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And has sued Amazon for their use of anti-competitive pricing.

This is just what Kahn's FTC does.

To me, what's missing from that set of recommendations is some method to increase the liability of companies who mishandle user data.

It is insane to me that I can be notified via physical mail of months old data breaches, some of which contained my Social Security number, and that my only recourse is to set credit freezes from multiple credit bureaus.

The title of the paper is also a reference to the famous YA novel "An Abundance of Katherines" by John Green.

I am currently ~400 pages into the Power Broker. I was motivated to pick it up again by a "read along" with Roman Mars from the 99% Invisible podcast. He's spacing out the book over the course of a year and interviewing fellow Caro fans and recapping major portions of the book. Never been a better time to tackle the beast! I am not sure I'll ever read a better biography in my life. At least, not until I read the Lyndon Johnson books.

Thank you for your incredible book Cliff. I found a copy when I was in high school about ten years ago and it changed my trajectory. It got me into hacking and tinkering with computers and led me to a career I love today. I always make a point of loaning my copy to anyone I see who was my age then with an interest in computers.

If you live in Manhattan south of 60th, your number one transit option should almost never be driving a car.

If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation, then you are receiving a subsidy in the form of the infrastructure that enables car dependent city planning. You're also compelled to own a car, which is enormously expensive, getting even more expensive, and is probably the thing you do on a regular basis which is most likely to kill you. Sprawl is expensive, and so is car ownership.

Hugely agree on transit access to the airport, but it has gotten somewhat better. The GCT Madison connection has enabled another connection to Jamaica for the JFK AirTrain alongside LIRR and the E-train. And no longer do you need a separate MetroCard, as the Port Authority has finally modernized with contactless payments.

And the Q60 bus serving LGA also couldn't be easier. It picks up from a clearly designated spot on the lower level and drops you off right at Jackson Heights for E and 7 access. Could there be a direct rail connection a la O'Hare? Yes, and there should be.

Great, now expand it to all of Manhattan, instead of just 60th and below.

And while they're at it, build the QueensLink so people actually take transit instead of just turning it into a park so that it can never be built.

It boggles my mind how unable NYC seems to be able to invest it its largest comparative advantage to every other city in the country: its density and transit access.

If you're referring to the number of folks who work in the central business district of Manhattan but have no choice but to drive (given the enormous catchment area of MTA services), that number is vanishingly small, and congestion pricing does have low income discounts.

If you're referring to those who drive taxis or cars-for-hire in Manhattan, yes, the idea is the cost should be borne by riders who choose those services instead of transit.

This also assumes that Amazon never gives up the ghost and finds ways to make sideloading books onto Kindle more difficult than it currently is.

I've always been surprised that they haven't cracked down on it, given the relative ease with which you can circumvent the necessity of the Kindle store for the majority of popular titles. Simply load up Calibre, pop almost any file type into your library, and away you go. We're really living in the Limewire age for e-book piracy, even if we don't realize it.

My guess is, someone has run the math and figured out that it's better to keep people on a Kindle device and occasionally spending a few dollars, in exchange for the slow death of physical media and legitimate alternatives. When those become less readily available, then perhaps you can begin to boil the frog.

You can be sure I won't buy a kindle if I can't sideload onto it. I buy at least 5/6 new hardcover books a year from local independent retailers to support authors I like. I wish more authors would allow an e-book copy to be distributed with hardcovers they sell. Do what vinyl did.

What makes you think replacements haven't filled the gap left by W.CD? The community is definitely not as fun or interesting, but it's definitely done the job for me.

While what happened itself was less than ideal, I'd be curious if there are any more detailed explanations other than this account of what exactly happened, and how the issue was resolved. I'll certainly be on the lookout for more posts in this series.

It's like a little bit like engineering "competency porn", but I enjoy stories like this. I read The Phoenix Project a few years ago, and while it was fictionalized and a heavy handed introduction to Agile and DevOps (I'm a data analyst so it was new to me), I liked it, and would like to read anything similar, if anyone has any recommendations.

