Because the value of accounts that browse extreme numbers of posts per day is near zero to advertisers.
Someone who has seen thousands of ads per day for years on end is basically immune to ads (or has blocked them, or is a bot)
One of the hard things to grok as an engineer or power user is that we are not the target audience for ad-supported services most of the time. How many people in this thread have aggressively blocked ads everywhere and are confused about why ad-supported services aren’t catering to people like themselves?
1. I'm not sure that an account that heavily browses twitter is zero value to advertisers. If anything, those are more engaged users with Twitter, _and_ Twitter should have more data and thus better targeting for that user.
2. The marginal efficiency of not showing an ad to a saturated user is probably offset by the reduced potential audience for your ad. Once you've seen 600 tweets, you can't use Twitter or view any more ads. That can shrink the daily audience significantly.
3. Users now need an account to view _any_ tweets. This further reduces the reach/audience for Twitter ads. If Twitter ads already have low CTR or referrals, and now their potential reach is cut, then they have no value.
I have blocked ads most places, but I use Twitter in ad-supported mode + receive ads through the app. I'm a good example of a user they'd be advertising to, and now I can't use it.
> Because legally, that's as meaningful as saying "they are quooquaquams".
I don’t see how this is at all equivalent, given that “psychedelics” is a well-known term that can be found throughout decades of literature and that gibberish word you just made up has no attached meaning.
If you’re equating random gibberish words to well-known words in literature then why does anything have any meaning? Why would a new word have meaning?
Regardless, the laws generally don’t refer to “psychedelics”, they refer to specific chemicals by their name. There are numerous compounds that would be considered psychedelics that are, nevertheless, not illegal because they’re not covered by any laws (including analog acts)
Because the term found through decades of literature isn't attached to legal categories, as I explained. It's the same way the term "drug" doesn't have much legal distinction, as I can't think of any legal commonalities spanning coffee, alcohol, Lipitor, cannabis, and heroin.
> Regardless, the laws... refer to specific chemicals by their name.
Not directly, very often. I doubt there's any specific law around Lipitor. Rather, drugs are grouped into categories and then the laws that permit or restrict them are mostly around those categories. Otherwise it would all be incredibly redundant (with exceptions for certain incredibly common drugs like alcohol). And the question here is how to categorize pyschadelics for legal purposes. And saying that we just call them psychadelics answers as many legal questions as saying we call them quooquaquams -- i.e. zero.
Then maybe it's the controlled substance administration that's wrong. Seriously, what level of hubris does it take to think that natural substances like psilocybin mushrooms which have existed for millions of years must be brought under the control of a polity's legislature? It's like declaring sharks or snakes illegal because they give some people nightmares. Future generations will laugh in disbelief at this idiocy.
I don't know what you're getting at here. We're not talking about values. We're talking about why the word "psychedelics" is a worthless term as far as the law is concerned.
From a values standpoint, I don't see how it would be idiotic to schedule truly dangerous drugs like 25i-NBOMe more strictly than psilocybin or LSD.
25i-NBOMe isn't "truly dangerous". It's only dangerous if mistaken for LSD and dosed carelessly, so rather than scheduling it more strictly, there should be strict requirements for accurate labeling and consistent dosing, like every other drug.
It is straight up dangerous. 5x a common dose of <1mg can kill you. Nobody that can actually execute on properly dosing it will expose themselves to the liability of doing so.
Drugs are cool and interesting, go ahead and do them, but trying to pretend that something like 25i-NBOMe is something that Joe Average will safely deal with is, frankly, pretty fucking stupid. This conversation is constantly approached with this idea that everybody is a reasonable, informed person that is fully educated on the risks, but that's just not how this works.
Well, that's an interesting idea. 20x a common dose of acetaminophen, an extremely pervasive, legal, over the counter painkiller, can kill you. Less can kill a child. Lots of drugs contain it, such as over the counter cough medicine.
People legitimately die or become seriously ill every year because they don't know this.
Granted, 5x is a lot different than 20x especially when a drug is taken for recreation rather than necessity. I've never done 25i-NBOMe, but it's my understanding that it's easy to overdose because a method of administration is blotter paper and people think they're taking LSD.
In our current world, when you get prescription drugs for the first time, you are provided with information about risks. Over the counter medicine, you aren't.
In my ideal world, if you wanted to do a recreational drug and it had risks like this, you'd have to complete a drug education course and obtain a prescription, you'd be provided with phone numbers for services like overdosing or mental health, specific to the drugs you're planning on doing, and dosage would be easy because medical professionals are doing it in a lab before they sell it to you.
