zukzuk

Facebook is going all in on conversion optimization — "increasing ad efficiency" as you put it. They've gotten really good at it, and I think there's a whole lot of room for it to get much better. This is especially true for direct response ads, and you can bet most of the revenue will come from growth in DR.

... but also a very bad idea in practice, as most devs eventually find out. Using the Redux store in lieu of state spreads code that could otherwise be self-contained all over your codebase. It's a good way to make a huge mess and write some very brittle code.

Top Hat — a Toronto based post-startup — has successfully gone against just about every point in this article. This article is full of whatever the inverse of survivorship bias is.

A not-so-subtle way of pointing out that these are all profit-seeking companies? A lot like how people used to write Micro$oft, back when Bill Gates was the nerds' devil. We're all sophisticated financially-aware grown ups now, so we've moved on to ticker symbols, as a way of signalling our enlightenment.

The pseudo-colonial takeover of Poland that this article alludes to was already unmistakable when I visited some three years ago. The cities — especially the malls and shopping districts — looked much like they do in western Europe, completely dominated by western European retailers and brands. The people wandering through these stores though looked dazed, alienated, and entirely out of place. This is what they wanted and what they fought for — western plentitude, with all those shiny, colourful goods they dreamed about. So why isn't it making them happy?

A big part of it may be that eastern Europeans are now effectively strangers in their own land. They have no sense of ownership or agency. During the day they work for foreign corporations, usually in low-level positions, and then in the evening they go out to spend their wages at those same foreign-owned establishments. This is definitely neoliberal colonialism, and it will not end well for everyone involved.

Came here to say more or less this. A centralized power grid was perhaps unavoidable, but now that decentralization is a possibility, the sooner the better. Nuclear is a good option when compared to big gas or oil plants, but what we really need is an energy paradigm shift, and there is little room for fission power in a decentralized grid.

I hunted a mosquito in my bathroom last night. It's dead now — a successful hunt — but I did not enjoy it one bit.

The difference being that with plants, you really don't have much of a choice. You have to eat something. Stalking deer, on the other hand, is definitely optional.

I'm totally perplexed at how you can appreciate something and still want to kill it.

This is thorough and overall really well done, but after reading through Part 1, I can't help but trot out Brian Cantwell Smith's "The Limits of Correctness" https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/11public_html/p18...

The distinction between "know how" (aka procedural knowledge) and "know that" (declarative knowledge) is a favourite in cognitive science, but I think it is a bit shallow. I guess the point I'm making here is that "knowing how" is a major part of knowing "what it is like" to be something.

For example, I know how to ride a bike, and that gives me some idea of _what it is like_ to be someone who knows how to ride a bike — an insight I certainly wouldn't have if I only understood the mechanics of bike riding in declarative terms. The fact that I will probably never know what it is like to be a bat has a lot to do with my inability to have the know-how that a bat has (it's very hard to know how to fly and echolocate when you don't have wings nor the appropriate sensory organs). However, I'd argue that an active, deep VR simulation of bat flight might bring you just a little bit closer to having that embodied, subjective knowledge, in a way that studying bat behaviour or anatomy from a purely objective perspective never would.

One of the more interesting proposals I was faced with as part of my Cog Sci & AI undergrad was that we do indeed have ways of communicating that subjective/experiential knowledge — knowledge which is otherwise ineffable. Art is one obvious example of this. At its best, art is able to communicate things that a purely propositional language cannot. The same could be said of rituals — participation in a ritual is a formalized way of forcing you to take on specific states of being that convey a kind of knowledge that can only be acquired by embodying it.

This might all sound a little floofy, but it's really not. Think about the deep knowledge conveyed through game simulations. I've never been to space, but thanks to hours and hours of playing Kerbal Space Program, I really do have some sense of what it's like to navigate through space — a knowledge that goes far deeper than if I had only learned all of Kepler's and Newton's laws and equations.