I’m quite convinced in most cases they are not spending time or energy consciously choosing to signal anything about status. They’re just not willing to pay the opportunity cost of keeping their attention on an internal communication any longer than the minimum required. They’re certainly capable of polished communication, but deploy that skill selectively when the return on investment is high.

It’s a classic rookie pitfall to over-index on form instead of content (guilty myself many times). It’s more instructive to pay attention to which questions and ideas powerful people focus on than the forms they use to deliver them (which are not as important, turns out).

In very broad strokes, Quixote says my perceptions and ideals are true and apparent evidence to the contrary must be a misunderstanding/ chance/ magic. His agency is to frame the world’s meaning in his own terms. Until finally he gives it up.

Candide accepts societal moral framings (i.e. rationalizations for wrongdoing) naively, but is slowly worn down by the evidence that they’re a sham. But in facing the seemingly intractable harshness of reality, he doesn’t become so cynical as to cede his own agency entirely—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”

To me that feels like a wiser response than absurdity or despondency.

It really doesn’t.

The more toward “enterprise” a software buyer is, the more what they’re actually paying for is a reputation, reduced liability, a throat to choke, etc. Functionality is only one piece of the puzzle.

Sounds like some other places use capitation to break the tight coupling between hourly productivity and profitability. Sounds interesting but politically very challenging. Would be interested to hear some perspective from consumers in e.g. the Nordics with experience.

Of course you don’t get any speech boost to enable conversation with this setup. But no one else around me has passthrough either so I turn off my tools to talk the old fashioned way. :)

Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.

If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.

I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.

Chat thinks it’s a kana segmentation error in a list of possible hypothesized problems/causes that get mis-rendered as literal nouns, such as “XML風, 設定方法, 処理の流れ / 処理流” such that roughly “XML style” -> “-style” -> “wind”, “setting method” -> “-method” -> “pole”, “processing flow” -> “-flow” -> “dragon”

(Note that XMl, setting, and processing are just examples to illustrate.)

The LLM assures me that “Japanese writers often end diagnostic questions with a compact list of possible causes (A、B、Cでしょうか？).”

Its final verdict: “very likely the English “wind, pole, dragon” = MT literal translations of a compact Japanese list such as 〜風、〜法（方法）、〜流 (-style, -method, -flow). The pattern, repetition, and the fact they appear at question ends all support this strongly.”

Or is there like a practical maintenance window each year at the end of the winter when you’d do this?

The application here is big, slow annual oscillations. Slow charge, slow discharge.

- adaptive sports for visually impaired players like beep baseball?

- robot swarm members knowing their relative 2d position with a single microphone? (frequency for angle, amplitude for distance)

- a cheap, durable way for human workers to track the rotation cadence of slowly rotating machinery?

Windows products since the 2000s. They may have won on quality early on but today succeed mainly via compliance controls and switching costs IMO.

Also big legacy B2B digital systems of record. Pretty much any ERP. Can’t say firsthand but this is my impression of SAP products and Oracle products. Also Encompass, the system of record for a large majority of the U.S. mortgage market. Most medical software.

There are a lot of recordkeeping systems that have a massive moat from handling decades worth of nuance. Their “quality” by modern UX and performance standards is very poor but they handle all the nooks and crannies of their industry.

To me it’s important to say that tit-for-tat and the Golden Rule are not the same. My understanding of the two are very different.

Genuine question- how do we know that? Is it just that the edits are very improbable to accumulate in the gonads in sufficient quantities to persist? We can’t actually prevent some fraction of them from reaching other parts of the body, right?

Then the thought came, when will they start showing ads here.

I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly, or the open source models get good enough, we could still enjoy that simplicity and focus for quite a while. Here’s hoping!