Its not easy at all. Try it out with your family on your LAN.
People are used to so much convenience, its easy to brush under the carpet, just how much work is happening behind the scenes. Just coming up with a basic list of 3 mordern conveniences you want to support for your family will be non trivial.
In fact, just try supporting one.
(Worked as an RA in a distributed systems lab back in the day, and just getting everyone who proposed the algos and systems to use them was a nightmare)
Is my family on my LAN the target for decentralized web projects? I figured it was more technical people that would know how to forward a port. I've personally been running a webserver from inside the LAN at home for 20 years now.
Lets not kid ourselves. The vast majority of people don't use the web. They consume it. And they will never care about IPFS or etherium layers. The distributed web is to create a refuge from the types of companies that serve those needs. But adding additional layers of abstraction doesn't help technical users achieve that goal, it's just a fetish. They can easily forward the port and set up a simple static webserver and as a big plus their non-technical friends can actually access the data.
Move Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein 10kms away from where they were born, surround them by a different set of chimps and the story doesnt end the same way.
A good book from Niall Ferguson - the Sqaure and the Tower - makes the case tradionally Historians have studied individuals instead of groups because its easier to collect data on one chimp versus the entire troupe.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
Yup, the influences on e.g. Newton happening to delve into reading up on Archimedes, Descartes, Fermat, and then synthesizing their inventions in his mind with lot of time on his hand, or for that matter Leibniz getting math tutoring from Christiaan Huygens seem to be crucial in relation to the invention of fluxions/infinitesimals. (Approximately from memory of reading Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz).
Having lived both 10kms north and 10kms south of Newton's birthplace (in more flat Lincolnshire farmland) I'm not sure he's the best example for that argument!
The idea that history is wrong to focus on "chaps" derives from marxism; and Fergusson is very much anti-marxist. The marxian view would be that historical change is the result of economic forces; that if (e.g.) Turing hadn't done it someone else would have, because economics was driving history in that direction.
I'm sympathetic to the marxian view of Great Men; I think it's no coincidence that the related work of Godel and Turing was published within a couple of decades of one-another, or that the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo emerged around the same time as one-another.
I'm certainly impressed by the greatness of Great Men; but I'm hard-pressed to find one whose discoveries were so remarkable, in the context of their times, that noone else could have been expected to make similar discoveries around the same time.
Alternative angle: among their insights and discoveries, the successes will be shaped by survivorship bias. When deciding what part of one's work to focus on, a person will pursue the things that are close enough to other contemporary work at the time, because it provides a short path to buy-in.
Turing was interested in a bunch of other stuff, but what people know about is the Computer and his war work (at Bletchley Park). His work on say Morphogenesis (why are zebra stripes different on each animal?) is little known.
But Turing probably isn't more important to how you get from the Treaty of Bern in 1874 (creating the UPU thus you could now practically write letters in Paris and send them to New York and it Just Works™ albeit it's expensive and slow) to the Internet than, say, Godel (more fundamental observations about the nature of mathematics that underpin computation) or Grace Hopper (the first compiler although today we'd say this is only a linker). Her Navy bosses couldn't immediately see any value for it. But Grace is apparently the first to make use of the meta-applicability of computing - the minutiae of actually programming the computer are tiresome, a lot of rote tasks perfectly suited to a machine, so, why not have the computer do those parts for you?
Can we get a rule where the adjectives like startling, striking, profound etc get applied after an application has been demonstrated. Speaking as someone who suffers from adjective overload.
The key is finding the "right" people and proving to them you can be useful. That opens doors to all kinds of opportunities.
I had subscribed to a local newpaper and an article showed up where a govt official was complaining about how most of the historic local budget data was still in paper or pdfs. I found the pdfs and converted them to csv and excel files. Found the contact info of the guy complaining and sent him the data. He was so happy about that, he put me on a mailing list where there were a bunch of serious people talking about local issues. That was the big door opener for me.
The question is totally irrelevant without knowing what your need is from the software.
Different people have different needs. So completeness will always mean different things. You worry about what you need out of it and whether you are getting it.
This is a very good question. What if I'm an Hollywood superstar or an NBA player or a billionaire and I want to chat and share stuff privately with my "colleagues".
Did the really use fb or instagram like we all do? I always see "official pages" for people like Bill Gates, but where/what do they share in their day to day life?
Ask yourself what you would use if you didn't want the general public to see it, while allowing your friends to see it? You would use anonymous accounts, or you would use use the privacy tools these platforms offer, or you would just use direct messaging apps.
Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, former Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor, is also, apparently, the man behind a Twitter account that uses the moniker “Pierre Delecto.”
I liked that, you FINALLY got a taste of the Real Romney.
I had dinner with him and his family. I wasn't before, during, or afterwards a fan. To sum it up quickly, I have never in my life been in the company of people so removed from the everyday working man while being waited on by them. Truly an amazing experience that I look back on with a pre and post understanding of "the elite".
My guess is that pretty much everyone has misconceptions about the experiences of everyday working folk in that the working non-elite are populous and diverse. The key observation is if their mental models are helpful and for who.
I was with well off people that were still humans. The Romney’s I was with, I’m really not sure.
If there was a conservative thought between any of them I didn’t hear it. Nor did I hear anything that I would have described as a “good take” on any thing, like if he were to suggest something on topic X, that neither proponents nor opponents of X would consider the idea valid. In a two hours, I don’t imagine I heard a single honest heartfelt conviction.
Without giving up enough to ID me to anyone at any time in the future, I can say this… the world would burn if the Romney’s were in charge.
Every time you rerun it, if someone somewhere (and the people connected to them get effected) how many attempts do you get?