Pandora's box has been opened, per the story all that remains is hope. You can't go back in time and change history.
If you want to make a better world from a better internet you need to save people from the tyranny of the marginal user (https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). It's not the web, its the people. Those people incentivize enshittification. People will need to change, not the companies, the government, or the creators... the supply is purely filling this demand. The indie web isn't going to help a grandma see photos of her grand kids as easily as facebook will. And the indie web won't help you find a used guitar as well as craigslist will.
I would often do general consulting while mainly helping with tech, marketing or sales... and I noticed that all of my most important advice no one would follow. It got so extreme that I would often joke that "I know my advice is good because no one ever takes it". David Maister acknowledged a similar thing in his book "Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy"
This article strikes a chord of course because its right in line with that thought. Deathbed regrets in that sense are kind of cheap - they knew what they were doing and did it anyway. I think the author is however missing a key feature of this genre though - those regrets are almost always things that are there, that have no deadline and are easily delayed. Spending time with family, working on hobbies or creative pursuits, and so on. What the regretters are failing to attribute is their lack of discipline... and that there is a valuable take away. The genre could really be just a derivative of: "I wish I had been more disciplined in my life"
People on their deathbed are not deploring their lack of discipline. In very real sense, what these people are mourning is the opposite. TFA links to another article, "The Deathbed Fallacy", which lists some of the most often mentioned regrets, namely:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I didn’t work so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I wish I didn't care that much for others' opinion.
It's not about having discipline. It's about enjoying our own unique human life and our world with all its possibilities. About not working the machine until we become machine-like ourselves. If I need flex some will-power muscles and employ a well-oiled personal productivity system to get me to spend time with those friends, it's either that I've become a machine, only gaining satisfaction from climbing whatever ladders my ambition set its sight on, or I'm slacking off on another important human life-task: finding and making friends which bring joy into and enrich my life.
Yes, deathbed regrets aren't actionable self-help advice. They are confessions, really, and no, they are not cheap. They are messages from those who've reached the fifth level of relating with death, that of acceptance, whereas we're still loitering on the first one, denial [1]. They uncover something deep and painful in ourselves, they say most of us are missing something important when we are afraid to go the uncharted routes and follow the safe pre-written ones instead.
[1] "The Denial of Death" is a book worth checking out.
I think this is an infinitely more useful way of saying what the blogger was attempting to.
There is a flawed prioritization happening that we are seeing have it's natural conclusion on the deathbed - delaying things that feel forever available (spending time with the kids) for things that feel urgent (that critical meeting).
As you said, it takes discipline to avoid this trap. There will always be another urgent meeting, but your children will grow up and go have their own lives.
"Fake urgency" is a terrible poisonous thing that often seeps into the work world. It is the cause of many ills and most deathbed regrets.
There are a lot of people who more discipline would help, but in many cases it seems to me that they just don't know what to do. For example, if someone lying there dying has a regret like "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" or "I wish I had let myself be happier" it is hard to say that their #1 problem is that they lacked discipline. I know a couple of people who are extremely disciplined ... at making themselves unhappy for no good reason.
I think it is more likely that a lot of people either didn't know how to relax - or potentially have internalised something about the nature of happiness that isn't true and that they can't let go of.
It's a bit like climate change. Every day we wake up in our comfy beds, we have aircon, gore tex, big cars, hurricane proof buildings. We see that there's a big problem unfolding over the next generation or two. Or three. Maybe a crop failure or two will lead to high coffee prices. Perhaps avocados will disappear from the shelves of the supermarket for a month or two and we'll just pause, say "huh?". Someone might mention a species of shellfish we never heard of which is now extinct, or there'll be even more wildfires "somewhere I don't live" that are awful and everything but does this transatlantic flight really make a difference or does it matter if I upgrade my phone/laptop/car every year... Anyways I need to get the kids to creche and get to work. I don't have time to think about this stuff.
Slow burning problems are the worst because they're so easy to ignore until it's to late.
I imagine this is being downvoted because it suggests consumers need to change their behavior. As the Reddit hive mind knows: corporations produce the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. But at the end of nearly all those supply chains are consumers, without which the enterprise would not exist.
