0wis

Nice article, interesting to keep an open mind. On "No. 0002. Preserving problems", it can happen to people too, no need for a complex system at the size of a company. I have often noticed recognized experts keeping the root of the problem unsolved because it was justifying their position. I may even have been subject of this curse. As an expert, you may know the root cause but have no incentive to solve it and it can be harder to mobilize ressources to solve the root cause than to keep solving the superficial issue. It is management or outside help role to identify and push for solving problems at their root, but it takes time and dedication because of expertise. As most of the time, incentives explain nearly everything.

I have an industrial engineer education. My master’s degree was specifically a collection of small projects to demystify (and have the keys understand deeply) all kind of manufacturing processes and the designing that goes with it : machining, soldering, smelting, forging, electrical circuitry.

I ended up working in IT for a large company because of opportunity. Both in terms of interesting projects and pay. All my fellow classmates that went into industry seem to be stuck in heavy internal processes, or working like hell to finish projects that barely recoup their costs. Those who went into hardware entrepreneurship struggle to find clients and investors. The only sector that still seems sexy is the very high end for B2B and luxury.

My analysis is that scale cannot be reached by non Chinese companies except for very specific and high end products (that have a smaller scale by design). Therefore it is impossible to compete on the price/quality ratio of large scale products. And I end up thinking that tariffs could be the solution.

I am based in Europe by the way

Plus, back of the napkin cost shows it is not that expensive. 30$ (or 20€) times 52 weeks : 1560$ (1040€) Not cheap but less than 5% of a minimum yearly salary of 32k$. [1] Same in most occidental europe. [2] And not everyone reads a book a week (if only so…)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cew/publications/employment-and-wages-an... [2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

Related indirectly : Turkish airlines hub (Istanbul airport) is a scam. Everything there costs at least twice the price it should. Especially food which is basically what everyone does during layover. Think 30€ for a burger or a kebab.

« Brand new » is not an argument by itself. Business is a must, or at least booking a lounge.

Setting for command is different from actual temp. Plus, humidity is rarely accounted for. A good AC that lowers humidity from 90%+ to 30% and this 30°C home becomes quite comfortable.

What about a continuous scale ? Choosing a base 60/24 for counting time is cultural and even if it is now the world’s norm, I would argue that an alien would not get this choice

Esthetism also counts, a high frequency means a smoother second hand movement. It is one metric watchmakers are fighting on. I found this article that sum it up quite well : https://www.ethoswatches.com/the-watch-guide/mechanical-watc...

For exactly the same reason : space is scarce but power even more. Power can also become unavailable in a degraded situation much often than on land. Therefore, it is a better design choice to have a chest freezer.

In a city appartement where floor space is scarce, convenience is a key feature and power costs barely nothing, it is a less obvious choice.

EU rollback on reducing gas liability, especially the widely debated rule on « no gas car after 2030 », feels now laughable. Maybe the reason why « technocrats » are good rulers is because they use science and data to do it.

If only the German infrastructure hadn’t been built for Nordstream…

In France, with Nuclear power and renewable it’s 20% lower.

Prices also depends on who you want to give power.

Not sure humanity learned nothing before the last 8000 years. It was just very slow. Maybe we will need new ways to learn

Seems fun but unusable on mobile. Windows are not responsive enough. General design seems fun though

Great project and build. I wonder if using a small fan would not help energy transmission, which is eventually the goal of cooking. It may also make the oven work like it’s at higher température while not consuming much energy. It would discharge energy from the walls faster using convection in addition to radiation.

Plus, you can experiment with tray materials depending on what you want to cook.

Suggestions inspired by my experience with convection/classic oven and copper pizza plates

https://www.italiancookshop.com/products/hammered-copper-rou...

It seems that any problem solving starts by defining the data.

« Always define your variables » is the first thing I learned during my engineering studies, in both math and physics class. Professors were insisting a lot about it. I still consider it is the most important thing I ever learned 10 years later.

Seems quite true even in a non-software large company. The work about work is often more important, and certainly is for promotion related progress.

That’s powerful. Most of the differences I can see between AI generated output and human output comes from the « broad but specific » context of the task. I mean company culture, organization rules and politics, larger team focus and way of working. It may take time to build the required knowledge bases but it must be worth it

Interesting site ! There is something playful in the idea of ambigrams that I can’t explain. Maybe something like a puzzle ?

A nice project could be to automate a generator. It must be quite hard because it feels like a mix between a Captcha and an AI hallucination but made right. The « glyph » search part of the site is maybe the best asset to start with a database of possible matches.

Currently improving my foundation in data preparation for ML, this short and right article is a gem.

It is exactly what makes the difference between good and bad experience, both for users and engineers. A well designed system is both easy to use and to maintain or improve. It looks simple, but it is not. It’s both leadership and craftsmanship at its peak.

Not everyone is conscious about it but I feel like it’s something that people will always want.

Like the « evergreen » things Amazon decided to focus on : faster delivery, greater selection, lower cost.

Not that sure. I know Bosch, Liebherr and Samsung fridges bought in the 2000’s that lasted 10+ years, some of them that keeps running even after being used heavily (being moved, used by families of 5…etc). They are repairable and some got repaired. They are 2-3000€+. Which is 2-3x the average monthly salary.

An other thing to account for is the price of repairs. If your appliances costs less than one hour of a mid-skill technician, it’s hard to justify the spending. Same for doing it yourself if you’re time is worth a lot. The only solution is to by high end, which is always risky and more cash intensive. Most people will prefer buying cheap and change to new if required

Yeah, short term. Because power users that are used to switch between languages using internet slang do not like half baked polished translation in their IP-location language. So they leave. Remain mainly low quality users who couldn’t or didn’t wanted to switch between languages. A more powerful forever September again.

I love it ! Thanks for sharing here !

I have to build a project for data analysis with ML (and optionally AI) for a course and certification I am passing, this is a great inspiration. I will probably do something simpler on European stocks.

You say it was a year long effort, was it full time ? Do you have an estimation of how many hours you spent on it ? Did you do it alone ?

At first, Amazon was exactly the kind of Equity business OP is writing about. And it was hugely criticized about it [1, for example]

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1377261/bezos-says-ama...

But then you choose it. I misselected several times

A nice, extensive and comprehensive article on a not well known country.

Except from the « Notes on Benin », is there any other country analysis in this blog ?

I have found this work very inspiring, I would love to write similar articles on my travel destinations.

Wonderful ! Even if I am not super interested in the topic, the explanations are so clear and the animations so nice that I have admiration for the work done. Full mastery of the web medium that makes an explanation way clearer that any paper could. Would love to work on a similar projet on economics & personal finance. Thanks for sharing !

Even if you do not use the ads you see to make your decision, they influence you.

I already knew this but got very conscious of it when I was surprised to go to McDonalds and then discovered that they had new ads on my full commute route.

Even without influencing you, brands may just make you aware of their products, which is already a big 0 to 1.

I never questioned the limitations for these upgrades…

Thanks for reminding me that everything is possible, I may try Opencore to keep it even longer !

If we are going this way… I still use a mid-2012 MBP as my main workstation.

Last one with upgrade capabilities, now it has two fast SSDs and maximum Ram. I changed the battery once.

Only shame is that it doesn’t get major MacOS upgrades anymore.

Still good enough to browse the web, do office productivity and web development.

12 years of good use, I am not sure I can get so much value anywhere now