I'm a contractor but often ride on US Navy ships. Before my first ship, I was told to buy a few cannisters of Zyns as that would help me earn rapport with the sailors. Nicotine makes me sick but having some on me certainly helped getting the enlisted trust me. They would take me to parts of the ship other contractors wouldn't really know to go to and even watched movies with them in the movie room. They ended up buying me a hat and all signing it. I'll never forget that cruise
This seems to happen with most big tech adoption in the first few years. The big data boom in the early 2010's had execs just buying up spark clusters and data lakes before they even had a clear analytical use case or governance.
Although it seems like the Pentagon is making good of a bad situation by turning these into trainer aircraft, the radar-less versions aren't even that much cheaper than the combat-ready ones. Wtf are we doing here
I think its always been a thing. Give a society any new technology and the distribution curve of human effort doesn’t disappear: a slice of people will aim it at entertainment, shortcuts, and the lowest common denominator (this book), and a smaller slice with high discipline and curiousity will use the exact same tools to become 10x more capable. The tech changes; the distribution of how people use it mostly doesn’t