I noticed the same about the presentation. It seemed like Musk is becoming more adept at adept at selling his vision (e.g. addressing "why invest in space" criticism), but shied away from any concrete information about SpaceX's plans.

He even joked about "it's not done yet" so many times I suspect there isn't much to report at the moment. I wonder what's the reason for this update now.

A tour of their facility a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

They're arresting them because they moved and sought to hide the movements of funds gained from an unlawful activity, not because they actually engaged in the original unlawful activity.

Newnewss for the sake of Newness. "Empty information calories".

Talking not doing.

Isn't that the actual (positive) purpose of TED? The whole self-delusion about how talks create progress felt tacked-on at least to me, like the mission statements of any large company. Did people really take it seriously?

Are you sure about that? Even if that were its mission, it doesn't have to be TED's primary function or effect. I suspect most people listen to be inspired (as entertainment), not to actually see the future.

Wikipedia mentions "The IGN website was the brainchild of media entrepreneur Chris Anderson", but I can't find any accurate source on how much he was actually involved with their operation (maybe only responsible for the website)?

I agree with the criticism on this. For actual change you need to do things instead of talking about them.

Many TED speakers may be credible on the topic they talk about (like Bill Gates, who does spend his time funding public health projects), but even then the value of talking about their achievements could be limited. Those talks may inspire listeners, but that cannot come at the expense of actually doing the work, or thinking that solely articulating ideas creates progress.

What's the alternative? Telling people that the future is not ok? Would people listen to talks like this?

If you're simply reading to inform yourself about a topic, it may be worth reading a couple of book reviews, and listening to an interview or two, rather than invest the significant amount of time necessary to really engage with the book.

A few hours of skimming and reviews/interviews may get you to 25% understanding and retention, which in many cases may be more than enough for your needs of being basically informed on the topic. Compared to the 50 - 100 hours necessary for a deep, analytical engagement with the text, that would only get you to 50% understanding and retention.

I like your summary of the article but disagree with the author. If one is measuring the "understanding percentage" of a book, I think he's actually looking for short-form information or answers (like gathered from a book review or blog post) rather than a book. For me, the value of the best books comes from the inspiration and impulse for original thought it gives. Not everything in a book is valuable for everyone, nor should it be.

For textbooks, of course cutting the detail gives you an overview more quickly, but it's just an overview. And this entire point doesn't apply to fiction books.

Maybe it's a question of what type of understanding we want from each book. Sometimes that's answers, sometimes that's understanding, sometimes diversion or inspiration -- they're not all the same. Consulting reviews but not the book is an awesome shortcut to get answers, but then you're not reading the book, but the reviews.

I think the gap between thoughtful, slow reading and quick reading is much larger. Assuming of course that slow reading means thinking about the sentences, probably highlighting passages and scribbling a few notes.

Doesn't apply to every book of course, and depends on the aspect of understanding you want (your own thoughts or what the author meant).

Effect of the 2021 US Capitol attack in China -- seeing it as emblematic of the west's societal problems.

What is he referring to here?

• In somewhat simplified terms, focusing on and exceedingly valuing new things over our cultural inheritance?

What a great introduction to the article.

• Ha, I didn't catch the foreshadowing until your reply here :)

• That's the awesome thing about open web annotations -- we can come here from all kinds of different places, yet help each other to learn more from reading.

That mobile games (and not immersive PC or console games) are mentioned here tells you a great deal about their direction, and they kind of audience they want to attract.

Update: this most likely refers to their cloud gaming service, to bring actual PC/console games to mobile devices. I still wonder if this new audience has an effect on the types of games they produce.

What's an example of a company that can't absorb large amounts of funding? I assume Google used it to improve their infrastructure to support an incredibly large userbase. Uber for example used most of its funding for marketing and kickstarting their marketplace. The general ethos of "hypergrowth" seems to be trying to get to scale as fast as possible.

So the argument here is not to chase scale by throwing money at it, but only invest when it's required? Does the second case actually exist outside of boostrapped startups?

Aren't IPOs by definition about diversification for existing investors?

This is what I often do, and I'm frequently frustrated there aren't any alternative words for many expressions that capture the same thing.

Like the author here, it never occurred to me that a good dictionary would be a solution, since I never saw one.

It depends on the goals of your writing, in general, using uncommon words makes you harder to understand.

I also suspect not all people find joy in expressive language, or don't even notice it as non-native speakers online.

The guiding reason behind Derek Sivers' writing.

Argument that popular modern dictionaries are taking the wrong approach by defining words as plainly as possible. That makes it no fun to use them except for definitions.

For writing at least, using something like the original Websters dictionary is a great help to improve your style.

