Its the usual Youtube thing where there's multiple videos. The one linked is the bibliography popular science utterly non-technical spin. There's a three part technical series, a fun two hours viewing, and the end of the third technical video goes has some performance shots. It performs really well for a tiny little thing, like per gram or per cubic centimeter the performance is excellent. Its a cool technology and when I saw it I immediately wondered if it would be possible to make a microscope the same way out of single solid cylinder of glass. I don't think so; but it would be cool. It would also make an interesting, although probably very expensive, binocular technology.
Catadioptric telescopes are in fact sometimes configured and sold as long (working) distance microscopes:
http://www.company7.com/questar/microscope.html
Not made out of a single piece of glass, though, which is one of the things that's so elegant about Rik ter Horst's design.
All delivery services so far, have been partial emulations of a concierge service including the high cost, but have made the user suffer thru the friction instead of the human concierge.
I don't see a way around this using mere technology. Either the service quality will have to be low, or the cost will have to be prohibitively high, or the people providing the service will have to be very poor.
We have solutions going back centuries that work. If you need more than an occasional concierge service you hire a chef as an employee. At some point it makes more sense to hire a part time chef than to pay enormous extra fees for giant shopping robots. Perhaps the economic decline from AI will make the idea of having house servants more acceptable to the very few people still having an income. Most strategies to replace high labor cost people with technology miss the point of long term permanent economic decline. We don't have a problem of too many financially successful people LOL if anything the problem is a severe lack of them.
Its kind of like cars. You have to unperson poor people who know how to drive if you want success with computer driven cars. This is the same concept but for hiring a servant to cook.
Also its very hard to scale royalty. If only the local equivalent of royalty can afford to pay to make the effort required to shop and cook and drive disappear, its going to be hard to dotcom scale that to billions of customers if there's only a couple multimillionaires who don't care about the price.
Trying to automate food shopping is like trying to go back to full service gas stations. Nobody wants it so its an uphill battle to sell.
I worked at a food store as a student a long time ago.
Remarkably few customers are weekly. We did sell entire cartloads of food on certain days at certain times but it's pretty rare.
Most of the people walking in will have to skip a meal that day if they did not stop at the store for just one thing. Then add some impulse purchases. Most people walk out with one grocery bag, some walk out with only one item.
Where I lived, most of this behavior was poor planning not financial. Most of the items were pretty nice, not the cheapest.
People who can't plan ahead to have enough eggs or whatever will never plan ahead enough for the enormous latency of very slow delivery. Those eggs they're buying, will be cooking mere minutes after purchase not hours.
People will forgive themselves for saving money, but will not forgive others at the delivery service for charging extra.
There is no delivery service that's cheaper and good enough, or dirt cheap and expected to be awful, but those are large profitable retail operations. The only sector offered is more expensive, which annoys people if they occasionally get a below average item while also paying a lot more.
Delivery is for people who buy tenderloin not ground chuck and they get MAD when their tenderloin isn't perfect.
I've found two very general personality criteria for online ordering.
Planners. The people who have a meal plan in Google Calendar for the next week and rarely have to "grab one thing on the way home from the store". The people who literally have no idea what they're eating on Thursday will go to the store today or tomorrow, who knows what they'll buy.
Multitaskers. The people who do their grocery shopping on the couch while not really watching TV, or similar downtime when its job #2. I used to shop online while theoretically cooking. It'll be five minutes until this is done I'll spend a couple minutes looking in the fridge for eggs / milk / etc and add to next weeks order.
A specific criteria I've found is people in general don't trust the delivery services for non-hyperprocessed food. I can trust a sealed bag of oreos is like every other mass produced food-adjacent substance. I want to select my own roast from whats on the shelf or my own apples. So people who only eat processed food products that come in plastic tend to like online ordering, people who mostly eat more natural food tend to dislike online ordering.
You have to know people pretty well to determine their project management style and their diet.
I'm a planner and that's one of the reasons I don't order my groceries.
If there's one thing I know I can't rely on, it's to be delivered on schedule and/or receiving exactly what I ordered.
Meanwhile if I go to the store, I can find an alternative or go elsewhere if I can't find what I wanted.
And I'm also a "natural food" person, so I'd rather pick things myself. Furthermore, if I crush a fruit on my way home, it's on me and I'll deal with it peacefully.
If I'm being delivered a crush fruit, I'll get mad at the company I ordered from and I'll have find a way to be compensated.
