one.point.zero

Results for tag: technology

The Soviet mechanical spaceflight computer.

An amazing-looking contraption built for the Soviet space program with a mechanical spinning globe and more cogs than an Enigma device.

Linked on the 30th of January, 2023 Details

The products you own are worse now.

It's not your imagination, products you buy are worse now. Fashion falls apart. Gadgets become unusable, etc. Mainly due to accelerating market changes rather than a deliberate reduction in material quality alone.

Fast-forward a handful of decades, and now several generations of people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break — functional planned obsolescence, if you will — but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object
Linked on the 11th of January, 2023 Details

A Novelist Invented a Fake Startup, investors want to fund it.

Not The Onion:

When Tahmima Anam set out to write her popular new novel The Startup Wife, she created a world for its characters to live in, including a secretive incubator called Utopia and the fictional startups it helped launch, complete with website. One of those fake companies has captured the imagination of VCs and other investors who don't know it's a fake -- and are interested in funding it.
Linked on the 27th of February, 2022 Details

The new pornographers.

A long read, but worth it, on how technology reviews have pretty much turned into design fetishism rather than proper evaluation of functionality. It's true that bad reviews have become exceedingly rare.

This report argues that consumer technology reviewers have failed their basic nominal purpose of critiquing tools. Instead, inspired by values introduced by Apple in the late 1990s, the tech review industry prioritizes aesthetic lust as the primary critical factor for evaluating objects. The reification of these values in their scoring system is transmitted to consumers and manufacturers alike. Like other prurient things, the objects designed within this paradigm are optimized not for usefulness but for photogenic and telegenic properties, a framework that finds its fullest realization in YouTube reviews and unboxing videos.
Linked on the 16th of February, 2022 Details

The forgotten history of the blinking cursor.

The ubiquitous blinking cursor that we all see without seeing has a long history. It's probably one of the oldest remnants of historical computing that's still there today.

Linked on the 15th of February, 2022 Details

The overpromise of tech.

An interesting look at the hype cycle in the tech world using the Theranos story as a starting point.

More generally, many of us have become ground down by tech’s promise to radically rewrite our future, only to find that it’s little more than a rebranding of the past imbalances, designed to supplant one controlling power with another.
Linked on the 10th of January, 2022 Details