Intruguing argument about how to allow more tinkering with software -- making it really easy to contribute, not just possible.

I think for example the note-taking community is on a path towards that -- a lot of the fun is about finding your own worflow and contributing to editor plugins you like.

This reminds me of physical tinkering, like building or fixing your own small furniture. That's also hard with the products we often buy today -- it's difficult to fix minature electronics which are meant to be replaced.

But with software (esp. open source) it could be easier, as everyone can have the same tools. I very much resonate with the idea of tinkering more and using less standards.

For many people, making changes to code at all is hard. The few times I remember actually forking a library to add functionality, it meant hours reading into the codebase and polishing my change to commit it upstream.

I like the author's argument, but it's not not just the friction to view source code -- many technical architectures are also needlessly complex or non-standard.

Paul Graham argued in 2005 (just before starting YCombinator) why venture capital is traditionally unfriendly to founders, and how it sets itself bad incentives.

Learnings: - Take a lesson from good hill climbing algorithms, and drop yourself in unfamiliar situations to find your career maximum. - Progress in artificial games (e.g. career ladders) is fun, but you're likely to miss the bigger picture.

How that looks in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc0b4aBOyBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0qenuKmong

Definition: "Yak shaving refers to a task, that leads you to perform another related task and so on, and so on — all distracting you from your original goal. This is sometimes called “going down the rabbit hole.”"

Intuitively I assumed the term meant to stay lean and frequently reduce all complexity down to the bare minimum, but it's somewhat of the opposite :) This idea in general might also be called serendipity.

Learnings: - It's easy to assume people in the past didn't care or were stupid. But people do things for a reason. Not understanding the reason for how things are is a missed learning opportunity, and very likely leads to unintended consequences. - Similar to having a valid strong opinion, one must understand why things are as they are before changing them (except if the goal is only signaling).

You can't help but notice the shade thrown over CD Project Red with this statement. The development of The Witcher 3 was notorious for its crunch, I can only imagine it was worse for Cyberpunk 2077.

https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period-for-the-witcher-3-was-not-humane/

https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-release-crunch-labor-delays-cd-projekt-red

Has better latency != can have better latency. If there's demand for Stadia I assume they could use more of those data centers. But not sure the performance of Stadaia is the problem here, it's far far easier to use Stadia than Gefore NOW. Yet, people don't use it.

Notably, this goal has been stated before, I believe by Microsoft for the Xbox 360? Running demanding workloads in the cloud elastically makes a lot more sense than buying hardware you rarely use.

I suspect Google wanted faster, more measurable results than is possible with game development. There's a reason why tech companies are vastly more profitable than game companies.

I don't particularly see the shame in changing a strategy that isn't working. As an early user of Stadia I do see the lost potential though, maybe that's where this is coming from.

I think that makes a lot of sense. Google doesn't want to do the "platform building" Microsoft and Sony excel at, and it doesn't have to.

Imagine playing or trying out video games simply on the developers website.

Smart strategy by Nvidia.

I would love some sources on this.

Do the other countries have sufficiently fast internet infrastructure to make streaming work well for many people? Is there demand for Stadia there? What's the criticism regarding this exactly?

Notably Steven Hawking (and others) warned about this year ago already. Not to take away from Musk's achievements, but he's not the first to recognise and work on this problem.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interstellar-travel-starmus-speech

Classic article about the topic: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

There is no accountability to people inside corporations, only to results. Which is working as intended, companies are meant to make money by serving customers, not employees.

The simple "truth" here is that these Stadia games likely wouldn't have been successful without a lot of additional investments.

That's corporate speak for "prepare for budget cuts". If nothing would change, they'd have said so directly.

Wow, are NFTs this old already? It feels like such a new phenomena around early 2022, late 2021.

Is that a bad thing, to have something to look forward to? It implies that new technological inventions are the only way to make progress, but it is undeniably progress. Not everyone will hold this view, and no one should force it upon you. So why are people constantly criticing "techno-utopia" views instead of creating and moving towards their own visions of the future?

That's the problem -- making it easy to feel good about consuming content passively.

Is this the ultimate form of culturally accepted bragging? How many people discover they can be vaguely "inspiring" instead of delivering substance? Maybe that's what's wrong with the world.

I agree -- they're larely without substance but "interesting" and "inspiring". Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

It is becoming to be true.

He did see a bright potential before him, and that's precisely why he had a change at succeeding. I don't like the latent criticism about innovation in this article, it feels mostly like envy to me.

Was it not? I broadly see 2000-2010 as exploring the early potential of the internet, without major cultural problems (but ending with the financial crisis).

For reference, here are the "the most popular talks of 2015": https://www.ted.com/playlists/320/the_most_popular_talks_of_2015_1