chrischapman

Maybe move all data centers into geostationary orbit. They would be solar powered with direct communication between each orbiting center and transmitters/receiver stations on the planet surface. With that sort of lifting capacity, it wouldn't take too long to move most data center servers into orbit. Would it be cost effective? Maybe not. But I reckon there would be some climate change benefit by moving all that heat out into space.

> thus alleviating the need for the developer to release a new version through the app store review process

I'm not an native app developer but this seems like a win, right? I wonder what app store owners will make of it?

> All users see the latest version of the UI at the same time on both iOS and Android

Seems very much like what you can do with a typical browser application. In the long run, I wonder if this is detrimental to the native app ecosystem. Why not just build for the browser?

> it seems rather clear to me that all these things cannot and will not be resolved on the implementation level

Absolutely! This is why we need good legislation. Tech issues will never be solved by tech builders. All tech measures invariably have a tech counter-measure. We've been round this loop so many times over the last two decades. It's a Sisyphean nightmare.

> It is structurally impossible to design your way out of capitalism

This is what good legislation can do for us. The only problem is it takes a lot longer to introduce good legislation than it takes to build bad tech. I'm optimistic that we're approaching the end of the bad tech era.

> Short of economic changes that are completely outside the particular problem domain that these kinds of posts tackle, there is nothing at all to be done.

I reckon legislators in the EU would disagree. They are doing a lot and it's starting to work.

> surgeon general moment

I get the impression that the GDPR is ushering in the surgeon general moment that you mention. It's slowly starting to improve the health of the web. The latest rulings may even finally kill the cookie banner. Hallelujah.

Not sure if you're being humorous but just in case, it means the 'making of a sigh' as in 'generating something new' rather than a 'group of people'. As a joke, it works for my generation. The older I get the more I sigh and these days it has a lot to do with cookie banners. But that's another matter.

Nice read. Firm supporter of Web Pi (3.1415). When it comes to building for the web today, I'm always amazed that "so much can be done with so little" and yet the default is the opposite - "so much is needed to deliver so little" - so irrational! Where did we go wrong? I wonder what Web Euler (2.71828) would have looked like?