> In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.
Because most people like it and it improves metrics.
From the discussion on sticky header [0],
> Our preliminary results show that an overwhelming majority of test participants reported positive experience with a sticky header. Participants mentioned they enjoyed the ability to access important functionality from any part of the page.
> Overall, there was an average 15% decrease in scrolls per session by logged-in users on the 15 pilot wikis in the treatment group (with the new sticky header), compared to the control group (without the sticky header). This indicates that our hypothesis was correct - adding the sticky header to the page reduced the need to scroll to the top of the page significantly.
> there was a 2.8% and a 6.8% increase in the percent of people who were able to successfully complete at least one edit using the edit button within the sticky header,
I tried several times to play chess against it. It made reasonable if poor moves for the first 10 moves of the game. It also gave plausible-sounding if entirely incorrect explanations of why the moves were good, such as "I'm playing Nf6-g8, which is a good move because it defends my pawn on f7 [it doesn't] and controls the center, allowing me to set up an attack on your king".
At some point though, it always got stuck and insisted on making illegal moves, even when I corrected it by providing the current board position in FEN.
Have you ever worked with education software? I have. It's awful.
Until 2011, my local school district was using a DOS-based attendance and grading system. No GUI.
In 2011 they switched to an internet-connected system that looked like it was built on Windows 3.1. Non-resizable text fields. Inability to tab from one field to the next. A tiny non-resizable window that you had to scroll manually with the scrollbar to enter data in all the fields, so to enter attendance for a whole class you had to scroll left and right with the mouse for each child.
It crashed every morning for months. Teachers would coordinate with each other to ensure they didn't overload the system.
My dad was up at 6 and at school for 7am. Worked 7am-3pm (8 hours). He did marking for an hour or two most evenings, and a solid chunk on the weekends. Probably 50 hour weeks. And that's after 20 years of teaching the same classes, so he had all the materials.
My ex-wife was brand new to teaching so had to develop curriculum on top of this. She worked 7am-5pm every day plus weekends.
Calling parents, dealing with kids with special needs, developing curriculum, marking, department meetings, making lesson plans, running extra-curricular activities or clubs, private lessons, doing paperwork or photocopying, etc etc, it all mounts up. There's a lot of behind the scenes work.
Now, some teachers simply don't do this. You can easily skate by, work the bare minimum 6 hour days, and not give two shits about the kids. But most teachers care about children and education (I mean, you don't become a teacher for the money).
Japanese is worse. You count "1 thing", "2 thing", "3 thing", except the word for "thing" changes depending on the shape of the thing you are counting.
So thin flat things like paper or shirts are 1 mai, 2 mai, 3 mai, while to count books you say 1 satsu, 2 satsu, 3 satsu.
Long round things like pencils or umbrellas go 1 pon, 2 hon, 3 bon, 4 hon, 5 hon, 6 pon, etc (yeah you read that right).
There are different counter words for different kinds of animals, small things, vehicles, shoes, drinks, people, etc.
> As far as GDP, Ethereum spawned an entire new industry with tons of companies paying actual salaries to people (in fiat, if I might add), all of whom bought lattes and cars and houses, and some, I'm sure, also bought Peloton bikes.
This is like the Broken Window Fallacy.
All that money that was spent building Ethereum could have been spent on activities that were far more useful to society.