Individual action cannot solve a tragedy of the commons. Refraining from consuming the commons literally just leaves more for others to consume. Which they will.
A tragedy of the commons can only be resolved through collective action. Carbon tax is the obvious example.
GP technically didn't suggest otherwise, and in fact the same "selfishness" highlighted in that comment also drives people to vote against the sacrifice of collective action, so IMO they're correct. But if you forget about that (implied) step, and instead read "we should all individually just get rid of our ACs and stop flying, to solve climate change" (which GP didn't say), then that would be incorrect.
Yeah my point about aircon (and to an extent, big vehicles) is that we have the ability, to a degree, to avoid or work around the problems that climate change is throwing at us. I personally take individual action on climate but I don't think it's possible to make other people change their lifestyle so I don't even try. Do what you want to do people. I live my way because of my own conscience, that's all.
I largely agree and I attributed it to the same problem; Moloch is a larger class of problems that includes tragedy of the commons (see other comment for a much better link).
I agree also that legislation like carbon taxes are the only ways to really solve the problem, and mostly read GP's comment with the more generous interpretation.
But I don't think that we should see the lack of that as a license for unhinged consumerism. I think people should hold on to their phones and cars awhile. They should prefer more fuel efficient vehicles if they can afford them, etc.
This is an oversimplification. Collective action is driven by a mass of individual beliefs that are strong enough to suppress bad actors. If you are one of the bad actors, it's more difficult to force the other bad actors to stop because they can accuse you of hypocrisy.
See e.g. Al Gore taking flights to speaking engagements about climate change. From one perspective, this is an effective tool and probably even carbon-negative if it leads to effective change. On another level, why is a guy with so many frequent flier miles telling me to fly less? Why is a rich guy who can eat the cost of a carbon tax telling me my plane tickets will cost more? Etc.
I am reminded of the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" refrain, which is sometimes used by people who don't like capitalism to justify taking the absolute least ethical option available.
> why is a guy with so many frequent flier miles telling me to fly less?
Maybe this is nitpicking but just to satisfy my own record more than anything: that would be individual action and I agree Al gore shouldn’t be telling anyone to fly less.
> Why is a rich guy who can eat the cost of a carbon tax telling me my plane tickets will cost more?
Carbon taxes affect big consumers more than small ones, and I would absolutely support eg a Canadian “carbon price” model where the money is doled out to everyone at the end of the year. And if anyone is still worse off, tax oil companies more until poor people are least-bad-off :)
I think you're misunderstanding me: the proposal of a carbon tax is fine, but if you're the person who spearheads it then it's most effective to already be individual acting. That way, you can't be accused of hypocrisy.
You can't support the tax as effectively unless you prove by your actions that you believe in the cause. While individual action won't directly solve the problem, failing to take individual action might jeopardise your ability to support collective action.
No. If you purely advocate for collective action and explicitly against individual action, people won’t hold you up as a personal martyr with higher moral standards. This happens when the conversation turns to blaming the individual. Stay on message, focus on collective action, and people will listen.
Individual blame and responsibility has become inexorably linked with the anti climate change movement unfortunately. It is a Trojan horse for those willing to derail the movement. But if you stay on message, and lead with “no individual action, only collective action”, any counter of “but You!” only serves to reinforce the message: “Yes, Me, because Us or Nobody.”
I agree with your overall point but the messaging is so crucial that even “people downvoted this because individual action, but…” no—no but: that’s the whole point. No but, no individual action. Moloch has nothing to do with an advocate or lack thereof. We need to stay really clearly on message: collective action solves a tragedy of the commons. The end.
Moloch becomes relevant when we fail to take collective action. At that point: yes, shame. On Us.
I spent the first chunk of my career doing sales (2nd half spent in software engineering). Theres a lot of good books out there but you're going to find a lot of the direct advice to be non-applicable (as I'm sure you can pick up from the comments). Most of the Literature out there is directed at professional sales people, who for the most part are non-technical, have the backing of a marketing org, and are also different than a founder. Anyway, heres a reading list. Most of the trainings I've been a part of were custom built to the org or market, and frankly I learned more from Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss. I did enjoy "the Wedge" training by Randy Schwantz... that one you should do the video not the book. It also sounds like you could use some marketing stuff so I'll throw some of that in there too.
