xiaopingguo

There really doesn't seem to be anything new about the divide. The only thing that seems new to me is the resistance to the solutions.

In any case it may all just be a matter of time. The current Greek tragedy that's playing out looks to be the bellweather of how it will be dealt with.

Invoking a vague ideology as the root cause feels like a diversion in itself from the basic problem of rich people getting richer while the poor get poorer and more indebted. The obvious solutions, debt forgiveness and plain old money/land handouts are for some reason being resisted by the elite in favor of promoting some form of normativity, "this is the way things always were and should be" and leading us back to feudalism.

"Value" hides a lot of meanings. The quote seems to imply monetary value, whereas there can also be aesthetic value, emotional value, value due to fame/popularity and more. Seems unlikely that an app would strip out all the rest for merely highlighting the first.

Finally, some disruption amongst the management class. They have a long way to go in the race to the bottom.

I think one of the failures is that UX is designed by people who are comfortable with the abstract, we (usually) know about what is happening in the background, and can figure how action A leads to result B, but most people are just not good at this stuff. For them, the UX has to be way more concrete, since they just do not have a clear picture of what is going on.

This also leads to some tech anxiety, an example of which was an acquaintance not long ago being unable to save a missed call into her contacts list on a Samsung/Android and worried that she was somehow too dumb to use the (very costly) "smartphone". Just a huge collective failure of the "smartest" people around to account for other people who are very different.

Eye opening. Did not think it would be this bad even knowing the real estate and internet situation there.

The opposite point of view is that there are way less actual problems in the world, and thinking everything is a problem that should be 'solved' is a problem in itself and hides the realistic efforts we can make on the few actual problems in our power to deal with.

The constant drumbeat of 'we should all panic now' is not really helping anyone and seems to be mere attention seeking.

Why not just fork the language? Why does one language need to do all the things?

Scandinavian languages already have "programmering" for "computering" if you want to sound quaint.

Wasn't Google at one point all about commodity/consumer level hardware for their servers? Seems a huge turnaround.

The reason 90% of everything is crap is that these things like performance and quality are almost directly opposed to business interests/needs. That seems unlikely to change. And it is a good reason to bet on free and open source software.

Manager B would most likely be politicked out of his/her job.

Sentence level translations, rather than word or paragraph level, graded by difficulty as beginner/intermediate/advanced.

You can look up more about that research from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensive_reading

Watching Game of Thrones recently, Brienne of Tarth gets really beaten up in the fight with the Hound. I do not recall having seen that level of prolonged physical action/violence on a woman in anything else before. Felt quite shocking to watch, even given the show's reputation.

I'm hugely in favor of graded sentence level translations especially for adult language learners. It is a more natural form of spaced repetition and requires much less will power to stick with it. Finding decent suitable corpora is the difficult part but very amenable to crowd sourcing efforts.

Also see this link for why reading is a really good way to acquire language: http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num1/mcquillan/default.html

"like-minded people"

This particularly obnoxious phrase seems to be coming up a lot more these days. Maybe it is just people admitting they really do not want diversity except in looks rather than substance. It seems to reflect a lack of ability or desire to deal with real world conflicts of opinion.

21% feels precipitous. The question is if that is just going to different platforms or if people are just more aware of privacy implications and thus sharing less on the internet as a whole.

Or is the novelty factor of sharing itself dying down and people discover they mostly have nothing original to say.

That was indeed a much better read. Particularly liked the bit about the bells.

While "c'est du chinois" is really not a valid excuse these days, with so many chinese people/students available all across Europe, ready (and hungry) to help Western companies deal with China's local systems/language, it should be noted that having Chinese competitors has not prevented Google/Facebook/Amazon from making their billions.

Focus should primarily remain on product and users.

More people should definitely try out sam and 9term as examples of how much code/features you don't really need and can still get real work done.

Personally, I wish sam had even less complexity and features than it currently does and thus be more understandable and hackable. Also, never going back to a normal terminal again, "dumb" terminals are awesome.

And actually, this experience has lead to a philosophy of software where I think the "dumb"er a piece of software the better and more reliable/performant it is likely to be. So I'm also hugely skeptical of the current Deep AI efforts leading to anywhere good.

The article does not mention the cost of these houses which would seem to be the major point of information.

I think these developments can market themselves a lot better if they drop the terms "low income"/ "low cost"/"social housing" and adopted something like "young people homes" or "starter homes".

Calling something a fad or saying it is too complex to be solved is also part of the willful blindness people seem to have on this issue.

I think it is all part of a trend of outsourcing ownership of your health to doctors and hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry, all of whom have financial disincentives to really fix this issue. Nassim Taleb's writings on iatrogenics was really eye-opening in this regard.

Seems more like people are refusing to listen to those who do actually know how to stop it. The resistance to LCHF/IF I've seen and experienced has been ridiculous. People just do not want to change or give up their precious carbs/sweets.

Of course LCHF promoters can do a lot more about concerns with sustainability, animal exploitation/ethics, convenience and so on, but anyone interested in fixing this problem already has the knowledge and tools to do so.

If anything, the FBI's recent success in cracking the iphone without even Apple's help should tell us that this is merely more security mummery. A mummer's farce if you will. Real security is more in line with Stallman's position of not using cellphones at all except maybe to fake normality.

It can hardly be called a crisis as long as people are still paying those prices/rents. Presumably they have rationally decided the better option for themselves.

If/when prices collapse and people lose jobs, those in debt and without savings would then be in crisis.

Once you deal with FOMO (the fear of missing out) you are then free to deal with all the rest of your fears, leading to much higher life satisfaction.

Stoicism, eastern philosophy (esp. ZhuangZi), travel and experience of other cultures, all help a lot.

Financialization of the economy and rentier capture of value/profits. There are six billion people who are waiting to be brought up to the average American's standard of living but have no path to it. Vast investments in housing, education, transportation and healthcare are needed, many times more than what even China has attempted, but this cannot happen as long as ROI is higher in the financial sector and increasing levels of debt prevent forward movement. Debt forgiveness and plain old money/land giveaways need to come back in style.

I guess the real question is what is success? If you do not think climate change is a big problem or do not have a disproportionate fear of asteroids, then most of Elon Musk's work seem to be tilting at windmills.

Personally, I do not think we are going to get anywhere in space travel without space elevator tech, funding for which may actually be reduced if Spacex shows initial success but fails later. And certainly the reports of work culture at these companies are damaging to individuals and society at large.

Extreme efforts in any one direction always have this as a drawback. A more daoist or pragmatic approach to life and its problems would be more efficient.

I found the distinction between productivity and creativity interesting. The past few decades have seen great increases in productivity but many people have noticed a lack of innovation. Apparently this goes back to the seventies. Peter Thiel in a discussion somewhere mentioned that he thought this was coincident with and probably caused by the oil shocks of the 70s. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it could be better linked to the war on drugs that also started in those days.