shadowmore

I guess that's the idea. Once a particular user reaches a certain density of articles from X paywalled publication per Y unit of time, they're inclined to pay for it to avoid missing out.

As much as I'm annoyed by paywalls like anyone else, it's not like physical newspapers are providing sufficient income anymore.

Though I think the only way paywalls will be truly viable is with a bundle subscription, something like Amazon Prime for News, where you pay a certain amount per month for access to all major news sites.

Though that's likely to only work if all the outlets can agree to work together on that and also get platforms like YouTube to implement paywalls on video content from said outlets too, so that the ~$13 you spend feels worthwhile for the sheer volume of content and freedom of access you get in return.

At least that's how it was for me with Prime. At one point, the benefits accumulated to such a degree that they became worth the monthly expense.

But I doubt I would've felt it was worth it if I had to pay multiple lesser subscriptions to different providers, even if they added up to the same $13 -- it just feels too complicated.

Sounds about par for the course for post-Jobs Apple.

> Cancellation does present a question about power, and who has it.

Neither side has it. The people with money have it, as always. Follow the money, and you can predict who gets cancelled and who doesn't.

Though there is an argument to be made for companies vastly overestimating the short-term negative financial impact of "offending" the various tiny, non-conformist factions in society due to how loud they are, and underestimating the long-term loss of faith caused by acting in league with those small factions against the majority of the population due to the "silent" in "silent majority".

Was just looking for a refresher on cap tables and the like, and being a visual learner, this is great.

Another tool some might find useful, which I was introduced to during YC Startup School:

http://growth.tlb.org

Startup growth calculator that helps get a basic feel for funding requirements and runway length. Really helps when it's visualized like that.

The entire premise here seems to revolve around university admissions.

Who measures success based on which university someone went to? Isn't that just the preamble to one's life after graduation, which is when people actually hit the road and make something of themselves?

Of course going to an Ivy League school has advantages, but constructing an argument against meritocracy based on access to institutional higher education is strange.

> ingrained misogyny was so common

Was? I wouldn't call it misogyny, because it isn't out of hate but out of the unique social dynamics between genders, but absolutely nothing has changed except one thing: it's now politically incorrect and against the rules to actually say what you think/feel, so everyone hides it.

Men and women still don't work well together. The attraction dynamics between them still overpower any attempts at keeping things professional. The social differences are still all there.

As a proud owner of an ADHD brain, I don't understand the victimhood narrative at all. If someone doesn't want to work with me because I feel "weird" to them, why would I want to work with them? Why should they be forced to work with me? Who says I'm entitled to a job? Who says they owe me anything?

And most importantly, I would need to be sickeningly entitled and delusional to assume that society has to adapt to fit me rather than vice-versa. That's the kind of reasoning children use when throwing irrational tantrums.

I've never had trouble socializing, but ADHD does produce all sorts of strange behavioral patterns. It's 100% my responsibility, as a human being with personal agency, to read the room and adapt my behavior to the society in which I'm participating, not for the entire rest of the world to cater to me.

I am in awe of your wordsmithing capabilities and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Oh, thank God, I'm not crazy.

Everyone dreams, but dream recall varies from day to day and from person to person. But there are a number of ways to improve it.

For instance, getting into the habit of introspecting your own thoughts the moment you realize you're awake -- you'll find that some of what seem like random things you're thinking about upon waking up are actually strands of whatever dream you were having in the last REM cycle before waking up, and if you practice pulling on those strands, you'll find that your recall improves over time.

There are also affirmations that can help. Literally telling yourself that you'll remember your dreams as you try and fall asleep, which implants a subconscious intent that helps create better recall.

I looked into this years ago when looking into inducing lucid dreams, and I can say from personal experience the various methods for getting more in touch with your dreams do work. It's just a question of whether you can be bothered to put in the effort and feel the reward is worth it.

This is one of those Drinking Oatmeal Through a Straw articles, where the author projects and forcefully interprets general statements to have narrowly specialized meanings.

