I loved the India/China border sub-plot, both as a fun story and as a metaphor for geopolitics.
At the end of the book no faction of elites is clearly winning, they're just hashing out The Line Of Actual Control.
I've heard him say that REAMDE was his attempt to write an airport paperback. I don't think he succeeded there, but Termination Shock does work as a light thriller so maybe he was taking a second swing.
I think the moon theory was almost right, but I didn't see any reference to insects keeping the light source to one side or the other. The researchers seem to think that insects orient as if the brightest thing they see is "up".
When I worked in an office it was much easier to casually ask for quick help. It was often pretty obvious whether a senior engineer was busy and focused or between tasks, checking email etc. and the overhead/friction of these ten-second conversations is higher when you have to wait for a response on slack, then launch a video call, share screen... instead of just making eye contact and saying "got a sec?"
I use Siri just for playing music, setting alarms, and reminders, but even there I run into bugs on a regular basis. One day she stopped being able to find songs from Apple Music, but could still play anything I'd saved to my phone (wasn't reception or CarPlay permissions or any of the obvious troubleshooting things you'd think, trust me I looked into it).
Sometimes she'll also misinterpret commands for unclear reasons. "Tomorrow at 7am, remind me to call John" and she responds "Ok, I've turned on your 7am alarm". I try again, speaking more clearly, and she says "Your 7am alarm is already on"
Businesses with high chargeback rates might get rejected by some payment processors, but there's usually another one willing to take them on in exchange for higher fees.
Interesting way of looking at it. I don't know if the marketing value alone could justify the $100m price, but when you think about a 30 second Super Bowl ad being $6m and compare that to all the discussion and news coverage generated by the Rogan deal... yeah I guess it was a pretty effective way of letting the public know they can listen to podcasts on Spotify.
Thanks for supplying the fact-check I was looking for. I think I've been seeing headlines about this "discovery" for over a decade, always presented as if it's a promising new technique but obviously there must be some reason it hasn't caught on by now.
There's a lot about this in Michael Lewis' "The Fifth Risk". The most maddening part is that the company lobbying to weaken the National Weather Service can't replicate much of what the government is doing here and sells a lot of repackaged NWS data. I suppose it doesn't matter to them if dismantling the service leads to less weather data being available overall, as long as their piece of the market gets bigger.
I think the only long-term solution is cultural. Different cultures have different relationships to intoxicants, and they can change over time. Over the last 60 years in America, drunk driving "high-functioning" alcoholism has been denormalized. It's still a problem for a lot of people, but there's more "loss of face" associated.
Looking at the stoners I knew in college, you'd think that pot was a pretty destructive drug. But now, working with successful professionals who buy dispensary weed on the weekends, it seems like harmless fun. Besides any class stuff going on there, I think that hanging out with people who want to do bong rips and zone out on the couch leads you to a different relationship with THC than having friends who will look down at you if you get too high to hold a conversation.
A Peruvian friend told me that their mother served coca leaf tea to the family on a regular basis. It was traditional, it wasn't treated any differently than we'd treat coffee, and it hadn't led anyone in her extended family to seek out more refined versions.
So how would cocaine legalization look in America? Would coca tea go on the menu at Starbucks? Would people stop there, the same way that lots of folks drink a pot of coffee a day but relatively fewer take caffeine pills? Probably not, that's not how we do things here. Without regulation, bodegas would be selling single-serve bumps in little tear-open packages with Scarface on the label. We will sell you as much "here, go destroy your life" as we can.
Up to a point, regulation can tamp down the market for cheaper and more powerful intoxicants (like, alcohol prohibition was hopeless but cities can successfully prevent malt liquor and everclear sales if they think that cuts down on alcohol-related deaths) But I think that attempting to shape the culture of consumption around a drug is probably a better long term strategy than full prohibition.
Among the many other ways our system amplifies recidivism, it's horrifying how common it is for police and prison guards to strike people in the head during confrontations.
The explanation that iOS users are subsidizing all other Anki users with that price somehow made it easier for me to swallow than if I viewed it as mere price-gouging.
Originally, Google was very effective at looking at the interconnections of content people had put online and using that to infer which pages were most relevant. SEO tactics immediately started gaming this system to create false signals of relevance, but for many years Google did an impressive job of staying ahead of that game.
I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.
I got very interested in chess after downloading the 'Magnus Trainer' app. I hadn't particularly been looking to improve my chess playing (I knew the rules but rarely played and had never studied strategy before), but I'm a sucker for any app that promises to make good use of 'playing with my phone on the bus' time.
The app is a mix of minigames and interactive tutorials. I moved through them quickly because they're all bite-sized enough to do in spare minutes while waiting in line etc. The tutorials are short, single topic, interactive lessons that introduce a concept, give an example from tournament play, and sometimes quiz you about what the next move should be.
The minigames seemed dumb at first, (and I still hate Dream Escape) but after playing them a few times in order to continue advancing through the lessons I came to see them as well designed "wax on, wax off" style drills. 'Poker Face', looks like a memory game but it's actually teaching you to quickly evaluate which player would benefit more from exchanging pieces. Beach Bounty helps you instantly visualize where a piece could be n moves in the future. Flight Control, where you try to quickly tap the appropriate square when shown the coordinates in standard chess notation, seemed pointless until I tried reading books about chess and found the notation slowing me down. Once I'd drilled the coordinates enough that they were second nature, I could visualize them as I read instead of constantly referring to a diagram and counting the squares.
In my lay opinion, Magnus Trainer is a brilliant bit of educational technology. It's not teaching you anything you couldn't learn elsewhere, but it felt easy and fun to me. If I hadn't stumbled across it I don't think I ever would have delved as deeply into chess as I did.
Thanks for making that game! When I was trying to learn better rhythm, I found it really interesting. I never got very good at it, but it was an engaging tool.