Just out of curiosity, is there nothing that you have preferences about? Because I think it's easy to look at someone else's hobby and reflexively say that they're overpaying for something.

For example, I can't personally fathom paying 4k for a gaming PC. 60 vs 40 frames per second doesn't "matter" to me in any meaningful sense.

That being said, I totally get why other people care. If gaming is the thing you really enjoy, I can see why you might want the faster framerate. If you exclusively play super demanding games, I can see wanting decreased loading times and better graphics.

I guess the point I'm making is it's totally fine to drink your Folgers and be fine with that. I do also think that there are "overpriced" coffee places that aren't offering meaningfully better quality and are surviving based on branding. But I think it's okay to spend more for things that you like more. If might be "just a cup of coffee" to you, but reflect and consider what your "cup of coffee" is.

In my opinion, life is more fun when we can enjoy the variety that it has to offer and let others do the same.

Oh sure, I have no objection to people doing it, enough people like Starbucks coffee to keep them in business and employing people and paying taxes so it's all good in that sense. I just don't partake.

Also if I like something (e.g. Whiskey) I try to find the bargain values that are still good (e.g. Evan Williams White Label 100 Proof) rather than spending a lot more on a bottle that's marginally (if at all) better but has a name with more cachet.

I guess the problem I see is that I can think of a lot of careers (teachers, basically all of healthcare, certain kinds of engineers, etc.) where "below market pay" is translating to shortages and the need to push under or unqualified workers into roles they're not suited for.

This leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily finding some highly skilled people to accept below-market rates for mission-drive jobs. It's finding enough skilled people willing to accept the tradeoff.

Public schools haven't solved that problem. Healthcare hasn't seemed to solve that problem either. They're cautionary tales in that if you can't find enough people to accept the tradeoff, the remaining job openings are filled with significantly worse candidates because you pay below market rate.

I think u/lotsofpulp addresses this in a comment below. I agree with that position: the reason it is becoming harder to fill those jobs has more to do with the lowered quality of the job than the pay.

I'm not sure the pay argument holds. For example, where I live, the average starting teacher salary is higher than the median overall salary. When you couple that with the fact they are on 4-day workweeks and get substantial time off (summers/holidays), the pro-rated pay is actually reasonably high for a starting salary. (Granted, I think it hits a ceiling relatively fast.) From talking to them, I suspect the driving force that make it hard to retain teachers is the lack of quality of life. I think it was Csikszentmihalyi who talks about the need for autonomy in one's career for it to be fulfilling, and the current system seems to limit that to an extreme. Just like u/lotsofpulp's comments about doctors, I think this means the job shifts much of the work from the purpose teachers chose the profession in the first place, and leads to burnout.

A serious problem with teaching is that the quality of the job is lower the better you are as a teacher. Good teachers spend a tremendous amount of time outside of school hours on grading and preparation. They also have effectively lower pay as they’re buying classroom supplies with their own money. But if you don’t care much about teaching and just do what it takes to keep the job, you can skip most of that.

But what if the rate at which things change increases to the point that humans can't adapt in time? This has happened to other animals (coral has existed for millions of years and is now threatened by ocean acidification, any number of native species have been crowded out by the introduction of non-native ones, etc.).

Even humans have gotten shocks like this. Things like the Black Death created social and economic upheavals that lasted generations.

Now, these are all biological examples. They don't map cleanly to technogical advances, because human brains adapt much faster than immune systems that are constrained by their DNA. But the point is that complex systems can adapt and can seem to handle "anything," up until they can't.

I don't know enough about AI or LLM's to say if we're reaching an inflection point. But most major crises happen when enough people say that something can't happen, and then it happens. I also don't think that discouraging innovation is the solution. But I don't also want to pretend like "humans always adapt" is a rule and not a 300,000 year old blip on the timeline of life's existence.

I'm not saying that our ancestors were wrong. Hell, I live in a house that was originally built under similar conditions.

That being said, buildings collapse a lot less frequently these days. House fires happen at a lower rate. Insulation was either nonexistent or present in much lower quantities.

I guess the point I'm making is that the lesson here shouldn't be "we used to make our houses, why don't we go back to that?" It also shouldn't be "we should leave every task to a specialist."

