"Similar" is doing substantial work. If this is your only clue, it is likely to mislead you for at least 50% of the game, and I strongly suspect you will have fun anyway :)
Outer Wilds, the video game, does a brilliant job expanding on this theme if you're hungry for more. "There's more to explore here."
Warning: progression is gated behind knowledge so spoilers are worse than usual and The Algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you if you start poking too deep into "outer wilds" searches. If you like The Last Question and can fit a game in your life, Outer Wilds is a solid bet.
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
The internet itself went through a similar growth pattern without astroturf. The original users were all researchers, which served as a strong implicit filter, and then the new users were students who had to be taught Netiquette every September, and eventually the floodgates opened to the public and the academics lost the ability to steer the culture in what was called The Eternal September (1993).
The same "initial implicit filter followed by gradual but inevitable reversion to the mean" dynamic explains your observations of early reddit without implying fraud, although it certainly doesn't imply the absence of fraud either. That said, "fraud" is probably a strong word for reddit astroturf in this present day and age where we have a (comparatively) planet-sized Dead Internet built on geological quantities of ads and slop.
Yes, laws are about politics and dispute resolution more than reasoning or correctness. Focusing on the pure logic is a trap for the computationally inclined.
You were arguing that RfR / Dilbert coludn't be true because if it were, it would have been optimized away. I argued that no, just because it happens and is broadly understood doesn't mean that it can be optimized away.
You can play semantic games about whether or not it should be called inefficiency -- I don't really care what you call it -- but the RfR / Dilbert dynamic is very real and very prevalent.
It's not that management is dumb, it's that every layer of management is self-interested. Every hierarchy has to contend with principal agent problems. Organizations can do a better or worse job of it, but the incentives are always there and they lead to predictable inefficiencies which are frequently observed. Everyone knows this, but unless you know how to get someone to manage without self-interest, you aren't in a position to solve the problem. Nobody is. That's why it lingers.
The Rules for Rulers theory vs the Leveraged Value Creation theory.
Naturally, reality is a bit of both, but people on top push LVC hard while they never mention RfR. A good leader earns their salary multiples over, but many poor leaders rake in the dough just from RfR.
Yes, video conferencing does it, but so does slack sometimes at startup, discord does it if you join a voice-enabled room, flash (RIP) used to do it in our HR time tracking app, and at home deviantart.com does it and games do it. However, whether or not a competent and interested nerd can figure out the underlying logic is completely beside the point. Normies don't stand a chance, so they just put up with (from their perspective) randomly broken or low-quality audio, until they can't, at which point they restart, switch devices, or maybe even buy a new device.
Any one of {Bluetooth SIG, device manufacturer, Microsoft} could have independently fixed the issue. Every one of them should have forseen it. None of them foresaw it and none of them fixed it, and years later it still lingers. Yikes.
I was on jury duty last week and watched a windows update slow-motion-trainwreck the proceedings for 30 minutes while 30-ish people sat there and waited on it.
Windows patch auto-revert-settings is cancer. It breaks my bluetooth every time and my setup is very typical so it probably does it to millions of others.
Details: Bluetooth headphones with microphones actually show up as 3 sound devices, one high quality output device and a pair of low quality input and output devices. Whenever a microphone is requested, the low quality pair is selected. Output quality goes to shit and any apps that don't get the memo will still send its audio to the high quality output device which has since become an inactive sinkhole. Since many apps request microphone access for non-obvious reasons, the symptoms are that you do something non-audio-related and sound in the rest of the system does some combination of {go to shit, stop working} on a per-app basis. The solution is to disable the low quality input and output devices, which keeps sound output functional and high-quality until Windows Update reverts your settings and sets the stage for the next microphone access to break bluetooth audio again. Ugh.
> It's basically insinuating that the techniques Renaissance used are somehow unfair because Medallion has such high returns, as if those returns were anointed by God instead of the work of the people at the fund
The general assumption I've heard from friends in the industry -- which may be justified or may not be, I am certainly not qualified to say -- is that they're juicing the Medallion fund with returns from their other funds, they're just using clever trading mechanisms to effectively "launder" what would otherwise be highly illegal transactions.
The advertising mileage they get out of Medallion alone would probably make the activity worthwhile, but I'm sure the tax-free income from the Roth IRAs doesn't hurt either.
> A lot of the cost comes from needing 50-100 transducers to get a useable image.
For-parts ultrasound arrays (which are usually broken because of obsolescence, frayed wires, cracked cases, bent connectors, etc, rather than destroyed ceramics) cost tens of dollars on ebay. But I agree with your overall point: hardware hacking ain't cheap. A $3k bench is north of desperation territory but still a fraction of what entry-level EEs get at the company I work for, and we're not in any line of business that would be considered "performance" by test equipment standards.
> direct sampling ADC at 80 MHz or less is far from an impossible task
The Sonix linked below has 32 40MHz 10bit ADC channels, which is a factor of 64 off from the 80 MHz figure if one were to assume 8 bit, and places us firmly into the realm of several-hundred-dollar ADCs.
Not impossible, but I'm pretty sure that's where much of the cost is hidden.