I'm reminded of Scott Alexanders musing re: whether someone "has ADD" if they have trouble focusing on things that are simply boring as fuck, like looking at spreadsheets (or code...) all day every day, week, after week, after week.
But then if all their peers are in fact outperforming them, because they're already all self-medicating for ADD symptoms, or have a prescription for ADD meds, so they can focus on something that most ordinary people would have trouble focusing on... what then?
What's normal in a work environment that's fundamentally and extremely not normal?
Given enough time abnormal becomes normal and everyone who couldn't fit in is selected out. Several thousand years ago agricultural societies were abnormal, but they allowed high population densities and were better at war so they dominated (except on the steppe).
When Henry Ford popularized the assembly line he had extremely high employee turnover. People didn't like working that way.
I looked at it the other day after the discussion thread about JS frameworks, but bounced when I saw ".svelte" files.
I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?"
I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler.
React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation.
[EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.
Things like .vue and .svelte are really more like hints to your Editor for which linter to use, which code highlighting etc. Also your build chain I guess.
I'll admit it's annoying but it's still just "normal-ass code". Vue, for instance, is just html, JavaScript and css. A .vue file is just all three in one file with special syntax to indicate each section.
That's true of Vue. Svelte has a compiler which changes and augments your code with additional code for it's state management system. So it's definitely not normal code.
I generally agree with your don't "add much more on top of JS" sentiment, but I like .vue files. It's "just" HTML, CSS, and JS in one file, which I find convenient for components. But it's optional--you're free to use three separate files.
Yeah, it's normal. When you do the same damn thing for the tenth time (or more) and you've watched all the previous ones be discarded one way or another, usually without ever doing anywhere near enough good to justify making them in the first place, you start to get the sense that you're basically just one of the pegs up near the top of the Plinko board that is modern business—not even one of the players, or the puck, but a peg—and it fucking sucks. I think some dude named Marx wrote about this a bunch.
Anywho, I've solved this by having fewer opinions about technology and generally giving fewer shits. Doomed project? Yeah, they almost all are, so, fine. Bad tech? Most of it's terrible, that's normal. Some moron having way too big a say in the project and making it worse while creating unnecessary work? Yeah, that's normal.
We must imagine Sisyphus happy. I suppose.
I've kinda thought about starting an agency or trying to launch a product, but between not being able to stand looking at a computer screen after my day job, and my guess that that'd end up sucking just as much, but in different ways, I've not done it yet. Honestly, probably never will. Coming to terms with what I, realistically, won't ever do has helped some, too. Kill any dreams you don't care enough about to work toward today. Just let 'em go.
The ratio of OK-or-worse to good-or-exceptional sure appears to be a less favorable for Netflix than the others.
Though people's rankings seem crazy to me. Apparently just producing a Star Wars thing and not totally shitting the bed in the process counts as "exceptional". Then again... yeah, that's kinda true, I guess. From a certain point of view. Still, better than nearly all shows on all those services? Yikes. I dunno about that.
While Ratio is usually the right way to evaluate things. Is that applicable in this case? Doesn't what matters is the number of good shows not the percentage? If I watch Netflix I can find three Exceptional shows and a bunch of Outstanding shows, including three at the high end of outstanding. If I watch Apple TV + There are no exceptional shows and only one at the high end of outstanding, but the ratio seems better.
It matters if they're not spending less for each show, on average, than other services. If you're dropping $20m a season, on average, and so are your competitors, but more of yours are duds, that's bad. If you're dropping $5m to your competitors' $20m, maybe it's not a problem if, say, twice as many of your seasons are bad.
But, part of the trouble with this analysis, as far as sussing out the above issue, is season-count. How many Netflix originals are as long as, say, The Sopranos? Or The Wire? How many are only one season, or maybe two? It's possible (possible! I do not know) the hours-of-original-content difference between Netflix and the other services isn't as large as this suggests. Or that it's even larger. Hard to tell.
I'd say that this chart points toward bad things for Netflix, but without some other pieces of data it's hard to tell what it's actually saying.
Hence my comment about the methodology. And HBO Max doesn't have anything that's exceptional?
For that reason, it doesn't really make sense to focus on the specifics of a handful of outliers as unreliably ranked by RT (I think). The real message is that large as Netflix' catalog is, it doesn't necessarily have a lot more highly ranked content than other sites have. (Which roughly squares with my anecdotal impressions.)
The fact that Titans is slightly higher ranked than Peacemaker on HBO is insane.
The data would be more interesting if it could be broken up by demographics. My wife (along with a lot of women) likes reality tv, and Netflix has a fair amount of that. I personally can’t stand it.
