Month: November 2024

Old people’s brains have been entirely cooked by the slop feeds that Meta produces. No parent worth their salt would trust these people to protect their kids. The EU should follow suit.

the law may infringe on the rights of young people and reduce their ability to participate in society

Since when is being spoon fed the worst advertising and content created by awful people looking to make a quick buck “participating in society”?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/29/meta-australia-social-media-ban-response

Seeing if I can move from Arc to Vivaldi but there are half a dozen radical improvements in Arc that *make* the experience. It just shows how much innovation and solid thinking was packed in all of that frivolous design.

Vivaldi on the other hand has a million settings which mostly show that nobody knows wat this app is supposed to be doing. There are entire note taking apps and e-mail clients in there but none of them fun or nice to use.

Products truly live and die in the pixels.

What China has done in industry after industry is to flatten the supply curve by subsidizing hordes of producers. This spurs innovation, increases output and crushes margins. Value is not being destroyed; it’s accruing to consumers as lower prices, higher quality and/or more innovative products and services.

If you are looking for returns in the financial statements of China’s subsidized companies, you are doing it wrong. If China’s subsidized industries are generating massive profits, policymakers should be investigated for corruption. 

A piece well worth reading about China’s economic policies if only for the fact that their flattening of supply curves is the only thing that is really fighting climate change.

China’s subsidies create, not destroy, value

Hard work isn’t always the work that takes the most time, or the work that gets paid the most. The hardest work is the work that challenges, makes us uncomfortable, or requires change. If we actually value hard work — we have to do some of our own.

I sure missed AHP’s writing. This is one about why people think that the next generation does not ‘work hard’ anymore.

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-kids-are-too-soft

I painstakingly built a bespoke Rust web application to host the Cuppings venue data and to add Google place_ids to almost 2000 Foursquare location. That’s been done for a while now but now we have the announcement of Foursquare open sourcing their location dataset.

That has two direct consequences for me:

  • I was going to scrub the Foursquare data out of the database as a clean-up but that’s something I won’t do for now. In fact, I may recode the venues so I have ids in both worlds.
  • I was toying around with the idea of building a next generation Foursquare/Dopplr on top of atproto which is something that I think is a lot more feasible now.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/20/foursquare-open-source-places/