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Maybe there are people who would be happier washing their clothes by hand, but I'm sure they're the exception rather than the rule.

Most people just don't like doing the shopping, cooking, and cleaning involved with daily meal preparation. Most people also don't like cleaning in general, and hate their commutes. Thinking of these as therapeutic tasks is as much a luxury of white collar life as unlimited access to maids and food delivery services is.

And the idea that you'd save time or money with proper knowledge of how to source and prep your own fruits and vegetables, or that time spent cleaning disappears because you consider it exercise, all seems like magical thinking to me.

As soon as you place a realistic dollar figure on the value of your time, for most of us, all of those calculations break down dramatically in favor of outsourcing most tasks related to food, cleaning, and transportation, not only as a matter of comfort, but also as a matter of economics.

It makes sense that it would work out this way, too. A single Uber driver with a single car can satisfy the transportation needs of a dozen people. An Instacart shopper can gather everything 3 families need in a single pass through the store. The driver can get those groceries to 3 homes in a single round trip instead of 3 separate round trips.

Outsourcing can seem wasteful and opulent, but in doing so you're often participating in a sharing economy or benefiting from economies of scale and division of labor that actually serve to reduce waste and inefficiency.

Haha, fair enough. :)

Some proof or data to back up the article's claim would be great. I'm not really buying it.

If moms auto-like every post, then how is that a relevant signal? Everyone has a mom. That would mean every post is getting penalized in the same way (which effectively means no posts are getting penalized).

And if circumventing this was as simple as excluding his mom, wouldn't the effect be even greater if he excluded all non-technical friends and family?

Which pretty much just means you're posting this for the greater public, which presumably a lot of users of Facebook's API already do. Since his intention is for his content to be seen by the greater public, then... go ahead and tell the API that?

It's a great angle for an article, and it's very shareable, but he provides no data (even though he seems like someone who would have all of the data).

That's interesting, but in that scenario, how important is the composer really?

Couldn't we just connect the variable output of the AI to some kind of Mechanical Turk-style focus group, feed those results as inputs back into the AI, and repeat that process millions of times? Might that produce a better song than an individual composer?

I've seen interviews with some modern artists, and they'll often take inspiration from decades-old hits (which are essentially de-risked melodies) and apply them to a modern template. I'm assuming the bigger labels already focus-group the output and make revisions. This seems like something that could eventually be automated.

> While true ...

This just broke my brain.

I think it's time for me to go to bed...

Is this possible? It doesn't seem like the necessary information is captured in a picture.

I don't think there's a person that could tell you whether food in a picture has allergens, let alone an app.

Maybe this has been said already, but one major problem with Twitter is that by default, the average person will publish and share content on it that's a complete waste of time and of no value to anybody.

The average unit of content shared by a user on Instagram or Snapchat is vastly more entertaining and relevant, and I think they achieve that by being more visual. Those platforms are image- and video-first, and they have all kinds of image and video filters. If we gave those tools to a monkey, it would produce something worth sharing.

The quality of their content is enforced inherently by the tools they provide you to share with.

Facebook achieves the same in a different way, by tightly integrating with your identity and social circles.

Twitter doesn't have any form of inherent quality control. Tweets are just words with little context. The people tweeting are usually strangers.

Risk is one of the things that debt can represent, sometimes, but there can be debt that doesn't involve any risk, and there are risks that don't involve debt.

What's risky about using a credit card to buy a kayak?

And how does investing money you already have in small cap equities represent a debt?

I think for the vast majority of individuals just trying to make good personal finance decisions, "don't take on debt" is (on average) great advice.

One caveat to this kind of thinking is that money is fungible.

One can easily pay for a vacation or years of eating at nice restaurants every day all in cash, and also go into debt for an education.

Also, one individual taking out an auto loan and a loan from Sallie Mae isn't 1 good loan and 1 bad loan. You could've foregone the high-interest loan on the big depreciating asset and used the savings to fund the education instead of the loan from Sallie Mae. In that scenario both loans were probably a bad idea, regardless of the return the education nets you.

I think another key metric beyond interest rate and rate of return, is degree of necessity. That's harder to measure though.