After the novelty wore off, Alexa was pretty useless in our home. It eventually turned into a voice command to set a timer while cooking and asking it to play Spotify. But after many times when it would kick in and interrupt us in the middle of conversations - when we didn't even come close to saying the wake-up word - it got in the way more than it helped. Really glad to have it turned off and put away now.
This is all solid advice but seems to be unrelated to gaining an unfair advantage.
I interpret "unfair advantage" to be more about employability and how valuable you are in the field (starting with inside the business you are in) and not about putting more money in your pocket.
My value to my last company - - a 60 person startup where I was a senior software engineer /the de facto “cloud architect” - was much greater than it is at the second largest employer in the US.
But, if your goal is to exchange your labor for as much money as you can, you optimize for what can get you the highest compensation based on your skillset and path dependencies - family obligations, desires, etc
The CEO class is a mixed group of people, some of which are incredibly smart. But your point is well taken and worth considering. They are "just people" too.
On a side note, I can't figure out all the responses to this comment. Everyone seems to be piling on and talking about stuff totally unrelated to your point.
It's unfortunate, but you can use real url routing with SPAs now... that could provide deep linking... can't speak to the original devs.
Went through this recently at work on an SPA app when I started making more pages separately and more atomically routable. It may be an "SPA" but that doesn't preclude proper urls/routes.
> There is no system better than complete free speech, because it allows the most amount of information to be passed back and forth and gives people the opportunity to decide for themselves.
I used this think this, but then I figured out that I live in a world where I'm not always welcome by the "majority" and have seen first hand how these things can go sideways. Now I view this attitude as a privilege and that it typically comes from someone whose rights aren't all that impacted by the tyranny of the majority.
> but then I figured out that I live in a world where I'm not always welcome by the "majority" and have seen first hand how these things can go sideways.
and if they cannot say what they think, they will simply welcome you more?
Amazing leap you made there. But by all means, let's let people run rampant and not have any boundaries and then shrug when violence happens against minorities.
I'm not familiar with them but things make a lot more sense now. The writing seemed pretty off with lots of odd signals about how to think, how to fall in line, and spell out what our outrage should be. The talking points seemed a little too clean-cut and less about a discussion.
It's sad because (despite being mostly on the left) I used to read the Spectator, in a "hear the other side, challenge your own point if view" way. And it was good. Decent pragmatic right leaning people. Then in the run up to Brexit it just sort of fell apart. Out was anyone with facts or reasons. In were pre-canned talking points, appeals to emotion and bare faced lies.
> pretty much everyone says they prefer the full price to be shown up front in search result pages. But, as someone who is privy to a ton of A/B testing in this area, the opposite nearly always results in higher conversion
That may be true, but those are measuring two separate things - customer desires and customer behavior. Just because it results in more sales doesn't actually mean the customer still wants that. I know I didn't when I rented a car recently but I was pretty much stuck when picking up the car at the airport. I would have definitely found another solution if I knew upfront how much the real cost was going to be.
> at the same time I'm not a fan of the news media's quest to find some of the biggest outliers possible
I don't consider being in the hospital wanting to watch Netflix to actually be that much of an outlier. It's pretty common and I know for certain that I'd want to do it (along with many many others) if I were in that situation.
Meta's has a corporate value for "Focus on long-term impact" which is trying to counter short-term gains that don't produce over time. They also talk about how you can make a "big impact" as an IC there, which from what I know is true since you can work on big projects, but they aren't necessarily the projects you'd want to work on if you have some form of value system that includes empathy.
Years ago, I met someone that boasted about doing auto-play for videos in your feed so that get sucked into related video after related video. He was particularly proud of implementing a feature (he worked it out with the PM) where you could only delete one video at a time from your history instead of in batch. The goal was to make it harder to purge your data and frustrate the customer so they give up. Ultimately they wanted more data on you so that they could further "optimize" the app to better suit/manipulate you. Pretty sure this is what they mean by their company core value of "focus on long-term impact."