The traditional model in the defense sector is:

- Military or gov't produce exact specifications for something

- Contractors bid to create that something

- The end product ends up being the result of macro-management and even sometimes micro-management from the very top, which would be the equivalent of SV tech startups being instructed on what to build by Oracle and Microsoft

But since the military and gov't are open to working with independent parties when said parties come to them with an offer, Anduril and similar companies have more freedom to develop tech as they see fit and then go and sell it to the military/gov't, and judging by this article, with considerable success.

The worst part is that they removed it but didn't replace hard press gestures on push notifications with long press gestures.

So now on any phone without 3D Touch, which is all of them going forward, you can't open notification actions in a single gesture. Have to swipe and hit View.

The majority of consumers, yes. Not majority of companies.

Whether tech giants or smaller businesses, they all do advertisers' bidding, and the advertisers themselves have the insipid idea in their heads that having their ads show up alongside non-PC content is going to somehow associate their brand with that exact content, as if it's an endorsement.

Full-blown globalists until they want something, whether less regulation or $8/hr foreign slave labor.

Late stage capitalism clearly isn't compatible with actual patriotism. Most patently patriotic business (and government) decisions would nowadays be called "isolationist" or whatnot. We're a long way from the Mad Men era.

On a first principles level, this highlights the core issue of bans/blocks/suspensions being handed out immediately rather than after a series of strike-based warning messages or something to that effect.

YouTube creators come to mind as some of the most blatantly affected by this, i.e. when YouTube automatically demonetizes videos, losing the creator revenue from 75%+ of the video's viewers, and then remonetizes it after an appeal.

At no point should any algorithm have the ability to block any account or perform any other such drastic measure (demonetization, etc.). It's just absurd.

Only that his product, Google Assistant, has no bias. Which I assume is accurate, since it's what, mostly NLP?

Wait, so they brought on a Google Assistant engineer to talk about Google Search and News results?

And he admits he has no "smoking gun"? And also says Google Assistant has no bias? And uses appeals to authority ("I have a PhD in CS and have worked at Google for years")?

Basically, the whole interview boils down to needing to trust this guy who isn't a known public figure with a proven track record.

I'm hungry for Big Tech insider info like many people, and I'm not naive enough to think Google is benevolent and unbiased, but this is starting to look like controlled opposition.

Hate speech is free speech. We know this both through logical deduction and through multiple different Supreme Court rulings. The "impartial" label just obscures the fundamental problem of it being absurd to consider any speech harmful to anyone, ever, especially within the context of an online content platform that isn't meant to be a publisher with a prerogative to edit said content.

'“Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies, they’ll remain on our site,” YouTube said in a statement about its decision on Mr. Crowder.'

I'm sure those policies will shift stealthily until everything except Baby Shark videos is banned.

Left, right or center politically? But a little too spicy for your average 8-year-old? Banned. Gotta keep the Coca-Cola ad execs happy.

It's a curious hyper-puritanical yet simultaneously secular social order we find ourselves in today. I'm sure this won't lead to any social unrest or civilization-wrecking upheaval.

"The iPhone XR is an interesting product for Apple: It is clear that it aims to be a lower-cost alternative to the higher-end XS flagships."

In what world is $800 an affordable price point?

Not really. It'll have the same result as literally every other revelation in the media.

The side completely, 100% opposed to any restrictions on speech (including "policing tone" as outlined in this presentation) will see this as corporate meddling in people's expression.

The side that supports speech regulation will see this as a structured plan to curb the kind of speech that's considered "harmful" or whatnot.

This presentation doesn't contain anything outside the current ideological dichotomy, no original or unorthodox thoughts or ideas.

BureaucracyTube -- the creators get no support or feedback, the networks get no control over their clients, and the advertisers get played like a fiddle by the loud minority of the easily offended.

Personal agency is dying, and Silicon Valley is, sadly, complicit.