The average Joe would much rather do drugs that they know are manufactured correctly, not adulterated or cut with other substances, where the dose is measured accurately, and where if something goes wrong they have a professional to help them, even if it means they have to pay a bit more than the black market - which will surely still exist.
And if someone goes through the black market and does because they did a drug that is now legal, and they didn't know the correct dose? Sad, but that's on them
Acetaminophen has a poor safety profile and I wish they would take it off the market, and that's a drug where the danger is in taking 10+ fairly large capsules of it instead of 1. The difference between normal 25i-NBOMe usage and fatal usage can be as small as putting a 1x1cm piece of paper in your mouth vs putting a 1x3cm piece of paper in your mouth.
I agree with your ideal world. The point of my original comment was that making no distinction between something like 25i-NBOMe and something like LSD, calling them psychedelics, and regulating them as such just isn't a good idea. I am not claiming that you should go to jail for having or using them.
Nobody that can actually execute on properly dosing it will expose themselves to the liability of doing so.
Nobody? Um, I'm right here? I bought a 0.1ml pipette back in the day for the precise purpose of safely dosing 25X-NBOMes volumetrically, rather than by mass.
And I'm not the only one. Hamilton Morris[0], Nervewing[1], and many others on forums such as Bluelight[2] write about their positive 25X-NBOMe experiences.
trying to pretend that something like 25i-NBOMe is something that Joe Average will safely deal with
Of course it's dangerous for Joe Average to use NBOMes. It's also dangerous for Joe Average to buy a dodgy parachute off of the dark web and do amateur skydiving. That doesn't mean we should ban skydiving and put Joe (and capable skydivers!) in prison. Skydiving is actually quite "safe", with fewer than 8 fatalities per million jumps, but I put "safe" in quotes, because it is not skydiving that is inherently safe or dangerous, but rather it is the way that skydiving has been incorporated into society to manage its risks that is safe.
I take issue with the entire punitive premise of this discussion, namely, that substances should be placed on a continuum from safe to dangerous, or good to bad, or "soft" to "hard", so that we can determine how harshly to punish people who possess them. If anything, drugs should be regulated, not prohibited, and they should be categorized in such a way as to make clear the risks they present and how to mitigate them. Under such a scheme, you wouldn't even need to ban anything, because why would Joe Average futz around with something obscure like 25I-NBOMe when familiar LSD is available from the corner smart shop along with a pamphlet explaining how to use it properly? Why does everyone's mind immediately leap to a carceral solution?
My point on liability isn't about your personal tolerance for risk and confidence in your own work on a n=1 scale, it's about whether or not you would be comfortable doing that work for thousands of other people with the understanding that a very minor fuck up results in somebody being dead.
To be clear, I'm with you on the idea that all drugs should be legal. I don't believe in scheduling drugs to determine sentencing. I do believe in scheduling drugs according to the odds that Joe Schmoe will bungle the usage of them, in an attempt to steer people who aren't doing a an appropriate amount of research toward largely physiologically safe/well understood options.
> But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.
I’ve done a lot of mentoring, including through some formal programs.
One of my biggest challenges has been students/mentees who find a very convincing blog post or video from a confident, polished writer, then mistake that person’s confidence for absolute authority on a subject.
The worst example I can think of is the world of JavaScript training influencers. These people produce courses and training material for sale, then heavily use social media to promote their material as the canonical source of truth in the field.
These influencers can be very persuasive, confident, and relentless in their advertising. They have an incentive to present their material as flawlessly correct and exaggerate or invent problems with other ways of doing things.
The result is juniors who have taken some overpriced online JavaScript course who are utterly convinced their knowledge is superior to that of the 10-plus years of experience of people around them. They’re off on some tangent trying to rewrite part of the codebase in some new framework/tool/language that their influencers said was the “best”. They won’t accept that there are multiple ways to solve problems or that some times the correct engineering solution is to use a simpler framework even if it’s not trending on Twitter.
It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources and assume that what they read is superior to the real-world experience of the engineers they work with.
Students can learn The One True Way from their teachers as well. I think that has more to do with who is learning and who is teaching than it has to do with whether they learned from a teacher or from a video.
Even without the junior getting overconfident, being able to read an article about something you're trying to learn and also being able to detect bullshit on a subject you don't know about is a skill in itself.
If I decided to learn Rust today, I'd be able to catch the sentences that go against my intuitions in programming and double check them. If I were to read an article about, say, superconductors, I don't have that same intuition as I do for coding. I'd have to fact-check every single sentence or just take it as truth.
