gergov

on the contrary, smaller transaction amounts are prone to MORE chargebacks because they are attractive targets for card testers

"Not everybody is like me" would be the number 1, number 2 and number 3 advice I would give to anyone who's trying to start an online business. Like in a "How about you do that as a mantra for 10 hours a day" kind of way, because it's truly astonishing how many people don't get that.

So if you want to cut costs on sales and marketing in your startup, internalize that, because customer acquisition costs are directly related to your not understanding of that principle.

Good thing such a high profile influencer will hammer that point home!

or if you're going to ask them their age just display age appropriate content. Automatic categorizing of even user generated stuff should be a pretty much solved problem by now

Below you, everyone felt it and felt it hard, everywhere.

I'm not up to date on the science, but my dad was old - born in '43 - and worked as a teacher, so he could see several generations grow up. He was tall for his generation, but by the time I was a teenager, he was tiny even compared to his teenage students. I was a head taller than him even before he started "old man shrinking".

He always pointed at food, that the generations after him had access to better stuff and more milk. The shortest member of my family is my niece who is totally anti-milk, but that's just anecdata.

So it might be some other macro-factor influencing growth, with milk being the most glaringly visible item on the table. But it does kind of make an intuitive sense, and the dutch are freakishly tall while they have some of the best dairy products in the world

Which makes it even more interesting. One of the most head scratching pieces of this puzzle that SBF got truckloads of VC money with laughable fundraising rounds + no board seats.

It didn't make any rational sense.

Unless the logical conclusion is that it means 'zero liability'.

maybe this is some 4D chess narcissism of wanting to be on the big screen while you serve time?

Well, once all these go down the prices of currencies will also come down, which affects even those who had their coins in cold wallets - unless they plan to hold without making a profit until the heat death of the universe

Also this is a funny argument. If these things are truly making people dumber but the change is happening on a generational level, then a dumber generation would not realize that it is dumber than the previous one.

It's also further muddied by other changes - like changes in education in the past 50 years - which makes the phenomenon harder to isolate and to judge.

The entire problem with ad fraud is that it's engineered to look good on those models.

Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other end, you would see that the more you spend the more customers you have. The question is: are those new customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially across devices). That's why the article mentions that most of the "big fraud" that was uncovered by simply turning off paid campaigns without conversions dropping. That's a pretty big giveaway that something is amiss.

There's an old saying in advertising that we know half of our budget is wasted, we just don't know which half. Ad fraud and bot traffic live in that area, kind of as expected waste.

Then there's the other issue - branding campaigns also cost an arm and a leg, and the most you get is vanity metrics like reach and likes and impressions and whatnot, which have dubious correlations with reality but they look nice on dashboards.

just because we are kind of worried about the winter even with IT wages doesn't make us russian bots?

Right, engagement at all cost it is, but there is a fundamental difference. Television required professionals where even wrestling and reality TV is scripted: it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it.

Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not present with TV. This seriously messes with the innate reasoning of most humans, because for all our individualism we are norm conforming herd animals.

Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake. If the same thing is pushed by all of their friends, now we're in the territory of peer pressure which is a different ball game!

The anti-vaccination / bashing of anti-vaxx people was a pretty big and one sided internet niche pre-2020. In a way that you did have some tinfoil hat people, you had some whistleblowers, and you had an army of people bashing them left and right. And we're not even talking polio, but with stuff like chicken pox, where there was a vaccine introduced, but the folk solution (locking up the sick kids with the healthy kids so everybody gets over it) were at conflict that turned super, super vicious.

In a sense it was an already ongoing battle with every argument already deployed and pre-determined, but all of a sudden everybody and their grandma were involved in the conversation against their will. The perma-online people predictably took up the positions they did, while a plethora of other opinions / skepticism emerged but were all summarily heaped in the tinfoil hat. Now it seems to be unwinding, and it feels just as surreal as the last few hours of a rave where everybody is kind of sobering up and looking at a very bothersome way home.

I guess philosophy education tends to vary from region to region, but "young people into phil" tend to be insufferable in one way or another, while older people with an understanding of philosophy (...and a great many real world problems) tend to be pretty okay people.

But that seems to be a broader issue with specialization anyway. Focus on one lane for too long and your brain starts to disfunction in odd ways.

the economy went tits up

you would be surprised how the world operates outside of tech

it's scary excel sheets and a lot of ducttape

hell I wouldn't be surprised if the next round of innovation will be born out of tech people going into gov and realizing how much man hours there are to automate

it's in the tradition of "posting the wrong answer to get the good one". within this genre the comment section ends up even more terrifying than the post itself!