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given that each choice is a compromise, and that choice is also a reaffirmation of values, then compromise itself is a reaffirmation of our values. This is not even that mind-blowing, really: it should be obvious that the means by which we negotiate opportunity costs is by measuring our options against our values and ranking them, and that by making the choice, we have voted for that ranking of values as the one we want to continue embodying, that this is the person we want to become.

What better way to show how good your taste is in movies than to talk about how much you didn't like that popular movie that everyone seems to be like? What better way to show that you have good taste in music than ripping on top 40 hits?The more toxic version of this is finding people who like something you think is lame and telling them why what they like is actually bad. "Oh, you liked this thing? Here's why it's actually bad. You're welcome." The goal, I guess, is to make that person actually go, "you're right, I thought I got joy out of this, but maybe I shouldn't have."As I've gotten older, the more I've recognized that when it comes to art especially, there's upside to enjoying something, and very little upside to disliking something. My "credibility" doesn't hang on me liking the right things. What I really want is to enjoy as many things as possible because that means I'll spend more of my time being happy.That's not to say that I think everything is good. I go into everything wanting to enjoy myself, but sometimes I just don't, and that's okay. My movie review thread is full of films that I just didn't enjoy. Sure, it's more fun to write negative reviews, but I'm still bummed that I didn't have a good experience, and I'm jealous of people who did enjoy their time.

Designers move from idea to a wireframe, a prototype, a logo, or even just a drawing. Developers move from a problem or feature to a coded solution that is solved and released. Both are creative, both are in aid of the end-user. The Design Engineer role is also creative and authors code but systematically translates a design towards implementation in a structured way.  I have never worked anywhere where there wasn't someone trying to close the gap. This role is often filled in accidentally, and companies are totally unaware of the need. Recruiters have never heard of it, and IT consultancies don't have the capability in their roster. We now name the role "Design Engineer" because the gap is widening, and the role has become too complex to not exist.

Pessimists Archive™ is a project to educate people on and archive the history of technophobia and moral panics. We believe the best antidote to fear of the new is looking back at fear of the old.Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism.

What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone? These questions go mainly unanswered apart from “You can’t prove it won’t happen!” In fact, these Baptists’ position is so non-scientific and so extreme – a conspiracy theory about math and code – and is already calling for physical violence, that I will do something I would normally not do and question their motives as well.

both Netflix and Shein realised that you can make far more SKUs if you’re not constrained by physical inventory - the time slots on linear TV and the store rooms of physical retail.

If you don’t need thousands of physical stores, then you can turn over the product range much faster and reach new customers much more quickly - and so Shein is now bigger than H&M and on track to pass Inditex.

Of course, the fundamental TV question is ‘what’s your budget?’ There’s a circular relationship: a given budget means a given quality and quantity of content, which, combined with your CAC, means a given audience, which means a given level of revenue and a given budget. There is no network effect in TV, and going to Hollywood with the world’s best software and $5 will get you a latte.

YouTube doesn’t buy LA stuff from LA people - it runs a network, and the questions are Silicon Valley questions. YouTube, in both the network and the kinds of content, is a much bigger change to ‘TV’ than Netflix. It’s ‘video’, but it’s also ‘time spent’ and it competes with Netflix and TV but also with Instagram and TikTok (it does puzzle me that people focus on competition between Instagram and TikTok when the form overlaps at least as much with YouTube). And YouTube doesn’t really buy shows or buy users - it pays a revenue share.

Netflix can indeed make TV shows as well as any legacy TV company, but did Disney make software that’s as good as Netflix? It didn’t have to. It just had to make software that’s good enough, because ‘software’ questions are not the point of leverage. But I don’t see any media companies competing with YouTube or TikTok, where software is the point of leverage - at least, not recently.

Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware - Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price.

one of the things I wondered before the event was how Apple would show a 3D experience in 2D. Meta shows either screenshots from within the system (with the low visual quality inherent in the spec you can make and sell for $500) or shots of someone wearing the headset and grinning - neither are satisfactory. Apple shows the person in the room, with the virtual stuff as though it was really there, because it looks as though it is.

For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. This iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.

A lot of what Apple shows is possibility and experiment - it could be this, this or that, just as when Apple launched the watch it suggested it as fitness, social or fashion, and it turn out to work best for fitness (and is now a huge business).

Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to a Meta all-hands after Apple’s event, made the perfectly reasonable point that Apple hasn’t shown much that no-one had thought of before - there’s no ‘magic’ invention. Everyone already knows we need better screens, eye-tracking and hand-tracking, in a thin and light device.

It’s worth remembering that Meta isn’t in this to make a games device, nor really to sell devices per se - rather, the thesis is that if VR is the next platform, Meta has to make sure it isn’t controlled by a platform owner who can screw them, as Apple did with IDFA in 2021.

On the other hand, the Vision Pro is an argument that current devices just aren’t good enough to break out of the enthusiast and gaming market, incremental improvement isn’t good enough either, and you need a step change in capability.

Apple’s privacy positioning, of course, has new strategic value now that it’s selling a device you wear that’s covered in cameras

the genesis of the current wave of VR was the realisation a decade ago that the VR concepts of the 1990s would work now, and with nothing more than off-the-shelf smartphone components and gaming PCs, plus a bit more work. But ‘a bit more work’ turned out to be thirty or forty billion dollars from Meta and God only knows how much more from Apple - something over $100bn combined, almost certainly.

So it might be that a wearable screen of any kind, no matter how good, is just a staging post - the summit of a foothill on the way to the top of Everest. Maybe the real Reality device is glasses, or contact lenses projecting onto your retina, or some kind of neural connection, all of which might be a decade or decades away again, and the piece of glass in our pocket remains the right device all the way through.

I think the price and the challenge of category creation are tightly connected. Apple has decided that the capabilities of the Vision Pro are the minimum viable product - that it just isn’t worth making or selling a device without a screen so good you can’t see the pixels, pass-through where you can’t see any lag, perfect eye-tracking and perfect hand-tracking. Of course the rest of the industry would like to do that, and will in due course, but Apple has decided you must do that.

For VR, better screens are merely better, but for AR Apple thinks this this level of display system is a base below which you don’t have a product at all.

For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. The iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.

This reminds me a little of when Meta tried to make a phone, and then a Home Screen for a phone, and Mark Zuckerberg said “your phone should be about people.” I thought “no, this is a computer, and there are many apps, some of which are about people and some of which are not.” Indeed there’s also an echo of telco thinking: on a feature phone, ‘internet stuff’ was one or two icons on your portable telephone, but on the iPhone the entire telephone was just one icon on your computer. On a Vision Pro, the ‘Meta Metaverse’ is one app amongst many. You have many apps and panels, which could be 2D or 3D, or could be spaces.

Reddit is rumored to have plans to go public, but they need better leadership than the current team. Huffman has shown no leadership skills. He doesn’t know how to read the room. Most importantly, he lacks the social empathy to lead a social platform. Even more disappointing is the lack of comments or intervention from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the always chatty — who seems to have advice for every other founder, except for his co-founder. […] In an attempt to monetize the content generated by the community, Huffman forgot that it is the people who make the platform. The community is the platform. It is something the owners of social media platforms forget. […] It happened with MySpace. It has happened with Twitter. It is now happening with Reddit. They never learn from past mistakes. They assume that because they own the platform, they own the community. Every time they forget that important thing, they erode the community’s trust. And once that trust goes, so does the unfettered loyalty. People start looking for options.

I have zero faith in Steve Huffman’s ability to lead Reddit. What kind of chief executive officer posts this comment after a massive community backlash?

closing off 3rd party API access mostly serves an IPO, not OpenAI. If Reddit merely wanted to restrict the ability to scrape its data, they could have done so without killing off clients – e.g. via licensing deals. However, perhaps if access to training data is seen as an elbows-out brawl, I could see how Reddit would be extremely protective of its data. I mean, lyrics websites, map makers, and dictionaries go to great lengths to protect their data. It would not be a giant stretch for Reddit to do so as well.

Huffman is right that, in the end, the whole situation reflects a product problem: the native Reddit apps, both on desktop and on mobile, are ugly and difficult to use. (In particular, I find the nested comments under each post bizarrely difficult to expand or collapse; the tap targets for your fingers are microscopic.) Reddit didn’t really navigate the transition to mobile devices so much as it endured it; it’s little wonder that millions of the service’s power users have sought refuge in third-party apps with more modern designs.

After a roughly yearlong inquiry, the FBI closed out the investigation in July 2016, finding that Clinton did not intend to break the law. The bureau reopened the inquiry months later, 11 days before the presidential election, after discovering a new batch of emails. After reviewing those communications, the FBI again opted against recommending charges.

