One of these catalogs is connected to an interesting story that happened to me not long ago. The situation took place in Poland. I recently visited a friend’s house, and there my attention was caught by an old chest of drawers that must have been made during the communist era (the PRL period). I asked my friend if he knew what model it was, since there weren’t many such pieces made in those days — there are catalogs and auctions, so these things must be documented somewhere. He told me that he had already searched for it online but couldn’t find anything.
Out of curiosity, we moved the chest of drawers and looked behind it. There we found a small label with a production date (probably 1963) and the name of one of the Polish state-owned furniture factories. There was also the model name – quite enigmatic – and when I searched for it online, nothing came up.
The mystery intrigued me so much that I spent several hours going through old PRL-era catalogs and online auctions. After quite some time, I finally came across a photo on an auction site where someone was selling a similar piece – another item from the same furniture set. The description was very detailed; the seller even claimed it was a unique piece and included an extensive history of these furniture items.
It turned out that they were designed by Marian Grabiński, and the set was originally a wedding gift for Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA. Kamprad liked the gift so much that the furniture went into mass production – but only in Sweden. They were never available in Poland!
The auction also included scans from one of the old IKEA catalogs from 1964 (pages 111–114, see thread link). But how did these pieces end up in Poland? I don’t know if the Polish company actually produced them for IKEA, but according to the description, at least prototype series was made in Poland and distributed among some communist party officials in limited number. This was never available to buy in Poland.
As I later found out from my friend – his aunt actually was a communist party member and even held a fairly high position there so it made perfect sense.
Parts of theoretical cartography are model example how Information Theory Bandwagon [1] works:
'By the mid-1970s any historical account of the development of models of cartographic communication becomes unmanageable very largely because of their increasing popularity and the way in which authors making use of them learn and borrow ideas from one another. One commentator faced with the proliferation of these models is distressed by being 'awash in a sea of scientific-sounding terminology mostly pirated from other fields such as electrical engineering.' [2]
Because no one rewards long-term efforts. You are rewarded for short-term goals and, at best, mid-term ones. In an abstract sense, customers reward you for long-term efforts, but this is something no one will put in an Excel spreadsheet with financial voodoo calculations, except when you are the sole owner of the business.
When Poland was in the Soviet bloc (post-WWII until 1989), there was the "Main Office for the Control of Press, Publications, and Performances." Every censor working there was known by their full name, and you could even negotiate with them on certain issues when publishing a book, movie, etc. This was classic censorship but based on some old-fashioned rules.
Now, Big Tech can censor your work while providing only a vague explanation, with no clear feedback channel to protest or request more information. How would you call that?
Yes, documents are online but how you can prove that those are hoax? The last analysis I know the guy made cross reference checks using modern search engines and newspaper databases and things where matching. I don't want to say that documents are real but for sure I never saw any argument that would definatly say that it was hoax.
Every single data point in isolation can be ridiculated and twisted in many ways and this is what Mick West is doing. it is another story when you have series of multiple data points through long timeline with recurring patterns and have to make sense of them. UAPs are raported since at least WWII (foo figters), some accounts are traced even to ancient times.
Yes, but even speculative demand consists of many levels of speculation. For example, I speculate (based on history) that the world will always consist of corrupt governments printing money like crazy, so "digital gold" will be much better for their citizens than what they have to offer. How reasonable is my speculation? Other people speculate that Bitcoin will double in value, while others speculate it will increase tenfold. I believe their speculation has less merit than mine (at least, that's how I see it). I also speculate that a programmable, permissionless money system, similar to SWIFT, is a very interesting idea that opens up many research avenues and there is some non zero value in it. Another example: How many gatekeepers do you think someone in a poor country has to pass through to transfer dollars internationally using their bank account? You really think there is no value in avoiding all those proxies that charge you high fees? So yes, there is a pyramid of speculations, but some of those speculations are much more reasonable than others.
Most paper money intrinsically has no value at all, even the paper it is printed on can't be used as toilet paper due to its lack of softness. It is only a medium of labor exchange. For me, Bitcoin is exactly the same, but in a very new form, backed by math instead of a government.
So, access to a permissionless SWIFT-like system from anywhere around the world has no economic value in your opinion? Go and ask people in African countries what it means to them.
and how much of gold price is in your opinion value of material itself? Strip out that material price and you have speculation price. Price of Bitcoin is mostly that speculation price + instead of material some mathematical properties.
As far as I remember, this paper draws an analogy not to system structures, but to the method of approach in their analysis. If a purely statistical approach to a designed system is presented as flawed, it is even more problematic when applied to more complex living systems. So this paper makes good point here.
How it will work if you don't know target platforms in advance? Will you compile zig module for every possible native target you know? Is sorce code public or only compiled library? WASM is universal solution, compile once run it everywhere. There is a reson why Microsoft Flight Simultor choosed WASM modules for plugin system.
It depends on the integration use case. For example, if I were writing a plugin system for my C# app, safety would take precedence over performance, and using WASM modules would make more sense. If I had some performance-critical code in Zig, then P/Invoke would be the way to go. However, in most cases, it's better to avoid P/Invoke, as C# is already a very performant language.
Yes, P/Invoke should work, especially when you are targeting a single platform. However, for multiple platforms, there might be some unexpected obstacles I am not aware of.