I hope you're never in a position to make any of these decisions.

Which one(s) and why?

A few months in the factory is nothing compared to your entire life. Stories are no substitutes for experience. Those who go on to get degrees and nice jobs would also benefit from the experience.

Sunday school because if you are sufficiently behind on the material you will never catch up. Never is a long time.

Getting the parents to show up and explain why the grades are bad will force them to consider why that is. I had lots of friends with parents who absolutely loved them but couldn't be any less interested in grades.

I appreciate how anecdotal this all is. How do you see it?

Scope

What kind of scope?

I'm not sure sex is always going to be the competition. More and more people are sexless (by choice or not).

There are already sex toys that you.. insert yourself in, and then have scripts that sync up movements with VR videos you are watching.

Crazy times coming in the next few decades.

Sorry, slightly tangential, but haven't we seen streaming services get progressively worse as more competition has entered the space? Netflix was great when they were pretty much the only place in town; now it's a fragmented disaster of services that have to squeeze harder and harder to keep things viable.

Well, but that's due to a lot of problems specific to the media landscape. Netflix started as an afterthought, the big media companies viewed it as a sideshow or as a stopgap measure while they made other plans, so there was a honeymoon phase where it was cheap and had a ton of media.

Most new entrants to the market are themselves media companies, so with each one the media landscape gets fractured. They're able to leverage popular content (over which they have a monopoly) to lure customers and raise prices. There's not many of them, and the barrier of entry is almost impossibly high (step 1: develop a 50-year back catalog of beloved films & franchises...), so the market is insular.

Compare with music, where there's a ton of smaller labels, and the barrier of entry is much lower. Streaming companies compete mostly on price, interface & experience.

I think the problem is kinda inherent in the market, and Netflix was just an anomaly because it caught the media companies flat-footed. You would need openness and competition on a much more fundamental level to solve streaming video media.

In the meantime, simple and open web payments could solve for music, podcasts, prose, reporting, art, etc. And hey, maybe somewhere in the process you could see the birth of micro-studios.

Agreed. But I think the solution to this is compulsory content licensing, not consolidation. Granted, the end result of that might still be consolidation (or many players just going out of business), but at least that would be true competition: the streaming services would be competing as streaming services (and would be judged on price, video quality, app/website stability and usability, reliability, recommendations, etc.), not as content producers.

I've been using the same reusable bags for years, so they have more than hit those numbers. Why are the cotton numbers so wild?

With the amount of time he's put into VR over the last decade I think it's fair to say he's as much an expert as anyone else at this point.

He became expert in the domain enough to decide to walk away...

He's now working on a startup in the AGI field, which will also probably go nowhere for him.

He gets to work on things that excite him - what a place to be in life. We can all envy that - but he's not very good at gauging problems and consistently underestimates their difficulty/time-to-market.

How do you know it hasn't and isn't slowly making its way here? Universe is a big ol' boy.

This sort of seems to assume that time and money in infinite, though. Buying a recipe book for one recipe seems like a profound waste of resources.

This sort of seems to assume that it is at all possible to gain knowledge and experience without making mistakes.

Hiring people who do not perform seems like a profound waste of resources. Doing projects that fail seems like a profound waste of resources. Learning technology that will not be helpful later in your life seems like a profound waste of resources.

When was the last time you found a cookbook where a significant portion of recipes stayed with you for the rest of your life?

Your comment embodies one of the core tenets of what makes a great programmer. Great programmers are comfortable navigating ambiguity. They make mistakes but quickly correct course. They know how to test ideas in a way that yields signals faster. They know that they need to make mistakes, and know how to keep the cost of those mistakes low.

It’s like being able to walk into a bookstore full of cookbooks, and by skimming a few pages here and there, walk out with 3 fantastic cookbooks.

In other words, good programmers have the ability to quickly understand the full problem space (including business concerns) and efficiently navigate the solution space.

You can't brush off the "crypto grift" though. That's the sticking point, and it's a very big one.

Nostr is extremely anti-crypto and pro-bitcoin. The trouble is that most people don't appreciate the distinction, they will in time but at this stage, without deeply researching and understanding the topic, most just include bitcoin in the snake pit of "cRyptO"

Yeah I find this incredibly annoying.