spanktheuser

The mistake the author makes is to define the visual design around a generation. Which is like defining an visual design around gender. Both can be salient but it’s rare for either to be the dominant characteristic that centers a design.

Task is generally the correct choice. Consider two apps: One is playful, coy, energetic, private and safe. The other is efficient, prudent, clear and secure.

It’s likely you can confidently determine which is a dating app and which a banking app. If I told you one is a dating app for boomers and the other a dating app for millennials you’ll have a much harder time.

Citation needed.

It’s just insane. I had no idea until Covid triggered the onset of type 1 diabetes in my niece. I was fortunate to spent time with her a year later. Her mother and father seemed to have aged a decade from the stress. I can only hope that the AI monitored artificial pancreas tech currently in testing is approved for general use soon. The cognitive load of monitoring and treatment is insane; the impact of any unanticipated variance so severe.

The problem is that the business model of YT kids contact creators contains incentives similar to those of SEO farms operating in the Google keyword ecosystem. Good content is shouldered aside by low effort, low value, high profit messaging.

As they get older, you’ll also find YouTube Kids serves as the primary gateway for consumerism / corporations to begin influencing your child. Between Netflix / Disney+, the traditional 30s television commercial has effectively disappeared for kids. Corporations have pivoted to sponsored content on YouTube kids.

YT Kids most popular channels are streamed play sessions and toy reviews with superhuman production values and unrealistic depictions of what the toys can do. Once a child has watched an episode of LOL doll play along (for example), YouTube algorithm will recommend LOL doll collection videos, which associate completist collecting with peer group social acceptance. Free to play video game spots were even worse, directly focusing on alluring introduction of the game’s addiction economy.

I gave my children access to YouTube kids for some of the excellent educational content reasoning that it would be a relatively safe experience. Within a month their homepage and all recommendations (and I do mean 100%) were sponsored 5-15 minute long toy commercials. Their interest in animals, nature, science, and dinosaur programming remained strong but disappeared entirely from view outside of keyword search.

All YT and Google apps are now removed from the devices they use. I allow unsupervised use of PBS Kids, PBS in general, Nat Geo, Disney Plus and Netflix Kids (with time limits) but YouTube is filtered from my kids devices at the router. They are not allowed Google accounts; all YouTube content access is done via keyword search with a parent selecting the material and remaining in the room during viewing.

There are programs on YouTube that can’t be replicated anywhere else. But the recommendation engine is distilled corruption and dismay.

It’s worse when you discover someone who sincerely behaves this way. I once spent two horrifying hours learning about the emotional journey of cat food from a young Purina brand manager.

That makes some sense - US healthcare is great if you are wealthy and barely existent if you are not. Canada strikes me as middle of the road - moderate quality for nearly everyone.

If you are one of the lucky 10% at the top of the heap US healthcare will outperform.

I’m not sure I disagree with your broader point, but I don’t understand how labor organizing equates with right-wing populism. To me greater efforts at unionization are simply a rational economic response. What am I missing?

Rather than bet, you could try traveling to some of these places. I’ve been to Vietnam and Cuba. In neither country could you find anything close to child prostitution (I don’t think it’s possible to observe organ sales in the same way). In part I believe this is due to the relatively flat distribution of income and wealth. Neither nation is as rich as their former colonizer, but they also lack the widespread desperate poverty which would incentivize these transactions. Both states also invested heavily in controlling inflows of capital and currency from tourists and their immigrant diaspora which would permit concentrations of wealth in the hands of someone who would purchase such things.

I did observe rampant child or underage prostitution in Cambodia, Thailand, Haiti, the Dominican Republic of course, if the American judiciary is to be believed, among certain American billionaires, politicians, and members of the British royal family.

Returning to the fundamentals of the debate I’d enjoy seeing some justification For your assertion that market mechanisms are unique to capitalist economies considering they predate them considerably.

Capital concentration and investment is a fundamental economic activity. No moderately complicated society can function without it. Capitalism is just one way to organize this activity. There’s a case to be made for it that relies on empiricism rather than mere distortion and ignorance.

I used to have many, many strong opinions about the effectiveness of various therapeutic techniques. After living a little, I’m left with only two: that most therapeutic approaches are effective for a limited set of situations and individuals. And that most therapists/advice givers fail to acknowledge this notion. Let alone describe the set of circumstances to which various techniques are suited.

I have a friend who found meditation highly helpful. Cognitively they are someone whose mind amplifies the emotional components of their experience, desirable or not. Tools that allow them to manage this have been helpful to their happiness.

On the other hand, my mind occupies the opposite end of the spectrum, requiring exceptional levels stimulation and novelty to experience any emotion. Practices such as meditation have been borderline damaging to my mental state. But piling on more stimulation - new hobby, new obsession, uncomfortable but fascinating experience - these serve to distract and make life vibrant. Rinse repeat forever.

