this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Can we start doing this with everything?
When I was a kid, in my country all machinery and electronics were accompanied with full mechanical and electrical schematics.
good luck getting the electrical scheme of a current CPU
not because they're secret, but because they're pointless. you wouldn't understand anything from such a schematic. it's way too complicated, and has to be broken down with lots of extra annotations to be comprehensible.
A lot of times it's because those things required maintenance, and it was possible to do with basic tools.
Most things these days aren't built with maintenance in mind, mostly because they're obsolete before they need to be fixed.
There are certainly things that doesn't apply to, but for a lot of consumer products, it is.
Also if a CPU breaks in any way, you can't fix it. Best to throw it away and get a new one.
Good thing is they basically never break, anyways.
"Obsolete"
ingredient lables can be pretty long. I think we need a QR code with this and much more information. it should be able to back track where you product came from and such.
Either that or it creates an incentive to use fewer, simpler ingredients.
Can QRs fit enough text to hold all the ingredients and their descriptions?
I'd hate it if they were just links to some crappy government website that'll inevitably go down couple of years down the line
Maximum 4296 alphanumeric characters, but that's with the largest-sized code and low/no error correction (so not always practical).
And with only the English alphabet, just like in the good old days of ASCII.
this is one of those things where distributed ledger would be useful as it should at least track chain of custody then there should be enough room left over for the ingredients table.
The problem is a lot of nasty things come from less scary sounding things. For example:
Ingredient: Ricin, Where it comes from: Castor beans, What it's used for: Poison.
There's historical truth to this. In toothpaste, no less.
Ingredient: Asbestos
Comes from: naturally occurring mineral
Used for: mild abrasive
To be fair here though, how much toothpaste do you dry and snort these days?
I assume there's a better example to make your point because at least here you're explicitly stating ricin is used for poison, an objectively good thing to know.
My point being that knowledge of where something comes from doesn't tell you if it's a good thing or a bad thing.
I could have rephrased "what it's used for" to be "laxative". A true statement which doesn't expose the fact that ricin is a pretty powerful poison.
People are biased to think "chemical name bad, common name good" and that's the problem I'm exposing. You can pull out a lot of toxic stuff from things that sound harmless.
The calculus here isn't strictly whether it's "healthy" or not. There are quite a few ingredients that can be derived from both plants and petroleum, for example, and I would choose the one derived from plants every time
This is still an improvement, let's leave it at that.
Ingredient: Hydroxyl acid Where it comes from: Deep underground well What it's used for: Industrial solvent
I wish. That would be rad.