manachar

Or:

4. Learn how to use the power setting of the microwave to ensure even heating.

That's pretty much the space Wordpress thrives in, isn't it?

How shit the product is for Wordpress is a matter of debate, but the documentation and ecosystem around it is robust enough to make it fairly easy to hack and use/abuse to do what you want it to.

I often think of markets in pseudo-evolutionary terms. The types and sizes of companies that survive are those that fit the environmental pressures.

One common trend in evolution is toward gigantism in places of intense competition. Whales, for example, may be as large as they are to avoid having to compete or be eaten by smaller animals. Being bigger means they eat more, leaving fewer resources for competitors.

It can be quite the winning strategy.

At least so long as the environment can provide enough stability to feed such large organisms in the manner in which they are evolved to exploit.

For companies, being large means you can always buy the competition or make sure the barrier to entry is too high for competition (thinner profit margins, "free" services, regulatory capture, etc.).

It works, and quite well. These large corporations can withstand enormous financial shocks, and if they can't, they get purchased by those that can.

For most mature markets this generally seems to shake out to most of the product area being divided between two or three big players and a host of smaller companies at the edges.

Oddly enough, when things are stable being large may be a winning strategy, but it is also very fragile and if the whole system gets disrupted, can be the first to fail when things change too much.

"Art that doesn't sell is just a storage problem."

Had an artist tell me this once and it stuck with me ever since. He was referring to paintings, but has generally held for every other artistic endeavor.

Looking through history art has always been commercial - it's just the audience that changes.

For music, musicians who got paid used to be focused on the tastes of just the wealthiest folks who liked to go and be seen at symphonies. Nowadays, it's the artists who can fill stadiums (and get fans to buy lots of merch) that make the most bank. As such, it is often those musicians who provide a sellable brand that do best. To many, this can feel fake and plastic. But like any product designed for mass consumption, it's essential.

Looking at the symbiotic dance between artist and viewer/reader/listener is really something special, and helps to provide context for changes in trends.

You could be the best guitar player in the world, writing the best guitar solos of all time, but if you can't get people to pay for it, it's just a storage problem for your guitar.

As many of these companies base their projections on a relatively small number of outside sources, it often strikes me as a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Big business and financial firms have been signaling a belief in a downturn for a while now -- including while posting about record profits.

If you enter a place it will provide a list of fossils potentially nearby.

It seems limited and not quite as cool as as say, showing a field guide of dinos in your area during a time period.

I've started hearing from non-tech people complaining about the spammy results in google results.

Feels like "trust" that they're actually seeing the best results are going down.

That said, many of these same people rarely actually google things outside of simple factual information that Google does okay at (e.g. height of the eiffel tower). Their experience of the internet is mostly through various social media filters (e.g. Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)

I also suspect this is part of the reason Google is giving worse results. Most of the actual content being generated on the internet is now occurring in various walled gardens that either pollute search results (Pinterest!) or don't show up (Facebook).

It's a tough problem for a company built on the open web that web mostly resembles a late-game Risk map with just a few big players.

You joke about nukes, but since they're such an "unthinkable" weapon they've become almost useless for most people who have them. You need them so that others with fewer compunctions are not able to steamroll you, but as an actual help to the kinds of conflicts currently going on and likely to happen in the future, they're just not as effective.

Whether that's fast cruise missiles, more powerful drones, more disposable drones, robot warriors, cyber-warfare, etc. militaries are trying to find the technology that breaks the stalemate caused by MADD.

Humans are regularly surprised to discover that the preponderance of evidence strongly suggests the universe was not created exclusively for themselves.

The hurdles for starting up in the US market are astronomical, and there's only one contract manufacturer Perrigo Nutritionals which not surprisingly has a large minimum order size. ByHeart became the 4th brand to have its own factory, first in 15 years.

The regulatory hurdles for starting a brewery are even more intense (likely one of the most regulated of any consumable product short of marijuana), yet there's not been a shortage of new ones of those starting even during this current pandemic.

I think the article leans too heavily on "heavily regulated" as a blame for lack of new players in the game and ignores the economic aspects are probably the bigger player.

That division of a mature market seems fairly standard for a consumer food product. I suspect you could say much the same about peanut butter or cream cheese (both of which have had some shortages).

