8 ms·

A lifetime ago I worked a retail job. I’d often say to coworkers “isn’t it amazing we get to work in the future, we get to use laser beams all the time!” They’d

by wincy 6y ago

A lifetime ago I worked a retail job. I’d often say to coworkers “isn’t it amazing we get to work in the future, we get to use laser beams all the time!” They’d stare at me blankly, and I’d squeeze the “laser gun” I was holding in my hands to scan a UPC. The most I’d ever get was a groan like I’d told a dad joke. No one was ever impressed. To me it’s amazing how such wondrous technological advances become mundane so quickly, the future is here and nobody is astonished.

superkuh 6y ago
When I was a child I'd often stare into the laser scanners at store checkouts in awe. They were so cool. Full of rotating mirrors and lasers. The modern handheld ones are a little less cool. But, re: "why lasers are useful", it's in the name. They're a way to get a spatial and phase coherent light source that's actually high power. In the old days they'd have to take a mercury arc lamp and put a pinhole in front of it. The pinhole gave it coherence but traded away all the intensity.
nearbuy 6y ago
On the topic of how wondrous technologies become mundane, I find it amazing how we surpassed some of the magic from Harry Potter, and no one is impressed. The first book was published in 1997. The characters have very handy magic wands, which among other things can be used as flashlights. They can send magical letters (howlers) that can yell at someone in the sender's voice. Fast forward to 2021, and suddenly everyone is walking around with a fancy tool in their pocket that can be a flashlight, instantly video chat with people, and answer questions on nearly any topic. Even the offensive spells seem inferior to modern weapons. The wizards have to recite an incantation for every shot, while assault rifles can spray 900 rounds per minute.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  The fidelius charm violates every known law of information theory and machine learning heuristics, not to mention the philosophical implications.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Can you explain?
    - serf 6y ago
      "The Fidelius Charm (incantation unknown) is an extremely difficult, multifaceted and potent charm that can be used to conceal a secret inside an individual's soul; the witch or wizard who houses the secret is known as the Secret Keeper.[1] A dwelling whose location has been protected by this spell is then invisible, intangible, unplottable and soundproof. This is an extremely old spell, one of the most ancient of all."[0] it's sort of like an in-world deus ex machina device, much like many of the spells and artifacts in the HP franchise. [0] : https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fidelius_Charm https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fidelius_Charm
      - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
        The most important crux of the matter is that it can hide both a posteriori and a priori knowledge. An existing piece of information in the world can literally be rendered unavailable except to a select group of people. In the book: > As long as the Secret-Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting room window! This raises a lot of uncomfortable metaphysical and epistemological questions. Is this a purely psychological effect? Or does this operate on the information itself? If it operates on information itself, how big can you scale the effect? Ignoring magic, if such an effect truly exists, what are its implications for information theory? (Especially since the information is clearly not destroyed as the spell can be undone.) Information itself could become weaponized. Can a RAM bit flip be triggered though the application of such an effect? Or is this effect purely mental? What about second and third order effects? Does the effect propagate? Assume a machine learning system with the following knowledge/word vectors: Food + Italy = Pasta. If Italy is placed under the fidelius, are the vectors and weights going to magically re-arrange themselves? How will people talk about the dish pasta? Of all the spells in J.K. Rowling's world this is probably the most creative/disturbing. The whole gimmick with the seven horcruxes is merely distributed systems theory applied to a lich's phylactery, a concept that can be traced back millennia to various ancient civilizations. Splitting and and anchoring soul has nothing on arbitrarily erasing, manipulating, and restoring information itself on an infinitely large scale.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Even Star Trek with it's PADD was susperseeded but it's just normal for people...
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  See also: Why Harry Potter should have carried an M1911 [1] [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/gwl0v/why_harry_potter_should_have_carried_an_m1911/ https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/gwl0v/why_harry_potte...
