cjmb (u/cjmb) - Readit News

cjmb commented on Monetization and Monopolies: How the Internet You Loved Died radicalcontributions.subs... · Posted by u/jfil

renegat0x0 · a year ago

This looks like a big tech propaganda piece.

I know it says that you need to strike a good balance between slacking of and competition, but author spends too much time saying that monopoly is good. It is not. It has never been.

I think enshittification live cycle draws a better picture. I think you can outgrow your initial idea. Company grows until the core idea can grow.

That does not end there. Grow is always expected. When you have perfect monopoly, how else can you grow more? You can diversify, you can buy competition. Creating a new idea beside your core idea often does not pan out. Take a look at google+. How much more can you squeeze out of users? You can enshittify. You squeeze, squeeze users, until your product deteriorates and CEOs leave a shall of a company.

Google does not squeeze users because of competition. It has a ton of money. It could innovate, but they decide to squeeze users. Easy money instead of hard work.

cjmb · a year ago

Respectfully, there’s a 1,000 word section in the middle about the fundamentally zero-sum nature of media and the competition for consumer eyeballs that I wrote to explain why the stunning success and growth of the mobile internet and walled garden apps is in fact a source of existential competition for Google and their open web.

Google’s share of consumer eyeballs, both direct on their own web properties & indirect via ads displayed on Web 2.0 sites, is smaller now than it was in 2012.

Of course, Google DID innovate. They spawned the modern AI industry. They just totally missed the boat on commercializing it, like many other ossifying monopolies before them.

cjmb commented on Monetization and Monopolies: How the Internet You Loved Died radicalcontributions.subs... · Posted by u/jfil

waingake · a year ago

The article is about Google being at its best when it had the least competition. You should read it.

cjmb · a year ago

That is exactly the thesis and the point of that whole section! I’m sorry you got downvoted for saying it, perhaps your tone was too blunt.

It’s not that Google was created as a monopoly with no competition — there’s a neat little graph about what happened to Yahoo in there! It’s that the experience of using Google and the Google suite was at its peak in their clear & unchallenged market leader phase.

Source: am author

cjmb commented on Some notes on influenceering lcamtuf.substack.com/p/so... · Posted by u/tptacek

luu · a year ago

> Some of my most popular posts are throwaway quips and memes that went viral on social media. One of my life’s crowning achievements is this: [witty, throwaway, quip tweet].

> In contrast, some of the work I put weeks or months into essentially lost the SEO game and gets nearly zero traffic ... Even though I don’t write for money, there is an immense pressure to produce clickbait — even if simply to add “hey, since you’re here, check out this serious thing”.

This will be different for different people, but I've noticed a moderately strong negative correlation between how much effort I put into something and how much engagement it gets (this seems likely to be different for people who apply their effort to generating engagement). The highest engagement content content of mine tends to be thoughtless social media comments I make without thinking. Something like https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/, which summarizes 300+ pages of FTC memos and is lucky to get 10% of the traffic of a throwaway comment and is more likely to get < 0.1% of the traffic of a high-engagement throwaway comment. Of course there's a direct effect, in that a thoughtless joke has appeal to a larger number of people than a deep dive into anything, but algorithmic feeds really magnify this effect because they'll cause the thoughtless joke to be shown to orders of magnitude more people so something with a 10x difference in appeal will end up with, say, a 1000x difference in traffic on average and even more in the tail.

I don't think this is unique to tech content either. For example, I see this with YouTube channels as well — in every genre or niche that I follow, the most informative content doesn't has fairly low reach and the highest engagement content leans heavily on entertainment value and isn't very informative.

cjmb · a year ago

Yeap, just +1'ing this too.

One other axis of engagement is "topical relevance" -- and I think that does have some overlap with the axis of "effort put in". Meaning: putting a TON of effort into a long-form piece tends to relate to some original thought or framing you have. But a lot of people are explicitly looking for something, even if that something is an entertaining throwaway meme comment.

If you go too heavily down the "flesh out topic of deep personal interest", you can end up too far away from the "topic everyone wants to talk about on the internet today" stuff.

Sadly (or not!), I take great enjoyment fleshing out topics of deep personal interest, even when they have limited relevance to the topic du jour. If it were different, perhaps we'd be journalists or more mainstream authors.

cjmb commented on Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/ta988

balozi · 2 years ago

A tiny window into how Harvard's $35 billion endowment was built. The story of why the ultrarich give generously to a an ultrawealthy institution.

cjmb · 2 years ago

$35 billion?

I regret to inform you the number has gone up substantially since you last checked it

cjmb commented on Discourse on Winning and Losing (1989) [pdf] static1.squarespace.com/s... · Posted by u/hammock

cjmb · 2 years ago

OP didn't include any context here, but I frequently link this resource to friends! So allow me to pitch it to folks who come here first: reading a transcript is a bit odd at first, but there are so many unfiltered gems in here analyzing how to not just how to compete and win, but also how to improve and coordinate across teams and different work styles.

To the extent that your team is operating in a competitive environment & you like seeing how other domains beyond just Tech & basic self-help business books really build & maintain advantages, you'll get a lot out of reading this.

