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Regardless of the obvious political quackery downvoting my original comment, this is what I was pointing out: we're not as self-prioritizing as we are convenience-prioritizing. Capitalism isn't the only solution, just like how any given criticism of the current implementation of capitalism isn't only indicative of a problem intrinsic to capitalism. The problem is we don't have effective checks and balances to over-conveniencing ourselves.

I believe that's the problem with capitalism as it is today. Whomever owns the means of production has literally zero constraints on maximizing their convenience. The expense ends up drastically inconveniencing, to the point of being a barrier to access, everyone who doesn't own the means of production.

I share your perspective with this. It's a fun idea. I've been a touch typist my whole life. But I did recently switch my default keyboard to International so I can type in French and Spanish, as accents are common to both languages but not included in the Windows 10 American English keyboard. I mention this because it has easily halved, if not hanged, drawn and quartered my typing speed. I'm several months in and still need to "test" touch type when I need a ç or ñ. So, I know speed comes down to muscle memory.

Really, it's not the blank keycaps that improved this person's typing speed. It was the deliberate focus on training their senses to memorize the way the tension in their left ring finger, or the way their right thumb extended to the left a little.

One fun and maybe not so novel use for this though would be training yourself to touch type AZERTY and QWERTY interchangeably. The blank keycaps would make it easy to switch between layouts and not run into a focus conflict like trying to mentally envision the A key, struggling to place it then looking down to see Q and having to fight your brain to not dump your mental priming for AZERTY and return memory for QWERTY. (There's a specific term for this in cognitive science. I want to say "trigger", but that's definitely not it. It refers to when a mylenated path is triggered by your senses and overrides your present thought.)

You're right. Perhaps Apple should start with a box then build the iPhone to fit inside.

Was it Isaac Asimov who pondered that man's goal is to automate itself out of existence? I don't get this lack of temperament with automation vs. direct labor.

I've called out Amazon before, and I stick to my stance that that company is going to boom and bust because it is so automated. Just ponder what the current top complaints are from Amazon customers, regardless of what service they use...? Well, let's head on over to https://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/amazon.html?#sort=hel... ...

> I contacted customer service through chat on TWO separate occasions ... Well, it was never fixed.

> To make matters worse, when you call they are not very helpful ...

> Merchandise more often doesn't arrive on guaranteed delivery time and customer service is rather disinterested on resolving any issues.

Those are the side effects of depending too heavily on automation. So, the charge that "anything short of [a web of automated services] will bias voting" is itself an insurmountable conflict. 1 in 10 mail-in ballots being rejected is an example of how automation isn't a solution in and of itself. States batch removing names with regex is an example. The same-day voter registration automation having a conflict with the purge of expired voter registrations is an example. Is it ever a smart idea to pour more salt on a wound if the sting is already unbearable?

The right solution is a system with enough automation to make the various key election services meet 80% of expected use, and to have people independent of the election provide the necessary checks and balances to resolve anomalous scenarios. Whether that's citizens who surrender their right to vote, or a code that substitutes for the names and PI of candidates and voters, I don't know. But I do know that the sting is already unbearable. Can we just please put away the salt?

"And I'm not even going to entertain the probability of six, though I can confirm it will be exactly as many degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon."

To WilTimSon's point: Having been on and off Tor, 4chan, 7chan, and a number of other networks and sites that host pretty questionable and sketchy stuff, I'd easily say the vast majority of people using these back channels don't take themselves seriously.

4chan mocked the hell out of the Christchurch shooter and Elliot Rodgers. None of those comments would be agreeable to the general public. The only places I've seen these guys, as well as Tsarnaev and the Columbine shooters praised is... Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit.

While I'm concerned about child pornography, there's more of it on Pornhub and XNXX than I've seen on Tor. And it's the low barriers to access on public porn sites that use automated filters that cause more of an issue. Bing itself will find adolescents if you type in keywords like "2k4" and "2ke" with adult terms.

Maybe Bill should focus less on trying to expose private paths and more on addressing the glaring gaps that come with over-automating platforms.

