In my opinion, in US, they became more fashion than athletic. Without realizing athletic is a huge fashion trend. The talk of hoka and on taking share, is true, but it’s also an extension of the fashion trend for something new/fresh/unique/authentic in the athletic category. Apparel has seen similar shifts, newer entrants like Alo and Vuori have put Lululemon and other more established brands on their heals.
I suspect the danger of pivoting into a pure fashion design is that even in the fashion market people crave a little authenticity. Perhaps you never run but you like the idea and so buy running shoes. do you get the fake running shoes or the real ones?
The other one I have noticed is work boots. With a complex market interaction. Real work boots are expensive, built to survive in an adverse environment. However people crave something with substance. So there is a large customer base buying them for fashion. The manufacturer notices this and start to reduce quality(no need to build them so well if the customer won't notice) and you end up with an expensive boot that sucks. The (much smaller) real customer base, the workers, do start noticing and slowly start moving to a different brand, the fashion customers eventually pick up on this and follow. the whole process can take decades.
I don’t think they want the most money. If they did, they’d have done this long ago. The trend we’re seeing is about them just struggling to meet their quarter over quarter and year over year numbers. It’s a short term driven change to strategy, they’re trying to fill the hole with something else (we all know what) before admitting it exists. If they said their golden goose was dying, the stock would crash.
FWIW, this same thing is happening in regular corporate America too. I have all kinds of non-CPA, non-finance background people telling me how I should treat financial transactions, without the nuance of GAAP or how an auditor would handle their reasoning. Everyone has an opinion on what our tech teams should/could allow or enable or create, without understanding the security implications and support it would require or what other projects are already working on.
It’s good in a way, because you can certainly challenge people’s answer when an idea gets shot down. But it’s also a bit exhausting that everyone is challenging everything all the time.
As an unfamiliar, I find it interesting how you specifically called out physics grads in the pre-LLM era. Is that just snark or is there some widespread truth / stereotype of that behavior?
Physics, and to a large degree pure mathematics, has attracted a critical mass of the personality type that needs to feel like the smartest person in the room in any given situation. It has given them a slightly notorious reputation in academia.
As a mathematician, this is far from my experience of actual professional mathematicians, because they encounter people much smarter than them quite often. Maybe more true among graduate students, however.
I don't know why mathematicians got lumped in with physicists further down the thread. In my experience this is a well known stereotype of physicists and while of course not universal you don't have to look very hard to see where it came from. In my experience mathematicians stay very much in their lane and often seem to be overly modest even within it.
The best/smartest professionals I meet operate this way (because we know we're wrong quite a bit and don't know everything). It's definitely a personality trait. Inquisitive, curious, intelligent, but also there's some metacognition involved where we can be confident in what we do NOT know.
In contrast, I studied chemical engineering for a short stint. First year, first semester chemistry classes and labs were riddled with these types of students. Tell you you're wrong, IQ 197, scoff when you ask a question, etc...
Listen, if you're the smartest person alive that's fantastic, but please don't talk down to me or the mere mortals that I prefer to hang around with. We get along much better and have a lot more fun saying "I don't know, let's find out".
From a one-time physics grad student, I do think there advantages to being ... like this.
The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.
Like, ultimately you can't be a knowledge worker by just waiting for answers and instruction from experts and relaying them back and forth. Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.
Like your sibling comment I saw this mainly with physics people doing data science:
> Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.
There is nothing more frustrating as a colleague than having a smart person walk in, insist you're all wrong, and then burn all the energy and goodwill in the organisation having to rebuild absolutely everything from the principles they currently understand because they refuse to listen to the experience that has built up already (in the entire field, let alone the organisation), only to produce something worse on every dimension than what already existed.
But there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid. I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.
At least in my experience (as a physics grad), me and all my fellow grads are much more likely to apply Chesterton's fence and then make decisions than not doing that and steamrolling existing decisions.
> I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it
You're actually doing the problem behavior right here: denying the validity of the experience of seeing exactly this happen, not as a one off, but repeatedly in completely separate situations and institutions.
> that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.