A great example is sunrise at the peak in Haleakala National park on Maui.

So many people were crowding the top that they started parking on critically endangered species and making an amazing experience something of a zoo. Something had to be done.

The reservation approach is two pronged. One batch of the majority of reservations is offered well in advanced. Then something like 48 hours before hand the final batch is offered.

This helps those who want more spontaneous while also keeping the numbers manageable.

Bluntly, the US population has mostly grown to the point where we are regularly having to deal with the fact that some things and experiences are just limited.

There's something endearing and maddening about a culture like ours that just flat out doesn't understand limits.

Analytics measures what you want.

If you want sales, then you're also gonna want to evaluate the sales funnel to see where friction in the online sales process can be reduced, and if you're big enough do some fancier things like A/B testing.

I will agree that a lot of people look at analytics often far too divorced from their business goals. If you care about sales of X, then you probably shouldn't be too invested in regularly looking at most of the big site level metrics unless you're trying to alter those to improve sales of X.

I suspect the result shown here is part of the broader tendency for people to only adopt the parts of things that make them "feel better".

Zen comes to America and it's adopted by self-absorbed people as a reason to be more like the self-absorbed people they want to be.

The advantaged of a well-thought out dogma is it can include things like a focus on compassion so that a tool doesn't just become another tool to help people rationalize their worst tendencies.

There are, of course, problems with dogmas, but I do encourage people to seek out things that challenge themselves rather than confirm their opinions and behavior.

Google has become blinded by metrics focused on giving people what an algorithm things most people want.

It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods.

I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the SEO.

This is not unique to google. Amazon keeps including things I didn't search for because they want to be "helpful".

Indeed, my experience at big box hardware stores is matching this as well. If you go for one simple thing that you know you want, you're presented with an entire aisle of absolute crap that sort of does it but for much more money while the one item you need is out of stock.

The interesting part of simulation genres is finding out what you need to change to make it fun.

What makes a simulation game fun varies per game. Stardew Valley could be described as a boring loop. EVE Online just yesterday made fans happy by getting official Microsoft Excel support.

The key seems to be to have a particular hook and perspective.

So, for a poverty simulator, you could embrace hustle culture and have people race to exploit loopholes in systems to maximize return.

Alternatively, you could take a radical approach at start with the crush of poverty and embrace it something like a rogue-like where you will probably always lose, but this time maybe you get a little further. Whether you want to embrace it ridiculously like Binding of Isaac embraced evangelical childhood abuse or be something else works.

Also worth remembering Papers, Please as a good example of a simulation making something "not fun" fun.

I think the challenge here is that efficiency is always relative to the position the observer is measuring it from.

In the case of Gloria, she should have some amount of slack to figure out how to do the big picture items of her job better, which include how better to help Tony.

Where things get tricky is when looking at the whole organization there's been a long tendency to see "slack" as "fat" that's to be trimmed. So, if a organization has two Glorias who both have some slack time, the argument is the organization would be more efficient and profitable having one Gloria with less or no slack time.

This has worked for corporate profits, but it leads to the humans in these positions unable to have the slack time needed to improve those positions.

Sometimes, this is fine and you can build a very profitable business off of it. For example, McDonald's isn't looking for their frontline staff to do any thinking.

In general, if a position can exist and doesn't need "slack" time, it is probably a position that should be automated as soon as it's cost effective.

If you really need a human to do it though, you should stop trying to treat it like machine and realize the importance of slack time and build it in to the schedule.

Baked clay is likely superior. Ceramics have fewer impurities that stone has that would cause data loss from standard things like erosion. Much of the oldest preserved writing is preserved on ceramics.

For another expensive approach, I suspect gold, like the gold voyager record would surpass it.

I imagine you could encode a lot of data in something like a QR code stamped in clay.

If you ever make it to Hawai'i, check out our Minit Stops - shockingly good food.

I think it's one of those nature/nurture things.

Lizards brain conditioned to infinite scroll crave it more. If you grew up without it and have avoided training that part of the mind, then it's easier to avoid getting hooked.

Humans seem to forget that we are always in the process of making ourselves. By choosing how we spend our time and effort today we are choosing the kinds of things we find more rewarding tomorrow.