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I get that this is not entirely serious, but it's easy to build a case for why muggle weaponry would not pose a serious threat to witches/wizards in the harry potter universe. the series makes several references to passive defensive enchantments. if the entire campus of hogwarts can be made almost impenetrable to hostile magical forces, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine that robes could be enchanted to be bulletproof. a skilled enchanter might be able to create passive defenses against most/all conventional weapons.
    - powersnail 6y ago
      If Bellatrix Lestrange could go for throwing knives, I feel that guns, and especially snipers, would be pretty effective at assassinating witches/wizards. Most of them doesn't seem to be putting up a shield all the time. Reminds me of a light novel, where the MC used witches' magics to bootstrap his industrial process, instead of fighting directly with magic.
      - waste_monk 6y ago
        >eminds me of a light novel, where the MC used witches' magics to bootstrap his industrial process, instead of fighting directly with magic. Out of curiosity, do you recall the title / author?
        bfuclusion 6y ago
        If I had to guess: Release that Witch
        waste_monk 6y ago
- cogman10 6y ago
  I graduated high school in 2004. It constantly amazes me how far we've come. Back in the 90s, CDs were the height of getting music. 1 disk would carry around 24 songs. That's it. The internet was accessible, but limited to around 56kbps on a desktop. Mobile data wasn't a thing. Texting wasn't a thing. Cell phones were barely a thing, but coverage was practically non-existent. Most people got their media only from broadcast stations. You had radio, television, and the newspaper and that was pretty much it. The fact that data is available pretty much everywhere is incredible. Even in the last 10 years, we've went from data being only available in the cities to being able to stream video in all but the most remote parts of the US. On top of that, something not really appreciated by the general public is just how good codecs have gotten. It is INCREDIBLE what can be done with the same amount of bandwidth we had in the 90s. AV1 + Opus can very nearly stream SD content at 56kbps! 1Mbps wasn't enough for SD content with MPEG2 and MP3 audio. Now, 1Mbps is enough for 1080p HD content.
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    I'm not from the US, at what age do people typically graduate highschool?
    - cogman10 6y ago
      18
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    I'm 50. We had cassettes and vinyl. I didn't have a Sony Walkman but my first personal cassette player was similar. It was too big to go in a pocket and was generally worn clipped to a belt or on a shoulder lanyard under your coat. By the time I went to Plymouth Poly (UK) in 1989 your cassette player was small enough to fit in the breast pocket of your sleeveless denim over jacket (over the leather jacket that is!) My first home PC was a ZX80 with 1Kb of RAM - not all of the 1Kb was available. Later I had a C64 which nowadays has a USB interface - I re capped it, sorted out a few other details and got it going again. The first game I played on it in 2018 when it sparked up was "attack of the mutant camels" - a Jeff Minter classic.
- p1mrx 6y ago
  Flashlights, cell phones, and assault rifles all existed in 1997. There was no portable internet access, but Harry Potter didn't have that either.
  - nearbuy 6y ago
    Assault rifles, certainly, were already superior to offensive spells in 1997. Cell phones existed, but they were just phones and few people had them. Now everyone walks around with this multi-tool that's of comparable utility to a magic wand. Phones now have a flashlight, camera, calling, video chat, maps and navigation, Google, real-time language translation, etc. The Harry Potter series doesn't have magic versions of all of these abilities specifically, but they all seem like things that could have seemed magical in 1997. In 1997, you might think having a map that updates your position live, or can automatically find the nearest burger restaurant is really cool and magical. If you've ever fantasized about what it would be like to live in a world with magic, here's one perspective: we do live with magic, and you get used to it.
hutzlibu 6y ago
"the future is here and nobody is astonished." Maybe thats because that is always the case (even though progress accelerated). But since for most people the future still means they slave away in a boring job, that might be a reason they are not thrilled all the time.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  on a similar note, most people only get to experience "future stuff" after it has been relentlessly optimized for cost to the point where it can be economically deployed at scale. a lot of the coolness has been stripped out at that point. on a couple occasions, I've flown in small GA planes. a bit bumpy for my tastes, but there really is a sense of wonder and awe when you can just ask the pilot to fly anywhere and see what stuff looks like from the sky. I don't get the same feeling on commercial flights; I just experience being stuck in a metal tube with beige plastic trim for a few hours. I'm still amazed by what computers can do, but to most people they are just "the thing I use to browse instagram".