Know how to maintain and fix the things around your house that are broken. You don't need a plumber to replace the flush valve on your toilet. But maybe don't try to replace a load-bearing joist in your house unless you know what you're doing? The people building their own homes weren't engineers, but they had a lot more carpentry experience than (I assume) you and I.

I think it's one of those things where you don't "notice" it, but where it nevertheless has an impact. Sort of like someone might not "notice" the fact that there's more butter or salt in restaurant food, but it's subjectively better than the same meal they cooked at home.

For a more directly relevant example, companies frequently A/B test changes to a UI to see which ones people like better. The specifics of those changes would be pretty marginal if you didn't know what it looked like before (like if you're a new user, you wouldn't notice if the notification was red versus purple, or what the wording in the menu is). Despite this, there are some sites that just "feel" better in a way that you can't really describe.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I can't tell if I'm looking at Arial, Helvetica, or this Nebula Sans font unless they were side by side (and even then I'd just be saying they're different, not identifying them by name). But I think the site would feel a lot less modern if it were written in Times New Roman. I think you'd notice if it were too hard to read when small, and I think if it looked "bad," you'd at least subconsciously notice that.

Sure, I'd happily take a more readable, less eye strain, less ink consuming, whatever, font. What is announced here, however, is "A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic, designed for legibility in both digital and print applications" which is just designer speak for NIH.

Worth questioning who that benefits the most. It definitely benefits consumers in the sense that they won't be bombarded by advertisements.

But it also benefits large businesses that already spent millions advertising and now have a much deeper moat.

It kind of reminds me of college sports before NIL deals. Back then, you couldn't pay college recruits. You'd think this levels the playing field, right?

In fact, we saw the opposite effect. You see schools spending millions to add waterslides to their locker rooms, or promising "exposure" that smaller schools can't offer. You essentially had to spend twice as much on stuff that indirectly benefited the players.

I'd expect similar things to happen among businesses. Think "crazy stunt in Times Square so that an actual news site will write about it."

Is there a sentient human that has access to (and actually uses) all of the Pokémon game guides yet is incapable of beating Pokémon?

Because that's what an LLM is working with.

I'm quite sure my grandma could not. You can make the argument these people aren't intelligent but I think that's a contrived argument.

>The Guardian US expects to hit $44 million in voluntary reader donations in the U.S. and Canada this year, up 33 percent over last year

>"We’re now at a place where our audience is actually bigger in the U.S. than The Wall Street Journal’s audience in the U.S."

That feels like not that much money considering the readership, right? The WSJ has somewhere around 3 million subscribers; they would need to be making only 14 dollars per subscription per year to do that sort of revenue.

Not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but more that you need a pretty substantial readership to get there.

Put another way, that revenue is like 200k subscribers at 20 bucks a month. That would put you at the level of a newspaper like the Minnesota Star Tribune as far as subscription revenue.

>that revenue is like 200k subscribers at 20 bucks a month

I suspect donors (as opposed to subscribers) pay much less than $240/year.

That's my point. This is a website with readership comparable to the WSJ that is pulling in reader revenue closer to the Minnesota Star Tribune.

It's just something that I feel should be in the conversation. The Guardian's business model is clearly successful for them, but IMO it's not something that can apply to most other newspapers.

Based on my napkin math for the WSJ compared to the Guardian, the WSJ would only expect to get ~5% of their revenue replaced if they switched business models. Even if I'm off by a factor of 5, you'd still be looking at a 75% reduction.

I don't say this to be critical of the Guardian. I love their work and I'm happy they've chosen the model they have, because it enables access to high-quality journalism for free. It is also a great case study proving that this business model works and can be sustainable. But I don't want people drawing the conclusion that every newspaper could survive like this.

What sort of business are you running? Are you under time pressure from competitors to get the product out? Do you personally have monetary pressures? How do you feel about this work schedule, and does it feel sustainable?

The point I'm making is that you are unique. The fact that you're an independent founder is the one thing you share in common with other independent founders. What works for you will be a function of your business, your temperament, your personal life, and a variety of other factors.

Patent trolls benefit from it being expensive and time-consuming to challenge patents (and defend yourself from infringement claims)

These regulations are actually beneficial to big business. It makes it significantly easier to defend your own patents and sue anybody that infringes on them.

I imagine that these benefits are much bigger than the downside of dealing with patent trolls.