Employers have to make the argument "we're better than sitting at home wanking all day."

This WILL cause widescale economic realignment. I expect all the telemarketers will walk out the second the economic gun is removed from their foreheads. But conversely, you might see people enterring fields that are structurally vital but historically undercompensated once rent and student loans are off the table. How many quants would rather be teaching long division to 10-year-olds?

If you have a service you can't emotionally convince people to take with a low discretionary-income-only salary, you'll just have to offer larger and larger cheques to attract them, or find a way to do without. Maybe you have 30 people applying to be CEO at $1 per year because they have BIG VISIONS to build, but the burger flippers are suddenly making $120k per year to keep them on. It will force a grand reckoning of what actually delivers the value in a society.

Another interesting point might be the end of "continuity" of employment-- if you're not two paychecks from starvation, you might see people enterring and leaving positions on a short term basis. This could reduce burnout or just encourage more specialization-- working for a firm just for the duration of the project where your skills matter, or just long enough to afford a 5090.

Or we could consider some sort of mandate-- drafting people into the workforce for their UBI. Then it becomes a political selling point to minimize how much of this is necessary to actually keep the wheels turning. That's the data I'd personally love to see. Once we eliminate non-productive work or redundancy that exists for commercial purposes, could we be averaging 20 hours a week?

The idea of having private firms try to build their interpretation of what the Army or Air Force wants seems redundant and inefficient. And then you have to bury the cost of failed designs in the contracts you do win, or sell them designs to other countries that end up using them against us after a couple coups.

I've used a few handheld transcievers and they tend towards clunky user interfaces-- tiny, fiddly displays, highly modal keys, and basically needing to memorize the manual to use it.

Even worse-- there's not a strong correlation between the quality of the RF unit and the user-interface. The Yaesu FT-60 is a reliable, high-quality radio, with all the user friendliness of a live porcupine.

But with a 6-inch pocketable touchscreen you could solve most of the UI problems, and focus on the radio problems.

Keeping the division also gives you flexibility-- you could design a 25-watt tabletop unit, or modules for different bands, that shared the same basic control software and UI

The benefit of this was that when Internal Revenue called and said in lieu of a tax return, you sent a takeaway menu covered in pornographic drawings, you could reach out to the person you paid and expect them to take accountability.

Instead, we're getting :sparkles: You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have sent the taxman the Goatse picture, would you like me to try something else? :sparkles:

Satellites for connectivity to ground-based data centres seems to make sense, but that seems like it's relatively light hardware compared to a rack full of compute and storage.

If we're looking for apocalypse-scale redundancy, we already have all sorts of ground-based infrastructure and multi-continental designs on earth already.

I wonder if it's some weird play in the seasteading style-- if they put the data in space, it's outside the reach of any government except ones willing to jam the airwaves or fire missiles capable of reaching orbit.

Maybe that type of awkwardness is specific to my firm, but that's sort of what killed my drive to try to do that. We used to have one day every second week for that sort of work, but since it was scattered around, the tasks ended up disappearing-- nobody reviewed them and they didn't get merged.

So now they're trying to do a week-long internal hackathon to recover that vision, but I feel like that's going to produce a handful of big-bang ideas and not the 25 tiny tools that would actually streamline things.

It would be irresponsible to treat it as completely ephemeral though; clever tooling would make it easy when you remember "I already solved this issue 3 months ago, let me pull that back and reuse it."

What terrifies me is doing it with the current slopbox user experience. From a UI perspective, it's clumsy system that discourages developing mastery in favour of guesswork and gacha. (When you said the wrong thing in a classic command line, it at least told you so rather than trying to stagger along with it) And as an executing tool, it's simply sluggish-- once you've expressed what you want, Claude takes minutes to do what a regex does in milliseconds.

I wonder if the latter is fixable-- pre-configure the bot to generate answers as reusable code instead of slowly pumping the changes themselves.

End users should be authenticated so you can prove you're selling real eyeballs in the demographic mix you claimed to marketers and to provide lip service for the 'think of the children' regulators.

But anyone who's paying for ads should have as little friction as possible to dropping money and spewing garbage.

I'm surprised nobody is looking at some sort of "corporations are people" angle here-- we've attested the device ownership, but it's owned by the Lorem Ipsum Corporation, which is a legal/demographic dead end and spawned just long enough to buy the device.

Why would you get into the 3DO business knowing that if it took off, you'd end up competing with other, potentially cheaper brands?