> It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources
As long as it’s kept in check I think it’s practically a necessary development stage for many. Everyone needs a starting point from where they evaluate and integrate other values and perspectives. Humility and pragmatism are learned through the process.
It's also extremely motivating to learn a new field if you think you're shortcutting your way to expertise by following a big guru. By the time you realize how things really are, you're already deep enough in the topic to go further with ease.
A great conductor once said to me, "I really like your new voice teacher, he really knows what he's doing. Not like your last voice teacher, he didn't know anything. Your first teacher was on the right path, too bad you didn't understand the message yet."
I heartily agreed the whole way through, until he revealed he had no idea who any of my teachers were. It's just that everyone feels that way.
The lesson is: blindly following a series of teachers like oracles is the way of the beginner. The path of the master is accepting that YOU are your own teacher, and everyone else is just providing tools.
This is junior developers, not anything to do with internet influencers.
Used to see the same thing with every junior developer who went to a conference or read a new book. I did it myself at that point in my career. All kinds of enthusiasm (which can be good) and ideas (which might not be good because the junior developer does not have the experience to be a good judge).
I largely agree with you (and saw this a lot during my working years), but sometimes it's the only way new knowledge (of new frameworks, languages, ways of working, etc.) come into a company/project.
What's normal isn't all that matters though, and the broad consequences of the behavior of the capitalist class are starting to creep quite deeply into what's normal for a lot of middle and lower class people.
Personally, I would like that to be countered much more like how they do things in China. Making an example of some bad apples can be very persuasive.
Rear view cameras are a safety feature. You’re not sticking it to anyone by refusing to look at it.
I understand that you’re upset about data collection, but refusing to use a basic safety feature is a pointless protest. The only people who might be harmed are those around you.
No, but on the other hand, I do have some glimmer of hope that eventually someone at Microsoft will see these kinds of comments and do something to fix that abomination. I have no doubt Microsoft employs many very talented people, but none of them seem to be working on the user facing products which make my corporate laptop run so poorly (Teams or OneDrive).
They've transitioned the consumer client from Electron to Edge WebView, Angular to React, and the same for the enterprise application appears to be in public preview and slated for general availability later this year. Still web tech but it's supposed to address some of the memory and performance problems.
Yes, appreciate the transparency, but it's kind of embarrassing "22 second launch time" was considered acceptable for so long, and "more than twice as fast" now means "almost a 10 second launch time".
Yeah it is something but as an app that usually runs at startup, I'd just be pleased if it can snap a little faster and be less janky. Fingers crossed.
Your kidding right, I mean teams is not great, but compared to the UI rubbish of zoom and slack?
Take for example the whole business of screensharing, if you share a single screen in zoom you get black blocks for all the zoom windows. Yes it makes sense that I don't share the window with participants, but at least let me freaking close it. Similarly moving the controls from bottom to top of the screen reliably confuses early (and even more advanced users).
And don't get me started on quoting text or including math in slack and what is the whole threads section?!
It feels like a quarter of the time screenshare doesn't even work in Teams and it's noticably choppier when it does work.
Code blocks working in Teams is inconsistent, and it seems to add additional spaces when copying.
Quoting & mentions also sucks. The channels, chats, activity screens are always a mess, feel like UX bandaid.
Private channel limits are garbage.
Search and discovery sucks.
There's inconsistent options for the calendar between Outlook & Teams. Don't you dare expect functional compatibility between MS products. Scheduling assistant sucks, sometimes confuses itself when people are busy.
The UX seems to rely on a myriad of nested menus & modals that are XHR backed, so each one lags. Even just typing text feels slow. It's as fluid as molasses.
> and it seems to add additional spaces when copying
It regularly adds _fake spaces_ to code blocks. People paste working code/SQL into their things and all spaces were replaced with mysterious utf8 that are invisible like spaces.
> AVX-512 is still not present in the chips with E-cores.
Why would they put a dig at Intel’s consumer chips in a slide deck for their server parts? The Intel Xeons don’t have E-cores. This doesn’t make any sense unless I’m missing something.
Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512, right?
And even if they weren't, it would still be a cheap PR win.
>Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512, right?
All the current generation processors (Zen4) support AVX-512, both mobile and desktop. It may be confusing because AMD's numbering scheme is intentionally misleading and they sell previous gen chips with new model numbers.