Pressure from equity holders, which happen to be Chinese logos. Someone shared an example on HN yesterday of Tencent, the largest gaming company. Chinese-owned, and owns major stakes in nearly a dozen of the largest game publishers and storefronts. Everything from Epic Games to Activision Blizzard, from Ubisoft France to the studio behind PUBG and the studio behind League of Legends. Path of Exile, Clash of Clans, Call of Duty Online... a Chinese mega-conglomerate has significant investments in all of them.

I've been asking the same question about Black Lives Matter causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage.

They can do those things on other apps, perhaps apps not published by Chinese companies that offshore user data to circumvent privacy rights.

And you're right: This is tiny. It's tiny enough that such a big question like, "Shouldn't the right to pursue happiness prevail?" should appear unfit to ask in its context.

I'd like to ask what rights and rule of law were upheld by even permitting Chinese products in the US economy, given allowing Chinese products is in effect financing the violation of rights on the other side of the planet?

I presume conlangs ignore this by design as fixed language. They are formed and mostly governed by rules, but the anthropological component of language never makes it into the design because there is no timeline of evolving usage.

And again, presuming here, but the outcome is a language that fails to adapt to the culture(s) that depends on it, and thereby becomes useless. Language, as we know it, evolved over an expansive period of time, from the first association of sounds to objects, now all the way to complex written grammar that includes some half-dozen tenses, some gendered, singulars/plurals, etc. We can describe things with written language that are otherwise indescribable with physical or spoken language, like the Portuguese saudade (a physical and emotional state of intense, fixated longing for someone or something that is absent, or which existed previously in a different state).

Better yet, create a "Help Center," that has 1,900 articles that all have a link that says, "Need more help?" and then that link goes to another of the 1,900 articles that also has a link that says, "Need more help?" And that link goes to another article, which has a popup that reads: Call 1-800-ABCDEFG. Then they call that number and get an automated system that says, "Thank you for calling. How can I help you today? You can say things like, 'I need help,' and 'I need different help.'" And then they have to speak all the menu choices. And the 0 button doesn't take them to a representative, only back to the first prompt.

This is too much fun to brainstorm.

I appreciate your argument. What I was trying to point out was that the obsession with car modding is why films in the Fast franchise, even a decade after the first one debuted at the box office, still do extremely well. They're sheer entertainment, just fast driving with some plot points to justify the next action sequence.

What didn't land for you, maybe for more people, was that documentaries, classical and jazz, etc. are not as appreciated because they require some effort to understand and thereby appreciate. That was my point about wishing a textbook would top the bestsellers list and not yet another book shilling apocalyptic hypotheticals about Donald Trump that the author always has some magical cure for. It's like self-help politics, but The Secret is "impeach Donald Trump", every time. It's easy. It's low brow after the first dozen books, as it only intends to satisfy helpless aggression in readers. And while it's nothing new, I wish people were as enthralled with a book teaching math or chemistry or accounting. You know, stuff that's useful to people.

If someone wants to write a book about the process of governance, that's one thing. But if it's another pseudo-analysis-by-way-of-emotion book, it's disingenuous to suggest an anti-Trump political commentary is any more useful today than anything written by Ann Coulter.

I've learned in life, both by doing and not doing, that effort is the only metric for success you can control.

As far as how you set your expectations, I'd like to propose an experiment: Draw a Punnett square, where X is each possible choice you can make with your time relevant to one variable (work/don't work) and Y is each possible result of the subject of your choice for X (meet deadline/don't meet deadline). You can imagine easily what a p.sq. of these four possible combined outcomes looks like. The point isn't that some of the intersections are impossible (ex. don't work/meet deadline). The point is to notice your ideal outcome (don't work/meet deadline) is: a) impossible, or if not impossible, then b) unlikely, given each intersection has the same general probability of occurrence. In a nutshell, stop expecting the impossible and the improbable. By investing yourself fully in just one of the possible outcomes represented in a p.sq., you will both fail to accept a reasonably good but unfavorable outcome and fail to persist when your ideal outcome appears unachievable.

That's the reason the Fast franchise is some 8+ films in and still doing $500M+ box offices.

It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.

> They are right that legislators / the antitrust entity has no right to this information, but the best way to achieve that is if they didn't have it in the first place.

But they do have a right to it by way of enforcing compliance with existing regulation. That's why Facebook isn't daring to outright refuse the requests. It's hoping by some wishful thinking that a decision will come back restricting the Commission on the basis of rights violations. It's a 50/50 bet that could either ease Facebook's burden on GDPR, or worsen it.

