20.37: Random Thoughts of the Week
ℹ️ This is not a newsletter, nor is it a weekly update one can expect to be delivered every Sunday. These are just random thoughts or ideas I come across and pin down during the week.
Found on the “news”
- Google is — or was — literally subsidizing the development of competing browsers.
- Amazon’s workers hanging smartphones on trees next to delivery stations remind me of the Flash Boys’ storyline. Where traders were laying off fiber cable thought the country and placing their order handling hardware next to the stock exchanges.
- We westerns know nothing about how to optimize mobile experiences nor the opportunities arising around e-commerce — and I also realized I know nothing about China.
Things I’ve shared
- Remind yourself of this next time you want to upgrade your smartphone — aren’t we just paying for minor, incremental upgrades?
- No idea if this works or not, but it is definitely a clever implementation of text-to-speech using artificial intelligence.
- Happy Sharing — or Xiangwushuo, is a point-based secondhand sharing platform that helps people swap used items online.
Things I was into
- Wabi-sabi occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West. In stark contrast with the Industrial Age, that embodied an ethos based on the pursuit of a “like-new” state, the Digital Age embodies a Wabi-sabi approach to technology. Source: Breaking Smart
- Static vs. dynamic stability and why fighter aircrafts are designed to be dynamically unstable.
Random thoughts
- 💩 Why our toilets do not analyze our poop if the gut is considered to be the “second brain”?
- 🎙️ There should be way to quickly highlight, transcribe, and log audio clips from Audible or podcasts.
- 🌬 Why simple fan selector rotary switches (the thing that turns it on) step from being stopped to its maximum in the first shift — further decreasing its power with the following shifts?