pbw

We don't have to have "so few people on earth we are stuck". As the BBC article[1] says China could go from having 100 workers supporting 20 elderly people to 100 workers supporting 120 elderly people. So workers have to support 6x as many old people. It's this inversion that I think he's worried about, more than running out of people whole sale.

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220531-why-chinas-popul...

You are right the more space we have the more we dream up ways to use it. However I wouldn't go as far to say "drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them". People still store text but it's now basically free. Images and audio are heading towards free. Videos still add up. You specifically call out executable programs which I agree have grown in size very rapidly. So I think it depends on what you are putting on the drive. I wouldn't say all space gains have been eaten up by bigger files.

A modern HDD is 15-30 million times cheaper per byte than that 10mb “hard disk you’ve been waiting for” ad according to diskprices.com. What will get 30 million times better in the future vs. what is tapped out?

‪If you adjust for inflation assuming the year was 1980, the drive would cost $12,000 in today’s dollars. So today’s drives are over 800 million times cheaper. Plus lighter and way faster I’m sure. So more than 1B times better, easily, with 42 years of progress. ‬

> Bruh, get real. TikTok is filled with women complaining about dating. Why not just admit what is staring you in the face?

I’ve never see a video with a woman complaining about dating on TikTok. In years of use.

I’m not saying you are not seeing them, just that I have not seen one.

People think you get dopamine hits when you find cool stimulating things. You actually get a steady drip while seeking, it’s what keeps you transfixed looking for the next thing. And as this shows a variable reward gives you a stronger drip:

https://liveinnovation.org/dopamine-more-than-pleasure-the-s...

I figure a big challenge for TT is they must send you less good stuff to rate it. They probably hold off doing that until you appear hooked. You wouldn’t want a new user to get a bizarre/lame video with 5 views.

I visit my YouTube “home” screen on my TV and I like most of what’s on there. It finds good stuff.

Unlike TikTok’s one video at a time with YT I’m scanning through dozens of thumbnails for what to watch.

OP here. Once trained I still get videos I don’t want. So the mix is much better, but you are never totally done training.

Videos that make you smile or laugh might be a hard criteria for it to learn. Compared to specific interests like “wood working” or “astronomy”.

I’m amazed how seldom I see political posts on TT. I’m not really sure why that is. My Twitter is highly political even though I try to follow very few political people.

Maybe the hurdle of making a video is just that much higher than typing in a few angry words?

That’s really interesting. Thanks for all the details. I think every mega social media site has serious problems such as these that stem from the fact they don’t have enough humans in the loop. TikTok is so different though it has surely created its own new blend of problems.

I think the game they are playing is hoping new users and creators pour in faster than burned and burned out ones leave. Which is sad, but from an economic angle makes some sense.

In a way they are promising a service they can’t possibly deliver on. It would (presumably) be unaffordable to have top-notch moderation and customer service.

I think some day we might decide it’s not legal to run a site so big you cannot possibly police it.

I agree TikTok is doing something different from the other guys. The amazing thing is that it's been out for 5 years and no one has copied what it does. Although I'd guess the algorithm has gotten a lot better over time as well, so it might be a moving target for the others.

I don't know how it all works. However one thing I will sometimes do is like a video but not watch it to the end. What I'm thinking in that case is this is good content, but not something I really want to watch. Like a musician that I want to encourage, but just don't feel like watching to the end. I suspect TikTok "understands" that situation.

I'm tend to not follow. I'm not sure how that factors in, except obviously it populates your Following page.

OP here. My guess is the vast majority of TikTok users don't realize how much control they have over its contents, and thus they end up watching mostly attention-grabbing fluff. I think even they will stumble on good meaningful stuff, but it won't be that often. But yes, I've find with effort it's a great resource. The best one for short-form videos that I know of.

What I'm mainly saying, I think, is that it's possible to find good content on TikTok, but it takes discipline and effort. You are saying McLuhan would disagree and say it is not possible to find good content on TikTok? I'm lost there.

I'd like to read the book, though. I've never paid much attention to media studies but now with AIs powering things it's becoming more interesting to me. And I know people have been talking about it since the 1960s.