I do this on my Planck, and have aligned the numbers to have both a row of digits, and intersecting 789, have the layout of a conventional number pad on the rows below. I feel like I have more flexibility and control on a keyboard with fewer keys than I have ever used before this!

This was always inevitable. The demand for fully remote jobs will always be higher than for in-person. With more demand for those positions, the companies can afford to pay labor less. WFH was always going to come with a pay cut. I don't know why people are simply expecting the other shoe never to drop. I'm not saying that it should, I'm saying that it will.

I don't see how reading good advice on doing deep work is at odds with spending time doing it. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe," etc.

If you read his book(s), and got something out of it, great! So did I. But my issue with where Cal's ideas end and his business begins. His philosophy itself is relatively simple but his business revolves around getting you into his ecosystem and keeping you consuming the same content on how the "deep life" operates. He ultimately becomes a cog in the attention economy he is trying to avoid, and for me, that casts him as a hypocrite.

Like many 21st century self-help gurus, the true content can fit on an index card, and the rest is examples that are repeatedly teased out for additional length. His podcast is the most brutal extension of this. I've listened to it since its inception, but gave up because it hit the right neural circuitry that let me feel like I was improving myself without doing so. It was productivity porn. It stopped being about helping people, and started being about merchandising long ago. You can even hear it in his voice when he says things like "don't waste your time with frivolous podcast listening. Except our podcast of course! we're not frivolous. We're deep". Happens like once an episode.

It seems pretty unfair to call him a "hustle culture charlatan" when at the same time later on pointing out his emphasis on work-life balance. Isn't that the opposite of hustle culture?

Even his discussion of how you spend your personal time revolves around doing activities that he refers to as "high quality leisure time". It is yet another relentless pursuit of min-maxing efficiency, with the underlying idea being that leisure is the fuel that allows you to burn brighter for longer than the other people around you, but winds up with your personal pursuits functioning as yet another resource to optimize. I think this idea, while well meaning, can be destructive. Embracing this idea that there are certain "right and wrong" leisure activities has led me to constantly question the utility of things I've enjoyed in the pursuit of "high quality". Plus how many people who seek out advice about the kind of optimization that Cal preaches are truly interested in work life balance?

It's like an alcohol company telling you to drink responsibly. It's plausible deniability. This point acts as a defense against criticism for Newport. The people who truly embrace Cal are just as likely to look towards other figures who are selling the same shtick he is. His discussions of these points only serve to differentiate his rhetoric from a figure like Tim Ferris or Andrew Huberman, when they are less distinguishable than they'd like you to believe.

Cal Newport has become a particular kind of hustle culture charlatan, and it's been pretty fascinating to watch. I began reading his writing when was focusing on teaching study habits to college students when I myself was a college student. As he grew up, finished his PhD and started his academic career, he began building a brand around offering advice on "deep work". It sells the idea that you can, and should, only work on meaningful problems with limited distraction, and have a solid work-life balance, filled with "valuable leisure activities".

You can debate the merits of his arguments, and should, as ultimately what he sells is advice, but something truly rubs me the wrong way about how he has continued to market himself. A kind of Andrew Huberman-esque, long form podcast, a thinly veiled advertisement for his courses, books, and products.

One would think that if you were truly living a "deep life", watching a two hour long video podcast every week wouldn't exactly fit into your schedule.

While I credit his critique of the attention economy to opening my eyes a little bit and changing how I view my time, I can't help but feel that as he's risen in popularity following his "deep life" work, he's continued to become more and more of what he used to decry, just another way to waste your time while feeling like you're being productive.

I think RTO would have been an easier pill to swallow for some if the US was less car dependent. I'd be the higher a proportion of the workforce in an MSA drives, the more they'll push back against RTO.

I'm more surprised that reddit has maintained features like old.reddit.com and their API for this long. To me, this is textbook enshittification. Either die unprofitable or live long enough to see yourself rip features from TikTok.

