In the early 2000s someone (drunkmenworkhere is what I remember) made a blog post generator that you could sign up for, add some names, some interests, and it would generate blog posts with Markov chains and some other magic. I signed up, not fully understanding how it worked, added some friends and family as names, played around with it, it wasn't what I thought it was and moved on. Meanwhile it kept generating entries about me and my family doing fantastic things.
At some point my then ex-wife (we've since reconciled) was google-stalking me and came across these entries. At some point they became outlandish enough that she contacted me to ask what was going on in my life. There was a very confused conversation where I had no idea what she was talking about and she was somewhat concerned about my health and safety. It wasn't until I talked to a relative and started googling myself with some specific terms that I came across the entries and was able to figure out what was happening. I emailed the individual running the project and asked to end the entries and if possible remove them from the internet to avoid further confusion.
They don't do 4 yr grants anymore. You basically get a recurring 1 yr grant, so your upside now is limited to just that year. It trades risk for upside.
1. Does it keep up with rapid movement? (If something fails this, it’s a total non-starter.)
2. Does the eraser on the back of my pen work? (If not, it’s very frustrating and a very bad sign.)
3. Does pressure sensitivity vary the thickness of lines? (I just find it’s a bad sign if something lacks this—tools that support pressure sensitivity seem to pretty consistently be far better than tools that don’t.)
Witeboard fails all three, badly. So no way am I ever going to use it.
Ziteboard is a bit better at #1 (though still not good), but fails #2 and #3 and has hideous latency and accuracy as well—it’s postprocessing strokes heavily, which makes sense for mouse but shouldn’t be done either at all or as much for a pen. So I’m not going to use Ziteboard either, it’s unpleasant to use.
Browserboard is the worst of the three: hideous latency, terrible accuracy, missing the start and end of each stroke, and fails all three.
I’m using Firefox on Windows on a Surface Book. I know much better is possible, because I wrote a simple, local, pressure-sensitive drawing tool some years back (in the early days of pointer events), and it worked just about as well as local apps like Microsoft Whiteboard or Krita or GIMP do. All three of these tools just seem to be making rookie errors like doing too much processing probably on the main thread, and skipping coalesced events. (Those are my guesses of the problems, as a developer that has dealt with this space.) None of them are good; Ziteboard is merely the least terrible.
> Land is expensive due to artificial scarcity created wholly by regulation.
This is a bit of a strawman. I suggest you broaden your perspective and don't only rely on narrow US anecdotes in order to try to explain global phenomena.
I live in Asia where there are essentially, especially from a Western perspective, zero regulations. (I've never seen a house with a smoke detector, for instance.) And land is still expensive. In a country where the per-capita GDP is under $3,000 a year, the houses in my neighborhood still cost over $500,000 and most of that is the value of land (parts & labor for building a house of that size are only about $150,000). And the city I live in has a population over 13,000,000.
"Building up" doesn't happen magically. It takes investors willing to put up tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for an uncertain payoff many years in the future. That kind capital simply isn't trivially available here.
The road to my house is wide enough for a single car -- and it is in quite poor condition. The roads flood every year (up to about half a meter) during the monsoon and "flooding" means sewers are backed up so it isn't pristine water we're talking about.
All of that infrastructure needs to be improved to increase density by "building up". In a developing country, those things are in the condition they are because the local city has an insufficient tax base to fix things in the short term. Again, it doesn't happen magically, easily, or instantly.
What's more, there are constraints to "build up". Every house in my area is already four stories tall. Because of the high water table, there's no such things as "foundations", so every house is built on top of dozens of steel piles driven 20 meters into the ground. Construction of new houses regularly causes damage to adjacent houses, due to the unstable land. Construction here is primarily of brick, which has height limits due to weight. You can use other materials but then you have additional costs of needing to import materials and not having workers with experience in it.
Sure, it is possible to take all those four story houses and turn them into eight story houses. It just takes an extra level of complexity of architecture and construction.
I’m not sure if you’re too young or just don’t remember anymore but in the late nineties Microsoft literally tried to coopt the entire web. The embrace, extend and extinguish strategy wasn’t going to end with their domination of operating systems or office suites. The unholy combo of Internet Explorer and ActiveX were designed to ensure that the web would only properly function on a Microsoft platform. We literally squeaked through by the skin of our teeth thanks to the fiasco of ActiveX due to its myriad of security holes and a meteoric rise of Google who were strongly opposed to the shit Microsoft was trying to pull off. That said, in the 1997-2000 time frame things were looking incredibly bleak for the future of open web protocols. So much so that most companies were abandoning official support for any browser that wasn’t IE. We really got within a millimeter of a global, proprietary MSInternet. Count your lucky stars they failed in their most ambitious embrace and extend project.
I went on holiday to Spain once, bought an inflatable dinghy and paddled with a friend for a long time around the coast until we got to a beach. On the beach was a naked man. After we had convinced him to get some pants on (mickey mouse boxer shorts) he told us his story.
Basically he'd gone on holiday exactly like us once, found this beach, and just thought, "fuck it" and stayed. Fuck the job, fuck the family, fuck the friends, everything. He lived in a cave near the beach, the locals gave him food and he did the odd job when he could be arsed.
Ever since I've thought, "if it ever gets so bad I want to kill myself, I'm just going to get up and go back to that beach."
That simple thought alone has got me through some rough times.
As we paddled away from the beach other people started coming out of other caves to come and watch us leave.
At some point my then ex-wife (we've since reconciled) was google-stalking me and came across these entries. At some point they became outlandish enough that she contacted me to ask what was going on in my life. There was a very confused conversation where I had no idea what she was talking about and she was somewhat concerned about my health and safety. It wasn't until I talked to a relative and started googling myself with some specific terms that I came across the entries and was able to figure out what was happening. I emailed the individual running the project and asked to end the entries and if possible remove them from the internet to avoid further confusion.