avastmick

Having lived in China for five years and seeing how it is done there (literally everywhere), I see this as a payment problem. There is no sensible, low cost payment infrastructure to support this safely. Instead most of the west has a fractured app ecosystem where each app ‘does payment’ rather than via a set of trusted payment apps that do the security up front and then passes to the provider. For example, in the article the photos show an anonymous QR code you’d scan with your camera, rather than in China where you’d use Alipay or WeChat, whose app you’d use to scan the QR. When I returned from China, it took a while to readjust to the heightened (and often expensive) friction of payments. Not saying scams don’t exist in China, just that the payment provider gives some guarantees on the veracity of the claim made by the QR code

I’m in a similar space. Solo working on an Edtech solution. Man it can be hard. @cjs_ac, I’d be keen to chat, if you’d have time.

I like this view. I’m not especially successful (by any of the measures knocking about) but in the midst of a startup again for the last year. This time I work how I want to work and am actually enjoying myself. The whole 80 hours a week startup thing is padded with a lot of performance art in my experience. I am actively avoiding all that this time around. I find that I solve a lot of things by not doing them or solving them when not actively trying. We’ve made great progress so far.

I really cannot understand consciousness. And if I am honest nor do I see peoples fascination with it. Especially now that scientists are trying to measure, they seem to come up short and some posit that it must a quantum effect or something else.

I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking brings: I am lost it all the “arguments”; I really do not understand.

A lot of way smarter people than me think it’s a worthwhile concept to wrestle with. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it.

A lot of people way smarter than me agonised over the nature of the soul too. Is it that debate replayed? Are we just trying to justify humans “specialness”?

Fairly common in Australia and New Zealand to relocate complete houses. I’ve seen them done here in NZ fully furnished.

Most houses here are wooden construction with corrugated steel roofs which keeps the weight down.

Slightly tangential is the work I did on a National digital identity platform. It enables personal information sharing from trusted sources (birth records, tax records, banks) and could simply enable true/false responses to queries such as “Are you over 18” instead of sadly spraying PI data everywhere to be lost or stolen.

We as a team worked super hard and were super proud of what the platform could do. We even won some awards. But due to politics and bureaucracy its capabilities were never used and today the service is a national joke and really only used to logon to government services. It is going to be replaced with something new and shiny.

Now, I look back and think why did I care so much and work so hard. Why was I so naive that it would be used as designed.

Isn’t this a building quality concern rather than a concern of building location and style?

I live in a townhouse with shared walls on both sides and we never hear our neighbours. I’ve asked them if they hear us (we have teenagers) and one said never, the other said sometimes an occasional thud (teenagers wrestling).

Similarly we have a private outdoor space or deck and a shared open area. Both are great and well designed. I think it can be done well.

I know too that often it is not.