Saturdays

The Courage to be Disliked

the predominant theory is that the length of an organism's lifespan is inverse to the rate of it's metabolism. Look into Kleiber's law. Also worth reading the book Scale by Geoffrey West.

I'm reading this book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and it's quite fascinating to think deeply about what is Consciousness. I think the book does a good job of defining and explaining Consciousness.

Highly recommend it to think critically about the subject, but I think your point is valid, consciousness occurs for many things, and then it doesn't have to many other things. You don't need consciousness to nearly instantly detect that b comes after a sequence of {a,b,a,b,a,?}. You need consciousness to think about _why_ b comes after though. When you go for a swim and then recall the event, you most likely recall it in an objective or third person way mentally - the image or visual in your memory is that third person view.. but that's not actually how you experienced it.

I wonder how much of that applies to animals, and I wonder if we can ever get that answer.

+1 - and the mole and the chile en nogada there is fantastic. The churches are beautiful. Really neat day trip.

theoretically what's in it for them is that people will build content faster and with less barriers for eventual consumption on their platforms

Does anyone remember 'the sixty one', I used to use that all the time to discover music, was really cool - sadly, I left with the rest after the redesign plus overall the music discoverability market was already shifting away from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesixtyone

That's a very weak blanket statement, there are totally reasonable A/B tests you can run that don't deteriorate a user's experience, and the results can guide you to a better customer experience overall.

I used Hugo+Git+Netlify and it worked well, however its a pain to create a custom template that I love - I'm in the process of switching to Wordpress+Elementor, just because I'm taking a more visual approach to building now and am a bit lazy with trying to manage my own design system and all that...

That being said, there's nothing wrong with Hugo or other static site generators, and they are crazy fast and mostly hands-off once you got what you need.

That deck is so well done, the way it lays things out about Foley and how he ran the business is a great teaching moment for people in any business. It does a great job of showing what red flag type statements and behavior to look out for in leaders.

Nintendo would like to have a word

Simplest answer: Demand has gone up overall for technology like tvs, computers, game consoles, etc... Meanwhile, during covid the ability to scale (production and supply chain) to meet that demand has been difficult.

apart from the obvious issues around pre-covid population and 2020 census stats being used here...

I expect a mass exodus once lease renewals are up and buildings don't want to give the same 2-3 months free incentives.

This comes from something I've noticed in NYC these past several months. In the winter and up until mid-April, most rental buildings were providing huge incentives (2-3 months off on a 12 month lease) for people to occupy their buildings. What's interesting is that most of the new people I'm meeting in the city ONLY moved to NYC because the city 're-opened' and rent is affordable w/incentives from certain perspectives.

Those who have been living in NYC took advantage of incentives to move into nicer/larger spaces - but this is often unaffordable to them once the lease renewals are up.

For some perspective, a $5,000/month place with 3 months off, is a net effective rent of $3,750/month. I've seen this go at some upscale buildings. A personal friend of mine can afford this at the $3,750/month rate, but not at any rate above that. If they gave a 1 month free incentive upon renewal, his net effective rent would be $4,580/month.

That's one example, but it goes for $3,500/month 1 bedroom in some areas - with 2 months off that's ~$2900/month.

So it really depends, but I hear from a lot of new people I meet that they are here for the year and got a great deal on a place - they wanted to experience the city for a year, and this seemed like an affordable time and way to do it (since they can work from home)

I think if you use BetterTouchTools and modify your Touch Bar for custom needs (I use the GoldenChaos presets) - it can prove to be somewhat useful, and save screen real estate on certain things too. So I'm not 100% against it, but I understand the appeal of having physical keys.

I think most readers would scoff at those price points, especially when comparing to the plethora of content available from streaming services such as Netflix, which is at $8-9/month for individual use.

That being said, is there a model for a group of authors/publishers that is $8-9/month for a growing large selection novels (a la Netflix catalog)? If there is, it probably won't 'solve' any of the issues the article and others are bringing up here.

Oooh this looks interesting.. I export my GoodReads data and play with it on a spreadsheet to learn more about my reading trends.

Thanks for sharing this. I take goodread reviews very lightly, especially for new books which I figure are either done by folks who get early access, book bloggers, etc.. (which I assume comes with their own bias at the pleasure of early access) and now throwing in 'bots' into the mix..gross!

I did enjoy 'The Humans' and 'How to stop time' but would never mark either of them as 5 star books, mainly because I would count books like 'Madam Bovary' or 'Rebecca'or 'Crime and Punishment' as a 5-star book. Nonetheless the praise for Midnight Library irked me before I even took a look at it. Folks are so keen on jumping to 5-stars without a critical approach to it.

Rather than a single 1-5 star system, a questionnaire with 1-5 stars for aspects of a book could be a better way to rate.

From 1-5 how would you rate: 1. the plot 2. enjoyability 3. character development 4. etc...

and then average out the scores across each aspect to get the user's score on the book.

Obviously there is incentive for goodreads to push for 5-star reviews all around, for the most part, because who wants to buy a 1-3.5 star book from Amazon? Also a larger scale or more options to choose from with rating would lead to lower conversion of rating submissions.

I won't claim to be perfect about rating books either, but its appalling when a book like 'The Midnight Library' (4.3 as of this time) has a higher rating than 'Crime and Punishment' (4.2).

Such an interesting topic to start with, and glad he extends it from the premise of burning books to things like misuse, access and privatization of knowledge.

The burning of Harry Potter books fascinated me growing up. Back when I was a teen it was for religious reasons. More recently it has also occurred for political and protest reasons directed at JK Rowling. It so happens that banning books and 'book burnings' may have the opposite effect and rather call added attention and possibly higher sales to the books at the subject of the ban/burn. I tend to frequent the 'banned book' section at bookstores such as 'The Strand', some of my favorite books are there.

Some great literature is only known to us because someone decided NOT to burn works such as Virgil's Aeneid and Dickinson's poems. I know it's not the point of this book in particular, but interesting nonetheless.

Thanks for the awareness, I'll be picking this up to read!

FYI, I ca'n't reach your site! If it works will check out!

Highly recommend reading 'The Courage to be Disliked' it may not revolve around 'privacy' but makes you think a lot about the 'self-validation' feedback we are trained to think we need... it helped me cement a decision to leave social media and other things in general within my personality.

I think a lot of folks here think WeWork is just a co-working space.

WeWork has full on teams from F500s occupying their spaces in some locations, sometimes even completely isolated from externals companies by building or floor. Its a great trade-off to owning/renting and managing your own space. I'm not saying its cheaper in all respects.. but its less of a headache, and less headcount needed to manage. The individual co-working space is the small play.

It is especially more lucrative if you think about it from a real estate perspective, there are so many provisions and ways to grow that investment if you own key properties.

To be clear the filing says >$100K, I'm sure some are spending way way more, it beats the cost of hiring an engineering team to do all this (build, improve, maintain etc...)

The Design of Everyday Things makes me rethink every user interaction or problem I face, and not just at work. Every time I open a door, I begin to think about that experience.

Recently, Educated by Tara Westover, and in the past The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, both have taught me to approach individuals with the true ignorance of their lives that I have. You don't know where people come from and what life led them to where they are when you meet them. Try not to make assumptions. Additionally, I have to remind myself that I grew up loved, cared for, and privileged compared to so many other people.. the fact that I could read their story and post here is a testament to that, helps me try to stay down to Earth and that I had some advantages growing up that others did not.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker... I used to be a chronic advocate for sleeping less until I read this and did my own scrappy post-research. I'm much more conscious of my health and my sleep now.

I could go on and on..