I mean the problem is they're arrogant. The two aren't mutually exclusive, far from it.
My point is that wanting things redone because you don’t understand it is dumb behaviour, not smart behaviour.
There wasn’t even a denial of the validity of experience, I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?
> The two aren't mutually exclusive, far from it.
Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative. While you can be intelligent and arrogant, you can’t really learn things without the humility to say you don’t know stuff. In my experience, most physics grads I know constantly say they don’t know stuff, way more than people from other disciplines.
> My point is that wanting things redone because you don’t understand it is dumb behaviour, not smart behaviour.
Smart people can do very non smart things when they feel their status as smartest-person-in-the-room is threatened, which is the entire point.
> There wasn’t even a denial of the validity of experience, I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?
Now you're gaslighting, bluntly.
> Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative.
I've never seen any evidence of this, but a _lot_ that many physics (and pure mathematics) grads are enormously more arrogant than the general population, enough that the trend under discussion has actual basis.
> The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.
Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.
GP here is suggesting that accepting established status quo at face value (i.e relying solely on other people's experience/letting them deal with problems you face in their domain without being able to examine why they arrived at the decisions they did) can lead to worse outcomes, and I agree.
Your response was that it is frustrating to have someone walk in and question things (precisely what GP is suggesting), only to have the final product of whatever decisions these people make be worse than the status quo (not what GP is suggesting).
I responded by saying - there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid.
You did not address that. Is there not a difference between these two things? GP is suggesting to do the latter, not the former. i.e question why things are the way they are, crucially not that people should make decisions based on things we don't understand about the status quo.
You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*
Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement. All I said was there is a difference between questioning things and forcing decisions based on things they dont understand - smart people don't do the latter, arrogant people do. Someone doing what you are suggesting, is not doing what GP is suggesting, they are different. The former is smart, and the latter is not smart.
When I pointed this out here: I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?
You accuse me of gaslighting you.
> Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative.
There might be a trend of this in academia (which is where the xkcd joke stems from), but in my personal experience I dont see this much in industry, and you can disagree with that.
I also don't see an xkcd joke being an actual basis of anything either. You are making declarative statements - but a _lot_ that many physics (and pure mathematics) grads are enormously more arrogant than the general population, enough that the trend under discussion has actual basis. - without any backing of this other than anecdata, and I was pointing out a different anecdotal experience.
> You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*
> Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement.
But it is exactly what you are doing in the exact quote of yours you even put there.
I am being nice, but it's quite clear you are a near perfect example of this stereotype (if actually a relatively polite one), right down to the wall-of-text when cornered.
I'm being nice too and all I've been trying to do in this thread is point at a distinction between GP's point and yours which you seem unwilling to engage with.
It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart). Perhaps the issue is that these two behaviours are easily confused.
I had to write the long comment to illustrate this difference. I'm saying in mine and GP's definition doing what you are suggesting people usually do is not smart, its dumb, and that is not what GP or I are suggesting people do.
> It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart).
But you expressed doubt of stated (and frankly not even remotely subjective) experience, so if we dropped you in an organisation your immediate response to anything you don't understand is "That doesn't match my mental model, so I doubt it actually happened", followed by either everyone giving up or you insisting everyone persuade you of absolutely every last detail of everything. It's enormously tedious, and the reason it comes across as arrogant is the demands put on everyone else to explain everything to you because you clearly see everyone else as incapable of the same level of insights that you are, all the while you are telling people what they experience is them being mistaken.
Just look at the way you questioned whether or not I could tell if someone is actually smart or not. It's just plain insulting. And it's not just me, it's everyone that has this same experience which forms the basis of the stereotype.
You seem to be imputing a lot of intent into my comment and then extending that to value judgements about smartness etc. I don't know what any of this has to do with what GP was saying. Yeah, there's a balance between questioning everything and questioning nothing, but there are a lot of bureaucratic things that happen in organizations and its generally a good thing to question certain things that don't have clear explanations, isn't there?
The doubt was simply about whether or not what GP is saying is smart behaviour to exhibit - Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people. is the same behaviour that you are saying you've experienced ( i.e you are talking about different things).
