I've accepted that we kind of lost the net to the money people and bureaucrats. Mid-late 90's it really was a frontier full of adventurous nerds. I would spend entire weekends on Efnet learning and experimenting with a tight group of people. Since a parallel non-commercial web has never taken off (and VR fizzled) I've ended up adventuring outdoors, the old school way. It's less intellectual but triggers similar feelings of discovery. There's a lot of experimentation and improvisation once you get into things like ski mountaineering because something always goes wrong. The camaraderie is also strong.
Another alternative is simply Science, if you can handle the barrier to entry.
I like your point about the outdoors. My best adventures happen there these days. One of my most recent hobbies is using a fine net to capture microfauna from random bodies of water and checking it out with my microscope. It sounds lame but my god, I’m enthralled by what I find in there. Every time there’s something new. I’ve been writing a blog post about it for weeks but I can’t finish because I keep finding cool new stuff I want to write about. Maybe I need to do an ongoing series, haha.
I also started cleaning urban creeks and streams (with permission from my city) and made a little project out of it. It’s related to my business, but primarily just a volunteer project I enjoy. Definitely find some weird stuff. It’s a lot of fun just discovering new spots and pulling trash out of nature though.
I don’t think that’s a good idea for anyone but the possibilities are pretty much inexhaustible for a lot of people. Outside is big.
That's funny I'm also setting up a home lab and buying a vintage microscope (state of the art 1999 from auction) to look at the creatures living in my pond. There are always new avenues.
Ponds are amazing. Really, I think tons of urban homes should have them. They make an incredible difference to local ecology. You’ll find so much cool stuff!
Yeah, I was always a high-achieving, intellectual kid, and I've been really struggling as an adult to recapture that same love of learning. I think maybe some of it is actually a love of adventure and discovering new and interesting, exciting things. Not necessarily academic or intellectual pursuits. The Internet used to provide so much of that, it just doesn't anymore.
I agree, talent needs to catch up, and new UI concepts are needed (the current VR web browsers feel very awkward). One app that was built very thoughtfully for VR and nailed it imho is Hyper Dash. Making teleporting the preferred form of movement vs. walking was brilliant.
Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.
> and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content
...and a history feature that's nearly unusable. I don't even trust it anymore - Chrome's history UI feels like it's losing information, and there've been plenty of times I'm 99% I visited a page few days or weeks before, but it's nowhere to be found in history. And honestly, I don't even need full-text search. I need a table with the following columns: page URL, page title, and access time. I need that table to be sortable by these columns, and filterable by their values.
In a way, we've regressed from the days of IE 5, back from the time where browser cache was a folder. Because back then, I could open that folder, sort it by date, and guess the sites I visited from the name of the files - that being a much better UX than what I get in Firefox today.
This is a problem that Google tackled themselves, but it had too many problems[0]. Recent attempts use Chrome Dev Tools[1] to cache the results. So this may alleviate problems Google had. Memex had attempted this, but deprecated it:
> We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users
...
> We spent so much time on building the search and with it also 30-50% more time on every new feature because of interdependencies with the amount of data produced. End2End encrypted sync, backup, search performance, search filters, all were directly or indirectly necessary to work much better than we can afford. We're just 2.5 devs.
Another developer attempted this, too. But didn't have many users:
> I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]
One user does point out the reason why this may not have took off:
> about once every two months, I am looking for something that I swear I came across on the Internet at some point. However, the rest of the time, I'm able to re-find it just by doing another search, whether on search-engine-of-choice, or a search box on particular-website (e.g. socnet, stackoverflow, reddit, github, hacker news...).[3]
>> I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.[2]
Here's then a problem I wish people worked more on: structural support for products/features that are used rarely, but when they're needed, they're really needed. Browser history interface falls under this: it's rarely needed, but when you open it, it's usually because you really need to find something again that's not easily found through web search.
Agreed. There are a few full text/archiving solutions out there but they all seem to be very manually driven. Automating that properly seems to be hard to make slick enough.