I guess the expectation was that it would be like CD players and VCRs, the market would be big enough to maintain a bunch of different brands.

Consider that the largest payment card network on Earth (China UnionPay, 7 billion cards) - decided it was easier just to bootstrap acceptance in the US by a partnership with Discover rather than connecting directly to merchants.

If you want a new scheme to work, distribute something like social security and welfare cheques through it. That immediately forces broad acceptance.

Why not just send every American household a few tins of free fruit every month? It might be the closest thing to nutritious food some people get?

A modest regulated profit could result in a healthier industry-- one where the least economic hiccup doesn't cause carriers to shut down with limited notice, where they can afford to not play chicken with hours-of-service laws and maintenance standards, and where people don't get promotions for trying to sell the idea of standing-room tickets.

That seemed like a great idea for certain types of goods-- the market for plenty of collectibles are thin in any given locality, but it was always clumsy to get to the global marketplace. If you had a normal consumer eBay account with 30 feedback, you might have a hard time getting trust against sellers with 400,000. You had to deal with packing, shipping, nonpayment, complaints.

Handing it all off to a professional with experience and a high volume credible account was worth a consignment commission. But they seemed to dry up after a while, I think when eBay pivoted from "the world's garage sale" to "AliExpress but some products are in domestic warehouses."

If you had a widely deployed retail presence that was already used to dealing with used merchandise (pawnshop-style laws, routing items for cleaning/refubrishment etc), turning the tradein counter into a consignment counter is a potential win. New revenue stream, gets people in the door, and provides an expectation of legitimacy and predictability.

Cherry was selling mechanical switch keyboards for POS and specialty applications for decades before the enthusiast market emerged.

Unicomp was addressing the market of terminal-lockin customers who needed a replacement for the IBM Model M (frequently 122-key version) that had finally popped its last rivet at 23 years old.

They didn't have to chase trends, minimizing risk and keeping scale high.

Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names. They might be able to hold some ground by virtue of "You can get it for $89 today at Micro Centre and not have to dig into it too hard", but they're very interchangeable (maybe RGB and programming ecosystems matter for some)

Boutique vendors might be able to keep things running by going from trend to trend or relying on a small, dedicated audience-- group buys where everything is pretty much prepaid are probably better than trying to sell at retail and end up on a pile of unsold stock.

But I wonder how far off we are from "bespoke to order"-- a wizard with a bunch of knobs but some constraints, and it generates a stack of files that get forwarded to PCB and CNC/3D-printing jobbers, and in 8 weeks you get a parcel from Shenzhen with an assembled keyboard.

I'd suspect right now, the small-scale inefficiencies are what holds it back. It's doable but probably too expensive to make a viable product out of.

There's no reason a webpage shouldn't be as themable as, say, a GTK or Qt based desktop application.

We should be trying to snatch back styling power from the designers and putting it back on the user-agent's side. Let the page look brutalist until the user has chosen an appropriate theme for their needs rather than railroading them into what someone in Marketing decided looked good.

I get choice paralysis when you show me a prompt box-- I don't know what I can reasonably ask for and how to best phrase it, so I just panic. It doesn't help when we see articles saying people are getting better outcomes by adding things like "and no bugs plz owo"

I'm sure this is by design-- anything with clear boundaries and best practices would discourage gacha style experimentation. Can you trust anyone who sells you a metered service to give you good guidance on how to use it efficiently?

They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.

I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.

In many cases, this consists of dramatically limiting user-to-user comms, hyper-aggressive filtering, sometimes even to restricting to pre-canned messages only. (I'm sure someone is already encoding morse code ethnic slurs into patterns of friendly gestures, but that's another story).

Windows CE/Mobile was heavily shaped by the corporate presence. People didn't queue up at midnight at Best Buy to buy CE devices, they were sent down from IT and ran a handful of bespoke line-of-business apps. People associated them with big clunky barcode scanner devices, not sleek hi-fi media players. It had all the consumer charm of a corporate lanyard and ID badge.

I'm not sure they could have respun the existing product to get that to "sexy consumer facing item" without a huge rework anyway. And the rework was excellent-- I liked Windows Phone enough to own 3 (a Lumia 1020, then replacing it with a 530 after the screen broke, and a bargain 640 as a modest upgrade) The experience was smooth even on the bottom-range device and it felt more holistically designed than contemporary Android.