This is an interesting perspective I haven't considered much before. Let's analyse this point a bit more. This post is a bit of a rambling stream off the top of my head.

First, what I have thought about casual clothing up to this point: I always considered the concept of telling other people what they should have to wear to work to be somewhat ridiculous. When I think of being forced to "dress up", the places that this could be useful that come to mind are 1. when you want to maintain a consistent aesthetic amongst a group of people ie. a funeral, a wedding, a party, 2. when you want to make an artistic statement ie. "dressing up to look nice", whether this means impressing your boss or impressing a potential mate. In either case dress generally assumes the form of what I consider a "costume": Clothing that is meant to do something apart from just cover the body. Some people are naturally more comfortable more dressed up than others, some people consider wearing their favourite casual shirt "dressing up". "dressing up" is not a binary thing, it is a spectrum, you can be a little dressed up or a little dressed down. Sometimes having too casual a dress culture can be alienating to those whom like to dress up. This is a real issues, however I've tended to sweep it under the rug and not considered it in too much detail before.

Now let's look at the concept of casual dress causing "casual culture". For the sake of this thought, let's just assume "casual culture" is in fact a bad thing. For reference, I think casual culture is not entirely a bad thing: I think the core of work being "too casual" really means it's casual to the point where things are laid back enough that things are not progressing efficiently, and overall employees cannot feel satisfaction from the level of work being completed. Again this is entirely subjective, workers from different countries may think what you are calling casual culture is "too uncasual" or working "too casual". And of course casualness is also a spectrum not a binary "casual" or "non-casual".

With this definition I think the core subjective nature of the comment starts to become apparent: When is work "too casual" ie. "when are we not taking ourselves seriously enough to feel satisfied and get work done"? Rather than trying to figure out the total casualness level that makes work "toxic", let's instead look at each action by itself how it effects total casualness. The "delta casualness" of an event if you will. For example, if we move from dressing in classic "work clothes" to dressing in something closer to weekend wear, this has a net effect of increasing casualness. It also has the "feedback effect" which you state as inspiring "casual culture". Let us ignore this feedback effect for now. So is this increase, without taking into account the feedback effect, good or bad?

The core cons I see in casual clothing are quite obvious: less comfortable, need to spend money on pointless objects in order to increase casualness, lack ability to express oneself. In other word there is no core utility in casual clothing. What are the pros of casual clothing? Honestly there really aren't any large I can think of, except for as mentioned previously the feedback effect. Let us then look at the feedback effect.

The feedback effect, whereby an increase in casualness causes a further increase in casualness leading to a "toxic culture" is debatable. Let's assume that it's real though. What actually are just changing our clothes doing to us as people that causes the overall culture to be effected so dramatically? I think it's similar to working at home vs going to work. I think many people, myself included, find it much more difficult to work at home than working at work, purely because we feel less of that motivation to actually do work. When I have to go to work, I have to then justify having just spent 30 minutes commuting to work, which I do by saying in my head "Why did I just waste 30 minutes on travel? ah yes I did it to get work done, therefore I should work". It forces me to get into "work mode". I think that casual clothes similarly just push us mentally in this direction. "Why did I go through all this effort of getting dressed up like this? Oh yes it's to work. Thus I will start my work". It's simply being used as a token to express our "seriousness".

However I think that really any sacrifice can be a "token of seriousness". As I say, commuting to work in my own life has always been a big motivator. If it were socially acceptable and not cult like, we could have people scream and chant at the beginning of every day. In fact some examples of this are Walmart with their weird Walmart chants, and schools with the pledge of allegiance and national anthems. In fact both these places also (sometimes) bear uniforms, again acting of tokens of seriousness. What makes a token of seriousness depends on the person and the environment, and thus the effectiveness of the tokens are generally quite subjective. Not wearing casual clothes will only cause a feedback effect of decreasing the seriousness of work if it was a significant token of seriousness in the first place.

So the question really boils down to, "is dressing up a useful token of seriousness?" Which I have to state in my opinion it isn't. The things that make me feel serious are generally maintaining proper hygiene, proper schedule, moving to a physical place of work daily. Not dressing up does cause a small drop in seriousness I agree, however I think this drop is acceptably small. I warn however I am very heavily biased towards a lack of dressing up due to having never worked or been educated anywhere which required dressing up.

So what is the solution? I think that individuals should find their own tokens of seriousness if they need them. This is why an open dress policy is good: it makes it optimal for everyone so long as everyone is making sure to push themselves to make logical decisions about self motivation. If they feel better dressing up then they should. In practice, I mentioned before this casual dress culture does actually cause it to be more difficult for others whom find dressing up a reasonable token of seriousness as they now they stand out whenever they dress up, and perhaps this is a serious issue (a seperate debate). Yes there is some merit in everyone dressing up and keeping a consistent aesthetic, however I don't think this aesthetic significantly changes the culture (another debate surely). I think dressing up largely changes just the individual's seriousness. If a boss is properly devoted to maintaining a non-casual workplace, simply forcing people to dress up will probably increase seriousness a little, but it is not a fix for your coorporate culture as it is not a significant enough token of seriousness for many. I think if you do not want people to be less casual you do it through other more direct means, for example creating a culture of overtime, short breaks, lack of "screwing around" on work time, etc. It feels silly and manipulative to make everyone wear a costume in hopes of inspiring them to work harder rather than just making your end goals clear.