One very easy win though would be to address the fact that history in browsers only allows you to see and sort by the most recent date you visited a page. So you can't really answer the question "what are the pages I visited in March this year?" (for example) with any confidence and you can't be sure you've got all the pages you visited in a particular cluster if you might have gone back to one of them later.
Having digged through my history on Firefox it seems it has gone backwards... Like now it's something popping up from side and horribly slow. Plus I remember being able to remove sites in navbar by delete... But now that is gone...
i'm working on this as a browser extension. to get my feet wet i created Yet Another Speed Dial (https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial) which many people find useful, but the end goal is to apply the same kind of richness to all bookmarks and history
Koyaanisqatsi (1982) - made me realize the degree to which society has been mechanized, how our alienation to nature and each other is almost guaranteed if we give ourselves over to technology.
Koyaanisqatsi has been my favorite movie ever since the first time I accidentally caught it on TV almost 20 years ago. I've since been to live screenings with Glass and his Ensemble playing it, etc. :-)
And.. despite eventually discovering what Reggio is about, I have always taken the opposite view of the movie. To me it feels like a neutral view of how systematized our world is, how technology enables such systems, and how such systems are a fundamental and valuable part of moving forwards as a species. Humans = technology = systems.. but positivity for such things is my world view anyway, and Koy is a blank enough canvas to take this on.
The second sequel Naqoyqatsi felt like a more on the nose critique of the ills of technology and modern society to me, made up entirely of stock video set to a fragile but very human soundtrack, in contrast to Koy.
If that was the intent of the film, it didn't work on me. It starts out with shots of nature and then I guess the idea was supposed to be, "Along comes mankind, industrialism ruins everything, life is out of balance!". But the problem is that it is all so gorgeous. Shots of Pruitt–Igoe being blown up, the Twinkie factory assembly line, traffic jams, bridges collapsing, a rocket exploding, all shot so that they are beautiful trippy visual wallpaper.
True the film is captivating on the aesthetic layer, with manufactured landscapes appearing as beautiful as the natural ones. Sounds like some viewers pull a positive (or neutral) message out of that equivalence.
I don't see it as positive or neutral, more like unintentionally nihilistic. I consider it a failed propaganda movie that is very successful as art for art's sake.
And maybe that was the artist's intent all along. From the title I doubt it but I read that originally the filmmaker wanted it released without any title.
To me it had the opposite effect. The gradual transition from nature to more urban/industrial scenes awoke the feeling in me that humans and society are just part of the same nature.
Re: Ghost Dog, I was also obsessed with that beautifully shot driving scene (with Killah Priest in the background). I was listening to a lot of hiphop at that time. Usually a burned CD playing on a glowing car stereo.
While I don't know about GIS specifically, I work in a similar field where the market leaders have an enormous feature set accumulated over many decades - some from the 1960's and never stopped growing. But I squeezed in with the main basic features first then as I got customers, added what they wanted and continually grew it. My advantages are price and ease of use. Users didn't need to go on a training course without all those features to learn. Many of the features of the big boys are so niche that most customers never need them, or are obsolete but retained for legacy, or are just not really essential.
Can I take a look at your product? I would be curious what a minimal ArcGIS would look like and how long it would take to build. GIS is super edge-casey, I think.
No sorry. I've created too embarrassing a trail of HN comments to want to link this identity to my livelihood. But it's not actually GIS, just a similar sort of product. It might be that an equally minimal GIS really too feature-poor to be any use at all.
These firms have to guard their data. It’s all they have. So yeah they put up big walls and add lots of hurdles (calls, agreements, phases, etc) to increase the perceived value of what they are selling you.
If this data was more accessible, it would definitely be a game changer.
Finding it and presenting it and making it explorable is the really hard part.
I agree, we may have reached peak level of Seth Godin-approved consumer startups.
Re: 1, it does bother me producing all that plastic when a cardboard structure with sterile, swappable lining might do just as well in non-windy areas.
Another alternative is simply Science, if you can handle the barrier to entry.