cameronh90 6y ago
Reminds me of that Louis CK bit about internet on aeroplanes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 "You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”"
- dver 6y ago
  And just skipping over the running out of money thing. Old enough that ATM's were a big change. Before that, it was a Friday trip to the bank to get cash for the weekend. Credit
- atoav 6y ago
  I think bringing back that absolute bafflement intentionally once in a while is good habit, especially for people working in technology. I am constantly amazed that computers work at all. The more I learn about it the more amazed I am that anything works. Especially software wise I see soo much duct tape on so many layers, like looking at a house of cards that could (or rather should!) crumble down any minute, because it seems to defy reality.
  - pengstrom 6y ago
    My illusions of technology were lifted after a course in advanced computer architecture. The true technical complexity is unfathomable enormous. I mean, correctly flickering 3 billion times per second on nm scale and being super sure you got the designs right? Cannot imagine.
    - atoav 6y ago
      And even if you did get everything right, every now and then a friggin' cosmic ray zaps through just in the right way to flip that one bit in your memory.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Yes,sometimes we need to be reminded: https://youtu.be/yFj46Ei61Mg https://youtu.be/yFj46Ei61Mg [7:30-8:00] I nearly took off the sofa just by watching it.
throwaway314158 6y ago
> To me it’s amazing how such wondrous technological advances become mundane so quickly, the future is here and nobody is astonished. When they're ubiquitous they lose a lot of wonder. But furthermore, a lot of these advances are buried/not directly visible to the end-user. Think of a CD player: You use a laser to produce sound from (what apppears to be) a smooth plastic disc. I bet the concept of the wheel was pretty damn wondrous in the beginning too.
d33lio 6y ago
I just bought a proper $250 Zebra scanner for some personal inventory projects / projects that utilize pdf417 and data matrix 2d bar codes and I have to say... this is the absolutely coolest piece of "plug and play" tech I've bought in years! Granted, these scanners largely use machine vision tech but lasers are still used as a form of "dumb" auto focus aid. On another tangent, I still CANNOT believe that one company at least within the US controls 100% of the issuance of UPC codes. They sell them for up to *$30 A PIECE*! We need a "LetsEncrypt" for UPC codes - granted they serve an important role in load balancing across online stores, preventing counterfeit goods and in Amazon's case... penalizing sellers when they find the same UPC being sold on another online platform at a lower price ;) Lasers will always be cool
cosmodisk 6y ago
I get you. And it's not just lasers, it's so many more. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that the technological progress is quite slow, but then I slap myself in the face to remind myself that in just couple of decades we ended up having devices in our pockets just like those from sci-fi films! Lasers are great tech,I used to be fascinated by them when I was a kid devouring science literature. I hope I'll more great use cases in the near future.
jonplackett 6y ago
Mitchel and Webb did a very funny sketch about this https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8 https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8
mc32 6y ago
Maybe they knew it was a cheap CCD unit (I admit, not likely if it was the multi-directional units you have at checkouts, etc.)
tuatoru 6y ago
It was even more exciting two lifetimes ago. In short order people got electric light (magic! just flick a switch), phonographs (on hearing one, people apparently went looking for the soprano behind the curtain), moving pictures (there are stories of audiences being panicked by a film--black and white, 16 fps, grainy, silent, and all--of a train coming toward the camera), radio (plays, orchestras, and other entertainment from hundreds of miles away), and all sorts of wonderful houshold appliances like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and electric heaters and stoves which saved tens of hours per week. And glow-in-the-dark radium watches, and telephones. Having lived through these (in a rural area, things came a bit later than in the big cities) my mother-in-law was unimpressed by the movies about Buck Rogers rocketing around the solar system and Dick Tracy's video wristwatch, taking them as just things that hadn't made it to her town yet.
7952 6y ago
That is how I feel about WiFi. The fact that you can send out large amounts of data on shared channels is amazing. It is astonishing that it works as well as it does.

