Not sure if its a sufficient explanation, but I like what I've heard from Cal Newport about this. More and more self-service IT systems were able to replace a lot of jobs. But the result is that now you are responsible for doing things via IT systems that were previously outsourced to somebody else. E.g., you're booking your own travel instead of using a travel agent. In some sense, things are more efficient because we don't need travel agents. But also, things are less efficient because now you just have to do this task yourself. Do this across dozens or hundreds of discretely tasks and fields, and you end up with a society where everybody is doing everything themselves in a web browser instead of having some expert or professional to do it for them. So less individual time and focus is spent on your own area of expertise, and more is spent trying to figure out any number of confusing IT systems built to replace a "less efficient" human system.
It's been disappointing to see Khan's FTC focus so much on big tech—and frequently fail to make their case—when so many other anti-competitive behavior in other sectors has gone unchecked. The consolidation of medical firms and hospitals comes to mind. Feels like they are picking their fights based more on ideology than on trying to minimize harms to American consumers from anti-competitive practices.
Learning, memory, and attention are finite biological resources on the individual level. As long as there's a fresh crop of college grads each year, companies can afford to burn out a few older people.
I've had this same experience. Every time I go to my local specialty beer shops, it's nothing but 4-packs that _start_ at $16. I've never even heard of most of them, and a large portion are just the really over-done trendy IPAs that every brand new brewery seems eager to produce. Maybe 20% or less of their offerings are what I'd call a solid mid-range 6-pack of beer.
For months now, emails with subjects like "MCAfeeconfirmati0n--#21845315" and "confirmation#4073301981" have been hitting my inbox. These are such obvious spam emails that I'm unsure how the spam filters aren't catching them. Reporting them as spam hasn't done anything to catch them.
Book bans just feel silly and antiquated in the age of the Internet. If kids want to read something, they can get it on their phones—that and probably much worse than anything that would ever end up in any school library.
Something I once heard that I think is kinda true:
When something goes wrong on the computer, there are two types of reactions: I am wrong, or the computer is wrong. The "I am wrong" person is discouraged and never gets very good at computes. The "computer is wrong" person persists until they bend the computer to their will.
The disappointment of old games for me is usually the controls. Newer games have polished controls so well that movement almost feels like a direct extension of thought. But when I go back and play my old favorites from decades ago, movement feels so clunky! I spend so much time fighting the controls rather than getting into the groove of playing. I didn't see it the first time around, because there was nothing better to compare against.
I was at a place for many years where the CEO was quite bad. He had few skills, both technical and interpersonal. So many people in the organization had strategies for dealing with him, distracting him away from important work. I was always disgusted by the wasted efforts of the entire organization finding ways to route around this CEO, and leaving was one of the best things I ever did.
Simple case of distributed costs and concentrated benefits. Imagine a corrupt bureaucrat who demands a small bribe from every person who needs them to perform a service. It's a pain, but the bribe is small and it's just this one bureaucrat this one time. The bureaucrat, of course, is doing this to everybody, so they amass a great sum even though every person pays a small amount. The bureaucrat can put a lot of effort into maintaining his corrupt position. But for the people who pay the bribes, it's not worth it to upend their own lives in a crusade against that one corrupt official over the matter of a small bribe.
While I really enjoyed Stardew Valley, I had to stop playing it. I wasn't getting a chill country farmer escaping the busy city vibe. I was trying to maximize my actions for every minute of play to get the most rewards in the shortest time. It really felt like work, not play—so I gave it up.
In my experience, companies value call center staff so little that turnover is extremely high. That means that you're unlikely to speak to someone with enough experience to solve your problems correctly. I can't count how many times I've had to call a company half-a-dozen times and received half-a-dozen different wrong or unhelpful responses. I'd like calling to be more available, but I don't believe it's a silver bullet solution.
I can't say what the author's intent was, but I see two ways to parse this: one I disagree with, one I agree with.
The disagreeable interpretation is that the only way to learn is from a pristine book. This is so obviously stupid that I see no reason to discuss it further.
The other interpretation, which I think is more useful but unclear from the text, is that _passive activities are subpar learning activities_. From what I've read of effective studying techniques, things like highlighting text don't help. Active recall techniques like spaced repetition are much more useful for cementing learned knowledge. Likewise, if you're "learning" from a screen by just staring at it, consuming it, then your knowledge-to-inputs ratio is going to be low. I've watched plenty of YouTube videos on how to do numerous things, but I couldn't do any of them on the spot because I've never tried. The knowledge went in one ear and out the other. The material must be engaged with somehow.
Any theory of economics that only works if you can depend on an elected body to take quick and reasonable steps—like raising taxes—is one doomed to failure, and ought not be tried.
I worked for a 80+ year old non-profit. Their tech was definitely a shit show before I turned it around. I won't be surprised if it ends up degrades into a shit show again in a decade or so.
I gave up on containers in Firefox a while ago. They didn't really support subdomains, which made using some services (e.g., AWS) extremely painful. Any site with a different subdomain for the login page, the auth flow, the dashboard, etc., became unusable. Don't know if they ever fixed it to allow for grouping subdomains.
I experimented with modafinil for a week once. Early on, it seemed great—I was productive and had a good mood. By the end of the week, I really didn't feel any different from baseline, and it was exacerbating my bad habit of clenching my jaw during focused work, leading to soreness in my face by the end of the day. I did not perceive the benefits to be enough to continue.
If a 501(c)(3) non-profit receives a donation for a specific project, by law they cannot direct the funds toward anything else unless the donor releases the funds for another purpose. This is more of a thing with large donations than, say, a recurring $10/month. If a small-dollar donor tried to restrict their funding, the non-profit would probably ignore the restriction because the donor has no leverage to find out if their instructions were followed.
If anyone with a ton of money wants to focus Mozilla specifically on Gecko, Rust, whatever, then that person can probably get them to do it.
I used to do gradient interpolations all the time in dataviz using D3, and using HSL/HCL/LAB always created better gradients. I wish we had color mode options in CSS gradients, but this is a good workaround for now.
I've used Lottie animations in the past for custom animations of UI elements. Was pretty straightforward and the results looked good. Lots of people are complaining about how heavy it can be, but small UI animations and the lightweight player leave a fairly small footprint.
I'm always surprised that more people don't do this. It will be a hot sunny day, and I'll see people standing at an intersection waiting to cross. They'll be out in the sun, when mere feet away are shady spots they could wait in. I don't understand how/why they tolerate the heat instead of expending the tiniest effort to get in the shade.