Some common issues I ran across that pushed me to Obsidian (for now) were mobile app support, package maintenance, and difficulty configuring and maintaining.

Many people have no difficulty setting up and maintaining an app like beorg and orgzly, but translating the many keybinds and modes to a ml mobile interface can be cumbersome. I've personally experienced issues with folding large org files, not to mention the act of actually keeping the files in sync. SyncThing / rsync works for many, but is another tool to maintain. Even if you can get your files right, the workflow on mobile is not up to par with desktop, and I've had a much easier time with Obsidian sync.

Which leads to package managment. It can be harder to depend on the goodwill of open source maintainers to find solutions to corner cases, particularly if you find something that becomes a staple of your workflow. If my choices are become a competent Elisp developer or kick someone a fee to keep working on a project, I'm picking the latter. I personally still am hesitant to push more and more of my workflow onto org-roam knowing it was birthed as a labor of love and a side project, knowing that it might not be maintained, or that versions will require labor and patching on my part to roll out, as was the case with the jump from org-roam v1 to v2.

Also, depending on how you do choose to setup emacs, it can be a house of cards to set up all your packages and keep them running and up to date. Even if you are really savvy with elisp, keeping your versions, packages, and dotfiles in working order across multiple systems (not to mention mobile, as above) can be daunting. And not all platforms are supported equally. Configuring doom emacs to run on my Windows 10 work machine was and is not easy. Obsidian installed and opened in one click.

I get and understand supporting open source and if that's an objective, logseq seems to be doing a great job on that front. It's still missing some features that would push me to switch over entirely (their Android support is non-existent, and many plugins I loved on emacs and Obsidian I haven't found a nice solution for (time-tracking and time blocking, and not even Obsidian can match org's export features, but markdown works fine for now, while logseq files were difficult to format).

Overall, I love org mode and want it to be my daily driver. But at the end of the day I have to remember that I can't let knowledge management be a part-time job. I was spending so much time tinkering with tooling that it was impacting the very thing it was supposed to help: my workflow. Maybe someday I'll revisit org over several cups of coffee and a rainy afternoon, but Obsidian and Todoist will take care of me until then.

I dunno. As the country bifurcates more and more, I'm thinking long and hard about if I want to travel to certain states. I'd rather as little of my money as possible be spent there.

I know plenty of people, myself included, with similar anecdotes. For me it was LSD.

I've been sober for five years, starting the year I was finishing at university. At this point, I was taking prescription stimulants, smoking weed, and drinking every single day, and never had a moment sober. It had been that way my entire university experience, and I was slowly exiled from every social circle I attempted to join, and had various near scrapes with devastating consequences, but nothing stuck.

The summer before my final semester, I took LSD with my girlfriend. It was during that trip when I realized I needed to stop, or I was going to continue to be miserable. It took about another three or four months for me to realize the thought I had was the truth, but I quit, and have not relapsed in over five years now. That also means I haven't taken acid since that trip. I don't think I'd need to in order to stay sober now, it has just become the way I live my life.

I wound up getting heavily involved in 12-step recovery programs, which I admit, are not for everyone, but saved my skin, and gave me a group of sober people to call and add to my social network. I still go to meetings, but I think my experience with LSD made me realize that was the path I needed to take.

All these recommendation engine problems people aren't discussing here aren't bugs or problems, they're features. They're either pushing the content that makes people engage with the platform the longest, or that promote another feature that the platform is trying to push on you. With YouTube, it's MrBeast style videos, influencer bait, and shorts. With Spotify, it's for sure podcasts.

Podcasts are so heavily pushed by Spotify because they're trying to make themselves the centralized one stop shop for your audio consumption. They didn't pay Joe Rogan millions for no reason.

As a man under thirty, I see the JRE logo on the front page of my Spotify at least five or six times a month. I have no interest in listening to podcasts on Spotify. I very much dislike Joe Rogan. I hit the option to not request it to me again, and yet there it is.

They're not recommendations based on your taste. They're a mix of just enough of your taste so that you trust and buy-in, mixed with whatever flavor of the week the recommendation engine would love to sell you.

