People have relatives and relatives have many genes in common.

If there are genetic traits that predispose people to remaining childless, it could wind up that populations with those genes end up with larger branches on their family tree.

It's been a while since I read the Selfish Gene, but its central point is that natural selection is about genes, not individuals.

When a new technology comes along, it diminishes some aspect of the human experience - because whoever had a talent for doing things the older, more difficult way becomes less important.

In that regard, AI is the extreme, because it threatens to make so many of our intellectual talents useless.

So she has one comment on the internet admitting she cheated on her taxes, another copping to an axe murder, another revealing she's the one and only D B Cooper.

I'm embarrassed to say, I just realized the big problem with my original comment, and it is hackneyed: the end-users probably weren't the customers.

I doubt Google was cavalier about its relationships with advertisers back then.

As a user, you were faceless. I have a vague memory from the early Gmail days. I'm pretty sure they charged me $5 to contact support.

Customer focus includes more than having a good product, though having a good product is a component. The business model Google chose (it was a choice) for Gmail wasn't compatible with focusing on Google's customers.

That said, there were other good examples. I chose Gmail because I believe it was one of the best known products of the era.

Gmail (and similar products) killed it.

The internet made it possible for a company to serve hundreds of millions of people without the overhead of listening to, or supporting, or giving much of a shit about them. "Why are you complaining? It's free!"

Gmail envy makes it seem like you're some underachieving sucker if you bend over backwards to deliver a great customer experience.

It probably would be possible to have a billion customers and make them happy, but the number of employees it would take would only make you rich, instead of unfathomably rich.

  It is a disgusting dysfunctional institution that should have never been created in my opinion.

If that wasn't the root cause of his/her rage, it might be that the person felt the referral was a way to get rid of them, rather than a way to help them.

It's tricky because communication involves so many soft factors.

Uncommon Apps should create and maintain a pdf document with fair, useful information about competing podcast apps that do not use the subscription business model.

When someone complains to Uncommon Apps about the subscription model, if Uncommon Apps cannot change the person's mind (which will be the usual case), then Uncommon Apps can offer to forward a list of alternatives.

This would allow Castro support tickets to end with something useful. Uncommon Apps is losing this sale regardless, but at least there is some reputational gain.

If I contact a company to decide if I want to become their customer, I probably like them.

If I contact a company about a post-sales problem or for technical support, it's a different story.

Technical knowledge and people skills are different things.

If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you. If your response is focused on "educating the customer" or is too conscious of what's fair for the business itself, it will probably not impress.

Great customer support is the kind that might result in a customer sharing their interaction with friends or social media. The support the author mentions in this post isn't likely to do that.

So for a record company to ink a deal with Apple was lower risk than with Microsoft.

Sometimes American fast food chains roll out a trial product in an isolated region, like a Canadian province. In 2003, offering music downloads to Apple users was a bit like testing a 'Baconator' burger with residents of Quebec.

Grok will break the rules to be "maximally based".

If I get run over by a speeding chatbot, I'd rather it be by Claude rushing a pregnant lady to the hospital, than by Grok drag-racing against a car full of frat boys.

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  * We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules and decision procedures, and we try to explain any rules we do want Claude to follow.

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936.

Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of North Americans by spamming late television with his obnoxious self-help infomercials: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI

As long as there have been dissatisfied people, there probably has been someone promising to be a deus ex macchina with the secret to turn their lives around.

  What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behaviour of a Zuckerberg or a Musk would be a little more flattering than mine.

I see large companies selling things they ought not sell (eg: Meta glasses, Tesla FSD) and making malevolent decisions (eg: Google deprioritising search content, Amazon hijacking product searches). Those things probably bother Graham too, but I reckon I consider them more evil than he, since I have less reverence for the 'invisible hand of the market'

Whether my comments constitute a motte-and-bailey depends on whether a reasonable person would assume the "impossible to earn a billion dollars" statement to be hyperbole.