zharknado

“Flash” MOE is named for the sloth character in Zootopia I presume?

Alternative hypothesis—-efficiency. Executives are very, very busy. As long as you can figure out what they mean, polish doesn’t add much. (Unless it does because it’s an earnings call, board meeting, etc.)

I’m quite convinced in most cases they are not spending time or energy consciously choosing to signal anything about status. They’re just not willing to pay the opportunity cost of keeping their attention on an internal communication any longer than the minimum required. They’re certainly capable of polished communication, but deploy that skill selectively when the return on investment is high.

It’s a classic rookie pitfall to over-index on form instead of content (guilty myself many times). It’s more instructive to pay attention to which questions and ideas powerful people focus on than the forms they use to deliver them (which are not as important, turns out).

My favorite part about Pratchett is that the characters who are most competent choose to act in the best interest of the less competent “normies” who will never understand or appreciate what they’re doing on their behalf.

Interesting. You have me thinking of Candide as an answer to Quixote.

In very broad strokes, Quixote says my perceptions and ideals are true and apparent evidence to the contrary must be a misunderstanding/ chance/ magic. His agency is to frame the world’s meaning in his own terms. Until finally he gives it up.

Candide accepts societal moral framings (i.e. rationalizations for wrongdoing) naively, but is slowly worn down by the evidence that they’re a sham. But in facing the seemingly intractable harshness of reality, he doesn’t become so cynical as to cede his own agency entirely—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”

To me that feels like a wiser response than absurdity or despondency.

Agreed. Competitors will undercut a price that ignores the unit economics, because it’s super easy to do.

> Giving it away for free puts that whole company out of business!

It really doesn’t.

The more toward “enterprise” a software buyer is, the more what they’re actually paying for is a reputation, reduced liability, a throat to choke, etc. Functionality is only one piece of the puzzle.

The clearest example I’ve seen of this effect is with dental hygienists in the U.S.. Big labor crunch as lots of industry veterans left the labor force during COVID, wage and career growth prospects are weak vs. alternative options for newcomers, very difficult to automate in practical terms, and the way they produce revenue is usually per-procedure, with a ceiling largely fixed by insurance reimbursement rates, so the offices that employ them see a profitability issue when contemplating a raise.

Sounds like some other places use capitation to break the tight coupling between hourly productivity and profitability. Sounds interesting but politically very challenging. Would be interested to hear some perspective from consumers in e.g. the Nordics with experience.

“precipitates” ha! Wonderfully evocative.

Fwiw sometimes I wear my APP2 inside my cheap passive 3M earmuffs haha. For an hour or two of use it’s been comfortable enough that I can listen and also attenuate loud tool noise e.g. a weed trimmer.

Of course you don’t get any speech boost to enable conversation with this setup. But no one else around me has passthrough either so I turn off my tools to talk the old fashioned way. :)

Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.

Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.

If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.

I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.

I’ll play!

Chat thinks it’s a kana segmentation error in a list of possible hypothesized problems/causes that get mis-rendered as literal nouns, such as “XML風, 設定方法, 処理の流れ / 処理流” such that roughly “XML style” -> “-style” -> “wind”, “setting method” -> “-method” -> “pole”, “processing flow” -> “-flow” -> “dragon”

(Note that XMl, setting, and processing are just examples to illustrate.)

The LLM assures me that “Japanese writers often end diagnostic questions with a compact list of possible causes (A、B、Cでしょうか？).”

Its final verdict: “very likely the English “wind, pole, dragon” = MT literal translations of a compact Japanese list such as 〜風、〜法（方法）、〜流 (-style, -method, -flow). The pattern, repetition, and the fact they appear at question ends all support this strongly.”

My lingering question is how do you service a leaky pipe surrounded by dirt that’s 600C? Do you just have to forfeit a good chunk of your energy savings for the year?

Or is there like a practical maintenance window each year at the end of the winter when you’d do this?

Yes, the article addresses this explicitly. The key criterion to make it viabile is steady long-term energy consumption for the winter months. Otherwise the cost to rapidly extract the heat gets too high and wrecks the economics.

The application here is big, slow annual oscillations. Slow charge, slow discharge.

Brainstorming applications of knowing your angle relative to a point source:

- adaptive sports for visually impaired players like beep baseball?

- robot swarm members knowing their relative 2d position with a single microphone? (frequency for angle, amplitude for distance)

- a cheap, durable way for human workers to track the rotation cadence of slowly rotating machinery?

“Sure, your rocket’s reusable, but can it go 300k miles on the original engine?”

> Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?

Windows products since the 2000s. They may have won on quality early on but today succeed mainly via compliance controls and switching costs IMO.

