Prefetch
Faster browsing through caching
Tenet: Webpages load slowly because of the server and the round trip distance the packets travel - not because of your computer or your internet connection.
I want a faster internet browsing experience. Why am I waiting for Gmail to load my emails — especially the emails that came in in the hour since the last time I checked? Why am I waiting for the NYTimes to load the news in the morning? When I’m on a webpage and I click a link, why do I wait?
Theoretical solution: Prefetch webpages. Specifically, have a background process on my computer or router that every minute prefetches the top 10 pages I visit every day AND for every page I land on, prefetch each link immediately.
With prefetching, my top 10 pages load instantly from a local cache. Further, the version that loads is no more than 60 second old. Links on each page would load very quickly. If I need the real time version of the page, I just hit refresh which forces a request to the server.
Do you know of software that does such prefetching?
The two pieces of open source software that come to mind are: Pi-Hole and Clash. Together they have inspired this idea of a Prefetcher living on my machine or a RaspberryPi in my network. Pi-Hole — inspiring the standalone device improving my internet browsing experience and Clash as a proxy — “fetching” on my behalf - as it is a proxy commonly used to get around the Great Firewall of China.
Wastewater COVID Tracking:
Massachusetts Water Resources Authority
Source: http://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
No such thing as waste… there’s data in that water
E-ink daily front page of NY Times
E-ink is going to be amazing once the price drops (which we’ve been hearing for 10 years!?)
Speaking of the front page of the NYTimes:
Text -> Photos -> Lots of Photos -> Color Photos
Access: Amazon and Digital Money
Amazon has recently started banning certain customers for returning too many orders. Losing the ability to shop at Amazon would be significant for me — and over the next 10 years — I think very significant for the 110+ million Amazon Prime members in the US. We depend on the ease and reliability with few good alternatives — eBay, Walmart, etc just don’t cut it.
It’s one thing to be banned from a store, even the Everything Store — but what about being banned from money?
China is starting to experiment with digital currency
When China transitions to 100% digital currency — what happens when a citizen’s social score is too low and they ban them from money?
And what happens when this occurs in the US — the dollar being digitized and then certain people are excluded or banned for whatever reason. I’m certain there will always be an underground market but keeping assets in currency that cannot be easily digitally blocked — as in blocked from transacting — seems like a must.
Fun: Bread Robot
On one hand, do we need a robot to do the work of putting the bread into the basket? Is the cost of all those machines really lower than the cost of hourly labor? On the other, wow — it’s almost fully automated. Pretty soon they will need just 2 people - 1 to fix the machines, and one to clean up after them.