by wincy 6y ago

superkuh 6y ago

When I was a child I'd often stare into the laser scanners at store checkouts in awe. They were so cool. Full of rotating mirrors and lasers. The modern handheld ones are a little less cool. But, re: "why lasers are useful", it's in the name. They're a way to get a spatial and phase coherent light source that's actually high power. In the old days they'd have to take a mercury arc lamp and put a pinhole in front of it. The pinhole gave it coherence but traded away all the intensity.

nearbuy 6y ago

On the topic of how wondrous technologies become mundane, I find it amazing how we surpassed some of the magic from Harry Potter, and no one is impressed. The first book was published in 1997. The characters have very handy magic wands, which among other things can be used as flashlights. They can send magical letters (howlers) that can yell at someone in the sender's voice. Fast forward to 2021, and suddenly everyone is walking around with a fancy tool in their pocket that can be a flashlight, instantly video chat with people, and answer questions on nearly any topic. Even the offensive spells seem inferior to modern weapons. The wizards have to recite an incantation for every shot, while assault rifles can spray 900 rounds per minute.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago
The fidelius charm violates every known law of information theory and machine learning heuristics, not to mention the philosophical implications.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Can you explain?
  - serf 6y ago
    "The Fidelius Charm (incantation unknown) is an extremely difficult, multifaceted and potent charm that can be used to conceal a secret inside an individual's soul; the witch or wizard who houses the secret is known as the Secret Keeper.[1] A dwelling whose location has been protected by this spell is then invisible, intangible, unplottable and soundproof. This is an extremely old spell, one of the most ancient of all."[0] it's sort of like an in-world deus ex machina device, much like many of the spells and artifacts in the HP franchise. [0] : https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fidelius_Charm https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fidelius_Charm
    - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
      The most important crux of the matter is that it can hide both a posteriori and a priori knowledge. An existing piece of information in the world can literally be rendered unavailable except to a select group of people. In the book: > As long as the Secret-Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting room window! This raises a lot of uncomfortable metaphysical and epistemological questions. Is this a purely psychological effect? Or does this operate on the information itself? If it operates on information itself, how big can you scale the effect? Ignoring magic, if such an effect truly exists, what are its implications for information theory? (Especially since the information is clearly not destroyed as the spell can be undone.) Information itself could become weaponized. Can a RAM bit flip be triggered though the application of such an effect? Or is this effect purely mental? What about second and third order effects? Does the effect propagate? Assume a machine learning system with the following knowledge/word vectors: Food + Italy = Pasta. If Italy is placed under the fidelius, are the vectors and weights going to magically re-arrange themselves? How will people talk about the dish pasta? Of all the spells in J.K. Rowling's world this is probably the most creative/disturbing. The whole gimmick with the seven horcruxes is merely distributed systems theory applied to a lich's phylactery, a concept that can be traced back millennia to various ancient civilizations. Splitting and and anchoring soul has nothing on arbitrarily erasing, manipulating, and restoring information itself on an infinitely large scale.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Even Star Trek with it's PADD was susperseeded but it's just normal for people...
Ajedi32 6y ago
See also: Why Harry Potter should have carried an M1911 [1] [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/gwl0v/why_harry_potter_should_have_carried_an_m1911/ https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/gwl0v/why_harry_potte...
