Casio watches especially gschock really feel like they solved the goal of watches. Let people know the time accurately and cheaply.
I have a few “dress” watches I’ll wear to weddings and my smartwatch which is nice for the gym and general. But I still have a gshock I keep around for traveling or when I just want something that will work.
The idea you can toss it in a bag or throw it on and it will just tell you time accurately without worrying about it dying or having to maintain it is still incredible.
I went down the watch rabbit hole for a while. When I was looking for a travel watch, I was stubbornly looking for a mechanical watch. I also wanted it to handle the issue that arises with countries like India, which are 30 minutes off all the other time zones. This was a nearly impossible task, and prices grew to the point where I didn't think I would even feel comfortable traveling with such a watch.
I stewed with this problem for the better part of a decade, without a solution.
I then stumbled across the Casio AE1200, their world timer. As I thought about it, this was the perfect choice. With a 10 year battery, I could just grab it and go (changing the battery whenever I renew my passport), I didn't have to deal with setting a bunch of complications, because the quartz movement just kept it going all the time. It solved the IST problem. The low cost meant that I could travel without having to worry about my watch... if something happened, oh well, get another one. Along with that, I wouldn't make me a target for pickpockets. I had been so caught up in watch culture that I didn't realize being cheap could be a feature in the right context.
I've had it for about 3 years now and still smile every time I wear it. Sure, it's a cheap Casio I picked up at some random retail store... but it took me 10 years to grow into the person who could appreciate it and it solved a problem that I thought about way too much for the previous decade. It's one of my cheapest watches, if not the cheapest, yet I think it's my favorite one.
A tip for anyone in the market: There is a lot of ugly text on this watch. It can be erased with an eraser. I used a white plastic eraser. At first it doesn't seem like it's doing anything, and then the text is gone. This is much better than the chemical solutions some videos online use.
I was tempted to upgrade the bracelet, case, and crystal. There are options for metal and sapphire from 3rd parties, but if I did that, I'd then be more worried about losing it, which is an anti-feature when traveling. I have intentionally kept it stock other than erasing the text on the case itself to stay true to that realization I had a few years ago.
And credit where credit is due, I think it was the Talking Watches episode with John Mayer and Ed Sheeran that made me realize cheap was a feature. They were showing all these crazy one-of-one watches they had custom-made from AP and alike, but they both just traveled with a G-Shock for some peace of mind.
I feel like "just a question of cost" is a heavy lifter here though.
Cost core to our resource allocation system, for better or worse, and if something costs a lot it usually means we can't do it as much. In this framing, cutting out animal testing would (often) mean medical research is slower. In this framing it's a question of where people are willing to put the dial on ethics vs results, and of course pumping the breaks in one place without universal buy-in just means the cruelty moves elsewhere.
I don't think the above 1-dimensional framing is the whole story though. You could imagine more standardized data sharing, so that the data that cost the lives of a few thousand rats could be used by others. And of course you could require (as drug trials do) that the study be registered before any experiment happened, and that the results be published regardless of the outcome. Some of these changes could actually make the science better, in addition to more ethical.
hopefully animal testing alternatives keep innovating enough that they, like some renewable energy sources today, become cheaper to make use of than their incumbents
I hope so too! Unfortunately animal studies are still one of the main pillars of physiology and drug development. They were even a requirement until very recently in the US, see the rule just approved by the FDA [1].
It’s not just a question of cost. Our biological mechanisms are so complex, there is no single system that can tell us whether a drug is 100% safe or not. That’s why drugs are eventually also “tested” in humans during clinical trials. How amazing would it be if we could throw any drug/compound into a computer, then also spit in it, and get a personalized efficacy score as a response…?
Animals are NOT cheaper. Pharma companies do everything to avoid animal testing.
For most drugs the only reasonable test animals are mice and rats. And they LOVE to naturally get cancer and other diseases, so you need to use large groups to get even a semblance of statistical significance.
Oh, and don't forget that it takes a lot of time to run the tests. And time IS money for pharma.
Even within animal testing, the cost and convenience of animal testing could vary tremendously. Working in animal testing intrinsically means running a death-camp for mice. The mice aren't are barely even raw materials, they're basically stationery, more treated more like a mobile pH test-strip then a living creature.
There are ways that animal testing could be made far more humane (like birth control to prevent the kind of overbreeding that demands mass culling), but those, themselves, would be costly.
And in order to test cures, you must first inflict the animals with the disease. How many do you need? Are you sure? Because waiting to produce more later would also create costs. Cheaper just to breed a huge batch now and then cull the surplus.
the interesting element of the article for me wasn't "somebody put malware on a torrent site", it was how the author reverse engineered the .exe to see why the file ended up there
If theranos can hallucinate magic blood testing machines for juicy investor dollars, why can't AI hallucinate magic energy storage devices for same, but faster!
I’m sure there are people who aren’t looking at the code at all. But for those that are I guess I’m wondering why bother with an IDE anymore?
I’m finding I can just review everything I need to with a text editor like Neovim now. Even GitHub review is probably good enough for people.
I love their tools and am keeping my subscription for now, but would have to agree.
VSCode has been eating at their users for years now. Jetbrains tools still were much better in my opinion but they are competing with “free” and “good enough”. With AI getting better, the main advantages of Jetbrains are gone.
I don’t need a massive IDE anymore. I still need an editor, but there’s hundreds of better tools for quick edits than a massive IDE.
It’s a company at the end of the day, but I hope they find a niche or pull a Garmin play like you said, otherwise I don’t see them being relevant.
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