I don't understand why this doesn't exist.

It seems to me the market for "no bullshit" appliances is HUGE, and waiting for a company to grab it and make billions.

I have a pessimistic view on this because I think most people are sadly very prone to going for whiz-bang style over substance. This is why people still buy Samsung appliances when Speed Queen are no frills but top tier in reliability.

I think an even more important factor is that, in the case of speed queen, it has a great reputation within specific communities...but you can't really buy them in the stores that the average person visits for appliance purchases.

Whether or not you agree with it, joe next door is going to go to someplace like Best Buy or Menards for their new appliances, and they carry brands like Samsung and Maytag, and they are going to buy display models of the ones that draw attention to them.

I don't think people actually trust Samsung as a brand that much. Marketing pipelines are just tailored to foist theirs and other garbage products because it generates revenue.

Yep, that's sort of what I'm getting at: people (generally) don't care enough to look past the marketing.

More generally, it's sort of like how on auto enthusiast forums people are like "why don't car companies make cars for us anymore, manual, V8, rear wheel drive" and the answer is that, while there are enthusiasts, their numbers aren't enough to make the economics work compared to churning out a boring crossover that will sell significantly better.

They do exist. Cheapest stoves and fridges at home depot right now are the same old dumb appliance stuff they’ve been for 40 years. Cheapest microwave they sell is the same as its been for 30 years after innovating the dedicated Potato setting.

Solid and reliable is more expensive.

That means it's purchased less. That means it's in fewer big box stores, where most people buy their appliances. That means it's purchased even less.

It's also much harder to differentiate whether an appliance is more expensive because it's solid or because it's bullshit.

Can you elaborate on the compatibility issues you ran into, with ESM, please? Are they related to specific libs or use-cases?

The two I find most annoying

Hoisting/import order especially when trying to mock tests.

Whether or not to include extensions, and which extension to use, .js vs .ts.

Off-topic, but reading your article about hosting a website on your phone inspired me a lot. Is that possible on a non-jail-broken phone? And what webserver would you suggest?

Yes, no root required. I asked Claude to write Flutter app that would serve a static file from assets. There are plenty of webserver available on play store too.

Just use termux.

Those silly architects never thought of this.

A building that requires human pain to stand? I guarantee you this is something at least a few architects have fantasized at length about. Like ours, it seems to be a profession that attracts outliers.

It is the opposite of the usual process, where workers on the field turn the architect plans into swear words.

I remember trying to decipher the rules of this game, back in FFIX prime, with a whole lot of frustration. I probably still have a paper notebook full of schemas and notes somewhere in my atic.

A few years later, Square published FFXI, a Final Fantasy MMORPG. And to play it, you had to go through PlayOnline, a walled garden supposed to gather all the future online Square games. Spoiler, it didn't happen.

The first game published in PlayOnline was...Tetra Master! A standalone version of it, where you started with a random cards set and challenged other real players to win cards from them or lose yours to them.

The game was never a success, because people would rather play FFXI of course, but also because the rules were even more cryptic. There were situations were people would beat all their adversary's cards, but then lose the game for no reason. You could also lose the first card you put on the field, before your opponent even played.

I'm thinking the game was bugged, on top of having weird rules.

PlayOnline's tetra Master was shutdown in the 2010s iirc.