" Despite all the pitfalls, organizations like Otherlab and many other small engineering firms have managed to get by on grants combined with contracts. However, their work often feels scattered and incomplete. The need to pursue different contracts and grants makes it hard to do the sort of deep long-term work that can lead to extensible breakthroughs."

This feels off to me... Otherlab is arguably one of the only working examples of what Ben is talking about here. This opinion feels not thought-through to me, and undermines much of the other opinions in the piece.

why's that?

Accuracy is a function of variability and bias.

does anyone know of an existing alternative to goodreads?