notSupplied

The merit-based school such as Styuvesant in NYC and Lowell in SF are both filled with rather poor Asian kids.

The demographic profile of these two schools are substantially lower income than the very expensive cities they reside in.

Edit: Got the names of the schools wrong.

Spending extra time reading to your kids, sending your kids to tutors, paying for summer programs, sweating over neighborhood to move into for their good schools...many of these things are now considered “inter-generational privilege transfer”. But not long ago, they were simply called “good parenting”.

Why even bother doing good parenting when the ideologues in charge want to “fallacy of meritocracy” away any advantages you have given to your kids?

I used to be pretty annoyed by conservatives boasting about "family values". I thought it was just performative virtue signaling. But looking at how the far left views the hard work of parenting as something that ought to be "equalized away" has me thinking maybe the I was wrong.

Steam allows achievements in one game to affect another game?

The whole point of games is that each game invents its own rules, unaffected by the real world, including the rules of other games. Works of creative authorship operate because the author can establish clear walls, then reinvent the rules of that world.

Games are cool because they each are separate universes. They are closures. Metaverse billionaires who want to break the boundaries between games by connecting all game economies are simply trying to rake all games. They’re trying trans-dimensional conquerors like the Combine.

Hardware people: We worked our asses off for this breakthrough in performance.

Software people: Thanks buddy, so we can move everything to Electron now?

On a serious note, it does saddens me how a portion of hardware advancement is lost to inevitably sloppier software in the name of iteration speed.

Elephant in the room is that an A15/M1 beefed up GPU is exactly the right chip for a Nintendo Switch/Steam Deck form factor device.

Reminds me of Conflict vs Mistake theory. Mistake theorists worry about whether an idea is true. Conflict theorists worry about whether an idea is useful their enemies.

Shifting the argument to "bad faith", "closet X", "stealth Y" is exactly that: It says nothing about whether something true, only that "it helps the bad guys."

Treating everyone as an individual is exactly the opposite of “assume all cows are roughly spherical”. It means judge someone with the highest resolution information available. The fact that perfect information is not always available, doesn’t mean you can’t still have the maxim of making the best of the information you have / can acquire.

Regarding hard-to-cancel subscriptions:

I always thought this should be the credit card company's responsibility. High-end credit cards like AMEX and Chase Sapphire already have so many cushy perks, what's so hard about also adding something like "We'll guarantee you can 1-click unsubscribe from anything <=$30 month and underwrite any risk of these going to collections"?

Actually, one of the reasons Genshin is lauded by it's player base is that you can clear the hardest content with free to play characters. The 5 stars have way flashier looking abilities and get more face-time in the narrative, and are generally a bit more meta, but are not leaps and bounds stronger. So Genshin has at least proven that "selling broken OP characters" is not a necessary ingredient to making a $2B hit. That said, other gacha games are definitely all about selling that power.

Lets take a step up the value chain: Qualcomm also literally built their dominant position in 3G/4G/5G radios from the ground up. Is that more than sufficient justification for them maintaining as much control as they please? Because I remember Apple being pretty peeved about having to pay a % rake to Qualcomm, complaining that it was unfair.

You could repeat that for any product that has a dominant player somewhere up it's value chain.

Hence, the phrase "gerrymandering" the boundaries.

Yes, but after you take the product home from Walmart, and open the packaging, a little card slips out with more deals from the manufacturer…deals that are neither controlled nor raked by Walmart.

The app upselling you on more features afterwards is equivalent to that. Apples view would only make sense if even when inside the app, you’re STILL in the store. Because to Apple, the AppStore is not Walmart, the iPhone is Walmart. You never leave.

More economic activity is shifting from meat space and onto our phones over time. Apple’s idea that they deserve a 30% cut of “economic activity that happens on an iDevice” will appear ever more expansive.

During the pandemic, when fitness classes shifted to virtual video sessions, Apple demanded a 30% cut because what was once an offline “delivery of the goods” became online and iPhone -facilitated. What’s so dystopian about this example is that a virtual gym session is not too different from any kind of remote work.

Under the “value is delivered over an iDevice” philosophy, Apple’s tax can take a bite from nearly any plate in the economy.

Which made me realize…a lightning bolt symbol could just as easily be interpreted by laymen as “charging only”!

What a mess…

If you learned that punishment produced no useful benefit to society, and you want to punish anyway, then what you’re seeking is revenge, not justice.

Actually, an even more obvious reason that I missed:

Politics have become so tribal, that even simple sentences no longer mean what they mean at face value. Instead, they more often signal membership in a group who holds a certain bundle of beliefs.

Do you think human lives matter...as in...all of them? Do you think men should have basic rights...as in...mens rights?

