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zweep

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Dating apps cater to men ~9-10 and women ~4-10. Many women would rather have sex once every two weeks with a polygamous man they consider a "9" than sex every night with a monogamous man they consider a "5". This has always been true but dating apps have enabled it at scale in society-transforming ways.

This isn't just speculation, it's from data that OKCupid blogged and then un-blogged when they were acquired by Match.

The wildly unbalanced gender ratio makes men frustrated, which causes them to invest very little in reaching out to women so that they can reach out to dozens/hundreds/thousands, which makes an experience for women of thousands of dick pics/"hey"/etc, along with earnest high-investment outreach from men who are too ugly/poor/short/whatever to capture their interest.

If there was a system for people in the 25th to 75th percentiles of desirability to have a dating market where the men were only allowed to contact 3 women per month, I think it would be very popular among women.

It's very effective for humidification, the difference is immediately noticeable. The room is probably 100 square feet, I'm only humidifying it at night, so by your calculation it should take only about half a gallon of water which is probably what fits on a towel give or take.

This was one of the early theories about how Facebook would monetize -- that your real-life friends would value their relationship with you too highly to recommend anything but truly great products to you. That hit the reality that people would squander most of their friends for their stupid MLM scheme.

To mildly humidify my baby son’s room without having to maintain a humidifier, I use a towel soaked in water, draped over a chair, with a fan pointed at it overnight.

What I mean is that, with some things like music, I can say that this recording is better than this one because the musician is playing with better dynamics, or better pacing, etc, but with two chocolate cakes from a restaurant I can only say “this one is better.” I can’t give any advice to the chefs. Typesetting is like the latter, I can say “this looks better” but can’t say “it’s because the margins are wider” or the serifs are fatter.

How is TeX terrible? I’d appreciate it if you could calibrate your response roughly to my level of discernment, which is to perceive LaTeX documents as better looking than Microsoft Word, but not be able to articulate why, or have much finer grained resolution than that.

This sounds a bit like Comic Book Guy. For every person who has the opinion that Excel is “so crappy” there are probably 100 like myself who place it in the highest category of application software quality, with applications like Gmail and Adobe After Effects. You can prepare a list of weaknesses of any of these, the same way you could write about all of the mistakes that Michael Jordan made in basketball games.

And there’s a 1000x programmer who doesn’t deliver something that a team of 1000 people would create, they deliver something that a 1000 person team couldn’t create in their wildest dreams. Dennis Ritchie, Jeff Dean, etc.

When I had a VC-backed company what I really wanted was something like this... where everything that was "commodity" would be delivered from the VC, who can negotiate better terms for it. Office space, internet, payroll services, accounting, recruiting, etc... all should come from a VC who can get it in bulk.

Even one level deeper... if it's a consumer Web or enterprise SaaS startup... it could probably be all built on the same tech stack. Why not have the VC own 60% of the business and provide the tech infrastructure and have only the frontend and business logic implemented by the operating team?

Software is built like crap because when it fails it doesn't kill anyone. Except the software that does kill people when it fails, and that's engineered properly -- not perfectly, but in line with other things like airliners and elevators.

The flip side is when Lisa Simpson asks a Russian man for directions to the bus and he politely answers her but she mistakes his gruff Slavic manner for hostility.

Or he also realizes that it’s bullshit. I led a “diversity workshop” in my company at the request of management because I’m known to be an excellent public speaker. The content was 100% crap but I was commended for my work and was rewarded for it so I’d gladly do another.