> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

I've found that this is also true of American engineers, particularly those fresh out of college. So many people have internalized that open curiosity will yield no result at best and direct punishment at worst.

> The market then becomes a voting machine for the public to decide if they think the person will succeed or not.

Which would be great, if the mechanism and prize for "voting" were something other than people's basic means of survival.

Gambling addiction isn't bad because there's something wrong with predicting outcomes, it's bad because it causes people to lose all of their money.

"Kalshi, but with a maximum order size of $1" would be great. Kalshi, with a maximum order size of oh crap I can't pay my rent this month, is very bad!

Talking about "traditional" sports gambling rather than prediction markets: how do we account for the heavy restrictions they place on "sharps" (consistent winners)? If a game can be won through application of skill, but winning through application of skill causes you to be effectively banned, then the game cannot be won through application of skill.

Phrase it like this - market makers and casinos and other hosts really don't want it be a game of skill.

They don't mind a few with skill so long as those people don't win too often and they brag about their winnings to others who then think they have skill.

of course if you had the skill to win big why would you not make that your job thus making too much.

The game is still won through the application of skill even if the house chooses not to play it with you.

Duration comes into play here. Is blackjack a single long game or is each hand a "game?"

The house isn't a player. They offer the game for players to play. That is a fundamentally different role.

Saying that the house is playing the game against you is equivalent to saying that Nintendo is playing Super Mario Bros against you.

There is an entire category of casino games where the house is a player. These are called house-banked games and they include most of what you imagine when you think of a casino floor: blackjack, roulette, craps, slots, etc.

But even in player-banked games like poker, the house is an agent participating in the game through the dealer. They can still exercise their right to free association and not play with you.

A corrected analogy would be Nintendo banning you from Mario Kart Online for suspected cheating. Yes, Nintendo isn't playing, but they still have that authority as the facilitator.

"Blocking traffic" is at this point a tired trope. Any sort of disruptive action is described as "blocking traffic", which is somehow framed as a form of violence. (My favorite version is when people argue that it is a form of unlawful detention akin to kidnapping.)

This would be more accurately framed as "parking illegally", which is the sort of thing for which you occasionally get a ticket placed under your windshield wiper, not the sort of thing for which armed, masked agents violently arrest you.

There are two different things at play, and it's important to be clear about them:

- Legal protest. Standing out of the way, yelling, singing, signs, etc. 100% protected, only subject to reasonable crowd control (by the local LEA), eg to move people off the roadway.

- Civil disobedience. Intentional non-violent violations of the law. Intended to slow/disrupt government activity. You are breaking the law to make a point, and should be willing to accept the consequences. The violations are almost always minor, with at most a week or two in jail and a fine. Law enforcement has a legal obligation to apply proportionally in the enforcement, if they are non-violent then little or no force is acceptable in detaining or citing the protestors.

>If you resist arrest, you will be forcefully arrested/apprehended. If you then attempt potentially life-threatening physical harm to the officer you will likely be met with deadly force.

Translation: you'll be summarily executed if the officer vaguely feels "threatened"

You can call it whatever you like, it's going to happen, and you know it will. You have the choice to not throw your life away by fucking with ICE and trying to aggravate and harass them on purpose, and to not become a clickbait internet video of someone getting shot for being stupid.

All of this conveniently ignores the question of whether the ICE agent's act was legal or ethical, and is bordering on victim blaming. And the record, I am against the women's behavior. I just think the ICE agent's response was totally disproportionate, and that we shouldn't be killing people for such activities. I'm also against stealing, but that doesn't mean I'm going to cheer if a shoplifter gets summarily executed by a cop, or think "the shoplifter has the choice not to throw their life away by not screwing with the cops" is an acceptable excuse for the cop's behavior.

I'm beginning to strongly suspect that many foods are being engineered not to leave you satisfied but to leave you so close to satisfied. I never feel like I just got the perfect bite. My brain wants one more, chasing that perfect bite.

It's a worrisome addiction pattern. I'm still not sure if it indicates something that's been done to the food or a serious problem with my thought patterns.

Don't punish the behavior you want to see. Would we rather they defaulted there? Sure. But it's arguably an even better signal to see that they're willing to listen to their customers even when there is no direct financial incentive for them.

Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force everyone to buy new speakers, driving sales. But if the community is able to get open source firmware to run spotifyd on them, there is a non-zero (not everyone, but it's non-zero) amount of people that will just not buy new speakers from them.

> Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force...

Maybe?

People stuck with Bose bricks might show a preference for non-Bose replacements.

People who thought Bose speakers would stay useful longer might prefer Bose, or be willing to pay for a more expensive Bose speaker model.

(Yes, I agree that some PHB's at Bose were almost certainly imagining that their customers would be forced to re-purchase Bose speakers. I'm questioning the validity of their initial assumptions.)

From talking to friends and family, so n=10-ish, non-computer people have not realized that sticking computers in things means they die on computer lifetimes, not appliance lifetimes. No more switches that last for the life of the house; no more speakers that your kids can do modest maintenance to and keep using.

And, if I, a non-Bose customer, hear that Bose open sourced a previous version of their speaker, which gives me some confidence that a present purchase might be somewhat future-proofed, then I am more likely to buy a new Bose product vs a competitor who does not provide sources.

If they can make this OS story go viral, then they stand to have a lot of customers defect from their competitors even people who would never really care about open source.

Could easily be net positive.

It's not negative, though, or at least they don't think so. The fact that they are doing this OSS release means that they believe any loss of new sales would be dwarfed by a loss of goodwill if they'd bricked the old devices.

Certainly goodwill is harder to quantify.

This is why I said "direct". This is an indirect financial incentive, and there are other indirect financial incentives at play here (as others have noted).

The turn-based version sounds interesting, but I think it falls on its face in practice. The game then becomes:

1. lure the horse to an optimal point on the map.

2. trap it in a small circle of fences.

3. build part of your final wall with the remaining fences.

4. one by one, move the fences trapping the horse in place into position.

Public interest stories are left-leaning only in that they tend to oppose the wielders of centralized power, and centralized power is generally a right-leaning construct.

Not only does the bad tutorial have an in-universe justification; the ways in which it is bad are actually significant to the worldbuilding in multiple ways.

The missing information also encourages positive interactions among the community - newer players are expected to be missing lots of key information, so teaching them is a natural and encouraged element of gameplay.

I stopped playing the game awhile ago, but the tutorial always struck me as really clever.

> I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting.

There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.

It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.

I have never been sure if collecting is wholesome. I think Pohl did show it as one example of rampant consumerist addiction in one of the books(can't remember which of the ones with marketing guys).

I would guess that collecting goes beyond wholesome once finding the products comes really hard and there is very high prices and extremely low rates involved.