> I'm saying the market for what TRU provided had disappeared
The market still exists, doesn't it?
Kids still exist, kids still play with toys.
People simply buy toys from Amazon now, not TRU.
Just like people buy electronics from Amazon, not Best Buy/Circuit City.
And shoes from Amazon/Zappos, not Payless.
Seems like most retail markets still exist, they've just been cornered by the giant "Everything Store".
IMO, physical toy stores should be competitive to e-commerce with the right strategy. Simply going to the store could be an exciting adventure into itself, with higher fidelity discovery than a screen provides. Esp. post-COVID where people are opting more for analog/offline options after online/lockdown burnout.
Claiming TRU's market disappeared feels similar to claiming the bookstore market disappeared, yet Barnes and Noble had a well documented and surprising comeback by shifting strategy:
meaningless statement without quantity. kids don't play outside or with each other at the same rate as they did 35 years ago. video games and smart phones are vastly replacing physical toys.
The market exists at a far lower valuation. 90% of the sales will go to Walmart/Costco/Target/Amazon/Aliexpress/Kroger/etc, 10% will go to the remaining businesses.
You might go to the local toy store every now and then and pay 2x or more for the same toy just so your kid feels the ambiance of shopping in a toy store or supporting a local business, but the majority of your purchases will not happen there, certainly not enough to supporter the huge Toys R Us stores of the past.
Is "Measure of the Universe" the book you're thinking of?
Alternatively, chapter 8 of "Realm of Numbers" touches on logarithms, and "That's about the size of it" chapter from Assimov on Numbers" includes a log-scale table of animal weights (from blue whale at 8.08 to Rotifer at -8.22)
The official French hosted instance requiring some French-specific stuff seems pretty normal. Likely specific to that instance's authentication system, not the Docs software itself.
You should be able to emulate close to CRT beam scanout + phosphor decay given high enough refresh rates.
Eg. given a 30 Hz (60i) retro signal, a 480 Hz display has 16 full screen refreshes for each input frame, while a 960 Hz display has 32. 480 Hz already exists, and 960 Hz are expected by end of the decade.
You essentially draw the frame over and over with progressive darkening of individual scan lines to emulate phosphor decay.
In practice, you'd want to emulate the full beam scanout and not even wait for full input frames in order to reduce input lag.
Mr. Blurbuster himself has been pitching this idea for awhile, as part of the software stack needed once we have 960+ Hz displays to finally get CRT level motion clarity. For example:
> Eg. given a 30 Hz (60i) retro signal, a 480 Hz display has 16 full screen refreshes for each input frame, while a 960 Hz display has 32. 480 Hz already exists, and 960 Hz are expected by end of the decade.
Many retro signals are 240p60 rather than 480i60. Nearly everything before the Playstation era.
> Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you.
OLEDs are still behind on motion clarity, but getting close. We finally have 480 Hz OLEDs, and seem to be on track to the 1000Hz needed to match CRTs.
The Retrotink 4k also exists as a standalone box to emulate CRTs and is really great. The main problem being it's HDMI 2.0 output, so you need to choose between 4k60 output with better resolution to emulate CRT masks/scan lines, or 1440p120 for better motion clarity.
Something 4k500 or 4k1000 is likely needed to really replace CRTs completely.
Really hoping by the time 1000 Hz displays are common we do end up with some pass-through box that can fully emulate everything. Emulating full rolling CRT gun scan out should be possible at that refresh rate, which would be amazing.
1000Hz is enough to match CRT quality on a sample-and-hold display, but only when you're displaying 1000fps content. A great many games are limited to 60fps, which means you'll need to either interpolate motion, which adds latency and artifacts, or insert black frames (or better, black lines for a rolling scan, which avoids the latency penalty), which reduces brightness. Adding 16 black frames between every image frame is probably going to reduce brightness to unacceptable levels.
The brightest CRTs were those used in CRT projectors. These had the advantage of using three separate monochrome tubes, which meant the whole screen could be coated in phosphor without any gaps, and they were often liquid cooled.
Direct-view color CRTs topped out at about 300 nits, which is IMO plenty for non-HDR content.
For smooth and fast motion, yes. Although I don't have such fast displays for testing, you can simulate the effect of sample-and-hold blur by applying linear motion blur in a linear color space. A static image (e.g. the sample-and-hold frame) with moving eyeballs (as in smooth pursuit eye tracking) looks identical to a moving image with static eyeballs, and the linear motion blur effect gives a good approximation of that moving image.
I know this is meant to be tounge-in-cheek and not serious, but still fun to mull over.
IMO, main issue is the assumption that GDP/capita is independent of population size.
I suspect most economies would hit a saturating point where most people are underemployed and there's no productive work left for new entrants.
While South Korea shrinking 1/4x each generation is bad, growing 4x would probably also be bad.
Seems like the best case would be hitting some optimal population size + age distribution then maintaining that each generation -- not shrinking but also not growing.