In no particular order, and please keep in mind this is off the top of my head:
* The presentation secrets of steve jobs (just a good book on presentations, framed around Steve Jobs to sell more)
For what its worth this question comes up fairly often. It seems like technical people would like a "technical people" guide on how to do Sales and marketing. Does that sound useful to anyone?
Ted Chang, Bunch Books on Roman Architecture, "You, me, and Ulysses S. Grant", Raving Fans (for work), 3 body Problem, Not the end of the world, Anti-fragile (3rd time), Transformed (for work, it was trash), Harry Potter (in Spanish), and some other things I can't think of off the top of my head.
sure, we went to Rome and I was surprised to find that much of the architecture didn't present as I was expecting. I took a bunch of photos. When I came home I checked out "The Romans: builders of an empire" and then the wife bought me "Roman architecture in 50 monuments" which was really cool. I've subsequently read up on the aqueducts... which are really really cool
It's actually a different crawler for training data: Googlebot-extended so you can exclude yourself from the training data though not the search summaries.
I'm not sure of the legality but I definitely appreciate their product. This lawsuit seems odd because google themselves scrape content for their indexes. From what I see SerpApi is really just providing a machine interface that Google themselves refuses to provide users and visibility into SERPs which is also something that users should have available to them.
Google publishes how to control their bot - with robots.txt. They then obey those instructions. Google also takes some effort to not use all your bandwidth. Google isn't perfect, but they are at least making a "good faith" effort to be nice and this does count in court. Overall most will agree that in general what google does to allow people to find their website is worth the things that google is doing.
You can of course argue a lot of edge cases if you really want. For the most part I want to say "it isn't worth the argument". In some cases I will take your side if I really have to think about it, but in general the system google has been using mostly works and is mostly an acceptable compromise.
But their robots are enabled by default. So it is a form of unsolicited scraping. If I spam millions of email addresses without asking for permission but provide a link to opt-out form, am I the good guy?
At this point everyone knows about robots.txt, so if you didn't opt-out that is your own fault. Opting out of everyone at once is easy, and you get fine grained control if you want it.
Also most people would agree they are fine with being indexed in general. That is different from email spam where people don't want it.
Looking at SerpApi clients, looks like most companies would agree they are fine with scraping Google. That is different from having your website content stolen and summarized by AI on Google search, which people don't want.
The claim is SerApi is not honoring robots.txt, and they are getting far more data from google/more often than needed for an index operation. Or at least that is the best I can make out of the claim in court from the article - I have not read the actual complaint.
People are generally fine with indexing operations so long as you don't use too much bandwidth.
Using AI to summarize content is still and open question - I wouldn't be surprised if this develops to some form of "you can index but not summarize", but only time will tell.
Do you have an example of a court saying that violating robots.txt violates an existing law?
In Ziff Davis v. OpenAI [1], the District Court for the Southern District of New York found that violating robots.txt does not violate DMCA section 1201(a) (formally 17 U.S. Code § 1201(a), which prohibits circumvention of technological protection measures of copyrighted content [2]).
It's my understanding that robots.txt started as a socially-enforced rule and that it remains legally voluntary.
This is actually a super power I have after spending my first part of my career in sales.
I was never formally trained so I just keep asking "why" until someone proves it all the way. Sales itself is also a lot about asking questions that won't come up to find the heart of the thing people actually want... which is just another side of the coin.
I understand they are out there, I understand there is an ecosystem and they are important to that ecosystem... all that goes out the window when you see a great white cruising through the water. We're cool as long as they are out at sea and not where I'm at.
Yes, that's true of large predators in general, like tigers and grizzly bears. But traditionally, while people realize that these animals can be dangerous, people don't hate these animals but want to protect them, just away from people. This was different from the feeling towards sharks, which were hated. It is good that they are beginning to be viewed like other predators.
If you want to make a better world from a better internet you need to save people from the tyranny of the marginal user (https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). It's not the web, its the people. Those people incentivize enshittification. People will need to change, not the companies, the government, or the creators... the supply is purely filling this demand. The indie web isn't going to help a grandma see photos of her grand kids as easily as facebook will. And the indie web won't help you find a used guitar as well as craigslist will.
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