vkk8

Streamlining production seems like a wrong goal in this game. I mean, who cares if you can efficiently churn out dozens or hundreds of new TV-shows and movies if none of them are good? Having one really good TV-show on the catalogue is worth a hundred crappy TV-shows. And if you manage to produce one good show, who cares if its' production process was extremely efficient. It's a long tail game.

> A SaaS company, Salmon as a Service, providing next day delivery of fresh salmon, when the same thing can be bought at the local store.

If "fresh" really means caught on the day before, I would use this service. The "fresh" salmon in supermarkets is usually several days old.

This would transfer the real estate from the people to huge rental companies that can buy real estate without 30 year loans. Probably it would also lower the prices a lot, though.

I wonder why fixed interest rates are so prevalent in some countries (like, apparently, the US) while in other countries the standard is to tie the interest rate to a reference rate (like EURIBOR in the Eurozone)?

Related to the last point: There is no way to estimate how much work a new job is in reality. I'm currently working 10-20 hours a week remotely. I think my salary could be improved, but taking a risk of actually having to put in 40 hours or more of work every week is not worth the small(ish) increase I could reasonably get by changing jobs.

In banks the technical people are, in my experience, always second class citizens. They are expected to shut up and do what the business people tell them to do. They are not really responsible for anything or making decisions and are paid accordingly. The best paid technical people in banks are not people who are working on some cutting edge technology developing new stuff, but people who happen to be the only ones who know how to maintain some piece of god awful critical legacy infrastructure. This is also the reason why the banking technology develops so slowly and why the infrastructure in banks suck so much.

My thoughts exactly. I remember reading about some indigenous tribes in Africa whose diet is mostly just fruits.

You could maybe make an argument that the fruits we consume now are a result of hundreds of years of selective breeding and contain much more of it than indigenous plants.

Indeed. Somehow people managed to eat lunch before the internet.

I've heard of people doing similar things before. Maybe people working in high security environments downloading libraries from random websites is common enough that some attackers are actually targeting those people by backdooring common Python packages, C++ libraries, etc. and trying to get their server to bypass enterprise blocking somehow.

Yes, it almost sounds like Agassi sort of showed his father was right to force him to play tennis. If I suddenly "chose tennis", it wouldn't do me much good because becoming a world class tennis player requires decades of training starting from a young age.

Seven Sketches in Compositionality by Spivak and Fong (https://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/7Sketches.pdf) is supposed to be very practical. It includes many examples, but I'm not sure how useful category theory actually is in the example cases.

There is the theory of monotone co-design (https://co-design.science/index.html) which is formulated using category theory. It seems pretty practical.

Then there's topological data analysis, which is clearly a practical subject, and can be formulated in terms of category theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_data_analysis

I'm not very knowledgeful of any of these subjects, but I, like you, got somewhat interested in category theory and tried to find how and where it's used some time ago. These are the main things I found.

The thing is, I think there are people in academia who are not just bullshitting. Occasionally real scientific advances do happen. It's just that if I don't personally have a breakthrough in sight, I'm supposed to just produce garbage and pretend that I'm doing a good job while trying to do the actual good research on my free time or something.

> That's how boring research gets prioritized.

Yes, I realized I was part of the problem, but couldn't help it (except by leaving). If it was only a bunch of PhD students and postdocs wasting their time, the boring research wouldn't be such a problem. It becomes a problem, however, when everyone is doing it and the actual good publications get drowned in noise.

I did a PhD in physics and feel like I missed all the great "meta lessons" some people seem to learn in their PhD. Mostly I just spent my time alone doing calculations either with pen and paper or computer. Most of the stuff I did was either suggested by my supervisor or was obvious continuation of some previous work. Even after I got my PhD I didn't feel like I was really a member of the research community or that I had a PhD level command of my field. I just did a bunch of calculations, wrote papers on what I did and got a PhD. It was almost like doing homework on a really long course, but just more difficult.

I left academia after a failed postdoc because I realized I had no clue how to conduct research on my own; I didn't know how to pick good research topics, or how to manage my time, or how to find people to collaborate with, or how to collaborate productively with someone for that matter.

I'm not sure if the fault was my supervisors or mine. I'm a bit "on the spectrum" and have lots of difficulties with social interaction, but I guess so do many other people drawn to technical fields and still they manage to navigate the system somehow. I certainly never sought for any kind of mentorship because I didn't realize it was needed and, also, because it felt extremely awkward.

Also, the whole academic system seemed a bit fucked up. People do research and write papers because they have to produce something measurable, not because the research they do is actually interesting or important. I published five papers during my PhD and I would say that maybe only one of them was slightly interesting or important, and even that could have been much better. All of the papers were published in proper, highly regarded journals (mostly Physical Review). Towards the end of the PhD I started having some vague ideas of stuff that would be _actually_ interesting and more worth my time, but also more difficult and less certain results. When was I supposed to do those? I was still in the mindset that I wanted to stay in academia so I couldn't take any risks.

> And my money is that they'll use whatever volume they free up to mindlessly make the phone thinner.

For some reason this is what the phone manufacturers seem to think that people want and I don't know why. I don't think getting thinner and smaller phones has given me any extra value in the past decade. I would rather have a thicker phone with bigger battery.

> 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the game.

