In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.
pop star Lily Allen says she makes more money selling pics of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify royalties.
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre occurred in 1902, in Hanoi, Vietnam (then known as French Indochina), when, under French colonial rule, the colonial government created a bounty program that paid a reward of 1¢ for each rat killed. To collect the bounty, people would need to provide the severed tail of a rat. Colonial officials, however, began noticing rats in Hanoi with no tails. The Vietnamese rat catchers would capture rats, sever their tails, then release them back into the sewers so that they could produce more rats.
Payment for treatment generates a perverse incentive for unnecessary treatments. In 2015, a Detroit area doctor was sentenced to 45 years of prison for intentionally giving patients unnecessary cancer treatments, for which health insurance paid him at least 17.6 million dollars. Unnecessary treatment may harm in the form of side effects of drugs and surgery, which can then trigger a demand for further treatments themselves.
In 2002, British officials tasked with suppressing opium production in Afghanistan offered poppy farmers $700 an acre in return for destroying their crop. This ignited a poppy-growing frenzy among Afghan farmers, who sought to plant as many poppies as they could in order to collect payouts from the cash-for-poppies program. Some farmers harvested and sold the sap before destroying the plants, receiving significantly more money for the same amount of poppies.
The Tax Reform Act of 1976 provided for loss of tax benefits if owners demolished buildings. This led to an increase in arson attacks in the 1970s as a way of clearing land without financial penalties. The law was later altered to remove this aspect.
[Vitaly Borker found that online complaints for DecorMyEyes (his site for selling eyeglasses) put the site at the top of Google searches. He then responded to bad reviews with insults, threats, and other harassment to continue ranking high.]
Funding fire departments by the number of fire calls that are made is intended to reward fire departments that do the most work. However, it may discourage them from fire-prevention activities, leading to an increase in actual fires.
[Inventing your own module instead of using a pre-existing one increases your maintenance work down the line as well as the learning curve for new contributors who need to get acquainted with non-standard tooling.]
Even if you don’t reinvent the wheel, being very particular about various aspects of your project that aren’t really critical (say, code formatting) is mostly about marking your own territory. Behind the facade of enforcing quality standards, you are primarily asserting your ownership of the project and demonstrating this power to other contributors.
in an open software culture whose central ethos is continuous iteration and improvement made possible by openness, our licensing stack and its ingrained principles are apparently immutable.
GreenPilled: How Crypto Can Regenerate The World
[Turn endeavours for change into a multiplayer coordination game where participants can all win by collaborating before, during, and after.]
A Fun Product Business for People Who Love Their Community
[Create a pocket-sized 'community passport' that's valid for one year with offers from at least 20 participating local businesses in a specific niche (like coffee, ice cream, beer, books, music) and price it at $1 per business; promote to local community groups and media or influencers in that niche.]
📢 Introducing Really Good Business Ideas
The search landscape is changing with generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT). A newsletter lets me keep my content gated from these tools in order to preserve the value of my work.
[Current AI investment is dominated by GPUs, which deprecate within years and are superseded quickly; the more speculative spending goes here, the less likely this bubble leaves us with potent foundation for cheap use over the long-term.]
How Bible Sales and Chipotle Explain the Economy
Automation erases the “training ground” work that once created experts. When machines do the junior tasks, no one learns the senior ones. Apprenticeship collapses. CEOs, driven by short-term preservation, hype AI as salvation because it buys them another quarter.
A regulação do streaming e a invenção dos cineastas de aplicativo
['motoboys' are victim to a high rate of fatal accidents in Brazil and the country's largest organ donors, but a universal healthcare system pays the bill and not iFood.]
supports a great variety of business and private messaging & chat services like Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zendesk and many more.
Open-source alternative to Beeper which makes much code available but not their main client.
Move your FOSS project to an org!
