Been using Webflow for years almost daily. Still a big fan but seeing round after round of VC money and little improvement on the actual tool (Webflow Designer) something feels off...
I bought an Ikea Eneby 20 about three years ago (there's a dual speaker version available). It's my travel companion. Still in use. Almost daily. Indoor. Outdoor. Techno, Rock, Spotify...it just sounds good (bass a little prominent but can be fixed trough EQing or a piece of cloth)
It looks good (not like a plastic toy) and sounds absolutely great. Paid $40 back then. (last time I checked it was 50€+ in EU right now).
You absolutely can pay >400 and it might be accurate hifi, but what you really want from a speaker is joy :)
Please take a moment and open the demo on a smartphone.
It might not be the actual device for the end user but people will read this on HN and just click the link...and then get a very little disappointed
Can someone help me understand the greater vision of this project?
I do like the idea and efforts from a technical point of view. Tinkering with OCR on unusual (or old) languages.
But that's not the goal of this project as far as I'm concerned (it's a byproduct?) Archiving every single news entry for the sake of completion sounds more like obsession than purpose. We're creating so much information that it will be even harder to separate garbage from valuable information (you have to spend time reading the useless stuff before you can justify whether or not it's valuable to you).
Information overload IS a problem and by adding more information to an already saturated ecosystem I don't see the vision here but would like to understand :)
It almost seems like a hording problem but for the digital natives. People accumulate a lot of stuff but rarely can they actually appreciate what they possess as time & perception is a very limiting factor.
An article that would shed some light would be highly appreciated.
They're not generating new information though, they're aiming to make old information available. I'm sure that it's quite helpful for historians to be able to search & read old newspapers, it gives more details about what people read about and often establishes a more specific time line.
We're probably not that good at recognizing which bits will be of interest to future generations, so archiving everything (to a point ... but I believe that newspapers are well within reasonable) sounds like a good idea. Plus you never know what you discover when you make things available.
Not to mention that from 1800 to 1930 the world population doubled (1 billion to 2 billion, passing the 1.5 mark just around 1900).
While this pales in comparison with the 6 billion humans added since, that's a significant change - particularly for most likely available recorded sources - at a time of monstrous evolutions to major world powers/empires, expansion into vast new areas of the world (namely North America) of essentially the British empire (while at the same time the East India Company ceased to exist by the end of the century for contrast), some abolition of slavery becoming a reality in places (1833 for the British), and what arguably kickstarted much of the mental frameworks for our entire lives: the first two industrial revolutions (for example: democratization of once-monastic school system while adopting the year-of-production type of mental model for its promotions).
1804 is the first locomotive. 1859 is The Origin of Species by Darwin. 1861 is Maxwell equations. 1869 is Mendeleev's period table. And so on and so forth[0]. Measurement devices also improve in reliability and efficiency, leading to many of the early recordings we can now look back at when it comes to the consequences of the explosion of human activity with regards to the environment.
It's quite a fantastic century to keep a trace of, frankly.
Think about it this way - to view the particular page, article etc you would have to be able to travel to the library in person to view it. If digitized multiple people across the entire globe can access the content. Furthermore printed material degrades over time and at some point becomes unreadable. By digitizing it it remains accessible to future generations. Who knows what may or may not be of interest to future generations. Storage is cheap - historic information is priceless.
Whole article resonates so thank you for putting that up. The word POLYMATH is a little clunky for non-native speakers. If you were to ask people in the streets the word GENERALIST is probably easier to understand. I experienced that with a lot of words that tend to describe a certain type/trend/box. I'm not advocating against the word just trying to raise awareness why there's people out there that would rather simply break it down to "Generalist" and Polymath will most likely be a niche word on a global scale.
A polymath has multiple areas of specialization or expertise, a generalist has (even more) multiple areas of competence. These aren't mutually exclusive. Note the special case of the generalist with ONE area of expertise is the "t-shaped" individual, which is probably a more appropriate baseline goal than anything else. Although I am not sure how domain knowledge intersects with technical skills as a matter of strategy...
Story: I went to a user test interview for Mavo (which also caters to beginners).
I'm a UI designer and I work in frontend scripting (HTML+CSS). I did my first hello world in Turbo Pascal almost 15 years ago so I'm NOT a beginner and I can understand code.
the Mavo interview consisted of basic programming concepts. It made me sweaty and I felt like the dumbest baby user because of the expected timeframe to answer questions.
Presenting a FUNCTION to a beginner IS overwhelming (even tho you wouldn't feel overwhelmed as an avid developer).
Advice: Sit down with actual beginners and watch them trying to start a project using dip language. you'll learn so much about how far away from 'beginner friendly' you are (from a practical pov)
:(