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I get that this is not entirely serious, but it's easy to build a case for why muggle weaponry would not pose a serious threat to witches/wizards in the harry potter universe. the series makes several references to passive defensive enchantments. if the entire campus of hogwarts can be made almost impenetrable to hostile magical forces, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine that robes could be enchanted to be bulletproof. a skilled enchanter might be able to create passive defenses against most/all conventional weapons.
  - powersnail 6y ago
    If Bellatrix Lestrange could go for throwing knives, I feel that guns, and especially snipers, would be pretty effective at assassinating witches/wizards. Most of them doesn't seem to be putting up a shield all the time. Reminds me of a light novel, where the MC used witches' magics to bootstrap his industrial process, instead of fighting directly with magic.
    - waste_monk 6y ago
      >eminds me of a light novel, where the MC used witches' magics to bootstrap his industrial process, instead of fighting directly with magic. Out of curiosity, do you recall the title / author?
      - bfuclusion 6y ago
        If I had to guess: Release that Witch
        waste_monk 6y ago
cogman10 6y ago
I graduated high school in 2004. It constantly amazes me how far we've come. Back in the 90s, CDs were the height of getting music. 1 disk would carry around 24 songs. That's it. The internet was accessible, but limited to around 56kbps on a desktop. Mobile data wasn't a thing. Texting wasn't a thing. Cell phones were barely a thing, but coverage was practically non-existent. Most people got their media only from broadcast stations. You had radio, television, and the newspaper and that was pretty much it. The fact that data is available pretty much everywhere is incredible. Even in the last 10 years, we've went from data being only available in the cities to being able to stream video in all but the most remote parts of the US. On top of that, something not really appreciated by the general public is just how good codecs have gotten. It is INCREDIBLE what can be done with the same amount of bandwidth we had in the 90s. AV1 + Opus can very nearly stream SD content at 56kbps! 1Mbps wasn't enough for SD content with MPEG2 and MP3 audio. Now, 1Mbps is enough for 1080p HD content.
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I'm not from the US, at what age do people typically graduate highschool?
  - cogman10 6y ago
    18
- gerdesj 6y ago
  I'm 50. We had cassettes and vinyl. I didn't have a Sony Walkman but my first personal cassette player was similar. It was too big to go in a pocket and was generally worn clipped to a belt or on a shoulder lanyard under your coat. By the time I went to Plymouth Poly (UK) in 1989 your cassette player was small enough to fit in the breast pocket of your sleeveless denim over jacket (over the leather jacket that is!) My first home PC was a ZX80 with 1Kb of RAM - not all of the 1Kb was available. Later I had a C64 which nowadays has a USB interface - I re capped it, sorted out a few other details and got it going again. The first game I played on it in 2018 when it sparked up was "attack of the mutant camels" - a Jeff Minter classic.
p1mrx 6y ago
Flashlights, cell phones, and assault rifles all existed in 1997. There was no portable internet access, but Harry Potter didn't have that either.
- nearbuy 6y ago
  Assault rifles, certainly, were already superior to offensive spells in 1997. Cell phones existed, but they were just phones and few people had them. Now everyone walks around with this multi-tool that's of comparable utility to a magic wand. Phones now have a flashlight, camera, calling, video chat, maps and navigation, Google, real-time language translation, etc. The Harry Potter series doesn't have magic versions of all of these abilities specifically, but they all seem like things that could have seemed magical in 1997. In 1997, you might think having a map that updates your position live, or can automatically find the nearest burger restaurant is really cool and magical. If you've ever fantasized about what it would be like to live in a world with magic, here's one perspective: we do live with magic, and you get used to it.

