This is an interesting follow-up to the original example. I quite like the proposals he makes (although with some reservations about the extreme one —- some level of contact with end users is always valuable in my experience)
However, relevant to contemporary software (where nearly every project, regardless of scale, seems to need a team...):
The exception, of course, is that makers working in teams have ways to communicate within their team.
My experience is that “the team” seems to be a disproportionate source of interruptions. If anything, I wonder about a system where a manager acts as a form of message-queue within the team. Pretty much the direct opposite of a lot if contemporary approaches (...scrum...) but perhaps a bigger increase in maker-schedule time than focusing on external interruptions.
Money-shot on p66. About 8 months for EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested). I worked on some of these Life Cycle Analyses and can attest that they were quite rigorous.
An ethical spin can be made on it, as Zuck did in his testimony. He is making advertising more efficient for small businesses, which helps those businesses grow. That is a good goal, and I believe this to be true. We just need to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze.
I really don't care, because it's important enough to repeat in any discussion about rebuilding the Web. Involve some real systems people. Design a real app platform, with multi-language support, especially compiled languages. Have a cohesive end to end development story.
It’d be nice if there was a possibility of real competition at the basic platform level. The browser model is so entrenched, yet it still amazes me that we’ve been stuck with it for two decades.
Net-positive fusion reactors still don't solve everything sadly; they're likely to be really costly and because of those economics will only serve really populous energy grids.
One thing I learned from someone wise is to not down-select technologies for a solution (i.e., this is most dangerous when the government down-selects technologies). Something might arise other than solar cells specifically that accomplishes their goal.