I don't think that works either. I'm not a meal planner, but I will usually just make do with food I've already bought. Nothing appeals? I might eat cheese toast or yogurt.
The microline series, antique stores are full of them. Every high school or lower undergrad boomer had one or a similar clone and they show up in antique stores and on ebay all the time. The 80 and 120 are about the same size and sell for about $20 and I don't bother buying them anymore when I see them. The 80 puts the T scale on top and the 120 more usefully puts it in the slider IIRC so you can chain calculations.
Grad students or undergrad STEM students would have something like a 900 series, I have several, very nice. This is a desk rule it will not fit in a pocket. Something like a 600 series is a short pocket model, anodized aluminum, very nice and desirable.
The microline series was definitely made to a price point and unless you find one in unusually good condition or its your first collector rule I would not bother picking it up. They stick very strongly and the cursor cracks after half a century and they are slippery in the hand and warp more than most rule and I don't think they're easy to read. They were cheap to make and cheap to buy.
Slide rules in the 2020s are an efficient market; something that barely works "the walmart solar calculator of its generation" like a microline series sells for around $20 today, a VERY desirable N600 series sells for like a hundred bucks and I think its a bargain at that price.
If you mean most popular as in most desired today not most sold back in the day, that's probably the 600 series or specialty rules like I have a N-16-ES with the electronics engineering scales. The latter sells for about as much as a working HP48 calculator, which is interesting. If you mean popular as in attractive that is surely the Faber-Castell short 83N series, I think that's a 62/83N. I would like one of those LOL. Unleash 1960s German graphics artists on industrial design and tell them to make the coolest looking slide rule possible under 60s industrial design rules, you get the 83N series, very very cool way to spend $300 or so, its the kind of thing you put in a lighted display case to admire.
Wow, thanks. This is an incredible deep dive and I obviously came to the right place for that question. This kind of detailed comment is why I still appreciate HN so much...
The financial people I know all own 12Cs and they've been in continuous production since '81 although the innards are just a very boring ARM processor now.
They do what people want, the keyboard feel is infinitely smoother than tapping on a phone, etc.
I have an HP-41 app on my phone that the author gave to me when I was doing some product reviews early-on in the smartphone days. But definitely not the same as the physical HP calculator.
Yeah, the 12C was the standard in business school. But I needed a new calculator and the 41 with its various modules worked fine and was more general purpose.
> You have to keep a parallel exponent calculation in your head, and that slows you down
We were taught to estimate and use the rule to refine. I date back to the early electronic calculator era and we still had textbooks referencing slide rules etc.
"I want a dropping resistor for a plain old 1980s LED in a car" (back in ye old red LED 20 mA days) "Well experience indicates that will be far more than 500 ohms and somewhat less than 1K and IRL you're probably going to install a 680 and call it good" If you want an actual calculation for engineering purposes you calculate the ideal value under worst case conditions as about 585-ish ohms or whatever using the slide rule, purchasing LOLs at the idea of buying 0.1% precision resistors for mere LEDs, installs cheap 680 ohms and ships it. Maybe 680s if you want it bright to see in daylight or 820 if you want better odds to survive an alternator field winding dump or open battery (about the same thing). You can at least use the slide rule to verify everyone rounded in the "safer" direction to handle the worst case scenario.
The all plastic ones are intrinsically safe in a potentially flammable environment, they don't require power, they're an education in how most engineering materials in the real world have surprisingly wide tolerances so they are far more than accurate enough for most work, for people who learn graphically/visually they are the logical next educational step after counting on fingers.
They're pretty useful for teaching amateur people how to implement algorithms. Multiple ways to solve problems, some easier than others, some more efficient than others, with immediate rewards of faster higher accuracy.
> The all plastic ones are intrinsically safe in a potentially flammable environment
Never thought of that, and I used to work in an ATEX environment where calculators powered by watch batteries had to be carefully logged and carried across to a "safe" area inside a special (horribly expensive) Peli case.
My credit union app already wants 24x7 GPS tracking of my location and full access to my camera at all times and full access to my collection of photos, so the app is already dead to me anyway. Demanding that I use it on a locked down device isn't going to change anything for me, I'm already actively not using it. I use the website on a desktop, I rarely need to access my CU at all much less access it remotely.
Given the large amount of battery and bandwidth already used to track my every move, I wish there was something like "Docker for phones" where I could enable and disable 24x7 full access to my every action IRL.
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