From that "$94-232 per ton" number I was curious how much it would cost to "fix" CO2 emissions with just this tech alone.

According to this [1] page I stumbled apon, there's about 3 trillion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Now obviously we don't want to get rid of all of that CO2 or else we would all die, and a ton isn't quite a tonne, but roughly speaking it means it would cost on the order of 100 trillion dollars to do a "reset" on the earths CO2 levels with this technology.

Of course I have no idea how long it would take, no idea how the costs may change with time, no idea what other technologies are used alongside this one to also help with CO2 emissions, and of course we're continually putting CO2 into the atmosphere so it's not at all the full cost.

But I think it's neat to see a dollar number in some way. Just think, a few more orders of magnitude lower and it might almost be something we could just do.

[1] https://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-co...

I mean to an extent you do search for the least number of move: you memorize a number of different algorithms and apply the one that will work with the least number of moves in the given situation.

The method used by a majority of cubers is called "CFOP" [1] which can can solve the cube in "average 50-60 moves" according to a quora user [2].

[1] https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/advanced-cfop-fridrich/ [2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-moves-does-it-take-to-solve-R...

I know laziness sells, but really is it so bad to just click the mute button and turn on some music? I rarely watch TV these days but when I do I often sit with a different form of entertainment (music player, laptop, handheld video game system) and just switch to that during commercials.

To me the real issue with commercials isn't the fact that they're selling me something, it's the fact that they're interrupting my entertainment. That will happen regardless of whatever pops up on my screen.

In saying all that, I do like the concept. Perhaps video taping a show and removing the ads afterwards would have the optimal effect? Just googling around I seem to find some video taping software already has this feature, not sure how well it all works though.

Haven't read the whole paper, just the first couple pages and some bits here and there, however this appears to give enough high level details to get a good idea of what exactly is happening:

Problem: BLE and WiFi cannot directly communicate with eachother because standard WiFi hardware cannot decode BLE packets (and vice versa).

Solution: Fortunately, WiFi and BLE work in the same band. The issue is they have entirely different bandwidths, methods of multiplexing, data rates, etc. WiFi transmits on a number of 300ish Khz sub-channels with a total bandwidth of 20 Mhz, while BLE just uses a single couple MHz channel. There are other hardware issues but this is a larger one.

The "doppler shift" comes in here because both WiFi and BLE have been made specifically to combat the doppler effect (or other small offsets), and so both enable firmware to control the frequency offset of the carrier with a decent sized bandwidth (about 150 kHz but a lot of different numbers get thrown around, depends on the hardware that's used).

WiFi hardware allows firmware to detect where in it's 20 MHz band a carrier is being detected, and blue tooth allows firmware to adjust the carrier signal's frequency offset. So by modulating the carrier frequency of the BLE data can be bit banged out, and bit banged in by looking at the center frequency of the strong signal being detected on the WiFi end. There's a bunch of complications on top of this because of BLE frequency hopping and other jankiness, but I think this is the just of it.

BLE cannot just look at how much the WiFi signal is shifted to read data from WiFi, because the WiFi signal bandwidth is too large and no matter how shifted it is there's always a strong signal everywhere in the couple MHz wide BLE channel. However, the WiFi preamble just so happens to look slightly different to BLE depending on the frequency shift applied to the WiFi carrier, because different WiFi sub-bands overlap the bluetooth band with depending on WiFi frequency offset. This way, the WiFi can communicate to the BLE device. Again there seem to be a lot of complications here since this is exceedingly janky, but it manages to work. This bit banging process abuses some very specific pieces of the BLE hardware, seems a lot more complicated than the previous one. The paper of course explains this in more detail but much later.

Result: Communication is possible with these changes, however because of how hacky it is, it doesn't have great rates. The paper says 6.5 kbps in interference free and 1.59 kbps in a "crowded" environment. For reference, this is about 10 times slower than dial up (56 kbps). So no, you're probably not going to be streaming on bluetooth with this hack quite yet. This makes sense since you're sending data by modulating the carrier frequency using a method that's not meant to be updated by firmware nearly fast enough to send at a decent data rate.

Sorry if some of the details about WiFi and BLE are wrong, I don't know these protos very well and I'm just going off what I read in the paper and some quick googles.

This reminds me of another article from a bit back about a guy who "hacked" a government website by accident to download what was supposed to be private files, by simply incrementing a query string integer in the URL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16853203

It scares me a how seriously this was taken. This wasn't a mistake or miscommunication, they actually are going to take this person to court where he could be given 10 years of prison time.

The police claimed "There’s no question, this was not someone just playing around" while the convicted of course said what the rest of us are already thinking "I didn't do anything to try to hide myself. I didn't think any of this would be wrong if it's all public information. Since it was public, I thought it was free to just download, to save". There was no warning or sign that any of this publicly accessible information was not meant to be publicly accessed.

The fact that you can "hack" anything by complete accident, without malicious intent, because of someone else's shit software is mind boggling to me. In the the OP article it's mobile browsers being shit not bothering to deal with popups properly, and in the article I linked it's the Canadian government's website security being shit.

Ultimately I believe we need to make laws regarding hacking much more clear, or else any person using a computer is more or less at risk. I'm almost certain if someone was looking over my shoulder all the time and was identifying any "illegal hack" I accidentally did, I would be facing jail time by now, at least by the extremely low standards presented in these articles.