Honestly, I hope it worsens it. SV Tech, especially social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, have caused a lot more trouble now than they have created benefit. Back in the days of MySpace, it was a "hip" thing to interact on social media. But as the capability to monetize social media shrunk, and Facebook and Twitter, among others, decided to go public with none of the diversity in their product portfolios that's kept public giants profitable for decades, they turned to pretty nefarious and reckless opportunism to keep investors happy.

Facebook has struck deals with South Asian wireless providers that have since come into serious trouble with governments who saw social media be used to aid anti-government agendas. I was co-sponsor on a deal with one of the largest providers, which was desperately trying to get out from under its agreement with Facebook, since it had effectively lost all the money it had earned from the partnership to fines, bans, and regulatory compliance in countries like Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. All of those governments have cracked down severely on social media being used to organize anti-government activity.

Facebook is not our friend. It's not here to protect us. It's not interested in serving our best interest. If it was, it wouldn't have entire teams of attention engineers. It wouldn't constrain our ability to receive direct support for issues on the platform to a set list of automated help articles. Facebook wouldn't have allowed political ads at all during an election cycle, because the integrity of the election was already in question over the volume of activity by US candidates and the impulsive nature of social media activity in response.

I'm all for turning Facebook upside down and flushing its head in the toilet. It's gotten a little too cool for its own good. It needs to be reminded that its still just another student in the same school of life everyone else has to attend. We can't afford to set aside skepticism because we're enamored with the glow of its success with adoption. I mean, COVID-19 has had an insanely good run at new adoption too.

No one prices to "encourage proper use." They price for a number of variables. And I do agree that arguing they're overcharging is unfair; however, SU-pricing standards include triggers for excessive use as part of the customer guarantee. If Amazon has no problem automating the product, they can automate some billing features, like notifications and bandwidth restrictions when a customer is nearing excessive use based on the population use of a particular service.

Amazon's systems should have notified at least twice and required direct confirmation from the customer for their continued use.

We don't just make business decisions like this based off our self-interest. In this case, a failure to be resourceful on Amazon's part gave the customer one of two options: track everything manually minute-by-minute, or be surprised by an excessive bill.

Alright. Because this personally applies for me, what about creating missions of past decisions made without missions? (This sounds naive, but I could use some insight.)

For ex. I did my undergrad in IT Security. I did an MSDA. I ended up in professional sales. I don't know what to do with all this. I've been good at tackling hard subjects my entire life, but how do you craft a mission from a hodgepodge of difficult and unrelated skillsets?

OOC: I'm not familiar with SPACs and reorgs/realigns. I have experience with PE in acquisitions within professional sales. But do you have any insight into how these work top-down with leadership vs. IPO/PE acquisitions? Is there much difference in the usual 2 EOQ expectation for turnaround results?

I just watched a video on branchless programming, and it blew my mind that the guy got a 3.36s function to return in .48s by using more code. The idea of trying to outsmart a compiler or runtime is motivating me to pick back up coding after 8 years away.

I've fired people for having less wherewithal than to ask a question like this. His performance, output, or attitude are irrelevant. He knowingly used company property to violate federal law... IP law at that. Guy should be lucky he didn't get sued for gross negligence.

Good question. But the issue of kicking the can about insolvency played a huge role in the Great Depression. At that time, and having had one major global conflict behind the largest sovereign states in the world, I have no clue why people in power continued placing the same bets with even higher amounts attached.

I do think the safety net of shared consequences has made it safer for them to get away with it. Companies will take huge risks because, while the equity holders stand to lose everything, so too do the workers. And they know the downward pressure on those workers forces them into choosing between their needs and their time. I mean, look at gaming companies like Bethesda and Rockstar Games. The downward pressure on having to deliver a billion-selling title because they deliberately limit staff and new IP opportunities, contract more and more labor. It's a framework of continuous stress and instability. Companies optimize for stress all the time. I've seen it firsthand across meetings with Inc. 5000 and Fortune 500 logos.

Reminds me of those videos from the 1950s that predicted what life would look like in the year 2000.

