Nice article, interesting to keep an open mind.
On "No. 0002. Preserving problems", it can happen to people too, no need for a complex system at the size of a company. I have often noticed recognized experts keeping the root of the problem unsolved because it was justifying their position. I may even have been subject of this curse. As an expert, you may know the root cause but have no incentive to solve it and it can be harder to mobilize ressources to solve the root cause than to keep solving the superficial issue. It is management or outside help role to identify and push for solving problems at their root, but it takes time and dedication because of expertise. As most of the time, incentives explain nearly everything.
I have an industrial engineer education. My master’s degree was specifically a collection of small projects to demystify (and have the keys understand deeply) all kind of manufacturing processes and the designing that goes with it : machining, soldering, smelting, forging, electrical circuitry.
I ended up working in IT for a large company because of opportunity. Both in terms of interesting projects and pay. All my fellow classmates that went into industry seem to be stuck in heavy internal processes, or working like hell to finish projects that barely recoup their costs. Those who went into hardware entrepreneurship struggle to find clients and investors. The only sector that still seems sexy is the very high end for B2B and luxury.
My analysis is that scale cannot be reached by non Chinese companies except for very specific and high end products (that have a smaller scale by design). Therefore it is impossible to compete on the price/quality ratio of large scale products. And I end up thinking that tariffs could be the solution.
Plus, back of the napkin cost shows it is not that expensive.
30$ (or 20€) times 52 weeks : 1560$ (1040€)
Not cheap but less than 5% of a minimum yearly salary of 32k$. [1]
Same in most occidental europe. [2]
And not everyone reads a book a week (if only so…)
Related indirectly : Turkish airlines hub (Istanbul airport) is a scam. Everything there costs at least twice the price it should. Especially food which is basically what everyone does during layover. Think 30€ for a burger or a kebab.
« Brand new » is not an argument by itself.
Business is a must, or at least booking a lounge.
Setting for command is different from actual temp. Plus, humidity is rarely accounted for. A good AC that lowers humidity from 90%+ to 30% and this 30°C home becomes quite comfortable.
What about a continuous scale ?
Choosing a base 60/24 for counting time is cultural and even if it is now the world’s norm, I would argue that an alien would not get this choice
For exactly the same reason : space is scarce but power even more. Power can also become unavailable in a degraded situation much often than on land. Therefore, it is a better design choice to have a chest freezer.
In a city appartement where floor space is scarce, convenience is a key feature and power costs barely nothing, it is a less obvious choice.
EU rollback on reducing gas liability, especially the widely debated rule on « no gas car after 2030 », feels now laughable. Maybe the reason why « technocrats » are good rulers is because they use science and data to do it.
Great project and build. I wonder if using a small fan would not help energy transmission, which is eventually the goal of cooking. It may also make the oven work like it’s at higher température while not consuming much energy. It would discharge energy from the walls faster using convection in addition to radiation.
Plus, you can experiment with tray materials depending on what you want to cook.
Suggestions inspired by my experience with convection/classic oven and copper pizza plates
It seems that any problem solving starts by defining the data.
« Always define your variables » is the first thing I learned during my engineering studies, in both math and physics class. Professors were insisting a lot about it. I still consider it is the most important thing I ever learned 10 years later.
That’s powerful. Most of the differences I can see between AI generated output and human output comes from the « broad but specific » context of the task. I mean company culture, organization rules and politics, larger team focus and way of working.
It may take time to build the required knowledge bases but it must be worth it
Interesting site ! There is something playful in the idea of ambigrams that I can’t explain. Maybe something like a puzzle ?
A nice project could be to automate a generator. It must be quite hard because it feels like a mix between a Captcha and an AI hallucination but made right. The « glyph » search part of the site is maybe the best asset to start with a database of possible matches.
It is exactly what makes the difference between good and bad experience, both for users and engineers. A well designed system is both easy to use and to maintain or improve. It looks simple, but it is not. It’s both leadership and craftsmanship at its peak.