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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • Because that’s what intelligence is. There’s a very funny video floating around of a squirrel repeatedly trying to bury an acorn in a dog’s fur and completely failing to understand why it’s not working. Now sure, a squirrel is not the smartest animal in the world, but it does have some intelligence, and yet there it is just mindlessly reproducing a pattern in the wrong context. Maybe you’re thinking that humans aren’t like that, that we make decisions by actually thinking through our actions and their consequences instead of just repeating learned patterns. I put it to you that if that were the case, we wouldn’t still be dealing with the same problems that have been plaguing us for millennia.







  • Yes, but by other companies. Those problems are not created intentionally in order to create and exploit a market, they’re just consequences of those other companies doing business. Pretty much the only example of companies creating problems so that they can sell solutions I can think of is free-to-play games (e.g. make game excessively grindy on purpose to sell boosters). Some of that scummy monetization is now creeping into real-world products, with things such as subscription-based heated seats that are installed in your car regardless but disabled unless you pay up, but the vast majority of products and services on the market address problems that were not created by their manufacturers/providers.