But doesn't this? Medthodology aside, taking the data as is, Netflix has like 30 programs outstanding or better. The next best is like 10. Weird about HBO Max though. Maybe because they don't consider HBO shows as 'streaming'. At least Succession should be in exceptional. If not a lot more, if you include the older work.
What should happen, if we're doing "shoulds", is that it shouldn't be permitted for one company to own both distribution and production, nor for such companies to create long-term exclusivity agreements with one another.
In certain ways yes, in certain ways no. The monopoly provided by copyright does really hinder effective competition. Requiring non-discriminatory licensing would radically change the competitive landscape in this space.
Interestingly, competition is worse for consumers in some respects here. It's resulting in fragmentation of the market such that people are too many services for 1-2 shows each
There’s vastly more high-quality television being produced than any other time in history. From my perspective, subscribing to one of the major services gives me a better experience than cable TV ever did, at a much lower cost. If I run out of stuff to watch I can always switch to another.
> competition is worse for consumers in some respects here
The implicit assumption here is that without competition, we'd have all (or most) of the same shows, just on a single service.
I don't think that's true. I think competition between streaming services largely on the basis of original content has produced a lot of good shows that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. It seems to me like there's a lot more variety in things to watch these days, and it's not like I have to pay for every streaming service every month...
Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example? Netflix has started and cancelled a ton of original series, but would they have even been tried at all back when cable TV was king? I don't know, maybe there are some statistics on the variety of TV shows being watched and I'm wrong, but I can't find them.
A shift in the competitive landscape might encourage distributors to integrate better with aggregators or meta-interfaces of various sorts. Or directly with one another, in some fashion.
> Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example?
I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production. However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
More importantly than whether Disney would still be OK, I think it would make it easier for indies and startups to participate in the market.
> A shift in the competitive landscape might encourage distributors to integrate better with aggregators or meta-interfaces of various sorts. Or directly with one another, in some fashion.
That's a big "might" there, isn't it equally possible that eventually distribution will converge on a single platform? It's much easier for that kind of thing to happen with streaming than with, say, theaters.
> I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production.
But there is no monopoly right now. I don't think you can slice an industry as thinly as "Star Wars TV shows" and say Disney has a monopoly there. Disney does not have a monopoly in the streaming market, no-one does. They have a monopoly in the same way Walmart has a monopoly on Walmart brand toothpaste, I guess.
At most you can say it's an oligopoly, which I somewhat agree with and yes, it seems like it could be improved.
> However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
If the government bans production companies from distributing their shows, mandating middle men and lower profit margins for the producers, that decreases the incentive to spend as much on production. And it's not clear that forcing a distribution middleman into the transaction is going to lower prices. After all, when Netflix raised prices, people left despite Netflix's "monopoly" on Netflix Original content.
Either of us could be right, it would be great if we could find some data, or some example from another industry to get a clearer picture.
Exactly that. I want to see more competition on price, features, and quality, and less on content availability.
It'd also make it easier to enter both parts of that market, as a production company or a distributor, which is currently something that only a company with an enormous pile of cash and/or ownership of an existing large catalog of material, can realistically do.
I really think services like YouTube are going to win out. For every hour of video I've watched on Netflix or Hulu I've probably watched 40 on Youtube. The variety of content there is absolutely incredible and so much of it is very deep educational content.
I hate YouTube for their recommendation system. I watch few things and then get million recommendations of the same thing by different author. I don’t want that, I want to see other topics and must actively search for them.
I think people are watching a lot more video in general. There are multiple generations, at this point, that mostly wouldn't pay for cable or even bother with rabbit ears even if TV & movie streaming services didn't exist, but do pay for a streaming service or three. I don't think YouTube's going to beat that entire market, unless they shift tactics pretty substantially. I think they expanded the market, though, grabbing almost all of that new territory for themselves in the process (at least until TikTok came along)
> I think people are watching a lot more video in general
My parents, their parents, and many of their peers have TVs on in the background during virtually every waking moment they spend at home, and have done so since at least the 90s.
People are watching video differently, but I'm not sure it's "a lot more".
My parents and my in-laws (all in their 70s) do this, too, and I'm astounded by it. The TV is just on and playing in the background all the time, even when we visit and are sitting down and talking. It's not enjoyable to me.
Come to think of it, my wife often does this as well (she's in her 30s). She'll put something on and then do something completely different, just the other day I came into the room to find her with netflix running on screen, a youtube video playing on another screen and her staring at her phone looking at something else.
But I find myself, if I'm going to watch something, sit down and focus on it completely, to the point that I often pause and rewind if I didn't quite catch the phrasing of something.
I guess it's just that certain people don't mind passive viewing and can have a lot more inputs without being bothered by it.
I absolutely detest YouTube and the only reason I sometimes use an Invidious instance to access it is that people basically don't put video anywhere else anymore.
