Kinda wild that the model just gave up when it hit current debt levels. Not because the math was off but because it assumes we’ll “fix things later” by default. That’s not a forecast, it’s blind hope baked into the system.
Feels like we’ve passed the point where debt is just a background worry. If the models can’t even handle where we’re at now, maybe the risks are way closer than we’d like to think.
Want to screw with an Economist? Ask them for a model that can keep the Vatican afloat for a thousand years through empires/nations/banks/currencies collapsing.
It is interesting that the complaint is that the model would not converge. Convergence might be a nice property to have or desire, but simple systems don't necessarily converge. For instance ecosystems are chaotic.
This nuclear battery tech is wild. Tiny devices that could run for decades without a recharge changes the game for things like sensors, medical implants or space gear. Still early but if they improve the efficiency, it could seriously shift how we think about power.
Loved this, it’s silly fun on the surface but there’s something satisfying about reclaiming agency. Those cursors tearing away dark text areas feel symbolic, like pushing back on pages that are overwhelming or tedious.
It’s a playful twist on UI customization, not about automating or filtering content but about physically “eating” it. Makes me rethink how subtle interactions can change our feeling toward the web we spend hours staring at.
Absolutely, I feel like there is a lack of expressivity on the web – sure, I can upvote, comment, block/report or go away, but that's basically it. I can't frown, toss thing off the table, spit, grunt, roll eyes, look away, listen intently, nervously touch my face or fidget with my keys. At least not in any socially significant way. And as we spend so much time online, our expressiveness also kind of gets filtered down to the tools that are available. Not bodily expression but a few very limited gestures. So maybe we can imagine and create new gestures?
My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :)
https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/
And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great):
https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
The sharp drop in Premier League draws after 1993 clearly lines up with increasing club inequality, something most fans feel but isn't always backed by data.
It raises an important question: is competitive balance worse for business? Fans love unpredictability, but money seems to be concentrating power.
Unfortunately, because of the phenomenon of "brand loyalty" fans will continue to support their teams even when they have no chance of winning anything (due to lack of finances); and the elites that run the EPL know this all too well.
Much more fun to go out and support lower league clubs. And cheaper too.
Few months ago I was watching Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley interviews and they said that in F1 there should be a cap on how much teams are allowed to spend because Mercedes always wins....but in football there are no such thoughts and limits and that's why Manchester City and PSG rose so hard in the last 10 years. If you pump billions of dollars into any business, you will more likely win than not win, just look at TikTok, they pumped billions into advertising and user-acqisition and now they rule on mobile.
There absolutely are limits on how much can be spent. That’s why Man City is under investigation of 100+ charges for violating FFP, financial fair play, rules.
Even the Yankees were deemed unbeatable because the power of their checkbook, yet they haven’t won the World Series since 2009 (according to quick search. I don’t follow baseball). So the big purse isn’t always the thing people make it to be. Sure it helps, but no guarantees. Otherwise, moneyball wouldn’t have been a thing
>There absolutely are limits on how much can be spent. That’s why Man City is under investigation of 100+ charges for violating FFP, financial fair play, rules.
They are under investigation posteriori, they should've been stopped apriori acquiring top players for large sums of money.
I do not accept that premise at all. You make it sound like they discovered it was wrong after the fact rather than knowing the rules before making the decision. That's some serious white washing
My intention was preventing the abuse of financial power e.g. put price controls on player acquisitions so Manchester City or PSG are not allowed to pay €100M for a new player while other clubs can't afford top players or rising stars. It would disturb the football industry at first but you can make that policy dynamic or in another words limits change as the macro climate in the football industry changes.
Loved this, such a good reminder that for a lot of us in SE Asia, VCDs weren’t just a format, they were basically the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs. Karaoke, bootlegs, family movies… it was all mixed in.
What’s interesting is how much the timing of official releases shaped all this. If you had to wait months for a cinema run or home video, the “street version” was too tempting to pass up.
VCD were a format that put compressed video and sound onto a standard CD. That is where Mp3s sort of come from. The VCD actually used MPEG1layer2 for sound, but layer 3 came along and computer enthusiasts used that for audio in the mid 1990s. SVCDs came out in the later 90s They used the MPEG2 like Dvds and were often spread over multiple discs. DIVX came from a Microsoft program that had MPEG4 inside of the software, this and the wrapper AVI came together for the first internet distribution focused format. There was a Chinese DVD player and some mainstream ones that supported VCD and SVCD and later avis. There was an active scene modding certain Phillips DVD players in the early 2000s.
You left out the DIVX pushed by Circuit City with the DRM crap limiting the number of plays. I never truly looked into the format, but I once heard that the format would use IPB long-GOP encoding, but left out the B-frames and used in their place the code that made it locking. It's demise couldn't come fast enough. I seem to recall it needing a phone cable to work as well, but the wiki page does not mention that, but does mention something implying connectivity "The player's Security Module, which had an internal Real-Time Clock, ceased to allow DIVX functions after 30 days without a connection to the central system."[0]
DIVX/XVID is ambiguous, it is a video format and separately a crappy DRM ecosystem from defunct Circuit City. The format DIVX would compress a full length movie to about 700MB (a CD capacity), where VCD MPEG-1 only got 75-80 minutes. LaserDisc owners were already trying to solve the disc-change interruption problem with premium two sided players. The format was also better to watch, in that the compression artifacts were less obvious. But the Rights Holders at the time, like for music, were more concerned with piracy, even though everything they did would make the consumer experience worse and drive more piracy. DIVX the DRM is a great example of an anti-consumer consumer format, and environmentally wasteful too as the plastic disc became "spent" after 30 days.
As I thought I reall should had specified what I meant DivX ;) 3.11 and the later derivatives. No restrictions and from a some year - even a built-in support in the hardware CD/DVD VCRs
Interesting read. It’s wild how a small shift in bloom timing can mess up bees’ whole schedule. Anyone know if farmers are actually seeing lower yields because of this?
As a person who owns some hayfields it comes as no surprise. Spots that are wetter and warmer or richer have different plant populations. Large-scale farmers who have GPS-integrated combine harvesters get yield maps as the machine measures how much production there is in various spots.
So many teams struggle with “fake Agile”: standups that feel pointless, Kanban boards that stay outdated or sprints that are just mini-waterfalls.
There’s an interesting write-up on what a real Agile environment looks like, covering principles, common pitfalls and ways to create conditions for true ownership and collaboration.
What have you seen really make or break an Agile team’s environment?
Feels like we’ve passed the point where debt is just a background worry. If the models can’t even handle where we’re at now, maybe the risks are way closer than we’d like to think.