He's right about cleaning datasets being an entire job itself. But that should have been a red flag for his conclusion even then. Scaling anything means scaling costs. So, the more you want your neurochip to do that it isn't capable of doing by design, you need to do before or after it's done its task(s). That's what's between the lines of what he mentioned of "silent fails." If you don't want bias in your output, and your design isn't capable of vetting bias, you need to do the work of vetting bias before you pass that dataset off. That means you need an entire model defining bias, predicting impact and constraints on outputs.

I've said it before and will continue saying it 'til I'm apparently blue in the face: The complexity of a solution is dependent on the complexity of the problem it solves. I get that simple things feel attractive because they require less effort. We don't really reduce effort so much as we shift it from wholly solutionizing to partly solutionizing and mostly trying to continue to partly solutionize.

Eric Barone's success with Stardew Valley won this debate. Hell, Eric won this debate by virtue. He didn't have to do everything himself, but the very fact he's limited anyone else working on the game has played a huge role in every port of it continuing to sit in the top 10 for sales nearly four years on from its release.

I love Eric. Like, love him. He did something unimportant, but it meant something to him. And over time, it began to mean something to other people. Harvest Moon is not a massive selling franchise, so Stardew Valley was more likely to flop on that basis alone. Then you add in that indie devs get little exposure, no advertising, none of the connections that AAA companies have access to. And then there's the fact the game wasn't broadly tested before release. Eric had weeks of major bugs to patch right after release, and the pressure of hundreds of thousands of people who'd just spent $15 on his game. But maybe, just maybe, the patience and gratitude he received for his unimportant game was all the product of what he did and how he did it.

Any of the people could've said, "Just sell this to Valve. They'll fix it. You're in over your head, dude." But instead, he got a lot of, "Saves still corrupt. But make sure you get some sleep!" and a whole lot of "Can't get X to work, so I'm going to do Y." People could've abandoned the game. They didn't.

I like this idea of unimportant things. I can't be the only person thinking it's both absurd to spend time inventing a new way to keep shoes on our feet, but also thinking it's absurd we're using a piece of string still but sending billion-dollar machines to collect soil from nearby planets.

"Hold my America," said the beer.

Less often than meetings start and end on time.

When I applied to my MSDA program, I had to interview with the lady who would become my first year mentor. "Now, do it over again... on paper." That's what she'd say to anyone too confident in their outputs. She has a reputation for weeding out people who can pass the entrance testing and qualifications, but can't adapt. And what we do requires thick skin. You're wrong until you just happen to be right.

And those jobs are running on $15 subscription MRR models. I'm not unappreciative, trust me. I just also don't appreciate that they have systematically obstructed competing services. And they've done all this using the same tactics we were tearing Microsoft apart for in the 90s over shipping Windows with Internet Explorer built into the OS.

Do a search through Google for a digital whiteboard, and once you scroll past several ads, one of the first links is for Google's Jamboard. How is this creating "trillions in value, and millions of jobs via direct and indirect employment"? It's funneling more utility into the Google service model, which is "free", because your data is not.

Big Tech is as much responsible for the dwindling payouts on music and movie royalties to artists, as it is responsible for the GDPR. It's as much responsible for us not owning the media we pay for, as it is now also responsible for the half-finished, nickel-and-dime microtransactions and advertisements that litter even paid services.

It's dangerous too. We've watched Silicon Valley completely strip industries like music, movies and gaming of a wide swath of its profitability. It's the birthplace of modern XaaS offerings.

It just doesn't sit right with me that someone would suggest a conglomerate like Google is more progressive than government. It reads like a love letter to the villain in every dystopic novel.

I'm more concerned about what's not clarified: What are the costs to these independent repair specialists? Are they being charged exorbitant fees to keep Apple's in-house repair options more competitive? What cut is Apple taking, if any, per repair? Does Apple guarantee a repair made through these independent providers isn't going to result in a bricked device down the road? Can consumers see a cost breakdown of parts and labor like we can with repairs to non-Apple devices? And what criteria is being used to determine an "authorized" third party? Is that criteria biased against critics of Apple's platform? Is this considered a "license to repair", and if so, under what conditions is Apple reserving the right to revoke that license?

I have more questions than anything else.

Just waiting for a time when we can say this about Apple and third party repairs.