In your circumstance I would not attempt to achieve closure. Instead I’d try accept that what happened to me in the past will taint what’s happening now. I’d read the books, journal the ways the celebration of them was damaged. Revisit them a few years later to compare the experience. Attempts to force closure have always failed for me. Wallowing in the emotion as means to explore it even more deeply seems to bring more rapid resolution.

Would this work for someone who has much stronger baseline emotions of grief or melancholy? I have no idea because I’m not that person and my opinions about their experience are worthless.

Ultimately in your shoes I would first focus on experimentation designed to test various hypotheses about your own mental tendencies. Where are you flexible versus resistant to change? Which parts of you are resilient and which vulnerable? Seems to me that this would be the fastest way to learn which tools you need to adopt to achieve your goals.

At least that’s how it looks from here. Trapped, as always, inside this particular brain. Good luck.

As a longtime product designer in the process of refreshing my development skills, one of the things I appreciate about Rails is how transparent and evident it’s point of view is. Without too much trouble I’m able to understand both the jobs the tool is suited for and whether I’ll enjoy the experience of learning / working with it. Many other frameworks / languages I’ve experienced require a more significant investment of time before I’ve been able make a similar assessment. The feeling of investing a few months into a dead-end is unpleasant.

I’m sure an experienced engineer is much more able to make these assessments; however as a perpetual dilettante in this space clear signaling is such a time-saver.

It's interesting that the consensus assumption is that he's been hired for value he'll add in the future, rather than the things he's already done to enrich Thiel.

I'd argue that the buyers are getting a free ride by offloading the negative externalities of the purchase to others. So we have to consider the cost of climate change remediation, the cost of accidents etc. A study by the Technical University of Dresden(1) estimated a rough cost to society of €16,000 per new car sold. 40%-60% of that cost was due accidents, the single highest cost category.

The costs will change from society to society, but given the mix of vehicles in the United States and the structure of our health care system I feel confident that A) the accident cost are higher here and B) those costs will be distributed in less equitable fashion.

1 https://stopclimatechange.net/fileadmin/content/documents/mo...

To clarify a common point of confusion: what you seem to be describing (personal property, market economy) is not unique to capitalism. Market socialism is not command economy and involves the use of markets and money to efficiently allocate resources. However, there's a substantial difference in corporate / business ownership; profits are generally redistributed to the workers and thus reward labor over capital accumulation.

I long for a corporate messaging service that incorporates deliberate scheduling. Being forced to choose specific business-wide delivery windows, alongside a /discouraged/ urgent option, feels as though it would go a long way to ameliorating the interrupt-driven messaging culture of most organizations.

Curious about your reasoning. I immediately wondered what type of cargo would be suitable for this sort of launch system. I came up with a fairly short list. Fuel/water/perhaps food for interplanetary spacecraft destined for Luna or Mars. I imagine one could design some types of cubesats to withstand the tremendous acceleration forces. That was about it.

Is your skepticism based on cargo suitability or other factors.

An interesting question to ask one’s self: how many open issues exist in the private repo of the various commercial insulin dosing providers? How would one judge, at any given moment, whether Company A or Company B has the more robust software? And whether Company C’s recent v2.0 release has increased or decreased the reliability of their software?

Interesting study. The data collection & classification methods seem strong as does the underlying data set. However I’m unconvinced their analysis necessarily follows from the established facts.

- Knowledge workers are treated as a homogeneous population. But it seems unlikely a software engineer, a VP of software engineering, and a business development associate obtain the same benefit from frequent in person meetings.

- Remote teams aren’t merely in-person teams + Video/VOIP stack. Optimal process and culture is drastically different for each case. It seems possible that some/most of detrimental effects would disappear over time as new remote teams adopt better processes and discard legacy methods optimized for proximity.

- There is a lack of nuance. While I may be persuaded that on average in-person collaboration adds value I strongly suspect there is tremendous variability between individual meetings. I once worked for a very senior Ballmer-era product executive who jumped ship to an alluring startup. In the year before they were fired I easily spent over 200 hours meeting and collaborating with them. To say that each hour was merely empty and valueless would do a disservice to this individual’s talent for value deletion. The abrupt conversion to WFH was accompanied by a substantial increase in communication friction. In such cases I would expect lower value, less focused, and more vacuous meetings and network connections to be the first that are jettisoned. It seems dangerous to assume the collaboration dynamics associated with success pre- WFH will remain so post-WFH. This is a novel, potentially pattern breaking change.

Wonder what precautions they’ve taken to prevent jamming by superglue or two-part epoxy.

Relevant song ‘bout how Johnny Cash ended up driving a “…49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 Automobile.”