I'm not even questioning if you can tell if someone is smart or not - its just obvious that forcing decisions based off things that are not understood is not a smart thing to do - which..we all agree on -, and neither I nor GP were saying people should do this?
Maybe I could've phrased it better but my whole point was GP says X, you are saying Y. I think there is a distinction between X and Y and I doubt that the people GP is talking about are the same people you are talking about (hence, smart as you put it vs smart as GP put it).
I see you don't understand the point, and you're doing that thing of imposing on me trying to help you understand it, which seems highly unlikely to work. Going back, again, to your quote:
> I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it
And yet that is quite simply exactly what I have seen multiple times in multiple organisations on multiple continents, but for some reason you "doubt" this because it doesn't fit what you think of as "smart behaviour" when spelled out like that, and then spend ages arguing that now there's no intent to this comment? Or any of the others . . .
I am going to do what I always end up doing in such situations, of just giving up and walking away, which every normal person does way earlier in proceedings. Ils sont fou ces physiciens.
Its clear that you are taking great offence to that particular quote and determined to misunderstand my point due to your pre-existing bias, despite my many attempts to clarify it, so let me finish the quote for you.
I doubt, that someone smart (as you put it) ..and not as GP put it..who..would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it..are..the same people that GP is talking about when they say there are advantages to being "like this".
This is no longer fruitful, but I only hope that this thread might to be a reason to more charitable in your interpretation next time regarding such a discussion.
It's possible to step out of your area of expertise in a way that's confident but also humble. Arrogance is not necessary. The person who signs everyone's paychecks might be making it mandatory, but that's not quite the same thing.
> we treat understanding new systems as something approachable
And, computer scientists, mechanical engineers, and chemical engineers don't?
> from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.
Humblebrag alert! This has little to do with being a physics grad student, and much more to do with your motivation.
I guess all I'm doing here is arguing that a little hubris can help a person avoid being timid, and far be it from me to say that computer scientists, mechanical engineers, and chemical engineers have not been imbued with any hubris by their educations.
You can get pretty much all the same benefits with additional upside and fewer downsides by just showing curiosity and eagerness to learn from others' expertise. Yes, on the internet you might get better answers by being confidently wrong rather than asking for help, but when talking to other humans directly you'll get a lot more people who will just try to end the conversation as quickly as they can if you're arrogant, whereas people tend to respond really well to respecting their intelligence and experience.
I've personally found that doing the opposite of what you say and being willing to look like the dumbest person in the room by asking whatever questions I need to for my own understanding often ends up working out quite well; people are often wonderfully willing to share their knowledge with me even if I feel like I'm asking something very basic as long as I'm actually being friendly and humble, and there are plenty of times where there have been others who told me they have same question but didn't feel comfortable asking.
In some ways, it's similar to when I played bass in two different bands in college. In one of them, I was probably the most talented musician in the group, and it was fairly boring for me to practice with them, but we needed it as a group, whereas the other was with a friend of mine who was an insanely talented guitarist possibly more talented in music than pretty much anyone else I ever met. I loved practicing in the second one because I'd learn so much from him just by exposure and getting to pick his brain, but I imagine it got boring for him sometimes as well having to wait for me to "catch up" to what was easy for him. Being the smartest one in the room feels like it would get old after a while, but having smarter people around to learn from is endlessly engaging.
It’s not about being in your lane. It’s about approaching things with an open mind plus the desire to solve the problem instead or proving yourself right.
Yeah, I guess my point is that IMO a lot of people have so little interest in solving the problem that they aren't even approaching it at all, open mind or no.
It's not my experience that I'm constantly arguing with people, for what it's worth. I get positive feedback for being willing to work on areas of the codebase I'm not already familiar with, and develop an understanding of areas of the codebase no one is familiar with.
It is quite possible to be wrong and not annoy people, and it's not even terribly difficult to learn. It does require a bit of humility and introspection though.
You don't have to not stray into areas you don't understand, but be humble when doing so - if you think something is being done in a stupid way, you probably don't understand it yet.
