Recent Volts episode has great overview of China's electro-tech build out, world is at or near peak fossil fuel across all sectors and countries (with 1 notable exception), etc.
Clean electrification is inevitable - A conversation with Kingsmill Bond of Ember Energy. [2025/11/21]
Cite cliché about the only intuitive user interface is the nipple; everything else is learned.
Having done my share of UI work, my value system transitioned from esthetics to practicalities. Such as "can you describe it?" Because siloed UI, independent of docs, training and tech supp, is awful.
All validated by usability testing, natch. It's hard to maintain strong opinions UI after users shred your best efforts. Humilitating.
Having said all that... If stock icons work (with target user base), I'm all for using them.
Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know.
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
Not automatically. There's aleeady case law(0x1) that ruled that images captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records, even though the data are stored by Flock (a private vendor), not directly by the city.
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
IANAL: That court's decision was based on the contract w/ Flock. It does not move the needle wrt public records.
I may read the decision, testimony, and any amicus briefs. During the 00's, Wash Citizen's for Open Govt had a prominent blindspot wrt tension between privatization and public records (in the shape of Tony Nixon). I'm curious if they were involved with this case, and if their positions have matured.
The thesis has no predictive power, no explanatory power. Merely descriptive.
That "change is inevitable and we all better adapt or die" is somewhere between axiomatic and cliché.
What is "innovation"? How do you define it? (Am honestly asking.) How do we get more of it? (I know this is an area of active research.)
I forced myself to reread and revisit Christensen a year or two back. I may not have looked hard enough, but I didn't find any evidence that he'd updated or expanded his thesis, corpus. IIRC, no mention of Everett's diffusion of innovation, of thesis from Design Rules: the Power of Modularity (an adjacent topic), no engagement with ongoing innovation research.
FWIW, my still poorly formed hunch is that "innovation" is where policy meets the cost learning curve meets financial accounting. With maybe a dash of rentier capitalism.
But I'm noob. Not an academic, not an economist. Deep down on my to do list is to learn how DARPA (and others) places their bets, their emerging formalisms (like technology readiness levels), how emerging tech makes the jump from govt funded to private finance (VC).
Enough of my babble. In closing, I'd like to read some case studies for the two most "disruptive technologies" of our times: solar and batteries.
No surprise to us geeks, of course. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" and all that.
The big surprise (disappointment) to me was witnessing how "do your own research" looks in practice.
- Type in some search terms.
- Open handful of the top hits.
- Believe everything.
- Even the obvious scams & ads.
There's something about media that bypasses most adult's innate skepticism. Like if I told some stranger (IRL) that saffron cures baldness, they'd be all GTFO. But hear it from a talk show host or read it on Facebook, well shit, it must be true.
Noob me hoped "wall-to-wall" meant something like "everyone in the building".
Reasoning that once the whole of a company is unionized, it's a short hop to worker directed social enterprise (a co-op, more or less).
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