> It's really every category of commercial activity.
I'm not going to defend capital's ability to ruin things, but this is framing is not helpful. Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term, requires two additional things:
1. A platform that tries to attract both producers and consumers. Amazon is the canonical example. The platform does what it can to attract enough consumers that producers have to use the platform to reach them. Then it squeezes out the value to the producers (e.g., hiking acquisition fees, etc.; competing with them and underselling them with cheaper alternatives). The final step is to destroy the value to the consumer, by degrading quality and increasing price. By this time, neither producers nor consumers have many levers to fight back.
2. Non-physical pricing levers. Enshittification requires the ability to observe consumer behavior and jigger pricing at great speed. We see this in Amazon again; ridesharing apps introduced surge pricing; ads are priced according to what platforms know about you. In a physical store, the logistical cost of changing the price of goods is nontrivial, so we don't see the same sort of gaming there.
Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into some vague "things got worse" meaning.
>Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into
The gp I replied to already used "enshittification" in a more general way to describe "almost all software". Most software out there is not the platforms that have the 2 factors you listed. I was just going going along with the conversation.
As far as policing the usage of "enshittification", you've got an uphill battle because people like the way it sounds and tend to use it as a spicy word to talk about anything getting worse. They're not going to research what Cory Doctorow was talking about and doublecheck to see if matches exactly what he was trying to describe. E.g. See it used to complain about "public libraries", "policing", "tech jobs", etc: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshittification
It's the same story with Express as a web server framework for Node.
I've always felt that the biggest problem with the Javascript ecosystem is that it's entirely too preoccupied with syntax. Remember CoffeeScript!? Some of the most influential forces in the community can waste entire years bikeshedding some syntactic thing that is mostly a matter of personal aesthetics. And this trickles down to the grunts trying to ship a product.
It's a fundamental drawback to Javascripts other strengths. And that's the reason it's so easy to find Express apps that are hot garbage. It's one of the most enduring myths that If you know Javascript, you can write a Node app.
It only works because software has been such an economically productive force, that having thousands of professionals spending weeks deciding whether semicolons are good or bad, or fighting their webpack configs, or migrating for loops to array methods... whatever... it still makes money at the end of the day.
For a very informal tour, The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu is a science fiction novel where the history of mathematics, physics, and computation play a large role. So much so that I think it puts many people off the book and its entire trilogy.
We didn't. It's on our list of things to open source and write about though, so we will when time permits. Probably won't be until after the new year, as we're focused on preparing for CES.
I work on a similar team, with a mix of people who want to use functional styles and those who want something more imperative.
I lean toward the pro-functional style, but I also put a few strong constraints on when to use reduce. Namely, I would almost never use it in cases where I either want to (a) mutate something other than the accumulator or (b) include more than two branches of control flow in the reducer function.
This kind of goes for all the functional array methods. Many people are tempted to use them simply as alternate syntax for iterating through the array (i.e., a simple loop), where the loop body could contain several statements -- i.e., data mutation side effects, taking different execution paths based on certain conditions, etc. The functional style is way less clear in this sort of code.
The benefit of the functional style in the context of javascript array methods is when you can see at a glance what the shape of the resulting value is with respect to that of the source array. This is usually best done when the body of the reducer/mapper/filterer is a single expression.
Can somebody please ELI5 his whole phenomenon? I don't really understand who are the targets (other than Nate Silver) of all his polemic. From my limited exposure, he's basically making age-old conservative points, arguing that the Enlightenment ideal of human knowledge has strong (but unidentified) limits.
Why is he so popular? And how did he get so rich on Wall Street if he just thinks randomness blows all the statistical experts out of the water? I know I'm missing something.
No: he does not say that statistics are useless. He says that the assumption of normality does not hold in real life: fat tails and the absence of means are ubiquitous. That is all the “black swan” means and how he got rich: taking risks which are nonsense under normal distributions but not so under, for instance, the Cauchy distribution.
Taleb's basic claim is that options that are way out of the money are underpriced. So he set up a fund, Empirica, which bought options a long way from the current value. This strategy does extremely well in years of a sudden downturn, and loses money in all other years. He and his investors did really well in 2008. He doesn't talk about the other years. Solid numbers for Empirica are really hard to find. Whether this is a win as an ongoing strategy is a big question. If you'd bought into that strategy in 2009, after it worked once, you'd have lost money for a decade.
Right, Empirica was the first "black swan" fund, which caught the crash of 2000. Universa was the next round, starting in 2007. That caught the 2008 crash.
As a strategy, this depends on a rough prediction of when the next crash will occur.
> this depends on a rough prediction of when the next crash will occur
If you think the tails are mispriced (and you have some kind of alternative distribution), and markets are liquid, can't you just keep on making Kelly bets? Maybe you need to model third-party investors bailing too, though...
Thanks. Ok, so is he creating strawmen everywhere, then? I know people working in government, biotech, climate research, and none of them seem to think that the normal distribution is the only model out there, or that the mean is a very meaningful (no pun intended) statistic.
The problem is: the normal assumption is just an assumption with a very interesting asymptotic property. That makes it good for computations.
However, Nature and more specifically economic events have little asymptotics in them (mainly isolated things like crises, earthquakes, crashes, accidents...).
I tend to agree with him on this.
He is not against science. He is mostly against economic modellers.
Some of his books contain pretty interesting insights, unfortunately his huge ego and his unwavering admiration for other egomaniacs like Trump gets tiring and leads to obvious contradictions that he doesn't explain. One of his main thesis is that people having "skin in the game" leads to a better society, but then somehow being critical of someone who makes horrible bets on real estate & casino using billions of other people's money (bank's) and not suffering any consequences, is sacrilege.
I don't get your last point - I think he is clearly in favor of "if you take the risk, you deserve both the win and the loss" - explicitly calling out that people who risk other people's money and take their cut whether it wins or loses are the worst.
I have had to push for leveraging postgres for data validation (including typing columns with enums where applicable), and sometimes it's hard to convince people, but all you have to do is (a) poke around your existing data and find cases where you have junk because of some out-of-band process that created data without using your main app's validation, and (b) do a couple out-of-band things like an ETL or two and see how it saves you from creating junk.
I don't know where I picked this adage up, but it's also something I constantly think about:
Your data will outlive your application code.
IME, if you value the data's integrity, it's not really a question whether you should be pushing validations down to the db layer.
I'm not going to defend capital's ability to ruin things, but this is framing is not helpful. Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term, requires two additional things:
1. A platform that tries to attract both producers and consumers. Amazon is the canonical example. The platform does what it can to attract enough consumers that producers have to use the platform to reach them. Then it squeezes out the value to the producers (e.g., hiking acquisition fees, etc.; competing with them and underselling them with cheaper alternatives). The final step is to destroy the value to the consumer, by degrading quality and increasing price. By this time, neither producers nor consumers have many levers to fight back.
2. Non-physical pricing levers. Enshittification requires the ability to observe consumer behavior and jigger pricing at great speed. We see this in Amazon again; ridesharing apps introduced surge pricing; ads are priced according to what platforms know about you. In a physical store, the logistical cost of changing the price of goods is nontrivial, so we don't see the same sort of gaming there.
Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into some vague "things got worse" meaning.