I’m a huge user of AI coding tools but I feel like there has been some kind of a zeitgeist shift in what is acceptable to release across the industry. Obviously it’s a time of incredibly rapid change and competition, but man there is some absolute garbage coming out of companies that I’d expect could do better without much effort. I find myself asking, like, did anyone even do 5 minutes of QA on this thing?? How has this major bug been around for so long?

“It’s kind of broken, maybe they will fix it at some point,” has become a common theme across products from all different players, from both a software defect and service reliability point of view.

I think it’s maybe close to a wash between non-replaceable batteries in wireless headphones dying and cords failing, in my experience at least. The ideal case IMO is over-ear headphones that have a replaceable cord—I have some 14 year old Bose QCs and some newer Beyerdynamics, both of which I’ve replaced the cord on.

I was just talking with a friend about this on Sunday, just before the big oil price runup—it was very curious to me that I had had to hunt around a bit for coverage of what was going on with the strait.

Closure was something I had known was a risk with any conflict with Iran after learning about the Tanker War in some politics class in college, and following the various threats over the past 15 years or so. It seemed like something that should have had tons of coverage as soon as I heard the US had attacked Iran, and I wanted to know what was actually going on with it...yet all of the mainstream press seemed to skirt around it until oil prices finally spiked on Sunday, even though traffic through the strait had fallen off a cliff a week beforehand.

If Moltbook becomes as big as Instagram I’m giving up on tech and moving to the mountains to raise goats.

Ultimately I think all of what you describe there falls into a bucket of personality traits and social skills that contribute to success in many areas of life.

It's some combination of what they call "self monitoring" in social psychology, plus general EQ and Machiavellian personality traits that allow people to read the room and adjust their tone, speaking style, word choice (including picking up in-group lingo quickly), posture etc to be most effective given the setting. This applies to basically any social environment, and is often a frustrating reality to many people who may be extremely competent but see others around them who are obviously less competent "getting ahead" through social acumen, office politics etc.

This has been studied among MBA graduates, Do Chameleons Get Ahead, The Effects of Self-Monitoring on Managerial Careers (pdf): https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/...