I've also found it applies wonderfully to competitive videogames, but I'm not sure that's as relevant to this forum.

If winning is not your primary objective, this may not be as interesting to you.

cjmb commented on Wearing an eye mask during sleep improves episodic learning and alertness pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3... · Posted by u/mmaia

aksss · 2 years ago

https://mantasleep.com/products/manta-sleep-mask-sound

No experience with it but sounds like the kind of thing you're after.

cjmb · 2 years ago

I can confirm this thing is amazing

the pro one, not the one you linked (headphone inserts seem like needless ear pressure): https://mantasleep.com/products/manta-sleep-mask-pro

i toss and turn all night and this thing stays on most of the time, is incredibly comfortable, and i am so grateful i received it as a gift (would never have bought for self)

cjmb commented on Maybe treating housing as an investment was a mistake goodreason.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/kqr2

kurthr · 3 years ago

Every time I see this I have to laugh. If you live in Tokyo, I'd love to hear your anecdotal experience.

I have stayed and visited japan for the last 35 years, and find all of the "Tokyo is so affordable and buildable" is hilarious. The breathless articles I read about it leave out fundamental aspects (the incredible density, the absolute destruction 70 years ago, the corruption [especially in Shinjuku], the size of the "livable apartments", the need to rebuild anything from before 1980 for earthquake safety, that youth population falling by half, the stagnation of wages), and the fact that most people who can leave Tokyo to raise children do (even if it means commuting 2hrs each way every day on a train).

This just doesn't match anywhere in the US or frankly almost anywhere else in the world. I know 2 people who actually still live in Tokyo. One is a 28 year old single foreigner, and the other is stuck in a 100 year mortgage with their extended family. All the rest moved.

cjmb · 3 years ago

Agreed. Don't forget the massive implosion of the real estate market 30 years ago that turned a whole generation off of buying property and bankrupted vast swathes of the population.

Said "breathless articles" usually just grab some "rate of price increase" chart benchmarked to the most severe recession in recent decades and start celebrating just because Tokyo also has good housing policy. But in trying to advocate for good policy elsewhere, they just end up championing national recession, international stagnation, depressed wage growth, and more.

see charts & data etc here: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/japans-housing-crisis-...

cjmb commented on Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief robkhenderson.substack.co... · Posted by u/Armic

medler · 3 years ago

> You can study for them and objectively do better, become a better applicant

The thing is, attempts to measure the effect of test prep show they have little effect. According to these studies, SAT test prep courses might add ~30 points to your score: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

cjmb · 3 years ago

did you read that link or just the subtitle?

quoting the penultimate paragraph (why are the relevant bits always buried?)

> Analyzing a 2008 survey conducted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, he noted that one-third of respondents described a jump from 750 to 770 on the math portion of the SAT as having a significant effect on a student’s chances of admissions, and this was true among counselors at more and less selective schools alike. Even a minor score improvement for a high-achieving student, then—and one that falls within the standard measurement error for the test—can make a real difference.

Your link literally says: - test prep improves scores - most conservative possible study suggests ~25 point bump in score - college admission stats show this matters for many applicants

???

the fact that the piece ALSO says, later on:

> students who have a mean score on the math portion of the SAT around 450. According to the same admissions counselor survey, a 20-point improvement to a score in this range would have no practical meaning for students who are trying to get into more selective schools

and no kidding. 450 on either section is clearly not suitable for a college experience at a "selective school." You're expected to do multivariable calc during MIT's freshman year, regardless of major. 450 on math SAT means you can't do algebra.

cjmb commented on OODA Loop en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOD... · Posted by u/yehudabrick

taeric · 3 years ago

Would be amazing if that talk is available as a recording somewhere. I was several pages in before I looked at how big the transrcipt is. Will have to come back to it. Huge thanks for posting it!

cjmb · 3 years ago

Of course! It was hugely influential on my thinking/approach to problem solving under uncertainty/adversity.

And yeah the other commenter provided a link but there is no actual recording of this exact transcript -- the ones that I found on YouTube just frankly are not quite as good as this one (which is why this one has been preserved, I assume)

Sometimes the transcriber missed a question or you need to fill in the blank yourself a bit (which I think actually meshes perfectly with the content of the talk!), but it's worth it!

cjmb commented on OODA Loop en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOD... · Posted by u/yehudabrick

cjmb · 3 years ago

I highly recommend reading Boyd's transcript of a talk he gave in 1989 instead of the wiki on this stuff: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5497331ae4b0148a6141b...

It will resonate with any builders in the HN audience and give a ton of context behind the thinking here.

> You know, some people like to be regarded as being an analyst. They think that’s a term of endearment. I treat it as a personal insult if somebody calls me an analyst. A personal insult. If you’ve read the last paragraph, I’ve showed there are two things you have to be able to do: analyze and synthesize. Analysis and synthesis. And if you can do that in many different areas, tactics, strategies, goals, unifying theme, you can run businesses, you can do any goddamn thing you want.

I find his discussion of Clausewitz's "friction" and the idea of speed as always being relative to one's adversary incredibly useful, even for my day to day work in Tech.