OP here. That's great to hear. Yeah it's kind of interesting when people complain "TikTok only has teen girls dancing" or some similar niche, without them realizing they are basically revealing what they tend to watch. Although one flaw I think I'm hearing, with other social networks as well, is people see shock-content and cannot look away, and then they get more of that. Which seems like a flaw. Also, I find it's a skill game to very quickly detect a video is not worthwhile and skip it; it's often not easy, people work really really hard to grab your attention.

> Trained or not, there is nothing good about scrolling through stuff for every moment when you're bored.

OP here. TikTok doesn't mandate you use it every moment you are bored, that's a choice made by the user. However I agree it is very potent entertainment technology, and I have read about people using it 8 hours a day, and hating what it's doing to them. I have not read the book, but it brings to mind Infinite Jest, a film "so entertaining that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die." The premise of my post is it can be used for good instead of evil, but it does require discipline.

I don't think you are arrogant but you sound very rigid and simplistic in your view of work and life. Strive to do better and strive to help those around you do better. You don't need to have fixed standards and then freak out when people don't meet those standards.

At the same time it's okay to move on to different teams and different companies looking for a really exceptional situation where everything goes great all the time. But realize most of your career will not be under those conditions. And that's okay, you can still learn and grow, and get paid to do it, even if there are problems.

> Nothing is more frustrating than having a slow experience while browsing the web.

This seems a bit tone deaf with a war going on?

The metaverse was an open standard in Snowcrash. The villain L. Bob Rife was distributing a mind virus in the metaverse and in real life using a drug, but he didn’t create or own the metaverse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

I wrote an article a while back arguing that "7 plus or minus 2" implies objects in OO software development should be decomposed to have 9 or fewer members: https://tobeva.com/articles/brain-oriented-programming/

One thing I find really awkward with podcasts is if the guest has better audio quality than the host. It skews my mental model of who is "calling in" and it makes the host feel much less authoritative.

Using the word “wrong” here feels click-baitey when he admits many of the principles are right in certain cases or certain ways. The opposite of every great truth is a great truth. If a principle were true across all space and time with zero exceptions or nuance then software development would be easy.

I very much like the “fits in your head metric” though and I wrote about it at length here:

https://tobeva.com/articles/brain-oriented-programming/

This is how AirPods might work in a few years. In any environment you will be able to turn up/down the different sound sources around you.

I vividly remember playing this game on my friend's older brother's Mac. We loved the sounds, but I had no idea there was so much work behind them, or that they were that ground breaking.

The article is great writing. Looks like he has a podcast The Life & Times of Video Games [1], I will have to check it out.

[1] - https://lifeandtimes.games/

With dark mode it's hard to read the Bird's Eye View diagram: https://imgur.com/a/pJwZP9v

I guess a consequence of dark mode is you should not use transparency in your diagrams if you have black lines.

Does it mention pricing? I couldn't find it.

Apophenia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

To literally change the government would be a ten year project at least. I'm just raising it create discussion. I just think when Trump leaves office people are going to rapidly forget how bad it was. And another Trump (potentially Trump Jr) is just one election away from winning.

But the idea is to guard against either party going nutso. Parties should be given the chance to steer the ship. But we shouldn't let them take apart the ship, and deny is there is water, something has to be out of bounds. Play is "freedom within constraints" there have to be constraints, reality should be a constraint.

Yes counterweight is a great way to put it. I don't at all know how to implement this idea, but I feel strong if we don't figure that out, with the best minds we can find, we are doomed. Imagine Trump but more religious, with more power, more aggressive, more grandiose, more ties to dictators. We've seen proof positive the system is vulnerable to single loose cannon. We need to at least attempt to improve the system. To not do that is total negligence.

The proposal it not that the government "be ruled by science" at all. The proposal is all three branches of the government still exist. The legislative still makes the laws, the executive still runs things, the judicial still interprets the laws.

It's just a question of wedging in a small check and balance that most of the time does nothing, but who can intervene, in TBD ways, if things go gonzo bonkers. Have you seen Handmaid's Tale? The religious right is not far from that. We don't want that.