Recorded in 1976 as domestic steel & car manufacturing tanked in the United States taking Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburg and much of the Great Lakes with it.

https://youtu.be/18cW_yHo3PY

If these companies fraudulently stole the identity of individual Americans why aren’t they facing criminal charges?

The Francis Wilhoit definition of conservatism as a form of aristocracy seems applicable:

“There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

It’s interesting how people like the OP single out the two cures for the diseases of hatred & oppression: censorship and cancellation. And yet lack the courage to couch their ask in plain language: Let us say anything we want but never face any consequence for doing so.

My former business partner back in the Web 1.0 days (hey D) had remarkable experience in scaling large systems. Studied under ast. Rolled his own ETL language to power primary research for a Nobel-prize winning social scientist. Could sound like Werner Herzog on demand. He’s the kind of man anyone shuts up and listens to. While helping him clean up a failed $25mm Deloitte project circa 1996, we got drunk in a Manhattan bar. Sometime around martini #3 he said:

“The next 10 years of software will be very boring. The entire field of CS will be employed turning paper process into digital process, at great cost. Almost all of these projects will fail because Americans are admirably earnest but tragically over-confident. You underestimate paper.”

“Good money for us though. But have a hobby to occupy your mind or you will be miserable. Zum Wohl.”

And that’s how I ended up order an ill-considered 4th martini. He was correct, although the interregnum was perhaps 2-3 years shorter than he predicted. Or 15 years longer depending on how one judges these things.

It’s also predicated on the existence of an economy which provides ample leisure for some while others labor ceaselessly at the edges of poverty. There’s a reason the Indian sub-continent lacked a food surplus, academic establishments, strong governance etc. Great Britain looted an estimated $45 billion from its Indian colonies during the 173 years of its rule.

I don’t think you should be speaking for anarchists unless you are one yourself & embedded in that community. As a non-anarchist who is sometimes in coalition with them on certain issues I have a very different impression of their view on this matter. I don’t think you can claim their support for your slippery slope / free speech absolutist position.

This is probably true, especially given the state of the surveys (for example, it required less than 10 minutes perusal to uncover obvious bias against distracted-type ADHD diagnostic surveys and by extension, females with ADHD).

Although online history may provide superior illumination of a patient’s condition, crucially, it can’t be standardized. As such, it will never support the following cases:

1. Allow health insurers to predict and thus price the cost of psychiatric care.

2. Serve as an “impartial” basis for insurers to approve / deny claims in accordance with their pricing model and profit goals.

3. Create a defensible, scientific-seeming rationale for allowing some population monitored access to schedule III controlled substances while denying it to the wider public.

4. Allow wealthy, educated and self-directed individuals to learn the responses needed to obtain access to medically beneficial controlled substances without resorting to the black market.

Cynics, marxists and progressives would likely enumerate several additional cases, but the pattern remains the same. Survey-based psychological tools correlate weakly with patient outcomes and diagnostic accuracy and strongly with the politics and economics of private health care.

It's almost as if capitalism requires outcomes which are exploitative. Whether that is the labor force, the environment, minority populations, civil society, population health.

Too bad no one has written a book or three looking into this. I'd read it.

I'm struck that the commission directors proceeded despite the ample evidence they knew would surface should the corrupt firing be contested. It seems that don't fear personal consequences for their actions. Disposing of limited liability or significantly weakening it seems necessary.

I have family and friends that were military pilots (of WW II vintage through to the 1990s) and would argue that the shared style is due to factors other than imitation. Among them:

• 1930s - 1960s (perhaps beyond) military pilots were selected by a highly meritocratic process that corrected for disparities in wealth, class and education (but not race, gender, sexual orientation). As a result, there were large numbers of pilots raised in poverty, with no college degree, & strong regional accents. These individuals became officers and then seeded the commercial airline culture that exists today.

• By the late 50’s at least, the military strongly selected for a particular personality type. All candidates for flight school were given psychological assessments. Among the factors selected for was how they reacted in emergency situations. Having lived among pilots all my life, I can absolutely confirm a tendency to remain absurdly unexcited by physical danger and fast-moving crises of any type. They also tend to under-react to situations that require resolution but that lack the same crisis atmosphere.

Anecdotal, but in summary my guess is the military developed a template and Yeager was an exemplary fit.

Be careful extrapolating to the individual from studies such as these, as the study environments control for context while the real world does not.

For example, I worked with an developer who I’d consider low on agreeableness. She functioned extremely well in a seed stage startup as 1 of 2 engineers. She was willing to fight for the right decision no matter what and didn’t care how people felt about that.

As the startup scaled, however, her disregard for the feelings of others hampered her effectiveness. Her engineering team became one of the lower performing in the organization.

Did her personality help or hinder the organization? Did it contribute or detract from her individual goals and overall happiness?

Yes.