efficient full scale powerplants are a money losing proposition without huge subsidies. They are being squeezed between extremely cheap renewables, low cost natura…
> Nuclear also has a lot of fearmongering and red tape around it. Plants are reaching their EOL and in many cases new ones are not being built due to the cost of getting through all the red tape (getting approval from the feds down to local government, dealing with inevitable NIMBY lawsuits, etc). Renewables are the future, but we aren't fully in the future yet. This is a common trope. I can't work out where you live…
But there are places with much larger portions of their power supplied from nuclear plants, e.g. France, with >70% nuclear power.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (an…
I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs, etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents as you typed. So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and drop it into the message. It worked fr…
Microsoft teams is well-positioned to do this as it is integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive. However, it's not super easy to add metadata...
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
>implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company is one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds or more business process / transformation project. And the actual success / failure of these projects is almost entirely guided by the business transformation part. This 1000%. There's so much institutional friction with these projects for so many reasons; some of them political, some of them inter…
They see tools not as a way to get more done or be efficient, but as something that's "moving their cheese" and they don't like it. It doesn't matter how overworked they are by remedial tasks that could be automated, until you show them everything finished, end-to-end, working flawlessly, they won't be interested in the slightest. Will they be paid more for the increase in productivity?
I looked into content rating systems one time. Specifically PICS[1] As it gained some attention in some big media outlets where authoritative sounding journalists full on attacked it. Some attempted to portray it as a filter. At first I didn't understand why the persistent negativity but eventually I got it when one of them wrote how he acquired his skills though years of article writing and that the public scrutiny was an insult to his profession.
I then began to notice this pattern in other people. If you give them efficient software they wont be able to bullshit their way out of any argument. Productivity is the enemy. Everything possible must be done to prevent the people above from figuring out what is really going on.
One very simple example I ran into recently. A new and improved app was made but it had exactly the same flaws as the previous one. An amount of time is assigned to tasks but if you add up the tasks for a day they greatly exceed the real world number of minutes worked. Then when complaints come in they simply assign extra minutes to the task pushing the total amount of work further over 8 hours. The number of characters for feedback was also reduced. When I jokingly asked about it (knowing how their game works) they pretended it was to hard to divide the work over the day. You cant just say a 70 min task must be done in 50! All hell would break loose! It is then left up to the assignee to figure out how to cut the corners. The managers carefully monitor the feedback, if anyone finds out corners are cut the employee is called in to explain for it. Eventually the smart ones figure out how to cut corners without anyone noticing it.
The entire show depends on the clients inability to add up all the minutes.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#346#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activit…
I think this gets pretty close to what you're after: https://runyourown.social/
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Nuclear reactors don’t scale down very well. The economics really break down under about 10MW which is ~5,000 times more power than most homes need. This is true and fully agreed. Home reactors are not really feasible or even a good idea. >Even ultra cost efficient full scale powerplants are a money losing proposition without huge subsidies. They are being squeezed between extremely cheap renewables, low cost natura…
> Nuclear also has a lot of fearmongering and red tape around it. Plants are reaching their EOL and in many cases new ones are not being built due to the cost of getting through all the red tape (getting approval from the feds down to local government, dealing with inevitable NIMBY lawsuits, etc). Renewables are the future, but we aren't fully in the future yet. This is a common trope. I can't work out where you live…
http://www.ieso.ca/power-data
Ontario sits at about 2/3 nuclear. We have for a long time. And our electricity is relatively cheap.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
Agreed! But the trouble for me with Excel is that it has an incredibly low ceiling. There are so many people out there doing what is essentially app development but with terrible tools. Tools that give them the wrong habits and mental models for working at scale. I would love to see the spreadsheet reinvented to be a) collaboration-oriented, and b) a good on-ramp to ever-growing programming skills. So that when Bob i…
I have thought about this myself too, so I'll offer my two cents: Spreadsheets are really versatile, but they're a victim of their own versatility. You need to build something that is similar enough that people understand the concepts, but different enough so that people don't get frustrated by the fact that it's not Excel/Google Docs.
I always envisioned something that functioned like a Jupyter notebook, and pulled some pages from the MatLab debugger tool ...kind of like how Light Table implemented them, but don't get too caught up in that analogy. That way, you could create and define tables that are stand alone objects, and run [code] operations on data in those objects to create new tables. Everything that is processed from the tables is it's own [new object] entity, and can be [output or not] viewed or hidden. It would move away from the idea of having few tabs of large continuous spreadsheets in favor of having many small tables [matrices] that would have identifiers [variable names]. And if the user really wanted, they could drag around tables on a spreadsheet like grid, but the data in those tables would not be editable in that view. Oh, and graphs are their own entity too. Users can use a GUI editor to make graphs, but the graph properties will be user accessible in some sort of markup language for the edge case where the user needs to make a ton of graphs, and then needs to make some styling change to every graph. Not something I've ever experienced though... \s
This will:
1. Reduce the need for Excel's reference gymnastics that are performed when you move or insert rows/columns in to referenced data.
2. reduce the headache that is excel formulas. Since each object will be a formula instead of every cell. Also, the formulas don't have to be a single line, so it will be more readable.
The trick is finding a good language to use - Julia maybe? and designing a good GUI for helping non programmers do useful things like accessing and referencing data from objects in an intuitive way. This could be where the traditional spreadsheet view could come in handy. I like how you mentioned that it needs to serve as a good on ramp for ever growing programming skills, because it needs to be intuitive enough that non programmers can understand the basics and accomplish something useful, but powerful and hackable enough that the mental models can transfer.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is there something I'm missing here? Yes. If Ring had even the barest shred of ethics, they would client-side encrypt the videos stored in their cloud. It would use no extra space. The user would have to explicitly approve the decryption and sharing of videos. But they don't, because being able to access and datamine those videos is a huge money-maker for them. Ring is terrible, but their engineers willing to imple…
And then the second someone lost their phone, their camera becomes worthless and they can't view their videos. The average user can't be trusted to manage client-side encryption keys reliably.
No? You can derive a key from a password.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, almost every non-Facebook social network has failed. I wouldn’t consider that to be proof that a limited social network can’t succeed but rather that social networking sites are difficult to produce.
That's why this has remained an idea for me rather than anything I would consider attempting. Social networks have an enormous bar to entry. This is why I think this would most feasibly be applied as a restriction to Facebook/Instagram and it's probably something they will never implement unless forced.
Facebook and Instagram have the concept of “close friends”. A lot of people use it pretty close to how you’re envisioning.