I very much worry about people who spend all their time tuned to social media, which seems to have become an arms race to figure out how to become the most addictive form. TikTok is currently winning - somehow sucking hours and hours of people's lives away, be constantly fed a steady stream of just the right kinds of videos to make the lizard brain happy.

It's cruel really. To take our human desire to connect and socialize and monetize it in such a shallow and empty way.

Russia didn't hide their military buildup, they just lied and gaslit the world via their various disinformation channels into believing that Putin would have to be insane to actually invade.

"Move fast and break things" with a healthy does of deep disrespect for the user mixed into a young and mostly self taught discipline (UI/UX) based on nice sounding pseudo-science that cherry picks usability studies to meet aesthetic desires of the highest-paid opinion in the room.

The modern web disgusts and enrages me more often than not.

The iPad selling well annoys me, as it's prevented a touchscreen/drawable MacBook.

Apple and most others would rather us have broken and locked down operating systems that sell us apps, it's more profitable for them and increasingly it's what consumers want to.

That would take a lawsuit or a powerful battery manufacturing consortium to create a standard and convince DeWalt, Ryobi, Makita, etc. of the value.

Right now vendor lock in to batteries (that have no guarantee of being available in 4 years when the battery inevitably dies) just makes too much money.

An additional and worthwhile addition: Black Lives Matter.

The movement was never ONLY Black Lives Matter, or Cops Lives Don't Matter, or any of the other ways various opponents have decided to interpret the name to justify ignoring the societal criticisms of the protests.

Truth is, words are tough, and the more complex and nuanced a topic gets to be, the more a pity simple phrase or title become impossible to be accurate. Additionally, being provocative has its uses, especially in the early awareness stages of a movement.

"Routinely run their own servers"

That's doing a lot of work.

Sure, it happens, but that vast majority of humans (including programmers) will not be in that category.

The future is weird.

Automate that work as much as possible and richly reward those who pursue it.

One of the oddities of modern work is that the lowest paid jobs are mostly those nobody wants to do.

Sure, we're not at replicator level, but farming of many crops require far fewer people than many imagine.

Personally I find that many things that could be automated are not yet automated because humans are cheaper. Think cashier, waiter/waitress, and so on.

In white collar work land, an amazing number of jobs could be automated, but are not yet because it's cheaper to use humans. These are the people who essentially just move numbers from one computer to another with a small amount of work in between.

What you choose to be a fulfilling pursuit is what you should get to do.

For some, that's surfing. For others, that's building a rocket to Mars.

My point is that ideally we build a society where as many people as possible get to choose what they find fulfilling, and pursue it as much as they wish.

The problem we have right now is that opportunity, training, and investment for many things are restricted to the very few.

I agree that an exclusively hedonistic outlook on life is empty, but so too is letting the very few enslave the others to their dreams.

Reframe this critique:

This should be the point of civilization and society. We should be working to free everyone to be able to go surfing when able.

I dislike that some people get to be "privileged" enough to be able to do so as much as the next guy, but I also dislike when people act like it's wrong to aspire to this.

The problem isn't that this is bad advice; the problem is that our civilization currently prevents this for most people, and instead aims to convince the 99% that they are the essential workers who can't go surfing.

Moralization, as you put it is a fundamental question most humans have at some point.

Is this thing/activity/etc good/bad/neutral?

Additionally, any group of people basically ask the same question with the added problem of should we allow it in our group.

Few people have a problem with individuals and society moralizing about murder.

However, as you note, throughout history there's clearly been a tendency for this moralizing to become weaponized as control mechanisms for hierarchal power. In essence, "good" becomes defined as "does nothing to upset the powerful".

Video games get modern hate for two basic reasons. 1) They're new/different 2) They encourage people to spend time in ways that don't directly support and sometimes directly challenges the current paradigm.

The biggest complaint is that they're a waste of time, but honestly I think most of the ire is that they're just not as profitable. For example, TV used to be fairly negatively seen, but as they became a key part of maintaining our consumer society (via ads), complaints for them went down. As video games become more revenue focused, it seems complaints for them are lowering.

On the reverse side, I think humans could use more moralizing. Not the pearl clutching way, but a more steadfast dedication and education in good ethical systems. Of course, the trick is determining what a good ethical system is.