Did you cringe a little at the last few words of those sentences? Even though at face value, they are very agreeable sentences? I think similarly, middle/right leaning people who aren't actually racist, think that parroting a political phrase on demand at work, is signaling a bunch of other "bundled ideologies" that they don't want to be a part of.

The most typical reason people don't like to answer that question is because they believe it is as setup for a followup:

"Then why aren't you doing X?!" where X in this case could be "Fire this person", "Setup a committee overseeing all hires", "Commit to quotas", "Donate money to this cause."

Also reminds me of this "Yes Prime Minister" skit about leading questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

So, do you denounce white supremacy? If you said yes, what if they followed up with the following questions:

- What have you done to fight it? - Have you donated to XYZ org? - How much? Why not more? Surely you could afford it? - How much time have spent volunteering for causes that fight it? - How much? Why not more? Surely you could afford it?

If you anticipated this line of questioning would follow, where the person asking the question's intent is to test you, and shame you if you were to fail it, would you still engage with that question?

He did not "refused to acknowledge racism as a concept could exist in companies", he said "We don't live in a white supremacist culture."

Consider the phrase "We live in a democracy culture": You can practically assume that everyone the conversation believes democracy is the correct way to govern, and NOT believing that would be considered very far outside of the overton window. Even as Democrats and Republicans fight over voter ID laws, both sides claim their view is more true to democracy.

So similarly, while racism exists, we do not live in a culture where it is the norm to openly state that "White people are superior." Yes, white nationalism exist and it is a nasty idealogy, but the fact that they have to airbrush their ideology in "ethnostatism" is a sign that openly expressing white supremacy is an unmarketable idea.

This is what I take the phrase "We don't live in a white supremacist culture" to mean. It is a very different claim from "racism doesn't exist". However, I think a more empathetic thing to say would be something along the lines of "White supremacy doesn't define our culture. We live in a nation where this ideology is openly condemned by the vast majority people on the left, center, and right. However, that doesn't mean it is completely absent, especially in our past, whose effects still linger on today."

Totally, the flow of value goes BOTH ways. The Mac in the 90s was on the verge a death, because you’d pay a premium for a platform with far fewer apps available for it than Windows 98. If Microsoft didn’t bring Office to the Mac, it would have been even more irrelevant.

Apps are the difference between “A phone with extra tricks” and “A computer in your pocket.”

You are significantly more locked in to your phone than your meal. There are also more choices for where to eat that what phone OS you want to have. Your phone OS is also a gateway to many different industries. Transactions made on a smart phone make up an ever expanding portion of economic activity, whereas eating-at-restaurant generally remains a constant portion of consumer spend.

That "someone with a copy of the blockchain" is not going to be credible enough to rehydrate Bitcoin. Mining is not just for transactions, but for maintaining the ongoing legitimacy of the blockchain, which is where the real value of Bitcoin lies.

I agree with this. I think design has a serious principle-agent problem.

A beautiful design will live forever on your personal portfolio, but no one can directly experience usability there. So designers are fighting competing incentives to do what’s right for this product, and what’s right for their professional image. I think this is partly the cause for trend toward stylish-but-less-useable.

They wanted both the FAANG level compensation AND the academic freedom. They ought to know their role in this machine is akin to Big Sugar tricking the country into believing that fat was the real evil for 5 decades.

My wish is for companies to stop outputting "research" and researchers to work for the correctly aligned institutions...and accept the pay cut that comes with it.

Actually, this article may be creating a streisand effect for Codex.

No, you have not laid your case for why. You have losely described some of his policy positions, followed by the words "is white supremacist" and "is racist".

The "why" is entirely missing. This comes off as "it's so self evident I don't have to bother explaining it" to others, and is the main reason why you are getting downvoted.

- CP2077 could be viewed as a one time inter-generational fluke, where a project was designed with the ambition of PS5, then half-heartedly fitted into a PS4. Once people get their next gen consoles, this use case probably goes away. Can you imagine a lot more of these CP2077-like scenarios that justify being a Stadia user?

- Stadia will be just as vulnerable to "exclusive content fragmentation" as consoles. Now that they've shuttered their internal studio, they will in fact, be constantly on the defensive in the war of exclusive content.

It depends on the unit economics.

Google has billions of accounts because it is FREE create them. Which could mean the cost of providing human support is actually too expensive on a per unit basis. The only way to rectify these economics is to charge for the account.

I pay for Google One to store more photos...however I have no clue if this improves my situation. Does the algorithm give me more slack for being a long, paid user? Do I get real customer support in the event I do get flagged? No clue.

I wonder if the killer feature for AR/VR is as simple and unsexy as replacing my ridiculous array of massive monitors.