I think that's a common trait of tenured academics in the top 100 universities in the US. Don't know about Europe and elsewhere though. Not so much of nontenure track sorts who do all their dirty work.
I've experienced it in industry, too. I recently got out of data science in part because I got tired of working with people who, emboldened by their PhDs in some completely other field, liked to patiently but condescendingly mansplain common, basic misconceptions about my area of expertise to me.
(And it got so much worse once they started using LLMs to aid them in their efforts. Glazing as a service is a hell of a drug.)
So much easier, now that I am a lowly software engineer and can't be held responsible for a certain class of decisions, to just step back and let them be wrong.
Not the parent, but it's half joke half truth. Anyone who's done a lot of "first principles" work falls into this trap a bit, it's an issue across stem fields. Most grow out of it, or at least learn to qualify their statements for the audience.
I suspect the person you replied to only happened to see that from physics grads. I have seen it in all sorts of people and I sometimes did it myself when I was young (I am not a physics grad).
Its snark/stereotype, but there is some truth. But my take, is physics sort of took over a lot of chemistry, biology.. and to them its the answer to all questions, because in the end it just molecules. There is some truth to that but..
That sounds like the alcohol permit loophole. Instead of getting a permit to sell alcohol, just buy this $10 pack of peanuts and it comes with a free beer. This is known to come with hefty fines btw.
That said, If the gift is insubstantial in value it’s allowable. Or they’re supposed to give you a statement of the value and you have to deduct the donation less value amount. My thought is maybe the content is or will be free and the app is just a convenient portal to consume it. So one would claim it’s rather insubstantial. But to be honest, no auditor would really dig too deep into a donation to PBS.
There’s also c) you just aren’t price sensitive to the changes and find it overall rather immaterial d) can recall how expensive and crappy cable/satellite tv was, still see this as a good deal e) have many people in your household with different media preferences and cost per capita is pretty low
Also you should consider the base period timing is when many of the big movers were in a rollout of their application and thus the price was either artificially low and/or represented a severely limited offering compared to their current offering.
Honestly, most the flock cameras are installed on a fence post that is easily vandalized. This movement will be matched by sturdier construction and the resistance will likely sigh, get bored, and move onto something else.
Probably, I'm not aware of that but it's visibly not enclosed. Seems like it could be hardened quite easily. But even then, I suppose an agitator could just paint the camera every day. I don't think that type of vandalism is inspiring and people would give up. They want to unleash some fury and if they can't physically destruct the thing then they'll get complacent in their means
Mass deployment on public property and the network effect that having them all connected and using things like license plate readers is all pretty new.
Largely the US hasn’t had widespread surveillance, it’s been private property ownership of CCTV type systems for security reasons which Americans are ok with. Reading my license plate, face, gait, etc every 100 meters as I move across a large distance loses the security reason and entered the world of mass surveillance. Which while many of us struggle with caring about, is seen as infringing on our right to privacy which itself has a complex legal interpretation of and where systems like this cross a line into what is acceptable. The fact that law enforcement can query flock to learn of an individual’s location without any warrant is often seen as directly opposing a constitutional protection from government search. It might also be important to know that the US Constitution is seen as a law of physics in some areas and that most laymen that read the Fourth Amendment would come to the conclusion that this is not allowed and thus unconstitutional at its core. There’s of course legal things that have happened since that clarify interpretation of the constitution so the wiggle room they have to operate, especially when it’s something the government wants to exists, is enough for now. The Supreme Court would be the ones to eliminate grey area. They recently issued a ruling taking a heavier privacy stance. Meanwhile, people on the street have grown deep distrust in tech and government which is visible as they are destroying these cameras.
To be less cynical, I think it would require editing to original submission. I also see why editing the “bad press” company submissions could have undesirable optics. So, maybe the mods just choose to be a bit more laissez faire than normal and lets the community self moderate the related posts. Probably within some reason in the comment section, but they allow us all to be quite critical in ways that could easily be considered against the HN guidelines and they’re not squashing it either. I think that is perhaps the best stance for them to take honestly.
reply