This is awesome. Only thing that is missing is a place for me to ask a question from Kagi Assistant about the current story I am looking at, using the story as part of the context of my question.
One of their digital lock designs had a rather cough Pleasing vulnerability. But other than that it's vendor lock-in (heh), and lack of availability in the US.
With most so called locksmiths being drillsmiths in the US, not being able to clone DD and dimple keys.
Puck one. Or maybe the OP is just bitter they can't pick it for their next "belt" after getting chuffed with themselves picking average american garbage.
Digital locks aside, this is more applicable to any lock you buy and rely on (substitute US with your local region):
> lack of availability in the US
I wouldn't go out of my way to find something like Schlage here, when Abloy (Assa Abloy) locks are available in abundance with locksmiths able to duplicate usually all the key variants.
No, there was a vending machine smart lock that if you hitachi'd it right it'd unlock.
And, I phrased it wrong: most people expect to be able to walk into lowes and clone a key. And while it seems assa has been on a buying spree since I last looked at them, I do not associate them with anything you'd be able to find at big box store. When I think assa abloy I think "you better have the key card or you're SOL."
As a European, most of the products mentioned in the linked article and this discussion are from brands I've never associated with Assa Abloy in the first place.
In addition to the pedigree that someone else pointed out, macOS is also explicitly certified as UNIX by the legal stewards of that name: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
I have to dig out this chart when people complain about macOS's "non-standard utilities." Linux's GNU tools are the ones that aren't standard. If anything, Linux did an "embrace, extend, extinguish" against Unix in general.
Note that it isn't the norm for clay tablets to survive. We have lots of them, far more than we're willing to provide the manpower to read, but in most cases[1] that's not because they were made to be durable.
Whenever a city was conquered, the tablets there were immortalized as the city burned down. But cities that didn't get sacked didn't burn down, and their tablets could be lost. For example, we don't have the clay records from Hammurabi's reign in Babylon, because (a) he was a strong king, and Babylon wasn't conquered on his watch; and (b) he reigned a long time ago, and that period of Babylon sank below the water table, dissolving all the records.
[1] Some tablets were intentionally fired for posterity.
Pedigree of the team and a believable project plan.
Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit.
The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.
Empathy is usally a limited resource of those that generously ascribe it to themselves and it is often mixed up with self-serving desires. Perhaps Rationalists have similar difficulties with reasoning.
While I believe Rationalism can be some form of occupational disease in tech circles, it sometimes does pose interesting questions. You just have to be aware that the perspective to analyse circumstances is intentionally constrained and in the end you still have to compare your prognosis to a reality that always choses empiricism.