Also big legacy B2B digital systems of record. Pretty much any ERP. Can’t say firsthand but this is my impression of SAP products and Oracle products. Also Encompass, the system of record for a large majority of the U.S. mortgage market. Most medical software.

There are a lot of recordkeeping systems that have a massive moat from handling decades worth of nuance. Their “quality” by modern UX and performance standards is very poor but they handle all the nooks and crannies of their industry.

Fantastic! Top notch explainer and engaging game.

To me it’s important to say that tit-for-tat and the Golden Rule are not the same. My understanding of the two are very different.

> This is somatic editing. These edits will not be inherited.

Genuine question- how do we know that? Is it just that the edits are very improbable to accumulate in the gonads in sufficient quantities to persist? We can’t actually prevent some fraction of them from reaching other parts of the body, right?

Congrats! Great video write up also!

I feel this. I had a very productive convo with an LLM today and realized that a huge part of the value of it was that it addressed my questions in a focused way, without trying to sell me anything or generate SEO rankings or register ad impressions. It just helped me. And that was incredibly refreshing in a digital world that generally feels adversarial.

Then the thought came, when will they start showing ads here.

I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly, or the open source models get good enough, we could still enjoy that simplicity and focus for quite a while. Here’s hoping!

And they were supported because they were useful labor. Even an unskilled, brand-new apprentice could pump the bellows, sweep the forge, haul wood and water, deliver messages. If it frees up the master to produce more valuable output, that’s a win-win. Then they can grow into increasingly valuable tasks as they gain awareness and skill.

IMO one of the big problems is that we’ve gone too far with the assumption that learners can’t be valuable until after they’re done learning. Partly a cultural shift around the role of children and partly the reality that knowledge work doesn’t require much unskilled labor compared to physical industries.

Great observation! The legibility or the permission grant matters a lot.

I think it’s more productive to ask, “why would someone attribute a different value to learning about the geography, architecture, and language of a region vs. learning about the characteristics of the hardware and software one specific company used to take a picture of it?”

I think asking that question helps move past the surface question of how information was learned (memorization) to the core issue of which learning we value and why.

I played the demo of Craftomation 101 a while back. It was good! Had a good balance of watching emergent behavior and feeling the need to micro-manage/accelerate the process.

Graphical-only instructions were maddening, though! Especially organizing ideas by dragging them around in 2d space. I would have loved the ability to drop into written code.

The main thing is logging into your brokerage account(s) at least once a year so the custodian knows you’re still active. Laws vary by state but a sounds like it’s often 4+ years of no contact/activity before they have transfer it to the gov’t.

More broadly, you can lobby your representatives to require stricter criteria to be met before assets can be escheated in your jurisdiction. E.g. phone calls, multiple pieces of physical mail or have mail returned as invalid address in addition to the basic timeout period.

Reminds me a bit of the gentleman who didn’t check his AMZN stock for ~20 years and found out it had gone to escheat with the state of Delaware. They had cashed it out years earlier for less than 10% of its present-day value. His play is to hope the hypothetical value continues to grow to the point that a specialist attorney will take the case and split the spoils with his kids.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159

I’ve always figured we’ll have robots mining our trash piles in the future for metals and other recyclables. Possibly bespoke, cobbled together, and manually piloted.

Sounds dystopian and probably is, but also I feel like I would kinda enjoy remotely excavating trash as an occasional hobby. You know, hop on the Discord with the gang, make a battle plan, you take the copper wiring, I’ll shore up the tunnel.

Tail risk, basically. Amplified by cognitive biases that make horror stories more salient.

Fair, it’s probably incorrect to say there’s “no abstraction” in an ORM, maybe more precise to say it’s quite a leaky one. I’ve never seen an ORM used in the wild where you could actually avoid thinking about tables and columns and rows pretty frequently. But that’s admittedly armchair anecdotal.

In the small-to-medium scale cases I’ve seen, the main re-use you get for a particular mapping is when an object is used as a child node elsewhere. If it’s a one-off you’re essentially writing a bespoke shorthand wrapper for some custom SQL. Which may be a convenient shortcut or prettifier, but isn’t really functioning as an abstraction. Net net it seems like more overhead. Or like the real benefit is constraining database design to closely align with object design (which could be valuable but isn’t a function of abstraction).

This is all assuming code ownership across the stack. With a separate team managing data representation and handing reliable object contracts “over the wall” I could imagine a situation where the consumer gets to think purely in objects. I just haven’t observed that in practice. E.g. What if the contact has two address records? What if the number of purchase records exceeds the maximum result size? If things like that come up regularly enough, it’s worse when you’re waiting on a separate team to fix the leaks.

Yes, ORMs came to mind for me as an example of indirection without abstraction. If you accept OP’s litmus test of “how often do I have to peek under the hood” I think ORMs generally don’t score particularly well.