I generally believe that markets are somewhat efficient.
But somehow, we've ended up with the current state of Windows as the OS that most people use to do their job.
Something went terribly wrong. Maybe the market is just too dumb, maybe it's all the market distortions that have to do with IP, maybe it's the monopolístic practices of Microsoft. I don't know, but in my head, no sane civilization would think that Windows 10/11 is a good OS that everyone should use to optimize our economy.
I'm not talking only about performance, but about the general crappiness of the experience of using it.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. [1]
What Dropbox does well though is on demand sync. Having frequently accessed files stored and synced locally and offline available while keeping most of the files off the limited harddrive space.
Other options like OneDrive don't have such capability on Linux or are not available there at all. It's very hard to find a suitable alternative especially a European one.
But, for anyone on a site literally called "Hacker News", a DIY dropbox should be trivial. The fact that anybody, especially, "nerds" or "hackers" would pay good money for what is effectively an FTP server with file versioning is insane.
I am mostly jealous that I didn't build and sell dropbox. Becoming an overnight millionaire by setting up an FTP server.
But seriously, modern approach, rclone[1] + "cloud" stoage (webdav, ssh, wasabi, whatever)
Out of the question, it has no definition which is only related to physics. Well, there's the "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom" definition, but this was chosen to match the celestial-based unit related to the Earth's rotation (which does not tell anything to extraterrestrials).
Wouldn’t be required. Take any frequency, Hydrogen in this case, and multiply it by pi which is unitless. The resulting frequency is pi times whatever you started with no matter how you count the passage of time.
What are you supposed to do if you have no Internet connectivity? You basically have a brick on your hands until you can connect it to the Internet? That's ridiculous.
Well you see, contrary to the rampant speculation you get on sites like HN, when we deployed a telemetry update to report on how many of our users have no internet connectivity, the data showed 100% of respondents had internet connectivity.
I mean, Xbox has been like this for a long time and clearly it's not dettering sales at all - and even with Windows the functionality to skip it has been well hidden and required bringing up windows console and typing in a command that rebooted the installer - hardly something that your average person would do I guess. So yeah, it's ridiculous, but Microsoft knows it will make zero difference to sales.
I own an xbox (which I received as a gift) and absolutely hate having to log into it any time I want to use it. MY 15 year old PS3 still delivers a far more pleasant user experience.
The main useful outcome we get from chess is entertainment.
Entertainment that comes from a Human vs. Human match is higher than Human vs. AI, at least for spectators.
But many sectors of the economy don't gain much from it being done by humans. I don't care if my car was made by all humans or all robots, as long as it's the best car I can get for the money.
I think you're extrapolating a bit too much from the specific case of chess.
But somehow, we've ended up with the current state of Windows as the OS that most people use to do their job.
Something went terribly wrong. Maybe the market is just too dumb, maybe it's all the market distortions that have to do with IP, maybe it's the monopolístic practices of Microsoft. I don't know, but in my head, no sane civilization would think that Windows 10/11 is a good OS that everyone should use to optimize our economy.
I'm not talking only about performance, but about the general crappiness of the experience of using it.
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