Until very recently (a year or two ago?), the US didn't allow film studios to own movie theaters. Hadn't for something like 70 years. That was due to antitrust action over a situation pretty similar to what's happening with streaming services.
I think it's a good idea to mitigate the downsides of the monopoly granted by copyright, when possible. We saw similar problems with studio ownership of movie theaters, and solved that by not letting studios own movie theaters (via an antitrust suit). That's only very recently, and in what may be the twilight of the movie theater itself, changed.
In the current environment, I suspect we'll see (are already seeing, to some extent) history repeat itself, but not do anything about it this time, because we're so skittish of regulating markets now.
I don't think you should have to own an extensive catalog of content to launch a streaming service. Nor that you should effectively have to grovel for the patronage of one of a handful of integrated production+distribution mega corporations to undertake production of new media. But that's rapidly where the market's heading, and I don't see any mechanism to change that course short of anti-trust action.
There are, as usual, some benefits to the rents the current monopolistic system produces (extra cash sloshing around to throw at projects, for example—extra R&D money is a typical benefit monopolies produce, and in this case, because the monopolies are on particular content rather than on all content [so far—Disney's getting alarmingly close], there remain incentives to actually spend that money on, if you will, R&D, or the closest thing to it in media production) but at the cost reduced competition on cost & quality, and of making it much harder to enter the market, for new players.
Wouldn't be that weird if they were. Perfect fit every time and any customizations he wants, for a relative cost that'd be indistinguishable from "free", considering how much money he has. Why not? If I could pay nickels per item and get bespoke-everything, I absolutely would.
I think similarly, and I also can see how easily you could end up with bespoke stuff just from all your assistants trying to make you happy and having previous experience connecting their employers with tailors or fashion houses. Especially since the cost and convenience of measuring and selecting has decreased so much.
This was the case in the Midwest in our basically-the-same-shape-as-modern-cars 90s family cars. We'd use the windshield cleaner thing next to the gas pump nearly every time we stopped, when on road trips, and for good reason—there'd be a few large splatters and a bunch of smaller ones, every time. And that's if it wasn't particularly buggy out that day—there were some times we stopped for the windshield, not for gas.
I think I've done that like... four or five times, total, since the year 2000. And I think every time it was for a single big bug-splatter.
[EDIT] I also recall there being tens of times more large insects—butterflies, large moths, grasshoppers, katydids—around in general back in the late 80s and early 90s, even in the 'burbs, like they were just all over the place in the Spring and Summer, you'd walk through lawn-length grass at the school playground and tons of them would be all around you, hopping away or taking to the air, and now I have to try pretty hard to find even one... but surely that can't be right, can it? That'd be super noticeable by scientists who track that kind of thing. Right?
I’ve driven a lot over Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas in rural areas since the 60’s. The number of bug splats now is just a fraction of what it was in the 60’s and 70’s.
There might be a perception thing involved as well. Insects tend to emit sound in high frequencies and adults get worse in hearing those as they age. When I was in my early 20s, my mother once swore there were no crickets around while I was like "how can you not hear them? They're so loud...". Nowadays, I wonder were the crickets have gone...
That seems, I don't know, silly? It feels mean to say silly, but I can't think of a better word. Why not use 6 digits, or 7 digits, or 20 digits? Then you'll really trigger some long-term thinking in your readers. I could start writing all my dates in years since the birth of the universe, to give people a feel for the long past and how insignificant their little lives are. But this defeats the purpose of dates, which is to communicate facts about time using a common system of numbering.
Conway, too, found much to interest him, apart from the engrossing problem he had set himself. During the warm, sunlit days he made full use of the library and music room, and was confirmed in his impression that the lamas were of quite exceptional culture. Their taste in books was catholic, at any rate; Plato in Greek touched Omar in English; Nietzsche partnered Newton; Thomas More was there, and also Hannah More, Thomas Moore, George Moore, and even Old Moore. Altogether Conway estimated the number of volumes at between twenty and thirty thousand; and it was tempting to speculate upon the method of selection and acquisition. He sought also to discover how recently there had been additions, but he did not come across anything later than a cheap reprint of Im Western Nichts Neues. During a subsequent visit, however, Chang told him that there were other books published up to about the middle of 1930 which would doubtless be added to the shelves eventually; they had already arrived at the lamasery. "We keep ourselves fairly up-to-date, you see," he commented.
"There are people who would hardly agree with you," replied Conway with a smile. "Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know."
"Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940."
"You're not interested, then, in the latest developments of the world crisis?"
"I shall be very deeply interested—in due course."
But then if all their peers are in fact outperforming them, because they're already all self-medicating for ADD symptoms, or have a prescription for ADD meds, so they can focus on something that most ordinary people would have trouble focusing on... what then?
What's normal in a work environment that's fundamentally and extremely not normal?