That used to be the case until the "limited state" was introduced specifically for videos that don't break any rules but are not politically correct or are otherwise uncomfortable or controversial, which makes them not appear in search results, removes all voting and commenting, and basically makes YouTube a content hosting provider, not a content platform, for the creators of said videos.

Content platforms have no place policing content. All the algorithms currently used are utterly flawed, and they will always be flawed, both technically and morally. Technically, they'll always have false positives, especially at scale. Morally, they turn the platform owners into political figures inherently, siding with or against certain thoughts and sentiments.

The only solution is for platforms to be completely content agnostic and allow absolutely everything except outright graphic violence and adult content.

No removing any kind of speech whatsoever, including so-called "hate speech", no policing political topics, no identifying "fake news" and so forth -- words cannot hurt anyone, objectively, and everyone has their own personal agency to decide what they want to watch and make their own decisions based on what they see, even if it's state-funded propaganda.

If the police or FBI come to them with a warrant and take down notice, then sure. Otherwise, allow absolutely everything, and allow the free market of popularity to reign supreme.

In fact, all sides of all political and social issues should be outraged that content platforms think they have a place deciding what we can and cannot see.

And advertisers should stop allowing online outrage to dictate where they advertise by realizing two simple truths: a) if I'm watching a video with your advertisement on it, it's because I made the conscious choice to watch that video, and even if the video is about apartheid or waterboarding or guns, it's content that I want to consume, so they have no place stripping me of my personal agency, and b) the old model of advertisers being seen as endorsers for TV shows doesn't apply to on-demand online content.

That's a flawed argument that has no coherent cause-and-effect chain.

"Legally" is the only thing that matters and can be regulated in any tangible way. You cannot and should not enforce artificial constraints on legal and humane social trends, because unequal outcomes are the result of free will and a free market -- yet the prevailing narrative now essentially equates lack of equal outcome in professional fields to human rights violations, and that's a terrible thing to do.

It is neither the government's nor anyone else's obligation to make certain people (of both genders) who are not hardworking, intelligent or ruthless enough have the same outcome as those who do achieve great things due to those and other factors specific to them (this includes such simple things as requesting/demanding higher pay, which in itself requires certain characteristics present in a larger quantity in men due to being inherently aggressive creatures biologically).

This kind of argument reminds me of a comparison I heard a while back between the left and right: the left believe humanity is inherently nurturing, while the right believe humanity is inherently competitive.

Both are true, but the left-aligned media is currently pushing the former at the expense of the latter, resulting in the right-aligned media going hyperpartisan as well.

Meanwhile, they're forgetting that the truth of competition (ruthless, primal competition that's masked by modern civility) has always and will always remain an inseparable part of humanity, resulting in all sorts of inequalities and differences in outcome based on human input, in the same way my Macbook could have produced the Evernote app had I been the one with the idea and skills and foresight to create it at the right time rather than someone else.

You basically have to behave as a parsing script with the media now. I find myself immediately scanning the article for links to sources and emphasized data points, especially if the headline is clearly exaggerated.

I guess it's foolish to hope that, at least once, in a single article, the utterly unfounded "must have 50% representation" would actually be supported by some kind of argument.

Or to anticipate at least someone mentioning that equality of opportunity is already present, while equality of outcome is inherently tyrannical.

Or to expect that anyone will demand that coal mining and manual labor have 50% female representation as well.

At least let me see the value proposition directly (not in a screenshot) for one movie/minute before forcing me to sign up.

Is signing up even truly integral to the app in some way, be it functionally or for monetization purposes? Either way, a registration wall during beta for a highly visual product doesn't seem like a great idea.

I know the counter-argument to this is probably that this limits the number of beta users and makes it less overwhelming to manage early on, but I side with the school of thought that favors exposure above all else, especially during early stages.

Medium allows you to setup canonical links. According to Google, that means the original post will be ranked highly when more than one instance of the same content is identified. Or does it play out differently in practice?

Would love to see actual data or even anecdotal examples of what happens when people crosspost to Medium and properly setup canonical links.

Likewise. A blog post like that would go to the top of my To Read list.