it never made sense to have devs all over the world doing the same task with tiny variation. Centralization was inevitable. LLMs might have been a step change but the trajectory was already set.
One thing mostly not addressed is just how hard it can be to receive social opprobrium for pushing against things that are obviously broken but act as important foundation for current social reality. Even small amounts of contrarianism can get surprising amounts of not just overt push back, but social undermining over seemingly trivial things.
This creates a different kind of blindness to 'What you Can't Say' and 'Schlep Blindness' but rather a filtering of most smart contrarians into fields where lots of smart people bicker over table scraps of prestige and the few interesting problems that are legible and funded to work on. Work on seemingly low status problems and you won't have to waste your time competing.
Womier low profile brown switch keyboard. Does wired, 2.4ghz, and 3 bluetooth modes at the press of a button. Was the winner after trying lots of mechanical keyboards. Tape mod and o-rings (about 20 minutes of work) and it feels and sounds incredible.
Privacy film so that I can leave more window blinds open on the windows facing the street.
Elastic laces for some of my shoes to make them slip on.
A silicone face scrubber for gentle exfoliation on a regular basis.
Honeycomb style seat cushion. Used for meditation, car, floor sitting, etc.
Large scale turn based overworld with real time combat zombie civilization game where you start out as the last outpost and have to retake the world. Like Xcom. Maybe a mod like this exists somewhere for some game.
Sanrenmu clone of a kershaw Cryo with no spring loaded flipping (I consider it dangerous)
Nalgene water bottle, I wrapped mine in cloth tape and it serves as a foam roller
Concept 2 erg
Mealsquares
...weird pick: Core Transformation by Connierae Andreas. After experimenting with a dozen different therapy modalities it blew them all out of the water.
Your reward system is hard coded. So you pay attention to the sensory data correlates that result in the highest preference satisfaction. This gets compounded until you've bootstrapped up to having a reasonable causal model of the things that affect you the most.