> I suspect most economies would hit a saturating point where most people are underemployed and there's no productive work left for new entrants.
I don't know if that's actually true. When you have more people, you likely need more construction to house them, and more restaurants for them to eat at, and more shops for them to shop at, etc. And more delivery drivers, etc. That's not to say a mass of people is enough to form a thriving economy... I think there does need to be some core product or service or some of the people are contributing to or a resource they're harvesting, because the economy either needs to be self sufficient or be able to exchange something of value for the inputs it needs.
This really hits home and makes me happy to see on the HN front page.
Nearly 10 years later and I still consider my time working on Riak at Basho the highlight of my career.
After leaving, my original plan was to found "Basho 2.0" after my non-compete expired. But, unexpected personal/family hardships in 2015-2018 made big-tech money the better choice for awhile, and Cloud/competitors continued to chip away at the market.
Often stil regret not taking that path.
But, happy to see technology I'm very fond of still living on and providing value to the world.
I'm super happy to see YOU jtuple!!! I haven't seen or heard anything from you in years. I'm sorry to hear about personal/family hardships you suffered. I loved working for Basho in that era. I hope things are going well for you these days. No need to reply and get all mushy if you don't want to, I'm just really happy to see you posting and hear that you're out there.
TBH, we shipped fully working strong consistency in 2014. It just had a limited feature set, was disabled by default, and was never promoted/marketed since it didn't fit the direction the new CEO/CTO was pushing.
The engineering exodus around that time sorta killed the project though, and we never were able to do the big follow-up work to make it really shine.
(Disclaimer: Former Basho Principal Engineer, primary author of strong consistency work, lead riak_core dev from 2011-2015)
I think another 18 months would have been enough too. But it just wasn't the right environment after the hostile take-over / leadership transition.
There were customers happily using strong consistency in production, but somehow the idea that it wasn’t “finished” kept getting repeated over and over by management. I was well on my way to solving the biggest rough edge (tombstone reaping in SC buckets) but then I got pulled off to work on the infamous “data platform” and never got to finish that work :-(
I'm not sure though for how much longer it will continue to make sense for the project as-is to continue to roll riak_ensemble forward as part of future releases. As there are no contributors who have direct direct experience or knowledge of using it in production, so it is hard to claim it as being a supported part of the product in any real sense.
I apologise if we do eventually cut it. Having worked through the code when chasing unstable tests, I developed an appreciation for the quality of the work.
If you don’t mind my asking, how did you find working with Erlang in such a context? I’ve always been curious about it, but these days it seems like most people are mostly interested in Elixir for REST APIs and I am content with my existing tools for that purpose. However, there are clearly places where OTP and other Erlang functionality would shine and I’ve always thought it might be fun to keep in my back pocket.
The "hacker" stereotype is certainly stale, but subbing "young person" (and implying not "old person") is equally silly.
I'm 41 and have been awake before 7am maybe 20 times in the past 10 years. Half the reason I still put up with computers is because it's one of the few professions where I can work a 11-7pm schedule most days and still excel.
There are morning people and night people. You are what you are, no judgements, but it isn't something you grow in/out of, nor should be expected to.
> There are morning people and night people. You are what you are, no judgements, but it isn't something you grow in/out of, nor should be expected to.
I knew most of the stuff in that article. If I wake up at 5am on full alert, mind racing, I read for a couple of hours and then go back to sleep when it's possible. I know that I can't function well on less than 7 hours, so I don't try.
The article seems to be taking about people on the verge of entering "the facility", on their slow slide into dementia, who are making do despite not getting enough sleep. I'll get back to you when I hit 70.
How do you build 600,000 houses a year with a population of 40 million? Cancel all other jobs and redirect all labor in Canada to building housing?
I'd be very surprised there are "220-250K housing starts per year" really. A lot of that might be development in the planning stage that is tied up in red tape whether it be in the investment stage, or navigating bureaucracy. I'd be very surprised if there were 100K houses per year actually being built.
edit: Does "housing starts" here refer to bedrooms? E.g. a 3 bedroom house counts as 3 housing starts? If so, the 600K goal (required to keep up with population growth) is much more reasonable, though still far off.
The market still exists, doesn't it?
Kids still exist, kids still play with toys.
People simply buy toys from Amazon now, not TRU.
Just like people buy electronics from Amazon, not Best Buy/Circuit City.
And shoes from Amazon/Zappos, not Payless.
Seems like most retail markets still exist, they've just been cornered by the giant "Everything Store".
IMO, physical toy stores should be competitive to e-commerce with the right strategy. Simply going to the store could be an exciting adventure into itself, with higher fidelity discovery than a screen provides. Esp. post-COVID where people are opting more for analog/offline options after online/lockdown burnout.
Claiming TRU's market disappeared feels similar to claiming the bookstore market disappeared, yet Barnes and Noble had a well documented and surprising comeback by shifting strategy:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34165960