But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.
That view has been accompanying me for a while as well. Difficult to really put a finger on it, because what I'm thinking of are fields where "enthusiast dilettantes" did not have their joy in honing their skills in the slightest way affected by the existence of trained professionals so much better than them. But when anyone can just throw a few ktoken at it, that joy has to be, uhm, "renegotiated".
I guess sub-fields with little tool use won't be affected a lot, tool-heavy sub-fields.. might pretty much be over. (think playing the guitar at a campfire vs going wild on a set of TB-303 + TR-909 vs going wild on emulations thereof)
The other "ai took our..."
I like that term, I have been looking for a while now and haven't yet been been able to come up with a better one.
> there hasn’t been any significant investment in Eastern part to build an industrial base (except for in Berlin and its suburbs)
Dresden is not a Berlin suburb. When it comes to investment in semiconductor industry, Dresden has likely seen more than the entire rest of Germany together.
I tend to share that position, but there's one counter argument that's not without merit at all: too much to lose. Even the worst climate change outcome would be less bad than the outcome of climate change plus some botched radical fix attempt could be.
Mars on the other hand, what's the worst that could happen? Someone writing the Coca Cola logotype across the red?
Yeah, "when have national-socialists ever been fascist!" is all I read in GP's post after I got to that part. It's just a brain crash for me (I'm German)
Not to mention they’re talking about lead-acid batteries, which have been replaced for pretty much every application, except (for now) starter motor batteries for combustion vehicles, by the various lithium batteries.
To be fair (as a joke), it's from Low Tech Magazine. Lithium batteries are too high-tech for them. They want you to power your mechanical blender, mixer, and other machines with a drive belt. Turn the drum of your washing machine with a wood fire heating the water.
I remember reading about low tech efficient cook stoves for poor countries and thinking the misses would rather have an induction burner, microwave, and an ice chest running off a solar panel.
> the misses would rather have an induction burner, microwave, and an ice chest running off a solar panel.
Those would definitely be hits.
Also, solar panels are old. Bell Labs demonstrated the first practical silicon solar cell in 1954. At some point, you're just trying to split (possibly nonexistent) hairs for an aesthetic, as opposed to making a principled stand against technology.
I would too...but an off-grid solar and battery setup sufficient to run the induction stove and microwave is still well into four figures - cheap for a developed country resident who wants some basic comforts in their wilderness lodge, but still well out of reach for a subsistence farmer in the poorest parts of the world.
That's the thing, like the used to be very expensive swing compressor ice chests that you can buy in the US for $150. You'd only need a 100 amp hour battery and a 100W solar panel to power it.
"have" is doing most of the work here. Most EVs have a small 12v battery to power 12v components. But the driving the car to the store part is done with lithium.
Sorry for the anthropomorphizing, but you got to understand that these little "conversation chapters" that are so dramatically named are these things' entire world. Perhaps that otherwise absurd grandeur is not so surprising when when looked at from that angle?
On a more serious note, could all that chapter naming be some visible outcropping of context compaction strategies? "Condense the conversation history into a summary". Not really surprising that it comes up with these "cute" headlines. Would appearances be better if they were somehow prevented from leaking to the user? Sure. Would results be better? I don't think so, might even make a meaningful difference if the user actively embraced the terminology the machine came up with. Ouch.
You can bury stuff like setting the time into a menu, people will accept it. They know that there will be a way to set the time. But if the 12/24 is hidden, whatever is picked as the default will drive away a noticeable fraction of those would-be buyers who prefer the other setting. For starters, pretty much everybody who does not get pulled into a sales person interaction that's sufficiently deep to touch the subject. And that sales person interaction won't be the best possibly, you don't want to bore them with nuisance settings, you want to show off The Stopwatch (or whatever was the flagship feature of the watch in question)
Trying not to leave any money on the table is exactly the approach that reliably kills off nostalgia income streams.
Picking off some low hanging fruit while demonstrating provable restraint can result in a huge money stream that goes on and on. But when the mindset "it's good, but it can be better!" becomes dominant (e.g. through market dynamics, being publicly traded means that ownership perpetually shifts to those who think that income sources could be squeezed just a little harder, or much harder, actually), it quickly turns sour. And when it flips from beloved to "why throw money at those greedy $expletive,plural" it flips hard, and forever.
"So much better" means "with added smartwatch crap"?
The whole value of them is they are simple, minimally changed over time (you can depend on getting the same model in a decade), functional, with no/bare minimum smartwatch crappery, essentially endless battery, and no planned obselecense.
The G-Shock is great but not perfect. Some things I wanted when I was deployed in the desert: No metal against skin AT ALL, silent but sturdy flap for covering the display (bonus if nonmagnetic), less/no nooks to collect sand/mud, sync radio time internationally, no shiny metal whatsoever (mine was shades of beige and "olive drab green" almost everywhere but still had polished metal screws and a polished metal buckle), ability to disable or configure backlight strength/color.
I'm sure battery and charging tech has improved in the past two decades as well.
It also would've been nice to have longitude/latitude readout internationally (so: satellite sensor plus support for Galileo and other recent global navigation services). Vibration alarms could have been more convenient than beeping, especially if there's a "stay awake on night post by buzzing every X minutes" mode.
Why would i put even more "smart" crap on or around me? I pay by physical card; i hate the "app" being forced on you by banks outsourcing their infra onto their clients.
And why would i need to track my.... steps? Because some corp started this shit as a marketing ploy years ago?
But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.
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