There are many kinds of Intel server CPUs with E-cores, with up to 24 E-cores, which are branded Atom, not Xeon, and which are less known, because they are mainly intended to be integrated in various telecommunication systems, e.g. in mobile phone infrastructure.
Intel server CPUs with E-cores that will use the Xeon brand, because they will have much more cores (6-times more, i.e. 144 vs. 24) than the current models, are announced for 2024.
I think the point is that they are not doing much more relative to the hardware improvements. How much less functional was windows 3.1 notepad compared to win10 notepad? 50% (utf8, maybe multiple windows)? RAM and CPU have increased 25000%. That should be way more than enough to handle the extra features in notepad.
Tim Ferriss is very good at downplaying the effort and costs that go into businesses. Good for inspiring people to try, bad for actually being transparent.
In this example, the (claimed) $200 production cost and $2.10 DVD cost are probably nothing relative to this large marketing cost:
> piece through trade magazines
The marketing costs and effort are conveniently omitted.
The info is generally available. It is just old school and somewhat of a lost art.
There’s lists of publications by trade. You could buy ad space on multiple publications or individually. The model was $n per square inch of space.
The trick was finding the lists. General business magazines used to have advertisements for companies that ran/owned the lists. So it was somewhat accessible to the general public.
Cost was similar to how ad words are calculated. So the more niche you’d go the better chance you had of manageable costs (unless your niche was super expensive for some reason).
Effort is relative. Once you knew how the marketing channels worked everything else was fairly straightforward. The ads that worked were just left on autopilot. There weren’t redesigns or none of the shit that’s done today. Ads were left alone. Tracking was even rather simple. You’d have a special code, phone number, or mailbox that tied the ad to the order. Simple stuff.
You can replicate all of these today and still make a tidy sum. But you won’t do it behind a computer. Gotta go out into the wild and talk with people about all kinds.
> The marketing costs and effort are conveniently omitted.
I agree with you, but also somewhat disagree on the overall takeaway. Yes, of course you have to put more effort into it than just spending $200 NRE and $2.10 unit cost. The quiet part that really needs to be said out loud (way more than marketing costs and effort) is: find a niche with really great unit economics. When you've got a product with 10% margin, you have to manage all of those marketing costs very very carefully. When you've got a product with a raw 5000% margin, it matters way way less whether your CAC is even triple the raw manufacturing cost of the product.
Back then marketing was easier - just throw something up on eBay. But there are some 'hidden' costs not discussed.
I have a friend who did something similar back around the same time frame and he did pretty well. His niche was doing video tutorials on how to use new camera equipment. He needed to buy/own camera and video equipment. Luckily he already had it from is other endeavor as a photographer. He needed to have the skillset to the make and edit the video. Again, he had that from being a photographer. He ended up selling quite a lot of DVDs.
So the moral is to find a niche that leverages a lot of what you already have/know.
Fitness influencers and podcasters took the Vitamin D story and ran with it to extremes. The number of people who think more is better with vitamin D or assume that their levels are severely low without checking is scary.
Taking a nominal amount of Vitamin D is probably a good idea for those of us who spend a lot of time indoors. Taking 10s of thousands of IUs every day for years is probably a bad idea for anyone who isn’t regularly checking their Vitamin D levels.
> Taking 10s of thousands of IUs every day for years is probably a bad idea for anyone who isn’t regularly checking their Vitamin D levels.
This extreme is obviously bad but if you spend most of your time indoors and you're located somewhere that doesn't get much sun without government fortifying your food with vit D (like some Scandi countries do), I don't see the harm in taking somewhere around low 1000sIU per day.
I’m indoors most of the time (previous skin cancer so I’m really careful about sun exposure these days) and I’ve been on 5000 IU daily for years and my levels show up basically perfect on the blood test every year
"The average content of vitamin D 3 found in wild caught salmon was 988 ± 524 (mean ± SEM) IU of vitamin D 3 /3.5 oz which is a typical amount that is served for dinner (Table) In contrast, farmed salmon had approximately 25% of the vitamin D content present in the flesh of wild salmon"
And everyone knows that a fish meal that size doesn't satisfy all the way to bed time.
So you can imagine a hunter gatherer running around eating a ton of fish, berries etc. and how many IU's that would be
Someone who has seen thousands of ads per day for years on end is basically immune to ads (or has blocked them, or is a bot)
One of the hard things to grok as an engineer or power user is that we are not the target audience for ad-supported services most of the time. How many people in this thread have aggressively blocked ads everywhere and are confused about why ad-supported services aren’t catering to people like themselves?