I wonder if they had any kind of proof of this. I would think that there are plenty of kids who could get their parents to pay five bucks for the game, but not 500 bucks to buy a fancy new computer.

This makes sense. The sort of users that leave any kind of feedback or even hang around long enough for you to gather statistics are those who think the product is pretty good, but there are just these small issues that they hope will get fixed. The users who think your product is complete crap try it, stop using it very early and never leave feedback or statistics for you to analyze.

And to some extent, all of the nightmare scenarios from those technologies happened. Over time, those scenarios just became the new normal way of life and we adapted to it. Of course, many have made the case that a lot of our psychological and societal problems have their roots in those technologies just as their opponents originally thought they would have, but, again, this is the new norm now so people mostly don't think about it.

It seems to be a recurring thing with new technologies. Something new arrives and some people instantly see how it can ruin some aspects of our lives and warn about it. It gets taken semi-seriously, but in the end not seriously enough and the thing that those people warned us about ends up happening. After the fact no-one cares, because the new normal is now the thing that used to be unthinkably horrible before.

I remember someone here on HN once commented something about how the Amish instead of just categorically opposing all new technologies decide collectively which technologies to use and take into consideration how the technology might affect their culture and communities and this has lead them to reject things like the television and cars. I can't find any more realiable sources on this, but it sure seems like a much better way to build the society than ours is.

The "free" Western cultures are increasingly vulnerable to hacking of either human psychology or collective customs and laws. It's like a code base where every new commit automatically gets accepted and only occasionally some commits get reverted because someone managed to prove without doubt that it was a bad idea. To continue the metaphor, this sort of project management might make sense when the code base (or the civilization) is new and the focus is on just getting something running as quickly as possible, but makes the code base (or the cultural heritage of a society) bloated, unmanageable and vulnerable to attacks over longer time periods.

And, ironically, much of the work that the "normies" do is something tech guys could to hundred times faster. It's stuff like manually copy-pasting numbers from a crappy proprietary software A to a crappy proprietary software B or entering numbers from some system to Excel while it could be done by just directly pulling the numbers from the database the system uses.

Seriously, modern work is all about knowing what to do and how to do it rather than putting in a large number of hours executing a straightforward task.

Alain de Botton has a book called "Religion for Atheists". His central point is that religions have gone through hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and likely contain rituals and rules that benefit us even if the religion literally isn't true. Discarding religions because we don't literally think there's a bearded guy in the clouds watching over us is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

This is what I'm also wondering. What is the point of making a contract in the first place if the price quoted is not binding? If the provider needs more material or manpower or whatever than expected, then it should be their fucking problem and not the clients. The possibility of unexpected stuff happening should, of course, also be taken into account in the initial price quote since the provider should be much better at estimating the probability of something happening than the client.

This feels like a pretty low hanging fruit to regulate away. Ban antibiotics use in agriculture in civilized countries and ban importing antibiotics grown meat from the others (I would guess it's easy to test).

Exactly what I also wrote. The only people who are really good at any complex topic are huge geeks with some level of obsession for it. I've met plenty of programmers, mathematicians and even some finance people (those people work in trading) who are like that, but never a doctor.

Possible explanation: People who become physicians do so for wrong reasons. Medicine is highly paid, high status field and thus attracts people who are reasonably smart and just want to have a good life, but are, in the end, not very internally motivated to keep studying their field. Better system would select for people who are more geeky and like to read the new antibiotic studies for fun, much like many developers do stuff like write their own compilers and file systems for fun.

> private or personal use, including research [1]

Doesn't that mean that most forms of piracy should be legal in India? That is, torrenting movies or music, etc.?

How would you go about unschooling yourself as an adult?

I've been "in the system" my entire life (like most of us). Thanks to Covid and remote working, I've recently found myself with a lot of free time. I still have a job, but I don't really care about it at all nor derive any fulfilment from it. Since it pays well and doesn't require very much of my time (again, thanks to remote work), I've decided to just keep doing it and try to find meaning in my life from other things. This has proven to be very difficult, most likely due to lifetime of being "in the system".

In the (power)lifting scene, I have really enjoyed the articles by Austin Baraki et al. from Barbell Medicine on pains and aches in the context of physical activities. See for example https://startingstrength.com/article/aches-and-pains or https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/the-barbell-medicine-gu...

In a nutshell, the idea that there's a straightforward causal link between something being physically broken in your body and you feeling pain is simply wrong. Sometimes people feel pain in various body parts without any detectable physical changes and sometimes classical training injuries, like herniated spinal disks, can be found by medical imaging without the person feeling any pain at all. Also the common advice to rest until the pain subsides is often - but no always - wrong; there are plenty of anecdotes of people with completely fucked up knees or ankles or back starting heavy powerlifting program and suddenly healing from their injuries or at least learning to use their body in such a way that the injuries don't bother them anymore.

My take on all of this is that someone in too high position at Zillow forgot to read their Taleb books.

I guess the answer to these problems depends a lot on the job. I don't know why we would expect all sorts of different jobs to nicely fit into the same 9-to-5 5-days-a-week model anyway? For sure there are jobs where that works just fine (manual labour, etc.), but also jobs that would benefit for less working hours and more rest time (many cognitively heavy jobs) or jobs where the best model would be 24/7 readiness to work, but only small number of hours doing the actual work.