hutzlibu 6y ago

"the future is here and nobody is astonished." Maybe thats because that is always the case (even though progress accelerated). But since for most people the future still means they slave away in a boring job, that might be a reason they are not thrilled all the time.

leetcrew 6y ago
on a similar note, most people only get to experience "future stuff" after it has been relentlessly optimized for cost to the point where it can be economically deployed at scale. a lot of the coolness has been stripped out at that point. on a couple occasions, I've flown in small GA planes. a bit bumpy for my tastes, but there really is a sense of wonder and awe when you can just ask the pilot to fly anywhere and see what stuff looks like from the sky. I don't get the same feeling on commercial flights; I just experience being stuck in a metal tube with beige plastic trim for a few hours. I'm still amazed by what computers can do, but to most people they are just "the thing I use to browse instagram".

cameronh90 6y ago

Reminds me of that Louis CK bit about internet on aeroplanes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 "You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”"

dver 6y ago
And just skipping over the running out of money thing. Old enough that ATM's were a big change. Before that, it was a Friday trip to the bank to get cash for the weekend. Credit
atoav 6y ago
I think bringing back that absolute bafflement intentionally once in a while is good habit, especially for people working in technology. I am constantly amazed that computers work at all. The more I learn about it the more amazed I am that anything works. Especially software wise I see soo much duct tape on so many layers, like looking at a house of cards that could (or rather should!) crumble down any minute, because it seems to defy reality.
- pengstrom 6y ago
  My illusions of technology were lifted after a course in advanced computer architecture. The true technical complexity is unfathomable enormous. I mean, correctly flickering 3 billion times per second on nm scale and being super sure you got the designs right? Cannot imagine.
  - atoav 6y ago
    And even if you did get everything right, every now and then a friggin' cosmic ray zaps through just in the right way to flip that one bit in your memory.
cosmodisk 6y ago
Yes,sometimes we need to be reminded: https://youtu.be/yFj46Ei61Mg https://youtu.be/yFj46Ei61Mg [7:30-8:00] I nearly took off the sofa just by watching it.

throwaway314158 6y ago

> To me it’s amazing how such wondrous technological advances become mundane so quickly, the future is here and nobody is astonished. When they're ubiquitous they lose a lot of wonder. But furthermore, a lot of these advances are buried/not directly visible to the end-user. Think of a CD player: You use a laser to produce sound from (what apppears to be) a smooth plastic disc. I bet the concept of the wheel was pretty damn wondrous in the beginning too.

d33lio 6y ago

I just bought a proper $250 Zebra scanner for some personal inventory projects / projects that utilize pdf417 and data matrix 2d bar codes and I have to say... this is the absolutely coolest piece of "plug and play" tech I've bought in years! Granted, these scanners largely use machine vision tech but lasers are still used as a form of "dumb" auto focus aid. On another tangent, I still CANNOT believe that one company at least within the US controls 100% of the issuance of UPC codes. They sell them for up to *$30 A PIECE*! We need a "LetsEncrypt" for UPC codes - granted they serve an important role in load balancing across online stores, preventing counterfeit goods and in Amazon's case... penalizing sellers when they find the same UPC being sold on another online platform at a lower price ;) Lasers will always be cool

cosmodisk 6y ago

I get you. And it's not just lasers, it's so many more. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that the technological progress is quite slow, but then I slap myself in the face to remind myself that in just couple of decades we ended up having devices in our pockets just like those from sci-fi films! Lasers are great tech,I used to be fascinated by them when I was a kid devouring science literature. I hope I'll more great use cases in the near future.

jonplackett 6y ago

Mitchel and Webb did a very funny sketch about this https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8 https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8

mc32 6y ago

Maybe they knew it was a cheap CCD unit (I admit, not likely if it was the multi-directional units you have at checkouts, etc.)

tuatoru 6y ago

It was even more exciting two lifetimes ago. In short order people got electric light (magic! just flick a switch), phonographs (on hearing one, people apparently went looking for the soprano behind the curtain), moving pictures (there are stories of audiences being panicked by a film--black and white, 16 fps, grainy, silent, and all--of a train coming toward the camera), radio (plays, orchestras, and other entertainment from hundreds of miles away), and all sorts of wonderful houshold appliances like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and electric heaters and stoves which saved tens of hours per week. And glow-in-the-dark radium watches, and telephones. Having lived through these (in a rural area, things came a bit later than in the big cities) my mother-in-law was unimpressed by the movies about Buck Rogers rocketing around the solar system and Dick Tracy's video wristwatch, taking them as just things that hadn't made it to her town yet.

7952 6y ago

That is how I feel about WiFi. The fact that you can send out large amounts of data on shared channels is amazing. It is astonishing that it works as well as it does.