I am not a lawyer nor do I have a JD, but the argument I've heard from friends who have recently passed the bar amounts to the idea that the inordinate amounts of memorization required to pass the bar are a poor measure of someone's ability to actually practice law.

Worse than that, if a lawyer were to attempt to give advice without consulting any outside resources and not doing any research, that could be construed as malpractice. As a result, you could argue it even encourages that kind of behavior. Yet, that is what the bar exam asks.

I've seen countless takedowns on HN of programming interviews on whiteboards as a poor way to evaluate someone's ability to write code. Same concept, different domain. Similarly to those programming interviews, it can also be seen as a "best of the worst" situation.

While only semi-related, this reminds me a lot of iPodLinux, a project from around 2006/2007. I'm on the younger side, and this project was my first real introduction to the possibilities of computing. It let my grayscale iPod Classic play videos and Doom, which at the time, was mindblowing to me and my middle school classmates. In the process I was fortunate enough to actually learn a thing or two about Linux and computers in general.

While they're not always the most practical, they can definitely encourage the hacker ethos in people who wonder what their devices can do that Apple might hide outside their walled garden.

As far as I can tell, for the same reason that all consulting firms exist: so key decision makers have a scapegoat.

When someone needs to justify a decision or identify a strategy, they can pass the work off to a consulting firm. In doing so, they get the best of both worlds. If they take the advice of the consulting firm, and all goes well, they're praised for bringing in the extra help. If they don't take the advice of the consulting firm, and all goes well, then they stuck to their guns and can take all the credit. If they take the advice of the consulting firm, and things go sour, then it was just "bad advice", they can pick another consultant and wipe their hands clean. And in the many instances where they don't take the advice, and things still go sour, it was the consultants fault for not providing the advice needed.

What they actually say is far less important than their position as a stakeholder in the decision making process. In fact, as another commenter has already pointed out, the insight that a consulting firm will always provide is that you need more consultants. Few people truly love working with consultants, the advice is often dished out by overworked 20-somethings with little to no domain expertise, and yet, here we are.

Source: I work for a similar firm targeting a specific niche, and many of my best friends are in similar roles, including at Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and EY.

I'm confused as to why this headline has to be so close to clickbait. I'm not even one to stand up for people like Lambda, I think a lot of bootcamps are shady at best, and actively deceptive at worst (Trilogy).

It is definitely important to note that that these loans can be discharged in bankruptcy. But as far as I know, isn't this less stringent than typical student loans, which can't be discharged in bankruptcy? Is the point here that there was a population of Lambda students who weren't aware they could discharge their loan, and this contract prevision was preventing them from doing so? Or was the school deliberately making that process more difficult? The article makes none of that entirely clear.

On the whole this doesn't scream "deceptive educational financing practices" to me. That sounds like a government agency press release making a mountain out of a molehill and trying to knock Lambda down a peg, but I might be wrong.

Edit: after reading how dischargeability impacts people's ability to take out the loan in the first place, yeah, this matters quite a bit, and I was wrong because I didn't understand how education financing works. I'll own that. Seems Lambda was being less than equitable in how they approached the matter, and hoping no one would notice.

Dispersion.

While remote work is more commonplace in tech, lots of firms are confronting a workforce that had a strong year fully remote, and will dig in their heels at the thought of needing to commute to an office.

While I think this article does a great job of highlighting what the dangers of the consolidation of power inherent to the growth of index funds, I'm not certain it captures the whole picture behind why exactly they've become the dominant investment vehicle of choice.

I don't need to rehash any discussion of low interest rates, QE infinity, and housing prices here. But I wonder if an increase in interest rates / treasury yields would marginally drive capital out of index funds to mitigate the problems the author discusses. The money must move or slowly decay, but where else can it go?

I don't understand either. The lingering files left over after I deleted a .app would always require a third party tool to gather and clean, and even then, I wouldn't be sure, and would then find missing preferences files. I don't have that problem with the Windows uninstaller.