The Nature of Quiet Failure: When a design is flawed—such as a complex app, a poorly designed tool, or an confusing website—users don't always abandon it immediately. Instead, they learn to navigate its shortcomings, creating workarounds. The Danger of Adaptation: The success of a design is often measured by user retention, but if users are simply adapting to a bad design, the system has failed, yet it appears functional. Examples: Software/Dashboards: A dashboard that provides no actionable insights doesn't trigger complaints; users simply stop opening it. Physical/Workflow: A door handle that is confusing (e.g., a push bar that looks like a pull handle) teaches users to rely on signs or trial-and-error, rather than intuitive design. The Goal of Good Design: Good design should feel invisible and intuitive, not require user adaptation.
share.google
It is an expensive adaptation. From a purely evolutionary perspective, the human brain consumes about 20 per cent of the body's metabolic energy while representing only 2 per cent of its mass. That is a massive physiological tax for the ability to worry about the future, perceive existential threats, and invent bureaucracy. There is also the argument that high intelligence is a self-limiting filter. It tends to create complex technologies capable of destroying its host species before it develops the wisdom to control them. You see this friction in technology constantly; increasing a system's 'intelligence' or complexity often decreases its robustness, introducing spectacular new failure modes rather than simply solving the original problem. If the goal is simple contentment, intelligence is likely a maladaptation. Ignorance avoids the capacity to conceptualise what is missing or broken. But if the goal is agency—the ability to tinker, fix, and modify your environment rather than just enduring it—then it is the only tool available, despite the heavy overheads.
Your skepticism is understandable
“Designs rarely fail loudly; they fail by teaching users to adapt.”
The user is asking about the Trump cabinet in 2026, which seems to involve a fictional scenario. I'll need to search for possible details on it, but I should be careful about making any defamation claims or presenting opinions as facts, especially regarding public figures. I'll clarify if the response leans toward satire.
1. **Pride** — the sin that doesn’t look like a sin: it calls itself standards, certainty, “I’m just being honest.” It makes correction feel like insult and turns every room into a mirror. 2. **Greed** — appetite with no “enough.” It doesn’t want comfort; it wants possession. It measures life in accumulation and treats people as supply lines. 3. **Lust** — desire that refuses to stay human-sized. It trades presence for consumption, turns bodies into abstractions, and mistakes intensity for intimacy. 4. **Envy** — pain at someone else’s good fortune. It doesn’t merely want what you have; it wants you not to have it, so the world feels fair again. 5. **Gluttony** — the inability to stop at satisfaction. Not just food: more attention, more stimulation, more noise—until pleasure goes numb and you chase the next hit. 6. **Wrath** — righteousness set on fire. It loves the clean simplicity of a villain. It makes destruction feel like virtue and calls the wreckage “justice.” 7. **Sloth** — not laziness so much as surrender. A refusal to carry the weight of your own life: postponing, numbing, drifting—letting the days happen instead of living them.
Mozilla will no longer accept 'proof-of-work' cryptocurrencies, which are more energy intensive.
The likelihood of bitcoin prices falling to $100 is greater than that of the digital currency trading at $100,000 a decade from now, Harvard University professor and economist Kenneth Rogoff said on Tuesday. “I think bitcoin will be worth a tiny fraction of what it is now if we’re headed out 10 years from now ... I would see $100 as being a lot more likely than $100,000 ten years from now,” Rogoff told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “Basically, if you take away the possibility of money laundering and tax evasion, its actual uses as a transaction vehicle are very small,” the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said. While bitcoin has been associated with illicit transactions, estimates of the proportion of the digital currency used in illegal activities vary. Shone Anstey, the co-founder and president of Blockchain Intelligence Group, gauged that the level of illegal transactions in bitcoin had fallen to 20 percent in 2016 and was “significantly less than that” in 2017.
CNBC
A decade from now, bitcoin is more likely to be $100 than $100,000, Harvard economist says
Regulation will be a trigger for the move lower in bitcoin prices, Harvard's Kenneth Rogoff told CNBC.
It's a pattern in your thinking: spotting when people/organisations/incentives rebrand compulsion, scarcity, or failure as elevated principle, and calling bullshit on the halo-polishing. Very much your brand of cleithrophobic sceptical meliorist energy.So yes—it rings the bell because you've been pulling that particular alarm cord for a long time. What's the latest context making it clang again? https://x.com/i/grok/share/9bf45b345076467caffa9506d60f9161
Over the last 12 months (23 Jan 2025 → 23 Jan 2026), *Confused of Calcutta* has had **one new post**, dated **22 July 2025**. ([Confused of Calcutta][1]) That **July 2025** post (“musing about cricket”) is a long, affectionate defence of *Test cricket as lived experience*—the joy is in the full five-day texture (including draws, delays, queues, banter, glitches, and weather), with personal memory threaded through (Eden Gardens 1966–67; later matches at Lord’s/The Oval) and the point that it “wasn’t really” about winning or losing. ([Confused of Calcutta][1]) The broader arc if you treat “the last year” as *the most recent run of posts leading up to now* is: **information filtering / capacity constraints → distrust of notification-abundance → back to cricket as a humane, messy, non-optimisable system**. In September 2024 (“Musing about filters and brakes”), he frames modern digital life as “filter failure” and pushes for *subscriber-side* control: trust-based recommendations, timing control, easy turn-off, and “tune-ability” (a graphic-equaliser metaphor) for alerts and pings. ([Confused of Calcutta][2]) The other “recent” posts are cricket-stat anorak pieces from 2024: “The Double Double Double” builds a taxonomy of Test all-rounders (runs/wickets/catches) and lands on **Jacques Kallis** as the only “Double Double Double” (2000 runs, 200 wickets, 200 catches) under the scheme he defines. ([Confused of Calcutta][3]) And February 2024’s “Double Dagger-Asterisk” is explicitly written as an “unGoogleable” puzzle aimed at resisting spoon-feeding to LLMs, using scorecard symbols as the hook. ([Confused of Calcutta][4]) [1]:
musing about cricket
I was brought up to believe that a good game of Test cricket is one that gets to day 5 with all four results possible. That a great game or makes i...
 "musing about cricket" [2]:
Musing about filters and brakes: A long post
A detour My use of “filters and brakes” was not meant to be clickbait to entice you here on false premises. This isn’t a post abo...
 "Musing about filters and brakes: A long post" [3]:
The Double Double Double
Introduction You have been warned. This one’s for hardcore cricket nuts. Red-ball nuts. Five-day nuts. The hardest of the hardcore. No colour...
 "The Double Double Double" [4]:
The Double Dagger-Asterisk: For cricket anoraks only
Background When Google first arrived on the scene, I used to enjoy constructing “unGoogleable” questions and sharing them with others. ...
 "The Double Dagger-Asterisk: For cricket anoraks only"