ohduran

Haven't this people read Seeing like a State?

Allow for the possibility that you have something important to contribute to the world.

"You get the commenters you deserve" is a common joke on Marginal Revolutions.

Agile is there for the convenience of managers. The language of its manifesto has been essentially weaponised, in my opinion. The idea was to give more power to expert programmers that cared for the user without the constraints of bureaucratic procurements. And instead, what we got is something remarkably similar to Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon.

It has backfired, because most organizations cherrypick what they want about Agile, and discard what doesn't adjust to the "way we do things here".

In case this resonates with someone, I wrote more about it here: https://alvaroduran.com/essays/against-agile/

Oh wow, perhaps I was too terse and left too much room for interpretation. I meant that there is no way for a for-profit company to eventually sell personalized segment data once it has it, even if there were initial promises not to do so.

In that regard, the "siren call", as dwohnitmok says, it's a very appropriate way of encapsulating what I meant. You can be bold and not do it, but as soon as you have investors, they are going to demand it , pressure you into doing it, and if you do not comply replace you with someone who will not be sitting in a potentially profitable line of business and do nothing.

because the underlying assumption is that what they'll tell you is the truth, and that's not necessarily the case. Think of a Firefox plugin in, AdNauseam style, that always says NO.

You can't have one without the other. The economic incentives are just too intense.

It's a good point. I'm no expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but assuming that it's just a matter of infrastructure, then Bing wouldn't suck so much. Microsoft has the means, the engineering power and the incentive to crush a direct competitor. And yet, it sucks.

So in practice, the more data you have, the better the engine is. I don't have a theoretical reason for why that is the case, but thing is I don't actually need it.

100% this. There is a glass ceiling to the quality of a search engine if it's free; it starts with G.

The paid option hasn't been explored yet, and for good reason I think: in principle, you need training data for it to be any good. And, again in principle, the only way to amass user data is for the service to be free, leveraging that to sharpen the tool.

So in principle, I reckon this is doomed to fail. But I might be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. And that's enough.

I have to say, it's one of the funniest homepages I've ever come across.

I wish people bragged about reading ONE book. "Heard that you read a lot, what are you reading lately?", "Well, I've been at it with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the last five years, highly recommended".

Agreed. Go straight to the source: How to read a book, by Mortimer Adler. Ironically you will find there that you must grapple with the good books, which arguably disqualifies just reading about it in a blog.

Anything good that can be said about it is an understatement. A true masterpiece.

I have a contrarian view about reading productively, which is: READ WHAT OTHERS AREN'T READING.

It's as if there is a similar process as the Efficient Market Hypothesis happening with books: the best-sellers define our shared reality, and apparently (at least for me), they aren't worth reading.

For example, think of Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell. Virtually everyone has heard of the 10'000 hour rule. That means that the first thing you have to do to be more productive in your reading is start by NOT reading Outliers: all its content is already common knowledge.

Which brings me to this post. No matter how many books the author is reading, he is simply reviewing what everyone else (Atomic Habits, Thinking Fast and Slow, Grit) is reading too. So there is little value in what he reads, because it's discounted by what "everyone" knows already.

What do you guys think about that? Am I too off course?

There's a running assumption pervading organizations like the World Bank: that trade is ALWAYS better. More trade leads to a better world.

Truth is, I think, more complex than that. Trade is usually better, but increases the overall fragility of the system, as now I rely on a third party for something that I need and cannot produce myself.

So, assuming that the conclusions on this paper can be extrapolated to any 3D printing product (printed product?), it may not be such an issue. It may increase the options available.

> And critically by “highly recommend it to you” I do not mean “I agree with all the takes.” I think contemporary society is willing itself into a state of incredible stupidity by people wanting to evaluating the worthwhileness of reading something purely on the basis of whether or not it’s correct.

I think this is a very good point that I don't see raised very often.

Not really. Say I'm shortsighted, and still a potential mating partner due to a variety of other traits (being a billionaire, or looking suspiciously similar to Ryan Gosling). In that case, I would be able to transmit my genes to my eventual offspring.

The case with gay genes is different. Regardless of any other trait, I'm genetically prone to not have any offspring. Thus, eventually my genes would be less and less common.

Not an expert here but, IF a gay gene existed, wouldn't have it been evolved into extinction?

utterances! https://github.com/utterance/utterances

I was talking about this movie the other day, and I hypothesized that it was so successful (most people I know have fond memories of it) because it struck a cord with those of us who came of age with Disney movies. In other words, this movie felt like it was addressing a teenager generation that was OK with watching a cartoons movie.

I presume that, if this is correct, the article hints that this happened by accident.

This please! Spend your time wisely. Just saying no (or yes, for all that matters) isn't a helpful heuristic.

that's what I thought when I read the article.

> One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of primary school.

That comparison doesn't support the hypothesis. It should have been compared to teenagers from 10 years ago. Otherwise, you can't rule out the effect of growing up on the mental health if these girls.

>IKEA is continuing to try and remain true to their principals—protecting the environment and striving to become a carbon neutral company, while still remaining one of the world’s most pleasurable shopping experiences.

They lead the article with THAT? #redflag

> They tell of a technology company that seems to see its employees first and foremost as raw materials from which it wants to forge its own success.

How unlike any other company I know.

Does this work with a 7Plus as well? Asking for a friend.

In case you're looking for something similar, but django-boilerplate doesn't adjust, try cookiecutter-react-django instead. It has Heroku deployment, and a minimalistic approach.

https://github.com/ohduran/cookiecutter-react-django

Agreed! That's precisely why it's important that she (or someone supporting the "against" argument) is mentioned: it keeps us honest. Which is the whole point about the scientific method, by the way; "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

The author managed to write an article on the problems of scientific method without even mentioning Paul Feyerabend's "anything goes". He didn't mention either the fantastic "Lost in Math" by Sabine Hossenfelder, in which this precise problem is fully addressed in a manner that uninformed people can grasp. No mention of Karl Popper and the philosophy behind why on Earth do we use data to begin with.

This article is, to say the least, incomplete.

Thanks for this! The format of the interview is clearly not aimed at clarifying how to (seriously) read scientific papers, with contradicting views among the interviewees.

Ah, that's interesting, I read it the opposite way: computers are so different from the brain that the end result is that they complement each other really well.