I think philosophy has to find gaps in what science can do in order to justify its existence. Some things are untestable -- what are we supposed to do with those things? There are qualitative and normative problems that science can't help us with.
I generally agree with you though -- we'd be better off if we just focused more on science, and describing things accurately, instead of just coming up with wild ass ideas. But it still is good to acknowledge and be aware of known limitations with that approach.
I like thought experiments like this. Sort of along these lines, I've been wondering more why we don't make displays that just connect to a cloud hosted VM instead of PC's -- the end user never has to know what or where is powering the images in front of them. Assuming its just network bandwidth issues preventing this, but eventually this could make more sense than having an actual machine in your home. Would be a lot cheaper, there would be hosting economies of scale, etc.
If I'm thinking about this correctly, isn't this essentially what a Chromebook does? Google Sheets, for example, shows me a picture of a spreadsheet that's being generated on a Google server, not my machine. A Chromebook is just a display with a keyboard - and the Chrome browser is just the software that passes the images from the server to my display.
Chromebooks are full laptops, with a full OS, running a full browser, windowing system, notification system, device drivers, network stack, etc.
You can even run Android apps, or linux native apps under chrome://settings.
You can edit that spreadsheet locally, just click on offline editing.
Sure when you click save it saves to the cloud, but that's about the largest difference between Chrome OS and Linux, they are running the same kernel after all.
Yeah, I think chromebooks are halfway there -- but like chromebooks still have CPU's and an OS. I guess I was thinking that the network connection could be, for instance, to a windows 10 client VM, so you could run games and other things you couldn't do in a chromebook.
The fact that you would need constant network access in order to view the display would be one thing that potentially hinders the experience.
There are however many desktop as a service providers in existence that effectively host desktops in the cloud and allow users to connect to those desktops from a thin client or their PC.
Yeah, I've used like Citrix desktop before at my job, but I'm still using a computer to connect to that. I was thinking just a screen that just has the basic ability to connect to different cloud hosted VM's, and no OS other than that. I'm not sure I've seen anything like that before, either for enterprise or consumer.
I think as years go on the network access issue becomes less and less of a problem though. Plus, for home dekstop computers there is pretty much constant access.
Sun sold something calls a sunray which was basically a dumb display. Just enough compute to handle the usb devices and send the events over the network and decompress and display the resulting video stream.
Unfortunately sun tied the sunray to incredibly expensive/slow sparc servers. So while the terminals would never need upgrading, the servers where never competitive in the first place.
It's also silly to have expensive server ram filled with frame buffers and the zillion client processes that normal desktops have for weather, date, time, calendar, notifications, speaker volume, notification mirroring, etc.
A more enlightened approach would be something more like plan 9 where compute can transparently happen client side or server side.
I still have a couple SunRays running in my house attached to a Linux server in the basement. I've upgraded the host 3 times but the terminals have aged in place. They are truly magical devices.
Who is "they"? Did you not have product teams writing clear business cases for everything you work on? Like if a developer doesn't understand why something is important it isn't going to get done right.
I never thought it had its basis in genetics, though that is pretty interesting. At least from what I remember in reading Albion's seeds it was the result of distinct cultures.
I think the division can be pretty broad. I live in Boston, and I've sometimes heard comparisons of North Shore vs South Shore to be culturally rooted in Puritans settling North, vs Pilgrims settling in South. Generally genetically the same but a little different starting point, culturally.
There's no conflict here. In a world where people were perfectly blank slates, and all such patterns were purely culturally transmitted, you would still expect a giant Yankee blob on the map just because they mostly came from East Anglia. (And the people of England when they left weren't perfectly mixed, most had lived in one region for millennia.)
I've had bad experiences with their garage sales, buying products that say "too heavy" or "didn't like fit" but are just broken. Like at least give products a look over, especially electronics that can't easily be tested by a customer in store. Spent like 3k one year at REI, then was sold broken products that they didn't take back. Dividends don't accumulate on sale products so their pricing isn't competitive - I think once the bubble popped for me I realized REI isn't special
Well, specifically, one that I remember was a solar charger. I couldn't exactly go outside and let it sit in the sun all day to see if it worked before buying. What set me off was when I asked them about it, they said, "hey its hit or miss. Actually we have another one next month, try your luck again!"
So I mean, its minor, and maybe I'm being petty, but it irritated me enough to stop buying gear there. Esp given how much I'd spent on winter camping gear the months before. Started trying to support local shops more where I can, and buying online elsewhere.
I don't really see the problem there to be honest. When it comes to electronics at the garage sale, I usually don't purchase unless I can tell that it's working or isn't difficult to fix. There could be a number of things wrong with electronics that don't show on the surface. One of the downsides to the garage sale is that sales are final. Basically, you took a chance on a risky second-hand product and the fortune wasn't in your favor.
That's why it works on them.