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ridaj

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Then more bots come in undetected and you have to rebase again when you find them. It's a continuous process. You need very understanding investors to pull this off. At the same time there's only so long you can sweep inauthentic engagement under the rug until someone calls you out for it.

As a tentatively more minimalistic explanation, the musical ear perceives specific geometric relationships between frequencies as strong stimuli, and a major chord consists of simultaneously striking frequencies x, x times the cube root of 2, and x times 3/2.

A nudging system like this better have a much higher signal to noise ratio otherwise it really amps up the clippy-like annoyance. Keep in mind this isn't something you have to go turn on in a menu for "help me write inclusively", it's enabled by default for all; and while I might personally appreciate the reminders when they do work, I'm not sure as many users of the software think playing word police should be a priority.

And revenue will shrink accordingly. If that's his plan, he's right that it can only happen in a private company. Otherwise the resulting revenue deceleration will send Twitter into a stock price self-fulfilling tailspin as stockholders start seeing it as a doomed platform.

The cost of actually administering fairness in elections (maintaining voter rosters, verifying identities, preventing double-voting and providing public auditability while ensuring voter anonymity, prosecuting fraudsters...) is quite high compared with what an ad-supported global platform can afford. Just look at how tough it's been for Twitter to kick out inauthentic actors, eg Russian troll farms or spam bots. Spending more resources on botfighting is difficult from Twitter's standpoint since it doesn't by itself drive revenue or engagement, and they are fighting determined permanent attackers, some even state-funded.

Speaking of, the primary revenue feed for Twitter is advertising, which directly competes with fairness and transparency goals: ad business is predicated on the idea that more $ = more speech, regardless of the intrinsic value of the speech; and since there is no practical way to know where the $ came from, it does an end run around transparency goals.

Putting aside cats, there are plenty of diseases that impact humans which don’t get researched enough due to very rare, e.g. <1 in 100 million people.

Sure, and is that a problem? Should we as a society not apportion medical research spend to the most impactful areas? I'm curious to what extent the misalignment of incentives is due to capitalism as opposed to the actual need being lopsided

It’s certainly a very big need to the people who suffer from or are dying from rare problems.

I totally agree. At the same time society cannot put all of its resources in support of very rare cases at the expense of common issues of similar seriousness

areas that need it

The premise of capitalism is that enterprising individuals and institutions will respond to the monetary incentive created by these needs.

Could it be that what is unprofitable to treat is maybe not that big of an actual need? Can I argue that I'm happy that there has been no research on feline urinary tract disease as long as human cancer isn't solved yet?

Some fertility specialists will say on first consult, the odds that you could get pregnant naturally just went down as you walked through the door to my office.

All because the kind of people who visit a fertility specialist have lower fertility stats than the kind of people who don't (duh). The average practitioner doesn't really excel at distinguishing between correlation and causation.

Re opendoor etc

A less competitive market is less dynamic and worse for sellers, but it is better for the iBuyers that remain.

If they can avoid taking on the bad deals that Zillow was previously shielding them from. I've seen how in some markets the disappearance of a provider that falls victim to this kind of adverse customer selection merely moves the problem to other providers in a cascading fashion. It's not clear that there are that many profitable deals to be made on the iBuying model

Did you write this comment before doing any research into how NYT handles their games?

I'm somewhat aware of how it works.

NYT has a bunch of daily mini games that are free and have been for a while. Only the full crossword and the archives are paid.

Well it's like I'm a fish complaining about the fisherman's worm having a hook in it, and you're saying but at least there's a good worm.

Free tier games on NYT clearly serve as feeder for subscriptions. Here's an example of NYT juicing someone's "high" following a free game of spelling bee, in order to push them to subscribe.

https://pasteboard.co/pIS5qkZcXkNB.jpg

I hate this kind of manipulation. Again can't blame the NYT for responding to competitive pressure but the free portion of their game is such an obvious attempt to hook gaming subscribers that I personally really don't see it as a "nice thing".

I do think there's a ton of nice things on the Internet. The FOSS community as a whole and Wikipedia are astounding in their civilization-transforming, anti-capitalistic effect on society. 20 years ago people paid Microsoft for the only half-decent productivity software around, Internet Explorer and freaking Encarta, for crying out loud. I don't think wordle is nearly close to the same level especially after getting bought.

No, because it got bought by NYT. It was absolutely glorious as an indie phenomenon but to see it fold into a giant media conglomerate so quickly is yawn

The most epic move would have been to pull the plug on wordle right at its peak, which was about two weeks ago. Not sell out. Just rip it out clean and let a thousand sorry clones try to compete for crumbs. That would've been an awesome statement.

There's a difference between regression testing and exploratory testing. For regression testing, stuff that gets repeated every release is hard to catch by human eye, especially as releases get more and more frequent. Automating rote regression testing just to ensure that what works yesterday still works today is a great way to ensure that the manual testing is about to focus on exploratory testing only