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.
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.
You say that in a way that suggests that Google being a market leader is what caused or allowed them to develop a peak user experience. To me - and I suspect others too, given the downvotes - this causality is in the opposite direction to what common sense dictates. And simply pointing at the correlation doesn't help prove your case.
To me, it looks like Google achieved a market dominance because they had a great product, but quite quickly they began practising anti-competitive behaviours and before long the user experience began to degrade.
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.
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.
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)
As a side sleeper I had the opposite experience unfortunately, so YMMV. The Manta Pro is touted for side sleepers, but I've used both the pro and original and they both suffer from the same problem: it still slips around and the walls of the eye cups press into my eyes as I sleep. I gave it a few weeks of waking up with soreness and misaligned vision. No amount of fiddling with eye cup positions or strap tightness helped. The thickness of the strap is a fundamental design problem with the Manta approach, even with the expensive tech fabrics on the pro. It's overbuilt.
After trying about 10 other sleep masks, I ended up with the Alaska Bear Silk Two Strap [1] which has straps so thin they're imperceptible, and a much more effective retention mechanism, for a fraction of the price.
I have used (and loved) the Alaska Bear Silk mask for years, but it does come off occasionally. I’m absolutely going to try the double strap one now, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for posting this. I've been looking for a mask with eye cups but couldn't find anything decent on Amazon.
Have you tried the Silk one? I'm tempted to get that one instead of the Pro since the materials sound nicer, but the site is really unclear about the differences...
Hmm… I just bought one but I notice their page has a quote of customer praise saying they can no longer sleep without one. That seems a little bit troubling
Earplugs and sleep masks are habit forming, but speaking as a light sleeper, it's better than the alternative. It's easy enough to always have one on hand, and makes a big difference in my restfulness.
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.
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.
I guess 25 points does make a difference but I do think it’s a pretty small difference, especially at the top of the range. I remember the MIT admissions blogs years ago claimed that they do not distinguish at all between a 750 and an 800.
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.
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!
Some Googling led me to this: https://geekboss.com/blog/boyd-patterns-of-conflict
It does have 4 youtube videos that seem to be of a presentation he gave, though I don't think it's the same one as the transcript (apologies, I haven't watched them yet, only briefly skipped through them). They are a bit potato quality, but might still be of use.
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!
and what would then happen if a bank were -- somehow -- induced to make more of those loans, which, as you describe "duplicate" or "create" money a number of times up to the number of loans made?
and how would the world look if that same bank then decided to stop making so many loans?
would there be a difference in the total money "created"/"duplicated" between those two worlds?
you can quibble with language ("Many people get ensnared in a series of linguistic traps when they talk about bank accounts." - quoting the article) but I think you'll find the OP and other commenters here have a sufficiently reasonable model of what is happening under the hood in the modern banking system. I suspect if you view the OP charitably and accept that he does understand what's going on and is describing the relative difference between these two hypothetical scenarios I gave above as "more or less money creation"...the essay becomes less "bad".
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.