reactchain

This is really cool. I can see it being extremely useful for reviewing. The numerical citation style of CS papers has always been a pain point for me.

The argument here is that "smart people are worse looking" is actually a case of _of the people you encounter_ smart people are worse looking, but that overall there is no correlation. This makes sense, but I think it's more complex. If you took the entire population, I think you could still conclude the "smart people are worse looking" if you define smart to include non-innate, learned behaviour, for the simple reason that good looking people have an easier time in life (getting jobs and so forth) and are therefore less compelled to spend time and effort becoming "smart". So there's a self-balancing aspect that produces these correlations in the general population as well.

This is a great essay, better than some of Paul's other recent writing which has felt less inspiring than his old stuff. This feels in depth and written from the heart.

True, but I think it points to an inherent weakness in the business model. The reason it's so hard to build these businesses without relying on Google (and playing cat and mouse with their ranking algorithms) is because customers fundamentally don't care whether they get their content from you or someone else.

There is a recurring lesson with these type of threads: don't build a business that is dependent on an unstable, black-box algorithm of a mega-corp. If your business is so fragile that an algorithm update by Google causes you to have no customers, then you should have built a business with a bigger moat, brand recognition, etc. It sounds like this business was more of an SEO hack.

I find the more important question to be "how do you remember what you read?". I think (at least in my case) remembering more of what I've read would be a better investment in time than reading more, or better directing my reading. I would love to hear tips people have.

Check that you're getting enough uninterrupted sleep. I think it's a hugely underestimated way to gain mental clarity.

Has anyone noticed a shortage of Pi Zeros recently? It seems everywhere has run out of stock.

The US has a very coveted position in the West, but the reach of this is getting smaller every year. Having root access to FAANG for instance is pretty useless in China, Apple is the only one of those five with any presence to speak of. And anything supply chain related China would be in the more powerful position.

What are the chances major projects we use today aren't backdoored similarly? It's so easy to do and so hard to detect.

This is fantastic. Way better than the Algolia search which seems to be the most "official" one. I love that you cached the article content too.

Isn't this type of thing usually a civil case - how is it that he can get jail time? Also what ever happened to Kalanick in all of this?

The next logical step of course is to start bumping up "disadvantaged" listings in search rankings.