My local school system was forcibly desegrated _less than 10 years before I was born_ [1]. You can still plainly see the impact of redlining on my city [2]. I think it goes without saying that this wasn't covered in our schools, public or private, and was something I only really understood the scope of as an adult.
I was born and raised in liberal west coast Oregon. We sure weren't taught about the racial implications of our state's history either. When Oregon was admitted to the union the state constitution prohibited blacks from living in the state. 100 years ago the Klan was big here, and even now African Americans are less than 2% of the population.
The Warmth of Other Suns is a very good book for filling some of that hole in your education. I am not sure if I wasn't taught about the Great Migration at all or was taught about it for 10 minutes but definitely did not get out of school with much understanding of this aspect of American history.
Thanks for the link. I'm a white American who has been lucky enough to visit Sri Lanka! I don't agree with your conclusion that American racism is inescapable, or uniquely so. I believe we can make progress on bigotries - in particular, despite the current and despicable wave against people who are transgender, non-binary, or otherwise queer, I believe we have made significant progress in reducing homophobia over the last 5 decades (the ones I can remember!). On the negative side, I did reach the conclusion (due to what I've seen during the Trump era) that much of what I thought was progress on racism was simply racists learning to code-switch. That part's depressing.
I do not think American racism is inescapable. I do think it is more part of the culture than it is in other places: like caste in India. It makes it more difficult escape because race is treated as an important and immutable characteristic. I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.
The other oddity is a tendency to lump everyone non-white together. Think of phrases such as "global majority".
> I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.
Liberal Americans said race is arbitrary in my experience. And people who said gender identity should be respected believed it was fixed.
I would have thought American liberals (like me) would mostly view race as a social construct and therefore not immutable. However I am not an expert in sociology and my experience must be shaped by not being part of any visible minority.
I think that is true when considered in isolation at an intellectual level, but when any issue is discussed in more detail the assumption creeps through. Maybe because it is hard to internalise. Maybe because of the deep division: one thing very odd about the US is that black and white people from the same area (and whose ancestors have lived there for generations) speak different forms of English and/or have different accents.
For example, take the example I gave above. People will not accept self-identify of "race" and have their own ideas of what someone "really is". In America it is often based on the one drop laws of segregation: someone whose ancestry is predominately white can be considered "black".
Also, consider the term I mentioned, coined by liberal Americans. It embeds the racist assumption that the world is divided into white and non-white people: that everyone who is not white one group.
I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis during the 70s and 80s. My district was one of the last to desegregate schools in the state, fought for years to avoid it. Well, it finally happened in the early-80s, a 'bussing' program was started to bring Black kids from North St. Louis to attend schools in my district. I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I remember all the adults in the neighborhood were furious. There were protests outside my school on the first day. People threw rocks at the bus from North St. Louis when it pulled into the parking lot.
It was a little tense at school for, maybe, a few hours, but mostly it was just confusion - WTF is going on?. But after that, it was cool. All the kids quickly realized we're all basically the same - we all hated homework and were intimidated by girls, the usual adolescent stuff. I didn't know it at the time, but the school deseg program was one of the most impactful events of my childhood.
In the UK you just fill in an online form. I don't think anyone is going to come and weigh you to double check what you put in the form is true. Almost zero oversight which is a bit shocking really.
Been on one for a few years now, it tempered my persistent auto-immune issues. Short term side effects are barely present for me. This stuff has made it so I don't have to be on steroids and antibiotics every other month. I did not start the medication for weight loss purposes, though have lost 10-15lbs, but I attribute that to being off steroids.
Long term? Who knows for sure. Semaglutide has been approved for 9 years. Liraglutide was 2009 and hasn't shown thyroid issues still. Exenatide has been available since 2005.
GLP-1s aren't new and haven't shown widespread negative issues beyond gastrointestinal upset, and that is typically fixed by... drinking more water. The trials in rats have pointed towards potential thyroid cancer risks but those haven't been seen in people.
There is reason to have some healthy skepticism for pharma. But I am sometimes astounded by how unshakably cynical people can be.
I suppose we all could wind up with cancer in 10 years or something hypothetically, due to some unforeseen mechanism. But here's my story.
I went from 200lb to 140lbs at 5' 9" over 3 years. I feel great. I don't need to eat 1000 calories before bed just to sleep through the night. I focus better at work. Blood pressure is back to normal. HDL is back to normal. I can run without joint pain. I feel good about myself. I feel comfortable going on dates. I'm not a near-obese shut-in loner that can't be in a caloric deficit without wrecking my sleep.
Unless there are literally fatal side effects, these drugs seem pretty miraculous.
This is how Lightstream Studio has provided stream overlay for consoles[1]. Some years ago Microsoft added them as an official destination using a better protocol and dropped the need for MITM hackery.
I used to work in this space and Lightstream was always doing interesting things, even if they never seemed to find PMF.
PMF… I love how we’ve invented a term which means “customers”. I know it’s not the point of your comment but the acronym in place of a common word will be tougher for folks to follow.
You can have customers without product market fit.
A product that hasnt found PMF could be a solution looking for a problem, or it might solve a true problem but that problem isn't important, durable, or (crucially) common enough to sustain a business.
So OP was saying that Lightstream Studios made some great stuff, but that ultimately the problem they were solving wasnt durable or widespread enough for the market to sustain the business they had built.
Background on Lighstream Studios is they did a streamer setup in the cloud, so you didnt have to run OBS locally. A lot of people seemed to want that at the time, especially console gamers, but the market changed around them. Consoles are way better at streaming without any other stuff now, and PC gamers largely settled on running OBS (for free) on their own existing hardware. They had like 17k paying customers at one point, so customers wasnt the smoking gun here.
That's one scenario. You can actually have sticky, engaged customers at huge scale, and even marginal profitability, while lacking Product-Market Fit. But breaking even/modest profits do not equal success for venture backed firms or mega-corps.
A good example is the voice assistant hardware from Amazon and Google. The speakers are everywhere, basic daily use stats are likely solid, and retail display square footage remains huge. Yet almost no one will pay for the associated subscriptions or other premium services. The hardware was sold at a loss(?) expecting downstream revenue from services that customers simply don't value enough to buy.
Sounds like you don’t have a customer, in the sense that I will also accept a free chocolate bar someone hands me on the street but won’t pay for it.
I take your point that PMF is useful to describe a thing. I just see it as a funny term to describe something obvious. But language evolves in different social groups and this is the language of SV. In large part I find it odd because I’m not part of that group and have other ways of describing the same thing. Accepting that neither is right or wrong.
There are plenty of businesses with customers that don’t sell products. The PMF distinction is useful because many startups are actually specialized consultants/agencies, not products.
There are plenty of companies (successful ones) that I’d argue don’t have PMF, but have plenty of customers (ex Palantir)
Anecdotally, it feels like Opus, Fable, and Sol "get distracted" when you use them for writing code. Great at reasoning and coordination but they will go off on a tangent and refactor half the code base. I only use them for reasoning (of course) and coordinating subagents.
1: https://www.wlky.com/article/forced-busing-anniversary-50-lo...
2: https://www.louisville.com/redlining-louisville-dividing-lin...
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