[When you're the only owner of the repository, people are] more likely to see you as the (only) person responsible for fixing things when they break, or reviewing external contributions.
users are able to advertise their membership to the project, shown both on their profile and on the organization’s profile
the project is more identifiable as a team endeavour, as the association to your account is visually less prominent
To countless low-wage employees across the world, low-cost products will seem attractive - even ‘liberatory’ - but, when you zoom out, they are the ones cheaply producing the cheap things that are being sold back to them.
whenever a company is claiming to ‘democratise’ something, they’re basically saying that they will drive down costs on the production side of the equation to get the consumption side hooked on the resultant cheap thing, after which they will be in a position to extract.
It sometimes feels like easyJet’s management presents customers with a devil’s bargain: we’ll give you cheap travel if you agree to hand over your dignity and be treated like the crap you are.
When the core of your business model involves squeezing both customers and employees, it means that relations between those two camps very quickly get frayed. The stressed employee and the stressed customer are both being played by the senior management, but they often end up facing each other as mortal enemies in different parts of the system.
Bufferland exists to provide a shallow layer of human care within an otherwise bureaucratic profit machine, but today easyJet is also using it to _recoup its losses_from yesterday’s cancelled flight.
Companies like easyJet drive down prices through so-called ‘economies of scale’, but they also make heavy use of Economies of Silence: the frontline employees act as punching bags for customers, like an emotional shock-absorber, but this also serves as a system of noise-cancellation for management, freeing them from the emotional responses that would come from actually hearing the customers’ voices.
if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor.
OpenAI's inflated valuation, as I understand it
[The only way for labs to capture enough value would be to either invent superintleligence or have a monopoly.]
[this study claims] that the length of tasks LLMs can complete is doubling every 7 months
[Models are currently commodified, but their labs are not priced as such.]
[If all 163 million working Americans bought a ChatGPT subscription at $20/month, it would provide 40 billion in annual revenue, which is only about 10% of what would
justify the current valuation based on more the traditional method using price to earnings ratio.]
AI Is the Market, and the Market Is the Government
The stock market has never been the economy - it’s really a reflection of what the economy dreams it could be in a world where share buybacks translate to meaningful productivity.
as AI swallows up more and more capital, it is both the economy and the stock market - and the government.
As long as portfolios are green, the electorate stays somewhat calm. The administration is effectively borrowing confidence from the AI bubble. Speculation has become governance.
The equity market believes the AI story overrides everything else. The gold market believes something is fundamentally breaking. They’re both reacting to the same underlying reality, but they just have different theories about what happens next.
Both gold and equities are surging because they’re hedging different kinds of collapse. Gold trades on fear of the system. AI trades on faith in the story. That both are rallying tells you something about where we are.
This is what it means to live in the United States of AI. Democracy as an asset class or something. For now, the line keeps going up. But speculation isn’t stability, and the permission government borrows from investors is never really its own.
yes to brag here is my stainless steel pan after making eggs!!!!
- heat the pan on high and after a few minutes drop a few drops of water into the pan. if the water sizzles its not ready. if the water forms little beads and the beads easily dance across the pan, it’s ready!
- turn the heat immediately to low.
- drizzle some olive oil in and move the pan to coat. then drop in a small pat of butter, then gently add your already cracked eggs
- DO NOT TOUCH for at least 30 seconds
- gently put a spatula beneath to see if the egg has released from the pan yet. don’t rush it, this is key! when it’s ready to move it will move easily!
Look at any modern software application: buttons are verbs, boxes with drop-shadows are nouns, API requests are grammatical structures. We’re not “using” interfaces so much as speaking them. When you pick up a new piece of software you can usually operate it but you lack fluency, you’re still learning the dialect.
Fallacies of distributed computing
- The network is reliable;
- Latency is zero;
- Bandwidth is infinite;
- The network is secure;
- Topology doesn't change;
- There is one administrator;
- Transport cost is zero;
- The network is homogeneous;
There are 9 circles shaping the rocket. The circle count can be further reduced to seven or even four , but this yields shapes that are too simple and not very interesting.
It is easy to simplify things, the trick is to know when to stop.