The relevant Espionage Act cases brought by the Justice Department over the past century, Comey said, all involved factors including efforts to obstruct justice, willful mishandling of classified documents and indications of disloyalty to the U.S. None of those factors existed in the Clinton investigation, he said.That’s in contrast to the allegations against Trump, who prosecutors say was involved in the packing of boxes to go to Mar-a-Lago and then actively took steps to conceal classified documents from investigators. The indictment accuses him, for instance, of suggesting that a lawyer hide documents demanded by a Justice Department subpoena or falsely represent that all requested records had been turned over, even though more than 100 remained in the house.The indictment repeatedly cites Trump’s own words against him to make the case that he understood what he was doing and what the law did and did not permit him to do. It describes a July 2021 meeting at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which he showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” to people without security clearances to view the material and proclaimed that “as president, I could have declassified it.”“Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” the indictment quotes him as saying.ADVERTISEMENT

Though Attorney General Merrick Garland in January named a second special counsel to investigate the Biden documents, no charges have been brought and, so far at least, no evidence has emerged to suggest that anyone intentionally moved classified documents or tried to impede the FBI from recovering them. While the FBI obtained a search warrant last August to recover additional classified documents, each of the Biden searches has been done voluntarily with his team’s consent.The Justice Department, meanwhile, notified Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, earlier this month that it would not bring charges after the discovery of classified documents in his Indiana home. That case also involved no allegations of willful retention or obstruction.

Huffman is right that, in the end, the whole situation reflects a product problem: the native Reddit apps, both on desktop and on mobile, are ugly and difficult to use. (In particular, I find the nested comments under each post bizarrely difficult to expand or collapse; the tap targets for your fingers are microscopic.) Reddit didn’t really navigate the transition to mobile devices so much as it endured it; it’s little wonder that millions of the service’s power users have sought refuge in third-party apps with more modern designs.

One of the most upsetting things about the API changes, from developers’ perspective, is that many of their users bought annual subscriptions, and Reddit’s new pricing takes effect at the end of this month. That leaves them little time to make things right with their customers.

the unsettling reality that in an age where our nation is the wealthiest it’s ever been1, we seem to be set on a dangerous trajectory toward the utter dissolution of any shared commitment to the things that have historically made life worth living — like family, friends, and broader connection

I’m an extremely critical person. I’m not proud of that, but I’m also not trying particularly hard to change it. I think it’s one of my core strengths and definitely my greatest weakness — I’m able to dissect precisely what makes a thing work and what’s holding it back.

Which is great — except for the fact that it’s nearly impossible not to wear this hyper-critical lens while looking at myself too. Framed positively, this is the most potent “growth mindset” imaginable. Framed negatively, this is being fucking brutal towards myself. And unfortunately, the latter is a much stronger motivator: self-flagellation and withholding satisfaction are addictive in the way that they produce consistent results.

The inactive form is especially pernicious: it feels excruciatingly difficult to ship things when your standard is nothing less than excellence in the eyes of the people you most respect.

Relentlessly examining all the ways that things could be better allows you to recognize and replicate quality while developing a taste for objective truth.

reciting affirmations or “being nicer towards yourself” is basically bullshit advice because it’s asking us to go against our entire nature — the very nature that has been both rewarded and refined into one of our most valuable assets out in the external world.

Backing away from your voices allows you to piece out the kernels of truth embedded in each of their undertones. In my case:I haven’t achieved anything I’m proud of yet and want to feel like I’ve earned my spotI want to commit to something and hold myself to itI want to do something worthy of respect from the people whom I respect

You might avoid doing things that threaten your sense of self, even if they would help you grow. They’ll direct you towards things that feel attainable and legible, even if that’s not what’s best. Being able to accept yourself lowers the stakes, letting you see yourself clearly.

If one must be self-critical, do it based on trajectory, not position.

If you hate things about yourself, it’s impossible to keep it contained. People reserve their greatest cruelty for people who remind them of what they hate about themselves.

maybe that’s the hidden gem of being extremely critical: it gives you a lot of signal on what you want out of life — or at least to start, a lot of signal on what you don’t want. High standards are an essential ingredient to excellence and to be completely honest, I’m quite uninterested in doing anything less than excellent.